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Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

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Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#151

Post by hysan »

rramadass wrote: post #98
lainga wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents engineering firms from acting like law firms?

Well... Because the Industry thinks that Management/Marketing/Sales are the important "leaders" and Engineering is just mere "foot soldiers" and hence replaceable/dispensable as needed. The above is justified as "Business needs", "Investor returns", "Profit next quarter" etc.

Very early on in my career, I had a few good mentors who all told me the same piece of advice - tech (IT, programming, QA, etc) are __cost centers__ to most businesses. No matter how valuable you are, your pay is not going to scale the same way no matter how good your performance reviews are. I’m very thankful for that advice because I was never shocked when raises were low or when finding out that new, lower leveled coworkers had higher starting salaries than me. My default mindset is that I’m fungible to the business. Work hard but also expect to fight to prove your worth. This is generally good advice in any career but I think it’s a must in tech.

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#152

Post by kaba0 »

rsyring wrote: post #149
kaba0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, this 10x dev myth should just die. There are only at most 2x developers, and most ordinary people are just below the 1x factor.

"Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" cited research indicating it can be as high as 28x. To get that number, you have to take into consideration terrible devs who are negative multipliers. I.e. the scale is not 1x - 10x. It's more like -10x - 10x. I've personally experienced development projects where there was easily a -5x - 5x difference between the least and most productive. I've seen productivity improve…

Minus times plus is minus though :D

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#153

Post by fire_lake »

basch wrote: post #130
lainga wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents engineering firms from acting like law firms?

In theory, this would become some type of exploitable game theory. Send out offer letters to companies most indispensable people, just to jack up your competitors labor costs. Arms race. Eventual mutually assured destruction.

Companies did engage in the reverse of this, to keep salaries down.

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#154

Post by fire_lake »

hintymad wrote: post #21

Amazon used to have an internal Slack channel that allowed employees to share their total compensations anonymously. Thousands of people shared and the numbers were eye opening. Basically, if one was not a star and got consistently promoted every two or three years, she would not get compensated at market price. As a result, an L6 who stayed in the company for years often got lower total compensation than an L5 new h…

Any resources on these levels? Never worked for a FAANG so curious where I would sit.

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#155

Post by brazzy »

YZF wrote: post #120
BurningFrog wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubling your income would mean you can take 50% of your time off with the same income. Pretty sure that would change your life!

It doesn't really work like that. The reality is that you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary (if that's what you mean). When you make more money you typically want a nicer place to live, maybe a nicer car, your standard of living will go up somewhat. Now to maintain that standard of living you're going to need to save more money. Maybe you have kids and you want to be able to pay for their education, or b…

Developers in the USA earn far beyond the level where the lifestyle creep that you describe is so compelling that it makes any sense at all to say "you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary".

A more solid factor is that companies don't want to hire part-time developers, because coordination overhead means twice the number of developers each working half as many hours are far less effective.

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#156

Post by jongjong »

steelframe wrote: post #25
BadHumans wrote: post #9

This entire piece starts from the conclusion that engineers leave because they aren't paid enough then works backwards from there. This is wrong from my experience. Anecdotally, I have never left a job because of money. Sure, I left jobs and got ones that ended up paying more money but the reason I started looking in the first place wasn't money. It was for other reasons that usually included frustrations with manage…

You should try leaving a company for money sometime. Financial independence really is life-changing, and you can get there surprisingly quickly in the tech industry by putting yourself on the market more often. Anecdotally, at my current company nearly everyone I know who left did so within a few months of hitting the 4-year cliff on their signing equity. I've left 3 companies in my career primarily because the next…

I've never been in a position where I had any kind of leverage to negotiate a serious increase.

I've even been in an extreme situation in crypto sector where I was putting pressure on the company founder for a salary increase. I was earning like USD $100K per year comp total. They had over $100 million of assets. The founder, a multi-millionaire who had more money than he knew what to do with said that the pressure I was putting was like "Holding a knife to the company's throat." Guess how much of a raise he offered? 2%! I quit. Within 1 month after I quit, they fired half of the company. Coincidence? They didn't even need to do layoffs, they still had over $100 million in liquid assets/runway. They were spending at a rate of like $1 million per month. WTF!

Out of the 10+ tech startups and corporations I worked for over the past 20 years, that was the closest I ever came to receiving a raise and still didn't get it.

The whole market feels fake. Like a kind of weird social engineering PsyOp.

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#157

Post by mbsa_cs »

gregfjohnson wrote: post #78

A person close to me works at a law firm. She was feeling a bit stagnant, so she connected with a recruiter. She got a very solid offer with a significant pay bump. She gave her two weeks' notice to her firm, including appointments with the partners. One of the partners asked her for a half hour. They came back with a massive pay raise, and a promotion to partner if she would stay. She was in a state of shock, but th…

“but his talent to the current company is vastly greater than his generic value on the market”

This has always been one of my fears. I would not want to become indispensable for a no name company while paying the price of being average to the market.

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#158

Post by brazzy »

bb88 wrote: post #47
kccqzy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my case. I left Google but it wasn't because of my direct manager. It was because of Google-wide issues that are outside of my or my manager's or my director's control.

Usually front line managers are kind of hamstrung. Yes they can fight for their people, but the reality is, that if the C-Suite only wants to give you a %2 raise because well, they have an off-site meeting in Maui -- well tough. The modern management model has been to reduce the power of the front line manager to the point he can only maybe hire and fire, but then he is the one to give the employee bad news.

There was never a management model where front line managers could freely decide on raises. There's always a budget, and you playing favourites causes drama.

Re: Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

#159

Post by fire_lake »

ralferoo wrote: post #125

I worked in the UK at a FAANG, so I was on a different bonus system, but my US colleagues had a very significant lock-in. Both your starting bonus and annual bonuses were implemented in terms of share grants that vested at 25% each year. I heard from several of these colleagues that the annual bonuses were often about the same as the base salary, so for some of these guys it was around $200k. So, at any given time th…

And this is why VCs love it when founders quit FAANG to work on their idea. It’s a strong signal.
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