[HN Gopher] Stop trying to promote my best engineers
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       Stop trying to promote my best engineers
        
       Author : foxfired
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2025-11-07 21:12 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (idiallo.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (idiallo.com)
        
       | Arainach wrote:
       | I largely disagree with this premise.
       | 
       | We should be encouraging people to grow, and we should be
       | rewarding them based on something as close to product/customer
       | impact as possible.
       | 
       | If someone is an incredible Senior dev who doesn't want the
       | cross-team responsibilities of a Staff dev or people management
       | responsibilities, then yes, they should be OK to stay as a Senior
       | dev without pressure that they HAVE to do something else. This
       | doesn't mean that you should pay them as much as a Staff, because
       | a Staff has more impact and that's why you're paying them more.
       | 
       | In particular, you want well-defined pay bands for job titles,
       | because otherwise things get unfair quickly. Best case people
       | find out that people are getting paid rapidly different amounts
       | for the same job, get angry, and leave. Worst case there's a
       | pattern where you're paying all of demographic X less than
       | everyone else and you get sued.
        
         | Ethee wrote:
         | I think the true problem here lies in reconciling titles with
         | responsibilities. In software engineering most of our titles
         | are very generic and can span different disciplines entirely. A
         | senior dev working on database and a senior dev working on
         | front-end probably shouldn't be compensated the exact same
         | because their disciplines are completely different so
         | conversely the value they bring to the company can vary wildly,
         | but they're still senior devs by title. But if the best
         | mechanism by which we can 'reward' these people is by adjusting
         | their title this comes with an implied difference of
         | responsibilities. Instead I think we need to do away with the
         | HR non-sense of correlating titles with value. If an engineer
         | does something of value that should be rewarded, give them a
         | raise or bonus, not a title change.
        
           | Arainach wrote:
           | >A senior dev working on database and a senior dev working on
           | front-end probably shouldn't be compensated the exact same
           | 
           | Strong disagree. There is an antipattern I've seen across the
           | entire industry, including big companies that should know
           | better, where UI work is undervalued and considered "not as
           | complex" or "simpler". I have fought with promo committees
           | who didn't want to promote people because they assumed the UI
           | work was "easy". All of the people making these claims had
           | worked exclusively in backend for a long time and all of the
           | should have to go take an IC role putting up with the hell
           | that is modern frontend development. Only then will I give
           | any credence to how difficult they think UI work is.
           | 
           | If your argument was "because there are 10x more frontend
           | devs fighting for the same job", that's one thing, but saying
           | it should be done because the disciplines are different is
           | nonsense.
        
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