181–190 of 209 posts
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Did we mention the perks like our "unlimited vacation policy"?
I worked at a company with "unlimited vacation" and I took on average 5 weeks of vacation per year - so it does sometimes actually work.
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If the mission is feeding starving children, or curing cancer, or public service, then yes, I want people who are motivated by the mission. But usually the mission, the real mission, is to make the founders exceptionally wealthy, and forgive me if that doesn't get me out of bed in the morning.
Even if the mission is to cure cancer, thats the worst reason to not pay people well. Those are the most difficult problems, and you definitely need the best people to solve the hardest problems. If the idea is to pay people really poor because that problem is so difficult, I think its a bad idea and simply taking advantage of people, not to mention the best people will go solve other problems that pay them well.
1. People work in education because they love the work, not the money.
2. We don't need to pay educators well because they're not the tops in their fields.
3. We can't recruit top candidates because the pay is shit.
4. Rinse, repeat.
Corp: "We only hire the very best" Programmer: "What's the salary?" Corp: "Market average. Also, we're looking for people who aren't just motivated by money"
I see a similar effect that drives me nuts: Corp: "We only hire the best, but we can't find any good people. There must be an industry shortage of good engineers!" Me: "What about $candidate that we interviewed last week, I thought you liked him?" Corp: "He was great! But he wanted too much money" Me: "..."
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Select "100 top salaries"
But those seem mostly like chief investment officers, CEOs, doctors, dentists and surgeons... I mean, public service can pay well if you are a commissioner or head of a for-profit part of public service. I'm not sure there is much of a comparison to be made for software developers, though.
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True. But there are also many cases when sales people force the product development team to implement the most idiotic "feature", because "we think the client is ready to sign the check and this is really important to them". The bad side of commission-based compensation is that they want to close the sale, no matter how harmful (in the long term) it can be.
The only thing "idiotic" about customer-requested features, especially on high-ticket items, is when they introduce excessive technical debt. This can come in the form of code instability, disrupting development schedules, etc. Features that do more harm than good to the product and the business. Beyond that, it's not idiotic. It's just stuff the programmers don't care about. Price you pay for getting a paycheck.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -- Henry Ford.
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"Money is the measure of how valuable my work is to you. Are you saying you don't value my work as much as your competitors do?"
No, it's a piece. Vacation days, for example.
I agree with your later point about not wanting to be surrounded by people who are _only_ in it for the money. In fact, I took a small pay cut when I left me last job because I was (and still am) very excited about my new company's projects and aspirations. In my experience, though, "we don't want people who are motivated by money" has always been code for "we pay like ass and we're going to Stockholm Syndrome you into feeling like the privilege of working 12 hours a day is worth our $30K below market salary".
If I didn't need money, I wouldn't be looking for employment. I'd be hiring other people to work on my dreams instead. All else being equal, yeah, I'm going to the place with a bigger check.
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I'm not even going to try to reply on the sexist nature of the second half of this comment, but focus on the startup-related one. Your guy switched to another company because you were on track to become rich off his work, and he was not. If you incentivized him right, he'd stay. Did you ask him why he left? Because if not, you really did not learn a lesson.
I knew someone would call me sexist. I know where you're coming from but I think people whenever they come across something that makes them uncomfortable just call it "sexist", "racist", etc. and call it a day. All I did was state the fact. You explain how it is sexist and if it's logical I will shut up. Lastly, he switched because no one was getting rich off anyone's work. We were going through difficult times. But…
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But.. But startups are special! They can't pay for stuff! We can't treat them like an actual business!
That's honestly something that has always confounded me as an outsider to the glitz and glam of coastal tech life. How are technology start-ups any different than say, a new butcher shop in the midwest in terms of obligations to their employees?
I love startups because it's exciting and genuinely fun to be scrambling alongside a team who's as into their work as you are yours. In practice it's also very low risk, because I know that if my company laid me off tomorrow then I'd be unemployed for approximately a weekend before hopping onto another team.
FWIW, sane startups also take really good care of their employees. Mine has good pay and great benefits, and that's pretty common. You don't hear about those places on the front page of Hacker News, though.
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But.. But startups are special! They can't pay for stuff! We can't treat them like an actual business!
That's honestly something that has always confounded me as an outsider to the glitz and glam of coastal tech life. How are technology start-ups any different than say, a new butcher shop in the midwest in terms of obligations to their employees?
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The only thing "idiotic" about customer-requested features, especially on high-ticket items, is when they introduce excessive technical debt. This can come in the form of code instability, disrupting development schedules, etc. Features that do more harm than good to the product and the business. Beyond that, it's not idiotic. It's just stuff the programmers don't care about. Price you pay for getting a paycheck.
Not every request from the customer makes sense. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -- Henry Ford.
My spouse actually deals with this more than I do. She's a product owner/analyst in international e-commerce, a very deep subject/domain expert in a narrow field. Customers, not really understanding the complexities of the domain, ask for things that are often technically impossible, illegal, or self-destructive. But she's serving as a first line of defense for engineers, educating sales reps and customers (and executives) about the nature of their business, and what can/should/shouldn't be done.