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

Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

marker.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 515 posts

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#71

Post by diob »

Kranar wrote: post #11

To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…

What came first, the chicken or the egg in your scenario? Did they stop doing great work because the rewards didn't match? Or did you stop matching because they stopped doing great work?

Always hard to tell.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#72

Post by nell »

Many flaws with the argument, here is one:

It is hard if not impossible to attribute an individual employee's performance to company growth. Many variables can impact company growth - so even if engineering does their job,product many not and vice versa.

Even if everyone does their job exceedingly well, a sub optimal strategy could kill the company. Or the market could shift. How do you account when company stops growing? If the spending will only go up, how will the company justify the increase in budget when there are bad times.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#73

Post by modeless »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #17

The flaw with this argument is the assumption that the value add of a given skillset is approximately equivalent in different environments. We see this for example on a larger scale in OLED tech, where a key OLED engineer in South Korea might be worth $250k to the Korean Economy but worth $2.5M to the Chinese economy, which is why poaching was halted by classifying the job as a national security interest. The profit/…

Valuable tech employees at FAANG absolutely make seven figures.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#75

Post by _tom_ »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13
vsareto wrote: post #7

>I’ve watched talented engineers leave companies for greener pastures after painfully short tenures. I’m even guilty of this myself — I left an amazing company after less than two years to join Ethena as VP of Engineering. Engineers can leave after months and still get jobs. You're not guilty of anything for leaving after 2 years for a VP position.

Also director and VP positions skip the leetcode.

Leetcode is one reason people don’t job hop. If you actually have a job, you don’t have time to spend on the silly, non-job-related problems.

Leetcode doesn’t filter for skill, it filters for who has too much time on their hands.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#76

Post by CoastalCoder »

CosmicShadow wrote: post #23

I was working on a startup that could tell an employer if their employees were looking for a new job so they had a chance to try and retain them instead of paying the huge cost of having to hire, train, put strain on the team, etc. I talked mostly to startups between 10 and 400 people, but the problem I heard from most leaders was "if they are thinking about leaving, fuck em, they are dead to me already". I tried to…

Were you troubled that the startup was trying to surreptitiously expose employees' job-hunting activities?

I would think that if a manager was unaware of the job-hunting, that was intentional on the part of the employee.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#77

Post by closeparen »

mauving wrote: post #4
ukoki wrote: post #3

> The hard truth that many companies struggle to wrap their heads around is that they should be paying their long-tenured engineers above market rate. From an ethical point of view, maybe. From a rational point of view, maybe not. Jobs are "sticky" — it's a pain to apply for jobs, arrange interviews, deal with the possibility of getting rejected. And if you do get an offer and accept you will be leaving colleagues th…

> [...] Jobs are "sticky" [...] My experience has been the opposite, in that sticky jobs are jobs held by people who aren't in demand. There's a balancing act for employers ("brilliant but flighty" is less desirable than "good but sticky") so it's certainly possible to argue that jobs being sticky for less-than-brilliant people is a good thing... but in my experience, jobs aren't sticky because of inertia for brillia…

I think people who are "brilliant" at interviewing will job hop frequently, while people who are "brilliant" at actual job performance will tend to be promoted and incentivized to stay internally.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#78

Post by dwater »

bookofsand wrote: post #52
paul_f wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers especially can take on side projects to supplement their income. Maybe a bit less focus on the day job to reflect the below market pay. Keeps things in balance.

The vast majority of companies ask for a 'we own everything you breathe' agreement as a prerequisite for employment. The vast majority of employed software engineers don't have the luxury to work on side projects, unless they relinquish the IP to their employer for no additional compenstation, which renders monetization moot.

I worked with someone who was working 2 full time 9-5 jobs simultaneously for a few months before being found out. When the company did realize what was going on, they quietly parted ways with him without any punishment, because they didn't want it to get around that he got away with it for so long. I think if you're not at a big organization with a proper legal department, that's the most likely outcome.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#79

Post by sokoloff »

fizx wrote: post #64
nine_zeros wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. I would prefer being at my current job, leverage my tribal experience to build things (and I have specific things on my mind) better and faster. If I pitch this to my CTO, he will agree that using my knowledge to build things better and faster aligns with business goals. Only middle management rationalizes theories such as you proposed. Middle management sometimes just forgets what is the goal of…

Hi, Person currently in middle management here. While we'd love to pay our good people more, at a moderately sized company and up, we operate under an unbelievable number of constraints, from HR, finance, etc.

Each company has to decide which departments will run which parts of the company.

In a company where HR or Finance runs tech, you’ll get one set of outcomes. Those outcomes are likely different than if tech runs tech. It’s not shocking to me that Google and Netflix get the results that they do; in those companies, HR/Finance isn’t running tech.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#80

Post by trjordan »

The biggest simplification that I disagree with in this post is that impact rises monotonically.

It's true that long-tenured engineers (if they're good) can do amazing things. Things that other engineers don't have the implicit knowledge or political capital to do. The problem is that once that project is over, it's not guaranteed that the next project will be as impactful.

So ... do you pay them for their impact? And promote them? Knowing you're guaranteed nothing the next quarter?

Or do you put up barriers to promotion? "Sustained performance" or "multiple successful projects?"

I'd love to see an approach to IC comp that's variable. Land a huge project; get a bonus. Everything past Senior Engineer is temporary; if you want to be paid like Senior Staff or Principal, do the work in that year. I suspect orgs could justify being more generous with bonuses because it's not recurring.

It's at odds to a lot of the way engineers look at comp, but it would align money with what individual businesses need in a more interesting way than the current "plan on your RSUs going up by 50% next year" comp plans at FAANG.

Post reply on HN