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The one-salary experiment, ten years in

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Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#21

Post by aikinai »

mikeash wrote: post #20
ng12 wrote: post #8

People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surpri…

What’s the difference between motivation to stay and reluctance to leave?

I think that should have been “motivation to work.”

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#22

Post by rodiger »

mikeash wrote: post #20
ng12 wrote: post #8

People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surpri…

What’s the difference between motivation to stay and reluctance to leave?

If I had to guess, differing incentives. Both are synonymous for "why they stay" but with different base reasons.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#23

Post by jessriedel »

The first bullet point of the top comment from 5 years ago begins "As the company grows,...". The company has N=20 employees now. How many did they have 5 years ago? N is extremely low for making any generalizations, and it certainly isn't growing like a startup (in the sense Paul Graham uses the term).

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#24

Post by ummonk »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #13

The article says that the top 10 % for software developers in SF is $136,000 (and they state that this is low). I thought that the top 10% is around $200k of compensation? Am I wrong?

The author seems to express skepticism at that as well. That might be accurate for base pay, not counting equity.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#25

Post by leesec »

JohnGB wrote: post #9
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #5

As an economist, you'd expect them to have trouble attracting highly skilled people seeking only wages. On the other hand, also as an economist and from my own personal experience, there's a whole host of non-monetary benefits a flexible business can provide (which other businesses and corporates seem to balk at), and there's also the little talked about preference of some people wanting a negative correlation betwee…

In the Netherlands, if you have a child under 9 years old (it could be 8), your company is required, by law, to let you work 4 days a week if your want. It's actually really common with something like 28% of working men taking a "papadag" ("Daddy day" in English). I wouldn't even consider a job that didn't allow me time to spend with my kids. Money is definitely not the primary driver for a lot of people.

Had never heard of this. Wow.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#26

Post by gonehome »

mikeash wrote: post #20
ng12 wrote: post #8

People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surpri…

What’s the difference between motivation to stay and reluctance to leave?

I view this generally:

Motivation to stay is being directly excited by the work you’re doing or the thing you’re building. You want to work where you are. If another opportunity comes along you probably wouldn’t consider it.

Resistance to leaving means you’re at a pleasant place to work, the money is good, and you like your job, but you’re not super excited about the thing you’re building. If another opportunity came along you might jump if it’s something you really want to do (this is harder if your current pay is high and job is pleasant).

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#27

Post by tootahe45 »

ng12 wrote: post #8

People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surpri…

Do you need the best devs in the world to be the n-0000th domain registrar?

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#28

Post by ng12 »

mikeash wrote: post #20
ng12 wrote: post #8

People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surpri…

What’s the difference between motivation to stay and reluctance to leave?

Think about someone who works at an non-profit NGO versus someone who works an 80 hour week at an investment bank. The NGO worker might only be making $30k/year but he stays because he really cares about his work. The investment banker might hate his job and hate the long hours but stay because of the high salary he'd be unlikely to match elsewhere. The NGO worker has high motivation and low reluctance, the i-banker has the opposite.

The actual technical term for this is motivation vs. hygiene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#29

Post by sa46 »

ng12 wrote: post #8

People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surpri…

> Entirely non-surprising that devs are the ones who left because by hard capping their pay you are reducing their reluctance to go work somewhere else with higher pay.

The surprising part is that their dev retention (article notes small sample size) of ~3 years matches Google at 3.1 years and surpasses Uber, Dropbox, Tesla, Facebook and Airbnb. [1] That suggests that the culture created by the one-salary experiment increases the motivation to stay enough to offset the incentive to leave.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#30

Post by civilian »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #5

As an economist, you'd expect them to have trouble attracting highly skilled people seeking only wages. On the other hand, also as an economist and from my own personal experience, there's a whole host of non-monetary benefits a flexible business can provide (which other businesses and corporates seem to balk at), and there's also the little talked about preference of some people wanting a negative correlation betwee…

I was thinking the same-- I wonder if they compensate the more market-desirable engineers by giving them more freedom / spare-time than support people get.

The article justifies the higher-than-market wage their support folks get, because it helps retention and their support people do a lot more than support. That's fair justification for paying over-market for support people, but it still doesn't seem like justification for a salary that's exactly the same.

And I agree that it's silly how companies won't offer 4-day or more-time-off as part of an employment agreement. I'd be seriously interested in a job that allowed me to take extra unpaid vacation time.

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