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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?

#311

Post by Aeolun »

ed312 wrote: post #87
blahbhthrow3748 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bands are usually per level - if someone is sufficiently good you bring them in as a Principal/Staff/Magic Unicorn/whatever. This leads to the same phenomenon where you need to work for 2 years to get promoted but if you jump ship your new manager will set your level in line with your salary expectations. And of course the levels are largely meaningless outside of compensation and office politics.

This exact scenario happened to me - I was a "senior manager" by HR title but I was actually just promoted to team lead in practice. I meant to illustrate the setting of compensation happened almost entirely without engineering input at a company level (in my experience, where I worked, etc.).

Damn! This explains why my company has so many senior managers. Sometimes with just one report :P

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

#312

Post by Aeolun »

greedo wrote: post #294
antisthenes wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average inflation over the last 20 years is 2.1% Honestly being given anything under 2.5% is just insulting. Pay freeze or COL adjustment in line with inflation is for a few years in bad recessions imo, like 2009-10 or, probably the upcoming 12-18 months. Being given 3% is in the neighborhood of "better than nothing", but nowhere near what it should be for an employee trying to get ahead and putting in the required e…

Yup. Our team is only allowed to have one person with "Exceeds standards." One. A bastard form of stack ranking. So the mgr picks based on his gut feelings, and then justifies it with a vague review. The lucky team member gets a 5% raise, everyone else is usually ranked as "Meets standards" which merits a 2.5% raise. A few people who need time in the penalty box get a 1% raise. So what happens is your actual performa…

Even 5% is nothing to write home about. Still far under the amount you would get if you switched jobs.

But then you’d have to run the interview gauntlet again, and frankly that’s just so distasteful that I don’t want to.

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

#313

Post by Aeolun »

buster wrote: post #134
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…

Ask yourself, did you provide a 40% increase in value in the last year compared to the year before? Probably not. For another company, that possibly desperately needs a new employee, you might have the value that without you the added income will be zero, with you... More then that.

> Ask yourself, did you provide a 40% increase in value in the last year compared to the year before?

It’s more that I’ve been providing 200% value for 40% of the cost for a while, so they have plenty of space to raise my salary significantly without losing any money.

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

#314

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

dlp211 wrote: post #157
tidepod12 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they do. This comes up every time compensation gets mentioned on HN. Engineers claim that "I only make $500k/yr at Google and I'm poor because SF prices :(" which is just bullshit. In a previous thread, someone mentioned that they make $300k/yr in SF, and even after paying for housing in a nice area and food/utility expenses, they had over $11,000 per month left over in discretionary income. That is insane. Unle…

Most Engineers do NOT make $500k total comp per year at FAANG companies, most engineers don't make $300k TC/yr at these companies, and those aren't the engineers I'm talking about anyways. These companies are made up mostly of engineers who make between $100k-$250k. That's still not a small amount of money; and I never claimed that these people are poor; just that these salaries don't satisfy their needs and desires…

Not true. The amazon sde2 external hire offer I saw given to people with >=1 year of experience is around 250K in Seattle and higher in California. Amazon is known as one of the lower paying FAANG companies.

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

#315

Post by quicklime »

davidgay wrote: post #280
salarycommenter wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quarterly, with no 1 year cliff. Close enough to monthly it's not that bad thought.

No, quarterly vs monthly depends on the number of units ready to vest (if there's enough, it will be monthly).

FB vests quarterly for all employees, regardless of how many shares they are scheduled to receive.

GOOG vests monthly, but if you're going to receive less than 1 share that month, then I guess they might round that down to 0 and effectively vest less frequently.

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

#316

Post by Twixes »

amflare wrote: post #90
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've always assumed its because of sticker shock. +40% is a lot, and as a salary it's right there on paper. As a rehire, the equivalent amount is hidden in several dozen smaller costs. Also if yesterday you made 14 widgets for 10 money, paying 14 money for 14 widgets is hard to justify, nevermind that when you were hired you made 10 widgets a day. The obvious solution for the dev is to go hunt for a job that reads "p…

Ah, yes, think I'm gonna go make some widgety widgets now, to grab that valuable widget-making experience

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

#317

Post by sershe »

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…

Can you just rejoin the organization again? They (used to?) say that the fastest way to get promoted in Microsoft, for example, is to leave for a competitor and then rejoin in 2 years.

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

#318

Post by my_username_is_ »

kbenson wrote: post #222
my_username_is_ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock based compensation may be the norm in Silicon Valley, but it isn't par for the course across different roles and industries. But the ~3% raise seems to be pervasive. This tells me that it doesn't have to do with stock based compensation.

~3% a year is a cost of living increase. If anyone gets 3% for a promotion they could ask where that number came from. If they recently got a 3% bump that means the promotion put them ahead by ~12 months of work at the company in the prior position. Does that make sense? If they haven't gotten a raise for close to a year, it means the promotion didn't really come with a pay bump at all if that's what they normally ge…

I've only ever had it referred to as an annual merit increase, but it's definitely more aligned with the national cost of living.

Regardless of what it's called though, the question remains. Why does your value to other companies increase faster than your value to your own company? Presumably you're learning more about your company's business and your specific domain problems, which should make you more valuable to your company than it would to others. Is that assumption not valid?

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

#319

Post by goatinaboat »

zffr wrote: post #37

The article's title is pure click-bait. It would be more accurate if it were "How to Keep Your Engineers Interested in Sticking Around" Very little of the article says anything about how much to pay engineers. I only found 2 paragraphs about engineering compensation: > The most comprehensive study, though, is Daniel H. Pink’s Drive, which is summarized in this animation from the RSA. Pink suggests that money isn’t th…

Pink suggests that money isn’t the main driver for highly skilled workers

Consider that the people who benefit from convincing engineers that other engineers aren’t motivated by money are those who hoover up that money for themselves.

Or alternatively, managers aren’t “highly skilled”, can’t have it both ways!

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

#320

Post by C1sc0cat »

ipnon wrote: post #228
C1sc0cat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your boss at 121 time askes so exactly what have you delivered.

Git activity is the most praised metric at my company. Refactoring and commenting is highly rewarded. The utility of this metric is dubious.

My Sympathies id start looking for a new Job

Ah like the place I worked at where some one spent 10 person years of effort to replace a perl system with the corporate standard Oracle one.

No value to the share holders but they ticked the boxes for probation managed a teem of eight or more and a budget of "1 million pounds"

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