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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?

#401

Post by flavius29663 »

fleddr wrote: post #272
scarecrowbob wrote: post #214

I literally had this conversation with my boss yesterday, and I was a bit floored that they don't quite "get" it. I'm the lead dev at a small co that does work, mostly custom WordPress, for gov / edu / SMB (mostly NGO or trade groups). I'm the senior technical staff... there's a junior dev and a "project manager who codes but doesn't read log files". I've been working with this company for 7 years and never gotten a…

This is because many businesses are ran from an accounting perspective. When they give you a huge raise, payroll costs are up. Yet you won't necessarily deliver a revenue increase to match it. So it's a financial loss. This might trigger you to leave, but accounting doesn't care about future potential events. Similarly, I could make the point to my boss that an additional monitor, would increase my productivity by 20…

yep. This is a business led by accountants. I've also seen businesses led by sales people (great sales people, btw) - that wouldn't understand anything other than selling features. The best jobs have been with companies who have a technical leader. It still has downsides, but it's night and day compared to the other 2.

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

#402

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

wpietri wrote: post #86
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…

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…

The Japanese corporation I worked for had engineers and managers change jobs every two years.

One of the reasons was that they wanted to "cross-train" people. They liked to have a lot of process, and tended to think of employees as "Swiss army knives," that could adapt. They had style guides, and a whole infrastructure (HR and technical), to support this. Lots of training.

Not sure how effective it was. I feel that they weren't as productive as I'd like, but they were really good engineers. I had a lot of respect for them (which doesn't mean that I didn't want to strangle some of them; from time to time).

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

#403

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jjav wrote: post #278
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…

> What I do know is that it's much easier for me to hire a competent lawyer or UX designer than it is to hire a competent software developer I'm curious if you grill the lawyer on some abstract topic from their undergrad courses (possibly 20 years ago) and make them write it perfectly on a whiteboard? Meaning, the same way software developers get interviewed? Or do you look at the lawyer's professional experience and…

Here's a post I made yesterday, in another thread, that sort of speaks to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28034629

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

#404

Post by urthor »

Because they don't want to inflate their salary bill across hundreds of thousands of people.

You can't just give one guy a raise. Especially in this age of Level.fyi, salary transparency works both ways.

Basically they are cycling through every other strategy other than an across the board pay band raise.

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

#405

Post by yupper32 »

jjav wrote: post #323
yupper32 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. How much time do people put into side projects that make money? 15-20 hours/week? I work 40 hours/week at a Big-N, but if I put another 15-20 hours per week into my current job I'd get promoted extremely quickly, and get a bigger raise from that promotion than any "side project" I could come up with. I don't want to do any of that, and moving companies is still probably the easiest way to get a large ra…

> if I put another 15-20 hours per week into my current job I'd get promoted extremely quickly That'd be a very rare circumstance. In most jobs working 15-20 hours overtime each week only gets you 15-20 hours less for living your own life, nothing else.

In software engineering?

At all companies I've been at or have intimately known about, there have been clear guidelines for promotions and examples to look at. These are medium to large companies. FAANG and non-FAANG.

I'm sure you're right in a lot of cases, but I feel like at most software companies I'm not too far off.

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

#406

Post by MichaelZuo »

abc_lisper wrote: post #166
MichaelZuo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well market dynamics over the long term should take care of companies that short sighted. They will be outcompeted by others that are better at building organizational capacity.

Yeah, that long term is not useful for the engineer whose skills should be valued right. He will be older by that time

Well that’s sorta how life works? It’s like any other market dynamic that organizes society. No guarantees that anyone will be utilized to their highest and best purpose.

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

#407

Post by urthor »

Also, just because the job market is hot doesn't mean there aren't TONS of chumps.

The number of people out there who are happy being underpaid because of inertia far, far exceeds the number of people who will actively leave a job for another to get a bigger pay day.

Companies are caught because if they give the subset who are actively dissatisfied a raise, they are giving the "inert employees" a raise as well.

Hence they have a huge disincentive to give anyone a raise.

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

#408

Post by hdhjebebeb »

thx2099100 wrote: post #389
bumby wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a trade off between depth and breadth here? While not the SV tech scene, I remember working for an aerospace company that had some people in the same positions for a couple decades. For the administrative positions it seemed to breed complacency, but for the technical positions it seemed to provide a very deep level of technical expertise that would be difficult to cultivate within a couple years

the other side from my experience at a previous engineering job is that it can also breed deep defensive layers around bad engineering work. the same 3 core people stayed on the project for 11 years from the begging and hired and fired around weither you're a threat to their position. managers would come and go, they were helpless and held no real power in the project, until they settled for a puppet manager who woul…

same, i joined a place where it turned out a small group of people basically held all the power and had created a byzantine system only they could reason about. management was also trapped because the devs who knew the system held all the power.

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

#409

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

notJim wrote: post #387
cletus wrote: post #327

There are several factors: 1. Organizations will often see bumping up an employee's pay to match another offer as some variant of extortion and it's they view this as disloyal. Never mind that the other offer clearly shows they're now below market. I didn't say it makes sense; 2. There is friction in changing jobs and companies and people will generally have a threshold for making that jump (eg they won't switch for…

These are good. I think I'd add one: 7. Tech companies (explicitly or not) are skeptical of people who don't switch jobs. People call them "lifers" as a denigrating term, for people who are just coasting. Switching jobs implies that you're hungry or ambitious (regardless of whether it's true), whereas remaining at a job shows that you are complacent.

There's some other words that may also apply:

"Integrity," "Loyalty," "Honor," "Reliability," "Trustworthiness," "Empathy," "Honesty," I could go on...

You are correct. People sneer at these anachronistic qualities. I've looked up many noses.

But it's what worked for me. I'm fairly happy how things turned out for me.

What was it Hunter Thompson said?

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

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

#410

Post by joshuamorton »

t-writescode wrote: post #206
SubuSS wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people talk about comp, they usually talk about the # of $$ they took home last year - anything else is magic money so to speak. For the same reason a manager isn't going to value a $10MM grant in company that ended up being a penny stock, he isn't going to downgrade a company that resurrected from the pits either. Money in hand last year is the best measure possible/available.

That's not what it looks like on levels.fyi. It's regularly: "SDE 1, 110k + 75k stock options", and then levels.fyi will declare that 185, not 110 + 0, 112 + 38, 115 + 19, 120 + 19 edit: and then people will come on here and say "look! Brand new Google employees make 200k!"

Levels FYI doesn't usually do that.

Looking at how they handle Google, for example they show base|annual stock|signing bonus.

So when you see 130K base + 33K stock, that was a grant of 130K vesting over 4 years. And then with signing and annual bonus of ~20K, that person is in fact making 200K starting (although the median is probably a bit lower for a completely new employee).

On the other hand, people often forget about refreshes when looking at these things. And while a refresh grant won't be as large as the initial grant, they do make the overall comp significantly larger.

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