Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

This is absolutely, fucking dumbest idea I ever heard.

Say you have two engineers that both have 10 years of experience, one is barely scraping by and one is working his ass off and significant contributor to the team.

They earn the same money and, more importantly, they both know it. And the team knows it. And the manager knows it.

Can you guess which one will feel treated unfairly and will start looking for a new job?

Imagine a good employee comes to you and says she is going to leave because she has been offered better salary somewhere else.

You have now only two choices:

1) break the commitment you made to entire company,

2) let her go.

You can also decide to promote her, but management is really a different job and you lost your team member anyway.

Over time your business will accumulate people who just barely passed your recruitment process and are just barely competent to avoid being let go.

If you think you will keep the better one just because you say some nice words and give them recognition token, guess again.

Let me explain what this means: it promotes people who sit idly by the computer (because they gain regardless of their involvement) and punishes people who actually give a shit and who try hard being better every day.

It punishes your business HARD. In most businesses, most progress is being done by small minority of employees. And now you are leaving gates open and saying you are not going to even try to keep them doing good job.

Under Daily's levels system, I'd have 11 years of "direct" experience and 5 years of "indirect" experience, for a total of 16 years of experience, putting me in their highest band (Level 7) with a salary of $270K.

But as I've told every employer who's hired me since leaving journalism, and particularly as I've transitioned from an IC to a manager, those years of experience in journalism were invaluable. I learned how to ask the right questions; how to handle the stress of always being on deadline; how to be a generalist, quickly learning enough about a subject that you can clearly explain it to others; how to communicate effectively in general; and many other skills that are absolutely relevant today.

Obviously, it wouldn't matter for this banding whether those years are treated as "indirect" or "direct" experience -- I'd be in Level 7 either way -- but I could see it matter for others.

Full disclosure: I applied to Daily last year but they ended up filling the position with an internal candidate.