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

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

#91

Post by lakevieew »

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…

People here on work visa (H1-B) have to go through renewal of their work visa application as it is tied to their employer. This step while being fairly straightforward can add to the inertia in switching jobs.

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

#92

Post by usrme »

nine_zeros wrote: post #41
pizza234 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily "ridiculous". AFAIK in US is typical to change SWE job every few years (those 2-3 years indeed). Those who succeed in doing this consistently (I'm not implying one should, or not) ganerally end up with a high salary, a higher position, and more satisfaction (assuming that change give them satisfaction). Parent's observation may be a reasonable explanation when looked into context - the time to mo…

> Parent's observation may be a reasonable explanation when looked into context - the time to move on arrives after 2-3 years, and if there's no strong incentive, devs will start to feal uneasy, and move on. This is like saying, "Making people drive slower will reduce total number of accidents. So lets just reduce all speed limits to 25 miles an hour. It's only the obvious solution right?". This kind of lazy thinking…

Just as an aside: one of the best one can do in terms of policy is to lower speed limits to reduce accidents; it's proven to be very effective in countries like Finland. Far from the only, but one that requires zero changes to existing infrastructure other than changing signs.

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

#94

Post by danielrhodes »

A couple thoughts here:

Using money as a mechanism for alignment is not always effective or useful in creative fields. Engineers join a company for a variety of reasons, such as wanting to be part of the mission, coworkers, personal development, brand/location/perks/benefits, and so on. If somebody wants to leave, it's because they have fallen out of alignment. When people are out of alignment they can grow resentful or hard to motivate, and that in turns creates a bad state of affairs for both an employee and the company. There's an opportunity cost here where somebody could join the company who has better alignment.

Another way to look at this is that some level of turnover can be a good thing. In the same way that some universities will not allow former students to become professors in order to inject new thinking, companies benefit from new people coming in and injecting new ways of thinking into their organizations. So encouraging people to stay to maintain organizational memory is probably bad over the long term.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by pxue »

b3morales wrote: post #70
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…

You're not really making an independent measurement here. You see developers "stagnating" and moving on; how do you know that's not caused by lack of pay increases and other things you're doing (letting people pick new projects, for example, to keep them interested)? Maybe if you did "go out of your way to retain employees" you'd have employees who end up making your business even more successful during their longer…

Output/performance shouldn't be determined by pay, ie pay is a lagging indicator of output/performance.

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

#98

Post by Pxtl »

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…

3 years is also the amount of time it takes to become the resident expert in one of the company's Scary Basements, and then both your productivity and morale hits the crapper while this tired old beast that nobody wants to support you in modernizing needs fixes and tweaks.

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

#99

Post by SauciestGNU »

shagie wrote: post #84
mattydoincode wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here! I'm not arguing that software engineers should necessarily be paid in proportion to the end economic result of their employment. Although that's an interesting point for another article perhaps! Rather simply that companies tend to undervalue domain specific knowledge and forget how costly and time consuming it is to hire and retrain new team members. This should be taken into account when considering co…

Consider the question of "could you get into a bidding war with Apple or Netflix for a tenured developer?" Is there a point where another company can pay more than the economic product of the developer at the original company? Yes, hiring and training is expensive... and the loss of domain knowledge is costly too. There are a lot of places that aren't making that much money to be able to get to "market rate". I'd als…

Similarly, there are plenty of companies here in the Midwest who think it's ok to pay devs 50k/yr, and I want to say in the strongest possible terms fuck that. Employers who won't pay an equitable wage for devs don't deserve to hire them.

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

#100

Post by b3morales »

pxue wrote: post #97
b3morales wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not really making an independent measurement here. You see developers "stagnating" and moving on; how do you know that's not caused by lack of pay increases and other things you're doing (letting people pick new projects, for example, to keep them interested)? Maybe if you did "go out of your way to retain employees" you'd have employees who end up making your business even more successful during their longer…

Output/performance shouldn't be determined by pay, ie pay is a lagging indicator of output/performance.

My experience has been that if it lags far enough, output starts dropping to realign with it.
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