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How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

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Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#151

Post by RussianCow »

buster wrote: post #134
vbtemp wrote: post #62

I just want a straight answer from someone who knows more than me. How come every time I switch jobs I get a 30-40% raise, but at any one company I never get more than a 1-3% raise each year, no matter the growth of productivity and responsibility. There's obviously some kind of prisoner's dilemma-like iterated game that reaches that Nash equilibrium, and I'm trying to figure out what it is exactly. I would have love…

Ask yourself, did you provide a 40% increase in value in the last year compared to the year before? Probably not. For another company, that possibly desperately needs a new employee, you might have the value that without you the added income will be zero, with you... More then that.

This doesn't track, though, because this happens within the same company. It's not uncommon to struggle to get a small raise, and then have the same manager hire someone new for a much higher salary.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#152

Post by 5874-4b22-a4e0 »

blyry wrote: post #101
nurettin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've changed your code from promise chains to await statements (after warning you, of course) because they just look awful. And I would then have expected you to buy me a beer for getting rid of all that ugly code.

So you would've spent company time rewriting working code to match your personal aesthetics? Sounds like parent didn't have a reasonable structure in place to generate consensus amongst the org about stylistic preferences vs tech debt, and where developer priorities should lie. There's some ego in both of your comments as well. Async is nicer looking that promise chains, but there risk in changing working code, no? G…

We are literally paid to browse hacker news, day trade for a greater portion of the day, and somehow making the codebase more aesthetically pleasing is an issue?

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#153

Post by piptastic »

vbtemp wrote: post #62

I just want a straight answer from someone who knows more than me. How come every time I switch jobs I get a 30-40% raise, but at any one company I never get more than a 1-3% raise each year, no matter the growth of productivity and responsibility. There's obviously some kind of prisoner's dilemma-like iterated game that reaches that Nash equilibrium, and I'm trying to figure out what it is exactly. I would have love…

I've heard from a lot of people at certain companies who know that if they want a certain salary bump, they need to leave for a year or two and come back. So if you're still interested in your first organization, don't discount going back there. Generally, it's way easier to get hired the second time as you're a known commodity, and assuming you can demonstrate your skill improvement over that time period, you can get a 20-40% bump from your current job.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#154

Post by losten »

neilwilson wrote: post #39

In Herzberg's theory, Money is merely a hygiene factor, not a motivating factor. Generally by the time engineers start thinking about money you've already lost them. My rule of thumb has always been that when I start thinking "I'm not getting paid enough to put up with this", it's time to move on whatever happens.

I am a big fan of Herzberg's dual factor theory. I find it much more practical and actionable than the ubiqitous Maslow's hierarchy.

In one of my previous jobs, I asked people in my team to make a survey to identify their motivational and hygienic factors. The surprising result for me was how much variation there was among different people. (e. g. for somebody salary was a motivational factor, for anybody hygienic one). Anyway, understanding these factors for individual team members made me much more effective manager.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#155

Post by ghaff »

ed312 wrote: post #84
t3rabytes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Radford is one of those companies.

IIRC, that's the one they used. This struck me as kinda crappy and anti-competitive. Perhaps this is too idealistic, but I would prefer a more transparent and open market for talent.

OTOH the sectors where compensation is probably most open and transparent in the US such as public sector tend not to be the best-paying.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#156

Post by mrnook »

paulcole wrote: post #65
prepperpotts wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Cost of living has spiked a lot in tech hubs, too, but devs are usually on the upper tier of the income curve.

It’s not like NYC wasn’t expensive compared to Kansas 10 years ago.

Of course, but what about Austin or Denver? The tech industry has brought high paying jobs to a lot of smaller cities that weren't accustomed to such high salaries.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#157

Post by dlp211 »

tidepod12 wrote: post #116
dlp211 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FAANG are of course well known for paying way way above what is necessary to satisfy "everyone's material needs and desires" Do they though? Quality of Life is not just how much you make, it's relative to what you have to spend. You can't realistically afford a home -even for most of the engineers- with a decent school with a sub 30 minute commute anywhere around one of these companies unless you want to be house p…

Yes, they do. This comes up every time compensation gets mentioned on HN. Engineers claim that "I only make $500k/yr at Google and I'm poor because SF prices :(" which is just bullshit. In a previous thread, someone mentioned that they make $300k/yr in SF, and even after paying for housing in a nice area and food/utility expenses, they had over $11,000 per month left over in discretionary income. That is insane. Unle…

Most Engineers do NOT make $500k total comp per year at FAANG companies, most engineers don't make $300k TC/yr at these companies, and those aren't the engineers I'm talking about anyways. These companies are made up mostly of engineers who make between $100k-$250k.

That's still not a small amount of money; and I never claimed that these people are poor; just that these salaries don't satisfy their needs and desires and these salaries certainly do not feel like you make $100k-$250k. Part of that is anchoring our expectations to what those amounts of money mean to when we first really began to understand the concept of money which is usually in our tween-teen stage of life, but it's also that these are in incredibly high COL areas.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#158

Post by commandlinefan »

agensaequivocum wrote: post #128
vbtemp wrote: post #62

I just want a straight answer from someone who knows more than me. How come every time I switch jobs I get a 30-40% raise, but at any one company I never get more than a 1-3% raise each year, no matter the growth of productivity and responsibility. There's obviously some kind of prisoner's dilemma-like iterated game that reaches that Nash equilibrium, and I'm trying to figure out what it is exactly. I would have love…

> How come every time I switch jobs I get a 30-40% raise. I see this frequently. I have a question: how many times have you done this? Don't you hit a limit at some point fairly quickly?

> Don't you hit a limit at some point

Not OP, but I did some job-hopping right after college in the late 90's. That was a glorious damned time to be a programmer: I doubled my salary twice in four years, changing jobs four times between 1995 and 1999. Then, around early 2000, I decided it was time to do it again (I was young and inexperienced, and it never occurred to me that anybody would have a problem with me job hopping). All of a sudden, I found it really hard to find a new position. Everybody looked at my resume and pointed out that I had never stayed at a single job for longer than a year. I did finally find something, and started staying at jobs for much longer periods of time (four years is my shortest stint since), but when my last company shut down suddenly and I found myself looking again, the four-jobs-in-four-years from 20 years ago came up as a negative in the interview process again.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#159

Post by ghaff »

pjc50 wrote: post #114
_jal wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Everyone I've ever known who had significant options knew exactly what they were worth. I knew someone who changed their bash prompt to (price * unvested count / days left). He said at the time it was the only thing that kept him from quitting or punching his manager.

Long ago companies only bothered issuing options when the stock was illiquid; certainly my startup share options never had a meaningful market value from founding to acquisition. Publicly-quoted companies issuing options is just a weird form of deferred bonus with a favourable tax treatment.

Well, they also come with the hope that they'll increase in value prior to vesting. But, yes, RSUs in public companies are certainly more like getting bonuses that vest over time than a stock market lottery ticket.

Re: How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

#160

Post by jonahhorowitz »

Reedx wrote: post #74
vbtemp wrote: post #62

I just want a straight answer from someone who knows more than me. How come every time I switch jobs I get a 30-40% raise, but at any one company I never get more than a 1-3% raise each year, no matter the growth of productivity and responsibility. There's obviously some kind of prisoner's dilemma-like iterated game that reaches that Nash equilibrium, and I'm trying to figure out what it is exactly. I would have love…

Which is part of why it's not that uncommon to see people who bounce from job to job every year or two in the Bay Area. It rapidly boosts salary. I've also seen where people leave for a top paying company, which sends their compensation right to the moon, then come back after a short stint. Netflix seems to be a rare example of a company that is proactive enough with pay raises to counter this (any Netflix folks here…

The guidance given to managers at Netflix is to calibrate each employee's compensation to "what they (the manager) thinks they could make if they went elsewhere." It's an extremely time-consuming exercise that every manager goes through every year.

They even encourage engineers to interview elsewhere and see what the offer is if they feel they are miscalibrated, and they will adjust appropriately.

Finally, a question they encourage engineers to ask their managers is: "if I had a job offer elsewhere, would you fight to keep me?" It's a scary question to ask, but a great way of getting feedback.

Source - worked there for 3 years.

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