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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?

#231

Post by gkop »

eloisant wrote: post #207
wan23 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This analysis is missing the appreciation of the grant during vesting, which is material. The 200k of FB stock was granted as 800k over 4 years. So if the stock goes up just 10% a year, by the time the 1st year vests it's actually worth 220k, the 2nd year is 242k, 3rd year is 266k, and 4th 290k in stock comp due to appreciation. If it goes up more than 10%, effect is even more pronounced, plus with refreshers, you get a genuine golden handcuffs type situation.

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

#232

Post by benchaney »

gamblor956 wrote: post #173
iso1631 wrote: post #44

The large UK broadcaster I work for is having to make large amounts of savings. They've decided that they don't like paying for slack (for £10 per user per month), and instead are going to force everyone to use MS Teams. Since 95% of people have been working from home (and no plans for most to go back this year), they won't allow people to take unused monitors back because they might end up lost. These are £80 monito…

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 CO…

The 1.6M figure is based on a company with 20,000 employees. How many of them have less than 20M in revenue?

Also, your units are wrong. 1.6M is the total amount being risked. There is no realistic risk of losing that much every month unless you think that every employee is going to lose their monitor every month.

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

#233

Post by dijit »

iso1631 wrote: post #198
dijit wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment a lot. from what I hear of our management Slack's enterprise sales folk are a bit shit w.r.t working out deals and the like. 10 quid per person, for context, is roughly the price of all the MS software stack if you're a decent size. So for 10-bob you get email, word, excel, teams and exchange/AzureAD -- or a chat app. So that's the context that they're dealing with; but I fucking hate teams with…

> So for 10-bob you get email, word, excel, teams and exchange/AzureAD -- or a chat app. And the people making these decisions use word, excel, teams and exchange a hell of a lot in ways to try to work out how to save some money. I for one don't need that. I need jira, confluence, slack.

Yeah, but this is how network effects works.

Accounting uses excel so everyone who interacts with accounting needs excel.

Then those who interact with accounting (HR, Purchasing) use excel so everyone they come into contact with needs excel.

There's is a metric which is called "Cost per head" used in my company, and it goes like;

1 Person:

* 1 Windows license

* 1 Office license

* 1 Visio license

* 1 Swarm license

* 1 Perforce license

* 1 Jetbrains license (optional)

* 1 Slack license

* 1 jira license

* 1 confluence license

* 1 gitlab license

* 1 Terraform Enterprise license (optional)

* 1 headcount in some HR software

and that's just what I can remember.

Controversial hot-take from one of our IT directors:

Just wondering why can't we just use slack and not use Teams at all :thinking_face: Slack seems so much better.

So, just to put this out there, I started this Slack originally. So it's a topic close to my heart.

But ultimately right now, Teams is eating the fuck out of Slack's lunch.

Teams is included within our M365 license, for all users, at a fraction of the price of Slack.

Likewise, all of the integrations, SSO, features, etc., come bundled in the existing license.

For Slack, they continue to push Enterprise Grid licensing costs of over 300 USD per user per year

Additionally, there are more people now starting to push us to formally drop Slack than Teams. Some studios are mandating the usage of Teams over Slack, as well as some projects.

Personally, I see several features still missing before such a conversation can hold weight. Teams will have private channels added in November, and I'm hoping they address file permissions, non-threaded channel chat and lifting of the 250 user limit in individual chats.

But once that happens, it's going to be extremely difficult for Slack to compete.

So, to manage expectations - I would not anticipate a future where Slack is chosen over Teams. It's probably best to start acclimating to that reality now.

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

#234

Post by bitexploder »

vbtemp wrote: post #139
bitexploder wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's manager myopia in many cases. I am sure there are some situations where a company may not be able to pay someone in a given role more than X dollars. That company may not view you as capable of the adjacent and more senior role that would increase your comp. But maybe you are on the edge and otherwise a solid employee that they would like to retain, but they feel it would not be fair to other employees in your r…

Thank you for this thoughtful response

Thanks, it was just a hasty brain dump, but upon review, I think I captured the essence of my observations, informal as they are.

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

#235

Post by leonardteo »

Honestly I have given up trying to “keep” engineers because it’s a losing battle. It’s impossible to compete with big tech. From the offers I’ve seen, if FAANG/Big Tech really wants one of your team members, they will get them and there is nothing you can do.

My employees stay because they want to. They enjoy the work, domain, colleagues. The salary is competitive and fair. They can thrive in this environment.

But I am under no illusions about creating some special environment that can prevent them from getting poached. You can throw cash, stocks, options all you want but if Big Tech wants them, they will outbid you.

Just assume that at any moment they can and will get poached and ensure that the business can continue if people leave. Keep the stack simple, stick to standards, minimize NIH etc.

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

#236

Post by JamesBarney »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #219
YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the times are definitely changing, a lot of people are still very averse to finding a new workplace. This means that even at a 1% raise per year, some people will stick around for decades. One of the best developers at one of the companies I worked for was exactly that kind of person. For the company this means a large amount of extra profit year in year out. The odds of you saying "Nevermind, I'm out" when the…

>This means that even at a 1% raise per year, some people will stick around for decades. One of the best developers at one of the companies I worked for was exactly that kind of person. As someone in their 30s who has spent in-person time at about a dozen companies (a stint in consulting will do that) ranging from start-ups to large enterprise, this is exceedingly rare from what I've seen. Hardly anyone makes it to a…

My experience has been the opposite. I've worked for large hospitals and oil and gas companies, and on any given team 50% of our senior engineers had been there over a decade.

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

#237

Post by YetAnotherMatt »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #219
YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the times are definitely changing, a lot of people are still very averse to finding a new workplace. This means that even at a 1% raise per year, some people will stick around for decades. One of the best developers at one of the companies I worked for was exactly that kind of person. For the company this means a large amount of extra profit year in year out. The odds of you saying "Nevermind, I'm out" when the…

>This means that even at a 1% raise per year, some people will stick around for decades. One of the best developers at one of the companies I worked for was exactly that kind of person. As someone in their 30s who has spent in-person time at about a dozen companies (a stint in consulting will do that) ranging from start-ups to large enterprise, this is exceedingly rare from what I've seen. Hardly anyone makes it to a…

I forgot to mention, my experiences are all based on EU countries. When we worked with US companies, we would occasionally joke that a 2 year tenure is considered long at the US companies we worked with. There would be people joining / leaving their teams every single month.

In the teams I've been part of, average tenure at the company was over 5 years in every single case. In one case over 15 years.

These are all development positions. Management positions and marketing positions did tend to move around a bit more often.

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

#238

Post by iso1631 »

dijit wrote: post #233
iso1631 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So for 10-bob you get email, word, excel, teams and exchange/AzureAD -- or a chat app. And the people making these decisions use word, excel, teams and exchange a hell of a lot in ways to try to work out how to save some money. I for one don't need that. I need jira, confluence, slack.

Yeah, but this is how network effects works. Accounting uses excel so everyone who interacts with accounting needs excel. Then those who interact with accounting (HR, Purchasing) use excel so everyone they come into contact with needs excel. There's is a metric which is called "Cost per head" used in my company, and it goes like; 1 Person: * 1 Windows license * 1 Office license * 1 Visio license * 1 Swarm license * 1…

By removing slack this adds a ton of work as all the integrations and workflows that have been built into slack over the years need to be rebuilt.

All to save 0.2% of the cost of a person

Now in our specific company the latest hotness only lasts about 2 years, from messanger to lync to skype to zoom to teams. Each is massively disruptive and comes as a major project for a team of project managers.

(They are also trying to downgrade us to office 365, which for our purposes removes archived emails more than 3 years old)

Now for a beancounter it may seem that spending £6k a month on someone, then pissing them off by making a £10 a month saving, it worthwhile. That's because the beancounter doesn't factor in the cost of pissing people off.

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

#239

Post by oarabbus_ »

JamesBarney wrote: post #236
oarabbus_ wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This means that even at a 1% raise per year, some people will stick around for decades. One of the best developers at one of the companies I worked for was exactly that kind of person. As someone in their 30s who has spent in-person time at about a dozen companies (a stint in consulting will do that) ranging from start-ups to large enterprise, this is exceedingly rare from what I've seen. Hardly anyone makes it to a…

My experience has been the opposite. I've worked for large hospitals and oil and gas companies, and on any given team 50% of our senior engineers had been there over a decade.

I used to work in medical devices and hospitals, and while it's _more_ true in those industries, the numbers of developers employed is less than in Tech. In other words, it isn't the Energy or Medical industries defining the equilibrium for developers. Jumping around in medical device/hospitals also results in smaller raises than in the Tech industry. Can't speak for Oil & Gas on that part.

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

#240

Post by kgin »

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…

What you're paid has nothing to do with your productivity or business value, it's about how much they have to pay you not to leave (or for a new job, to accept)

Inertia means that you have to pay someone more to change their life and come work at a new place. You don't have to pay someone very much more each year to have them continue on the same path.

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