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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?

#201

Post by mpalfrey »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #162
mmarq wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UK companies do not respect software engineers or reward them properly (not even stock), even interns in other places get paid 5x more than a senior engineer in the UK. In monetary terms this is not true. A good software engineer can make 150-200K in the UK without going into finance or FAANG. In real terms you are better off making 50-80K in Germany, Spain, France, Poland, Italy, etc…, especially if you have child…

Name a company paying 150-200K that’s not finance or FAANG?

Not too many even in London really.

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

#202

Post by ttyprintk »

Proziam wrote: post #85
lainga wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents engineering firms from acting like law firms?

Management perceives people to be more replaceable than they are. Years of working in, or being the architect of, the company's core product will make you a true expert in it. But, from the company perspective, your value is based on the 'market rate' for your generically defined skills and experience.

This is precisely the reason for management; when priorities are internally competitive.

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

#203

Post by Gud »

chrisandchris wrote: post #140
_zoltan_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of my swiss neighbours are more fit than half my friends in their 30s, and they are 70+. I'm not sure what the secret is but I'm fairly sure just moving here added an extra 10 years to my life expectancy.

That's because we hike across our 30s, and don't stop until our 80s (at least a part of the population). Work is fine, but being outside makes you live longer and better. My grandfather was still skiing while being 80.

Also I think less dependency on cars, in my experience (living in Switzerland) moving around by foot/bicycle/public transport is normal.

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

#204

Post by PhilipRoman »

nextworddev wrote: post #13
s-lambert wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's no supply for the people who know your product and codebase except for your existing employees, isn't that the whole point of paying them to stay?

They can be onboarded and trained

Depends heavily on the company and codebase. I've had situations when there is literally no way to arrive at the correct implementation unless you ask the guy who 8 years ago spent several months analyzing a particular unfixable hardware bug.

The worst case is mass layoffs instead of natural gradual replacement, since entire teams leave with no time to document their area (and little motivation to do so)

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

#205

Post by imhoguy »

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.

That is capitalism.

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

#206

Post by ttyprintk »

michaelt wrote: post #200
mppm wrote: post #172

It's always puzzled me why many tech companies seem so reluctant to give counter-offers to departing employees. Trying to pay as little as possible and not easily giving raises, even to their most productive employees, is at least somewhat understandable. But if a valuable employee is about to leave, possibly taking some critical knowledge with them, you'd think that a 50% raise should be on the table out of pure sel…

I've made some counter-offers in my time as a manager, but I've never had a counter-offer accepted. For a start: everyone resigns because of multiple factors, and money is of course one of them - but when handing in their resignation, in order to leave on a positive note they'll focus on factors outside of anyone's control. Usually people tell me they're leaving because of something like because they want to explore…

Great comment. Side note about PhDs: only some countries generously support you during it. And only some jobs are easier than it. I’ve only found people with multiple PhDs to have gained very related advanced skills.

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

#207

Post by rramadass »

hysan wrote: post #151
rramadass wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But it wasn't like this in the beginning of the Industrial/Knowledge revolution. Engineers/Scientists were valued and founded companies with Engineering at its core with Management/Marketing/Sales/etc. playing their proper ancillary roles. It was much later that the system was manipulated to place Management on a pedestal (undeserved) citing market/financial reasons. And Engineers have allowed this to happen, take root and persist to this day.

We need to change the above status-quo.

However; the important point we need to be aware of is that in the current Economic/Financial System many events and their payoffs are no longer linear and that is what companies are trying to optimize for. The best explanation of this is Nassim Taleb's Mediocristan (non-scalable) vs Extremistan (scalable) dichotomy. This video Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails—what they don’t teach you in STAT 101 is a very nice overview of the essential points : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcqt49dXtm8

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

#208

Post by dagw »

lrvick wrote: post #176
red_admiral wrote: post #148

As a regular reader of Rachelbythebay - I agree with the sentiment of a lot of other posters here, it's not the money that makes people quit. A classic story here is the "Sodas are no longer free" one: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... The total cost of free sodas for engineers is probably small compared to their salaries, and for the individual engineer, the new $0.50 per soda cost is p…

100% this. In every company I have been at that was going south, the first things to go after a hiring freeze were snacks and lunch. When companies walk back any benefits of the job that cause you to pay for things out of pocket, you just got a pay cut, and should GTFO.

I worked at a company that bought a smaller company. That smaller company had free snacks and we didn't. Somewhere in the negotiation someone from our company had promised the employees at the smaller company that they would be able to keep their free snacks. Anyway, merger happens and no free snacks.

Now there were probably several reasons why the merger wasn't a success and why basically everybody from that company left as soon as they could, but the one thing every one of them would bring up when you talked to them was "we were promised that we would get to keep our snacks and they lied to us".

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

#209

Post by whitehexagon »

linotype wrote: post #11
colesantiago wrote: post #3

It is simple. Because they have no money. For startups, they want engineers to take a pay cut to work 996-like hours. Especially in the UK, where there is a running joke where companies complain about a “skills shortage” when in reality companies cannot find engineers at top universities that want to take a pay cut and work for less pay.

What do you think the UK could do to make the situation better aside from increasing pay? Or is that the only issue?

IR35 was enough for me to leave the UK and never look back. Doesn't matter how much they pay if you have tax/legal uncertainty.

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

#210

Post by rapjr9 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #86
kulahan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then. Don’t forget to live in the meantime. It’s a lot easier to hike across Europe in your 30s than in your 50s.

" Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then. "? The median lifespan is over 80 and developers are paid above the median, often by quite a bit. It's far, far more likely in your 50s that you'll be staring down the barrel of a layoff + industry downturn and cursing yourself for the money spent on your trip across Europe and other frivolities in your 30s.

The median lifespan is no longer over 80, at least not for middle age males in the US, though it is for females:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

It also depends a lot on what your current age is. If you're 60 or older it's 80 or more. If you're younger than that and male it's under 80, going down the younger you are. Covid and other things reduced life expectancy in the US. This is the 2021 table, the most recent, life expectancy may go down further as new tables are published. However the graphs here tell a different story:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Part of these graphs are future projections, so it's difficult to tell what to believe. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the first table is what the insurance industry and Social Security uses.

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