71–80 of 294 posts
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Money isn’t everything, but the math behind retirement saving is compelling. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
Right but what if you enjoy your job and don’t want to retire?
"Too much money" is a solved problem
This entire piece starts from the conclusion that engineers leave because they aren't paid enough then works backwards from there. This is wrong from my experience. Anecdotally, I have never left a job because of money. Sure, I left jobs and got ones that ended up paying more money but the reason I started looking in the first place wasn't money. It was for other reasons that usually included frustrations with manage…
Leaving because of money isn't the same thing as leaving because they didn't pay you enough to stay. For most frustrations people encounter at work (or elsewhere for that matter) that causes them to want to leave, there is a price at which they would put up with it and stay. The price is often much higher than management would consider paying, and higher than the income they'd have at their new job, but it does exist. So the question of why don't they pay you enough to stay isn't really based on the assumption that you were going to leave because of money.
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UK companies do not respect software engineers or reward them properly (not even stock), even interns in other places get paid 5x more than a senior engineer in the UK. There is a also a huge cost of living issue in the UK which makes it dead on arrival for any software engineering job in the UK. I could say there should be more VC funding in the UK for startups but I don't think this would help either due to the abo…
Simply put, UK needs more companies run by software folks. Only software folks respect other software folks enough to pay them well.
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But there's no supply for the people who know your product and codebase except for your existing employees, isn't that the whole point of paying them to stay?
They can be onboarded and trained
/s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money isn’t everything, but the math behind retirement saving is compelling. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
Yep, I look at every extra dollar I could make (that I don't technically need to survive) as some number fewer minutes until I can retire. So every extra dollar is worth it, no matter how frugal my lifestyle is.
Amazon used to have an internal Slack channel that allowed employees to share their total compensations anonymously. Thousands of people shared and the numbers were eye opening. Basically, if one was not a star and got consistently promoted every two or three years, she would not get compensated at market price. As a result, an L6 who stayed in the company for years often got lower total compensation than an L5 new h…
I can relate to this. I was hired as an L4, got a promotion after 3 years to an L5. I later found out that my L5 TC was high-mid band for new L4s. To rub salt into the wound, I had to have “consistent” L5 level output (translates to about a year) before I could even apply for promotion and compensation only kicked in at the next review cycle. The ~13% salary bump was retroactively granted but RSUs were not, which was…
Now about the monetary side: the purpose of getting promoted is to get to a high enough level. Say L7 in Amazon. Since resources disproportionally concentrate to the top, L7+ got handsomely paid, especially when you are a top performer in that band.
By way of contrast, an engineering firm I am familiar with had an employee who had been there six years, and knew the company's very complex product inside and out, every nook and cranny. He was one of the only people who had such deep understanding of the system that he could fix any issues that might come up, hardware, firmware, software, everything. He gave his two weeks' notice, and then went to a different job. He's a very talented guy, who would command a very attractive offer, but his talent to the current company is vastly greater than his generic value on the market, because of his detailed knowledge of the product. Although he diligently documented his knowledge, the company was still left in a jam after his departure. It would have been great if the company had fought for him the way the law firm fought for the other individual described above.
A person close to me works at a law firm. She was feeling a bit stagnant, so she connected with a recruiter. She got a very solid offer with a significant pay bump. She gave her two weeks' notice to her firm, including appointments with the partners. One of the partners asked her for a half hour. They came back with a massive pay raise, and a promotion to partner if she would stay. She was in a state of shock, but th…