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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?

#201

Post by vsareto »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #144
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.

This class of characterization gets around, though usually the coverage is more directly about the "culture of fear." Please consider how terrible a job is when you're constantly afraid and working yourself to the bone to avoid being fired; it's probably in line with that. The WSJ had a piece in 2018 which sparked a bunch of follow-on coverage: "Mr. Hastings’ ring of top executives take the keeper test seriously. At…

>“Good, because fear drives you,”

What a fake. Fear of what? That some rich asshole doesn't like you?

If you get a Netflix job, you can trade down to a ton of other companies with better life balances.

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

#202

Post by iabacu »

ghaff wrote: post #59
centimeter wrote: post #30

> When it comes to engineers, the key to employee retention isn't just about pay. Maybe I’m atypical, but at a certain point all the other factors just don’t cut it. If you’re trying to pay me $400k/yr total comp and I can get $600k/yr elsewhere, the disparities in culture or whatever have to be pretty significant to dominate.

At those levels, you're probably talking about at least some stock-based comp and that's harder to factor in. But that aside, a lot of people would care less about the delta between $400K and $600K than the delta between $50K and $75K.

400K to 600K is still qualitatively significant.

For example, it can mean whether your spouse has the option to stay home to spend more quality time with the children, without having to sacrifice expenses due to income reduction; or it can mean how well (or not) you can take care of aging parents.

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

#203

Post by vbtemp »

_57jb wrote: post #196
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…

It's for the same reason that large financial institutions hire entry level engineers as "VP's" There are internal systems, some significantly older than others....they are trying to adapt the real world to their internal representation of the perceived world. The value you truly provide vs. the value they believe you provide is lost on them....so you must find/show it. Many enterprises assume 3% bumps for all employ…

Yeah, for a side project I want to try to model this in an agent based sim and to see if it can recreate some of these dynamics.

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

#204

Post by iso1631 »

cdumler wrote: post #26
iso1631 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, pay me $1m a day and I'll stare at a wall for you. Probably wouldn't do it for long, the first day would be amazing - that buys a great house. The rest of the week and I'm set for a very comfortable retirement.

For a few days. My experience is that high pay will A) keep bad people around for much, much longer and B) keep good people around until they get too fed up with the bad people.

I guess that's where high bonus low pay comes into it - if you are a "good person" you get the high bonus so you stay, if you are a "bad person" you don't, so you leave.

The problem then comes down to defining good person vs bad person, which in the real world is very tricky.

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

#205

Post by ghaff »

commandlinefan wrote: post #158
agensaequivocum wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>around early 2000

Things were still hot but there were at least storm clouds on the horizon at that point.

>Everybody looked at my resume and pointed out that I had never stayed at a single job for longer than a year.

A year means that, to exaggerate just a little, you were basically starting to look for a new job as soon as you started the old one. But, yeah, if someone has moved between jobs like clockwork every year or two, the working assumption of the hiring manager has to be that this time won't be the charm and you'll hop again. Whether they're OK with that doubtless depends on the role.

You might consider just leaving those right out of school jobs from 20 years ago off. If someone really wants to see them, you can tell them but it's not unreasonable to age stuff off your resume if you have lots of jobs.

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

#206

Post by tidenly »

My job gives me no bonus or raise after a year and a half, despite obvious vast increases in my responsibilities and the assumption of another engineer who lefts' tasks too.. I just don't know how to approach asking because I hate confrontation and those kinds of situations. I basically always change jobs because of this reason - I'm just avoiding a conversation I don't want to have and the raise is bigger by quitting haha

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

#207

Post by eloisant »

wan23 wrote: post #182
ForHackernews wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if you make 400k at Netflix instead of 200k of cash + 200k of FB stock at Facebook, you can just buy FB stock by yourself with the Netflix cash...

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

#208

Post by js8 »

Domenic_S wrote: post #166
Pfhreak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll even add that engineers should understand the value they bring to the company and adjust their concept of fair not just against their peers but against what the company is earning from their labor.

This is one of those things that sounds reasonable but is impossible to compute. Does the company earn more from the developer who makes the product, or the infra engineer who keeps it online? Well, without either they're not making anything... Also, if the company makes a bit less money this year vs last year, are you willing to take a pay cut?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937

It might be impossible to compute, but we still want to compute it.

Or rather, get some agreement. I would say not only it is impossible to compute, the question of relative human pay for different types of work is a meaningless question, like asking, what is more important on a car, tires or engine?

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

#209

Post by _57jb »

vbtemp wrote: post #203
_57jb wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's for the same reason that large financial institutions hire entry level engineers as "VP's" There are internal systems, some significantly older than others....they are trying to adapt the real world to their internal representation of the perceived world. The value you truly provide vs. the value they believe you provide is lost on them....so you must find/show it. Many enterprises assume 3% bumps for all employ…

Yeah, for a side project I want to try to model this in an agent based sim and to see if it can recreate some of these dynamics.

I enjoy this line of thought. I hope you do pursue this, I'd be interested in what you create.

Makes me think of the Einstein quote: "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas."

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

#210

Post by ghaff »

iabacu wrote: post #202
ghaff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At those levels, you're probably talking about at least some stock-based comp and that's harder to factor in. But that aside, a lot of people would care less about the delta between $400K and $600K than the delta between $50K and $75K.

400K to 600K is still qualitatively significant. For example, it can mean whether your spouse has the option to stay home to spend more quality time with the children, without having to sacrifice expenses due to income reduction; or it can mean how well (or not) you can take care of aging parents.

Of course. And I don't mean to imply it isn't. $200K is a lot of money to most people and may be enough to make a significant lifestyle choice that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

But in general percentage salary increments affect lifestyle more at the low end than they do at the high end. (And, of course, the absolute differences matter far more at the low end.

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