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Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

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Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#391

Post by Salgat »

majormajor wrote: post #340
light_hue_1 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're leaving out some serious costs incurred by your company and team. The loss of institutional knowledge, the loss of expertise, business process knowledge, personal relationships that could make hard changes much easier. Sure, you hired someone for $X instead of $X*1.2 but in terms of work done you probably missed out on a lot and came out way behind.

I think you're both overestimating those costs and also underestimating the difficulty of just being able to suddenly pay 1.2X for people. Re: institutional knowledge and expertise, etc - we tried to avoid too much concentration. If all the institutional knowledge for system X is tied up in person Z, what if they want to take on to a new roll, or I want to ask them to work on a different system or a new project? I li…

You're trying very hard to dismiss experience specific to a company and industry, but I'm not buying it. Someone who has intimate experience with an established code-base and the company will be vastly more proficient than a new employee of similar intellectual capability. It's why companies often try to hire people within similar industries and tech stacks to help reduce this gap.

It's like trying to argue that a mechanic who has only worked on Ford vehicles for 20 years should be able to quickly have the same proficiency as a mechanic who has 20 years of experience on only Porches. Nonsense.

Remember, a company can typically expect to hold onto a developer for maybe 3-5 years, so even half a year of training is a significant portion of their tenure.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#392

Post by lupire »

hunter321 wrote: post #236
wkimeria wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there is a correlation between companies that have a culture of letting engineers change roles/departments (and a clear process for doing so) and retention/average tenure.

As much as everyone hates on Amazon, no manager can block a internal transfer, maximum they can do is keep you for 4 weeks (with a very, very good reason). The average tenure on many, many teams is 6 months. Does help starve off the boredom.

Amazon employees attempt to rotate to Google every 2 years.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#393

Post by astuyvenberg »

majormajor wrote: post #247

There was an interesting paradox last time I was a people manager. Sometimes people would leave and get a bigger raise than we'd budgeted for them for that year. But at the same time, we never took long to hire a replacement at the same budget we'd been paying them. This required us to be diligent at doing market adjustments when necessary, but also led me to some other thoughts on compensation: if we think employee…

Strongly agree, I've experienced this myself from both sides of the table.

The concept of "the market" for engineering talent is far more nuanced and multifaceted than the nice x/y plots used to correlate compensation and experience (not meant as a criticism to the author at all).

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#394

Post by maxbreaker »

helsinki wrote: post #280
maxbreaker wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at a (giant well known) company/bank in New York that basically mandated that people switch jobs internally every 18 to 24 months. It was part of the expectations. I was there for 4 years. I had 3 different roles in 3 different teams. It helped a lot in fact in doing quality work. Thinking that you will inherit things you didn't do. That some other people will inherit your work / decisions. And always lea…

This is smart. I left GS right around the time they were starting such an (similar?) initiative. It also makes employees more fungible, on average, which is nice.

This was GS indeed. I personally liked that a lot. I've learn a lot there.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#395

Post by lupire »

perl4ever wrote: post #381
tikhonj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees? This seems like another thing Trader Joe's does—I've been to their stores in a few places I've lived, and while they always have a similar aesthetic, a lot of the specific decorations seemed to be unique per store with nice local details. Of course, this could still be done in a totally top-down way—hiring local consultants or something—but I wouldn't be s…

>Trader Joe's It's only been a year since they were in the news for not letting people wear things that say Black Lives Matter. And there was also the employee fired for sending a letter to the CEO about working conditions. https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/trader-joes-dan-bane-firin... I think there was a boycott, but people move on so quickly.

There's no need for employees to be able to run personal political campaigns directed at customers at work.

Would you also insist that TJ allow employees to wear "Meat/Abortion is Murder" buttons?

> employee fired for sending a letter to the CEO about working onditions.

Allegedly. The journalist made no attempt to investigate or disprove TJ's side of the story, not even to ask the employee about it.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#396

Post by bsder »

majormajor wrote: post #247

There was an interesting paradox last time I was a people manager. Sometimes people would leave and get a bigger raise than we'd budgeted for them for that year. But at the same time, we never took long to hire a replacement at the same budget we'd been paying them. This required us to be diligent at doing market adjustments when necessary, but also led me to some other thoughts on compensation: if we think employee…

Most software people don't leave jobs for a 20% raise (certainly not if they have to move). They leave jobs for a 50%+ raise.

The problem is that companies budget raises that barely cover yearly inflation.

If you aren't budgeting raises at 7-10%+ per year, your good employees will leave. It's simply logical.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#397

Post by jonathankoren »

randall wrote: post #259
wpietri wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create developer jobs that get boring for people after 24-36 months." I was chatting with a Trader Joe's cashier Sunday. It turns out they change jobs every hour. That was a surprise to me; when I long ago worked in a grocery store, I was assigned to one position for 8 hours for every shift. Why does T…

This is something I love about Facebook, fwiw. Engineers have tremendous liquidity in movement.

True, but Facebook also reorgs every six months, moving team responsibilities across orgs and cities all the time.

Surprise! Your team is shutting down and being moved to New York! Go back to the dating pool!

FB is a company that is successful in spite of all its internal failures.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#398

Post by jonathankoren »

jollybean wrote: post #104
errantspark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. Honestly if I can get a 20% pay raise by switching jobs, my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I can do to stay under the radar, why would I try? If I wanted to try I would go work somewhere else. There's just a complete mismatch in how much the company I work for values the experience and skill I gain over time and how much everyone else values it. Over time recruiters come to me with opportunitie…

"my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I can do to stay under the radar, why would I try?" Because it's a form of systematic corruption, maybe the biggest kind of corruption in the White Collar world. The objective is to 'do a good job' , not the minimum, in every endeavour. Doing the 'bare minimum' to keep a job is actually generally far under-performing, as most companies won't generally let people go. It's h…

> Doing the 'bare minimum' to keep a job is actually generally far under-performing, as most companies won't generally let people go.

Isn’t doing the minimum exactly the same as the company paying workers the least amount they can get away with?

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#399

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I dunno. Maybe it's not "all about the money."

I was a manager for 25 years (and stayed at the company for almost 27).

When my team was finally dissolved, in 2017, the person with the least tenure had a decade. The person with the most had almost 27 years (he and I started on the same day, in 1990).

The pay was...not so good. The corporation had some fairly lousy HR policies.

I'm told that I was the reason that these folks stayed.

Apparently, I was a half-decent manager. I hated the job, but did it well.

These were a different breed of engineer from what seems to be the benchmark, these days. They were very experienced, senior-level C++ engineers. We did image processing pipelines, and various forms of "engine" code (like that BASF ad: "We don't make the software you use. We make the software you use better."). A lot of my management style involved abstracting the corporate HR policies, and working with my team. They all had families. One actually had a serious medical issue, during his tenure. Most had to deal with various emotional and family issues.

I also completely supported them pursuing any training they wanted; whether or not it directly applied to their work with my team.

I had to deal with each person as an individual. I had to understand their drives, and work with them. I treated them all with the utmost respect.

They worked very hard. They stepped up to the plate, when it was crucial, and I let them have slack, when the dust settled.

It seemed to work for me. YMMV.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#400

Post by vp8989 »

Kranar wrote: post #11

To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…

"in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on."

Thanks for sharing this, I think you are probably "right" even though what you said is not an easy/popular thing to say.

What is your observed sample size on this? Could you elaborate on how you see people stagnate, and why you think this might be?

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