[HN Gopher] Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries
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Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries
Author : vr000m
Score : 115 points
Date : 2022-02-18 10:58 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.daily.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.daily.co)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The company I'm with now makes promotions without salary
| increases. The salary increase comes in the next review cycle
| when you've proven that you can do the job. It seems very unusual
| to me, has anyone else seen this?
| LandR wrote:
| So you get promoted, then have to do that job at a lower salary
| than the position should get you.
|
| Once you get the raise at the review cycle, is this also back
| paid for the time you were under paid for the role ?
| taneq wrote:
| Pretty cunning, I bet whoever thought that one up got a raise
| (in the next review cycle).
| ant6n wrote:
| At my place (not software), they ask me to perform the job at
| the next level, in order to prove that I can do it, before
| promoting me. They also require that at least 2 years are
| spent at each level. And during Corona they didn't promote
| anybody, meaning everybody`s career slid back by up to an
| extra year, depending on where u were in the cycle.
|
| I would've much preferred if they had promoted ppl and done
| salary increases later.
| sokoloff wrote:
| With overlapping bands, it's not necessarily the case that
| you were being underpaid (in a cosmic fairness sense).
|
| If you are a level N Foo and doing well (as determined by
| doing some amount of level N+1 work), you might be earning
| the top of the level N Foo band. If that's above the bottom
| of the N+1 band, you might be making the same as or more than
| the most recent N+1 hire.
|
| The day the company decides that your level "rounds" from N
| to N+1, you might already be being paid the exact correct
| amount.
|
| Design of pay scales and how they interact with promotion
| thresholds is complex enough that many fair systems can
| evolve. Most systems have evolved to slightly underpay the
| "almost N+1" employees for a period of time, leading to the
| expectation that promotion come with an immediate salary bump
| (and often companies do that to make the promotions "feel
| bigger"), so maybe the problem is promotions under _that_
| system should come with back pay rather than the situation
| described here being the one where back pay is owed.
| someelephant wrote:
| sure. usually more common in places where workers have low self
| confidence and don't think they could do better. if only they
| knew what opportunities were out there
| switch007 wrote:
| Are there many well paid good jobs for people with low self
| confidence? Ie can low self confidence people actually get
| those jobs by passing the interviews and succeeding in the
| role etc?
| thenerdhead wrote:
| There's a huge loyalty tax being paid here. Although the
| transparency is nice to have, it's simply not a sustainable
| model.
|
| People grow at all sorts of rates professionally. Some people can
| grow from a formal level to another in a year as they get a hang
| for their responsibilities/job. Some people have extremely hard
| years due to external factors too. This type of system
| incentivizes nobody. Why work hard? Why do challenging stuff? Why
| take on the jobs with most responsibilities? Etc
|
| > In the coming months, we aim to develop written guidance on
| what career growth looks like for different roles, and we'll
| start experimenting with rewards and recognition other than
| salary for particularly noteworthy achievements.
|
| How do you reward or give recognition if your system isn't fully
| thought through or based on the traditional methods of perceived
| impact and notable accomplishment? Isn't that exactly what this
| would be anyway?
|
| Honestly this sounds like a startup who just landed recent
| funding thinks they are "disrupting" the market with new
| unconventional TC methods. Not everyone is the same. One person
| with ten years of experience is another persons four years.
|
| What fairness is to me is understanding where you sit relative to
| your peers and market. It is checks and balances of your worth
| and not political players reaping the rewards constantly. It's
| the whole idea that there's three types of workers: experts,
| operators, and politicians. The former two actually do the work,
| the latter just takes the credit more visibly.
| pfortuny wrote:
| This is topical but your comment reminded me of Deming's New
| Economics.
|
| Rewards in a system with intrinsic variance are harmful and
| unjust.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Yep, everyone needs to work together so everyone can win.
| bl4ckm0r3 wrote:
| It really feels like the objective for growth is just to wait,
| and not based on actual skills. Not sure if this is a good metric
| tbh, years of experience have a lot to do with type of
| challenges, and type of challenges have a lot to do with
| environment and architectures. you can be working 10 years on a
| small flower shop or building a huge distributed system that can
| handle crazy traffic or have really complex business logic. The
| worst thing to me is that it encourages engineers to focus on
| less risky challenges since the complexity of the work does not
| contribute to experience.
| KevinEldon wrote:
| This seems like a reasonable strategy worth if you plan to exit
| in the next 3 years. It is simple to manage, is designed to be
| competitive for a point in time, and focuses on performance for
| growth (up or out).
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think simple to manage and "people who don't like it won't
| bother us about promotions" is high here. Whether that makes it
| worth losing out on corner cases where you'd benefit from a
| more individualized approach isn't as clear to me, but there's
| a lot of benefit from elimination of all promotion discussions,
| referring all of those to "check the calendar; if we haven't
| fired you by X, you'll be level Y on that day."
| jen20 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Direct experience in our rubric means substantially the same
| kind of work (coding, design, product management, etc.)
|
| This is a recipe for finding people without "n" years of
| experience, but instead finding people with one year of
| experience repeated "n" times. Great if you need a specialist in
| something, tragic if you need generalists - which most startups
| do.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| Having founded and worked at quite a few start-ups, start-ups
| should aim for one specialist for every half-dozen generalists,
| preferably even lower than that. It's not a hard and fast rule,
| and pretty flexible, but if you have a single generalist and
| lots of specialists in a start-up, you are in trouble.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Numbers wise looks good to me. Amazons recent base cap has thrown
| recruiters sideways and numbers instantly jumped in reach out
| emails.
|
| Turns out yes, compensation should be increase for hard to find
| skills that people use to create huge revenue. Shocked.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| YOE has little correlation with performance.
| thebackup wrote:
| It's interesting to see these salary levels. A senior developer
| (10+ years of experience) here in Sweden is paid less than their
| entry level salary. The difference in pay between Europe and the
| US seems huge. I wonder why.
| flibblercorn wrote:
| Yes that is something that comes up on hackernews a lot, and I
| personally still struggle to accept it.
|
| According to the Daily level system I should be in their band
| 5, so $210K, but in England I am paid less than half their
| entry level salary (at current exchange rates).
|
| Americans don't have IQ scores, or any other metric to suggest
| being approximately 4-8 times the quality of other developed
| countries workers, so it's hard to just take it and accept that
| their compensation isn't due to their ability (on average), and
| that life isn't fair.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I am an American who has worked in Europe for many years at
| multiple companies, so I feel at least somewhat qualified to
| give some insight.
|
| Europeans are just as talented technically as Americans, that
| has never been the issue. As a broad generalization, European
| _business culture_ is consistently poor at leveraging that
| talent to generate value, often treating it like factory
| work. Because American business culture is so efficient and
| effective at converting engineering talent into revenue,
| often on the scale of $1M revenue per engineer, they can
| easily afford to pay the higher wages while still making a
| fine profit. This has the side effect of making the market
| for engineering talent extremely competitive.
|
| In short, European technical talent as a resource is often
| being wasted by poor business practices, which means there is
| much less money to go around. There is no reason in principle
| that European engineers could not earn much more in Europe
| but changing business culture is slow, though some companies
| are trying.
| thebackup wrote:
| Thanks for this comment. A very interesting observation. Do
| you have any thoughts regarding American companies that are
| established in Europe, shouldn't they be able to introduce
| that American culture in their European offices?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am disappointed this comment does not receive more comments!
| I feel the same. From far away, it seems like Berlin is
| bursting with great technical talent, as well as Copenhagen,
| Stockholm, and Helsinki, yet the salaries are terribly low. (I
| see you Oslo, but not the same reputation!) Oh hey, please
| include France. They have such great, underrated technical
| universities... do amazing comp-sci research... but their
| _commercial_ software industry is so small!
|
| Some theories:
|
| * High taxes actually means lower _gross_ pay? (I am someone
| who strongly supports the "social safety net" -- do not read
| that question as some kind of weirdo libertarian / low-tax
| promoter.) As a counterpoint, usually high taxes means higher
| quality of life.
|
| * Or: Labour mobility is _higher_ in US than many high-tax,
| strong-labour countries in Europe /Japan/Korea/Taiwan. In
| short: It's easier to hire and and fire in US. As a result, I
| see massive income inequality in US, but much less in wealthy
| European countries -- and Japan/Korean/Taiwan.
|
| Another way to think about it: If software engineers are paid
| 50% of Silicon Valley in Helsinki, then Starbucks baristas are
| paid 100% higher in Helsinki. (I have no hard references to
| offer... but my point: Lower skill jobs pay living wages in
| Northern Europe/Japan/Korea/Taiwan, but less in US.)
|
| Personal question: Would you prefer to live in Sweden with your
| current wages, or a place with "up 100% wages for you", but
| much higher income inequality? When you answer, please assume
| much higher personal crime rates and visible poverty (or
| working poor).
|
| I live in a place with simply appalling incoming inequality.
| The visible poverty and working poor are so depressing. I would
| easily take a 25% pay cut to build more social housing and help
| the elderly who collect cardboard to retire immediately and
| play with their grandchildren all day long!
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The income inequality in the US is not that visible in day-
| to-day life. A large fraction of the income inequality is a
| side effect of the scale of US geography. The States with the
| highest and lowest median incomes are separated by 2x income
| and 1500 kilometers. It is also worth pointing out that even
| the poorest US State (Mississippi) still has a median income
| that is the same as Germany, so "poor" is relative.
|
| Different States have different economies due to geographic
| locale, history, and specialization. Consequently, the US has
| States that specialize in agriculture, manufacturing,
| services, technology, natural resources, etc which have very
| different economics and compensation structures which is
| reflected in local incomes.
|
| The median income is much higher in Washington than
| Mississippi, for example, but that doesn't imply anything
| about the distribution of income within those States. It
| would be like comparing incomes between the Netherlands and
| Romania.
| thebackup wrote:
| It's hard to answer your question without actually
| experiencing the differences first hand. It's not like we
| don't have visible poverty in Sweden. Almost every day I see
| people digging through the public trash bins for bottles and
| cans that pays a little for recycling and there are beggars
| in front of the stores and approaching you on the street
| asking for a money.
|
| There is however a base pension that each senior citizen is
| entitled to. About 15% of the elderly only gets the minimal
| amount which in many cases doesn't cover basic expenses, like
| rent and food, so they need to be on social welfare as well.
|
| But would I accept a 100% salary increase if it meant that
| social welfare had to be removed and people couldn't afford a
| place to live and to put food on the table? Of course not.
| Would I like if people that study hard and get well educated
| also get well paid jobs? Yes!
| benreesman wrote:
| This is sort of well-articulated and someone thought about it a
| lot. The salaries seem fine, as long as there's 1MM in liquid
| equity to go with the L7 one like Google does.
|
| But it doesn't seem to address the real issue (to which I also
| don't have a final answer): the jock/nerd thing is still playing
| out.
|
| If, as I believe is mostly true, A16 is pretty on the money with
| the software eats the world thing: hackers "should" today and
| inevitably will be the highest paid people possibly excepting the
| best salesperson.
|
| If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day,
| anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring.
|
| COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have _way_ less
| edge over Zoom.
|
| It's going to be a painful, but ultimately necessary transition
| where everyone whose math stopped at calc has their TC stop at
| 150-200k, and that money/seniority/prestige goes to the _only_
| truly irreplaceable people, again with the notable exception of
| the sales guy.
| humanrebar wrote:
| > COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have way
| less edge over Zoom.
|
| Being tall probably matters less, sure.
|
| I do find that ability to communicate _in writing_ with
| English-speaking audiences is _much_ more important than it
| used to be. Technical communication and persuasion that used to
| happen in hallways and on whiteboards is now happening in
| discussion threads, written code reviews, design papers, etc.
| In some cases, I expect people that some people that used to
| struggle now benefit from the ability to communicate more
| deliberately or without a verbal accent.
|
| I don't know that white versus non-white maps to excellent
| writing skills as such. Partly because I'm never sure what
| folks mean by "white" in these contexts.
| benreesman wrote:
| Yeah, I'm personally a bit conflicted that English,
| especially written English is such a key skill. I once spoke
| a little French, and enjoyed it immensely, but there's no
| money in it so it atrophied almost out of existence.
|
| Mandarin seems to be a pretty credible candidate for a "must
| know" business language, but even there that's climbing up
| hill at least a little.
| pc86 wrote:
| Why are you conflicted about this? There has to be a lingua
| franca for business, the internet, etc. (not necessarily
| the same language). Historically speaking, it makes sense
| how English would bubble up as this language. Why should
| that cause guilt or conflict?
| codechad wrote:
| rr808 wrote:
| > If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day,
| anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring.
|
| Optimizing compiler is a great example of a niche that a few
| guys should be in that really shouldn't be paid well. The big
| bucks earned at Google/FB aren't earned because they have
| better compilers or low level libraries, its because of the
| business strategies they have.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Compilers are why we can write in C++ instead of assembly.
| The related fields of interpreters and language runtimes are
| why we can write in Python.
|
| The optimising part makes languages that are faster to
| develop in run fast enough that they can actually be used to
| build useful things.
|
| Bugs introduced in that stack are horrendous to run down,
| easy to introduce and broad in fallout.
|
| Rather a lot of our modern tech world is built on compilers.
| It's a great example of where compromising on engineering
| capability scatters costs and breakage all the way through
| the system.
| bluGill wrote:
| While you are not wrong, it isn't the full picture. For
| most projects we don't need more language/compiler
| performance. Most web sights are served with a handful of
| servers, likely shared servers on AWS or something (so that
| you can get full data center failure redundancy - which is
| probably overkill). The total cost to run the servers isn't
| all that much on the bottom line and so you shouldn't pay
| more for compiler optimization.
|
| Of course google, facebook, and other large companies
| should be paying for optimization as it will pay off, but
| the vast majority of systems don't run at that scale. For
| most optimization is about ensuring response time is
| acceptable, and that is generally more about optimizing
| your code not your compiler.
| pc86 wrote:
| Nobody said they're not important.
| benreesman wrote:
| I agree that there are better examples than LLVM optimization
| paths. I was making a lame joke about the Mozilla open source
| documentary: not your bad it was so obscure.
|
| Everything is math now. Google et al played a this-far
| successful strategy where they made the "know your shit"
| engineer TC 1MM so the hackers wouldn't rebel and take the
| whole cake, like they could.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| Try building FB or Google without technology, and then you
| come back and say that the business strategy is all you need.
| rr808 wrote:
| Sure but that isn't what I said. Big data, cloud services
| smart tech people definitely needs to be paid as much as
| the smart business people. Compilers, meh.
| benreesman wrote:
| You've got a point, which is that kickass compiler people
| often love PL so much that they'll do it at a deep
| discount.
|
| I've found this on average to more true of "niche"
| languages: Julia, Haskell, etc.
|
| C++ compiler people much less often fuck around on their
| comp.
|
| In my experience.
| benreesman wrote:
| To the GP, not the parent (who is dead on), can I watch?
| humanrebar wrote:
| On the other hand, increasing performance by 0.5% at their
| scale is _big_ savings. Certain kinds of optimizations can
| save over 10% in runtime performance, easily. That means less
| compute, less engineering time spent optimizing with other
| approaches, snappier performance compared to the competition,
| and so on.
|
| Yeah, pay the "business" person better who decided, wisely,
| to fund these kinds of projects. But in my experience, it's a
| lot easier to find a strategic thinker who can understand my
| previous paragraph than it is to find an engineer who can
| accomplish it. It's especially hard to find engineers who can
| see that opportunity, explain it well enough to get funded,
| and bootstrap the project until it shows enough promise to
| justify itself.
|
| You're not wrong, though, that network effects and so on are
| a much bigger determinant in competitive advantage at a large
| scale. But "business strategies" can and do include ideas
| like "don't buy extra data centers".
| benreesman wrote:
| 1% on HHVM is a number I can't say more about than no one
| would believe it.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I work in finance. I have the seen the same situation play out
| with salespeople. As risk taking at large investment banks has
| fallen dramatically since 2008 regulatory reforms, the value of
| sales people has only risen. The "alpha" sales person seems to
| have no ceiling. Ideally, this sales person is working in a
| product area that does not increase balance sheet risk... holy
| moly... they are worth more than weight in gold. They bring big
| new accounts that trade like crazy, but balance sheet (and
| risk) does not balloon.
|
| And now to offer a small criticism of your post: I prefer to
| say "conventionally attractive" over "tall white guys", because
| that would be more inclusive. Yes, really, I have seen very
| successful women who present just shy of pornstars-in-real-life
| and absolutely clean-up by selling to drooling old (dumb)
| white, male, portfolio managers. The sooner all of this is
| replaced by passive investment, the better for all _customers_
| -- but not big banks(!). After all, as the saying goes: "Where
| are the customers yachts?"
| aphexairlines wrote:
| If you truly believe this, then please reconsider. The tech
| industry doesn't reward people for technically challenging
| work. Consider how many large companies were/are built on what
| you'd consider to be terrible technology choices.
|
| Don't expect an "ultimately necessary transition" because it'll
| likely go in the opposite direction.
| benreesman wrote:
| Please reconsider because I'll do myself a disservice? Or
| please reconsider because I won't take 1% of the marginal
| revenue I generate and we can't have that kind of thinking
| going around?
| aphexairlines wrote:
| Reconsider because you'll do yourself a disservice by
| expecting the world to work that way. You don't want to be
| surprised and upset when your employer rewards someone for
| introducing more bureaucracy instead of some technically
| challenging work you delivered.
| heurisko wrote:
| > tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.
|
| Why do you leave out class analysis? This has far more
| relevance than arguably either height or race.
|
| White working class boys, at least in the UK, are the
| demographic least likely to go to university.
|
| The story is likely to be the same in other countries. If
| you're working class, you're not going to be the intake for an
| MBA.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Class analysis isn't that relevant in the workspace. At least
| in the US, your perceived class changes with economics, so
| there's not much class differential in meetings.
|
| All said, I don't intuitively buy the idea of Zoom radically
| changing opportunities. At least as a short engineer, I've
| sensed zero difference, but then again, I never thought of my
| height as an actual handicap with regard to my job (studies
| on initial impressions be damned as the initial impression
| isn't that relevant once you've built up reputation).
| benreesman wrote:
| I agree, I was using talk white guy as a shorthand for rich
| kid with several other attributes.
|
| Being a tall white guy myself I thought it would get me less
| crucified.
| sockpuppet69 wrote:
| That's incredibly racist.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| You have never applied math above Calc in your life. Just admit
| it here. It will be good for your soul.
| benreesman wrote:
| Almost all my math is from MIT OCW on YouTube and a bit of
| 3blue1brown.
|
| I don't think there's any shame in that.
|
| What's your PhD in?
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| My Bachelors is in finance and stats. I do hope that makes
| you feel better.
| cindarin wrote:
| You may be right about many things you said, but this comes off
| as though you've got a complex about something.
| benreesman wrote:
| I'll extend you the benefit of the doubt and assume your
| intention is to be helpful.
|
| Can you be a little more specific and thus potentially
| actionable?
| uberduper wrote:
| I'm just a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude.
| But I'll give it a shot.
|
| You come off as having an inflated sense of the value you
| provide while being very bitter that you're not recognized
| for it. You seem to project the meritocracy playing out in
| your head on the "inevitable future."
|
| The work you do is no doubt challenging and you seem to
| find it very rewarding in and of itself. There are
| presumably few people that choose to do this work, but you
| need to keep in mind that does not mean there aren't lots
| of people capable of doing it.
| cindarin wrote:
| Unfortunately, I have neither the proper information nor
| interest to dig into that specifically. My best
| recommendation is to look into why I might have said that,
| and decide if you care at all what I thought. If so, take
| actions to change what things that you have a desire to
| change.
| benreesman wrote:
| Maybe keep it to yourself if the game plan is to half-ass
| psychoanalyze someone and then bail when asked a follow
| up question?
| cindarin wrote:
| Just because it's obvious to many that you need therapy
| doesn't mean that any who notice are capable or willing
| to give it.
| benreesman wrote:
| If it's not obvious to anyone from the recently deceased
| kid brother thing that therapy is indicated, I'd be
| curious how.
|
| I've been getting therapy since way before that happened,
| most people could probably benefit from a little mental
| health checkup now and again.
|
| What did I do to get your knickers so twisted that you're
| banging on a recently-bereaved guy with thus far zero
| productive suggestions?
| cindarin wrote:
| I'm sorry for your loss. I'm not trying to hammer on you
| for that. I hope you feel better soon.
| benreesman wrote:
| I mean, I'm a little edgy about a fairly recent bereavement,
| but if that's filtering into my opinions about comp structure
| then I'm probably pretty bad at my job, and therefore my
| opinions will trend towards utter irrelevance.
| loudmax wrote:
| It's not just sales, it's figuring _what_ to sell, and when to
| pivot. It 's all well to have a solid tech stack but the market
| changes and companies need to see changes coming and adapt.
| Having the most optimized compiler isn't going to help if
| you're trying to sell something nobody wants.
|
| Even tech companies don't just depend on elite programmers plus
| an exceptional sales guy. You need good design, good customer
| service, good marketing, and so on. Yes, there's a lot of
| bullshit in those fields (not that programming is free of it),
| but there's real value there too when executed correctly.
| [deleted]
| kodah wrote:
| While I like this promotion system, I think it lacks something
| like what the military calls "billets". If I'm a principal
| engineer and I lead two teams of engineers to deliver projects
| then I should be compensated for my knowledge as a principal
| engineer, then I should be compensated for the magnitude of
| responsibility of being a team lead. They are, in fact, two
| separate things.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I like the transparency and fairness. I dislike that it rewards
| time rather than merit and will likely discourage people from
| developing expertise away from their core skillset as there could
| be an argument that their experience in that area isn't relevant,
| or that their relevant experience in this area is so small.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| One thing I have always wondered about is if seniority based
| compensation can promote training without fear of replacement,
| actually improving the team over the longer term.
| someelephant wrote:
| promotions are such an absurd idea in this job market
| lscdlscd wrote:
| parkingrift wrote:
| Strong disagree with basing salary on years of experience. I see
| almost no correlation between output, skill, and years of
| experience.
|
| I actually consider this an anti-pattern that actively encourages
| coasting.
| rowls66 wrote:
| The OP did not say that they were basing salary on years of
| experience, but that they were using "years of relevant
| experience". That is a big difference, and relevant experience
| is a pretty arbitrary measure.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| They address this in the article by saying it is "relevant"
| experience. They've given themselves some wiggle room there and
| I'm assuming they will trust their hiring practices to make
| sure they don't hire someone with 10 1 year experiences.
| parkingrift wrote:
| I'm more referring to the culture this would create. If I'm
| at L3 the only thing I can do to get to L4 is... wait two
| years. Why would I do anything but the bare minimum to hit
| that tenure benchmark? More importantly, why would I stick
| around and wait?
| vehemenz wrote:
| On the other hand, significant merit raises (over 3%) are
| mostly a thing of the past. Workers that gradually improve at
| their job are paid less and less each year.
|
| If you increase pay regularly on a semi-fixed schedule, you at
| least solve this problem and improve your employee retention.
| ct0 wrote:
| Experience is relative here. While I agree, there should be an
| adjustment that captures something like "years of performance",
| but its harder to quantify.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think there's a large correlation in the 0-3 years window. I
| agree there's almost none in the 12-15 years window.
| cindarin wrote:
| Amusingly to me, I think the opposite.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's fascinating to me. I'd love to chat more deeply
| about that, but I can't see a way to get at the essence of
| the difference in an HN thread.
| pc86 wrote:
| I tend toward your side of things. In your first 0-n
| years of experience, you're growing extremely quickly
| (hopefully). You're working with a lot of new tech, new
| people, if n is greater than 4 or 5, hopefully at least
| two companies if not three. But by the time you have _n_
| -teen years of experience, it's much more like you've
| been repeating the same year of experience over and over
| again.
|
| Growth, especially if you have a decade of experience
| (and not one year ten times), is _hard_. I think
| especially at the upper end it takes dedicated effort.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| One thing I have noticed is that (prior to the pandemic)
| new positions in my geographic area were almost always
| limited to the kind of roles that could be successfully
| handled by programmers with 3-5 years of experience.
| There simply weren't many higher-level roles available.
|
| I'm in a standard tech area outside of Silicon Valley -
| plenty of standard enterprise Java jobs with a slightly
| smaller number of C# positions. My experience here has
| been that I seem to be able to make lateral moves into
| similar jobs that don't particularly offer more technical
| or career growth.
|
| This relates back to your original comment about not
| seeing correlation to gains in output and skill versus
| experience in years 12-15 for working engineers. Most job
| roles in my area simply don't require more output or
| skill than a software developer gains in those first 3-5
| years.
|
| I would guess that for people who do observed a
| significant correlation in growth in output and skill
| over those longer years of experience are biased by
| seeing engineers who were in positions that required
| growth in output and skill.
|
| Another weird effect (at least in my group - which tends
| to have long tenured employees - I've been here 12 years)
| is that I see engineers get stuck in specific
| responsibilities centered around institutional knowledge.
| For example, being the devops type for three legacy
| systems that will exist forever. If a new need comes up,
| my group seems to prefer hiring a totally new person to
| own that new project. We have actually lost a couple of
| employees who (rightly) were frustrated by not being able
| to get off of legacy support projects. These are the
| programmers with 20 years of experience but really have
| that initial 3-5 years plus the same year of experience *
| 15.
|
| In my case, I had personal reasons for staying in the
| area and have had to manage my own tech growth. Typically
| by side study and programming. Some of this has led to
| new work in the day job but I realize I traded career
| growth that I would have very much enjoyed for stability.
| I have also have enjoyed a tremendous amount of
| flexibility, some autonomy in choosing dev stacks, and
| collaborating with medical researchers.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's really the opposite. You hire people at a discount and
| give the 3-7% raises within a band. It's a forward process that
| incentivizes performance.
|
| I find it funny that people in tech get squirrely over annual
| raises, but don't have a problem with multi-year vesting
| schedules with massive payouts.
| deepsun wrote:
| I've yet to see anything better than years-of-experience (or
| years-in-company). I've worked in both FAANG and startups
| plenty, and personally I've seen worse outcomes from "impact-
| driven" OKRs, nepotism, team-surfing, than from coasting.
|
| Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs (which I consider a
| healthy lifecycle for any company).
|
| "Coasters" at least know that what they do today they might
| have to support for N years following, so design accordingly.
| (Although I've also heard horror stories when they make it
| intentionally hard to understand for job security reasons,
| fortunately never seen myself).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs
|
| Based on what? You've just invalidated all the tools one
| would use to evaluate performance.
| darkerside wrote:
| Probably based on an engaged managers evaluation of their
| work output
| robertlagrant wrote:
| See above - it's strange to discount management
| techniques for promotions and pay rises, but still use it
| for firing people.
| darkerside wrote:
| I think I missed the point where parent said not to use
| management techniques for promotion and comp. Can you
| highlight what you are seeing?
| closeparen wrote:
| We're talking about leveling and compensation based
| mostly or entirely on years of experience; this implies
| they are based only a little or not at all on performance
| reviews.
| tcbawo wrote:
| A part of me wonders whether certain organizations tolerate
| "coasters" as a talent reserve of sorts, expected to engage
| when things get busy or new/interesting challenges emerge.
| For whatever reason, many businesses fire underperformers,
| promote overachievers but treat the 80% in the middle very
| generically. Why work to be a top 20% performer when you are
| treated the same as the bottom 20% performer? Coasting seems
| like a natural outcome.
| bluGill wrote:
| Your best employees should always be working on the least
| important projects. Thus they will seem like coasters.
|
| By making the best be on unimportant projects you get the
| following benefits:
|
| Nobody worries about interrupting them if they have a
| problem - who cares if you make the unimportant project
| take more time.
|
| Your second best people get to experience leading important
| projects and thus you grow them into the best people
| (sometimes the previous best people may need to take a turn
| leading, other times the third best get promoted). See
| above about asking questions - the best people can mentor
| them as needed - again nobody cares if it makes their
| project late.
|
| Unimportant projects sometimes turn into next years most
| important project - and your best people have been creating
| a good base to throw lots of people at.
|
| When sales/marketing discovers an sudden opportunity that
| needs people now - you have experienced engineers to take
| it over without killing progress on what was the most
| important project. (be careful about this one - if they
| only rarely have such requests it is fine, but if such
| requests take up too much time you probably should either
| have a dedicated department of engineers for this - with a
| real budget and management to ensure the requests are
| really valuable enough to be worth the time - or you need
| to tell sales not to make such promises)
| ashtar wrote:
| This is a great way to lose your best people. Or it's
| pure /s
| bluGill wrote:
| Not if handled right. Remember those unimportant projects
| are often self-assigned as try the latest thing to see if
| it is useful to us, and they often get high visibility to
| management as cool things we want to do next.
|
| Of course if this is only treated as unimportant projects
| they will leave.
| pmmck wrote:
| Maybe a better term would be "critical projects" instead
| of "important projects" in that case?
| closeparen wrote:
| Recently I have been musing about a SlateStarCodex-ish
| "compensation systems very different from ours."
|
| One is Oxide [0], which has uniform compensation across the
| board, explicitly with reference to this problem about how
| performance processes influence work and culture.
|
| Another might be to take LeetCode-style interviews more
| seriously. We have already concluded that the most important
| criteria for whether we want to work with someone is their
| ability to solve algorithmic programming tests under time
| pressure. Why stop at initial hire? Maybe they got lucky with
| familiar material. Maybe they crammed and didn't actually
| internalize it in a stable way. We should probably be giving
| coding interviews continuously to existing employees.
| Further, since we have concluded that shades of interview
| performance are a good way to determine seniority and
| responsibilities, we could also use these continuous tests in
| place of the promotion process. Knock it out of the park?
| Congrats, you're a staff engineer now. Barely squeak by? Back
| to intern. It sounds facetious but it also addresses the
| "promo criteria distort architecture" problem and the "YOE
| isn't ability problem." The civil service is not too
| different. Officials get to the next level by passing written
| and oral exams.
|
| Another might be to have stakeholders bid on talent per
| project. This would match e.g. the creative industry where
| teams are constantly created and disbanded, and your next gig
| is based on the department head or director's assessment of
| the quality of your work or the experience of working with
| you in a previous project.
|
| [0] https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-
| of-...
| rr808 wrote:
| As someone with 20+ yoe this is true, I'm probably as good as a
| guy with 5 yoe and honestly I want to apply for jobs like that.
| Honestly tech has changed so much I'm skeptical anyone really
| has 20 years experience now.
|
| Its hard though when people see my work history they only let
| me interview for very senior roles which I usually aren't good
| enough to do.
| sofixa wrote:
| Do you need to divulge your whole work experience? You can
| just share the last 5-10 years ( most relevant), and then you
| wouldn't be put up for jobs you don't feel up to.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| I'd like advice on how to tackle this as well.
| darkerside wrote:
| I'm gonna be real with you here. You're not as good as a 5yoe
| employee, because people are expected to grow. Nobody hires a
| junior dev because they want a junior dev for 20 years. They
| hire a junior because they think the person has potential to
| grow into a senior dev over time.
|
| Over 20 years, you've not demonstrated that growth, and so it
| makes more sense for a prospective employer to assume that
| lack of growth will continue. Compare to a junior dev who can
| bring the same productivity today, but could rise to the
| level of principal or staff over the long term.
|
| For the record, I would bet that this picture doesn't match
| reality. My guess is that you've developed knowledge and
| skills that would make you much more valuable than you might
| think. But, you are expected to demonstrate them and use them
| on the job. Good luck!
| rr808 wrote:
| I kinda agree, but as its common for people to change jobs
| every year or 3 I'm not convinced employers really look for
| people to develop.
| mbg721 wrote:
| For "individual contributors" that breaks in a way that seems
| obvious, but managers deal in unmeasurable fuzziness almost by
| definition (since humans are complicated and they're in the
| business of humans), and there's significant pressure to become
| a manager after a few years.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Coasting can be compensated for by a "we're expecting you to be
| productive or we'll help you move on with our thanks & good
| will" policy. Make it easy for managers to fire and replace at
| market levels.
| parkingrift wrote:
| What metrics would you use to evaluate performance? I know
| what I would do, but I don't use tenure to determine pay.
|
| If the company has some metrics they're using to evaluate
| performance for the purposes of moving on from low
| performers... why not just use those metrics to move people
| up/down instead of years of tenure?
| m4l3x wrote:
| I am not sure if this kind of transparency will be beneficial to
| the employees or not. Like the article mentioning there is
| leverage missing for salary negotiation. That mean, that some
| folks would earn less assuming the model was adapted everywhere.
| However it may clean up inequalities. In the end people are
| divers. There are hires with only 2 years delivering better
| results, than one with 5 years.
| someelephant wrote:
| you got to appreciate that honesty about leverage. this whole
| program was designed because they weren't competitive in the
| market.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This is quite interesting, and I'm curious to see how it goes.
|
| I do think the definition of "fairness" is off, though:
|
| > Because using years of relevant experience is transparent and
| repeatable, both for leveling and promotions, it carries a strong
| measure of fairness
|
| Or more precisely, there are lots of ways to define "fair". And
| in this case fair is defined as "more years in post means more
| money, whatever your job is".
|
| This is not general fairness (perhaps nothing is) but it rewards
| loyalty. Other types of fairness (which actually their sales
| teams get) is "create more value, get paid more". I.e. kicking
| back for 10 years in a role that's fairly straightforward and
| hard to measure might reward someone as much as working
| incredibly hard and transforming the business for 10 years. That
| could well be considered unfair.
|
| I think rather than "fair" it's just "easy to measure", which
| accounts for the lack of need for promotion recommendations. I've
| never known them take very long, but yes, a length of tenure
| calculation will always be quicker.
|
| I would say also that I am curious as to how competitive this can
| possibly be for attracting talent. Desirable employees who need
| incentive to move to a company will generally get more money, as
| otherwise they won't move. Additionally retention might be an
| issue, as the same principles apply; market forces will mean that
| other companies that pay according to what an employee will agree
| to work for will have extra cash to wave at daily.co employees.
|
| Finally, I suppose that in the short term, powered by VC money,
| this is likely to work, and it's as good a way to spend VC money
| as any. I don't think we should call it a revolutionary way of
| working, as having a pit of money to prop up an idea does not
| make the idea sustainable for other companies. It might remain
| automatically workable for years to come if the company raises
| more money without having to survive on its own merits.
| [deleted]
| humanrebar wrote:
| > Not being able to pay enough for great candidates is a common
| problem for startups, and we've already had to accept that some
| very strong potential teammates won't even consider us, given
| enormous salaries at established tech companies. But by doing the
| legwork to make sure we're competitive within our cohort, we
| believe we'll have enough great candidates who want to work at a
| company of our stage and size.
|
| Recruiters and managers out there: I read "competitive"
| compensation as somewhere around median compensation. That will
| be attractive to undercompensated employees and employees in
| their early careers. It's hard to get good candidates to leave
| current roles without some sort of pay bump (20%, say?) unless
| there's some sort of serious dysfunction or mismatch with their
| current employers.
|
| Daily's plan is to shoot for median-ish compensation and get
| "enough great candidates" to reach the next phase of growth. I'm
| glad they're planning on revisiting in a year or so, though it's
| easy to kid yourself. Especially when you're taking what current
| employees are willing to tell you as proof positive. For one,
| selection bias is certainly happening. Also, in my experience,
| people tell you what you want to hear. Daily employees that are
| significantly unhappy with compensation are a bad fit for Daily
| now given the blanket compensation policy. The best way to
| address that is to _discretely_ look for other offers.
| sockpuppet69 wrote:
| nicoburns wrote:
| This seems broadly sensible. Only counting experience after
| schooling ends won't work for everyone though. I was employed
| full time as a software developer _before_ I went to university.
| And I had 5 years of non-commercial experience before that while
| I was still in high school that most people won 't have.
| Presumably there's some wiggle room for managers to use their
| judgement on what counts as experience, so it probably works out.
| KevinEldon wrote:
| You would negotiate how that experience is recognized in the
| hiring process.
| btucker wrote:
| I appreciate the intent here of making levels more transparent &
| evenly applied, but in practice this seems to be tying
| levels/comp to a demographic attribute people have no control
| over: their age. This makes me feel uncomfortable.
| mindvirus wrote:
| On one hand, this is pretty nice. I've always hated the career
| management aspect of working in the software industry, and so to
| have it so transparent and approachable makes a ton of sense so
| you can focus on doing work.
|
| However, my big question is how expectations and performance
| management scale with level? If someone's not there yet, but hits
| the years of experience for the next level, are they fired?
| Likewise, whose responsibility is it for people to get those
| skills by the time they age into the next promotion?
|
| Quick edit: Also wanted to call out how well written this post
| is. It lays out the facts, peoples objections, unknowns, and
| anticipates questions (salespeople remain on variable comp,
| equity isn't being addressed yet). So kudos to the author for the
| great writing on this thoughtful piece.
| david_allison wrote:
| > We start counting years after formal schooling (high school or
| college). Grad school often counts as indirect experience.
|
| As someone who worked in software development during High School,
| and took time off before University to work in software, this
| somewhat frustrates me.
|
| Alyssa Rosenzweig has 0 years of experience under this model.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Yeah, I was a bit frustrated with this as well. I was somewhat
| down-leveled right after finishing my PhD because a lot of
| employers didn't consider it experience, even though I did high
| performance computing work with projects that had multiple
| stakeholders. Honestly, I was more technically savvy then than
| I am now 4 years into working at a large tech company.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Honestly, I was more technically savvy then than I am now 4
| years into working at a large tech company.
|
| The usual reason I see for down leveling is because being
| technically savvy is not what companies actually look for.
| I'm talking most jobs rather than being in an R&D division
| that is PhD heavy.
|
| * Understanding the modern SDLC in a corporate environment
| and best practices. Academia often doesn't do things in a way
| that would be considered good production practices outside of
| it. Both from a process and a technical (CICD, heavy testing,
| layered frameworks, etc.) point of view.
|
| * The culture of academia differs from corporate which means
| that while you gain soft skills they are biased versus what
| you'd get in a corporate environment. That can have subtle or
| not so subtle impact on decision making.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| Me too. I never left school. I shipped my first commercial
| product in 1978 at the age of 11, launched my first company at
| age 14, and sold my first company at age 19.
|
| Here I am 44 years later with zero years of experience because
| I keep adding more years of college and university. I am not
| exactly the brightest crayon in the box, but I found college
| "easy" because I had years of professional discipline meeting
| deadlines.
|
| This idea of counting experience only after you left college is
| absolute nonsense.
|
| And too add, I never actually graduated from the UK equivalent
| of high school, which drives HR people nuts, especially when
| they find out that the CTO of the company they are acquiring is
| a high school dropout.
| KevinEldon wrote:
| May you continue to work until you no longer want to, create
| on your own terms, and drive as many HR people nuts as
| possible!
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I have never worked a day in my life. I get paid generous
| amounts of money to play.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Yup. I started web development when I was 5. There's a lot of
| very good, important things that you won't learn working as a
| kid (conflict resolution, dealing with bad business
| requests/requirements, etc), but at the same time, it's not
| like that experience is completely inapplicable either. If
| nothing else, 29 years of perspective on how web development
| has evolved and developer discussions means I have a radically
| different perspective than an 18 year old who decided to start
| learning to code last year.
| pumpkinprog wrote:
| Strongly agree. In some countries (for example, most of Eastern
| Europe), formal CS education is compatible with a full-time
| developer job during masters and even the last years of
| bachelor's studies. Therefore, some highly motivated guys can
| get 2-4 years of production experience upon graduation. Paying
| them a minimum wage is a great idea to distract talents!
| angarg12 wrote:
| I worked for a very old fashioned company in Germany that used a
| similar system to pay employees. After about a year I became the
| lead of my team. But since some of my colleagues had been in the
| company about 10 years, they were getting paid more than me.
| Frustrated, I left for a better (and better paying) job.
|
| I believe these systems produce a "dead sea effect". High
| performer will leave, being able to get better deals elsewhere.
| Low performers will stay, since they can' find a better deal
| elsewhere.
| odiroot wrote:
| Experienced a very similar situation in Berlin. I assume it may
| actually be a norm. Loyalty to the company > experience/skills.
| dkarl wrote:
| That's very interesting, and a contrary norm to many big
| companies in the U.S. Companies here are happy to pay
| whatever it takes to fill an empty position, but they often
| have limits on pay raises that prevent loyal employees from
| getting fair pay as they gain skills and rise to higher
| levels of responsibility in the company. Many people enjoy
| the familiarity and relationships at their job and would
| rather accept being underpaid than be forced to take a new
| job every couple of years, so the company loses a few people
| but gets to keep the rest at below market rate. Loyalty is
| effectively punished, and job-hopping is how you keep your
| salary current with the market and your experience.
|
| I know several people who have been affected by this, but the
| most dramatic was a software engineer at AT&T who had started
| in an entry-level position in network operations. He had
| received the maximum allowed raise every year, but he was
| being paid less than 70% of what other software engineers at
| the same level were making. The request to make a one-time
| adjustment to his salary had to be escalated to an executive
| in another office hundreds of miles away (the VPs in our
| office did not have enough authority) and took months to
| process. It was not routine at all. It involved a physical
| sheet of paper with the executive's signature on it.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Yes, I have seen this many times in my career. Internal
| transfer has no pay rise and may require equally difficult
| interviews as external offer. Yet, leave for similar
| position at another firm is up 20%. And, managers are so
| "offended" that you are leaving (lack of loyalty). I always
| think internal transfer is for suckers, as an external
| transfer almost always means +20%. Bizarre.
| itronitron wrote:
| Another view is that employees at the old fashioned company you
| mention don't have to get hired elsewhere in order to receive
| an annual raise. The company therefore has less turnover, does
| not hire as often, and is therefore less likely to hire a low
| performer.
| [deleted]
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Interesting! I didn't know this phenomenon had a name. I've
| seen the "dead sea effect" at a well known SV bigtech co as
| well. And this company has biannual performance review rituals.
| oblio wrote:
| http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-
| the-d...
|
| The blog has a bunch of other good article on related topics.
| vikingerik wrote:
| "Evaporative cooling" is another term for the effect. Hot
| talent leaves, cold talent stays, diminishing your total
| talent-temperature.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Those who leave are not always the best. Those who leave many
| places quickly are more likely to be difficult themselves and
| demand more. Those who leave after many years usually turn
| out to be great.
| rk06 wrote:
| Those who leave may not always be the best, but those are
| best will certainly leave. It makes no sense to Not switch
| jobs if you get higher salary and have capability to get
| it.
|
| In tech industry where job hopping gives significantly
| greater raise than yearly increment, those who switch jobs
| get more exposure and better worldview. While those who
| stay get 1 year experience 10 times.
|
| PS: Exceptions are always there
| ipaddr wrote:
| Completely understand where you are coming from. I think
| a combo of both can be important. Some depth at one org
| is important to see the results of some of your
| decisions/actions.
| humanrebar wrote:
| If you felt you were underpaid, leaving is fair. I don't really
| understand the requirement that all bosses are paid more than
| those they supervise, though. I mean, emotionally I can
| understand feeling that way. But I don't think it's a rule of
| nature or something.
|
| For instance, coaches often make less than their star players.
| Directors and producers often make less than star actors.
| Hospital directors seem to make less than surgeons.
| bluGill wrote:
| Traditional companies paid manager more, but supply and
| demand of engineers vs managers means that more and more
| middle management is making less than engineers.
| blitzar wrote:
| Telling or _managing_ a player to kick the ball into the back
| of the net is a lot easier than actually kicking it in the
| back of the net.
|
| Telling or _managing_ a team of 20 people to put products on
| shelves is a lot harder than putting products on shelves.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > Telling or managing a team of 20 people to put products
| on shelves is a lot harder than putting products on
| shelves.
|
| After 20 years of experience I can tell you it depends on
| many factors, but first of all on the people you work with.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I like the analogy, but I don't fully agree with it. If the
| "product on shelf" is a basic CRUD app, then sure, managing
| a team of 20 people might be harder than doing the
| individual tasks related to putting the product on shelf,
| but oftentimes there are challenging technical aspects
| related to the product. In some cases those technical
| challenges might be harder than management of the team.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Depends on how well isolated the tricksy bits are
| felipellrocha wrote:
| have you ever been a manager?
| 8note wrote:
| telling people is easy, actually getting the result that
| you want in each situation is hard
| Avshalom wrote:
| >>Telling or managing a team of 20 people to put products
| on shelves is a lot harder than putting products on
| shelves.
|
| no it isn't
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| And why would that be? That's a strong claim that's
| completely unsupported.
|
| Personally I disagree.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > lead of my team
|
| A lead isn't a manager or boos.
|
| That being said, a lead is frequently more valuable than the
| followers.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think this makes a lot of sense. Management is not
| "better", it is simply "different".
|
| And in terms of actual value delivered to the business, I
| doubt that a low/mid-level manager delivers _significantly
| more_ than an experienced and productive individual
| contributor.
|
| Organizations need both good managers and good individual
| contributors. Clearly managers of technical contributors need
| enough technical experience to make sound management
| decisions. But that doesn't seem like a good reason to
| constantly promote people upwards, nor does it seem like a
| reason to always pay managers more than ICs by default.
|
| However I think in some cases managers end up subject to
| extra risk if a project goes bad, so they are probably
| entitled to some increased "hazard pay" for that. (The
| risk/responsibility structure might be inverted at some toxic
| dysfunctional organizations, but that's beside the point.)
| joshuamorton wrote:
| I agree that inherently management isn't more valuable than
| IC-ness, but in terms of scope (which is one, though not
| the only metric for value) it's hard to argue that you have
| more scope than your manager. They're still responsible for
| what you're working on. Often more competent ICs are more
| independent, so this is a bit complicated since a manager
| of an independent IC can focus more effort elsewhere, but
| still.
|
| The way I see this usually at places with strong IC tracks
| and levels is that an L7 IC is payed more than an L6
| manager, but its uncommon for the L7 IC to report to the L6
| manager. You _usually_ , though not always report to
| someone more senior than you, and very rarely report to
| someone less senior.
|
| Also its far easier for a people manager to increase their
| scope than for an IC to do the same, so in some sense the
| advancement path is more clear.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| All of your points are valid. But here is the catch which
| many ICs might not realize. There are far more management
| positions than pure ICs. It's the unfortunate that you be
| disadvantaged if you stick to strict ICs path. The
| competition is also fierce. The talented ICs are so far
| above the rest (the 10x/100x engineers).
|
| It's a simple supply and demand problem. The company needs
| a lot more of above average managers/hybrids. It's not good
| for average ICs to stuck to their little world if they want
| better promotions.
| hellisothers wrote:
| Just to clarify when you say IC you mean literally an IC
| as opposed to the leadership path in an IC vertical? Many
| companies expect hither level ICs to be leaders in one
| way or another, you don't need to go down the management
| path.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| I mean the essence of the problem comes down to people
| management. If you mean the pure technical role, then yes
| that's what I am referring to which has far less
| positions. And usually your competition would be the
| elites. Because many ICs try to avoid people management.
|
| I am not talking about whether there is a such a path for
| ICs. I am talking about the numbers problem. The
| unfortunate truth is that there are far more positions
| involves people management. Engineering manager is good
| example because ICs can wield their technical skills. But
| still, this roles still requires you to do substantial
| people management.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| My boss doesn't know how much I'm paid. I like it that way.
| He communicates how he feels I'm doing to the people that
| need to know and it's working out ok.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This sounds like an unusual arrangement. Who actually
| determines your pay?
| 988747 wrote:
| It is often called "matrix structure", in which you have
| two bosses: HR boss that knows your salary, and day-to-
| day project boss that does not.
| ldoughty wrote:
| I find that interesting, and also concerning.. but I
| suppose it depends on the office culture.
|
| I tried to ignore my peers and direct reports salaries when
| I first moved into management... I lost an employee after 2
| years when another place offered him a 80% raise.
|
| At that point, I realized I couldn't count on a 3rd party
| to properly evaluate an employee's worth, and I started to
| take an active role in ensuring people are paid as close to
| market as we could afford (though, as a non-profit, we
| struggle to compete for technical talent)
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Well, I make a lot. I'm sure my boss is aware of that. I
| don't know a single person that is paid this much in
| Toronto and doesn't have to manage others. Not even
| close. So maybe that's why he doesn't need to know.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > I lost an employee after 2 years when another place
| offered him a 80% raise.
|
| First, I'd say it's quite normal in non-profits.
|
| Second, I believe that in a structure when you don't know
| the salary of your reports, there is always someone they
| can discuss it with if they feel they deserve more - and
| that person would definitely consult your opinion then.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Is not about bosses and reports, it's about performance. I
| wasn't anyone's manager. My role as team lead was to
| organise, coordinate and supervise my colleague's tasks, on
| top of my IC contributions.
|
| For another example, a guy joined a different team and was
| killing it, but was getting paid less than another college
| who was in the company 8 years and was hardly pulling his own
| weight.
| soco wrote:
| Here in Switzerland, most of the non-IT people I'm talking
| with are genuinely surprised that for instance project
| managers are paid less that developers. For them just hearing
| the word "manager" = big buck.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Supply and demand at work I guess; if it's easier to get
| project managers than developers it becomes obvious which
| one should be paid more.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Whenever I hear the term "Project Manager", and imagine all
| of the confusion collectively experienced by anyone who has
| had to explain that job, I think of Mr Burns from the
| Simpsons saying "Am I that out of touch? No, it's the KIDS
| who are wrong".
|
| Let's call it "Project Coordinator" or "Project Advocate"
| or something.
| [deleted]
| it_does_follow wrote:
| I had a similar reaction to this post, this is not a _new_ way
| of leveling, this is how leveling was done at most companies
| for a long time. State Universities and the Federal Government
| are still very much this way, with a very similar amount of
| counting years of direct /indirect experience.
|
| Back when I worked in academia I also had a very similar
| experience to yours. I wasn't leading a team but, especially
| earlier in my career, it was incredibly frustrating to be
| making significantly less than people who were both less
| skilled and less hard working, but simply had more years of
| experience. The perpetual theme was "you just haven't earned it
| yet", but "earning it" was purely a function of putting time
| in, it didn't matter how great the work you did was.
|
| I left to go to tech and even now that I'm on the older side of
| things I still prefer the pay structure being more closely
| aligned with the value of your skills + the amount you're
| willing to put into the job. I get paid plenty, and have no
| problem with someone much younger and less experienced then me
| getting paid more with unique skills and responsibilities I'm
| less interested in having.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Salary based on your "experience" as measured by the number of
| years you survived sitting by the computer.
|
| This is absolutely, fucking dumbest idea I ever heard.
|
| Say you have two engineers that both have 10 years of experience,
| one is barely scraping by and one is working his ass off and
| significant contributor to the team.
|
| They earn the same money and, more importantly, they both know
| it. And the team knows it. And the manager knows it.
|
| Can you guess which one will feel treated unfairly and will start
| looking for a new job?
|
| Imagine a good employee comes to you and says she is going to
| leave because she has been offered better salary somewhere else.
|
| You have now only two choices:
|
| 1) break the commitment you made to entire company,
|
| 2) let her go.
|
| You can also decide to promote her, but management is really a
| different job and you lost your team member anyway.
|
| Over time your business will accumulate people who just barely
| passed your recruitment process and are just barely competent to
| avoid being let go.
|
| If you think you will keep the better one just because you say
| some nice words and give them recognition token, guess again.
|
| Let me explain what this means: it promotes people who sit idly
| by the computer (because they gain regardless of their
| involvement) and punishes people who actually give a shit and who
| try hard being better every day.
|
| It punishes your business HARD. In most businesses, most progress
| is being done by small minority of employees. And now you are
| leaving gates open and saying you are not going to even try to
| keep them doing good job.
| verve_rat wrote:
| It's the dead sea effect. All the good people evaporate leaving
| only the salt.
| mnsc wrote:
| > Ambitious people like achieving goals.
|
| Like coming in, making the biggest impact they can eg. do a
| large spectacular redesign, leave for 10% pay jump immediately
| and never sticking around for that maintenance nightmare that
| were hidden in the details?
|
| Incentives will always be a tradeoff because you can't measure
| skill.
| lmilcin wrote:
| > Incentives will always be a tradeoff because you can't
| measure skill.
|
| Oh, so because it is hard let's just stop trying?
|
| You can't measure skill _accurately_. But you can try to find
| correlations and you can measure other things that are as
| much or even more important like... erm... results?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Wow, just aging into a promotion?
|
| This seems very attractive as a worker. But even I can see this
| could be problematic and not align to value production.
| yawgmoth wrote:
| Living in the Midwest and currently working remotely for a NY
| based company. Remote / coastal salaries are so much higher than
| typical Midwest engineering salaries that I'll never be able to
| return to the office again. This feels like a problem worth
| examining, but what can be done?
| JackMorgan wrote:
| For possibly the first time in human history we workers are
| able to get the benefits of geographic arbitrage and still
| command some of the highest salaries in the world. I really
| like that and appreciate it. However, if the dual benefits of
| going into an office and living in the Midwest are important
| enough for you, that office will cost you a lot in missed
| opportunity costs. I don't know if that's a problem that can be
| solved, or just a natural law of constraints.
| _jesseb wrote:
| Same here, midwest working for a SV company. Nobody in my city
| is even close to competitive to my salary, and my salary isn't
| even that amazing for SV.
| cebert wrote:
| I live in the Detroit area, and also noticed a huge salary
| discrepancy between local salaries and those for remote
| positions. The positive is there are many great opportunities
| for us to increase our income while living in a lower-cost area
| than Seattle, NYC, SanFran, etc. Midwest based firms need to
| reconsider their pay bands, or they're going to have problems
| competing for talent.
| humanrebar wrote:
| Midwest salaries have been low for a long time, and it has
| had an effect on the ability to attract and retain top
| talent. The difference now is that the market for employment
| for engineers unwilling to relocate to those coastal cities
| has expanded dramatically. The new entrants are coming in
| with market-clearing salary offers. I predict we'll see
| salary expectations in the Midwest increase dramatically.
| Some Midwest employers will have to adjust their business
| plans accordingly. For instance, consulting shops may have to
| increase pricing quite a bit.
| [deleted]
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| holy shit are people with 5 years experience really making 200k!?
| jawns wrote:
| My career path was 10 years in journalism, during which I was
| also programming as part of my responsibilities, and now 11 years
| in full-time software development.
|
| Under Daily's levels system, I'd have 11 years of "direct"
| experience and 5 years of "indirect" experience, for a total of
| 16 years of experience, putting me in their highest band (Level
| 7) with a salary of $270K.
|
| But as I've told every employer who's hired me since leaving
| journalism, and particularly as I've transitioned from an IC to a
| manager, those years of experience in journalism were invaluable.
| I learned how to ask the right questions; how to handle the
| stress of always being on deadline; how to be a generalist,
| quickly learning enough about a subject that you can clearly
| explain it to others; how to communicate effectively in general;
| and many other skills that are absolutely relevant today.
|
| Obviously, it wouldn't matter for this banding whether those
| years are treated as "indirect" or "direct" experience -- I'd be
| in Level 7 either way -- but I could see it matter for others.
|
| Full disclosure: I applied to Daily last year but they ended up
| filling the position with an internal candidate.
| sockpuppet69 wrote:
| Mezzie wrote:
| Yes, the years of experience metric greatly underestimates the
| value brought by rare synergies.
|
| I'm a decent programmer/developer, but that isn't my primary
| worth to a company. My primary worth to a company is that I'm a
| competent developer with additional specializations in both
| high-level research and media relations/communications.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I suspect that, for most locales, they're beating the market.
| There's a good chance I'd count for 15+ years of experience, and
| thus they'd pay me much more than my local market normally pays
| me.
|
| On the other hand, I had a company with a similar salary
| structure approach me. They were based in a distant country with
| a much lower cost of living. I pointed out that their salary was
| about half of what I normally earn.
|
| They didn't "get" it that they were out of their game trying to
| recruit me.
| KevinEldon wrote:
| "If everyone can get promoted simply by sticking around, managers
| have to be active in communicating with people who aren't meeting
| expectations and helping them improve. Managers also have to be
| willing to let people go if they don't show progress."
| mepiethree wrote:
| I've worked with plenty of people with "bad experience". People
| who don't learn from their mistakes, and consistently repeat the
| same errors, even things as basic as not testing their code
| before creating PRs.
|
| I guess this model works if you identify and fire those people
| early, but in general, this seems like a great way to retain
| proven career underperformers.
| SloopJon wrote:
| My company has four IC titles, the description of which includes
| typical experience, with credit for graduate degrees. When we
| went from two titles to four, I was assigned the highest title,
| and joked that it was another way of saying "old".
|
| I would be level 7 under Daily's system, making more than I do
| now, but then what's my monetary incentive to improve? Younger,
| less experienced colleagues can literally set a countdown timer
| to their next promotion/raise.
|
| It feels a bit lazy, to be honest. Some people have commented
| that it will lead to coasting. The alternative that I anticipate
| is up or out: you're a level 5 performer at a level 7 salary. You
| might be happy at a level 5.5 salary, but sorry, you're out.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It makes me think of Amazon's PIP system, where managers HAVE
| to get rid of the lower 20% of performance - whichever
| performance metric that is. When applied to this, it kinda
| means - assuming it's x years at the same company / using the
| same system - you don't get paid more for having X years of
| experience, but surviving X years of performance review
| firings. It's X years of not being in the worst 20%.
|
| I mean if using that system I'd probably set the bar higher,
| but thankfully I'm not.
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