Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 225 posts

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

#111

Post by s3tt3mbr1n1 »

jedberg wrote: post #17
s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote: post #3

I’m in the unique situation where I’m hiring my replacement after having made a promotion. I know they will make (substantially) more than me. How would I negotiate a matching or superior salary?

Everyone else is telling you to leave or try a power play, but food for thought -- you may actually be less valuable now in your new role because you aren't experienced in it. If you just moved from IC to manager, you might be a pretty new manager. It's normal for managers to have reports that make more than them. Just because you manage them doesn't make you more valuable. I'm not saying this is the case for you in…

That’s very insightful and the argument I would expect if I were to start discussions about salary. How would you counter this?

I would also say I’m more qualified for the job than those that are applying now, so I’m not sure if this really is applicable to me.

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

#112

Post by s3tt3mbr1n1 »

bboygravity wrote: post #71
s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote: post #3

I’m in the unique situation where I’m hiring my replacement after having made a promotion. I know they will make (substantially) more than me. How would I negotiate a matching or superior salary?

Read a book or watch some Youtube videos about negotiating (in general)?

Anything you would recommend, specifically for salary negotiations?

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

#113

Post by sys_64738 »

stagger87 wrote: post #91

Recently experienced an excellent colleague ask for a raise to $X, get rejected, leave, the replacement was hired for more than $X, the replacement complained about the workload being too much, and so we hired another body to cover the original developer leaving, again for more than $X. Absolute madness.

Word of mouth means that the attrition will forewarn those who have the same thought process.

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

#114

Post by gardenhedge »

jedberg wrote: post #9

This is one of the reasons I loved Netflix. Each year they would say "to get new people in the door with your level experience, we had to offer them $XXX. Therefore we are raising you to $XXX." Some years I got 25%+ raises. Netflix understood this like no one else.

That's awesome! It comes down to mindset by the people running the company

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

#115

Post by JohnFen »

bmitc wrote: post #21
bevekspldnw wrote: post #4

Used to be a high performer at Big Tech. Found out a coworker with less experience at the same level had $200k/year more in comp. I didn’t care about the money, I care about being taken for a fool. There were additional factors, but I left and started my own company within three months and nobody in my old team has anywhere close to my experience.

Not only is it an example of the idiotic decision making processes that companies use that are not effective in the long run, it demonstrates how they are happy to pit employees against one another. It is awkward for a person to know that they make substantially more than coworkers. It forms a feeling of guilt and other negative feelings. But what are they supposed to do? Negotiate lower salaries when starting or aft…

> 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.

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

#116

Post by guiomie »

jedberg wrote: post #9

This is one of the reasons I loved Netflix. Each year they would say "to get new people in the door with your level experience, we had to offer them $XXX. Therefore we are raising you to $XXX." Some years I got 25%+ raises. Netflix understood this like no one else.

Would they also do the opposite now that the tech labor market is going sour? "

We got 1000 qualified applicants and a bunch accepted our low ball offers, your salary is reduced by 25% "

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

#117

Post by HumblyTossed »

theshrike79 wrote: post #31
jedberg wrote: post #9

This is one of the reasons I loved Netflix. Each year they would say "to get new people in the door with your level experience, we had to offer them $XXX. Therefore we are raising you to $XXX." Some years I got 25%+ raises. Netflix understood this like no one else.

Companies should understand when their business hangs on people, you need to keep the people happy. Hiring people off the street for more money than people with 20+ years of experience isn't a good way to keep experienced workers employed.

But they don't. The people calling themselves managers will justify not paying existing people more once they have to pay new people more by saying that that is what they signed up for when they started. And then when people leave, they convince themselves that we are all interchangeable. No matter what happens, they have some sort of excuse or justification.

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

#118

Post by LeifCarrotson »

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.

Different businesses have different meanings to deadlines and timelines.

If it's v6.8 of your internal software product, no, the deadline doesn't usually matter that much. Maybe you are a bit behind your competition, but the only problem with just being at the 6.7 feature set a little longer is a small percentage of customers not sticking around. Your manager probably overpromised and underestimated, but aside from a bit of abuse and panic, you're right, it doesn't really matter.

But if you're one of 120 companies building parts for the 2025 F150 and your part isn't ready and the other 119 companies are ready, whether it's your supplier or you or your customer who is behind, you'd better believe that they've got you over a barrel in the contract. Like, the contract has a line that reads "for every minute of downtime after [date] you owe $25k". Your PM hopefully underpromised with an aim to overdeliver, but missed really bad. And all the checks and balances failed. If you've got adequate financials you can survive a miss once in a great while, but two or three in a row and even big shops will go under.

It's often important to understand the consequences of missed deadlines that your coworkers, vendors, or especially customers are accustomed to, people have wildly disparate experiences in this area.

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

#119

Post by ranger207 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #50
theshrike79 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies should understand when their business hangs on people, you need to keep the people happy. Hiring people off the street for more money than people with 20+ years of experience isn't a good way to keep experienced workers employed.

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 generations of programmers, nobody knows how anything works, and suddenly software quality starts to actually matter to investors and consumers

Post reply on HN