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Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

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Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#11

Post by justinlloyd »

david_allison wrote: post #4

> We start counting years after formal schooling (high school or college). Grad school often counts as indirect experience. As someone who worked in software development during High School, and took time off before University to work in software, this somewhat frustrates me. Alyssa Rosenzweig has 0 years of experience under this model.

Me too. I never left school. I shipped my first commercial product in 1978 at the age of 11, launched my first company at age 14, and sold my first company at age 19.

Here I am 44 years later with zero years of experience because I keep adding more years of college and university. I am not exactly the brightest crayon in the box, but I found college "easy" because I had years of professional discipline meeting deadlines.

This idea of counting experience only after you left college is absolute nonsense.

And too add, I never actually graduated from the UK equivalent of high school, which drives HR people nuts, especially when they find out that the CTO of the company they are acquiring is a high school dropout.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#12

Post by taneq »

LandR wrote: post #10
twobitshifter wrote: post #7

The company I’m with now makes promotions without salary increases. The salary increase comes in the next review cycle when you’ve proven that you can do the job. It seems very unusual to me, has anyone else seen this?

So you get promoted, then have to do that job at a lower salary than the position should get you. Once you get the raise at the review cycle, is this also back paid for the time you were under paid for the role ?

Pretty cunning, I bet whoever thought that one up got a raise (in the next review cycle).

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#13

Post by someelephant »

twobitshifter wrote: post #7

The company I’m with now makes promotions without salary increases. The salary increase comes in the next review cycle when you’ve proven that you can do the job. It seems very unusual to me, has anyone else seen this?

sure. usually more common in places where workers have low self confidence and don't think they could do better. if only they knew what opportunities were out there

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#14

Post by justinlloyd »

jen20 wrote: post #9

From the article: > Direct experience in our rubric means substantially the same kind of work (coding, design, product management, etc.) This is a recipe for finding people without "n" years of experience, but instead finding people with one year of experience repeated "n" times. Great if you need a specialist in something, tragic if you need generalists - which most startups do.

Having founded and worked at quite a few start-ups, start-ups should aim for one specialist for every half-dozen generalists, preferably even lower than that. It's not a hard and fast rule, and pretty flexible, but if you have a single generalist and lots of specialists in a start-up, you are in trouble.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#15

Post by ant6n »

LandR wrote: post #10
twobitshifter wrote: post #7

The company I’m with now makes promotions without salary increases. The salary increase comes in the next review cycle when you’ve proven that you can do the job. It seems very unusual to me, has anyone else seen this?

So you get promoted, then have to do that job at a lower salary than the position should get you. Once you get the raise at the review cycle, is this also back paid for the time you were under paid for the role ?

At my place (not software), they ask me to perform the job at the next level, in order to prove that I can do it, before promoting me. They also require that at least 2 years are spent at each level. And during Corona they didn't promote anybody, meaning everybody`s career slid back by up to an extra year, depending on where u were in the cycle.

I would've much preferred if they had promoted ppl and done salary increases later.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#16

Post by sokoloff »

LandR wrote: post #10
twobitshifter wrote: post #7

The company I’m with now makes promotions without salary increases. The salary increase comes in the next review cycle when you’ve proven that you can do the job. It seems very unusual to me, has anyone else seen this?

So you get promoted, then have to do that job at a lower salary than the position should get you. Once you get the raise at the review cycle, is this also back paid for the time you were under paid for the role ?

With overlapping bands, it’s not necessarily the case that you were being underpaid (in a cosmic fairness sense).

If you are a level N Foo and doing well (as determined by doing some amount of level N+1 work), you might be earning the top of the level N Foo band. If that’s above the bottom of the N+1 band, you might be making the same as or more than the most recent N+1 hire.

The day the company decides that your level “rounds” from N to N+1, you might already be being paid the exact correct amount.

Design of pay scales and how they interact with promotion thresholds is complex enough that many fair systems can evolve. Most systems have evolved to slightly underpay the “almost N+1” employees for a period of time, leading to the expectation that promotion come with an immediate salary bump (and often companies do that to make the promotions “feel bigger”), so maybe the problem is promotions under that system should come with back pay rather than the situation described here being the one where back pay is owed.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#19

Post by someelephant »

m4l3x wrote: post #2

I am not sure if this kind of transparency will be beneficial to the employees or not. Like the article mentioning there is leverage missing for salary negotiation. That mean, that some folks would earn less assuming the model was adapted everywhere. However it may clean up inequalities. In the end people are divers. There are hires with only 2 years delivering better results, than one with 5 years.

you got to appreciate that honesty about leverage. this whole program was designed because they weren't competitive in the market.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#20

Post by KevinEldon »

nicoburns wrote: post #3

This seems broadly sensible. Only counting experience after schooling ends won't work for everyone though. I was employed full time as a software developer before I went to university. And I had 5 years of non-commercial experience before that while I was still in high school that most people won't have. Presumably there's some wiggle room for managers to use their judgement on what counts as experience, so it probab…

You would negotiate how that experience is recognized in the hiring process.
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