The one-salary experiment, ten years in • Hacker News Board

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#41

Post by caprese » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

trishume wrote: post #17

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?

I think the issue is they got that figure from a site that only counts base salary, when a lot of high end dev compensation comes as bonus or stock.

yeah although people want to know "how much do people make" or "how much are people paid"

they - and the sources they find on google - quickly conflate income, salary, compensation while also having wrong and old aggregated information for all of it

this works for most people's fields, doesn't work for tech.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#42

Post by village-idiot » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #11

They can say all of the feel good stuff they want. I always have the same question - are there outside investors? If there are, by definition the entire purpose of the company is an exit strategy. Statistically, that exit strategy is to be acquired. As an employee without equity you should have no loyalty to the company above getting a check every two weeks and doing your best work during those two weeks. The owners…

While I’m somewhat sympathetic to your point in general about loyalty, I think you’ve missed the point by a lot. This is more than “feel good words”, this is a concrete set of actions about compensation that affects how much money gets paid to whom. In the world of business it doesn’t get much further from “feel good words” than that.

I would also advise caution about loyalty for equity. Bery few startup employees are paid enough on exit event—if it ever happens—to compensate for the time, stress, and loss of wages that they incurred over a non-startup job. Most people would be statistically better off not working for equity, and just accepting cash.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#43

Post by robocat » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

caprese wrote: post #40

> the average software developer in Wellington NZ makes NZ$64k. We pay more than that, but when you become a remote company, people start looking for the $134k USD These are two different scales, so for help I will normalize them: $64,000 NZD = $43,641.60 USD $134,000 USD = $134,000 USD

I am very skeptical of that reported average.

The average salary in Wellington, is NZ$59,649.

Maybe get a new graduate for $50k.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#44

Post by soneca » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #23

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).

According to a comment on the original HN thread, their "about" page at the time listed 8 people.

20 is not small enough to make it irrelevant as an experiment in my opinion.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#45

Post by tfehring » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:53 PM UTC

village-idiot wrote: post #38

chrisco255 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iwantmyname says they've had ~20 employees. You can't compare a company like that to Google, Uber, Tesla, etc, who've got multiple orders of magnitude more employees.

20 employees is down in the range where noise dominates. I’m not sure exactly how many employees are required for statistical significance, but it has to be in the hundreds.

Totally depends on the effect size and the threshold at which you're evaluating statistical significance. If their churn were 10x higher than Google's, 20 employees over 10 years would probably be enough to confirm the difference at a high level of confidence. But if their "true" long-run churn is "only", say, 10% higher than FAANG and friends, you would need a much larger sample to identify that.

N.B.: Even a 10% increase in employee churn is expensive in general, and even more so when your recruiters make as much as your senior engineers.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#46

Post by marcinzm » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

sa46 wrote: post #29

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…

Depends how senior the devs in question were and how competitive their interviewing abilities were. Junior devs who don't interview well are easier to retain for example.

Also, top companies have a problem because they are top companies. Working there is a signal to other employers that you're top talent as vetted by a top company. That increases the values of offers thrown at you and eventually one may be enough to pry you out.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#47

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:56 PM UTC

village-idiot wrote: post #42

scarface74 wrote: post #11

They can say all of the feel good stuff they want. I always have the same question - are there outside investors? If there are, by definition the entire purpose of the company is an exit strategy. Statistically, that exit strategy is to be acquired. As an employee without equity you should have no loyalty to the company above getting a check every two weeks and doing your best work during those two weeks. The owners…

While I’m somewhat sympathetic to your point in general about loyalty, I think you’ve missed the point by a lot. This is more than “feel good words”, this is a concrete set of actions about compensation that affects how much money gets paid to whom. In the world of business it doesn’t get much further from “feel good words” than that. I would also advise caution about loyalty for equity. Bery few startup employees ar…

Oh I don’t trust equity either. I wouldn’t take less than market compensation under any condition.

If they are investor backed. They are still playing with other people’s money.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#48

Post by didibus » Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

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 motivation to stay is the positive. Like you genuinely like going to your job.

Reluctance to leave is that even if you don't like your job, leaving is even more painful, maybe due to the loss of salary, or because the interview process is too much of a hassle, or other opportunities are just as bad if not worse, etc.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#49

Post by electricslpnsld » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

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?

Base salary at the bigs starts around 150 +/- 10%. Total comp packages take your actual W2 income way higher, though (50% signing bonuses, regular old bonuses, RSU grants around 75% of base salary a year).

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#50

Post by JustSomeNobody » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

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…

I can see that. A business is in business to make money. If we’re making money and the executives are getting bonuses and raises and I don’t get raises, I’m out. And if you tell me I’m not getting a raise because we’re “family” Im gonna puke on ya on the way out.