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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?

#181

Post by iabacu »

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…

Your current company will promote (and compensate) you based on your performance in the past cycles.

Your new company will offer you a level (and compensation) based on your expected performance in future cycles.

If you're on a growth trajectory, jumping jobs will usually give you a bump because your new company treats you differently than your current company. And it doesn't matter much whether you're coming from company A to B, or from B to A!

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

#182

Post by wan23 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #143
yibg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I’ve seen a job at Netflix characterized this way. Total comp at Netflix also isn’t any higher than say Facebook or google.

But Netflix pays real money, right? FB and G heavily compensate with stock that has historically been valuable, but could always tank with a cooling ad market or strong privacy regulations.

The stock has been historically more valuable than an equivalent amount of cash. For the most part, the historical trend of these stocks has been up and to the right.

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

#183

Post by nurettin »

foldr wrote: post #100
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.

Refactoring a large JS codebase is like painting the proverbial Forth Bridge. By the time you've finished, fashions have changed and it's time to rewrite it all again. You don't sound fun to work with.

It is exactly what I did with bluebird before async was even part of the language back in 2013, and when async finally arrived all we did was a simple regex replace. So yeah, I am pretty consistent at what I do and everyone who disagrees is just cringe.

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

#184

Post by ebgraham »

Our industry's asinine interview practices keep people from job seeking and getting their fair value. The sooner engineers refuse to give leetcode interviews, the sooner we'll see a natural bump in average engineering salary, and we'll have more power in the job market to demand better working conditions.

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

#185

Post by KoftaBob »

This question would be much easier to answer if salary transparency from employers was the norm, or even required.

If every job listing on Indeed had a salary/compensation range, it would be very straightforward to see what the going rate is for that particular skillset, and it would push employers to be competitive on salary.

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

#186

Post by cosmie »

ed312 wrote: post #69
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 can tell you as a manager the salary bands are generally set by HR for the whole company. I was told point blank at a previous employer that we payed the 70th percentile. I asked how they knew what that was - apparently there are companies that aggregate this data (legally?) and sell it back to HR orgs for $xx,xxx+ a year. HR for some reason wouldn't deviate from this band for top talent (discrimination maybe?)

As others have mentioned, Radford[1] is one company that sells that sort of data. Many providers of HR management and payroll systems also have secondary revenue streams by repackaging that data for uses like that. This[2] is one offered by ADP, one of the largest payroll providers in the US.

As a manager, one way to get yourself some wiggle room in the situation you mentioned is using that strict policy against them. Request as detailed a list of roles and compensation bands as possible[2], then creatively interpret the job duties such that you can justify opening the requisition with whatever role provides the most favorable "70th percentile" salary band to attract the talent you want to bring in.

Success varies between companies, but it's not uncommon for larger companies to have latent roles/titles set up in the system that are rarely used, but exist in the benchmark data and have far more favorable salary bands than the roles you'd typically use for your reqs. Or if you can get the full benchmark data itself, you can look through it all and try to get HR to add a net new one to the system based on what you find.

[1] https://radford.aon.com/surveys

[2] https://apps.adp.com/en-US/apps/79131/benchmarking-powered-b...

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

#187

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

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…

Because new employees are an unknown quantity and we have to be competitive to the market.

Existing employees are just fine getting their 1% to 3%.

I self-promote myself every two years, and if anyone asks "I was looking for an interesting organization taking on interesting projects such as yours"

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

#188

Post by 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #127
mywittyname wrote: post #64

I left a job which paid in the 95+ percentile of my area for one that paid right about the median wage (maybe a little less). My reason: I like to own the software I write. We had an influx of people on our team who began to rewrite sections of stuff I wrote a long time ago for no real reason. Basically, some of them didn't like promise chains and decided to rewrite every one they encountered. Things finally bubbled…

I mainly write embedded software rather than web stuff. I will say that the hardest to read and maintain embedded code I've ever had to work with was structured to use asynchronous chains of callback functions. It can get bad enough that you just can't fix a bug without dousing it with gasoline and lighting it up. Not to say that such patterns can't be used effectively, but maybe your former co-workers had some previ…

Promise chains are usually totally fine and readable, it's when callbacks are passed around without promises or bad abstractions occur that async code is problematic.

More often than not I would not touch code written with promises because it doesn't matter anyways since code using it can still use async/await + sometimes it makes some patterns easier to deal with (f.e. using a dependency written with callbacks and calling resolve from within the callback function)

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

#189

Post by phreeza »

tidepod12 wrote: post #51
xkcd-sucks wrote: post #9

In accordance with the standard hierarchy of needs, culture flows down from compensation. When everyone's material needs and desires are well satisfied, they interact genuinely and naturally. When people feel like good compensation is difficult to achieve, they put more effort into zero-sum internal politics, maintaining appearances, and so forth. You see this in upper management all the time; execs are friendly and…

This is demonstrably incorrect if you look at some of the highest paying companies in SV. FAANG are of course well known for paying way way above what is necessary to satisfy "everyone's material needs and desires", and yet they are well known for still being ruthless political cultures and backstabbing. Execs might be congenial because at that level, congenial is just how you play the game. It's still cutthroat, but…

This idea of FAANGs having a culture of ruthless political backstabbing is new to me, is it really the case?

I have heard about things like misaligned incentives (eg launching a chat app to get people promoted and then discontinuing it a year later) but that actually seems like the opposite of ruthless to me (complacent?)

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

#190

Post by hedora »

tartoran wrote: post #45
scrooched_moose wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I'm a MechE and my pay is decent (not amazing) for the area but I was fine with it due to a lot of other factors. In the last year or so, my company has had a culture shift leading to down-to-the minute micromanagement and I've lost all autonomy - every decision requires approval of multiple managers. There's no realistic engineering salary they could pay me to continue putting up with this and I can't get out q…

Less autonomy also means less responsibility which affects growth in a bad way, but there is a small bright side to this, it reduces the cognitive workload and one can have leftover energy for side projects and hobbies. For the ones who have absolutely no taste to bureaucracy/red tape/stupid hierarchies of command, this could be soul sucking though

It doesn’t reduce cognitive workload for high performers.

With my previous boss, I spent 90% of my intellectual effort managing up. Despite his best efforts, the project was delivered above spec and on time (saving his ass), but I burnt so many political bridges making it happen that I ended up moving teams.

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