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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?

#41

Post by mylons »

For whatever reason this is making me think about the narrative from a lot of VC’s, Paul Graham, Tyler Cowen, and many more that remote work will commoditize software engineering and destroy wages there.

And articles like this make me think about institutional knowledge and how there are no standards what so ever in software, and so long as new frameworks, languages, and not invented here syndrome persist there will always be a need to keep your engineering staff around.

/end ramble thoughts

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

#43

Post by Kinrany »

thanatropism wrote: post #8

An interesting question is whether paying enough (imagining an unlimited budget) won't end up selecting for coders who care more about the money than the work. A further question is whether these coders are actually better for the org -- the Henry Ford efficiency wage-type incentive may keep them at consistent pace and quality, whereas rockstars with physics PhD may have parallel agendas to make the project more fun…

Consistent quality requires accurate measurement. If you can't accurately measure quality and there's only external motivation, you get Goodhart's law.

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

#44

Post by iso1631 »

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 monitors.

It's these pathetic nickle-and-diming that is far more likely to make me look for another job than not paying a £200 a year pay rise.

Someone sees "£80 times 20,000 staff, that's over £1m, we can't risk that!"

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

#45

Post by tartoran »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #14
exabrial wrote: post #2

It's only about 50% about pay for STEM fields. They have to be engaged, feel like they have a voice or influence in the culture/business decisions, have great equipment to use, and flexible time off.

Yep. I'm a MechE and my pay is decent (not amazing) for the area but I was fine with it due to a lot of other factors. In the last year or so, my company has had a culture shift leading to down-to-the minute micromanagement and I've lost all autonomy - every decision requires approval of multiple managers. There's no realistic engineering salary they could pay me to continue putting up with this and I can't get out q…

Less autonomy also means less responsibility which affects growth in a bad way, but there is a small bright side to this, it reduces the cognitive workload and one can have leftover energy for side projects and hobbies. For the ones who have absolutely no taste to bureaucracy/red tape/stupid hierarchies of command, this could be soul sucking though

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

#47

Post by mytailorisrich »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #9

In accordance with the standard hierarchy of needs, culture flows down from compensation. When everyone's material needs and desires are well satisfied, they interact genuinely and naturally. When people feel like good compensation is difficult to achieve, they put more effort into zero-sum internal politics, maintaining appearances, and so forth. You see this in upper management all the time; execs are friendly and…

Management and upper management is not friendly, it is cut throat.

The skill people who go up the ladder have mastered, though, is to be deceitful and to maintain appearances, you might call that being professional at all times (at least to know when to be and when it is OK to be more natural).

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

#48

Post by mrnook »

prepperpotts wrote: post #31
xkcd-sucks wrote: post #9

In accordance with the standard hierarchy of needs, culture flows down from compensation. When everyone's material needs and desires are well satisfied, they interact genuinely and naturally. When people feel like good compensation is difficult to achieve, they put more effort into zero-sum internal politics, maintaining appearances, and so forth. You see this in upper management all the time; execs are friendly and…

Definitely agree with the latter part here about execs, but I feel like anxiety around compensation doesn't tie back to material needs as much as to the extent to which people measure their self-worth by compensation. Years ago, these studies were going around saying that people are happier when they make more money up to about $70k, at which point more money doesn't make you happier anymore. I'm sure that has to be…

Found the study: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489

It was conducted in 2010, so I wonder if anything would change if it was conducted again today. The current tech industry was in its infancy 10 years ago, and a lot of high paying jobs have been created since.

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

#50

Post by bonestamp2 »

paxys wrote: post #15

100% agree with this article, but would also caution against any kind of generalization. Different people want different things. For the first ~7-10 years of my career I strongly believed that everything was about salary. I picked jobs solely based on the comp package, and the work I did was motivated by bonuses and promotions. I'm sure that's still the case for a large chunk of engineers, but for me, with more exper…

Agreed. I think what happens for many of us is that when we're first out of college we just need money more than most other things to get our life in order (ex. buy a house/condo, kickstart retirement savings, a car in some cases, start a family, etc). So, we'll spend a lot of effort increasing our salary as quickly as possible to get to an income where we can afford to buy and sustain those things.

Most "things" are not fulfilling however. So, once our income satisfies all of those wants, then we feel more comfortable. When our income far exceeds our basic needs, we have the luxury to work (or hobby work) for things beyond paying the bills... fulfillment, positive change for self/family/community/world, achieving non-monetary goals, health, etc.

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