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Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

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Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#91

Post by lmilcin »

mnsc wrote: post #83
lmilcin wrote: post #33

Salary based on your "experience" as measured by the number of years you survived sitting by the computer. 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…

> Ambitious people like achieving goals. Like coming in, making the biggest impact they can eg. do a large spectacular redesign, leave for 10% pay jump immediately and never sticking around for that maintenance nightmare that were hidden in the details? Incentives will always be a tradeoff because you can't measure skill.

> Incentives will always be a tradeoff because you can't measure skill.

Oh, so because it is hard let's just stop trying?

You can't measure skill accurately. But you can try to find correlations and you can measure other things that are as much or even more important like... erm... results?

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#92

Post by rr808 »

draugadrotten wrote: post #54
rr808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day, anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring. Optimizing compiler is a great example of a niche that a few guys should be in that really shouldn't be paid well. The big bucks earned at Google/FB aren't earned because they have better compilers or low level libraries, its because of the business strategies they have.

Try building FB or Google without technology, and then you come back and say that the business strategy is all you need.

Sure but that isn't what I said. Big data, cloud services smart tech people definitely needs to be paid as much as the smart business people. Compilers, meh.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#93

Post by parkingrift »

lkxijlewlf wrote: post #63
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.

They address this in the article by saying it is "relevant" experience. They've given themselves some wiggle room there and I'm assuming they will trust their hiring practices to make sure they don't hire someone with 10 1 year experiences.

I’m more referring to the culture this would create. If I’m at L3 the only thing I can do to get to L4 is… wait two years. Why would I do anything but the bare minimum to hit that tenure benchmark? More importantly, why would I stick around and wait?

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#94

Post by Cthulhu_ »

SloopJon wrote: post #85

My company has four IC titles, the description of which includes typical experience, with credit for graduate degrees. When we went from two titles to four, I was assigned the highest title, and joked that it was another way of saying "old". I would be level 7 under Daily's system, making more than I do now, but then what's my monetary incentive to improve? Younger, less experienced colleagues can literally set a cou…

It makes me think of Amazon's PIP system, where managers HAVE to get rid of the lower 20% of performance - whichever performance metric that is. When applied to this, it kinda means - assuming it's x years at the same company / using the same system - you don't get paid more for having X years of experience, but surviving X years of performance review firings. It's X years of not being in the worst 20%.

I mean if using that system I'd probably set the bar higher, but thankfully I'm not.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#95

Post by JonChesterfield »

rr808 wrote: post #44
benreesman wrote: post #42

This is sort of well-articulated and someone thought about it a lot. The salaries seem fine, as long as there’s 1MM in liquid equity to go with the L7 one like Google does. But it doesn’t seem to address the real issue (to which I also don’t have a final answer): the jock/nerd thing is still playing out. If, as I believe is mostly true, A16 is pretty on the money with the software eats the world thing: hackers “shoul…

> If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day, anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring. Optimizing compiler is a great example of a niche that a few guys should be in that really shouldn't be paid well. The big bucks earned at Google/FB aren't earned because they have better compilers or low level libraries, its because of the business strategies they have.

Compilers are why we can write in C++ instead of assembly. The related fields of interpreters and language runtimes are why we can write in Python.

The optimising part makes languages that are faster to develop in run fast enough that they can actually be used to build useful things.

Bugs introduced in that stack are horrendous to run down, easy to introduce and broad in fallout.

Rather a lot of our modern tech world is built on compilers. It's a great example of where compromising on engineering capability scatters costs and breakage all the way through the system.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#96

Post by benreesman »

rr808 wrote: post #92
draugadrotten wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try building FB or Google without technology, and then you come back and say that the business strategy is all you need.

Sure but that isn't what I said. Big data, cloud services smart tech people definitely needs to be paid as much as the smart business people. Compilers, meh.

You’ve got a point, which is that kickass compiler people often love PL so much that they’ll do it at a deep discount.

I’ve found this on average to more true of “niche” languages: Julia, Haskell, etc.

C++ compiler people much less often fuck around on their comp.

In my experience.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#97

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

It’s really the opposite. You hire people at a discount and give the 3-7% raises within a band. It’s a forward process that incentivizes performance.

I find it funny that people in tech get squirrely over annual raises, but don’t have a problem with multi-year vesting schedules with massive payouts.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#98

Post by marcinzm »

Xcelerate wrote: post #39
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.

Yeah, I was a bit frustrated with this as well. I was somewhat down-leveled right after finishing my PhD because a lot of employers didn't consider it experience, even though I did high performance computing work with projects that had multiple stakeholders. Honestly, I was more technically savvy then than I am now 4 years into working at a large tech company.

>Honestly, I was more technically savvy then than I am now 4 years into working at a large tech company.

The usual reason I see for down leveling is because being technically savvy is not what companies actually look for. I'm talking most jobs rather than being in an R&D division that is PhD heavy.

* Understanding the modern SDLC in a corporate environment and best practices. Academia often doesn't do things in a way that would be considered good production practices outside of it. Both from a process and a technical (CICD, heavy testing, layered frameworks, etc.) point of view.

* The culture of academia differs from corporate which means that while you gain soft skills they are biased versus what you'd get in a corporate environment. That can have subtle or not so subtle impact on decision making.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#99

Post by benreesman »

cindarin wrote: post #89
benreesman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe keep it to yourself if the game plan is to half-ass psychoanalyze someone and then bail when asked a follow up question?

Just because it's obvious to many that you need therapy doesn't mean that any who notice are capable or willing to give it.

If it’s not obvious to anyone from the recently deceased kid brother thing that therapy is indicated, I’d be curious how.

I’ve been getting therapy since way before that happened, most people could probably benefit from a little mental health checkup now and again.

What did I do to get your knickers so twisted that you’re banging on a recently-bereaved guy with thus far zero productive suggestions?

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#100

Post by it_does_follow »

angarg12 wrote: post #50

I worked for a very old fashioned company in Germany that used a similar system to pay employees. After about a year I became the lead of my team. But since some of my colleagues had been in the company about 10 years, they were getting paid more than me. Frustrated, I left for a better (and better paying) job. I believe these systems produce a "dead sea effect". High performer will leave, being able to get better de…

I had a similar reaction to this post, this is not a new way of leveling, this is how leveling was done at most companies for a long time. State Universities and the Federal Government are still very much this way, with a very similar amount of counting years of direct/indirect experience.

Back when I worked in academia I also had a very similar experience to yours. I wasn't leading a team but, especially earlier in my career, it was incredibly frustrating to be making significantly less than people who were both less skilled and less hard working, but simply had more years of experience. The perpetual theme was "you just haven't earned it yet", but "earning it" was purely a function of putting time in, it didn't matter how great the work you did was.

I left to go to tech and even now that I'm on the older side of things I still prefer the pay structure being more closely aligned with the value of your skills + the amount you're willing to put into the job. I get paid plenty, and have no problem with someone much younger and less experienced then me getting paid more with unique skills and responsibilities I'm less interested in having.

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