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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?

#121

Post by alkonaut »

ukoki wrote: post #3

> The hard truth that many companies struggle to wrap their heads around is that they should be paying their long-tenured engineers above market rate. From an ethical point of view, maybe. From a rational point of view, maybe not. Jobs are "sticky" — it's a pain to apply for jobs, arrange interviews, deal with the possibility of getting rejected. And if you do get an offer and accept you will be leaving colleagues th…

This is a big factor. If I switch I want a 10-20% raise not because that’s very important in itself but because I’m taking a massive risk and have to endure a horrible process when switching.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#122

Post by throwawaysleep »

pxue wrote: post #97
b3morales wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not really making an independent measurement here. You see developers "stagnating" and moving on; how do you know that's not caused by lack of pay increases and other things you're doing (letting people pick new projects, for example, to keep them interested)? Maybe if you did "go out of your way to retain employees" you'd have employees who end up making your business even more successful during their longer…

Output/performance shouldn't be determined by pay, ie pay is a lagging indicator of output/performance.

But pay determines whether I have a future at a company and if I have no future, my objective goes from getting a good performance review to avoiding termination.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#125

Post by throwawaysleep »

alkonaut wrote: post #116
Kranar wrote: post #11

To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…

I have the opposite observation. The first few years are needed just to learn a domain. Productivity doesn’t begin to take off until after a few years. If no one had worked 10 or 20 years in my team we’d struggle to get anywhere. The impact of new hires can still be great when it comes from bringing fresh ideas and perspective (e.g processes, tech knowledge) and that obviously fades as everyone with a long tenure at…

Companies have basically said “don’t bother learn about the business except for the interview” with their compensation approaches.

Why bother spend time learning anything not applicable at your next role?

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#126

Post by mberning »

Kranar wrote: post #11

To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…

This absolutely happens. A lot depends on the company and role, but in my experience after 24-36 months you tend to become known more broadly in the company and are passed around as “person who knows about x” and these type of interactions characterize most of your days. It’s not a bad spot to be, but definitely not the most productive arrangement.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#127

Post by reedjosh »

vsareto wrote: post #81
b3morales wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not really making an independent measurement here. You see developers "stagnating" and moving on; how do you know that's not caused by lack of pay increases and other things you're doing (letting people pick new projects, for example, to keep them interested)? Maybe if you did "go out of your way to retain employees" you'd have employees who end up making your business even more successful during their longer…

I don't think pay increase will help stagnation. Maybe picking projects will if the company has enough variety. The best cure for stagnation I've found is to take long breaks and get into something else.

> I don't think pay increase will help stagnation.

No, but lack thereof can certainly cause it.

When there's no real reward, what's the point of putting in the extra work and taking risks? Two things that quickly break stagnation.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#128

Post by paxys »

Articles like these vastly overestimate people's desires to switch jobs. Yes one good engineer left last quarter because they were underpaid and someone gave them a better offer, but a hundred others stayed put. Things still overwhelmingly worked in the company's favor overall.

And add the fact that technical interviews are still designed to be as painful a process as possible, so much so that people I know have given up guaranteed raises just to not have to go through it again.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#129

Post by Cederfjard »

shados wrote: post #47

Many companies do pay for people to stay, but its debatable if its worth it. The last company I worked for gave me significant golden handcuffs. Probably 30-40% more than I could get elsewhere. They had a "cost of replacement player" policy, where they count the cost of hiring, sourcing, training over the years, etc, and come up with a number thats almost always way above market rate for people who have been around a…

> The uncomfortable truth is that there's very significant demographic differences when it comes to folks who use the "I got an offer elsewhere, pay me more and Ill stay".

What differences are those?

I tend to think that it’s a bad idea anyway. Once you’ve done it, your employer will know that you’ve already thought about leaving, so much so that you’ve already completed an interview process and have gotten an offer. Surely that must tend to be damaging to the relationship going forward (not saying that it should be, but that it often is).

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#130

Post by teawrecks »

Kranar wrote: post #11

To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…

I think there's more variables at play though. A person who has been at a company 3+ years has figured out how to be effective in certain areas, but is also now asked to be effective in a much wider range of areas. They are asked to maintain something they wrote in their first year, they are asked to attend meetings or respond to emails because they have the knowledge and influence, they can't start anything new because they are so pivotal to the thing they're currently doing. And yeah, these things are important to the company, but they make the worker feel like they're stagnating. The company starts to get in their way and they feel like the only way to do something they find interesting is to leave.

Companies need to give engineers the opportunity at a clean slate. Let them shed responsibilities and pretend they're just a very competent new hire with the freedom to start working on whatever they want to. If it's a larger company, you can usually transfer to another team somewhere, but you still get pinged about stuff you never want to spend time on again.

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