[HN Gopher] Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
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Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
Author : mattydoincode
Score : 319 points
Date : 2021-08-03 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| flowerlad wrote:
| > _we intend to create a formula that takes into account title,
| years of tenure, and performance to create a compensation graph
| that scales with company impact as closely as possible. By making
| it predictable..._
|
| Performance is hard to measure. It is highly dependent on the
| biases of the person measuring. So despite having a "formula",
| the outcome is not at a all predictable.
| slibhb wrote:
| They don't? I was given an 11% raise (without negotiating) this
| year because the tech company I work for wants me to stay.
|
| I could probably get more by leaving and finding a new job
| (15-25%) but 11% is more than enough to convince me to stay.
| Also, there are factors other than money at play, such as not
| having someone breathing down your neck, having coworkers who are
| nice, respecting your superiors, and so on.
|
| I have a friend who recently left a position at a startup paying
| ~200K (which is a lot here, we're not in SF/NY) for a 145K
| position purely to avoid dsyfunction, stress, and incompetence.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Your anecdote proves the point. If your friend was paid more,
| they might not have left.
|
| But in essence what you highlight also shows why companies
| don't pay to keep people to stay. Instead of paying someone
| money who hates their job, they might prefer paying less money
| to a new grad who isn't burnt out on their culture yet.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| majormajor wrote:
| There was an interesting paradox last time I was a people
| manager.
|
| Sometimes people would leave and get a bigger raise than we'd
| budgeted for them for that year. But at the same time, we never
| took long to hire a replacement at the same budget we'd been
| paying them. This required us to be diligent at doing market
| adjustments when necessary, but also led me to some other
| thoughts on compensation: if we think employee A is worth $X, and
| they get a job offer for $X*1.2, neither company has to be wrong.
| Maybe there's a bigger need at the moment in the other company.
| Maybe they're going to be working on something more valuable to
| that company than they were working on here. Maybe to us they've
| been a solid but non-exceptional performer, but the other company
| sees potential for them to do more in the interview. Maybe the
| other company just has more to spend. Maybe they're the third
| best-performer on the team, and we chose to allocate more to the
| top two people, so can't do as much to keep them as they'd like.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| You're leaving out some serious costs incurred by your company
| and team. The loss of institutional knowledge, the loss of
| expertise, business process knowledge, personal relationships
| that could make hard changes much easier. Sure, you hired
| someone for $X instead of $X*1.2 but in terms of work done you
| probably missed out on a lot and came out way behind.
| majormajor wrote:
| I think you're both overestimating those costs and also
| underestimating the difficulty of just being able to suddenly
| pay 1.2X for people.
|
| Re: institutional knowledge and expertise, etc - we tried to
| avoid too much concentration. If all the institutional
| knowledge for system X is tied up in person Z, what if they
| want to take on to a new roll, or I want to ask them to work
| on a different system or a new project? I like people who
| focus on what they can do next, not solely what they've
| already done. Otherwise it's a bad place for the company to
| be even if someone doesn't leave. Change is a constant,
| flexibility is good.
|
| Re: personal relationships - morale is always something to
| keep an eye on, but someone having an exciting new
| opportunity never seemed to hurt the rest of the team's
| morale that much.
|
| I think you're also making an unspoken assumption that the
| new hire wouldn't be _superior_ to the person who left in
| some areas! The most common case of this was "generalist who
| built a ton of stuff in an earlier phase of the company
| leaves, replacement is more experienced in the specialized
| area that that generalist was currently working on since the
| company was larger now and they couldn't contribute to
| everything as easily," but that's hardly the only way.
|
| And lastly, as I alluded to about budgeting more to keep the
| top two performers than the third - I think you're
| overestimating the amount of effort and/or success put into
| by the average developer at becoming the go-to expert on
| specific techs or business processes. If I tell my manager "I
| know the second most about React, the third most about Node,
| and the second most about the plugin system business logic"
| I'm not going to expect them to find me irreplaceable.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I think what this misses, which I saw in another comment, is
| the take here is an individual one.
|
| If someone leaves and gets a 20% raise, while it may be an
| isolated incident, I believe it's more often than not an
| example where the market rate has shifted up and a company is
| slow to catch on.
|
| While you may find someone new who's willing to accept $x
| instead of $1.2x, there is likely a large difference between
| the person being hired and the person leaving which represents
| the 20% discrepancy. And there's a cost on both sides that's
| not captured in the 20% differential.
|
| As others have said there's the loss of institutional knowledge
| and know how. But the new person may also be more junior or is
| switching domains and so has less experience and thus willing
| to accept a lower salary.
|
| It also takes a decent amount of time to hire someone new.
| Usually at least a few weeks. And I'm sure it can take longer.
| Sometimes 1 person leaving also means you really have to hire 2
| people to be as effective as you were before. And of course,
| the new hire may end up asking for $1.2x anyway if they
| negotiate.
|
| When all this is said and done, my personal belief is a 20%
| raise is far cheaper for retention just by the numbers.
|
| There may be several non math based reasons for not offering a
| 20% raise to retain someone, but purely by the math I think its
| always going to be cheaper to give a 20% raise.
|
| TLDR: I think this possibility is a false equivalency that just
| because you can hire a new person at $x means you're in the
| same spot as before.
| majormajor wrote:
| This was a growing company making an active effort to pay
| market rate - I realize this doesn't apply to everywhere.
|
| At the point where the market rate has shifted that much and
| my employer hasn't caught on, I'm out the door myself. ;)
|
| "Maybe the replacements suck in comparison" is certainly
| something we would've noticed - happily, it wasn't the case.
|
| But we were hiring basically constantly, since there was no
| team that had enough people for the work the company wanted
| to do, even before attrition. So we had a good feel for what
| we could get for the money. If someone on the team can do
| better elsewhere, though, more power to them - I would
| certainly take that opportunity too.
| hellisothers wrote:
| I hadn't looked at it this way before, this is a good lens,
| thanks.
| jnwatson wrote:
| While I agree with the premise, this reads like the wishes of a
| budding new head of engineering that hasn't yet been ground down
| by HR. I wish him luck.
|
| The most successful company I've ever worked for had over 300
| employees and 0 in HR.
| ctvo wrote:
| Agreed with everything in this post.
|
| Engineering compensation at big tech is too rigid to award high
| performers adequately. Some folks double the impact of others in
| the same role / level, and make 20% more, at most.
|
| Leaving and joining a competitor moves you to market rate. You
| fall behind each year at the job / role in this market.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I think special in the tech world, money is by far not the most
| important thing, because we all get enought money for a happy
| life. There are many other factors as well.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It is something I never understood.
|
| It happened to me, in my previous company, I was clearly
| underpaid, but the job was fine, people were nice, nothing to
| complain about except for the pay. Considering the situation, I
| looked somewhere else, found an offer for a similar job that was
| about market rate, went back to my company with the proposal and
| told them to match the offer. I was even ready to accept slightly
| less, but I didn't get anything, zero, no negotiation possible. I
| asked to see my boss the next day, he didn't even ask me why, I
| think I was already written off.
|
| And I am not an isolated case. The worst part is that I am sure
| they lose money doing that, because when they hire people at the
| same skill and experience level, they hire at or above market
| rate. It is very likely that they hired someone to replace me for
| more than what I asked them.
|
| Usually, everything else being equal, the more people move, the
| better they get paid.
| tedchs wrote:
| Article is a thinly veiled recruitment ad for this tiny company.
| madrox wrote:
| To reply to the title and not the article, tech companies do pay
| engineers to stay...just probably not you. That's the point of
| RSUs, LTI, and other grants that are unlocked through retention.
| More get released to employees during their tenure based on
| performance. If you aren't being paid to stay, chances are that
| was a systemic consequence of performance. Not always, but
| usually.
|
| There are pros and cons to losing employees, and quite often it's
| Pareto optimal to let people move on to bring in new talent.
| Engineers are generally paid pretty well, so money is rarely what
| a departure is about. I've seen a lot of engineers go, and only
| once was money the first reason.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Strictly if they aren't pro-actively paying competitively, they
| either won't honestly match and or if they belatedly do, you
| shouldn't trust them because they will repeat it again.
|
| This isn't just for programmers or engineers - it's any job.
| heisgone wrote:
| You have to see this from the point of view of a middle-manager
| whose main concern is his own career and salary. First, it's much
| easier to manage junior than seniors, more so when you are not an
| engineer yourself. Also, it's more likely you get a better salary
| when managing a large team of junior than a small team of senior.
| Even better, you can become a manager of managers if there is a
| bunch of juniors to manage. Another problem is that an employee
| cannot earn more than his boss, and non-tech managers salaries
| cap at a certain point.
| toephu2 wrote:
| > problem is that an employee cannot earn more than his boss
|
| Actually this is quite common at FAANG companies.
|
| E.g., I make more than my boss.
| nharada wrote:
| > it's much easier to manage junior than seniors, more so when
| you are not an engineer yourself
|
| I definitely have not found this to be the case. Good senior
| folks require very little active management.
| [deleted]
| frankbreetz wrote:
| >>Another problem is that an employee cannot earn more than his
| boss, and non-tech managers salaries cap at a certain point.
|
| This is only a problem in some places and is made up problem by
| management. Why can't someone make more then there boss,
| besides ego?
| jason0597 wrote:
| Some things in life are like the laws of physics. You will
| simply never make more money than your manager, no matter how
| many economic productivity arguments you can make.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| This is not one of those things: https://www.quora.com/Is-
| it-common-for-a-software-engineer-t...
| jason0597 wrote:
| I do not believe a couple of Quora replies are
| substantial enough evidence to prove an industry wide
| trend. How do we know those people on Quora aren't prone
| to sampling bias?
| sparker72678 wrote:
| You're right on the facts, but this problem is still
| pervasive. People are gonna people, everywhere they go.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| It's a problem that reliably recurs everywhere because
| organisations are made up of people and people are unwilling
| to be managers over other people who make more money than
| them. They quit. You need managers and if you want to keep
| them they need to make more than their direct reports.
| handrous wrote:
| Another way this is done is with reinforcement of social
| hierarchy outside of comp. This is where you get blatant
| infantilization of developers and _in my experience_ wildly
| untrue stereotypes (repeated uncritically as true all over
| most organizations) about "normal" developers being
| incompetent at design, UX, requirements gathering,
| communication generally, understanding business trade-offs
| and concerns, et c. Nearly all non-junior devs I've known
| have been _at least_ decent at most or all of those things,
| actually.
|
| [EDIT] Oh, it's also why devs are compensated like
| professionals (they haven't been able to figure out how to
| stop that, yet) but work at open tables crammed together,
| under management's direct eye, like they're packing cocaine
| in Colombia or something.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Why can't someone make more then there boss, besides ego?
|
| I mean, maybe, but I've never seen anyone even propose a
| solution to ego so that's still a hard blocker.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's quite common in sales.
| WJW wrote:
| "Why is X already solved, except for maybe reason Y" is a
| HN staple comment though. A few months I came across "Other
| than nuclear weapons regulations, is there any reason this
| can't work to fix <blockchain project XYZ>?".
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| ...any chance you have a link, or even just what the
| article was about so I can search back for an _excellent_
| addition to my quotes file?
| delaynomore wrote:
| >main concern is his own career and salary.
|
| Wait...ICs do not care about their own career and salary?
| That's news to me (Sr. IC).
| tschellenbach wrote:
| great content marketing campaign aimed at hiring for this
| company. paying engineers well is a concept as old as google.
| midnightclubbed wrote:
| Established tech companies can and do pay their engineers to stay
| using stock grants. The upside to the company is they can modify
| those grants based on market forces and performance, the
| compensation is not (entirely) a fixed bottom line cost. The
| upside to the employee is they can earn some multiplier of their
| base salary for some number of years.
|
| If you are a smaller company or start-up where you cannot give
| tradable equity then you have to offer something else. But if
| Amazon are hiring in your city then best to not try to compete.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| 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.
| omegaworks wrote:
| Pay employees based on the _value_ that they provide to the
| company and not the minimum amount that the _market_ determines
| they should make?
|
| What are you, a communist? :)
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Unless the engineer doesn't provide some business value way
| beyond expectations and a promotion is done, it will all come
| down to the cfo and HR, that's the reality. That pair has
| financial objectives and they have data and experience to know if
| hiring new(with all costs involved) or increase a salary makes
| more sense to their bottom line.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Finance departments set grids of pay that have varying degrees of
| complexity. The problem is that they tend to stick to these grids
| regardless of the impact of net talent loss. The thinking is, the
| company as a whole is better off sticking to the grid than
| overpaying any employee.
| sparker72678 wrote:
| Management tends* to undervalue software development in general,
| and see software developers as generally replaceable pieces. So,
| why bother paying above rate when even paying _at rate_ feels
| like too much for many companies?
|
| Combine that with the fact that it takes a while for the impact
| of someone's loss to be truly felt (and the fact that developers
| who leave are often scape goated), and most managers just can't
| get their head around the idea that a competent software
| developer is worth $200K/year + benefits.
|
| Not to mention that turnover costs are mostly hidden costs;
| rarely will anyone attribute a problem to a single individual
| leaving, and then connect that fact to "we should do a better job
| retaining people."
|
| *Yes, there are great places to work where this is not the case.
| That's just not everywhere, even in SaaS companies.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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/employee ratio at Apple is over a million dollars, so
| a valuable tech employee there should be making seven figures.
| That kills MBA's brains (and the traditional power structure),
| which is why the cartel worked behind the scenes on wage
| suppression.
| modeless wrote:
| Valuable tech employees at FAANG absolutely make seven figures.
| paxys wrote:
| That's a stretch. A staff/senior staff engineer (or
| equivalent) at FAANG will top out at mid-six figures
| annually, maybe more than that if there was a lot of stock
| appreciation since it was granted.
| smueller1234 wrote:
| Nitpick: From the PoV of the (public tech) employers, they
| typically look at compensation not including appreciation
| of the restricted stock. It's typically "base + bonus + new
| stock grant value" or sometimes "base + bonus + value of
| the restricted stock that vests this year, but using the
| value at GRANT time, not at VEST time".
|
| More specifically as an employee, I think any incremental
| value from holding the stock is not compensation FROM the
| company, since the employee equally has to carry the risk
| of stock prices going down.
|
| Of course, practically, one's cash flow in any given year
| is "base + bonus + actual value of the stock that vests in
| the given year" and can be vastly different from how the
| company does compensation planning. And this is also what
| determines income taxes (unless I'm bizarrely mistaken
| about how income taxes work in some jurisdictions).
|
| Having been a manager at multiple public tech companies,
| I'll say that this has led to very many 'interesting' comp
| conversations and not everyone comprehends the distinctions
| here -- regardless of what's arguably more 'correct'.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Thank you. I've gotten a bit tired of hearing people talk
| about their absurd compensation as though it's their
| yearly earning and that everyone should get it, only to
| ignore the part about it vesting quarterly starting 1
| year after reception, over 4 years.
| SubuSS wrote:
| When people talk about comp, they usually talk about the
| # of $$ they took home last year - anything else is magic
| money so to speak.
|
| For the same reason a manager isn't going to value a
| $10MM grant in company that ended up being a penny stock,
| he isn't going to downgrade a company that resurrected
| from the pits either. Money in hand last year is the best
| measure possible/available.
| t-writescode wrote:
| That's not what it looks like on levels.fyi. It's
| regularly: "SDE 1, 110k + 75k stock options", and then
| levels.fyi will declare that 185, not 110 + 0, 112 + 38,
| 115 + 19, 120 + 19
|
| edit: and then people will come on here and say "look!
| Brand new Google employees make 200k!"
| closeparen wrote:
| That is incorrect, the stock figure on levels.fyi is per
| year. It does average out over the grant though, ignoring
| uneven vesting schedules.
| closeparen wrote:
| Most people give their total compensation as their base
| salary + (initial grant / vesting period). It is an
| annual figure, but only a good proxy for year 1.
|
| In later years the situation is more complicated as the
| stock price will move, you'll receive annual refreshes
| which are performance dependent, and you might reach a
| new level. While the base salary changes with levels can
| be modest, 15% or so, refresher targets can practically
| double from level to level.
| SubuSS wrote:
| There is definitely a class of staff/seniors making seven
| figures in FAANG - this may be because of stock growth,
| 'special' bonus stock awards from extreme performance or
| retention, matching offers etc.
|
| But yes - these won't be the public / known numbers. These
| folks have no incentive to make it public and affect their
| own future numbers.
| romanhn wrote:
| Depends on your definition of valuable, I suppose.
| Directors and equivalent ICs (L8 / Principal level) or
| above can and do get over $1M in annual compensation even
| before appreciation. At F/G anyways.
| toephu2 wrote:
| Per year? Usually only director and higher levels make
| $1m+/yearly (not accounting for stock appreciation).
| mattydoincode wrote:
| 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 compensation
| structures to retain your top talent when considering the open
| market is always available to them.
| shagie wrote:
| 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 also like to put forth that the _idea_ of a market rate
| for developers across all industries is one of the things
| making it hard to find developers. There are more than a few
| new grads out there that are discounting any job that pays
| less than $100k /y because they believe that the market rate
| is that and anything less is being underpaid regardless of
| industry, company maturity, or locale.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| I made about $50k/y at a two different midwestern
| companies. I was getting paid about 2x the per capita
| income. I was able to buy a house with a double lot with
| a nice fenced lawn for $60k (no typo there, yes, $60k).
|
| I was reasonably paid for the area. Sure, I could have
| been making more if I was to go to a different company
| (challenging in '09). I'm making more now for a different
| employer in the midwest.
|
| The thing is that there are companies that don't make
| $100k/y revenue for the work that the devs do. There are
| also devs who are willing to work for $50k/y in the rural
| midwest (which is better than other jobs in the area
| pay).
|
| To assume that those devs should be paid the same as one
| in SF would have ultimately meant a loss of jobs in the
| area as the business wouldn't be able to afford to do
| that.
|
| There are plenty of places that are not the mid west that
| are paying more.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I'm not really sure that equitable is the right term to
| use here. $50k a year may very well be in line with what
| everyone else at a hypothetical midwestern company is
| making.
|
| I think it's always important to keep in mind that
| current developer salaries are the result of a
| constrained market and not because we innately deserve it
| or something. Yes it is a high-skill job, but there are
| plenty of high-skill jobs out there that pay much less.
| hiram112 wrote:
| Maybe in FAANG world, salaries really do increase linearly like
| the graphs from the blog showed, but in the F500 corporate and
| contracting world, the slope starts leveling out after 10 years
| of experience.
|
| A decent and ambitious dev can definitely gain 30% salary
| increases after their first few jumps, but once you're at the
| "senior" level, it's just not happening.
|
| In the first 5-6 years of my career, I jumped about 4 times, each
| with a large increase: from $55K to $80K to $100K to $120K and
| finally to $140K about 7 years ago in a relatively high COL city
| in East Coast US.
|
| As expected, even though my knowledge and skills have really
| increased over the past 7 years at my current gig, the company
| gives only the typical 2% inflation raises each year, and there
| is no equity or bonus system based on seniority.
|
| So now I'm at about $160K, which is still okay for my area, but
| disappointing considering somebody with similar experience and
| absolutely no institutional knowledge would be hired for my
| position at $180K (maybe higher in this market).
|
| But I'm stuck. I can go and play the interview game. And based on
| what I've seen, at best I'm going to get a salary offer of maybe
| $180K, and of that $20K increase, I'll end up pocketing maybe $1K
| / month extra, as all of the extra income will be taxed at my max
| rate.
|
| Is that worth leaving a company where I've earned respect, have a
| lot of knowledge, know is tolerable, and where I've got
| "credibility" and a history with senior executives and
| management?
|
| It's not for $1K / month, which may even be less if it turns out
| health insurance has a higher deductible, or I end up having to
| spend $200 / month more on commuting costs.
|
| I think most seniors hit this same glass ceiling earlier and
| earlier in their career - by mid to late 30's. And unless they
| move into management or really strive to jump to the next tier
| (e.g. FAANG company or finance industry), then there's no real
| financial incentive to jump, and a lot of risks if your current
| git is tolerable. And employers know that.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _Is that worth leaving a company where I 've earned respect,
| have a lot of knowledge, know is tolerable, and where I've got
| "credibility" and a history with senior executives and
| management?_
|
| That's where you make the play of going to whoever controls
| your salary and saying "I've got an offer that pays much better
| than here. Can you beat it?" People aren't going to look at you
| differently for it; it's part of business.
| hiq wrote:
| > in the F500 corporate and contracting world
|
| Why are you stuck with this world if there's a clear ceiling?
|
| > at best I'm going to get a salary offer of maybe $180K
|
| If you get a $20k increase every 2 years starting from $160k by
| hopping jobs, that's way more than your yearly 2%. If you're in
| the right location, the only risk is to quit a job 2 months in
| because it's actually not what you expected and come back to a
| company you initially rejected, or start applying again. If
| you're a dev in your 30s you should have enough money to stay
| afloat for at least a few months, in which case this is not
| that big of a risk.
|
| There's also a risk staying in the same company for very long:
| if you keep doing the same, using the same tech, you can become
| complacent and your skills irrelevant. At which point staying
| at your company is not really a choice anymore.
| hiram112 wrote:
| > If you get a $20k increase every 2 years starting from
| $160k by hopping jobs, that's way more than your yearly 2%.
|
| This isn't how it works. The $180K is the max I could get in
| my industry, and that's because the previous max in 2014 or
| so of $140K (which I did get) is basically tied to inflation
| or about 2.5%-3%. So while I've been getting 1.5%-2% raises
| for 7-8 years, I've been missing out on that extra 1.5%,
| which is where the extra $20K comes from that other companies
| might offer.
|
| But if I took a job at $180K, I'm again up against the salary
| ceiling in my city and industry. There is no $20K raise to be
| had after another 1-2 years by jumping again. At best, I
| might get the full inflation rate raises, instead of being
| lowballed by a percent or two, and which the difference
| accumulates to a large $20K or so jump only after 6-7 years
| more.
|
| > There's also a risk staying in the same company for very
| long: if you keep doing the same, using the same tech, you
| can become complacent and your skills irrelevant. At which
| point staying at your company is not really a choice anymore.
|
| This is definitely true at most corporate tech departments.
| However, in the contracting world you can jump around to
| completely different projects and learn a lot of new
| technologies. So in that sense, I feel I'm okay. The big
| issue is that you're not exposed to best practices and large
| scales that you'd see at FAANG. But it's not as bad as being
| stuck on a single codebase in a single language and framework
| with a single CI pipeline for 7 years.
| hiq wrote:
| > The $180K is the max I could get in my industry
|
| How do you know that for a fact? I think you hint at this a
| bit in your previous comments, but if your city / field are
| small to the point that every employer is like any other
| and that there's no variance in compensation, you're SOL.
| One way to solve this is remote work, if applicable to your
| field.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I live in coastal New England, and I faced a similar situation
| until ~6 years ago, when I started working for all-remote
| companies.
|
| I've been fortunate to find all-remote employers who pay
| average non-FAANG silicon valley salaries, regardless of where
| in the U.S. you live. The result is I'm paid a little (+20%?)
| higher than I would at a non-fintech company in Boston or NYC.
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| It's a sellers market right now, so jumping job to job is
| beneficial. Companies are willing to pay top dollar and salaries
| are on the rise.
|
| I like this approach. It incentivizes and rewards. Even if things
| changed and this turned into a buyer's market, it should help
| with employee happiness. Buyer's markets tend to drop employee
| happiness as employees feel trapped.
| sigzero wrote:
| "Pay to stay" is just a stop gap. More than likely they leave
| within a short time anyway.
| graton wrote:
| I think the answer is relatively simple. It is cheaper for the
| company to let a usually small percentage of their employees
| leave than it is to give larger pay raises to all their
| employees.
| black_13 wrote:
| And bring back the defined pension.
| trjordan wrote:
| 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.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You hinted at this by mentioning political capital, but in my
| experience as engineers gain experience at the company their
| impact largely grows in ways that aren't obviously visible.
| It's not like they are churning out work or managing teams that
| have ever increasing product impact, it's that their job
| responsibilities expand to include things like:
| - Convincing potential hires they should join the company.
| - Speaking frankly to leaders when newer employees don't feel
| comfortable doing it. - Seeing large cross-cutting issues
| that require time and experience at the company to identify.
| - Mentoring newer employees so they get up to speed and become
| productive quickly. - Arbiters of information and
| documentation that tends to never get written down. "Person X
| can help you learn about Y, Team Z is responsible for that,
| etc."
|
| These kinds of activities are _critical_ to highly efficient
| companies, but rarely ever acknowledged as impact. At least I
| 've rarely ever seen these kinds of things show up in regular
| performance reviews, and yet it's _painfully obvious_ when
| these activities are missing.
| donretag wrote:
| How many engineers leave for salary as opposed to other reasons?
|
| When I started my career after the dotcom bus, salaries were
| quite low. At one point, I was making less at each position after
| yet another layoff. Then the market improved, and I was making
| considerably more with each new job.
|
| Nowadays, I still job hop, but primarily because I do not like
| the role I am in. Companies will over promise and then never
| deliver. Bad managers. Many many bad managers.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| This hits home for me so hard. I just left a job after 5 years of
| playing the loyal soldier. It's been almost 2 years since I got a
| promotion without a raise. My manager has been constantly working
| with the HR to get me as much aligned with what I should get but
| his hands are tied by the corporate bs that he needs to work
| with. I got an offer from another similar revenue/size company
| and I was in two minds. The company literally asked me what I
| wanted and then just gave it to me (nearly twice what I'm earning
| today). It's a shame that my current company not only didn't keep
| up with the market, but also dragged its feet for 2 years to keep
| up with its own internal compensation structure.
| ufmace wrote:
| A few interesting thoughts in here. I had tended to think of the
| social stigma against discussing salaries as being detrimental to
| workers and probably encouraged by companies to save a few bucks.
| But on the flip side, if a company was to be scrupulously honest
| and made their best effort to pay according to actual value to
| the company and let everyone know openly how much that was, I
| expect there would be a _lot_ of drama and hurt feelings over
| evaluations of exactly who was contributing how much. Maybe it 's
| best to let those sleeping dogs lie after all.
| haho4 wrote:
| This isn't really a tech issue. This is an issue in all fields.
|
| Companies just do not value their own employees over new ones.
| vsareto wrote:
| >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.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Also director and VP positions skip the leetcode.
| _tom_ wrote:
| 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.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I wonder why.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I haven't read it yet but from the headline...
|
| They do, eventually - there's a term: "golden handcuffs"
| cblconfederate wrote:
| What about non-engineers?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| encoderer wrote:
| In urban tech centers, wages increased sharply over the last 10
| years. Both due to base wage increase and tech stock
| appreciation.
|
| Once you are within a company you will be given catch-up raises
| but in a fast moving market you will always be able to create a
| bidding war for your talent and increase your pay beyond what the
| employer will offer you.
|
| You have 3 options.
|
| 1. Climb the ranks. Technical or managerial. This takes time and
| is rewarded generously at most tech companies.
|
| 2. Get lucky with insane stock appreciation. Stay four years.
| Leave when your income drops in year 5.
|
| 3. Leave every couple years for significantly more money, by
| combination of up-leveling and getting the now higher market
| rate.
|
| Number 3 is the easiest path.
| sammyloso wrote:
| The churn spurs innovation - people coming from elsewhere with
| new methodologies and perspectives.
| sammyloso wrote:
| The churn spurs innovation - people coming into the team with new
| methodologies and perspectives.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| Because the millenial MBAs that have taken over tech believe that
| software engineers are a commodity and not an asset.
| p0nce wrote:
| > they gain domain knowledge that is specific to that company,
| and that stuff is incredibly valuable. The wild thing is that
| it's only valuable to that one company!
|
| From the engineer point of view, this is a bad deal as the
| knowledge they get is precisely not transferrable to another
| company. So staying is a risk (these skills won't even exist
| elsewhere) and there is a lost opportunity for the employee. They
| could be at another job, learning actually transferrable skills,
| thus improving their standing on the market.
|
| Solution: minimize company-specific knowledge, make it easy to
| grok and not company-specific. To be a bit blunt: your flavour of
| pile of poo codebase isn't particularly interesting so why should
| I learn it if compensation doesn't match the missed opportunity?
| mattydoincode wrote:
| Author here! My intention with "domain knowledge" point is
| mostly about all the non-coding stuff. Things like how your
| company functions, who to talk to about different issues, deep
| product knowledge and understanding the customers. I actually
| think transferrable skills grow as well, usually more on the
| technical side but also on the soft skills side in a generic
| way. I think the non-transferrable stuff is somewhat
| unavoidable because of the nature of products, domains, and
| organizations being meaningfully different.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I'm looking forward to seeing the follow up post on what
| sorts of ranges this philosophy turns into. Most companies
| that I have seen post their bands massively underpay people.
| Kranar wrote:
| 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 this I don't really mind hiring people to work
| for 2-3 years and then have them move on to another role, and
| most people I hire I do so with the expectation that I'll get a
| good two years of work and not much more.
|
| A very small percentage of people continue to improve over the
| long term, and those people I am happy to continue increasing
| their pay, but I don't really go out of my way to retain
| employees and I don't think it's particularly worth it to do so.
|
| This blog post mentions a kind of impact based compensation
| structure, and while I can respect the idea behind it, I am
| skeptical that they've managed to find a deterministic and
| impartial way of measuring "impact". I don't presume to have such
| a system so I pay based on what I observe in the market and let
| the market decide what the value is of software developers. For
| example, I genuinely don't know if software developers have more
| of an impact than the product designers, or the legal department
| even though I pay software developers much much more. What I do
| know is that it's much easier for me to hire a competent lawyer
| or UX designer than it is to hire a competent software developer
| and there are many more competent lawyers and designers out
| there... so I pay them less, regardless of whatever objective
| measure of impact may exist.
| hintymad wrote:
| It may well be true, but I doubt it for companies like AWS,
| which has enormous infrastructure, many implicit and explicit
| processes, and a peculiar culture to run such processes and
| leverage such infrastructure effectively. Losing good people
| means losing guardian of such culture, mavens of the
| infrastructure, and custodians of the processes.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Self-fulfilling prophecy?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent
|
| Even if you're right - 100% of the time, about 100% of people -
| the value of having the one guy who remembers why it was done
| this way and how it was fixed last time it broke available to
| look at it when it needs looked at is priceless.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| This ignores something very important: tribal knowledge.
|
| Truth is, losing a tenured engineer carries a MUCH larger cost
| than HR and some managers seem to understand-- these engineers
| understand the nuances behind why certain decisions were made,
| what kinds of things tend to work and don't, minutiae of
| various systems that simply will never get documented, etc. Not
| to mention the influence they can carry in the org.
|
| You're not wrong that a lot of engineers stagnate after a few
| years... but it's a big logical jump to put that blame on them
| rather than the org they're joining.
|
| That said, I like to always call out that there are
| "developers" and there are "engineers". The majority of
| software roles call for the former and these tend to be more
| "replaceable". It's harder to say that for the latter where
| they are involved in more strategic technical decisions.
| randcraw wrote:
| The value of tribal knowledge is even more apparent when
| 'engineers' describes a) traditional engineers (EE, mechE,
| chemE, civilE, etc), or b) software types with deep
| specialized skills that grow with domain experience (e.g.
| image analysis in medical/pharmaceutical, signal processing
| in audio/radar/telecom, or finite element analysts in
| weather/mixture modeling).
|
| The experience gained with years in roles like these isn't
| just in the use of computer tools, but in how to approach and
| solve proprietary domain problems with constraints that often
| aren't obvious. Knowing the pitfalls or conventions inherent
| in complex or regulated domains like automobile or
| pharmaceutical safety takes time to learn, making those with
| such experience more valuable to retain.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > a lot of engineers stagnate after a few years
|
| Stagnate is also a way of saying got good at the job.
|
| I mean after a couple of years at a place an engineer might
| be the person that know the systems best in the whole world
| if they are no commodity. It takes year to gain the
| experience and inside out knowledge of a complex system.
|
| To me it feels like I get a mental picture over a system
| after some time where I can smell where bugs comes from and
| very fast decide were functionality should be inserted. Up to
| that point things are just a hassle and then it clicks and
| becomes a breeze.
|
| Then I switch jobs to get a pay raise and the grind begins
| again ...
| WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
| Totally agree, that's exactly how it works for me.
|
| I join a company, work hard the first year to get a promotion
| and do the fun stuff, after that, I relax and stick around to
| vest most of the stocks and leave around the 2nd/3rd year.
|
| I have seen so called "architects" at big co that had been
| there for decades bringing absolutely no value to the table.
| And always asked myself why would the the company retain,
| promote and pay these guys big bucks. Nonsense.
|
| I call them : the legacy guys.
|
| The only thing I can think of is that the "legacy guys" retain
| the memory of all the legacy stuff, and the ability for them to
| maintain that piece of legacy/core/monolith piece of software
| that no one dares to touch.
|
| I guess that's valuable for the company, but not certainly for
| the employee.
|
| They stagnate exactly because by working on that legacy stuff
| they can rarely learn new tech, thus they wont be able to find
| a job at that level anywhere outside their current company.
|
| They are stuck.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| There are jobs for architects out there.
| N_A_T_E wrote:
| My title is Architect. It can be easy to stagnate. Recently
| I've had success working on brand new projects. Setting up
| the skeletons of code bases, CI/CD, database/persistence
| layers and internal/external dependencies before teams get
| onboarded. You might think of that like a glorified lead
| engineer. I stick around for 6-12 months to help the team get
| up to speed then move onto the next project.
|
| The architect part might come into play in finding
| engineering economies of scale. At this point I know how many
| of our internal applications work so I find ways to reuse
| existing code and services when we start new projects.
| seventytwo wrote:
| This is probably very dependent on the exact role and field,
| but o see your point.
| rfrey wrote:
| By retaining a person who has "stagnated" after 3 years
| (setting aside the ambiguity of what you mean by "stagnate"),
| you avoid:
|
| 1) Three years of lesser performance from the new employee as
| they climb that curve
|
| 2) The very real risk that your new hire will not be
| successful, or if they are successful, will not achieve the
| same level of performance.
|
| Also, I invite you to challenge what you consider "stagnation".
| It is not possible to continue linear improvement in a given
| role: good employees achieve mastery, and while they will still
| be improving that might not be evident to their managers who
| are looking only at work outputs. If a company does not want
| employees who are masters at their task, but rather want people
| to move up or move out (counter-productive as that might be),
| then it is literally middle management's job to find new roles
| for successful engineers, and I suppose fire the previously
| successful engineer if they're not up to the task. Complaining
| about an engineer "stagnating" in the same role after they've
| mastered it is just lazy thinking and lazy management.
| lmilcin wrote:
| > (...) 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.
|
| Or, another explanation, you are mistaking cause and effect.
|
| Maybe the people figure out they could be earning so much more
| somewhere else but they are unlikely to get the kind of raise
| at their current place, so they get disillusioned and
| demotivated?
|
| And then they change the job getting the significant raise,
| further reinforcing the behavior. Now they join another company
| fully expecting the same thing to happen in 2 years.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| This all just screams of issues with poor tech leadership.
| rhacker wrote:
| That didn't piss me off at all. But agree that might offend
| others. I do see myself getting stale in different shops. I
| kinda stopped jumping around every 3 years at this point
| though. I might just sit for a while to make sure there is
| stability going forward.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I have the opposite observation. The first few years are needed
| just to learn a domain. Productivity doesn't begin to take off
| until after a few years. If no one had worked 10 or 20 years in
| my team we'd struggle to get anywhere.
|
| The impact of new hires can still be great when it comes from
| bringing fresh ideas and perspective (e.g processes, tech
| knowledge) and that obviously fades as everyone with a long
| tenure at the company has used the same tech.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Same here. Took me over a year before I got somewhat
| confident with the domain, and after two years before I
| became fully productive. My boss takes this into account and
| doesn't hire people he's confident will move on in less than
| 3 years.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Companies have basically said "don't bother learn about the
| business except for the interview" with their compensation
| approaches.
|
| Why bother spend time learning anything not applicable at
| your next role?
| abeppu wrote:
| I think there's also an issue that a software engineer's job
| changes as they're more tenured at an organization. When you're
| newer, no one expects anything of you other than to come up to
| speed and build new stuff. If you have a project that doesn't
| require deep knowledge of the existing systems, push it to the
| newer guy.
|
| Only once you have deep knowledge of the systems you work with
| does it really make sense to give you work like a complex
| redesign of a group of components in an online system. And you
| then have a responsibility to help new team members learn. You
| do more code reviews, and more consulting on projects for which
| you are not a primary contributor. And you get ugly projects
| that are related to your area of demonstrated "expertise". Is
| that "slowing down"? Or are you just doing different kinds of
| stuff? And is it because the engineer stagnated, or that the
| organization created a morass around them?
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| tclancy wrote:
| A year to learn, a year to earn, a year to yearn is how I've
| heard the cycle explained.
| aszen wrote:
| Sorry but I really cannot understand how this is the case. In
| my short experience one can't make a significant impact to a
| mature large scale software product in 2 years. What kind of
| impact I'm talking, the kind of impact that can affect the
| business bottomline, that can actually transform the company.
| Without anyone having more than 2 to 3 years of experience the
| level of insight into the product would be quite shallow. Not
| to mention people that only stay for 2 to 3 years at a job
| never get to experience the long term implications of their
| code and decisions. They never get to learn from their mistakes
| since they keep making new ones and moving on
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > in my experience most developers do their best work after
| about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company
|
| Fair. That's about as long as it takes me to realise "nothing
| fundamental is going to change", so I tend to start losing
| motivation at this point.
|
| Thankfully I'm a contractor so that's about when I exit anyway.
| Everybody wins!
| bumby wrote:
| > _there are many more competent lawyers and designers out
| there_
|
| Curious if you could elaborate on how you came to this
| conclusion? According to ONET [1] there are 819k lawyers in the
| U.S. but 1.469MM software programmers.
|
| If you come from a software background I wonder if it's easier
| to spot an incompetent programmer than an incompetent attorney
| which could bias the heuristic. Or do you think there's
| something else at play that makes the proportion of competent
| software developers inherently much lower? E.g., there's no
| "bar exam" for programmers to ensure a basic level of
| competence
|
| [1] https://www.onetonline.org/
| wpietri wrote:
| I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is
| accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create
| developer jobs that get boring for people after 24-36 months."
|
| I was chatting with a Trader Joe's cashier Sunday. It turns out
| they change jobs every hour. That was a surprise to me; when I
| long ago worked in a grocery store, I was assigned to one
| position for 8 hours for every shift. Why does Trader Joe's do
| it? To keep things interesting: "She tells Money that the
| change in jobs during shifts helps to keep things interesting
| for employees. 'It's perfect because it breaks down your shift.
| You don't get tired doing one repetitive thing,' she told
| them." https://www.mashed.com/175743/workers-reveal-what-its-
| really...
|
| If Trader Joe's can do it hour by hour, I think tech companies
| can do it at least every year or so.
|
| I'm hiring right now and one of the major draws for the good
| people I'm talking to is the chance to do something
| interesting. If that's why their coming, it's unsurprising that
| I'll have to keep giving them that over time. For us, and for
| most places I've worked, I think that's doable.
| wwweston wrote:
| Yes, but this won't work because there's just not enough
| different things for an engineer to master. ;)
|
| More seriously, your observation is brilliant (and almost
| makes me wish I hadn't just accepted a new role). Because the
| software field contains such a breadth of things to know and
| breadth of potential applications, it's hard to get very far
| without having the kind of mind that is motivated by some
| level of intrinsic interest, and that can be a currency in
| its own right.
| itronitron wrote:
| I would really appreciate that as a developer, I have
| definite gaps in my skillset that I haven't needed (been
| paid) to fill. But everyone would have to get out of the
| mindset that developer Joe 'knows everything' about X.
|
| The perfect match would be pairing a developer that can
| explain some technology to a 12 year old with a developer
| that has the equivalent knowledge of a 12 year old (for that
| technology.) That would keep things interesting and build a
| very resilient organization.
| touisteur wrote:
| I used to manage a team of mixed very-experimented / very-
| juniors and I'd make sure every senior worked on stuff I
| knew were not in their comfort zone, and assign tasks in
| their expertise domain to juniors. They'd act as
| consultants, while checking other parts of the
| codebase/docs (as noobs) for incoherencies, sand-in-gears,
| and improving them. Over time, the experts kept things
| getting better, up to their common standards, and the
| juniors would level up far more quickly than other parts of
| the org.
|
| To keep things interesting/challenging for the experts I'd
| have them also reach across domains (to system eng, safety,
| quality assurance, bids, R&D) and sometimes even overreach
| (blur the boundaries) while protecting them from corporate-
| strife. Software is far more interesting in the context of
| the product, the customers, actors on every critical team.
| I'd also have them try new techs, or find some
| innovation/maturity budget for 'pet peeve hunts' and we'd
| often end up with new tools, large-scale improvements in
| code, perf, readability, robustness, observability, or
| testing. I'm going off topic here but I'm sad that 'Slack',
| the book, isn't more widely read.
| baxtr wrote:
| I worked for a company where devs would rebel because teams
| were partly re-shuffled at the beginning of a new year! I
| guess people are different.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think it really has to be mandatory, but it
| certainly should be allowed and encouraged.
|
| In the case where people were objecting to being re-
| shuffled, did they get to pick where they went? Or were
| they just told? a little agency can help a lot.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Absolutely this. Where I work, changing teams isn't frowned
| upon. I was in one role for a few years, then moved to
| another. I know the systems that are used most widely, the
| data, the business, I know a particular side of the business
| inside and out, and I already have important relationships
| and lines of communication.
|
| And now things are interesting again.
| teawrecks wrote:
| That's a great idea on TJ's part. I have also wondered how
| giving some amount of project ownership to low level
| employees would help with morale. In grocery stores you see
| every little thing optimized by a marketing team; from the
| way products are stacked, to what the cashier is allowed to
| say to you. But what if some of these jobs were given to the
| employees? I think we need to let workers be more creative.
| Give them a reason to feel invested in what they're doing and
| reward them for trying hard. You can find what they're good
| at over time, the hard part is making them feel like what
| they do matters.
|
| It seems like modern management theory has gone out of its
| way to optimize out the impact that any one low level
| employee can have on the company. And that makes sense when
| the goal is to make money. But what you're left with is a
| society full of people in mind numbing dead end jobs
| developing psychological issues.
| tikhonj wrote:
| > _But what if some of these jobs were given to the
| employees?_
|
| This seems like another thing Trader Joe's does--I've been
| to their stores in a few places I've lived, and while they
| always have a similar aesthetic, a lot of the specific
| decorations seemed to be unique per store with nice local
| details. Of course, this could still be done in a totally
| top-down way--hiring local consultants or something--but I
| wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that was done by the
| store employees.
|
| > _And that makes sense when the goal is to make money._
|
| Abstractly, I expect that this _isn 't_ the best way to
| make money. Modern management practices seem to value
| legibility and control even at the expense of expected
| income and company resilience. This probably says something
| fundamental about our culture, philosophy and incentives,
| but I'm not sure exactly what!
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly. And if you're curious what this says, I'd
| recommend reading Spender and Locke's "Confronting
| Managerialism". It's a great look at the dominant
| ideology of MBA-style management. And for me Rother's
| "Toyota Kata" was a good inspiration as to how to think
| of management not as control layer, but where teaching
| and support are the most important functions.
| cheriot wrote:
| This. Most companies pay lip service to internal mobility,
| but I still see managers trying to talk people out of it
| (presumably so they don't have to hire and ramp up a
| replacement).
| quanticle wrote:
| And that ends up being self-defeating over the long term,
| because oftentimes the developer will quit the company
| entirely if their requests for internal transfers are
| stymied for too long.
| austinl wrote:
| I stayed at my previous company for five years, but worked in
| four different roles across that time:
|
| - 1 year doing iOS frontend/product - 1 year doing low-level
| iOS systems - 2 years as a PM - 1 year doing backend
|
| I was never bored. I think giving engineers the flexibility
| to move around (provided they stick with one thing for a year
| or so) is a great way to retain folks. I can also say my
| efficiency during year 5 was fairly absurd (I won't
| necessarily say overall productivity was higher at the very
| end, since my interest in the company was waning, but I saved
| a lot of time by knowing exactly who to talk to and how
| systems across the stack worked).
| tintt wrote:
| Didn't know that about Trader Joe's, it's really smart. To
| your point: for many companies out there it may be easier to
| raise compensation a bit rather than to figure out
| interesting tasks for their engineering force. Business
| usually wants its employees to solve specific problems, most
| of them mundane.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| I worked with an engineer. She told me that when working at
| her previous company they permitted you to switch teams every
| 2 years. Every 2 years she would take that opportunity and
| got to work on a huge variety of projects with lots of
| different people. Some of them good, some of them not.
|
| It kept her there for 12 years or so.
| maxbreaker wrote:
| I've worked at a (giant well known) company/bank in New
| York that basically mandated that people switch jobs
| internally every 18 to 24 months. It was part of the
| expectations. I was there for 4 years. I had 3 different
| roles in 3 different teams.
|
| It helped a lot in fact in doing quality work. Thinking
| that you will inherit things you didn't do. That some other
| people will inherit your work / decisions. And always
| learning new things / keeping best practices in mind.
|
| It's something I've kept in mind everywhere I've been.
| helsinki wrote:
| This is smart. I left GS right around the time they were
| starting such an (similar?) initiative. It also makes
| employees more fungible, on average, which is nice.
| bumby wrote:
| Is there a trade off between depth and breadth here?
| While not the SV tech scene, I remember working for an
| aerospace company that had some people in the same
| positions for a couple decades. For the administrative
| positions it seemed to breed complacency, but for the
| technical positions it seemed to provide a very deep
| level of technical expertise that would be difficult to
| cultivate within a couple years
| wkimeria wrote:
| I suspect there is a correlation between companies that
| have a culture of letting engineers change
| roles/departments (and a clear process for doing so) and
| retention/average tenure.
| hunter321 wrote:
| As much as everyone hates on Amazon, no manager can block
| a internal transfer, maximum they can do is keep you for
| 4 weeks (with a very, very good reason).
|
| The average tenure on many, many teams is 6 months.
|
| Does help starve off the boredom.
| mcast wrote:
| That's untrue, a manager can put their employee into a
| performance improvement program (without even needing to
| inform them) which would block them from any internal
| transfers.
| Thiez wrote:
| How does a pip effect improved performance when the
| employee isn't even aware they're in one? Is trying to
| switch teams the only way to discover that, or are there
| other indirect ways?
| wombatpm wrote:
| But HR sees it as a way to prevent a subpar employee from
| escaping the natural HR process. The fact that you have
| not been informed yet is just a failure of current
| management to follow process, but does not obsolve you of
| your subpar performance. HR is there for the company, not
| for you.
| NortySpock wrote:
| But really, if the only goal is to not be able to shirk a
| PIP by repeated team-hopping, the PIP should just follow
| you as you move teams rather than blocking your progress,
| right?
|
| "Here's Joe Candidate, he applied for your open position,
| and he has a 3 month old PIP on track to be resolved in 3
| months. Accept or decline the transfer to your team?"
| wpietri wrote:
| In theory that would be good. The issue is that a lot of
| managers don't like dealing with problems. If somebody is
| doing badly and maybe should be fired (which is what a
| PIP is supposed to indicate) you don't want a manager
| just passing the buck to some unsuspecting team.
|
| Ultimately, I think you're right. It's impossible to
| build a bureaucratic pachinko machine that will make the
| correct personnel decisions. You really need line
| managers dedicated to coaching staff, and higher-level
| managers coaching line managers. One-size-fits-all rules
| are not the optimal solution. But bad management is
| endemic in so many organizations that I'm sure these
| abuses go on all the time.
| walshemj wrote:
| It would take several weeks to get to grips with a new
| team / project - must be very hard to get much work out
| of a team member before they are off.
| throwaway9191aa wrote:
| As long as you don't talk to your manager ahead of time.
| I watched a colleague tell our manager that the job
| wasn't in line with what was explained (colleague was
| right, he wasn't a fit). Instead of the manager moving
| him into a new roll, my colleague was PIP'd. When my
| colleague did try to transfer, the PIP blocked it.
|
| If you have a good manager, maybe its fine. But if your
| manager needs some headcount to cut.... don't trust them.
| the_rectifier wrote:
| False. In many teams half of the engineers are randomly
| put on pip and cannot switch team.
| wpietri wrote:
| Half?!? In most companies, a manager with half their
| people on PIPs would indicate the manager is really
| fucking things up somehow. Bad at hiring or bad at
| managing. That's not the case at Amazon?
| Arainach wrote:
| Changing projects is only half of it, though.
|
| Let's say I want a new project. I can search for a new
| team internally, find a mutual match, sign on, start
| and.....keep my current salary.
|
| Or I can search for a new team externally, find a mutual
| match, sign on, and get (in most cases) a significant
| raise and a new sign-on bonus.
|
| Even at a company I like, there's a significant incentive
| to leave.
| sdoering wrote:
| Only difference would be, that in current company it is
| more easy to get an understanding if new project
| management sucks.
|
| > People hire at companies, bbut leave their boss.
|
| In my anecdata thus rings true.
| projectazorian wrote:
| This is true in many cases but internal transfers can
| still make sense.
|
| Searching costs are a lot lower internally (no leetcoding
| needed in most cases, hopefully) and you are more likely
| to be able to land something outside of your current
| skillset, increasing your long term compensation and job
| security.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Usually companies don't increase pay when you switch
| internally so the only reason to do that would be because
| you love the workplace so much that you don't care if you
| get payed much more somewhere else.
| ilamont wrote:
| Many large organizations do this for promising workers who
| are being groomed for managerial or leadership positions.
| The goal from the company's POV is to have people who are
| familiar with many aspects of the business and are
| comfortable with working with new teams/challenges, but I
| think it also appeals to people who like being challenged
| ... or are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top
| levels of the organization.
| gmac wrote:
| Interesting. Not for developers, but essentially the same
| thing happens in the UK civil service.
| cjvirtucio wrote:
| This approach reminds me of the DevOps practice of breaking
| down information silos: make everyone learn a little bit of
| everything so that no one becomes a risk.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Something that really helps me at my job is I have 2 primary
| roles that kind of wax and wane. When I get bored with one,
| there's always something to do in the other.
| randall wrote:
| This is something I love about Facebook, fwiw. Engineers have
| tremendous liquidity in movement.
| suifbwish wrote:
| This isn't surprising. 3 years is about the length of time it
| takes most humans to become bored with monogamous
| relationships. There is a very high rate of breakups and
| divorces in non arranged relationships by the 4th year.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The divorce rate for the first 5 years is less than 20% in
| the the US. The US has a higher divorce rate than many
| countries so, in general, this is untrue.
| randomdata wrote:
| I'm not sure you've shown that. I would be surprised if any
| meaningful number of (non-arranged) marriages are
| established in year zero of the relationship. A quick
| Google search suggests to me that the average relationship
| is established five years before getting married.
|
| The original assertion was that relationships tend to break
| down in year four, meaning that they aren't likely to make
| it to marriage in the typical case. Marriage data is only
| relevant to the outliers who married early, and as far as
| that goes they could all be found in that 20% quite easily,
| I'm sure. The data provided is not sufficient to know.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Marriage != monogamous relationships
| brightball wrote:
| I'm going to make a suggestion for the cause of your
| observation.
|
| I think many people come into a job for a specific project(s)
| during which there is a ramp up period of understanding the
| requirements, limitations, team, how the company works, getting
| to know people (6-8 months).
|
| Then after working on that project, delivering it, iterating on
| it, tuning it, working through potential production support
| issues and some scaling items...in many cases the vast majority
| of the work is done (2-3 years).
|
| At that point, a few things happen because this developer is
| ready for a new project or new challenge, as are most of the
| people who were involved with that project.
|
| Their options are:
|
| - Find a new project at the company and restart the learning
| period as they transition in a potentially lateral move. If
| this happens, it's unlikely the company is going to give them a
| sudden compensation boost when in the eyes of management
| they're continuing to do their existing job.
|
| - Seek training related to some advanced problem that they
| solved to become the company's expert on the subject, in which
| case the company will likely pay for the training but not a
| subsequent boost in compensation (because in their eyes...they
| just paid for the training)
|
| - See how well they have marketed themselves to find out if the
| company has recognized their talent to promote them into a
| higher level position with an equivalent pay bump or
| potentially managing a team. The only problems is that you can
| only promote so many people, so this person will be the
| exception and not the rule.
|
| - Update their resume with the newly acquired skills and have
| somebody else pay them market rates to start a new project at a
| different company, using their current job as leverage to get a
| significant bump in compensation. Meanwhile, you'll be paying
| new market rates to hire the replacement.
|
| It's no secret why people often just jump jobs. You've finished
| one project and you're going to transition to a new one anyway,
| getting a fresh start can be a good choice. Additionally, no
| matter how much people like their situation in one job they
| will end up building up frustrations with certain people and/or
| management over time. As long as those people are still around,
| it will increase their likelyhood of leaving.
|
| But ultimately, you're looking at the likely timing of
| concluding one project and then exploring options for what's
| next. IMO, that coincides with your timeline.
| mberning wrote:
| This absolutely happens. A lot depends on the company and role,
| but in my experience after 24-36 months you tend to become
| known more broadly in the company and are passed around as
| "person who knows about x" and these type of interactions
| characterize most of your days. It's not a bad spot to be, but
| definitely not the most productive arrangement.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Another thing that happens is people get dragged into more and
| more meetings and also become the "go to person" for stuff.
|
| I've seen it time and time again, start somewhere new and start
| with very few meetings and you can really deliver.
| teawrecks wrote:
| I think there's more variables at play though. A person who has
| been at a company 3+ years has figured out how to be effective
| in certain areas, but is also now asked to be effective in a
| much wider range of areas. They are asked to maintain something
| they wrote in their first year, they are asked to attend
| meetings or respond to emails because they have the knowledge
| and influence, they can't start anything new because they are
| so pivotal to the thing they're currently doing. And yeah,
| these things are important to the company, but they make the
| worker feel like they're stagnating. The company starts to get
| in their way and they feel like the only way to do something
| they find interesting is to leave.
|
| Companies need to give engineers the opportunity at a clean
| slate. Let them shed responsibilities and pretend they're just
| a very competent new hire with the freedom to start working on
| whatever they want to. If it's a larger company, you can
| usually transfer to another team somewhere, but you still get
| pinged about stuff you never want to spend time on again.
| jjav wrote:
| > that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at
| the same company
|
| Have you looked into why?
|
| The one job where I stayed over 10 years was the one where my
| expertise was highly respected (large degree of decision-making
| autonomy, no micromanagement via agile) and I was able to
| fluidly change projects every 2-4 years. The pay wasn't that
| great but it never mattered because the job was so rewarding.
|
| Most other jobs just micromanage one to death and stagnate
| career, so a couple years of that kind of abuse is all one can
| take before moving on to the next deathmarch.
| b3morales wrote:
| 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 tenure.
| pxue wrote:
| Output/performance shouldn't be determined by pay, ie pay is
| a lagging indicator of output/performance.
| b3morales wrote:
| My experience has been that if it lags far enough, output
| starts dropping to realign with it.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| But pay determines whether I have a future at a company and
| if I have no future, my objective goes from getting a good
| performance review to avoiding termination.
| vsareto wrote:
| I don't think pay increase will help stagnation. Maybe
| picking projects will if the company has enough variety.
|
| The best cure for stagnation I've found is to take long
| breaks and get into something else.
| karmasimida wrote:
| That is really good advice
|
| I am in the same shoe of feeling stagnating this year and
| trying to figure out how to get out of it. The boringness
| and familiarness just drags along ...
| visarga wrote:
| My cure for stagnation is to play more. Amazing how playing
| at a pet project will get your juices flowing.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Agree. I've been at my place for 11 years now, and have had
| four very distinct roles over that time. Each change gave
| that revitalizing jolt of fresh challenges, technologies,
| etc, but with the benefit that I got to keep my seniority,
| influence, expertise with the in-house systems, and so on.
|
| Have I given up potential pay bumps by not going external?
| Sure, probably. But I have enough to be comfortable and my
| company has treated me well, both monetarily and in
| facilitating these kinds of changes when I've wanted them.
| reedjosh wrote:
| > I don't think pay increase will help stagnation.
|
| No, but lack thereof can certainly cause it.
|
| When there's no real reward, what's the point of putting in
| the extra work and taking risks? Two things that quickly
| break stagnation.
| b3morales wrote:
| Sure, and I don't really know either; my point was just
| that the parent is begging the question. :)
| errantspark wrote:
| Pretty much. Honestly if I can get a 20% pay raise by
| switching jobs, my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I
| can do to stay under the radar, why would I try? If I wanted
| to try I would go work somewhere else.
|
| There's just a complete mismatch in how much the company I
| work for values the experience and skill I gain over time and
| how much everyone else values it. Over time recruiters come
| to me with opportunities to make more money, they try to
| convince me to leave. It's such an obvious disparity I can't
| help but stop caring about the job I'm doing when it's only
| real utility to me is that I don't have to put in any effort
| to keep having it.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| >...I can't help but stop caring about the job I'm doing
| when it's only real utility to me is that I don't have to
| put in any effort to keep having it.
|
| Yikes! That's my current situation in a nutshell. My
| biggest concern is that I don't want to risk jumping ship
| and landing at a toxic company/team, or landing in a bad
| work culture.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I've got a nice vision about what I
| want to do where I am, but I can't get the money to carry
| it out, so I'm in that "no to low effort" stage.
| Nursie wrote:
| If you land somewhere toxic, you can always move again.
|
| In my experience there's almost always something toxic
| about a workplace, it's finding one you can live with for
| a few months or years that's the trick.
| jollybean wrote:
| "my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I can do to
| stay under the radar, why would I try?"
|
| Because it's a form of systematic corruption, maybe the
| biggest kind of corruption in the White Collar world.
|
| The objective is to 'do a good job' , not the minimum, in
| every endeavour.
|
| Doing the 'bare minimum' to keep a job is actually
| generally far under-performing, as most companies won't
| generally let people go.
|
| It's how entire industries stagnate and sink.
|
| When internal participants spend most of their time
| fighting over the surpluses, it's over.
|
| This applies to companies as whole as well of course, i.e.
| the $1B government contracts that should only be $500M etc.
| etc..
|
| Do a good job. If there's a better fit elsewhere, that's
| fine too.
| notapenny wrote:
| I personally want to do a good job, but some companies
| make that hard to employees, albeit sometimes
| inadvertently. Whether it's by tying people up in
| politics, having them do busywork, or just failing to
| reward them.
|
| To give an example, at one of my previous jobs, for
| several years in a row I was noted by my managers as
| being a high performer and someone who would be ready for
| leadership. Despite this, I got an average (you did good
| but that's it) performance rating, because only a few
| people could get the higher rating. The first year I had
| just joined so I was excluded by default, the
| second/third year other people ranked higher and because
| that rating only went to about 2 people, I missed out.
| When after this my manager approached me about a lead
| role, which was extra responsibility but no extra pay, I
| was pretty much done.
|
| When I was in my 20s-30s I hated people who seemed like
| they checked out, but I understand that a lot more now.
| Again, I'll do a good job regardless and if I don't get
| rewarded for that, I'll find the door and go elsewhere,
| but I completely understand why people who don't have
| that luxury or drive would rather keep their heads down
| and just go through the motions.
| beiller wrote:
| You have errors in you measurement, mostly in assuming
| employees only add a positive ROI when in fact their
| value can go negative. Thus doing the bare minimum is
| worth more than you think as long as the employee stays
| in the positive ROI (which I assume is the measure of
| bare minimum).
| ren_engineer wrote:
| in a world of at-will employment, why would anybody go
| the extra mile for an employer?
|
| Trust and loyalty are 2 way streets, the social contract
| has been broken by corporations
| simonh wrote:
| I work, they pay me. As long as they hold up their end,
| I'll hold up mine.
|
| What's the alternative, against their will employment?
| That sounds like it would suck all around.
| quanticle wrote:
| The alternative is having formal employment contracts. I
| work for the employer for a fixed term. If I choose to
| leave before that term is up, I have to pay a penalty to
| the employer. If the employer chooses to fire me they
| have to pay me a penalty. The exact amount conditions of
| the penalty are specified in the buy-out clause of the
| contract.
|
| This is universally how people with _actual leverage_
| (i.e. high performing athletes, Fortune 500 C-level
| execs, etc) get paid.
| mmarq wrote:
| Actually working more than the bare minimum in an
| environment where hard work is not rewarded, is the
| second most sensible thing to do, after leaving. Should
| you work hard so some shareholders can buy a yacht? It is
| the job of management to reward and incentivise hard
| work, and not the job of individual contributors.
|
| Fighting over surpluses is a very healthy dynamic, it's a
| mechanism for individuals and organisations to understand
| the importance of each other's contribution, produce
| price signals and improve the efficiency of the system.
| Instead pretending that a salary negotiated 10 years ago
| still matches the value of my contribution produces all
| sorts of distortions (eg productive employees being
| blocked in less productive organisations).
| salt-thrower wrote:
| If a company can make twice the profit for half the
| effort, they will. Why should I behave differently?
| handrous wrote:
| I have a really hard time distinguishing between the idea
| that companies are entitled to some maximum of an
| employee's work-quality and effort and the notion that an
| employee is entitled to compensation amounting to most or
| all of the marginal value they add to a company through
| their labor, _not_ just what they can convince the
| company to give them. Like, I don 't get how one can
| argue for the former and reject the latter, not regarding
| it also as a form of "corruption", as you put it.
|
| (I'm making an assumption here that you're not big on
| Marxism, I guess--maybe you do agree with both
| propositions)
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I think both of those ideas are wrong. A company is
| usually entitled to hire the most productive employees it
| can find for the remuneration it's willing to offer, and
| an employee is usually entitled to somewhere between
| 50-90% of the money it can convince an employer to pay
| them.
|
| Employees are never paid for the marginal value they
| provide, because for among other reasons, there's no such
| thing. You could come up with an infinite number of
| different ways to calculate that, which could all produce
| a different value. An employee is either paid something
| close to the equilibrium price for the labour they're
| offering, or something close to the average equilibrium
| price of all employed union members, if they're a union
| member.
| errantspark wrote:
| This is the all-important point. It would be insane for
| me to try my best to make money for a company when the
| effort reward curve is so non linear. The only reason the
| idea of "doing the best job you can" is propagated is
| because it allows one to abuse workers. I could see
| myself working hard at a company with a flat-ish
| compensation structure tied directly to the revenue of
| the company.
|
| "If I make a penny my boss makes a dime, that's why I
| shit on company time."
| handrous wrote:
| Right--I don't get how not putting in something
| resembling full effort can be corruption, but a company
| not paying you as much as they _could_ , rather than what
| they _must_ , isn't corruption.
| nickforr wrote:
| And if the revenue tanked would you accept half your
| salary, say, or would you expect a floor to be applied?
| brailsafe wrote:
| Doing a good job, and doing the minimum job, are not
| mutually exclusive. You can do a good job with the
| minimum amount of work required to stay employed. There's
| no reason to do _more_ , unless you're compensated for
| doing more.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > The objective is to 'do a good job'
|
| Nobody has that objective except the very passionate. A
| company will happily do a shitty job if it will still get
| paid. See IBM. See Facebook and Google on customer
| support.
|
| > Doing the 'bare minimum' to keep a job is actually
| generally far under-performing
|
| My manager hasn't seemed to notice that I work a 1/3 of
| what I used to now.
| pnutjam wrote:
| You probably know more now and get the same or more done.
| cyb_ wrote:
| Or perhaps they have and that is why your performance
| ratings are flat, you get a lousy annual raise/bonus (if
| any), and your career is stalled?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Except they aren't flat. I worked hard the first two
| quarters. Got a 5/6. Did very little this quarter and
| also got a 5/6.
|
| So I'm basically just vegetating until I quit.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| This is what all the cool-aid drinkers are missing in
| this thread. You can feel like you worked your ass off,
| or you can feel like you've been coasting, and still get
| the same performance review. I've seen genuinely valuable
| engineers get middling performance reviews because they
| didn't commit as many lines of code to Github that
| quarter as the other guy on their team.
|
| That's an extreme example, but even in a "good" system,
| management is notoriously blind to the actual value of an
| engineer. In a perfect system, performance could be
| measured empirically and compensation would be based on
| that. But no one on earth has figured that out yet, and
| something tells me they never will.
| Retric wrote:
| Performance ratings are meaningless if you're jumping
| ship every 2-4 years and the difference is between
| working twice as hard is a 2% raise vs a 4% one. What
| companies forget is new employees see the legacy of how
| you treated old employees over time.
|
| The basic structure of small consistent pay bumps was
| extremely effective when people stayed at companies for
| decades. Work twice as hard and make 2 percent more for
| the next 30 years, that's a big bump. Pensions pushed
| that out so even people nearing retirement still had
| reason to care.
|
| I am not recommending people do the minimum, just
| acknowledging how people respond to incentives.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| sorry due to covid your 2% was cancelled so your
| performance is worthless have a nice day.
| jollybean wrote:
| "Nobody has that objective except the very passionate."
|
| This is very cynical and pretty much wrong.
|
| I would put that attitude probably in the bottom 20%. I
| think most people want to do a good job.
|
| It's also kind of toxic because unfortunately it spreads.
|
| 'Doing a good job' frankly, often does not even mean
| working harder, from a lower-performing perspective it
| usually just means actually paying more attention and
| being more conscientious.
|
| And yes - in a large corporate situation, it's very often
| sometimes to feel the impact, be recognized etc. etc. -
| but that shouldn't dissuade from basic professionalism.
|
| If you're truly only 1/3 as productive, your manager
| surely notices, but there's probably little they can do
| about it. It may not be to their benefit to even try to
| fix it.
|
| This is what I mean by systematic decline - this is how
| bridges never get built, and they go 10x over budget.
|
| This is why NASA spends $200 Billion on only a few
| launches.
|
| It's why Ford/GM can't innovate.
|
| What Space X and Tesla are doing is in some ways
| spectacular, but in other ways, they are just doing what
| they are supposed to, and they can, because people are
| just doing their jobs.
|
| Life is a giant Prisoner's Dilemma. We can all spend our
| time trying to do the minimum, or even taking the cream
| off the top while nobody is looking, in which case, when
| everyone starts doing that it all comes down - or - we
| can try to be consistently conscientious.
| handrous wrote:
| > I would put that attitude probably in the bottom 20%. I
| think most people want to do a good job.
|
| I'd buy that most people want to do _a_ good job. I doubt
| very much that many care much about doing so, beyond what
| 's necessary or what they expect to gain them greater
| compensation, at _the_ job they do to earn money to pay
| the bills. Everyone I know with even a little of that
| "spark" has had it extinguished by experience. Usually
| before they're 30. Most reserve their good work for
| things that pay little or nothing. They care a lot more
| about that.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The big problems you raise are not because employees are
| not working 100% they are complex and have various
| causes. Employee productivity isn't in the top 10.
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| Won't somebody think about the poor bridges that never
| got built!?
|
| For real, If there is any single problem with the world
| its people doing _too much_. The oceans didn 't fill with
| plastic from people sleeping in. The air didn't fill with
| CO2 because people clocked out early on Fridays.
|
| Take a step back and look at life. Why should it even be
| work? Do birds sow seeds? Are monkeys bad programmers?
| Or, are they just monkeys?
| satellite2 wrote:
| The only honest and sincere answer gets downvoted to
| hell. The world is really burning.
|
| I just hope it doesn't mean HN is transforming into
| Reddit, with all the zero sum game people scaring and
| demotivating each other.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| This is a braindead opinion. Why would anyone work as
| hard as possible when there are 0 incentives to do so?
| When at any moment you could be fired without warning in
| a mass layoff and when even the highest performers only
| get 5-10% raises per year when jumping ship gives you
| 20%+ . You want good work then create the incentives for
| it, currently there are none.
| satellite2 wrote:
| It's a game where you can do the minimum or more and if
| you do more your boss can pay the minimum or more. If you
| do the minimumy your boss pays the minimum, it's a zero
| sum game, if you do more and your boss the minimum, again
| zero sum because you lost energy and he won more from you
| but if you both do more then it's a net positive. So the
| optimal strategy is to do more.
|
| Then like the cops in the prisoners game you are tricking
| yourself at playing the zero sum game because of trust
| issues.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| But in this scenario nothing stops the company to
| disclose the salary only themself.
| abrokenpipe wrote:
| It seems like the optimal strategy would be to do the
| minimum and then job hop since the pay increase is
| greater and getting a raise for working hard is not
| certain.
|
| I personally have not seen much correlation between pay
| working hard and getting pay raises, it seems about as
| likely as getting one for doing the minimum, and the
| effort to dollars ratio is usually not worth while. I
| don't want to put in 50% more effort only to get a 5-10%
| raise. Plus, as stated before, switching jobs results in
| much bigger pay increases making the raises irrelevant.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I'm still waiting to get a cut of those millions I keep
| saving the company with these projects lol
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| How come in your mind there's an onus on the employee to
| work as hard as they can but not on the company to pay
| that effort what it's actually worth? Unless there's a
| genuine emotional reason that transcends your salary
| (such as in community/nonprofit work) the relationship
| between an employer and company _should_ be transactional
| in my opinion.
| jollybean wrote:
| "How come in your mind there's an onus on the employee to
| work as hard as they can but not on the company to pay
| that effort what it's actually worth? "
|
| I didn't say that.
|
| I said they should 'do a good job'.
|
| As should the other company staffers, execs and the
| company as a whole.
| akiselev wrote:
| In an "at will" employment state - which I presume covers
| the vast majority of US based readers here - the final
| arbiter of whether someone is doing a "good job" or not
| is their employer. If they're still paying the employee,
| they must be doing a good job according to the employer's
| standards even if by the employee's standard they are
| doing nothing.
| jollybean wrote:
| This doesn't quite work because employee productivity
| assessment is very grey, and there's a lot of goodwill
| assumed in the equation.
|
| It's difficult to measure employee productivity.
| Sometimes, managers don't care. Sometimes employees make
| every effort to hide their lack of productivity.
|
| Despite that we might think of companies as 'evil' - most
| of them are not. We're all human, none of us like laying
| people off or firing them. It also comes with negative
| political consequences i.e. the person you fired may
| never be a good reference in the future. The manager may
| have negative incentive to let people go, as their
| 'worth' is founded on headcount. And truly the vast
| majority of employers just don't want to layoff or fire
| if that don't have to.
|
| What this means is that there is quite a lot of 'grey' in
| the system, and there's a lot of goodwill assumed by all
| parties.
|
| Everybody is saying that they want to do 'remote work'
| and at the same time signalling that they may 'want to do
| the least, because technically, I'm getting paid for
| that?' - in a situation wherein there is quite a lot of
| 'trust' expected?
|
| How do we expect employers to 'trust' workers in a 'very
| noisy productivity assessment channel' with this kind of
| approach?
|
| It just won't work.
|
| There isn't enough time in the world to be looking over
| each other's shoulders like that (I particularly don't
| like Amazon's approach for example).
|
| So the onus is on us to 'do a good job'. It doesn't mean
| 'break your back' - it means try to do what is expected,
| keep your chin up, grind through it.
|
| I feel that if people could see the big picture, and see
| that mountains are climbed one step at a time, that
| morale across the board would be higher. 'Passion and
| inspiration' are nice, but fleeting, whereas 'grinding'
| through the issues is how most things ultimately get
| done. In this way, they might be more personally incented
| to 'fix that bug' or 'get that build out'.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> It 's difficult to measure employee productivity.
| Sometimes, managers don't care. Sometimes employees make
| every effort to hide their lack of productivity._
|
| The former is the employer's problem and as far as the
| latter, I assume in this discussion that the employee
| isn't committing borderline or outright fraud with
| respect to the job description laid out in the contract.
| Considering how many people get hired to do flex work
| like security guards or to deprive competitors of talent,
| plenty of employers are aware of this dynamic.
|
| However, my goodwill only goes as far as "at will"
| employment protects me, which isn't very much.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| > my goodwill only goes as far as "at will" employment
| protects me
|
| Something tells me that the commenters in this thread who
| are defending the idea of working hard just for the good
| fuzzy feelings have never been through a bad layoff.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| You don't have to think of companies as evil. They are
| not inherently _immoral_ , but they certainly are
| _amoral_. They will let you go the moment it is no longer
| profitable to keep you. Have you been through a layoff
| before? The executives wring their hands, talk about what
| a tough decision it was, uproot dozens to thousands of
| lives - and then get a nice fat bonus when the cost
| savings reports come in, and the stock value goes up.
|
| Things like that teach me that corporate "good will" is
| an elaborate show. You are an expense to them, a
| necessary expense to achieve a certain output. You are
| paid your market value, not penny more. If they can pay
| you half your salary to get the same output, they will.
| If they can lay your team off and get significant cost
| benefits, they will. You are disposable. That doesn't
| mean they're bad people, they're just doing what any
| self-serving profit-seeking bureaucracy would do.
|
| Thus the relationship between an employer and an employee
| is always transactional, and any feeling otherwise is an
| illusion. It's not evil - it just is.
|
| The only asterisk to all of this is if you're at a more
| community-focused organization like a non profit. But the
| vast majority of companies that employ HN readers are not
| that.
| quanticle wrote:
| _And truly the vast majority of employers just don 't
| want to layoff or fire if that don't have to._
|
| I've seen far too many corporate moves that were driven
| by executives looking to goose the stock price to believe
| that. You can argue that it's the executive's job to
| goose the stock price, and thus they "have to" lay off
| people in order to avoid taking as much of a financial
| hit in a recession or whatever, but that just gets us
| back to the original position: the company has a minimum
| amount of loyalty to me, and, in return, I have a minimum
| amount of loyalty to the company.
| simonh wrote:
| Sure that's fair, but I've been very fortunate to have
| worked reasonably or very well paid jobs most of my
| career. Those jobs also enabled me to develop valuable
| skills. I think it's only fair I put in a good effort in
| return.
|
| Yes if business priorities change I could end up out the
| door, and that happened once, but no hard feelings. I
| quit all my other jobs anyway and there was nothing
| malicious either way.
|
| The clothes on my back, and those if my children, the
| house we live in, the car we drive all were paid for by
| my employers. Yes it was a transaction, but a beneficial
| one on both sides. It's all good.
| pnutjam wrote:
| What if my low effort is better then the other guys on my
| teams "good effort"?
|
| You're also selling yourself short. You paid for all that
| stuff. Your employer paid for the work you did, and
| probably took more whenever they could; through on-call,
| off hours work, etc...
|
| I try to comp my time, but I know I put in more then I'm
| compensated for, even when I was technically "hourly".
| I'm fine with that, but I expect to take back when I need
| it.
| [deleted]
| BackBlast wrote:
| Putting in low effort during your billable hours is a
| personal character weakness that you are cultivating. You
| should avoid it because it's bad for you, not just being
| unfair to your employer. Regardless of your relative
| effectiveness.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| > Putting in low effort during your billable hours is a
| personal character weakness that you are cultivating. You
| should avoid it because it's bad for you
|
| Why is it a character weakness? Why is it bad for you?
|
| By putting in low to average effort and switching jobs
| often, I doubled my salary in 5 years. All the while,
| I've had tons of time for vacations, hobbies, and having
| a life outside of work. And I've never gotten a single
| negative performance review. All my 1 on 1 feedback from
| managers has been glowing.
|
| If a company could use half the labor to get twice the
| profit, they'd do it in a heartbeat. That's the purest
| essence of capitalism. Why should I behave differently?
| The guy on my team who works nights and weekends to get
| assignments done gets paid the same as I do. He's just
| more miserable for it.
| BackBlast wrote:
| I didn't say anything about working extra hours, I
| specifically said low effort during your billable hours.
|
| Sounds like you're talking about the extra time that some
| places seem to expect. If that's what we're talking about
| - I totally agree that it's not worth it.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| Ignore my last sentence then. All I mean is, I get paid
| the same whether I put in half effort or full effort.
| Full effort, which can lead to burnout and stress, is a
| cost to me. Why would I increase personal cost with no
| monetary compensation for doing so? They're already
| paying me for half effort and I keep being told that I'm
| doing a great job. So I'm not going to go out of my way
| to do _more_.
|
| Edit: if I could double my output and know that my salary
| would double too, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I've
| never found a company with a comp structure that can
| actually achieve that. It's far more effective to just go
| on autopilot for a year or two, then get a 30% raise at a
| new job. Rinse and repeat.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| I disagree. What's fair is that they pay you for your
| work. Anything beyond that is just in your head. If they
| could still get your productive output and pay you half
| as much, they would. You should look at them through the
| same lens.
| tikhonj wrote:
| The problem is that "doing a good job" is rarely the
| objective at most organizations! People naturally want to
| do a good job; it's just more interesting and satisfying.
| But then we have layers of management and process and
| culture that push back on that in favor of control:
| follow directions, don't rock the boat, don't take any
| risks, always look like you're busy...
|
| In a world like that, the people who just "do a good job"
| are characterized by some level of stubbornness coupled
| with an ability to navigate this kind of environment.
| Should that really be the key skill that matters? Is
| _not_ being sufficiently stubborn "a form of systematic
| corruption"? That seems like a fundamentally uncharitable
| perspective that also provides no real solution. When
| that's how you see the situation, what can you do about
| it?
|
| My experience has been that changing environment and
| process to _actively trust people_ and, crucially,
| clearly _signal_ that trust improves things far more than
| blaming people. If you expect people to phone it in, they
| probably will; if you can establish real trust instead,
| they 'll go out of their way to make _something_ work.
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| Then they should pay me for results, not for showing up.
| Then I'd have an incentive to actually try to do the best
| job I can.
| esprehn wrote:
| You may enjoy the concept of the "tour of duty":
| https://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-emplo...
|
| http://www.theallianceframework.com/about-the-book.html
|
| Thinking about my career (and others) this way has helped me
| remove a fair bit of stress when making job, role or project
| changes.
| diob wrote:
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It's not hard to tell at all. You could just, wait for it,
| make the rewards match the expected great work and test that
| way.
| diob wrote:
| I definitely agree. Pay what you expect (great for great
| work), and if someone isn't cutting it let them know
| (chance for improvement). Worse case, let them go.
|
| Instead, most companies reward no one and wonder why the
| good ones leave or burn out ("weird, they don't contribute
| at the same level anymore").
| justicezyx wrote:
| Developer stagnant?
|
| I was in Amazon and Google, I never saw a case where the
| developer stagnant before the product/management went into
| stagnant.
|
| Developers just write code, and they just accumulate more
| knowledgeable and skills with the stuff they work on. How can
| they stagnant is something not obvious to me at all...
| munchbunny wrote:
| I'm not fully convinced that this is just about the devs. 2-3
| years is also about how long it takes for a nascent project to
| transition into a mature one, and when that happens the culture
| and energy of the team tends to shift. The same dev that
| thrives in one setting might end up out of place in the other.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think in tech 2-3 years is also about how long it takes for
| one's mental model of how the world works to become stale and
| outdated, usually coinciding with _other_ projects (that had
| been too nascent to use) maturing.
|
| I remember that in my peak webdev years in 2008, you built
| webapps by designing the HTML, converting it to templates,
| filling in data with Django or Rails, and then adding
| judicious interactivity with JQuery. By 2011 the world had
| moved on to Angular and SPAs, and you built webapps as a
| single HTML page and large JS bundle with a bunch of
| components that you'd fetch data for over AJAX. By 2013 the
| world moved on to React, and you had all these tools (Gulp,
| Grunt, Bower, NPM, etc.) to automate packaging and code-
| reuse. In 2015 people were still using React and more mature
| versions of these tools, but what changed was the economic
| reality that you could make lots of money as a webdev, and
| the industry itself was maturing with demand for new apps
| dying out.
|
| I'm witnessing this with my team at work too. We have an "old
| guard" of leadership that joined the team in its peak years
| in 2018/2019, and learned (and often wrote) the tech stack as
| it existed then. Now our team is colliding with
| infrastructure efforts that started elsewhere in the company
| and were too immature to use last year, but are now starting
| to bear fruition and get widespread adoption throughout the
| org. People who _were_ experts in the old way of doing things
| find that their skills and projects are now largely
| irrelevant.
| alex-nt wrote:
| Depends on what you work on. If you are not on pure tech (a
| minority of people are), as you get closer to the business
| you will get insights on how things work, how you can
| change them, make them better etc. Only part of our job is
| technical, and without the business knowledge you can't
| push the world in which you work further. There will be
| pushback from the "old guard" always, everywhere, as there
| will be push for the "new thing" always, everywhere.
| Neither is healthy, and both should be evaluated with a
| cool head.
| closeparen wrote:
| I think it's specifically a disease of the frontend
| community to believe that nothing you knew about
| programming 3 years ago is relevant anymore.
| jjav wrote:
| > I think it's specifically a disease of the frontend
| community to believe that nothing you knew about
| programming 3 years ago is relevant anymore.
|
| Exactly, and it is a shame. Stability and building on the
| shoulders of giants is how progress is made. Not by
| rewriting everything all the time.
|
| Luckily I don't work on frontend UI stuff. I learned
| UNIX, kernels, cryptography, TCP/IP, SQL and similar
| technologies in the late 80s to early 90s. While all of
| these areas have evolved and progressed, it's been a
| gradual incremental change year to year. A textbook on
| any of these topics from 1990 is still recognizably
| relevant, even where details have changed over the
| decades.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Nah, not really. My second example has to do with
| internal frameworks inside a FAANG, where the average
| half-life of code is about a year (i.e. half your code is
| deprecated or deleted a year after you write it).
|
| I've observed similar technology shifts with backend code
| (where MySQL was hot in 2003, PostGres in 2006, MongoDB
| in 2009, Cassandra in 2011, PostGres again in 2015, and
| now there's this huge explosion of storage solutions) and
| in platforms (where we were all about the web in 2007,
| all about mobile in 2010, all about blockchain in 2013,
| all about smartwatches & VR in 2015, and all about
| Ethereum & smart contracts in 2018).
| closeparen wrote:
| I don't think workers' entire skillsets are obsoleted by
| any of those changes, unless you specialized in trend-
| chasing (obvious risk) and _maybe_ if you refused to
| board the NoSQL train. But even now those 2003 RDBMS
| skills have a place again! High scalability companies are
| back to using traditional DBs where it makes sense.
| munchbunny wrote:
| I agree with this. While the flavor of the year frontend
| stack might change, since 2008 when I started dabbling in
| frontend, the fundamentals really haven't changed:
| understanding DOM, understanding the JavaScript execution
| model, understanding the layout models, understanding the
| complexities of dealing with data binding over
| asynchronous events and simultaneous users, and so on.
| jQuery didn't change any of that (although it drastically
| improved ergonomics). Angular didn't. React didn't
| either.
|
| My experience has been that paradigms and tools can move
| fast and are relatively straightforward to pick up. Deep
| understanding of the underlying problem domain and the
| systems underneath the abstractions is harder to pick up,
| but the concepts move more slowly.
| quanticle wrote:
| > _Nah, not really. My second example has to do with
| internal frameworks inside a FAANG, where the average
| half-life of code is about a year (i.e. half your code is
| deprecated or deleted a year after you write it)._
|
| That's exactly the same web-dev mindset, only applied to
| backend code. I find it remarkable that you take a half-
| life of 12 months to be a given, rather than a screaming
| red flag.
|
| Yes, the world changes, and code needs to change along
| with it, but it doesn't change _that_ much. Replacing 50%
| of your codebase every 12 months, year after year,
| indicates to me that the organization is just replacing
| poorly architected code with _different_ poorly
| architected code, not better code. The codebase is on a
| random walk, and any forward progress it makes is due to
| chance and evolutionary pressure, rather than reason and
| design.
| closeparen wrote:
| Remember that the architecture competency in FAANG exists
| in the context of a 2-3 year average tenure. And this
| elides a tendency to change teams internally even more
| frequently than that. It is unlikely that a senior
| engineer rated "Exceeds" at design and architecture in
| Silicon Valley has ever learned from or been evaluated on
| the consequences of their own decisions at more than 4
| years out. Median probably one year.
| kyralis wrote:
| An average tenure hides a good number of people with
| longer tenure than that. I'm personally a counterexample
| to your point, for instance, and I know quite a number of
| others on other teams at my company (one of the FAANGs).
|
| Turnover is definitely not uniform and a 12 month
| architecture lifespan is not, in my experience, either
| normal or healthy.
| closeparen wrote:
| My experience is that architectures usually last 2-3
| employee tenures, the point is the original architect
| usually doesn't see the outcome of their work.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My personality is that, in the product lifecycle, I prefer
| the prototype to initial release phases. Initial conception
| has too much uncertainty - everything is possible but nothing
| is decided - and maintenance is boring.
|
| I actually had a personality test where this was one of the
| things it measured. In my case, I think it did so accurately.
| piyh wrote:
| New devs are also unburdened by maintenance work.
| alain94040 wrote:
| randsinrepose has a great article on that concept, called the
| old guard. Definitely worth a read. How an engineer goes from
| an exciting new project to maintenance mode over time. It's
| the natural state of things.
|
| https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-old-guard/
| alex-nt wrote:
| Yes, it takes about 6m in a medium to big organizations to
| figure out what to do and with whom you have to speek to get
| stuff done. And for 2 years everything is rosy. Then you speak
| with you colleagues that changed jobs and find out that their
| income is 30% to 40% higher. That will, of course, put a downer
| on your day/week/quarter/year. You have 2 options, speak with
| your current company about compensation or leave. I tried the
| first option (admittently a bit late, but I did mention the
| problem in our review talks and other talks) after I found out
| that my income was 40% lower than colleagues that left 1 year
| before (was 3 years and a half at this company and had top
| marks every year, big company, a lot of cash to throw around).
| I was offered a measly 5% after being dragged in 4 meetings
| about how great I am. Left and almost doubled my income in 2
| years. This is all anecdotal, but I hear it from everyone
| around me, you HAVE TO SWITCH jobs every 2 years, you can
| stretch to 3, maybe. Of course, during the last years you won't
| deliver as much, you have to prepare for intervews and such.
| This was of no benefit for the previous company. Over my 4
| years there I've seen how we were bleeding knowledge that we
| never got back. The company didn't do so well, the thing I
| worked on just died after everyone left 6m after me. It's a
| shame, it could've been a nice thing compared with what I see
| offered by the competition.
| bla3 wrote:
| > I was offered a measly 5% after being dragged in 4 meetings
| about how great I am.
|
| The way you do this is interview elsewhere, get an offer for
| 40% more, and _then_ tell your manager that you have an offer
| for 40% more and that you'd really like to stay but they'd
| really have to do something about compensation. You'll get
| more than 5% then (but likely less than 40%). It's annoying
| that you have to invest the time for this, but it does
| provide data to your current company that your market rate is
| in fact what you think it is.
| DoctorDabadedoo wrote:
| I have trouble with this for two reasons:
|
| - If am a resource critical enough for the company to match
| an external offer and keep me because of the work _I do_
| and not because I 'm threatening to leave, why don't they
| act on it diligently and offer benefits accordinly
| (relevant pay raises, shares and etc.)?
|
| - The moment the company becomes aware that I'm considering
| to leave for some place else, I'm a potential replacement,
| if a good candidate or a layoff comes along.
|
| If I'm interviewing some place else, when I put my notice,
| I've made up my mind, I won't stay around long term.
| projectazorian wrote:
| Worth noting that this tactic is risky, especially at
| smaller companies. A lot of managers might get you the
| raise to avoid immediate disruption, while assuming you're
| out the door in a few months and acting accordingly. You
| might suddenly find yourself frozen out of desirable
| projects.
| pklausler wrote:
| Or take the 40% boost and come back two years later for
| even more.
| jjav wrote:
| > What I do know is that it's much easier for me to hire a
| competent lawyer or UX designer than it is to hire a competent
| software developer
|
| I'm curious if you grill the lawyer on some abstract topic from
| their undergrad courses (possibly 20 years ago) and make them
| write it perfectly on a whiteboard? Meaning, the same way
| software developers get interviewed?
|
| Or do you look at the lawyer's professional experience and hire
| based on that?
|
| It's easy to hire people when you make it easy, it's difficult
| when you put up artificial barriers to prevent the hiring.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| 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 their job and instead focuses only on their actions
| (self obsession), ego and the presentation of success. An
| example of middle management self-obsession is your use and
| throw mentality. Middle management does this because they don't
| actually listen to their reports. Managers think they are on
| another dimension and don't need to hear anything from anyone.
|
| A really competent middle manager would know that senior
| engineers, especially ones with tribal knowledge are the real
| 10x engineers in practice. Not because they type fast, not
| because they are hungry and energetic but because they can
| process situations and circumstances faster in their head to
| yield results.
|
| If I were a middle manager, I would do my utmost to retain
| trustworthy people around me. It's almost a no brainer
| productivity boost.
| mjburgess wrote:
| > For example, I genuinely don't know if software developers
| have more of an impact than the product designers
|
| Explains why this mentality exists. Middle management cannot
| see the impact.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Truly, sometimes I wonder if ICs should be allowed to fire
| managers if managers can't see what brings value.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Software engineers are allowed to fire managers. It's
| called quitting and becoming a consultant. It often leads
| to a large pay bump, but also comes along with assuming
| all the bullshit that your manager does for you, so it's
| not for everyone.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| No. Firing is not the same as becoming a consultant. ICs
| should be able to fire managers, along with their health
| benefits. Let managers take recourse as consultants.
| 015a wrote:
| Agreed; someone who says "engineers produce their best work
| 2-3 years into a role" is a manager who has created an
| environment where an engineer's best work is produced 2-3
| years into a role. This isn't a recognition of some universal
| truth; its an observation of the environment they had a hand
| in accidentally engineering.
|
| It is similarly easy to envision an environment engineered to
| encourage engineers to produce their best work 3 months into
| a role; Give new engineers one really exciting, well defined,
| small greenfield project, after that move them into a legacy
| maintenance role, never give bonuses, raises, etc. I know I'd
| get burned out pretty quick; my best work would be very early
| on.
|
| It is harder to envision a systemic change to encourage
| engineers to always have produced their best work yesterday.
| I'm not suggesting its easy; by far, the easiest and most
| common course of action is exactly the environment the parent
| commentator engineered, where engineers peak a couple years
| in. But, don't be fooled; the engineering _division_
| absolutely suffers in this environment, and it _is_ possible
| to do better.
| pizza234 wrote:
| 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 move on arrives after 2-3
| years, and if there's no strong incentive, devs will start to
| feal uneasy, and move on.
| simiones wrote:
| You've got it the wrong way around: usually companies have
| decided for whatever classist reasons that they have some
| kind of maximum raise per year. This ensures that after a
| few years people who are actually getting better at their
| jobs are falling quickly far below market rate for their
| level of experience. So, those that feel like they can move
| on, since it is the only possibility for increasing their
| pay meaningfully.
|
| This is not specific to engineering positions, it is a
| pretty common fixed policy in many industries.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Anecdotally, all the devs I personally know who hopped
| around like this did so because promotions/compensation
| were stalled out at their current job. Almost all of them
| would have stuck around if offered competitive titles and
| compensation, but they were often being paid 25-50% less
| than they would be as a newhire at the same company.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| This has been the case for most orgs I've been at, I tend
| to tie it to poorly managed growth and planning.
|
| it's shocking the number of developers I've seen left
| standed in their carrer progression (to quit eventully)
| due to overhiring and ending up siloed away somewhere
|
| but I guess that's just kind of the way it goes working
| for other people though
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > 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 is called incompetence, because
| finding really good balanced solutions is actually work.
| This work involves observing problems, understanding root
| causes, piloting and experimenting, bringing other mangers,
| skips and CXOs into alignment, executing retention deftly
| while keeping reports happy. But this is too much work for
| managers (but of course too much work for engineers is
| never too much work).
|
| What a joke! No wonder SWEs complain so much about
| management.
| usrme wrote:
| 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.
| fizx wrote:
| 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.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| the entire point is that companies spend far more money
| having to replace current employees because they don't give
| raises.
|
| Recruiting and onboarding a new engineer takes months and
| the lost productivity is at least 100K when you factor in
| engineering hours spent interviewing, recruiter fees,
| months for new dev to learn code base, etc.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| You might have constraints but you can still raise your
| voice EACH time attrition happens because of constraints.
| Only then will the system change and make lives easier for
| everyone.
|
| If not, you are forever going to be stuck in the cycle of
| hiring and attrition.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Speaking from experience, most large tech companies view
| engineers as area under the curve, as fungible hours.
| Speaking out about attrition usually doesn't have any
| impact at all above the Director level.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > Speaking from experience, most large tech companies
| view engineers as area under the curve, as fungible
| hours. Speaking out about attrition usually doesn't have
| any impact at all above the Director level.
|
| And blindly accepting things as it is, is the root cause
| of corporate decay.
|
| If you want a high performance team that cares about
| management and the job, management will have to return
| the favor. If corporate structures prevent managers from
| doing this, managers need to band together and fight HR
| or whoever is far behind the curve.
|
| Sorry, you are representing your company to the ICs. If
| you, a middle manager, can't talk to the powers-that-be
| to change the system, your reports will lose their trust
| towards you.
| NationalPark wrote:
| I'm not convinced this isn't explained entirely by
| compensation. There are perhaps a dozen large tech companies at
| which an only moderately remarkable engineer can make $500k a
| year right now. That number has gotten bigger every year for
| the last decade at least, and the much larger pool of "every
| other software company" is increasingly falling behind. You
| should follow up with your exits a few years down the line and
| see where they end up long term. I bet a few of them will have
| retired - how often do your engineers retire at 35?
| 535188B17C93743 wrote:
| While I think it's an organizational failure, even if folks
| aren't "growing" after 36 months, I definitely think there's
| institutional knowledge they have that helps them be more
| effective... the more time that elapses, the more of that
| institutional knowledge is lost and not documented.
|
| Obviously it's not great to have companies hanging on by the
| thread of a single person's knowledge over 10 years, but I feel
| like at a lot of companies (especially smaller companies), this
| is the reality.
| sparker72678 wrote:
| > but I feel like at a lot of companies (especially smaller
| companies), this is the reality.
|
| Exactly.
|
| There are many small companies that will be far more impacted
| be one of their 2 developers leaving than they would be by
| the owner being hit by a bus, but they'll still balk at
| raising salaries.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Well market dynamics over the long term should take care of
| companies that short sighted. They will be outcompeted by
| others that are better at building organizational capacity.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Yeah, that long term is not useful for the engineer whose
| skills should be valued right. He will be older by that
| time
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This isn't going to end well for Matthew, well if he doesn't work
| the back side of the curve, let me explain;
|
| The challenge is performance is transitory and pay is forever.
| Specifically, you will have engineers who happen to be on a
| project at a time when they can have a big impact, and they do
| and you want to reward that. But then the next few years might be
| polishing that project's stability and corner cases which will
| "feel" like very little impact. As a result if you change their
| pay to reflect their impact when they first deliver, and leave it
| like that, then the next few years will "feel" like the curve is
| inverted and your paying and not getting the impact that you
| would expect from that level of pay.
|
| This is why, invariably, engineer pay tends to evolve into "base
| pay" + "bonus pay" which can be thought of as the cost of keeping
| you around and the appreciation for what you have done for us
| this year. Many people make the "bonus pay" a fraction of your
| base pay, in that way an increase in your base pay will be
| reflected in larger bonuses later. Google famously did this and
| then added a twist which was called a "personal multiplier"(PM).
| This PM could range from 0 to 3, and the trick was it was kept
| secret. In that way you could never know whether or not your
| manager was "playing favorites"[1]. But it gave them a nice
| talking point about being "open" about how you would be
| compensated while not letting you convert the how into actual
| numbers.
|
| The second thing is that everyone is different. And even when
| they are a lot the same, they are different. Sometimes people
| will reach a compensation level that meets all of their needs,
| and lets them save for retirement, and they don't "need" any more
| than that. Tandem had a great term for that, it was called people
| who "retired in grade" which was code for someone who was not
| being motivated by pay any more so they weren't working as hard
| as it was possible to work them.
|
| The third thing is that sociopaths love a score. They really
| really do. All you have to do to get the most out of a sociopath
| is tell them how you are going to score them and let them see how
| they score relative to other people. (you'll say "pay" in your
| discussions but the sociopath will hear "score.") These folks
| will invest all of their time and effort in "winning", and
| because they are sociopaths they won't necessarily use that
| tactic of "work harder than those you are competing with." They
| may in fact spend all of their time developing schemes to
| sabotage other efforts in order that their effort stands out.
| Really not a great place to be, really.
|
| The bottom line is that compensation is hard, doing it well
| requires that you be honest about what you would pay someone to
| replace the person you are evaluating and verifying that you are
| paying them at least that much. And when people start going the
| other way, you need a plan for that too (you can fire them of
| course, but as the article mentions they have lots of domain
| specific knowledge that is handy). Generally successful companies
| move those people to working on projects that are important but
| not urgent.
|
| [1] To no ones surprise, the managers were playing favorites.
| cryptica wrote:
| Many big companies don't need 90% of their existing engineers so
| they don't care if most of them leave.
| paxys wrote:
| Articles like these vastly overestimate people's desires to
| switch jobs. Yes one good engineer left last quarter because they
| were underpaid and someone gave them a better offer, but a
| hundred others stayed put. Things still overwhelmingly worked in
| the company's favor overall.
|
| And add the fact that technical interviews are still designed to
| be as painful a process as possible, so much so that people I
| know have given up guaranteed raises just to not have to go
| through it again.
| SpeakMouthWords wrote:
| The Bridgerton example is silly and not comparable. His character
| is barely in the other books, so of course he's not in the other
| seasons. It's like asking why Professor Quirrell isn't in the
| second Harry Potter film.
| asdff wrote:
| There is also the near infinite pipeline of desperate undergrads
| taking the first decent enough offer that lands in their lap.
| Wring them dry for a few years and when they leave after
| realizing what they are actually worth, there are 10 more 22 year
| old applicants ready to take their place. I'd probably bet that
| most tech companies outside the most glamorous operate like this.
| It's just cheaper and that's all most companies care about
| quarter to quarter, not a deep mature efficient back end or
| anything that experience and expensive talent brings you.
| cproctor wrote:
| What if a company actively encouraged its employees to interview
| at competitors, and to welcome, even expect, external offers as
| part of discussions around professional growth, roles, and
| compensation? They could call it "peer review."
|
| The company would offload the work of finding market rates onto
| its competitors while potentially gaining insights into
| competitors' operational logic. And as a machiavellian bonus,
| this arrangement might depress its own employees' market rates
| because other companies might be hesitant to extend offers to
| candidates they suspect are not serious.
| Dunedan wrote:
| That's what Netflix does:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-encourages-employees...
| (version without paywall: https://archive.is/mdMr9).
|
| Also check out their culture document, which is quite
| interesting as well: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
| shados wrote:
| Many companies do pay for people to stay, but its debatable if
| its worth it.
|
| The last company I worked for gave me significant golden
| handcuffs. Probably 30-40% more than I could get elsewhere. They
| had a "cost of replacement player" policy, where they count the
| cost of hiring, sourcing, training over the years, etc, and come
| up with a number thats almost always way above market rate for
| people who have been around a bit.
|
| Attrition was lower than industry average...but not by much. The
| reality is that in big tech, salaries are high enough that people
| stop caring. People left for a variety of reasons, the most
| common one being "I want to see how it is elsewhere" (especially
| from college hires who have been at the company several years).
| Others leave because they want to work at a startup. Some leave
| to join their friends. Some because they move to follow a
| significant other who got a job elsewhere (many prefer offices
| over WFH, so offering that only helps so much).
|
| In the end, again, retention is higher, but when you crunch the
| numbers, its very debatable if it's worth it for the company.
| Worse, sometimes companies end up "competing" over it, so even if
| you pay a lot, the next one offers more because they know your
| salary bracket, then you raise yours until one gives. That sounds
| great for the employee but there are budgets and limits at some
| point.
|
| And then there's the topic of counter offers. The uncomfortable
| truth is that there's very significant demographic differences
| when it comes to folks who use the "I got an offer elsewhere, pay
| me more and Ill stay". If you give counter offers when that
| happens (as opposed to across the board bracket increase), you
| quickly end up with statistically significant discrepancies, and
| that's not ok.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| > The uncomfortable truth is that there's very significant
| demographic differences when it comes to folks who use the "I
| got an offer elsewhere, pay me more and Ill stay".
|
| What differences are those?
|
| I tend to think that it's a bad idea anyway. Once you've done
| it, your employer will know that you've already thought about
| leaving, so much so that you've already completed an interview
| process and have gotten an offer. Surely that must tend to be
| damaging to the relationship going forward (not saying that it
| should be, but that it often is).
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Male vs female most likely
| ghaff wrote:
| If it leads to not just more money but a significantly
| changed role, it can possibly work. Though arguably that
| conversation should have taken place earlier.
| ghaff wrote:
| Especially in Silicon Valley, there seems to be a lot of itchy
| feet in tech that leads people to changing jobs every 2 to 3
| years because some people get bored easily and get the
| impression it's almost required. Historically it wasn't. And it
| still isn't in most industries and most places (including tech
| jobs elsewhere). The two larger places I've worked, 10+ year
| stints were, if maybe not the norm, _extremely_ common. I 've
| spent most of my career in three jobs +/- 10 years each.
| disease wrote:
| Devs also leave after completing all the meaningful,
| interesting work and finding there is none left. It feels good
| to build and launch a product - or even add features that can
| have an impact on the bottom line. It is something very
| different to work on a list of features that you know very few
| people, if anyone at all, are going to use. Same goes for
| maintenance.
| jwineinger wrote:
| Exactly why I left a job and abandoned a $10k retention
| bonus. The work was interesting and fun, but approaching zero
| users.
| France_is_bacon wrote:
| There are some great rationales from people here who hire, and
| gave me a different viewpoint, so I appreciate why companies do
| that. They do so because of economic reasons - people stop
| becoming productive after a year, as Kranar notes, or people
| don't want to leave because it's a pain in the ass to apply for a
| new job as well as leaving friends behind.
|
| .
|
| One thing I personally have said for a long time, is that when
| you are just starting your career, you should get it in your head
| to change jobs as much as possible - so through your 20s to
| mid-30s. The reason is because a job move will almost always
| increase your pay, much more than any company ever will.
|
| The trajectory of income earnings at your early stages will be
| the most dramatic because there is a ceiling, for the most part
| (there will always be outliers), on how much you can earn, no
| matter what. You'll never see a programmer making $2 million,
| doing programming, for example. So if you start up at $60,000,
| just for example, the faster you get to $150K or $200K, if
| possible in your specialty if you have one, the better, because
| incremental increases will slow down at that point, no matter
| what. It will be much more difficult to get a job at $200K, as it
| will be to get to $75K. (Don't worry about the exact numbers, I'm
| just using them as an example).
|
| When you're in your in the 32 years old to 35 years old, you can
| start looking for a long-term job that has your values and
| interests.
|
| It used to be that companies wanted people at their jobs for a
| long time because it showed stability, and that they would stay
| with the new company a long time. I'm sure there are companies
| like that still out there, but if you change jobs a lot, like
| every 2 years, hiring companies will more likely look at your
| history and think you are a "hot commodity" that everyone wants
| to hire which causes more competition from hiring companies.
|
| There's also the fact that if you go from $50K to &75K to $100K
| over 6 years, rather than $60K to $76K over 6 years, the hiring
| company will find it much easier to increase th pay the person
| making $100K to $130K, rather than pay the $76K person to $130K.
| Even if both have the same exact skill level. It's just human
| nature. And it is kind of true. The person making $100K knows
| their value and goes out and gets it, the other is more
| complacent, whether _you_ think that or not or have all kinds of
| reasons why this is not true. Those are _your_ reasons, not the
| hiring company 's reasons.
|
| Finally, the other thing about changing jobs a lot at the
| beginning of your career and making more money is that when you
| do get a raise, let's say 10% raise for the two people in this
| example, the person staying at the same company for 6 years and
| goes from $50K to $78K will get a raise of $7,800 (and the same
| with a bonus), while the person going from $50K to $100K will get
| go get a $10,000 raise (and bonus). And that difference will keep
| getting larger the more money you make, obviously.
|
| Fuck loyalty to the company - they have zero for you. And your
| friends will still be your friends as you all disburse over time
| to new companies, and you will have a nice network over the
| country. Plus you will make new friends at your new company and
| expand your network even more.
|
| And, by the way, your absolute best way to get more job offers
| and higher pay, is by giving talks and publishing. I know one guy
| that gives technical talks twice a week, anywhere there's two or
| more people. I talked to him about it, and he said that he gets
| at 2-5 job offers per day sent to him. When you do public
| speaking, you become a thought leader, or industry leader. The
| same goes if you publish something - in a well-known website or a
| chapter in a book compilation, or whatever. You are again a
| thought leader.
| IanCal wrote:
| What is the probability that the job you are currently in
| generates the most value for any company? Given that your
| skillset has changed too.
| ukoki wrote:
| > 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
| that may be friends, risk your position being less stimulating,
| have to move house and/or deal with a new commute.
|
| There is a very real salary range between "low enough that I'll
| think about applying for other jobs" and "so low I'll actually
| start applying for jobs". Employers are aware of this and are
| paying salaries accordingly. It sucks for everyone in that salary
| band but -- ethics and long-term viability aside -- it's still
| the rational economic choice for employers. Every now and again
| someone will quit and get their deserved 40% increase, but many
| will delay leaving for years, or simply put up with it
| indefinitely, saving employers tons of money.
|
| Of course this may not be the case forever. It seems like
| recently the cohort of people who find interviewing and changing
| jobs more tolerable (the so-called "job-hoppers") is increasing
| in size. If you happen to be a part of this cohort, then
| congratulations, you're winning the job-market pain-of-change-vs-
| salary arbitrage game and will enjoy above-average year-on-year
| salary increases for at least the near future.
| [deleted]
| zz865 wrote:
| > There is a very real salary range between "low enough that
| I'll think about applying for other jobs" and "so low I'll
| actually start applying for jobs".
|
| True, the other side is if you're trying to hire and pay the
| same industry salary, people aren't going to move because
| what's the point? If you're trying to hire a lot of people you
| have to pay more than average just to get people interested.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| You can't nab people with market rates, but you can get new
| hires with market rates
| mauving wrote:
| > [...] 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 brilliant people.
| ggggtez wrote:
| It's not sufficient to make 1% more money. If it's not a 20%+
| increase, you might as well bide your time. This means the
| first, lower paying job, is sticky. Otherwise you could leave
| instantly at every better offer without penalty to long term
| prospects.
|
| And even for those brilliant people who can get it on the
| first try, you're taking about 2 months minimum to go through
| the interview process. If you're someone who doesn't like
| taking risks, that's a tall order until you've become
| convinced there is no path to promotion within your company.
| closeparen wrote:
| 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.
| Icathian wrote:
| This _just_ isn 't true. Find me any data that any level of
| performance results in better compensation than changing
| jobs every 2-4 years and I'd be willing to at least
| consider the idea, but it just doesn't exist.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| I mean, I won't claim the 'brilliant' label, but I am
| competent and in-demand, and my experience is just what the
| OP laid out. Once I started interviewing, opportunities came
| left and right. Getting starting interviewing was a hump
| though, and there IS always the fear of landing somewhere
| that seems good, but isn't, especially if your current job
| ONLY lacks for adequate compensation.
| ukoki wrote:
| You might be right. As a counter-argument I can only offer my
| anecdata of being a contractor who has met quite a few people
| deep in the bowels of large enterprises who I would class as
| brilliant, but who are coming up on five, ten and sometimes
| fifteen year anniversaries. Perhaps they do have good reasons
| for staying, but whatever they are those reasons are they are
| out of reach of my make-as-much-money-as-fast-as-you-can
| monkey brain :)
| ghaff wrote:
| I think you'll find a fair number of people who like their
| work, are comfortable where they are, and feel like they
| make enough money. And don't really care that they could
| maybe make more somewhere else.
|
| I also expect that the moving around every 2 years meme is
| pretty influenced by Silicon Valley. It certainly isn't the
| norm I've seen.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| You laid out the exact reasons I stayed as long as I did at my
| last job, even after it became clear I was not happy with my
| compensation. (except for the moving part - hurray living in a
| 'tech' town with lots of opportunities I guess.) Although I am
| really confident at this stage of my career in my abilities and
| reputation, interviewing is such a pain in the ass overcoming
| that inertia takes a bit, and you are right, companies count on
| that inertia.
| alkonaut wrote:
| This is a big factor. If I switch I want a 10-20% raise not
| because that's very important in itself but because I'm taking
| a massive risk and have to endure a horrible process when
| switching.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I've found a different kind of stickiness. I've been in enough
| circumstances that I now value sane management and co-workers
| who I like. I'm not in a hurry to leave a situation like that,
| because I know that it can be _rare_. I don 't need to maximize
| my money; I can get decent money while minimizing my misery.
| solatic wrote:
| > There is a very real salary range between "low enough that
| I'll think about applying for other jobs" and "so low I'll
| actually start applying for jobs". Employers are aware of this
| and are paying salaries accordingly.
|
| This is the difference between employers who play the game at a
| low level and employers who play the game at a high level. If
| you play at a low level, then you view your workers as
| interreplaceable cogs in the machine. You charge for soda at
| vending machines and balk at shelling out a few hundred bucks
| for a ping pong table. Sure, it's "expensive" when people
| leave, since their replacements are more expensive (not to
| mention ramp-up costs), but your perspective on your employees
| is how much they cost you to employ, so you try to keep that
| number as low as possible for as long as possible.
|
| Higher-level players order dinner to the office every night
| because they understand that the price of food is so
| ridiculously cheap compared to the additional productivity that
| the only way it doesn't make sense is if you manage your
| employees by what they cost and not by the value of their
| employment. Higher level players grant their employees large
| raises without being asked because they understand that
| defensive raises prevent your employees from searching for new
| work in the first place. Higher level players understand that
| loyalty has value, trust has value, and tenure has value.
|
| Are lower-level players rational? Sure. They're also either
| stupid, or of low enough relative productivity that the market
| will subsume them soon enough.
| paul_f wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Side projects dont make anywhere near the amount of money
| that devs here expect to milk from well funded companies
| bookofsand wrote:
| 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.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| It depends on your country/jurisdiction.
|
| Most countries I worked in, anything done after hours, not
| using company resources, and not in the competition space
| of the employer is simply allowed. No company would be able
| to enforce that.
|
| In fact (I have had that happen) if the contract tries to
| over reach, in particular regarding IP, then that clause
| could just be made void in court.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you work for a big company, there's not much out there
| to work on that's not in the competition space of the
| employer.
| dwater wrote:
| 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.
| yupper32 wrote:
| I don't know. How much time do people put into side projects
| that make money? 15-20 hours/week?
|
| I work 40 hours/week at a Big-N, but if I put another 15-20
| hours per week into my current job I'd get promoted extremely
| quickly, and get a bigger raise from that promotion than any
| "side project" I could come up with.
|
| I don't want to do any of that, and moving companies is still
| probably the easiest way to get a large raise, but my point
| stands.
| jjav wrote:
| > if I put another 15-20 hours per week into my current job
| I'd get promoted extremely quickly
|
| That'd be a very rare circumstance.
|
| In most jobs working 15-20 hours overtime each week only
| gets you 15-20 hours less for living your own life, nothing
| else.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Seeking that band sounds to me like an optimization trap as it
| wrongfully assumes the cost of churn from gambling it is less
| than the cost of turnover and growing salaries. It sounds a bit
| like deciding where we really need to cut costs are deep sea
| oil rig gaskets.
| lakevieew wrote:
| 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.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| > This step while being fairly straightforward
|
| Gone are those days when this was straightforward.
| mcherm wrote:
| ...and that is part of why H1-B employees receive less in the
| way of salary and salary increases at many firms.
| maxk42 wrote:
| On the one hand Mr. Dean rightly recognizes that longer-tenured
| developers bring more company-specific and domain-specific
| expertise to the table and they should be paid attractively to
| prevent them from leaving and taking that knowledge with them.
|
| On the other hand he touts his use of a compensation formula,
| reducing engineering salary to a formula rather than taking into
| account an individual's background, experience, expertise,
| demeanor, and individual impact. (To be fair, he does emphasize
| that the formula will include "performance" in some way, but I've
| always been leery of boiling down performance to a simple
| equation. We've all been in roles where people have had material
| impacts other than lines of code committed, features completed,
| or KPI scores.)
|
| I suppose I fundamentally agree with the author's premise that
| tech salaries should rise with the overall market to keep
| institutional knowledge from walking out the door, but on the
| other hand I don't think following a simple equation is the best
| way to get there.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I think the market has demonstrated institutional knowledge is
| worth $0 at most companies.
| maxk42 wrote:
| It might be valued that way presently, but that doesn't mean
| that's the worth. The companies that rightly assess the
| situation and determine that the cost of mistakes made
| because institutional knowledge is gone or the cost to
| productivity of retaining replacement personnel is high
| enough to justify an additional 2% - 6% annual salary
| increase across the board will outperform the companies that
| are constantly paying the training toll.
|
| How many times have you had a deployment go wrong shortly
| after the one guy who knew how everything worked left? What
| did it cost the company in terms of developer hours,
| productivity, opportunity cost? How many times have you
| witnessed a new hire take 30 - 90 days to get even halfway up
| to the speed and productivity levels of someone who's been
| with the company for a year or two? If you're swapping one
| employee for a small handful of failures plus a new, at-
| market employee who has half the productivity level for a
| full quarter then you're easily paying a 25% premium to let
| that employee go, when you could've retained them and made
| them feel appreciated for a 6% annual raise. It's
| frustratingly straightforward to determine which result is
| better for the company's bottom line.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| Many engineers are on their way out when they announce their
| departure. If they said: "hey, I'm thinking about joining this
| other company for a better compensation", that would be a topic
| of discussion. Most engineers instead tell me: "hey, I signed a
| contract with this other company. This is my last day".
|
| The other point is that money is not the only motivator (esp. in
| our industry). People just like change, either more
| responsibility, or less responsibility, maybe more autonomy or
| more direction, maybe different leadership, etc.
|
| Last, signing bonuses are quite large...
| odiroot wrote:
| > Last, signing bonuses are quite large...
|
| Is it a US-specific thing? Never heard of anyone getting it.
| jason0597 wrote:
| Well, HN and the tech industry are _extremely_ American...
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Unless the outcome of that conversation is a systematic review
| of how reward works for all employees & a counter-offer with no
| risk that breaking the kayfabe about the company mission harmed
| my future aspirations within the company, the conversation is
| too risky to have. The problem will be back in a year.
| cwbrandsma wrote:
| Especially for younger engineers (I'm thinking of software
| engineers in this case), it isn't just about money, but also
| experience. It is really easy to get type-cast into a specific
| role in the company and it can be hard to break out. One
| developer I interviewed spent 10 years maintaining one pearl
| script. Just one. He wondered why he was having trouble finding
| a job. Don't be that guy.
|
| But it is also about the money. When you can get a 20% bump by
| switching jobs...hard to pass that up.
| helsinki wrote:
| 20% used to be good. These days, it's something like 35-80%,
| it seems, according to Blind. My last job swap resulted in a
| 100% pay increase (10 YoE).
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I would never accept a counter offer anyway. Seems like leaving
| is too traumatic to the relationship.
| yupper32 wrote:
| At the end of the day you were underpaying them, so I'm not
| sure putting the "blame" on the employee is the right way to
| frame this.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It's like being in a relationship and breaking up because one
| is unhappy but refusing to talk to the other person about it.
| If you're unhappy with your pay and that's the only reason
| you're thinking about quitting, bring it up, what's the worst
| that could happen? To the people that say "retaliation", I
| find that highly unlikely. Every single place I've worked at,
| at least tried to accommodate me.
| yupper32 wrote:
| It's more like: you realize your SO for the past year has
| been putting in the bare minimum effort into the
| relationship and decide it's not even worth the
| conversation.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Missed opportunity really. That's a year of not having a
| conversation about something that's bothering you. Sure
| people can live their lives however they want, but
| talking about issues, for me, on average resulted in
| better outcomes than not talking. That applies to
| romantic relationships as well as professional ones.
|
| Somehow people seem to think it has to be one sided when
| it comes to professional relationships with your
| employer. Maybe it's a lack of structured, routine, two
| sided feedback that makes people not bring up issues
| around compensation. Maybe employers should ask
| proactively if the employee is happy with their
| compensation.
| cletus wrote:
| There are several factors:
|
| 1. Organizations will often see bumping up an employee's pay to
| match another offer as some variant of extortion and it's they
| view this as disloyal. Never mind that the other offer clearly
| shows they're now below market. I didn't say it makes sense;
|
| 2. There is friction in changing jobs and companies and people
| will generally have a threshold for making that jump (eg they
| won't switch for less than a 20% raise). So over the entire pool
| of employees it's cheaper to let a few go than give everyone a
| raise when many wouldn't leave;
|
| 3. Companies have a philosophy that you do the job you get
| promoted to first and then you get promoted to it and paid
| subsequently. Worse, often it takes time for things like equity
| to catch up. You may get a discretionary grant when you get
| promoted or you might not. And it can take years of annual
| refreshes to get to the total comp off a new hire at the same
| level;
|
| 4. Organizations seem to make the standards higher for existing
| rather than new employees. I think this is in part to avoid level
| and compensation inflation;
|
| 5. Up to a certain point there is an expectation of growth. Some
| of this is formal (eg up to T5 at Google). Some of it is more
| informal. They make the determination that even though you're at
| a terminal level and that's fine, if you've been there for years
| you're probably not going any higher so you won't be one of their
| future leaders or stars; and
|
| 6. Diversity. Tech companies have explicit goals around having
| certain minorities essentially over-represented compared to the
| demographics of, say, CS graduates. I guarantee you such explicit
| goals create perverse incentives that extend to how they handle
| retention.
| karmasimida wrote:
| To answer your question, yes they do.
|
| Ofc this would be dependent on how critical that specific
| personnel to the group or company overall.
|
| One thing to note though, when the employer is handed over the 2
| week notice, for the employee, the process has been at least
| months in making. I don't think at that point, it is merely a
| matter of money, sometimes people do want to shake things up.
| SergeAx wrote:
| First of all, there ARE engineers companies are paying to stay.
| Those are anecdotal 20%, doing 80% of impact. But this is
| actually irrelevant.
|
| The point is that companies should compensate their top-impacting
| engineers with equity, not money.
| nokya wrote:
| The analysis looks very reductive and seems to ignore the
| scientific knowledge about what motivates employees to quit/stay.
|
| One thing we know for sure: most people don't quit a company,
| they quit a manager. Companies are traditionally bad at
| identifying good managers. I think poor loyalty is mostly
| symptomatic of poor management.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I don't really understand this article, or the current trend of
| job hopping. I'm from the generation where you have one job,
| maybe two, and that's it: I've had 7, but I really only ever
| wanted _one_ good job.
|
| For some perspective: when I left Intel circa 2010, I was a
| Senior Staff Engineer fighting to get promoted to Principal
| Engineer (followed by Senoir Principal, then Fellow, then Senior
| Fellow, hahaha). FYI I loved Intel for the first 10 years, and
| hated the last 12.
|
| I made $130k base salary, $70k typical bonus (EB+ECBP), and stock
| options (most of which were worthless). This was after over two
| decades there, started in '88.
|
| Recently, a friend (12 years younger than me) was hired by Intel
| to work in one of the ML groups. He asked if the starting salary
| was fair: they offered him $400k. I was angry, jealous, and
| shocked. I have friends that are STILL there, grinding away at
| sub-200k base salary after nearly 30 years, and they are too
| scared to leave.
|
| So this idea of coders flitting from job to job just seems so
| alien to me. I'm obviously from a different generation. I don't
| even know what I would ask for pay if I ever left consulting.
| Headscratcher.
| ctvo wrote:
| There's a lot of implicit loyalty here. You're very loyal to
| Intel even when they didn't treat you the best. Why? What
| happens when you underperform, will they show you the same
| loyalty?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| You're 100% right. I came from a long line of "work till you
| drop at the same job" men who never took vacation, so it was
| burned into me. I was loyal out of "because that's what you
| are supposed to do", which I now view to be an illness. Which
| is why I left. I was naive thinking the fun of the first
| decade would last indefinitely.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I thought Intel was stiffing ML people too, maybe Gelsinger
| kicked some butts in management.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It's an in-demand skill, supply and demand.
|
| However, lots of folks leave for a while, get some new
| experience, and come back with a big boost in salary and maybe
| title. Give it a try if still interested.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I remember my first day at Intel. A guy was putting his stuff
| in a cardboard box, never to be seen again. It was during a
| downsizing, and my boss reminded me how lucky I was to be an
| intern. "The only guy with job security."
|
| Remarkably he's still there, and I still have other friends
| there, nearly two decades later. One of them writes on FB over
| and over about how pointless the meetings are, and complains
| about the stock price.
|
| When I left, I managed to get myself an offer for the
| management track, via a friend on the same track. I turned it
| down thinking I'd probably regret it, but I decided during the
| internship that there was something about this apparent
| elevator to the C-suite that didn't quite seem right to me. The
| ease of being at what at the time was an unassailable monopoly
| perhaps seemed both too good to be true and probably hiding
| issues down the line, both for the business and in terms of
| internal competition climbing the greasy pole.
|
| But also changing jobs every now and again has had other
| liberating effects. I have a lot more confidence that it can be
| done (since it's been done lol) but also there's a variety in
| seeing various businesses and people that's hard to get if you
| stay put. The fact that new jobs generally means more money is
| a big bonus on top of that. I suppose a lot of firms get a huge
| saving from people who don't look around much.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| How many companies will be around in 30 years? Half the
| companies I've worked for in the past do not exist anymore. The
| idea that you could get a job and stay there until retirement
| is antiquated at best.
|
| Guessing that I'm less than 10 years younger than you, I had a
| college professor that told my class to change jobs every 5
| years to maximize income. That was in the early 90s.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Loyalty to your company went away with pensions. Also, if those
| numbers are right I might need to clean up my resume.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| > I don't really understand this article, or the current trend
| of job hopping.
|
| The answer is in your comment: your friend who started recently
| at Intel is getting more than double the salary of the long-
| timers. What's not to understand?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Good point. I would say the confusion is due to my outdated
| expectations.
| clintonb wrote:
| Is your expectation something along the lines of, "if you
| are loyal to the company, the company will be loyal to
| you"?
| jimsimmons wrote:
| I like your view. The thing is people are constantly resume
| building these days. And that resume is never done. You get
| a good job? Wouldn't it be great if you got your name on a
| couple of cool things in your new place? After that returns
| start diminishing and people are quick to leverage and move
| on.
|
| I came to CA hoping to find mad coders lost in thought of
| their projects. All I see are career athletes
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The problem is that his view has cost him millions of
| dollars. Not job hopping is a multi million dollar error
| his the part of them and their colleagues.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Eh, but I'm at the end of my career: in hindsight, what
| would I have done with that extra salary? Bought a new
| BMW every year, or owned a "premium beige" McMansion with
| a pool? Or two McMansions?
|
| I'm not a status-shower, and the salary increase wouldn't
| have been enough to be filthy rich (e.g., buy an island).
| I can't complain though: I ended up about to retire a
| multimillionaire despite not job-hopping. But I was
| lucky, I guess, my first mortgage was $600/mo just
| outside the Bay Area and I sold for ~8x what I paid after
| living in it for decades. Plus early in life I was forced
| to pick cheap hobbies that I stuck with: reading and
| backpacking. :)
|
| My only regret is not taking better care of my back cuz
| now I can't sleep on a Thermorest+eggshell anymore, and
| all the fiat currency in the world can't fix that. Feh!
| bern4444 wrote:
| > my first mortgage was $600/mo just outside the Bay Area
|
| Is that in todays dollars or what it was at the time? If
| it's in today's dollars that's just incredible.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| 1990 dollars, $1200 in today's dollars according to this
| site:
|
| https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
| bern4444 wrote:
| Wow, yeah what a different market. Even with a high
| paying SWE job, home ownership for me (mid twenties)
| continually feels like an always increasingly expensive
| goal that grows more distant of achieving.
|
| Cool to read though about what you posted earlier!
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I literally had this conversation with my boss yesterday, and I
| was a bit floored that they don't quite "get" it.
|
| I'm the lead dev at a small co that does work, mostly custom
| WordPress, for gov / edu / SMB (mostly NGO or trade groups). I'm
| the senior technical staff... there's a junior dev and a "project
| manager who codes but doesn't read log files".
|
| I've been working with this company for 7 years and never gotten
| a raise. We have "unlimited PTO" which really just means I have
| no idea how many days off I can take. I mostly work with the biz
| because it used to be quite flexible and was only a 30-hour-a-
| week commitment. That's become much less flexible as we lost the
| ability to stack hours without "approval", I've started to be the
| only person on-call, I now have a junior who more or less reports
| to me, etc, etc.
|
| I'm looking for work now, mostly because the cost of realestate
| where I am is outpacing my ability to save for a down payment.
|
| The thing that got me a bit worked up is that when I asked my
| boss if they'd ever done the math on what it'd cost to
| replacement (even leaving out the cost of training) and their
| response was that they were 100% sure I'd make more money at
| another company-- they are just paying me what they feel like
| they can afford.
|
| Then they gave me an immediate 5% raise and 1.5% cash bonus.
|
| None of this makes one bit of sense to me... if I leave, they are
| going to have to find someone (or several someones) who can
| operate containers in GCP, write WP/Gutenberg blocks, Figma->PHP
| WP themes from scratch, and write integrations/ imports/ scrapes
| for these sites they build.
|
| I've been interviewing and know what that kind of work pays, and
| how much the folks charge for that... but this boss of mine seems
| prepared to let me quit rather than up my pay. For full
| disclosure, I'm making 70K/yr+ health insurance and who the hell
| knows how many vacation days.
|
| It's fun to do job interviews after all this time, and pretty
| gratifying that folks are so interested to speak with me, but I'm
| a bit worried how this person is going to get the stuff done that
| I've been doing at the price they've been selling the work.
| mcherm wrote:
| If this is what they can afford to pay and you move on then
| they will get to decide whether they can eliminate your
| position (maybe they can focus on a different part of their
| business and quit building custom WordPress sites) or pay more.
| Or get by with someone too junior to be able to do the work but
| hope that customers won't notice. Or maybe close the company
| down.
| elpatoisthebest wrote:
| I really struggled with this a few years back. I was adamant
| that I didn't want to "play the salary matching game." My boss
| insisted they didn't have the budget for a raise. I didn't want
| to job hunt, then bring my new offer to my boss, etc. I let
| myself be underpaid for at least 3 years because I was sure
| that my results should speak for themselves. Then I got really
| bitter and fed up. I got a job offer that was a 50% raise. I
| took it to my boss and immediately our company magically had a
| 50% raise in the budget. I quit in the middle of that interview
| because I couldn't stomach the idea that he'd been
| intentionally underpaying me all that time.
|
| It changed my outlook on companies and playing the salary
| matching game completely. While I'm still in demand, I'm always
| looking for a better offer. I am planning on this bursting
| sometime. In the meantime, I'm going to get paid.
| acntr_employee wrote:
| We got bought by Accenture some time back.
|
| After we were on system amd thelr regular processes were in
| place suddenly a lot of people got a massive raise to match
| the min amount of money this position at this seniority level
| has to earn.
|
| So far so good. But imagine the surprise of management when
| people weren't happy about the raise (10 20+ percent in not
| few cases) but a lot of resentment was voiced for being paid
| too little for years stating that there isn't enough money
| for raises and once big corporate brother rules that there is
| a minimum salary to be paid the money can be shelled out.
|
| I can totally relate with the colleagues who are currently
| looking at other options because they feel that they were
| lied to over the years.
| fleddr wrote:
| This is because many businesses are ran from an accounting
| perspective.
|
| When they give you a huge raise, payroll costs are up. Yet you
| won't necessarily deliver a revenue increase to match it. So
| it's a financial loss.
|
| This might trigger you to leave, but accounting doesn't care
| about future potential events.
|
| Similarly, I could make the point to my boss that an additional
| monitor, would increase my productivity by 20%.
|
| Accounting disagrees. Hardware costs are now up 20%, which is
| real money spent. Yet there's nothing in the books suggesting
| more revenue. So another financial loss. "Productivity" is not
| revenue, it's an abstract concept in knowledge work.
|
| It's a very one dimensional way to look at things, and far from
| a good one, but it might explain some things.
| locallost wrote:
| > If a developer of a certain caliber is able to demand a given
| salary on the open market, why isn't their existing company
| paying them that very same amount?
|
| One possibility would be it's because of the price point that the
| manager has in his head for that individual. I don't remember the
| actual term from Dan Ariely's book, but it was about becoming
| attached to the first price you hear. So if you know the current
| salary of employee X, and they want more, you could be reluctant.
| But an unknown person that you want to hire will ask for more,
| and that might be fine.
|
| Another possibility is that the management doesn't always know
| who they should keep, or simply they have a different perspective
| on who or what is valuable. So a regular employee might wonder
| that they let a person go, but their contributions were maybe
| either unknown or not as valued by the management.
| ksaun wrote:
| I think the term you may have been looking for is "anchoring."
| datacruncher01 wrote:
| Probably because it doesn't work long term. Sure a bit of extra
| money can keep someone around for a short duration. Eventually
| that person is going to leave for the underlying reasons that
| aren't financially motivated.
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| 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 reason
| with them, but it was fought as if held like religious belief. I
| mean if it's your baby they are unhappy with, I guess you can get
| defensive and maybe you are still in a scrappy mindset, but it
| was a bit frustrating for me as my idea was not hitting very well
| :/
|
| My wife was considering leaving her job, but not because she
| hated the work, or the company, but because she wasn't
| challenged, given opportunity or paid for her effort, when
| colleagues got paid more to do 1/20th of the work. If she was
| managed and compensated properly, she would have been more than
| happy to be retained, and I imagine there are a lot of others in
| that scenario (but more who just want to escape their manager of
| course, which is also very good valuable for the boss to have
| when trying to retain people).
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| >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 reason with them, but it was fought as if held like
| religious belief. I mean if it's your baby they are unhappy
| with, I guess you can get defensive and maybe you are still in
| a scrappy mindset, but it was a bit frustrating for me as my
| idea was not hitting very well :/
|
| I've seen HR on several places referring employee changing
| companies as "treason", not only casually but on internal
| communication. So with that framing, and the expectancy of
| employee loyalty, I wouldn't expect retention to be a high
| priority.
| [deleted]
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I've changed jobs a few times and achieved great compensation.
| But each hop required arduous months of networking, study, and
| interviewing, all on top of a full time job. I know other
| engineers who are more talented than me, older, and get paid half
| as much, because they don't have the personality type to go
| through that gauntlet. Some of these people work at companies
| that pay very well, but their managers have successfully cowed
| them from demanding promotions they deserve. Their employers are
| getting an amazing value. Why would they rock the boat?
|
| In short, the software engineering interview (and leveling)
| process is designed to discriminate between employees with
| different levels of competence signaling and negotiation skill,
| so each employee can be paid as little as possible.
| nell wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| > 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.
|
| A somewhat related anecdote that I love: In an online lending
| company where I was a manager before, I had the Data Science
| team reporting to me. At some point, one of the interns created
| a variable that improved the ML risk scoring model in such a
| way that the loan default decreased in about 2%. That is HUGE
| for a portfolio that has something like 10% default. This
| intern's variable saved the company a tremendous amount of
| money... yet the company did not give him anything for an
| improvement that was 100% measurable in $.
| austincheney wrote:
| The most important phrase in that whole link:
| in proportion to their impact
|
| Perhaps if software teams didn't write such shitty software it
| would be easier to qualify things like profit sharing and equity.
| I would certainly prefer to have half the salary if that means I
| were earning a nice slice of the quarterly profit.
|
| Unless you are selling software to a customer software is always
| a cost center. It is a tool, a means to end, which may enable
| business down the road but at any moment is just a money sink.
| That said it is generally lower risk for all parties to allow
| developers to write shitty software than attempt to connect
| software releases to revenue change.
|
| In the world of web most developers I have worked with over my
| nearly 2 decades toil in configurations and composition. There is
| little or no application creation, and the application creation
| that does occur does so by a few internally trusted individuals
| irrespective of their pay or title.
|
| To be very clear shitty software decisions almost always come
| down to a single question: _Is a given decision primarily focused
| on business goals or developer preferences._ For example is
| Spring MVC, Angular, or whatever a consideration because it will
| save the company $10 million over the next 2 years or is it
| because the company is more invested in hiring developers than
| internally training them?
| vbtemp wrote:
| My all-time highest HN comment was this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563997
|
| Basically, why do I get such big raises when I switch companies,
| but getting a nontrivial raise when _at_ a company is like
| pulling teeth?
|
| How come every company I work for is willing to give me a huge
| raise and reward me for my achievements at _other_ companies, and
| not do the same for achievements at _that_ company?
|
| The discussion that followed was illustrative. But I just came to
| accept it as a fact of life. I wish I could find a place to
| invest myself in long term, but that has yet to be found...
| ryandrake wrote:
| I remember that thread (and replied to it!).
|
| It's important to remember the whole "30-40% raise when you
| switch jobs" only really happens at the beginning of your
| career. Your next job switch will maybe be 20-30%, your next
| one 10-20%, etc. until you reach the inevitable compensation
| plateau. I'm over 20 years into my career and my last job
| change was for +1% or so. No company would offer more.
|
| If one could actually get a 40% bump every job change
| perpetually through their entire career, someone who starts at
| $100K would only have to change jobs seven times to reach >$1M.
| No way on earth that is happening for the vast, vast, vast
| majority of tech workers who job hop.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Of course, the idea is you reach that upper limit sooner, and
| making so much more earlier in your career - when properly
| invested - compounds upon itself dramatically and had
| enormous implications for one's own financial safety and
| lifestyle.
|
| And also, thanks for your reply there, nice to hear from you
| again!
| madrox wrote:
| The short answer is that this is how it is in a growth industry
| with high talent demand. If you were, say, a grocery bagger,
| you wouldn't see that kind of salary jump. The moment coding is
| no longer an in demand talent, this won't happen anymore. Hope
| you retire before that happens.
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