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When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

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Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#131

Post by andruby »

hobs wrote: post #87
dragon-hn wrote: post #37

I just had a very valuable teammate quit this week from lack of salary progression. New-ish grads are making more than him for much lesser jobs. The business refused to do even a token salary increase because of the ‘economic climate’ Now a critical project won’t happen on time, which will cost the company many magnitudes more in revenue than it would have cost them with a token increase. Oops.

I've seen this before so many times, and recommend people quit and sometimes even apply back at their same company. I got my friend a 30% raise after he quit, worked at a new place for two months, it blocked implementation of key projects and the CEO started freaking out. I asked him how much he would pay to fix the problem, and he gave me a number. I said if we paid that as the new salary to my friend we could have…

That’s a great tactic. I’d love to use that, but I’m afraid a lot of leaders are not rational enough (or have to big of ego’s) to hire the person back

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#132

Post by slibhb »

Define "pay equity" please. Does that mean everyone in the same role gets paid the same? Everyone with the same seniority gets paid the same? Something else?

Sure, some people are getting paid too little and others too much. But the concept of "equity" has no place here. It suggests that you "deserve" to paid equally. But equal to whom? And based on what? A new hire can be more valuable than a veteran. Two people in the same role can contribute different amounts.

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#133

Post by chucksta »

newaccount7hhhf wrote: post #70
dragon-hn wrote: post #37

I just had a very valuable teammate quit this week from lack of salary progression. New-ish grads are making more than him for much lesser jobs. The business refused to do even a token salary increase because of the ‘economic climate’ Now a critical project won’t happen on time, which will cost the company many magnitudes more in revenue than it would have cost them with a token increase. Oops.

What do you mean “cost them money” I legitimately can’t think of situation where releasing a product behind deadline would cost a business money? Obviously they just allocated resources more efficiently because they have fewer people. Likely they made more money because of increased demand.

EX: Contract with commitments to release on a certain date, making them liable

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#134

Post by thisiszilff »

Saulivar wrote: post #90

There was an article at Forbes that said employees who stay with the company for more than 2 years are underpaid by as much as 50%. So why do they stay for so long? Humans are resistant to change. Speaking of myself, when I was working as a programmer, finding a new job meant going through endless interviews with leetcode tests even though I had 15 years experience. Turns out it was Joel Spolsky who invented that pra…

> Which required me to learn "direct response marketing and copywriting".

How’d you go about getting good at these things?

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#135

Post by willcipriano »

beoberha wrote: post #103
jedberg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! We were encouraged to take interviews at other companies for multiple reasons. One was to report back the offer as data for the HR team. They used that both in level setting new offers as well as making sure you got an appropriate raise. It was also because Netflix understood that if you found a better job, it was better for both you and Netflix to leave and take that job, because it meant that you weren't truly…

It’s an awesome mentality, but I think it comes out of Netflix being a company that sells to consumers and not enterprises. I work at a big cloud company. We don’t have enough engineers to do the work our customers want us to do. Each piece of work comes from someone spending millions of dollars a year that has executive visibility. Letting someone go means some committed project goes unfunded and an unhappy customer…

> We don’t have enough engineers to do the work our customers want us to do

> Each piece of work comes from someone spending millions of dollars a year

You can afford to hire, you have the work. Where's the bottleneck? I'm hearing lots about unemployed people, especially on here.

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#136

Post by eastbound »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #38
thot_experiment wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave.

Leave? Into what is anecdotally the worst job market for developers since 2008 and maybe even the dotcom bust?

I don’t understand this remark. It’s still incredibly hard to find engineers here in Europe (I’m hiring at 5x the minimum wage, to give an idea). Where are the swathes of unemployed people that you are describing? Are a quarter of American IT professionals unemployed?

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#137

Post by indigochill »

ranger207 wrote: post #119
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is - historically it hasn't bitten companies badly enough that they stop doing it. On aggregate, you can get away with massively underpaying your top talent and overpaying new hires - most of which aren't good and will go to other companies before they're even moderately productive. I question why they're so obsessed with hiring so many new people to do basically nothing. That's the reason they have to ov…

> historically it hasn't bitten companies badly enough that they stop doing it. Because VC money based around vague promises of selling data to advertisers have traditionally propped up even fundamentally unprofitable businesses so software quality hasn't significantly contributes to success or not. Now that we're out of ZIRP then companies might start learning that in 10 years or so after they've replaced a few gene…

> companies might start learning that in 10 years or so after they've replaced a few generations of programmers, nobody knows how anything works, and suddenly software quality starts to actually matter to investors and consumers

I suspect in software specifically, there will never be such a reckoning because compared to maintenance, replacement is too easy.

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#139

Post by JohnFen »

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #130
JohnFen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is awkward This is why I don't discuss my salary, nor do I want to know what my coworkers make. It's not information that is terribly useful, but can make for very awkward situations. I do want to know whether or not I'm making a salary that is in line with the norms in my area, but I can easily find that information without knowing what any individual is making.

> It's not information that is terribly useful This opinion feels alien to me. Some of the most useful information you can have in a company is around salary/bonus/commission structures. From a purely self interested perspective, knowing this makes you a far better negotiator around review season. And from an organizational perspective, understanding what kind of things get people their bonus or commission goes a lon…

I think that it's a matter of priorities. I am not interested in making the most money I possibly can, I'm interested in doing the most interesting work that I possibly can. I have even taken jobs where I was paid well below market rates because the work itself was interesting enough to me or taught me a skill that I really wanted to learn.

As long as I'm being paid at least an amount that I consider fair, it doesn't matter to me what anyone I'm working next to makes. If I disclose my salary and I'm making substantially more or less than my teammates, that can cause reactions in them that make the job much less tolerable regardless of my pay rate. So I don't want to know what they make, and I don't want them to know what I make. I have to work with these people, and want that to be as pleasant as possible.

Now, saying that is not saying that people who prioritize maximizing pay are wrong at all. They just have a different priority.

Re: When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

#140

Post by JohnFen »

andruby wrote: post #125
JohnFen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is awkward This is why I don't discuss my salary, nor do I want to know what my coworkers make. It's not information that is terribly useful, but can make for very awkward situations. I do want to know whether or not I'm making a salary that is in line with the norms in my area, but I can easily find that information without knowing what any individual is making.

> I can easily find that information without knowing what any individual is making. How do you usually find that information?

The city and state governments have pretty solid data that is easily available.
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