Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

builtin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 349 posts

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

#71

Post by sigstoat »

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…

> You see this in upper management all the time; execs are friendly and graceful with each other because their material success is guaranteed, and promoting collegiality among execs is usually an orgizational goal.

i assume this is some sort of very subtle reductio ad absurdum?

> When people feel like good compensation is difficult to achieve, they put more effort into zero-sum internal politics, maintaining appearances, and so forth.

i was working at a place where the salaries were flat across the board, and set at a perfectly reasonable level, and it still didn't eliminate concern for appearances and bickering.

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

#72

Post by t3rabytes »

ed312 wrote: post #69
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 can tell you as a manager the salary bands are generally set by HR for the whole company. I was told point blank at a previous employer that we payed the 70th percentile. I asked how they knew what that was - apparently there are companies that aggregate this data (legally?) and sell it back to HR orgs for $xx,xxx+ a year. HR for some reason wouldn't deviate from this band for top talent (discrimination maybe?)

Yep, Radford is one of those companies.

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

#73

Post by laurentdc »

A nice, laid-back, zero-bs team is all I need. I value that much much higher than money. I have no interest in workplace drama. I've always considered career and competition to be quite pointless: if I had a good idea I'd build the product myself and keep all the margins in my pocket. It's computer stuff afterall.

Often I have no interest in the work itself either, but if the team is good I'm happy. They could make us shovel snow all day, I'd still come to work.

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

#74

Post by Reedx »

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…

Which is part of why it's not that uncommon to see people who bounce from job to job every year or two in the Bay Area. It rapidly boosts salary. I've also seen where people leave for a top paying company, which sends their compensation right to the moon, then come back after a short stint.

Netflix seems to be a rare example of a company that is proactive enough with pay raises to counter this (any Netflix folks here that can confirm/refute?). Not sure why more companies don't do that, at least when they're well capitalized.

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

#75

Post by wccrawford »

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…

I took my first programming job with the intent of staying 3 years and then getting a new job that would pay me what I was worth.

I got very lucky and they kept pace with what I could have gotten elsewhere for about 5 years. At that point, I stopped getting raises and about a year later, switched jobs for that 40% raise.

It's pretty much the norm for IT until you get to your pay level. It's complex, but I think it's mainly that it's hard to justify pay raises beyond what a job is worth and actual promotions are hard to swallow for management, especially if they don't need someone at that level.

When you left each job, they probably filled it with someone making about what you were when you left, but the new job you got was more demanding and better-paying.

I think for the first part of your career, aiming for pay is the right choice. After a while, the pay is fairly settled and you can look for other compensation instead.

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

#76

Post by ledauphin »

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…

by doing that for the first 10 years you likely established a much higher "salary floor" than you would have if you hadn't job-hopped.

Yes, at some point most people can end up "satisfied", but part of the reason you got there in the first place was the choices you made along the way.

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

#77

Post by travisgriggs »

Pay me enough so I can feed my family and have comfortable shelter.

Don't create a culture where I am a doer but not allowed to be a decider. I will eventually walk away from asymmetric power structures.

If you don't/can't trust me, I probably won't trust you. I prefer relationships of trust.

I want to learn and improve. Use your extra money to do that and act is if it matters to you.

If you must use pay as your sole means of appeasing me, pay me LOTS. So very much that I'm willing to put up with the bureaucratic shitshow that is your company, spending all my drone-ish non-innovative 9 to 5 day thinking about the rush I'm going to experience doing cool things with all of the excess cash you're giving me.

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

#78

Post by blahbhthrow3748 »

ed312 wrote: post #69
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 can tell you as a manager the salary bands are generally set by HR for the whole company. I was told point blank at a previous employer that we payed the 70th percentile. I asked how they knew what that was - apparently there are companies that aggregate this data (legally?) and sell it back to HR orgs for $xx,xxx+ a year. HR for some reason wouldn't deviate from this band for top talent (discrimination maybe?)

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.

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

#79

Post by enriquto »

I hope sooner than later there will be some kind of union of engineers and salaries will be public and standarized (and the median value of the salary for each position will be higher than today, due to the power of collective bargaining). It is shameful that some senior software engineers earn so much less than others, due to out-of-band reasons.

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

#80

Post by jandrewrogers »

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…

It is worth noting that "happiness" is distinct from "life satisfaction" in these studies. The latter does scale with income up to very high levels. Just being happy on a day to day basis is a low standard, many people aspire to more in life somewhat independent of happiness.
Post reply on HN