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Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

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Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#191

Post by benreesman »

aphexairlines wrote: post #164
benreesman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please reconsider because I’ll do myself a disservice? Or please reconsider because I won’t take 1% of the marginal revenue I generate and we can’t have that kind of thinking going around?

Reconsider because you'll do yourself a disservice by expecting the world to work that way. You don't want to be surprised and upset when your employer rewards someone for introducing more bureaucracy instead of some technically challenging work you delivered.

How about I worry about whether or not my haphazardly self-medicated anxiety disorder keeps me around the p90 in comp in a bad/typical year instead of the p99 when I have my shit together, and you worry about whether or not the wage fixing scandal with the big lawsuit involving all the big names might be an example of structural suppression of engineer wages?

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#192

Post by benreesman »

pc86 wrote: post #125
benreesman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’m personally a bit conflicted that English, especially written English is such a key skill. I once spoke a little French, and enjoyed it immensely, but there’s no money in it so it atrophied almost out of existence. Mandarin seems to be a pretty credible candidate for a “must know” business language, but even there that’s climbing up hill at least a little.

Why are you conflicted about this? There has to be a lingua franca for business, the internet, etc. (not necessarily the same language). Historically speaking, it makes sense how English would bubble up as this language. Why should that cause guilt or conflict?

Oh I just mean it doesn’t seem “fair” that other people have to work hard to be understood in the lingua franca, and I grew up in a household where it was spoken. Opinions will differ on whether I can construct a pleasant sentence from an aesthetic point of view, but I got “this line of code looks to be where the big is” for “free”.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#193

Post by benreesman »

codechad wrote: post #108
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…

> 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. I think you have some unresolved emotions regarding the "nerd/jock thing".

I just did the vouch that got you unflagged enough that I can comment. It’s a pissy remark, but I’ve done plenty of that myself, and frankly you’re not completely wrong.

Ive got my knickers a bit twisted that looking like a jock seems to produce more recognition than actually being a nerd. And if I feel like my accomplishments kind of sit in the shadow of my appearance or demographics or whatever, it must be 100x worse for some people, which sucks ass and is kinda depressing.

Code should talk, and bullshit should walk.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#194

Post by benreesman »

uberduper wrote: post #154
benreesman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll extend you the benefit of the doubt and assume your intention is to be helpful. Can you be a little more specific and thus potentially actionable?

I'm just a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. But I'll give it a shot. You come off as having an inflated sense of the value you provide while being very bitter that you're not recognized for it. You seem to project the meritocracy playing out in your head on the "inevitable future." The work you do is no doubt challenging and you seem to find it very rewarding in and of itself. There are presumably few p…

I mean, if anything I’ve spent more lonely nights with a bottle of Four Roses and some depressing existentialist book on a high rise tower balcony over not finding happiness in absurd pay than for any other reason.

Being overpaid even by the standards of what I outlined in the post tends to provoke a little guilt, in me at least.

Finding no joy in it whatsoever was legitimately depressing. Tyler Durden: “What now dad? I’ve got the degree/job/whatever, what comes next?”

Can’t buy that answer with RSUs. Or at least I never figured out how.

But yeah, the heavy duty hackers / mathematicians, who I am not one of! Are going to fuck everyone else up.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#195

Post by benreesman »

bluGill wrote: post #128
JonChesterfield wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While you are not wrong, it isn't the full picture. For most projects we don't need more language/compiler performance. Most web sights are served with a handful of servers, likely shared servers on AWS or something (so that you can get full data center failure redundancy - which is probably overkill). The total cost to run the servers isn't all that much on the bottom line and so you shouldn't pay more for compiler…

Its not even that you’re wrong in any meaningful way that makes this endlessly looping class of argument get under my skin.

I think it’s maybe more like: we need an HN where it’s unanimous that the computer side of optimization is life-and-death, and an HN where winning and losing is about other things, any language or database or algorithm is fine: we’re playing a different game that pays off just as much if not more.

People routinely make more money than they can carry on like node.js or whatever, it’s not a “better”/“worse” thing. But some people are looking for edge on gritty nuts and bolts of computing stuff, and some people are laughing all the way to the bank on this whole other category of thing that I can’t even do justice to in summary.

Trying to weld together an unspoken (except by idiots like me) consensus on how to stack rank these very different activities just seems to piss everyone off.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#196

Post by codechad »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#197

Post by closeparen »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #153
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.

I am disappointed this comment does not receive more comments! I feel the same. From far away, it seems like Berlin is bursting with great technical talent, as well as Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki, yet the salaries are terribly low. (I see you Oslo, but not the same reputation!) Oh hey, please include France. They have such great, underrated technical universities... do amazing comp-sci research... but their c…

I pay some of the highest taxes in the country in exchange for some of the worst highly-visible poverty and most dysfunctional public services. Either would be a huge improvement.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#198

Post by deepsun »

robertlagrant wrote: post #117
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…

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

You can still use self-assessments, manager and peer reports on the work done, e.g. each quarter. Just explicitly don't use them for promotion. If they are used only for "whether this person brings more to the company than company spends on them", then it unlikely to become a metric to game around.

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#199

Post by darkerside »

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.

I just want to say I'm impressed by your intellectual generosity here!

Re: Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries

#200

Post by Avshalom »

blitzar wrote: post #186
Avshalom wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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?

Yes, and so do all the managers and stockers that I've known over the course of my decade of stocking shelves.
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