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Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

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Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#181

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

closeparen wrote: post #174
deepsun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Recently I have been musing about a SlateStarCodex-ish "compensation systems very different from ours." One is Oxide [0], which has uniform compensation across the board, explicitly with reference to this problem about how performance processes influence work and culture. Another might be to take LeetCode-style interviews more seriously. We have already concluded that the most important criteria for whether we want t…

Assuming you're being serious - all of that sounds nightmarish and extremely subjective and failure-prone. Subjective assessments can easily skew towards politics and patronage. Your dept head is very likely indeed to confuse likability with technical ability.

The leetcode stuff doesn't necessarily correlate to actual productive capacity. Good teams tend to be a mix of complementary talents, and if you put a group of algo hackers together you'll get a lot of algo hacking. You won't necessarily get a lot of maintenance or debugging.

All of which highlights that the industry has no clue how to quantify talent either during hiring or after. And even less clue how to quantify the business value of talent. It has even less clue how to quantify needed talent - in the sense of creating teams with a productive mix of interlocking skills.

Abstract discussions about comp are meaningless from a business POV without that information.

This applies particularly to management. Some managers are clearly better than others, but in spite of all of the books, lectures, and general opportunism around management theory, many corps struggle with creating a sane productive culture.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#182

Post by ThalesX »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #178
soco wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Switzerland, most of the non-IT people I'm talking with are genuinely surprised that for instance project managers are paid less that developers. For them just hearing the word "manager" = big buck.

Whenever I hear the term "Project Manager", and imagine all of the confusion collectively experienced by anyone who has had to explain that job, I think of Mr Burns from the Simpsons saying "Am I that out of touch? No, it's the KIDS who are wrong". Let's call it "Project Coordinator" or "Project Advocate" or something.

Let’s call them “Project Secretary”, that should tune them down a bit…

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#183

Post by mqnfred »

thebackup wrote: post #169
jandrewrogers wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an American who has worked in Europe for many years at multiple companies, so I feel at least somewhat qualified to give some insight. Europeans are just as talented technically as Americans, that has never been the issue. As a broad generalization, European business culture is consistently poor at leveraging that talent to generate value, often treating it like factory work. Because American business culture is…

Thanks for this comment. A very interesting observation. Do you have any thoughts regarding American companies that are established in Europe, shouldn't they be able to introduce that American culture in their European offices?

A very interesting follow-up to an insightful post. I think the answer might lie in why the american business culture is more efficient in the first place.

I believe american business is more fluid, allowing for better arbitrage opportunities that ultimately leads to better arbitrage abilities for its actors.

More law and protection has the same effect as more code: it slows things down because it increases dramatically the amount of requirements you have to contend with. A double edged sword indeed!

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#184

Post by closeparen »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #181
closeparen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I have been musing about a SlateStarCodex-ish "compensation systems very different from ours." One is Oxide [0], which has uniform compensation across the board, explicitly with reference to this problem about how performance processes influence work and culture. Another might be to take LeetCode-style interviews more seriously. We have already concluded that the most important criteria for whether we want t…

Assuming you're being serious - all of that sounds nightmarish and extremely subjective and failure-prone. Subjective assessments can easily skew towards politics and patronage. Your dept head is very likely indeed to confuse likability with technical ability. The leetcode stuff doesn't necessarily correlate to actual productive capacity. Good teams tend to be a mix of complementary talents, and if you put a group of…

The relative virtue of workers and work products is in fact subjective and not a measurable quantity. Creative fields embrace this openly. Success in a creative project is highly related to the reactions it inspires in people (public, funders, critics, etc). A good creative leader has access to the same subjective reactions that the audience does. She also has them at a higher level of detail. That way she can give actionable feedback on specific elements, emphasize what works and cut what doesn't, to optimize the overall subjective experience. I came to know this process through the performing arts but I'm also pretty confident that it describes Steve Jobs. Personally I don't think we have nearly enough respect for practitioner judgement in the tech world. Software also succeeds and fails in many cases based on its subjective resonance with users and maintainers. (Though not all, contractor-maintained enterprise software exists). Good taste is also part of the virtue of a senior engineer.

Now in tech we are shy about subjectivity. One way to get a measurable quantity related to virtue is to construct a game. Within the framework of the game we can all agree on what is a win or a loss. We can also rank players according to their track record of wins and losses. Someone who wins when most others would lose is a good player. Someone who loses when most others would win is a bad player. We can have neat quantitative encodings of this, like Elo. And we can agree that winning or losing the game we have constructed has something to do with the virtues we care about. But unless we're talking about professional sports, the game is only a proxy. The subjective judgement now lives in the choice of this game, and not some other game, or this rule, and not some other rule, as our proxy.

This is obviously what we have done with LeetCode. LeetCode's fidelity as a proxy for working-programmer virtue is of course doubtful. The promo packet's fidelity seems like it should be higher. But the promo packet is also a constructed game and an imperfect proxy. When programmers play to win the LeetCode game they engage in not-very-constructive studying and practice in their free time, and perform the weird ritual for a few hours in a conference room. It is mostly the programmer's loss. When programmers play to win the promo packet game they do things contrary to working-programmer virtue in their capacity as working programmers. They design overcomplicated solutions, involve too many stakeholders in their execution, deprecate and replace things instead of maintain them, leave obvious defects in their products because there is no causal inference proving their dollar value, etc. The company loses. It loses big. Given that we have already accepted the tradeoffs of LeetCode interviews with respect to hiring, are you sure it's so ludicrous that they're a better set of tradeoffs than the ones we currently use for leveling?

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#185

Post by blitzar »

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.

I was thinking stacking shelves in a supermarket as an example of "putting products on a shelf"; but yes, as the complexity, skills required, technical knowledge or genetic 1 in a million requirement goes up for the managed worker there is a point where the degree of difficulty swaps over.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#186

Post by blitzar »

Avshalom wrote: post #137
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.

>>Telling or managing a team of 20 people to put products on shelves is a lot harder than putting products on shelves. no it isn't

You think managing minimum wage shelve stackers in a supermarket is easier than actually stacking the sheles in a supermarket?

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#187

Post by benreesman »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #131
benreesman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all my math is from MIT OCW on YouTube and a bit of 3blue1brown. I don’t think there’s any shame in that. What’s your PhD in?

My Bachelors is in finance and stats. I do hope that makes you feel better.

I’m going to apologize in advance, a little bit to you, but mostly to the community, for what I’m about to say. I still get like this with some frequency, but it’s less and less and that’s on purpose.

I think for a guy who had negligible exposure to literacy, let alone math, I’ve realized a substantial fraction of my mathematical potential. We could split hairs about which parts of the CUDA CNN stack I wrote in PyTorch or which convex optimizations I did that turned up about 700MM/year recurring for Instagram’s shareholders, but that’s kind of missing the point that whoever handed you any kind of document that makes you part of the broader enterprise of knowledge, and curiosity, and rigor fucked up badly.

I’m still an advocate for the idea that there should be universities, and that whatever fraction of the millions of dollars I’ve paid in taxes go to them, but I sincerely hope that you’re as much of an outlier as I think as to why I should stop paying for the part of that I do.

Now here’s the olive branch: I’m a contrarian and often cranky/negative person myself, and if you’re actually hot shit an financial mathematics, well I need to hire about three of those people, and I’ve got a soft spot for cranky contrarians.

Come do a month or two of contract-to-hire for any plausible wage and show me that you can back it up. Or go fuck yourself. That’s as productive of a reply that I’ve got in me right now.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#188

Post by benreesman »

cindarin wrote: post #109
benreesman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm sorry for your loss. I'm not trying to hammer on you for that. I hope you feel better soon.

That’s big of you. Thank you. We all lean on one another to make the community more positive when someone else is starting to fail at civility.

In that comment you were the person who sent things in a better direction. No sarcasm whatsoever: my regards friend.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#189

Post by benreesman »

sockpuppet69 wrote: post #59
benreesman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I was using talk white guy as a shorthand for rich kid with several other attributes. Being a tall white guy myself I thought it would get me less crucified.

That’s incredibly racist.

Me acknowledging that I’m squarely in the demographic that needs to be very aware of how easy it is to attribute success to hard work rather than privilege makes me any kind of prejudiced?

I’ve got the same tribalism firmware as any other homo sapien, and I’ve probably said some xenophobic shit in my life without even realizing it.

But I try hard to make my way on my code rather than being 6’4”, a lean 230 and conventionally handsome, I think that’s a lame way to make a living no matter what it pays, unless one is a professional athlete or a model or something. I’d probably need to tweak my body fat percentage by as much as 10% to have the same superficial stats as an NFL half back, but I’d rather embrace my inner nerd, which feels more natural.

If you want to read about it, we’ll I post under my real name and Chaos Monkeys won a bunch of awards a few years ago.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#190

Post by benreesman »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #140
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…

I work in finance. I have the seen the same situation play out with salespeople. As risk taking at large investment banks has fallen dramatically since 2008 regulatory reforms, the value of sales people has only risen. The "alpha" sales person seems to have no ceiling. Ideally, this sales person is working in a product area that does not increase balance sheet risk... holy moly... they are worth more than weight in g…

I can’t find any fault with your post, I think any confusion is due to an error in judgement on my part that dissing my own demographic as a euphemism for people who, uh, historically got more recognition for less work was a reasonably diplomatic thing to do.

Silver lining: your comment added insight to the conversation even if it was a response to clumsiness on my part.

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