Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

daily.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 206 posts

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#21

Post by cebert »

yawgmoth wrote: post #5

Living in the Midwest and currently working remotely for a NY based company. Remote / coastal salaries are so much higher than typical Midwest engineering salaries that I'll never be able to return to the office again. This feels like a problem worth examining, but what can be done?

I live in the Detroit area, and also noticed a huge salary discrepancy between local salaries and those for remote positions. The positive is there are many great opportunities for us to increase our income while living in a lower-cost area than Seattle, NYC, SanFran, etc. Midwest based firms need to reconsider their pay bands, or they’re going to have problems competing for talent.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#22

Post by KevinEldon »

justinlloyd wrote: post #11
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 deadli…

May you continue to work until you no longer want to, create on your own terms, and drive as many HR people nuts as possible!

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#23

Post by justinlloyd »

KevinEldon wrote: post #22
justinlloyd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deadli…

May you continue to work until you no longer want to, create on your own terms, and drive as many HR people nuts as possible!

I have never worked a day in my life. I get paid generous amounts of money to play.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#25

Post by ct0 »

parkingrift wrote: post #18

Strong disagree with basing salary on years of experience. I see almost no correlation between output, skill, and years of experience. I actually consider this an anti-pattern that actively encourages coasting.

Experience is relative here. While I agree, there should be an adjustment that captures something like "years of performance", but its harder to quantify.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#26

Post by sokoloff »

parkingrift wrote: post #18

Strong disagree with basing salary on years of experience. I see almost no correlation between output, skill, and years of experience. I actually consider this an anti-pattern that actively encourages coasting.

I think there’s a large correlation in the 0-3 years window. I agree there’s almost none in the 12-15 years window.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#27

Post by kybernetikos »

I like the transparency and fairness. I dislike that it rewards time rather than merit and will likely discourage people from developing expertise away from their core skillset as there could be an argument that their experience in that area isn't relevant, or that their relevant experience in this area is so small.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#28

Post by sokoloff »

KevinEldon wrote: post #24

This seems like a reasonable strategy worth if you plan to exit in the next 3 years. It is simple to manage, is designed to be competitive for a point in time, and focuses on performance for growth (up or out).

I think simple to manage and “people who don’t like it won’t bother us about promotions” is high here. Whether that makes it worth losing out on corner cases where you’d benefit from a more individualized approach isn’t as clear to me, but there’s a lot of benefit from elimination of all promotion discussions, referring all of those to “check the calendar; if we haven’t fired you by X, you’ll be level Y on that day.”

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#29

Post by deepsun »

parkingrift wrote: post #18

Strong disagree with basing salary on years of experience. I see almost no correlation between output, skill, and years of experience. I actually consider this an anti-pattern that actively encourages coasting.

I've yet to see anything better than years-of-experience (or years-in-company). I've worked in both FAANG and startups plenty, and personally I've seen worse outcomes from "impact-driven" OKRs, nepotism, team-surfing, than from coasting.

Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs (which I consider a healthy lifecycle for any company).

"Coasters" at least know that what they do today they might have to support for N years following, so design accordingly. (Although I've also heard horror stories when they make it intentionally hard to understand for job security reasons, fortunately never seen myself).

Post reply on HN