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

Good article on an important topic. I would like to address what I perceive as assumptions in the perspective. We really need to get away from this idea that salaries are these paternalistic expressions of fairness. We earn money from providing value.

If you want people to stay, your options are to give them money, prestige, or stability.

- Money includes salary, bonus, commissions and contingent comp, stock options and perks and even vacation time.

- Prestige is conferences, publications, exposure to high profile brand clients and stakeholders, airline points hotel and travel rewards, charity sponsorship and matching, committee memberships, media and public facing representation, and leadership options.

- Stability includes things like investing in training, giving them headcount, bringing them into the strategic fold, partnerships, responsibility for key client or stakeholder relationships, etc.

Evaluate your total comp using the triad of Money, Stability, Prestige. Chances are you are weighted toward one, and there is a role out there with a different balance. I think HR salary bands are a wishfull opposite of market rates, and personally I think they're stupid for any company that is still growing and not just optimizing an established long term revenue stream. If you are a bank or institution, sure, but your entire business is an optimization problem not a growth problem. If there is any upside volatility in your revenue and you are making something new that people want, pay for value, because I'd argue you can't afford not to.

I've watched companies lose key engineers that delayed major product releases over a $10-20k salary bump while flying their marginalized director of special projects around in business class, and my conclusion is that compensation is arbitrary and a negotiations power game. Don't spend too much time reasoning about it.

The companies that retain people are the ones who figure out the Stability and Prestige elements of the triad.

Saving £1.6 million/month isn't nickel-and-diming. That's almost £20 million/annually, which is more than many companies make.

As for the monitors, that may be COVID19 related. If the office is locked up, there are almost always physical/security procedures that must be followed in order to allow non-essential staff into the office...and that doesn't include any cleaning or sanitation that might be required by any COVID19 rules. This means that you need to have someone physically come to the office to open it up. On top of that, you need someone knowledgeable about the hardware (i.e., IT) to come in to make sure any employee taking a monitor home doesn't mess up anyone else's setup.

So you're risking exposing at least two lower-paid employees to COVID19 for the convenience of one higher-paid employee who could just buy his own goddamn monitor for £80 if he cares about the screen real estate that much.

I've been at companies with a culture of compensation transparency and companies with a culture of opacity. Anecdotally, the transparent workplaces had relatively high occurrences of drama and morale problems centered around structured performance evaluations, while the opaque workplaces were more laid back and focused on direct feedback and mentorship.

I've worked for about 7 different companies over 15 years and at each of those places I've seen a ton of engineers come and go. Most of the time, the reason they leave is one of three things: got fired, got laid off, or was pushed out. So, if you want your engineers to stick around, you gotta find out why so many of them are being laid off or pushed out and prevent that from happening. That's where you'll get the most bang for your buck.

Engineers don't just leave for no reason. They leave because they're either forced out or there's something that really sucks about the company: most of the time it's the work life balance that really sucks.

Absolutely. This.