This entire piece starts from the conclusion that engineers leave because they aren't paid enough then works backwards from there. This is wrong from my experience. Anecdotally, I have never left a job because of money. Sure, I left jobs and got ones that ended up paying more money but the reason I started looking in the first place wasn't money. It was for other reasons that usually included frustrations with management.
You should try leaving a company for money sometime. Financial independence really is life-changing, and you can get there surprisingly quickly in the tech industry by putting yourself on the market more often.
Anecdotally, at my current company nearly everyone I know who left did so within a few months of hitting the 4-year cliff on their signing equity. I've left 3 companies in my career primarily because the next company doubled my comp. I've only left 1 company for reasons other than pay.
Yep, I look at every extra dollar I could make (that I don't technically need to survive) as some number fewer minutes until I can retire. So every extra dollar is worth it, no matter how frugal my lifestyle is.
Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then. Don’t forget to live in the meantime. It’s a lot easier to hike across Europe in your 30s than in your 50s.
The sentiment is right, and sure, there are some differences, but please dont think your 50s is some geriatric period of your life where hiking across the alps/europe is not thoroughly enjoyable!
"Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then."?
The median lifespan is over 80 and developers are paid above the median, often by quite a bit. It's far, far more likely in your 50s that you'll be staring down the barrel of a layoff + industry downturn and cursing yourself for the money spent on your trip across Europe and other frivolities in your 30s.
If you spent a ton of money to hike across Europe, you've done something terribly wrong. I spent a month traveling across Europe by train a few years ago, and it was fairly cheap, certainly FAR less money than I would have spent on any vacation in the US.
Taking a vacation (any vacation) in the US is a frivolity, even if you live in the US. If you could theoretically rent out your home in the US while you're gone (for the same cost as your current rent+utilities, so no net profit), you'd probably end up saving money by spending a 2+ week vacation in Europe instead of just spending that time at home and going out to restaurants in your own town.
This is only tangentially aligned, but I live in Canada and find the same equation in the winter. I travel south, to a low-cost area, and get to shut down the heat in my house for 4 months. The result is a $2000 savings over those months on heating costs.
I don't think this is true for most people, when you ask older people about their regrets, it's often that they worked too much and didn't live enough.
I’m at that point where I’m working less and making more money and I’ve done most of the stuff people want to do traveling, hiking, gaming, etc. and I’m still in my 30s. Now everything starts to feel same old boring there’s no excitement.
It also depends a lot on what your current age is. If you're 60 or older it's 80 or more. If you're younger than that and male it's under 80, going down the younger you are. Covid and other things reduced life expectancy in the US. This is the 2021 table, the most recent, life expectancy may go down further as new tables are published. However the graphs here tell a different story:
Part of these graphs are future projections, so it's difficult to tell what to believe. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the first table is what the insurance industry and Social Security uses.
> Covid and other things reduced life expectancy in the US.
It reduced life expectancy for people who were alive in 2019. Those statistics say nothing about the life expectancy of people who are currently alive.
but obesity -- which correlates with income level and area code -- is what's killing people early. if you're fat as hell at 19 you're probably going to be even fatter at 60, and heart disease or cancer is going to kill you.
I couldn’t imagine living like that. Yes, it’s possible that I’ll get screwed since I started my money making career late, but I might have died of depression much younger otherwise. Everyone needs to find their own route through life and working your youth way is really really scary when you turn 59 and realize you haven’t lived yet.
In my 30s my single driving goal was to pay off my mortgage and be debt free (I came to home ownership late).
Thanks to this industry, I got there at 42.
I’m sure as shit not going back to the treadmill, for what?
So I am taking my young family on trips and experiences I never had growing up (visiting other countries, camping, hiking, etc.), and working on the health I neglected in my 30s.
Also being more assertive at work and not sacrificing like I used to.
Because of this, I’m probably not going to have a wealthy retirement, but I have a lot of peace of mind knowing we could keep the family afloat working minimum wage jobs, with the house paid off and no debts.
That's because we hike across our 30s, and don't stop until our 80s (at least a part of the population). Work is fine, but being outside makes you live longer and better.
I consider myself a "FIRE devotee without the compensation necessary to actually FIRE." So yea, time to retirement is definitely a variable that I actively try to minimize however I can. I don't want to be one of those guys who has to wait so long to retire that they're dead.
Knowing that you have F-you money in investments makes it a lot more likely that you can enjoy your job and removes other stresses in life, or at least it did in my case even with only lowercase f-you money.
Paradoxically, I think the willingness and ability to do that (assuming it's used at all reasonably) tends to increase your visibility and perceived value to the company when averaged over a large number of trials.
"This is stupid, but I'm going to keep my mouth shut because I like to eat and live indoors." vs "This is stupid and I'm going to tell the CEO that and suggest a better alternative."
This happened to me sometime between my first and second kids (last year or so). It was some mix of changing priorities, less time, starting to feel my age, work becoming more difficult, company cultural changes, etc. I think I've stuck a decent balance of saving and living, but man does life come at you fast. Went from happily working 60-80 hours (including some side projects) to struggling to work 40 hours. Reminds me of how one day something switched and I just couldn't drink anymore. Age is probably the biggest factor, and I can't imagine what this is going to be like in my 50s (just turned 40).
I assume you're talking about the proposed tax on unrealized gains that only applies on holdings over 100 million. 100 million dollar threshold being a critical piece of information you conveniently left out.
It doesn't really work like that. The reality is that you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary (if that's what you mean). When you make more money you typically want a nicer place to live, maybe a nicer car, your standard of living will go up somewhat. Now to maintain that standard of living you're going to need to save more money.
Maybe you have kids and you want to be able to pay for their education, or buy them a place to live... Maybe you're helping your family.
Personally I could have "retired" a long while back if I wanted to have a lower standard of living and also take some risk. But I don't hate my work, I do things out of work as well, I prefer a nicer house and a nicer car, I'd probably be bored if I didn't work.
Developers in the USA earn far beyond the level where the lifestyle creep that you describe is so compelling that it makes any sense at all to say "you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary".
A more solid factor is that companies don't want to hire part-time developers, because coordination overhead means twice the number of developers each working half as many hours are far less effective.
I meant it in that sense. Even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to work 50% for half my salary (likely) because my employer would have a problem with that. For the reason you gave and others.
If anything, most tech company contracts are written the other way around - there is almost never overtime pay and any thinking/work done both within and outside work hours is completely owned by the company.
Even under a progressive tax things don't work the way conservative fiscal armchair economists would like to have you believe.
Poor people still, comparatively, spend more of their income to taxes. That's because poor people have to spend more of their income on direct consumption, i.e. not investment.
If I'm poor I'm easily spending 90% of all my money on stuff for me, right now. If I'm rich that drops to 10%, and the rest goes towards stuff that isn't taxed.
So, while income tax may favor the poor, sales tax very obviously favors the rich. The only reason a progressive tax exists is because rich people are so powerfully favored in modern tax systems, we need to try to bring them back in line to the burden poorer people face. Even still, poor people face more burden.
The economy and society isn't structured like this. I'd happily take half the pay I have now for half the time. But the only way to get that time is to make 10 dollars an hour flipping burgers.
An injury that prevents you from working, or something like cancer in the family, could be a whole lot easier to deal with if you have a sizable nest egg.
I have considered it and it is a legitimate concern to think about. I'm still fairly young and healthy and I have enough money to not work for years if it came down to it so you could call it hedging my bets but it is something that does lurk in the background as time passes.
What's your FIRE number? When are you going to retire? Doubling your income shouldn't change your current lifestyle but it should change your trajectory towards retirement. Why retire at 65 when you could retire at 55,
or even 45?
Maybe not for you, but for your family and future children it could be a life changer. If something happens to you, having a few millions in the bank is also very nice.
I always find my salary very difficult to replace, and it's not particularly high. I'm assuming it's all pay cuts from here on out with the economy the way it is.
But if you realize the problem is not "the economy" (which you can't possibly affect), but something about you (which is the though you can affect the most), you have a chance to find a better path for yourself.
This is because the idea of economy has been highjacked by armchair capitalists.
The economy has almost nothing to do with the average person's quality of life. We've completely lost the plot. That's why a country like the US can have such an insane GDP and GDP per capita and have comparatively much lower quality of life than countries with worse economies.
When people say the economy is bad, they mean the things that actually matter. When economists say the economy is good, they're speaking of some theoretical economy nobody can see. They're speaking of numbers on a screen, that don't go into your pocket. That's where the discrepancy comes from.
I've never been in a position where I had any kind of leverage to negotiate a serious increase.
I've even been in an extreme situation in crypto sector where I was putting pressure on the company founder for a salary increase. I was earning like USD $100K per year comp total. They had over $100 million of assets. The founder, a multi-millionaire who had more money than he knew what to do with said that the pressure I was putting was like "Holding a knife to the company's throat." Guess how much of a raise he offered? 2%! I quit. Within 1 month after I quit, they fired half of the company. Coincidence? They didn't even need to do layoffs, they still had over $100 million in liquid assets/runway. They were spending at a rate of like $1 million per month. WTF!
Out of the 10+ tech startups and corporations I worked for over the past 20 years, that was the closest I ever came to receiving a raise and still didn't get it.
The whole market feels fake. Like a kind of weird social engineering PsyOp.
I'd have to make it into FAANG or similar to double my comp. I'd certainly be open to the idea, but the path seems awfully narrow for senior level midwestern engineers like me.
HR has a saying "employees don't leave jobs, they leave managers".
Pay has motivated me to look for other jobs, but only after I was already worn out and frustrated with my current job. Switching jobs isn't like getting a new car or moving to a new apartment. It's traumatic, kind of like going through a break-up. You work with the same people for years and then suddenly you will never see them again. That isn't pleasant.
If the pay is bad enough, I like to think I would leave anyways. But I think most people are given better reasons to leave their jobs and onto greener pastures.
I wonder if LLMs would do a better job as managers, if they can make up for cognitive biases in humans. Managers treat new employees with lesser experience, with higher regard and respect than existing employees with longer experience that remained at that company for a long time. Switching jobs is also the best way to get a raise, due to managers being heavily biased towards obtaining new hires. On one hand, they're supposed to keep good performers, but on the other hand they're supposed to keep talent flowing in. Employees should then also try to keep their jobs best they can, while also searching for better jobs and not getting more attached to their employer than their employer is to them?
Humans in general are too biased and faulty in their thinking. Sure, LLMs hallucinate and propagate existing bias in society, but at least they can maybe (in the future) evaluate employees and form more objective opinions towards existing staff and new hires? sounds better than humans winging it based on "vibes"?
I mean, that thinking is obviously wrong. Not everything is within your manager's power to fix. And people have different tolerances with how many headaches they put up with too. The manager might need much more time to improve things than their employee might tolerate.
Those are good points, but at the end of the day, people issues are management issues. It may not be your specific manager that is responsible but the management of the company and HR, who are responsible for the work environment that is set. I'd imagine it is a business (think money) decision on how much time and effort is put into cultivating a reasonably tolerable work environment. if employees have unreasonable demands for their work environment, I agree, it is the employee's fault. But fault aside, even for unreasonable and overly sensitive employees, they're still leaving managers who can't or won't fix people issues in their teams, more often than not, with many many exceptions of course.
If by "people leave managers" they mean anyone in the chain up to and including the CEO, then I guess? That's hardly a meaningful statement though, it's practically a tautology... the CEO is ultimately responsible for everything the company does, so whatever reason you have for leaving is their responsibility... by definition. I can't say I find a tautology like that to be a particularly insightful observation, but maybe I'm missing something.
Let me put it differently and talk about immediate managers only. If the people problem is coming from other teams, the immediate manager should "shield" their team members from that. If it is between their team members, then they need to somehow manage the person reporting to them. They can't always, and I personally find that understandable. But still, the "people leave managers" expression is implying that either that manager is not capable or they are not being given enough resources, authority or training to manage people in their team and outside their team.
From the CEO down to line managers, management is responsible for setting the tone and culture. Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook alike are responsible for how horrible and toxic of a work environment exists at amazon and apple. If the company is great, employees can usually switch teams when they don't like a manager.
Yeah, the "managers" in the term "people leave managers" refers to their immediate manager in my experience, and often their immediate manager doesn't make the call on a lot of stuff.
>It's traumatic, kind of like going through a break-up. You work with the same people for years and then suddenly you will never see them again. That isn't pleasant.
That depends on your co-workers. It may be more like getting a divorce from an abusive spouse.
How so? Getting out of a bad marriage isn't unpleasant at all. A bit traumatic perhaps, but that's like going through the trauma of major surgery so you can have your badly broken leg bolted together so you don't have to get an amputation or die of infection. The feeling of freedom and peace you get after getting out is worth the trauma of divorce.
Same goes for getting out of a shitty job with bad coworkers or a bad boss.
Sure, there is relief and a feeling this was necessary and for the best - but also broken dreams, failing social expectations, broken friendships. I guess I mostly agree with you, but I think such traumas make for unpleasant experiences...
Sure, I agree with all that, but also I think it's simply part of life for many people. Not everyone has everything go well for them in life, and people frequently make bad decisions (I'll freely admit to that myself). What's important is how you handle things afterwards. For another example, look at someone who's a really bad drug addict, but then cleans himself up and turns his life around. Sure, it sucks that he had to go through that bad phase in his life and suffer many years (which could possibly be blamed on himself, though addiction is also a biological failing). But we generally like to celebrate these turn-around stories where someone takes a bad life situation and makes it much better. The ex-drug addict will probably always be scarred from his experiences, and always need to be very careful not to get into that trap again, but usually people are happy for him despite all that.
When leaving jobs? For me it's even more traumatic. In-person working tends to come with a lot more drama, so leaving can be a relief in part. Remote working, at least for someone of my personality and slight obsession with technical matters, I could get more attached to like minded co-workers; with WFH I encounter minimal drama. But on this topic, pay is much less of an issue as well for WFH. I think I would put up with a lot more of undesirable work conditions remotely than in-person.
You think unprofessional workplace interactions, lack of growth (personal or/and company), and micromanagement aren't bad because it happens to you while you're at home?
Same. Over the past ~25 years, I've had 10 jobs, everything from junior engineer to a (failed) startup CTO. I've never left a job due to compensation. Poor morale, stubborn leadership, dysfunctional teams, uninteresting work, obviously bad business models, managerial incompetence and nepotism, have all been reasons. I even left jobs to take a pay cut to get out of these bad situations.
It’s because you’ve never stayed lo my enough for your salary to get stale. Around year 5-7 you’ll get tired of the less than inflation amounts of raise if you even get that. Every time I’ve switched jobs I get a title bump and a big raise.
Not only have I never left a job simply to get more money, I have on more than one occasion left a job for one offering less money - and considered it an upgrade.
Sometimes you have to ask: how, exactly, is the extra money I might earn here going to buy enough extra happiness to make up for the crap I'd have to put up with in the process of earning it? And sometimes there is no good answer.
I haven’t left many jobs because they paid poorly, but I’ve definitely stayed at jobs because they paid very well.
For many people working in the tech industry for the past ~15 years, they could easily find a new job with comparable or better pay. That’s no longer a guarantee for most people.
Kind of depends. I live in Canada, most companies don't pay software related jobs like dev or SDET particularly well. When I left my QA / SDET position at 9 years of experience my salary was $52,000 Canadian a year.
To give you an idea, it would've been like living in Denver, Colorado on a $35,000 USD salary in 2020-ish or so.
Not every engineer is going to be making six figures. You just don't see those folks talking about it too much.
I would say that's a very low total comp for an SDET in Canada in any major metro area (e.g. Toronto or Vancouver). New grads with a CS degree that can code can find an entry position for double that compensation. Startups or big co.
Low but it wasn't exactly unheard of either. There were full time positions publicly offering only $20,000 a year right on the listing itself. Not sure how publicly offering below minimum wage makes any sense though.
Highest offer I've heard specifically for a mid level SDET position was $72,000 for 4 to 5 YOE but it was with a big company out of Vancouver. AFAIK they had no problem filling that opening within a few weeks.
I find it pretty soul crushing to work hard and have a successful engineering team, only to have bonuses withheld because sales/marketing couldn’t hit lofty goals…
Followed by the company spending huge amounts of cash on acquisitions in the same year…
Too many companies are eager to invest in everything except their own employees.
> This is wrong from my experience. Anecdotally, I have never left a job because of money.
Leaving because of money isn't the same thing as leaving because they didn't pay you enough to stay. For most frustrations people encounter at work (or elsewhere for that matter) that causes them to want to leave, there is a price at which they would put up with it and stay. The price is often much higher than management would consider paying, and higher than the income they'd have at their new job, but it does exist. So the question of why don't they pay you enough to stay isn't really based on the assumption that you were going to leave because of money.
> It was for other reasons that usually included frustrations with management.
and here I am thinking this was a meme by HR
myself and all my competition leave jobs due to - and for - money. if you're sticking around to stay in graces of your comfortable management you are contributing to the wage gap for your respective gender in the wrong direction.
> if you're sticking around to stay in graces of your comfortable management you are contributing to the wage gap for your respective gender in the wrong direction.
No doubt you are disadvantaging your gender by wasting time here and not working two jobs. Or did you somehow think you had the privilege of thinking your income only matters to you and your family?
Amazing how people try to claim righteousness in stupidest of situations.
Wage gap for gender? There are a lot of things in life to fight for. But to fight for a meaningless stat that doesn't take into account pregnancy is probably not the best use of my limited power.
A job with good management and a good work environment is hard to find… that is worth lower pay to a lot of people.
I’m a person with tech skills in academia… myself and most of my coworkers and colleagues could make at least 2x in industry yet we’re still here because we like the job better. I have however lost a lot of colleagues.
For me it's the same. I'd be ok if management is crappy, but the pay is good. I actually left a company this year, because I was looking for (what I thought) was a very reasonable raise, but the company made negotiations very hard and annoying:
- first meeting with direct manager: I was offered a very meager immediate increase and offered a "personal improvement plan" for proper raise end of the year (I declined - I hate this nonsense and I know I'm already a senior, no need to work towards "senior").
- then 2 times a meeting was planned with the CEO, but CEO wouldn't show up. He stated both times something came up, apparently more important.
When I announced my decision to leave, at that point suddenly more was possible. I could get the raise I wanted, CEO excused himself for his behavior, etc... But at that point, too much harm was done, from my point of view.
I would have stayed easily 1 or 2 more years if the pay was decent and I didn't have to deal with the nonsense for salary negotiations.
Which I presume this is another way to say “your direct boss”.
Because 99% of an employees view of a company, and opinions about their employer, is actually just a reflection of their like/dislike of their direct boss.
Not in my case. I left Google but it wasn't because of my direct manager. It was because of Google-wide issues that are outside of my or my manager's or my director's control.
Usually front line managers are kind of hamstrung. Yes they can fight for their people, but the reality is, that if the C-Suite only wants to give you a %2 raise because well, they have an off-site meeting in Maui -- well tough.
The modern management model has been to reduce the power of the front line manager to the point he can only maybe hire and fire, but then he is the one to give the employee bad news.
There was never a management model where front line managers could freely decide on raises. There's always a budget, and you playing favourites causes drama.
The boss/employee relationship depends equally on both people. If you always "have a terrible boss" that really means your relationship with your boss is bad, which depends on both people.
You were warned. The Red Pill is near:
To spell it out: If you consistently have a terrible relationship with your boss, with several bosses... I'm sorry, but the common factor is you. You're probably a shitty employee.
Maybe, but it’s a mistake to begin applying this without a big-enough sample. A slippery slope exists: what if they say negative things about the domain? Worry that new patterns in project management are unproven but unchallengeable? I’ve had new hires say that their old team was “hard to work with” but for a release cycle I can’t be sure if that’s a compatibility odor or simply the truth.
The total cost of free sodas for engineers is probably small compared to their salaries, and for the individual engineer, the new $0.50 per soda cost is probably negligible compared to their salary. But moving from free (as in free soda) to non-free signals a culture change, and so the best engineers started updating their CVs.
Holy carp! When they took away the free soda at KFC I started updating my resume. I worked at the KFC headquarters for over 10 years and for most of that time they had free soda in the lobby. Then the cafeteria management got turned over to a 3rd party, I'm guessing as a way to save money. Setting aside a food company not managing their corporate cafeteria, this 3rd party wanted to sell sodas and that's really hard when the company is providing them for free. So, KFC took out the free soda machines in the lobby.
I'm not joking when I say that free soda was a huge selling point to new recruits in the IT department. We even used it as a "smoke" break for those of us who didn't smoke. Feeling that after lunch malaise? Walk down 5 flights of stairs to get a small Pepsi. Need to talk out some tech problem with a co-worker? Grab a soda together and take a walk. It was great.
When they announced they were removing the soda machines one of the KFC VPs even offered to pay for the supplies out of their own budget. Rumor has it that the total cost was in the neighborhood of $30k / year, which was nothing in the grand scheme of things. But the higher ups said no and the machines were removed. That's when I (and others) started to update our resumes.
I was in the break room at a former company when one of the warehouse workers who had been with the company for nearly 30 years and who had been through multiple ownership changes, made this comment to me: “well, the company is for sale again, the are buying Maxwell house coffee”.
Within a week I was answering due diligence type questions from “consultant” who turned out to be the CTO of the company that acquired us, and became my boss a few months later.
That was 20 years ago. Ever since through the 4 companies I have been through in that time frame, I have always used the break room as the barometer for corporate change.
If corporate starts sharpening their pencils at the small things they will sure cut on the bigger things like bonuses and raises. Time to leave if you are an over-performer looking for merit rewards.
> Feeling that after lunch malaise? Walk down 5 flights of stairs to get a small Pepsi. Need to talk out some tech problem with a co-worker? Grab a soda together and take a walk. It was great.
It sounds like hell. How do you not get fat doing this?
Actually, it was quite the opposite. We would walk down 5 flights of stairs, grab a small soda, and then walk back up them. Sometimes we would walk 1.5 miles around the pond before heading back to our desks. It was a bit of a workout, all told.
So strange how even within the same country our cultures differ enough to have stuff like this which actually disgusts me. Have southerners never heard of coffee? How fat do you have to be to take soda breaks instead of coffee or smoke breaks?
I worked at a company that bought a smaller company. That smaller company had free snacks and we didn't. Somewhere in the negotiation someone from our company had promised the employees at the smaller company that they would be able to keep their free snacks. Anyway, merger happens and no free snacks.
Now there were probably several reasons why the merger wasn't a success and why basically everybody from that company left as soon as they could, but the one thing every one of them would bring up when you talked to them was "we were promised that we would get to keep our snacks and they lied to us".
And food can also be a great incentive for improving culture of a work place.
I went from one department where the boss penny pinched all the lunches/leaving dinners/birthday budget... To a department where the boss works hard to keep a fund that allows us to go to nice restaurants, buy catered food for major meetings, and have a budget for birthday cakes.
I will tell you one thing, I definitely overlook the shortcomings of the new boss and try to compensate for them without much complaint. The first boss? I did just enough ass covering to get solidly good reviews.
Seriously. I have a 'thing' about eating around people... feels gross, prefer not to. You'd think I insulted someone for their choices by opting out
I know they mean well with their lunch offer, but I'm barely socialized. I don't want to develop that skill, it's not personal. I'm just firmly independent
Sorry, who are you? Definitely not my employer, family, therapist, spouse, or friend.
You have no idea and are speaking entirely out of turn. I don't need judgement from anyone but them. I'll bite anyway.
We don't all seek the same 'rewards'. My career is great, well known and trusted by many. I'm paid very well. I have a healthy network despite my refusal to aimlessly stuff my face hole. The interviews for my last two offers were technicalities.
The point I'm getting at is, I can be sociable when it matters. This and most things don't. There's benefit to be had. I saved a lot of time, arguably years of learning, by skipping religiously posturing around meals.
Still, thanks for your input, I guess. I hope we're all better served for having endured it. You can keep going on about my life if you'd like, but I'd prefer if you fuck off with your contrived perception.
Limitation of others is the point. Selection. I'm a product of the environment, choosing less.
As far as you know this pulled me from the gutter. Again, fuck off. Don't tell me limiting. You don't know anything about me or the path I had to take.
Your post is basically: "mental health problems, yikes". Let's really talk about limiting. Go be an NPC somewhere else.
Try to be someone damaged people like me would actually want to engage with. It's healthier for everyone.
Or keep trolling. You do you, boo. That's how the phrase generally goes. I can tell you that because people born in my original social class created it, visitor.
One thing is certain in 2024 - ANY agreement to the low rank employees about something after merger/acquisition is a lie. Like clockwork, every single time.
Amen! This has been my experience too. When the free snacks go, it is time to move to the next job. Usually the big cuts follow 6-18 months after the first snacks have gone.
The other metric is it is easier to leave for a better position, than experience a layoff for redundancy.
I was always happier floating between 2 different firms, as you literally don't have to engage with peoples games. You can call the bluff every time, and simply drop your hours if people get irrational.
Tip: When one sees a place with perpetual Ads for fresh desperate grads, than you know it is likely a digital Gulag operating on tax subsidies. lol =3
A person close to me works at a law firm. She was feeling a bit stagnant, so she connected with a recruiter. She got a very solid offer with a significant pay bump. She gave her two weeks' notice to her firm, including appointments with the partners. One of the partners asked her for a half hour. They came back with a massive pay raise, and a promotion to partner if she would stay. She was in a state of shock, but then informed the other firm that she was staying at her current firm.
By way of contrast, an engineering firm I am familiar with had an employee who had been there six years, and knew the company's very complex product inside and out, every nook and cranny. He was one of the only people who had such deep understanding of the system that he could fix any issues that might come up, hardware, firmware, software, everything. He gave his two weeks' notice, and then went to a different job. He's a very talented guy, who would command a very attractive offer, but his talent to the current company is vastly greater than his generic value on the market, because of his detailed knowledge of the product. Although he diligently documented his knowledge, the company was still left in a jam after his departure. It would have been great if the company had fought for him the way the law firm fought for the other individual described above.
“but his talent to the current company is vastly greater than his generic value on the market”
This has always been one of my fears. I would not want to become indispensable for a no name company while paying the price of being average to the market.
The point is that the market is willing to pay more, which seems counterintuitive since the employee should be much more valuable to their current employer. But, this does seem to happen with some frequency.
Because the Industry thinks that Management/Marketing/Sales are the important "leaders" and Engineering is just mere "foot soldiers" and hence replaceable/dispensable as needed. The above is justified as "Business needs", "Investor returns", "Profit next quarter" etc.
Very early on in my career, I had a few good mentors who all told me the same piece of advice - tech (IT, programming, QA, etc) are __cost centers__ to most businesses. No matter how valuable you are, your pay is not going to scale the same way no matter how good your performance reviews are. I’m very thankful for that advice because I was never shocked when raises were low or when finding out that new, lower leveled coworkers had higher starting salaries than me. My default mindset is that I’m fungible to the business. Work hard but also expect to fight to prove your worth. This is generally good advice in any career but I think it’s a must in tech.
But it wasn't like this in the beginning of the Industrial/Knowledge revolution. Engineers/Scientists were valued and founded companies with Engineering at its core with Management/Marketing/Sales/etc. playing their proper ancillary roles. It was much later that the system was manipulated to place Management on a pedestal (undeserved) citing market/financial reasons. And Engineers have allowed this to happen, take root and persist to this day.
We need to change the above status-quo.
However; the important point we need to be aware of is that in the current Economic/Financial System many events and their payoffs are no longer linear and that is what companies are trying to optimize for. The best explanation of this is Nassim Taleb's Mediocristan (non-scalable) vs Extremistan (scalable) dichotomy. This video Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails—what they don’t teach you in STAT 101 is a very nice overview of the essential points : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcqt49dXtm8
Well, yeah, and generally you need to seek new employment regularly, because your current company is counting on you not recognizing your worth, whereas other companies will have to make competitive offers in order to win you over.
> What prevents engineering firms from acting like law firms?
I wonder if it's harder to associate an employee's skill level with company profit.
If most lawyer companies have established hourly billing rates for each employee, then the owners can more clearly see an employee's true value to the company?
and yet for software consulting firms, this billing hours are also done the same. Yet, you don't see the same level of compensation raises unlike with law firms.
I think it's true that Engineering is just mere "foot soldiers" and hence replaceable/dispensable as needed (as mentioned in another sibling comment here).
Management perceives people to be more replaceable than they are. Years of working in, or being the architect of, the company's core product will make you a true expert in it.
But, from the company perspective, your value is based on the 'market rate' for your generically defined skills and experience.
I think engineers tend to overestimate the value they bring. _Most_ companies make money from business deals that are written and signed into contracts, sometimes those deals involve automating stuff, that's where software engineers are useful. If a company loses some rock-star engineer, the automations they worked on don't break immediately, there's some time for other engineers to figure out how it works. If something cannot be delivered in a timely manner according to the contract because engineering branch got weaker after a rock-star left, companies either have to pay some fraction as fines or may agree on deadline extensions, however the contracts have been signed, the money are flowing, all the holes will be plugged eventually by other engineers.
Anecdotally, I have been recently approached by someone who was very eager for me to consult them on the product they were going to build. After a few hours of talking I quickly realized that they don't really need to build anything complex. In fact, my advise was to only focus on the core functions which are very simple and leave the majority of actual work to be done manually by a much cheaper secretary-type role until the product got enough traction to actually benefit from automation.
All attorneys that work for law firms have billable hours. Only agencies and consultancies have billable hours for engineers.
It’s easier to say “we will lose $X if this person leaves” or “$Y will be at risk if they leave due to personal relationships” than it is to quantify an engineer’s revenue impact to the company.
People may hate this, but people leaving is valuable to companies as a whole.
Lawyers typically specialize and they work off the same body of work everywhere (the same set of laws). Having worked for 10 law firms doesn’t mean that they know something current employees don’t.
Tech isn’t like that. Everywhere is different, many of us touch multiple specializations, the body of knowledge we need is always shifting. An engineer that has worked 10 places very likely does know things your current employees don’t, like different tools.
Losing an engineer is bad for the individual business, but engineers moving around is good for businesses in general.
Partners at law firms know that the money comes from the lawyers, and they (probably) know who the rising stars are.
Managers at engineering firms too often think that the money comes from the wisdom of the managers and the hustle of the marketers, not from the work of the engineers.
This may be because partners at law firms are lawyers, but upper managers at engineering firms often are not engineers.
In theory, this would become some type of exploitable game theory.
Send out offer letters to companies most indispensable people, just to jack up your competitors labor costs. Arms race. Eventual mutually assured destruction.
The fraudulent offer letters notwithstanding, I think insiders would see this as an opportunity for Moneyball rather than a risk of unraveling in confusion.
Moneyball as in an optimization technique when roles are static. Obviously this is generic because static data of any value inevitably ends up in a spreadsheet. Otherwise, I’m not sure game theory holds together here.
engineers either have patent quotas or are blue collar as far as any Enterprise is concerned.
do you have patent quotas at your position? if not they are counting the days to replace you with a machine, someone overseas, a script, AI. depending on the decade.
Why is a lawyer position irreplaceable, but an engineering/blue collar one is not?
Not trying to be spiteful or angry, just geniunely curious about the business logic and psychology behind that kind of decision making. Isn't every job replaceable?
I think the reason is not that lawyers are irreplaceable, to the contrary perhaps.
The reason is most likely that law firms are always led by lawyers, while that's rarely true for firms where most engineers work (or for most other professions). Typcially, law firms can only be owned by lawyers due to regulatory constraints (the UK, Australia being a notable, but not particularly successful exception). While this rule restricts the possible size, scalability, efficiency and profitability of law firms compared to many other sectors, it can ensure a certain degree of independence (insulation) of the management from extra-professional influences. Like "Das Kapital" trying to change the way the firm works to achieve better returns in the next 5 years.
That leads to law firm management and owners being composed mostly of people who have previously worked in that exact field and PROBABLY being better at judging the worker's worth in terms of potential revenue he/she may earn, the client trust they have and the chance that they may transfer that to another firm...
Maybe law firms also have less of an illusion about what is valuable in their law firm as opposed to those companies relying on engineers who have or believe they have some special moat outside their people (technology, source code, inventory etc.).
No professional law firm would have any illusions that their lawyers are special - perhaps outside trial lawyers and some very special field of litigation, the firm just needs burnout resistant cannon-fodder with the capacity to run for at least ten years, so they may acquire the sufficient experience, plus a number of bland human skills and patience in coping with other human beings. There never was a genuine myth of the "10x lawyer", that's something that only ChatGPT invents.
(Sidenote: I wouldn't call an engineering job blue collar as long as you work in an office - WFH, we are all collarless workers now.)
1) Power/Politics - This is basically Human Nature at work and institutionalized as Management/Leadership/etc to put themselves at the top. A lot of it is BS (see the books by https://jeffreypfeffer.com/) but unfortunately only the enlightened in the industry have woken up to this. It is also the case that in these domains many of the objectives are intangible/subjective and difficult to measure thus allowing the actors to create an illusion of "Importance".
2) Nature of Engineering - The output of any Engineering activity has a well-defined boundary. This makes it more tangible/manageable/measurable and reason about. All the main costs are paid upfront and once gizmo-x/software-y is done the recurring costs are generally pretty low. This gives the illusion that the Engineer is now not worth his pay compared to his current output and hence replaceable/dispensable based on bean counter calculations. It also doesn't help that Engineers do a pretty good job so that a product/software once released and accepted in the market is generally very stable and not in much need of rework. This is the reason "Planned Obsolescence", "Subscription Model" etc. were invented by the Industry.
a lawyer very much can, but 1. there's no machine or script capable of replacing one yet, and 2. they are half sales people with their own client lists.
Amazon used to have an internal Slack channel that allowed employees to share their total compensations anonymously. Thousands of people shared and the numbers were eye opening. Basically, if one was not a star and got consistently promoted every two or three years, she would not get compensated at market price. As a result, an L6 who stayed in the company for years often got lower total compensation than an L5 new hire who was actually an L4 before jumping to Amazon.
Note: No L7 or above shared, or so as I knew. That said, like any large company, resources tend to concentrate to the top. L8 and plus were still compensated really well, but L7 were so so because L8 became the new L7 after waves of rapid promotions inside Amazon.
I can relate to this. I was hired as an L4, got a promotion after 3 years to an L5. I later found out that my L5 TC was high-mid band for new L4s.
To rub salt into the wound, I had to have “consistent” L5 level output (translates to about a year) before I could even apply for promotion and compensation only kicked in at the next review cycle. The ~13% salary bump was retroactively granted but RSUs were not, which was upsetting.
On a personal level, promotion always means I have more freedom to do more interesting stuff (and lose freedom to some other stuff too, so there is a balance). Impact and validation of my ability are some other factors, though not that important.
Now about the monetary side: the purpose of getting promoted is to get to a high enough level. Say L7 in Amazon. Since resources disproportionally concentrate to the top, L7+ got handsomely paid, especially when you are a top performer in that band.
> On a personal level, promotion always means I have more freedom to do more interesting stuff (and lose freedom to some other stuff too, so there is a balance).
In my role I didn’t have the freedom and the opportunity because we were a small team as part of a sub-org - not much scope for multi-team impact. I have influenced some product roadmaps but for minor changes.
Should I be hunting for chances that have more meat and convince others to see things my way?
L3 can work on a feature or part of a feature. L4 can own a large feature. L5 owns a project. L6 owns a large project or something that affects multiple projects. L7 is working across multiple teams to improve many teams projects.
However, a project at rando big company might be very different than a project at a FAANG, so even these terms are incredibly nebulous.
Generally, most FAANGs are very snobby in that even if you pass the interviews, if you don't come from another FAANG type company you get down leveled. I know multiple people this happened to( Interviewed for L7 EM, offer L6 EM. Interviewed for L6 SWE, offer at L5 SWE).
Age and experience matter less though. I know L5s who are 29, and L5s who are in their late 50s.
So if you interview for L6, unless you nail every part of every interview, expect L5. Same with L7, L4, etc.
My previous company did something similar. They had employee pay structure listed in their handbook and is available to all employees. If I knew what level you were at, I knew how much you were making.
I really liked it. They rarely had the problem where people felt they were under-compensated for doing the same job - a problem that I have since learnt is prevalent in other companies.
Management Mindset: As long as the employee is not complaining, why throw more money? Besides, they can't be "that valuable and hard to replace".
I have even seen management who don't even bat an eye or goes extra mile to hire some 5-10x more expensive(even compared to market value) limited time contractor but zero interest or energy in putting up a fight to give a fair pay bump to one or more severely underpaid employee(s).
The tainting is a mind game: an employee suddenly hears from their friend or random recruiter about some lucrative offer(usually at least 25-100% raise in pay), tries out their luck and lands an offer, but now manager(assuming a sensible person) needs to put a fight[1] with upper management to bring that same bump(or comparable).
However, the relation is now tainted: employee now feels that injustice had been done and there is no guarantee that in future further raises/promotions will not come easy[2] and the manager might be looking into replacing them soon. The manager is now also sad that, they got under pressure by a leveraged employee+upper management will push to de-leverage such assets(yes a term managers use), and seek to replace such expensive assets soon. Now, both sides are running on bad trust and it gets immensely uncomfortable, hence the employee leaves anyways or get replaced by some shiny new hire who will command more than the original employee being replaced attained at their level.
[1] This is often difficult, unless your manager is politically influential, because once you have neglected an employee too long, adjustment can be bit high, it is now difficult to justify, how suddenly a particular employee became so much valuable out of the blue. Human mind is wired in such a way that, slowly ascending a hill feels less tiring compared to ascending steep jumps, as the latter takes more energy(or in case of employee big pay bump).
[2] Even though the adjustment being a correct valuation, any raise/bump of significance also brings expectations of more responsibilities and higher performance which is the same ol' undervaluing again in action.
It's always puzzled me why many tech companies seem so reluctant to give counter-offers to departing employees. Trying to pay as little as possible and not easily giving raises, even to their most productive employees, is at least somewhat understandable. But if a valuable employee is about to leave, possibly taking some critical knowledge with them, you'd think that a 50% raise should be on the table out of pure self-interest. So why doesn't this usually happen? Is it just part of keeping up the charade (a big raise is a tacit admission that they have been underpaying massively)? Is it to increase the barrier to negotiations (you have to actually leave rather than just get an offer)? Is it because HR people get more points for bringing in "new talent" rather than keeping the current workforce? Or is it just that neither HR nor management have any clue who their critical employees are, so they are unable to prioritize?
I've made some counter-offers in my time as a manager, but I've never had a counter-offer accepted.
For a start: everyone resigns because of multiple factors, and money is of course one of them - but when handing in their resignation, in order to leave on a positive note they'll focus on factors outside of anyone's control. Usually people tell me they're leaving because of something like because they want to explore new challenges, or that they just feel that it's time for a change, or because a shorter commute will give them more time with their kids.
Such reasons do not invite a counter-offer. You want to spend more time with your kids? Good for you! I won't try to argue you out of it.
For another thing, when someone offers their resignation you only have a few hours to pull together a counter-offer - so on the occasions when I was able to make counter-offers, they were pretty meagre. I always get my team as close to the top of the salary range for their role as I can, so there's no headroom for anything big without getting a bunch approvals for a special exception.
And finally, a lot of people who leave get offers that are kinda good, or at least good for their situation. If a kid's leaving my employer, who most people haven't heard of, for somewhere like OpenAI? That recognisable brand might well be great for their career. Leaving to get a PhD? Great, so long as they know what it really involves.
And if I wouldn't council them to stay, I'm not going to be able to sell a counter-offer persuasively.
Great comment. Side note about PhDs: only some countries generously support you during it. And only some jobs are easier than it. I’ve only found people with multiple PhDs to have gained very related advanced skills.
I saw someone explaining how they would never accept a counteroffer because it proves how the company was fine with not giving them a raise they seemingly deserved until they finally found it somewhere else.
I think a lot of your points play a role, but a major one is that when the employee is handing in his resignation, it's likely they have mentally already closed that chapter in their life and won't remain happy or productive. At best they leave soon anyway, at worst you're now paying a premium for worse work.
Perhaps it's because the ones who stay always pick up the slack, thus a single employee doesn't actually matter that much? Maybe it's because we still feel too entitled to consider collective action?
I think counteroffers in your typical high-quality tech company are generally bad for three reasons.
First, you should be giving people pretty good compensation packages. If you're underpaying massively in the first place, then you're going to consistently lose your best employees.
Second, you should recognize who the best employees are, promote them, and pay them more.
Third, you should be giving people at the same level very similar compensation packages. It will get a little bit off but you want to try to keep things fair.
Given these rules, counteroffers lead to trouble. If you have ten equal engineers and one of them is overpaid 1.5x, do you just keep them overpaid by 1.5x the rest of their career as you promote them? Do you keep it a secret from the other ones? Etc etc.
Usually when a counteroffer seems like it makes sense you are screwing up one of these principles of a well-run company. Maybe you're underpaying people but also not getting what you're paying for. You're paying 40th percentile pay and getting a 20th percentile team. You give every engineer an equal salary. Then your star engineer gets an offer from Google that doubles his pay.
Yeah, then it makes sense to counteroffer. But it would be better to not be in this situation.
Switching jobs, with new physical locations, new informal structures, new colleagues imposes a change cost on the software engineer too. That's why a lot of people stay.
Additionally, paying every engineer the market rate wastes money on those that would have stayed anyway.
As a similar problem, countries that pay for babies find that 98% of their money is wasted on couples that have babies anyway. The Economist says:
"schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth"
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/why-paying-wome...
Now that's a scale problem. Is one engineer staying really worth $10m? $1m? You'll pay way more than you think.
I had to think about your argument. So the underlying collapse in birth rates is actually among 19-year-old women who have chosen college and specifically because of low social mobility. Programs to help the marginal inconveniences of new parents don’t perform as well as directing that budget at social mobility.
So let’s take a four-person company: marketing, HR, CEO, and engineer. Marketing, HR, and CEO share two beliefs: (1) if the engineer goes, the product will change. (2) no company has ever existed without marketing, HR and CEO. So, it’s not like they need a program parallel to these more-babies program; they just need to feel they could adapt to selling any variation of their product.
Engineering has a different belief: imagine what we could do if we had another engineer slot in to tackle this backlog. That does look a little more like the more-babies program.
For startups, they want engineers to take a pay cut to work 996-like hours.
Especially in the UK, where there is a running joke where companies complain about a “skills shortage” when in reality companies cannot find engineers at top universities that want to take a pay cut and work for less pay.
The no-money argument is less convincing to me, because I see this happen in well-financed companies.
A very common scenario is that some person leaves, and is replaced by a new person who ends up getting paid more for doing the same role. The old person was on an old outdated rate and the new person is on a new corrected salary (that usually is higher)
I suspect it's inertia. Companies don't make the effort to update old rates to match new market rates, because that requires active effort on part of the company.
UK companies do not respect software engineers or reward them properly (not even stock), even interns in other places get paid 5x more than a senior engineer in the UK. There is a also a huge cost of living issue in the UK which makes it dead on arrival for any software engineering job in the UK.
I could say there should be more VC funding in the UK for startups but I don't think this would help either due to the above issues especially pay, as I don't see this at all.
So there is nothing the UK can do to make the situation better other than talented engineers should either go into finance / hedge funds, leetcode hard and compete for FAANG jobs only or move to the US and don't look back.
> UK companies do not respect software engineers or reward them properly (not even stock), even interns in other places get paid 5x more than a senior engineer in the UK.
In monetary terms this is not true. A good software engineer can make 150-200K in the UK without going into finance or FAANG.
In real terms you are better off making 50-80K in Germany, Spain, France, Poland, Italy, etc…, especially if you have children and don’t own property.
Good for you, i work in finance in london and don't quite make that much, none of my friends in other places like JP, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Instagram ecc does make 200k pounds/year base, maybe in tc yes. Skill issue probably.
I would say 90-120k pounds/year base for a mid-senior engineer in FAANG/Finance is what most of us is being offered right now in London, based on my recent experience. What i feel is that many of us are being heavily undercut right now, me included, while consultancy keeps it's pace and everywhere outside London it's a bloodbath.
There is no Atlassian salary data for the UK on levels.fyi. I think you are just quoting American salaries.
Deliveroo L6 is 135k average, but I think it is more realistic to look at L5, which is just around 105k.
Also, 600 a day as a contractor is nowhere near 150K+, it is 132K paid to your company's account (assuming 220 working days a year - but that's not a salary!), or you go via an umbrella and then it is even less. A 600 daily rate is pretty average in London, but only if you work for a bank - which classifies as "finance", I guess... But then you are not an employee, you are a contractor, which is very different.
On levels.fyi there is one Atlassian P60 engineer (senior? staff?) in London making 230K+.
On L60-L50, I’m not saying that everybody makes 150K+; I’m saying that it’s not impossible for a good senior engineer (or staff or principal, as we call them nowadays) to make more than 150K at a non-FAANG company.
Maybe I got my maths wrong with contractors. I never did it myself, but I know they do crazy things with taxes (eg hiring their wife, son, dog and plants, to reduce the tax bill) and that they don’t take holidays. So I multiplied 600 by 5 and then by 50, got 150K and I assumed they’d make more than an employee earning the same.
I'd left the city 5 years ago, just before IR35 hit, so my info is not quite up to date, but in general I would say that nobody can work without taking any vacations - both for health and legal reasons. Some contracts may even stipulate a maximum number of days you can work in a year (that's where my 220 number is from).
And it used to be that you could do some tricks to lower your taxes, but there is a limit, and after the IR35 reforms many firms decided they don't want contractors, or they are pushing you inside IR35, which means PAYE taxes, and worse (because you still have to do the accounting for your company, pay corporation tax etc). So contractors are earning LESS than an employee with an equivalent salary, plus there are some extra burdens. It used to be that a regular engineer (without any management responsibilities) could achieve higher income in the short term being a contractor, but I'm not sure that is the case anymore.
Outside London, if you can find a place willing to take you on as a contractor it may still be worth it, because your daily rate will be less, meaning you may not reach higher tax brackets, and compared to almost everyone else around you you would still be king.
Apart for consultants which is what I recommend people get into for a high paying job, even looking at levels.fyi, the average pay is actually lower in the UK.
Take Samsara, on average basis an entry level engineer in the US pays higher than a semi-senior SWE (SWE II) in the UK, taking into account the base as well for a senior also looks dismal for UK engineers.
Even when these companies are public, UK salaries just don't seem to be competitive or appealing and this all just proves my point. Just go to the US, FAANG, finance or just be a consultant.
Precisely and this requires funding (as per my other point) but since the UK has a very very very risk averse culture to starting companies I do not see this changing unfortunately.
My 2 cents - I think this is also a function of the domain the organisation operates in. IMHO, there are predominantly two types of companies - one where the technology creates the business vs. one where the business uses the technology as an enabler.
For the former, think of companies like Boeing, nVidia or the Windows/Office divisions at Microsoft. Here, the product of technology is what brings in the money. For the latter, think of almost any "IT company" in the world which pieces solutions for clients in various businesses by leveraging existing technology/tooling and applying some amount of customisation.
The former tend to value engineers more (exceptions are always there) as there are usually less number of competitors, but the risk of the employee switching and enriching the competitor's knowledge (and hence, business) is significant. The latter tend to look at engineers as replaceable (with little to medium effort) resources, and value their payroll expenses more than retaining top talent.
Hiring people is like gambling for companies, as in most tech companies hire some person on the off chance they're a 10x developer, though expect them to be a 1.5x one on average. Even if you're a 2x developer, you haven't lived up to the hypothetical 10x ideal to your employer, so they aren't willing to put in the extra money and effort to convince you to stay, there's more incentive to put that money into hiring the next potential 10x-er
An analogy is, let's say you get a treasure box that can be opened for 100 dollars and may contain 1000 dollars. You open it and find 150 dollars. There is a smaller box inside which you can open for another 50 dollars which could contain at most 75 dollars but will most likely only contain 50 dollars. Do you spend those 50 dollars on opening the smaller box, or do you use the money to buy another larger chest that could contain 1000 dollars?
I don’t understand, from the beginning, why we weren’t talking about the 10x manager mathematically improving their team in aggregate? That has sports coach metaphors whereas the 10x engineer only has 19th century patent metaphors.
"Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" cited research indicating it can be as high as 28x.
To get that number, you have to take into consideration terrible devs who are negative multipliers.
I.e. the scale is not 1x - 10x. It's more like -10x - 10x.
I've personally experienced development projects where there was easily a -5x - 5x difference between the least and most productive. I've seen productivity improve when devs have been removed from a project.
By the time the Engineer has gone through the effort to find some place to go to, it's well past time for the company to increase pay.
They'd have to pay more than the difference, so they don't. And they'd have to be able to predict which engineers are about to leave (and churn models are terrible.)
I don't know. Every job I've left, I would have stayed if they counter-offered for some X factor of my new offer. Some of those companies were terrible, but that just means the factor would have to be very large. But I have to admit, the worst job I've ever had, I'd gladly go back to for, say $1M/year.
Middle and upper management never want to be put in a position to explain why they designed a team where it is not easy to just swap someone else in instead of paying more to keep someone. Usually if this happens, they will pay more to keep you until they find a way to solve this problem.
I worked in the UK at a FAANG, so I was on a different bonus system, but my US colleagues had a very significant lock-in. Both your starting bonus and annual bonuses were implemented in terms of share grants that vested at 25% each year. I heard from several of these colleagues that the annual bonuses were often about the same as the base salary, so for some of these guys it was around $200k. So, at any given time they had between $150k and $200k locked up in un-vested shares that would be lost if they left the company. It's framed as a benefit rather than paying someone to stay, but ultimately it's structured this way so it serves the same purpose of providing a strong disincentive to leaving.
For various reasons, I don't want to name the employer, but yes it does happen. I guess it depends on your interpretation of "long term"...
Those that are hired to be permanently based in the UK have an RSU-based system.
Those that are hired with the intention of relocating to the US instead get a smaller lump-sum signing bonus, a small lump-sum annual bonus while in the UK and the RSU incentives only start after moving to the US, and starting a fresh employment contract.
In theory, employees should only be in the UK for just over a year maximum, since if the H-1B visa petition isn't successful, you can apply for an L-1 visa instead after 12 months of employment. In my case, moving to the US got indefinitely postponed due to COVID, so I stayed in the UK for 23 months before I quit.
Obviously, beyond 2 years is moot as I'd already quit, but if I'd worked another month and had RSUs from the start, I would have been about $100k better off after those first 2 years. The next 4 years would have been worse off too, as the RSU allocation for the starting bonus would have been for significantly fewer shares due to the rise in share price over those first 2 years but the dollar value of the bonus would have stayed the same.
I wonder if what's going on is that most of the work is done by people who joined within the last two years.
Or maybe somebody leaving and having to be replaced by a new hire kind of rolls the dice on headcount, which low and mid-level managers might find interesting.
The answer I like the most is that, as the article says, when you hire a new person you have to pay, on average, market rate. When you're evaluating whether to change the pay of Joe Lifer, you sometimes have to pay market rate but often you don't have to. Maybe you'd save money by giving raises to Joe Lifer, but who knows? You're hiring people anyway, so if Joe Lifer wants to leave, that's a shame, pay the new guy instead of him.
The people running companies are mostly "professional managers" who see engineers as a fungible resource. If anything, tenure in the same role is mostly a negative signal. Why haven't you gamed the promotion system yet? Don't you want to grow into management or 'technical leadership' and spend your days in meetings? What is wrong with you?
I think the exceptions prove this rule. Bell Labs and Gore-Tex are broadly studied in business school as structures empowering technical staff to keep innovating. I believe your comment describes the case when the company is not expected to innovate.
I've heard the argument that an engineer who wants to go should be let go. They won't be motivated anymore even if you pay them more to stay. Not sure if that's valid.
In the UK, having a family often results in one partner quiting work because they earn less after tax than the cost of daycare.
Likewise interest rates on mortgages (which aren't fixed long term in the UK, unlike the US) have tripled and inflation has risen 20-25% over the last 3 years
Adopting this policy of "fire em if they ask for more" is so evil.
Depends. It helps to understand why they want to go to begin with. Basically, if you are having regular one on ones with your people on their ambitions, career development, etc. and they appear to be happy, them leaving would be a surprise. But the reality is that some people leave after a certain amount of frustration has been building up for a while and they aren't being listened to.
That can be with a lack of promotion; or career paths that are being blocked because the company looks outside the own organization for filling roles without even thinking to promote people.
Weak leadership/management can be very damaging. The whole Peter principle is a thing. If you get stuck below some incompetent burned out leadership, the best move is to just move sideways.
Companies are bad at fixing themselves. The symptom is usually high staff turnover. Throwing more money at the problem doesn't necessarily fix anything if the problem is deeply entrenched management layers protecting themselves with that money instead of using it to replace themselves with better people.
I used to have a great manager. We jokingly called him the cleaner because his career path was literally being parachuted into teams to fix them. All he did was listen to his team when he came in and then not shying away from doing surgical fixes. Including removing people or moving them sideways, promoting people, and just not being shy towards management about what needed fixing and why. He was a busy man. Lots of dysfunctional teams in that company and senior management had figured out he was good at this stuff. So he'd swoop in with the backing of management and then straighten things out and bruising some egos in the process.
And of course the reality is that we are in a job market with record high employment. Job security has relatively low value and is mostly an illusion. Especially if you are good at what you do. People that are insecure put up with a lot of crap. But a lot of jobs in tech are the opposite. This manager ultimately moved sideways as well. Because he couldn't fix the mess above him.
Like most simple arguments that make sense on the surface, reality is more complex. In some cases, this might be true, certainly if the engineer wants to go because of other reasons than pay.
I feel like this argument might be used by managers or HR in companies who know that their company isn't the greatest work environment.
I have a feeling it probably depends on the personality. People who are high on the conscientiousness scale will probably have a greater feeling of duty to still perform whereas people low on the agreeableness spectrum may coast out of spite.
Although it was only 3 years ago, from a macroeconomic standpoint, this feels like centuries ago. Since then, the tech industry has weathered several erosion events (SVB implosion, interest rate hikes) and it seems that aside from generative AI (which with the recent NVIDIA drop, may be showing first signs of slowdown), at least the VC funded startup space is at a local minimum in terms of market heat. Anecdotally, I've seen a lot of colleagues I've worked with at previous colleagues in hotter markets struggle with finding their next role for much longer periods of time with much more frustrating processes. The market for candidates seems tougher today than it's been in over a decade; in fact, I'm not sure what the last time was that it was this rough -- perhaps right after the 08 crash?
"The impact" of an engineer? How to measure that? Hmm. Let me think ....
Think of a new company the customers will "love". Start the company and, being a good engineer, be the CTO and CEO. "Impact"? The value of the new company. Pay? They OWN the new company.
It's honestly wild. Just had someone leave because of an incredibly dumb money-saving corporate policy reason. The overall impact will DEFINITELY be that projects get delayed and we waste a ton of time training the new guy, it would have been much cheaper to fix by just paying him more (or fixing the actual benefits issue). It's mind boggling how short sighted some of these fucking decisions are.
Maybe the title should get a [2021] because it sounds like the market has cooled substantially in the last year or so.
The article doesn't seem to take into consideration market cycles, assuming market rate always goes up at a rate that outpaces cost-of-living comp adjustments. While this may be the case more often than not, how are companies supposed to absorb market downturns? A salary reduction, if legal (?), seems almost as bad as redundancy except you risk being saddled with disgruntled workers who might decide to jump ship at the next moment that is convenient for them.
Some companies do. At my previous company (I have since retired), I would get yearly outsized stock grants to motivate me to stay. I sincerely doubt I could have found matching compensation at another company.
I never had any expectation of loyalty from the company and it didn't from me either, otherwise the stock grants would be unnecessary. I had some loyalty to my manager and had promised him to give a heads up before leaving the company. He knew I would retire once I hit my target.
In my experience, the job hopping for an increase only works up to senior / lead level (or engineering manager for manager counterpart). Anything after that requires time in role having a consistent, positive impact, and building up a portfolio that you can then use to sell yourself at the company for one of the coveted principal / staff / otherwise distinguished roles.
My first job hop was for about +33%. The next one was for +15%. The next one maybe +8%. Fast forward to today, my most recent job hop was probably even, maybe +0.5% at most. You definitely plateau at some point.
I see one obstacle by this transparency approach: How to create a fair measure for "impact"? I would say that it is very hard to measure the actual impact of a senior developer. He gives advice here and there, he influences decisions in a good way, he asks the right questions, he recognizes risks early and so on. All that can hardly be measured.
it's the same everywhere, not just with jobs and careers. contracts for (mobile) internet are always much cheaper for new customers than for old customers. or old customers don't automatically get the better conditions of new customers. and that although old customers are even more valuable, because they have already earned their acquisition costs.
The issue no one here seems to be talking about is that paying people according to tenure is anticompetitive for the company on both sides.
If you pay people more because they've been at your company longer (the way the follow-up post by Ethena describes[0]), you're explicitly choosing to pay them more than they can get elsewhere. You don't want to pay more than you have to for talent, so this is a hard sell to whomever manages the budget.
On the flip side, if you're attempting to pay people in proportion to their worth to you as a company, you're going to be paying less than the competition, because the competition front-loads this money. A new engineer takes a few months or more to ramp up, so if you're making an attempt to pay engineers based on their impact, you will be outcompeted by companies willing to give sign-on bonuses and extra comp to convince people to switch. That's built into the plan of the four-year cliff - you pay them a lot to start with and hope you get the savings on the other side when they don't spend the effort to switch jobs later.
Lastly, turnover isn't as much of a negative for the company as everyone seems to ascribe. Being forced to keep up with industry best practices and technologies to be able to recruit talent, to onboard new devs when someone leaves, and to retire unmaintainable legacy cruft when the creator leaves are not strictly negatives - they are risk reduction. That's not mentioning the benefit of fresh eyes and fresh ideas.
(Honestly, I think all of this discussion on both sides ascribes too much rational decision-making to what is essentially cargo-culted hiring processes. The biggest companies copy decisions from each other to the point that it's literally collusion[1], and everyone else follows suit because they are smaller and don't have the economies of scale to make researching alternatives positive expected value. People at the top setting policies don't have lines of communication to front-line managers to be able to determine whether their particular company needs extra focus on retaining developers for business continuity reasons, so to the extent that it's a conscious decision at all, it's based on industry-wide studies or company-wide turnover statistics.)
It's challenging being in big tech right now. I spent a year applying for equivalent level jobs at peer institutions and startups. Finally got an offer from a startup that was heavily stock weighted. Took the offer to my boss and got a $100k raise within a week.
How can a company effectively measure an employee's impact?
In my experience, when performance metrics are tied to salary, employees often manipulate the numbers to reflect a more favorable outcome, which may not accurately represent their true impact.
While the conclusion that engineers leave because they aren't paid enough does hold some truth, I'm much more compelled to cite the old "People quit managers, not jobs" saying.
In my experience money is absolutely part of the reason why people quit. Not everyone lives in places or is in circumstances where finances don't matter that much.
All this effort, metrics, measuring impact, performance reviews, blah blah blah.
You want to make sure your engineers paid top dollar? Tell them to go interview in other places. If you truely value them - beat whatever they were offered by X%.
With apologies, they are idiots. That they can't frelling figure out even remotely who is worthwhile to keep around or not is 300% on them, something so few orgs actually calibrate on, or do so based off awful anti-signals on, and it's embarrassing that this pathetic foolery has just gone on and on and on and on, with zero signs of improving.
My boss loves me, swears I'm so full fo awesome knowledge & smarts. But every review, there's some VP pissed off I asked a question about why we were switching to OKRs or how to was going to work or how it would help or some security team pissed off because I have complained about NetSkope or their shitty undocumented USB drive blocking policies. There's always some fuck doing a shitty job offended that some engineer dare speak up, and my boss is telling me again and again it's costing me many dozens of $k in raises.
It's so so so sad. Even if there aren't the dogshit losers, there's still so little discernment & taste. And there's so many people who can look busy and suck up, but actual deep knowledge is so so rarely respected. There's so many orgs that straight up deserve to fail, based on how bad they are at supporting their truest asset, their human resources.
It helps a lot! But honestly I think it's a bad disease that we say it's up to everyman to market & grow acceptance for everything they try.
It should be up to organizarions to discern & navigate what their people say, to find good options collectively, collaboratively, & not based on crude lowest levels of popularity/acceptance. There's a tyrant of structureless that most companies blindly wander into, that lets things settle as they may, without trying at all to suss out what maybe perhaps possibly could be right. It's ought not be up to every practitioner to advocate for & battle alone, battle politically for right; orgs ought build in mechanisms of support. Failing that I think they deserve to die.
But there's no supply for the people who know your product and codebase except for your existing employees, isn't that the whole point of paying them to stay?
In my experience it's virtually impossible to reach the same level of familiarity with a codebase as the people who originally wrote it. This is not only due to years of accumulated complexity and debt, but also the fact that code simply does not capture business intent completely, let alone correctly or with full context.
This is why projects tend to be put on maintenance mode or rewritten (piecemeal or from scratch) once their original owners are gone. This can be, but isn't always, expensive for the business' owners.
Depends heavily on the company and codebase. I've had situations when there is literally no way to arrive at the correct implementation unless you ask the guy who 8 years ago spent several months analyzing a particular unfixable hardware bug.
The worst case is mass layoffs instead of natural gradual replacement, since entire teams leave with no time to document their area (and little motivation to do so)
Over a period of 6 years, until they reach 30% of the knowledge/velocity of the people who wrote the original thing. /s
Basically the company:
- hires a new engineer on the new market rate so they get up spending extra money
- spends extra time and resources to onboard the new engineer to a fraction of the productivity of the engineer that's had tenure
Over the years, I used to think that companies are taking the hit on money and productivity in order to not have "irreplaceable" engineers. Better have replaceable cogs in the machine rather than important pillars of your company, right? Workers need to know their place, even if it costs you money and productivity.
Nowadays, I just think it's the sheer incompetence and the stubborn insistence of managers in thinking that giving a new engineer the same title as the title of one of your tenured engineers will somehow magically mean they both can do the same things, at the same pace.
I used to think that kind of company behavior was calculated malice, now I believe it's simply brutal stupidity.
That's right. You can just replace all that institutional knowledge and established social network infrastructure for a cost so low it's negligible. Not worth mentioning even.
if the salary of a role is 100k and you can pay seniors up to 400k (or some number). After some point, it won't make sense financially to increase salary as you can hire people for this role with much less. So the limit of the pay is set by market. If engineers want bigger and bigger pay, they would need to change to other roles that pay more.
It doesn’t seem to work that way. It seems like you need to seek new employment every 4 years or so in order to maximize your salary, unless perhaps you are working at a FAANG company, in which case perhaps it might be difficult to get an offer competitive with FAANG compensation.
