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Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

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Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#141

Post by clusterhacks »

sokoloff wrote: post #71
cindarin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly to me, I think the opposite.

That’s fascinating to me. I’d love to chat more deeply about that, but I can’t see a way to get at the essence of the difference in an HN thread.

One thing I have noticed is that (prior to the pandemic) new positions in my geographic area were almost always limited to the kind of roles that could be successfully handled by programmers with 3-5 years of experience. There simply weren't many higher-level roles available.

I'm in a standard tech area outside of Silicon Valley - plenty of standard enterprise Java jobs with a slightly smaller number of C# positions. My experience here has been that I seem to be able to make lateral moves into similar jobs that don't particularly offer more technical or career growth.

This relates back to your original comment about not seeing correlation to gains in output and skill versus experience in years 12-15 for working engineers. Most job roles in my area simply don't require more output or skill than a software developer gains in those first 3-5 years.

I would guess that for people who do observed a significant correlation in growth in output and skill over those longer years of experience are biased by seeing engineers who were in positions that required growth in output and skill.

Another weird effect (at least in my group - which tends to have long tenured employees - I've been here 12 years) is that I see engineers get stuck in specific responsibilities centered around institutional knowledge. For example, being the devops type for three legacy systems that will exist forever. If a new need comes up, my group seems to prefer hiring a totally new person to own that new project. We have actually lost a couple of employees who (rightly) were frustrated by not being able to get off of legacy support projects. These are the programmers with 20 years of experience but really have that initial 3-5 years plus the same year of experience * 15.

In my case, I had personal reasons for staying in the area and have had to manage my own tech growth. Typically by side study and programming. Some of this has led to new work in the day job but I realize I traded career growth that I would have very much enjoyed for stability. I have also have enjoyed a tremendous amount of flexibility, some autonomy in choosing dev stacks, and collaborating with medical researchers.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#142

Post by gloryjulio »

nerdponx wrote: post #112
humanrebar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you felt you were underpaid, leaving is fair. I don't really understand the requirement that all bosses are paid more than those they supervise, though. I mean, emotionally I can understand feeling that way. But I don't think it's a rule of nature or something. For instance, coaches often make less than their star players. Directors and producers often make less than star actors. Hospital directors seem to make le…

I think this makes a lot of sense. Management is not "better", it is simply "different". And in terms of actual value delivered to the business, I doubt that a low/mid-level manager delivers significantly more than an experienced and productive individual contributor. Organizations need both good managers and good individual contributors. Clearly managers of technical contributors need enough technical experience to…

All of your points are valid. But here is the catch which many ICs might not realize. There are far more management positions than pure ICs. It's the unfortunate that you be disadvantaged if you stick to strict ICs path. The competition is also fierce. The talented ICs are so far above the rest (the 10x/100x engineers).

It's a simple supply and demand problem. The company needs a lot more of above average managers/hybrids. It's not good for average ICs to stuck to their little world if they want better promotions.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#143

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

blitzar wrote: post #124
humanrebar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you felt you were underpaid, leaving is fair. I don't really understand the requirement that all bosses are paid more than those they supervise, though. I mean, emotionally I can understand feeling that way. But I don't think it's a rule of nature or something. For instance, coaches often make less than their star players. Directors and producers often make less than star actors. Hospital directors seem to make le…

Telling or managing a player to kick the ball into the back of the net is a lot easier than actually kicking it in the back of the net. Telling or managing a team of 20 people to put products on shelves is a lot harder than putting products on shelves.

And why would that be? That's a strong claim that's completely unsupported.

Personally I disagree.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#144

Post by robertlagrant »

darkerside wrote: post #123
robertlagrant wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs Based on what? You've just invalidated all the tools one would use to evaluate performance.

Probably based on an engaged managers evaluation of their work output

See above - it's strange to discount management techniques for promotions and pay rises, but still use it for firing people.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#145

Post by flibblercorn »

thebackup wrote: post #129

It’s interesting to see these salary levels. A senior developer (10+ years of experience) here in Sweden is paid less than their entry level salary. The difference in pay between Europe and the US seems huge. I wonder why.

Yes that is something that comes up on hackernews a lot, and I personally still struggle to accept it.

According to the Daily level system I should be in their band 5, so $210K, but in England I am paid less than half their entry level salary (at current exchange rates).

Americans don't have IQ scores, or any other metric to suggest being approximately 4-8 times the quality of other developed countries workers, so it's hard to just take it and accept that their compensation isn't due to their ability (on average), and that life isn't fair.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#146

Post by ashtar »

bluGill wrote: post #119
tcbawo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A part of me wonders whether certain organizations tolerate "coasters" as a talent reserve of sorts, expected to engage when things get busy or new/interesting challenges emerge. For whatever reason, many businesses fire underperformers, promote overachievers but treat the 80% in the middle very generically. Why work to be a top 20% performer when you are treated the same as the bottom 20% performer? Coasting seems l…

Your best employees should always be working on the least important projects. Thus they will seem like coasters. By making the best be on unimportant projects you get the following benefits: Nobody worries about interrupting them if they have a problem - who cares if you make the unimportant project take more time. Your second best people get to experience leading important projects and thus you grow them into the be…

This is a great way to lose your best people. Or it's pure /s

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#147

Post by usaar333 »

heurisko wrote: post #48
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…

> tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom. Why do you leave out class analysis? This has far more relevance than arguably either height or race. White working class boys, at least in the UK, are the demographic least likely to go to university. The story is likely to be the same in other countries. If you're working class, you're not going to be the intake for an MBA.

Class analysis isn't that relevant in the workspace. At least in the US, your perceived class changes with economics, so there's not much class differential in meetings.

All said, I don't intuitively buy the idea of Zoom radically changing opportunities. At least as a short engineer, I've sensed zero difference, but then again, I never thought of my height as an actual handicap with regard to my job (studies on initial impressions be damned as the initial impression isn't that relevant once you've built up reputation).

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#148

Post by aaronblohowiak »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #134
blitzar wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling or managing a player to kick the ball into the back of the net is a lot easier than actually kicking it in the back of the net. Telling or managing a team of 20 people to put products on shelves is a lot harder than putting products on shelves.

I like the analogy, but I don't fully agree with it. If the "product on shelf" is a basic CRUD app, then sure, managing a team of 20 people might be harder than doing the individual tasks related to putting the product on shelf, but oftentimes there are challenging technical aspects related to the product. In some cases those technical challenges might be harder than management of the team.

Depends on how well isolated the tricksy bits are

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#149

Post by _jesseb »

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?

Same here, midwest working for a SV company. Nobody in my city is even close to competitive to my salary, and my salary isn't even that amazing for SV.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#150

Post by hellisothers »

gloryjulio wrote: post #142
nerdponx wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this makes a lot of sense. Management is not "better", it is simply "different". And in terms of actual value delivered to the business, I doubt that a low/mid-level manager delivers significantly more than an experienced and productive individual contributor. Organizations need both good managers and good individual contributors. Clearly managers of technical contributors need enough technical experience to…

All of your points are valid. But here is the catch which many ICs might not realize. There are far more management positions than pure ICs. It's the unfortunate that you be disadvantaged if you stick to strict ICs path. The competition is also fierce. The talented ICs are so far above the rest (the 10x/100x engineers). It's a simple supply and demand problem. The company needs a lot more of above average managers/hy…

Just to clarify when you say IC you mean literally an IC as opposed to the leadership path in an IC vertical? Many companies expect hither level ICs to be leaders in one way or another, you don’t need to go down the management path.
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