Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix(neomindlabs.com) |
Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix(neomindlabs.com) |
I guarantee no one needed the author to explain that "hit by a bus" applies to more than tragic accidents.
I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's a loaded word with negative connotations, but what it really means here is "offer someone a better situation than you offered them". Employees have agency, they aren't wild elephants who need your "protection" from "predators" who just want to pay them more.
It's intentional language used by employers because it has preconceived notions and they succinctly communicate a story that benefits the employer.
When you hear poached, you think illegal and victims. It makes you think that the employer has been wronged in some way and that the employee was both participatory in something illegal or at least underhanded and at the same time being taking advantage of.
The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value.
But that's the nature of the employer/employee relationship, it's never truly balanced and one party is always benefiting more than the other.
In the vast majority of cases, I agree. If someone is working at CompuTech for $100K per year, and gets an offer from TechuComp for $110K per year, that's market forces working in favor of the developer. This is a good thing.
But there is the possibility for entities the size of Google to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves. For example, a guy working on self-driving cars might command a salary of $400K in most cases, but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them.
Most companies couldn't afford to do that, but FAANG are so vastly wealthy that they can hire entire engineering teams as a loss leader.
This is still good for the developers involved, at least in the short term, but it isn't so great for the market, or society, overall.
I think back fondly about the managers that genuinely wished me well at those exciting but scary junctions, even if I had my frustrations with them while I worked there. And if I'm being honest I still hold grudges against the ones that tried to make me feel bad and acted like I was betraying them for taking another job that I felt was the right decision for me at the time.
Even from a purely self-interest perspective, it seems to me that it's in every manager's interest not to try to guilt employees that are leaving or talk negatively about them. It's the last chance you have to leave a good impression, it costs you nothing at that point, and you never know when you may cross paths again, or the employee that left may be friends with someone you want to hire in the future and warn them not to join you, etc.
Employee value generation isn't fixed. It is entirely possible that the employee can generate more value in the same role at a different company. For example, if the product is more valuable, so is the work.
It is also possible that the "poacher" has such a ridiculous amount of money at their disposal that they're able to suck a talent pool dry with "so-much-money-you-can't-refuse" offers. I think, however, that enough employees are getting wise to the fact that a FAANG offer isn't an automatic "yes".
People do turn down offers even if the money is crazy high, especially older folks who have gained some control over their career path, have job-satisfaction, and don't want to stage-dive into a competitive hellscape of Type-A 20-somethings.
What other word would you recommend? Lured? Hired? They're not as precise.
I responded that I wasn't owned by my employer and just as they were free to let me go, I was free to leave on my own. The real reason was that since employers pay them and talent does not, they don't want to risk their income stream. Since that day, when this agency emails me to ask if I'm looking for new opportunities. I remind them of that incident and request that they don't contact me again.
It took about 8 years to finally sink in that I would NEVER have any dealings with them and they eventually stopped emailing me.
I was a SWE for a large corp for a while, and after that transitioned to a role of manager.
As I was very eager to build a good team, and the company HR looked slow and unefficient I tried doing recruting myself, at least the part of meeting people and talking them into come to work for us.
What I could decide (up to a point) the salary and benefits but people had to go thru testing with the people from HR (IQ tests, personality tests etc)
Anyway I was pretty successful in finding experienced engineers but the thing fell apart when it came to HR testing. "He/She is not a good fit for the company" they would told me.
This was going on for months. I did more than 300 interviews in my free time in maybe 5 months and only about 5 people where "ok".
At some point a guy from HR told me: 'you must stop sending employees from companies X,Y,Z to testing, we have a deal with them that we don't take each other's people' 0.o
The deal was not only no to stop "poaching" but when someone form those companies applied to a job posting they would call up the other companies HR and told them about it.
And there was more than 10 of companies they told me about that where forbidden.
Imagine all the people that applied for job at some company not knowing that their boss, the HR etc. would know about it.
It's seems counterproductive to blacklist them for behaving ethically just because it worked against you in one scenario. No recruiting agency is ever going to act in your best interests because you aren't the one paying them. One that behaves ethically is about the best you can ever hope for.
For example, some agencies only limit themselves to not representing a previously placed candidate if they are still the role where they were placed by the agency. Outside of that, if a candidate wants to move from one client company to another, the agency may even act as a catalyst, especially if the candidate would be a great fit for the new role.
That's a failure of American governance. Economists used to all know that markets needed to be regulated to make competition fair --- and efficient. But the American right has pushed for 50 years to deregulate everything, and the FAANGs have benefited from this rollback of anti-trust.
I'm not sure 'poaching' is the right word, but what the FAANGs are doing is unfair. And it's unfair because they benefit from deregulation and monopoly power that hurts anyone at a small business.
If you, as a founder, don’t want to give up equity, who’s fault is that? You’re expecting employees to work for a pittance of what they can make elsewhere and take on the risk without upside.
If employees are look at your business and decide the probability of their equity being worth anything is too low, who’s fault is that? You’re trying to dupe them into taking a bad deal, or failing to communicate the opportunity.
If your company cannot scale to provide market-rate salaries, whose fault is that? You’re expecting your employees to give up their salaries and their financial security to subsidize a non-competitive lifestyle business that suits you, not them. You’d better figure out some incentive where that equation makes sense.
There isn't an infinite maw for staffing at FAANGs, they aren't going to suck out all the air for all the technical talent in the room. Just the air for other members of FAANG and maybe the second-tier competitors. Startups that want to pay less than F500 compensation packages for greater job insecurity only think they're in the anoxic depths of available technical talent. They're really swimming in a talent-rich pool, they just want a McLaren for a Toyota price.
You can get a helluva lot done with a well-managed fleet of Toyotas, and done right, you'll get to the point where you will afford that McLaren cash-over-the-barrel should you really have your heart set on such managing such talent. Not every problem in the world requires world-class problem solvers, and in fact, most problems are solved every day by everyday people with sufficient time and determination. It just doesn't make for good copy for VC's to read about in the pitch deck.
In any case, rare is the startup I've seen that can even supply the right infrastructure to leverage FAANG talent. Their benefits aren't delivered de novo like Athena leaping from Zeus' head. For example, if you have a Free Electron personally grinding out non-core code and manning your most senior-level support desk fielding rando calls, instead of teaching more junior engineers and wading in only for the most difficult project-endangering parts, you're wasting your and their time, whether you're a startup or a FAANG.
Complaining about not being able to hire FAANG talent with sub-FAANG compensation packages without any discussion of the infrastructure is cargo-culting the effects of FAANG talent.
If you're a startup that must have FAANG-grade talent in specific positions, then pay the market price for that talent. Otherwise, you'll accommodate for lower-skilled staff like nearly any other manager in the world does, and adjust accordingly. The market has evolved so FAANG talent obtains competent legal and financial advice now, so promises without founder-level or even VC-level protections against dilution and other valuation clawback mechanisms are more correctly priced towards the market-priced zero.
Not from the employer's perspective.
Is this really a thing? Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado? Even factoring in my stock grants, I'm nowhere close to that number.
Netflix median engineer pay is around $400 - 500k, because they only really hire engineers who would be E5/L5 or above. Apple and Amazon also pay this at the titles which map to E5/L5, as does Microsoft, Uber, Square, Snap, Pinterest, etc.
This does not include stock appreciation, but stock appreciation certainly helps inflate the comp even further.
Going further out from FAANG: if you include non-liquid compensation, many pre-IPO companies pay comparably (or better, with the tradeoff of uncertainty); including Airbnb, Stripe, and Snowflake.
Source: I earn about that myself, I have friends at almost all of these companies, and I have worked at or received offers from some. Also, see levels.fyi.
I can't tell you what you should do, but from a cost of living perspective: people who make at least $300k in SFBA or NYC will very often come out ahead compared to making maybe half that in a significantly cheaper area, despite the higher cost of living.
I'm in my 30's now, with a family. There is no reasonable amount of money that could convince me to uproot and go to the valley. Sure I could come out ahead financially, but at what costs? Commuting for hours each day, working long hours, living in a smallish house with no yard, high crime, high pollution, etc. Those are just some negatives, but there are of course some positives too. For me, my time with family is my most valuable asset, and I don't think I'd sell it for $500k.
Sure you could go there and make a lot of money and basically retire in 10 years, but I'd rather have those 10 years back in time at the end I'm sure.
There's outrageous equity offered by like 5 companies. Everybody else is getting stock option grants worth 5-10% of what Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are offering (the situation is a little different for Netflix).
> Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado?
Probably not, Colorado is great.
Man I'd happily take up one of those Google jobs, but being an embedded software guy, I'm not even sure what they'd want me for. It seems like a lot of silicon valley companies are a great place if you're a web dev, or use C#/Java all the time.
You're in a lower cost-of-living location, and one where there's less competition; employers don't pay as much there because they don't have to. That said, if you like where you are, you might start by looking for remote work that pays better (from companies that don't say "we can pay you half as much because you're not in California").
Also, look for employers that have a robust technical job ladder for advancement; that's part of how you get a salary like that, and even higher. (I know software architects making 7-figure salaries.)
An interesting analogy is how many people uprooted and moved to LA in time's past to become movie stars, and how many succeeded.
Times are changing though and you can now apply to some major tech companies remotely, more will follow as Cali is now the hardest hit state and the desire to move their cools off.
It makes sense to pay a few that much so that you can have riches of people to choose from (and exploit?)
The best way to protect your prized employees is to treat them so well they'd be crazy to look elsewhere. If you, the business owner, can't afford that then you just aren't as competitive or successful as you think you are.
I think your analogy is only slightly apt. I rather see the company being raided for talent as the prey. The employee as its ivory.
First, elephants are usually not being protected from predators, but rather from hunters (illegal ones). I know it might sound like a nitpick because the two words can be synonymous, but since this is about terminology, I think it's appropriate. At the time you lose an employee due to "poaching", they're often not unhappy with the conditions you've given them and are not actively looking for another position. But they have been spotted by a "head hunter" hired to find talent for a specific role in a different company.
Second, employees might not belong to a company, but some companies spend a lot of time nurturing their talent through various programs (knowledge transfer, mentoring, experimental projects, personal time), because they hope it will benefit them in the future. Time is not free, it's even dearer than money, but it's the currency we all have the same amount of. If we don't consider another company just swooping in at the 11th hour to simply reap what should've been your benefit as a form of legal "theft", then what should we consider it?
Maybe the solution for companies would be to put some of their employees under contract, like in sports. They'd pay substantially more for those services, but a clause would include them if another company was interested to acquire their talent. That or maybe some insurance companies may start offering some compensation against poaching.
Poaching, on the other hand, usually does not mean that. It means targeting key people at competitors and specifically courting them to make them switch. Hence the analogy with hunting on someone else's land. I would also agree that the term tends to be overused.
Not discussing salaries is the exact same thing - the employer doesn't want everyone to know how much their peers are making, lest it result in higher overall salaries. I always think of offering candy to a kid but saying "Don't tell anyone I gave you this". It's pretty clear someone is trying to be manipulative if they don't want anyone else to know the details of the deal.
> Never underestimate how much better a person's life can be by working for a FAANG instead of working for you
Edit: For those who are downvoting, I'm simply saying this is what's implied by the quote. I'm not making a statement about FAANGs.
These are called figures of speech for a reason, being literal about them is not admirable nor worthwhile.
But they are quite happy to leave for Netflix and given turnover rates in tech, are almost guaranteed to leave in a few years.
(e.g. China recently hired away a few thousand engineers from TSMC this way)
Given that these folks are instead going to become apologists for obvious abuses of power in the name of "making a difference in the world", perhaps radicalized would be a better word choice :-)
Headhunters, poaching, they are clearly idioms because we don't live in the safari or a conflict zone with hostile tribes (because we won.)
Pull request rejected and closed.
2
a: to take (game or fish) by illegal methods
b: to appropriate (something) as one's own
>>> c: to attract (someone, such as an employee or customer) away from a competitor <<<
It dehumanizes the employee by comparing them to an owned animal.
Some people would similarly have a problem with claiming a higher salary equals a 'better situation'
It just happens to also be one of the easiest indicators to sell to a prospective employee. A great company culture is also a “better situation” but it’s a lot less tangible from the outside.
"We will do everything in our power to find you the employees you need, unless it might make one of our other clients unhappy."
This would be a disqualifying conflict of interest for a law firm.
I would be extremely surprised if these are wet-ink-signed naked no-poach agreements.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/division-operations/division-upd...
You probably won't end up doing embedded work though, just as a point of warning. I mean you might, but probably not. As sibling poster alluded to, there are some jobs closer to that area, but more likely than not you'll end up on some other team doing something completely unrelated to embedded.
It doesn't have to be a permanent thing though -
It does not take too many years of $300-$400k compensation to make your future much more free to pursue what you want. If you do FAANG for 5-10 years while saving aggressively and can't take any more of it, then you can go back to working on embedded software for a third of the pay and have a huge buffer for retirement.
The original quote was about their ability to poach employees.
What does it mean to poach an employee? It means to convince the employee to make the major life decision to work for them instead.
Why do people choose to make such a major life decision? Usually it's because they think it will make their life better.
Why do they think it will make their life better? Because the FAANG offers >= 70,000usd to switch jobs, pays for them to relocate and sell their existing home, offers fully paid health insurance for their entire family, offers hundreds of thousands in stock options, and an unbeatable salary.
This is how they convince engineers to work on the world's most effective attention machines. By making their life better in all these ways and more.
If you fail to understand that, if you fail to engage in any kind deep or abstract thought that isn't summarized by a four letter meme, then you're doing exactly what this article warns you not to do - you're underestimating FAANGs.
The employer sees employees as resources. Property. Property doesn't have agency. Someone else is taking the employer's property, but the employer isn't being compensated for the loss of their property.
But buying a whole company? That's paying the shareholders for their property. Therefore that's good.
(Satellite office of a bay area company)
Otherwise "they hired people who worked for me" and "they poached my employees" describe the same thing. If the bitter attitude is important to express, then it could be phrased as: "They hired people who worked for me and I have a stick up my ass about it."
"Did the employee reach out, or was he poached?"
I just do not think it's worth getting anal about the terminology. Who gives a shit if your old employer says "poached" when you just got a $50k pay rise?
Edit: I should add, it's probably mostly about the money. I mean, nice office, all the perks, all enabled by money. And for most people a very material raise in pay makes a difference
https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-offer-415-million-to-...
The scenario I'm talking about when you bring in a company as a partner. For example, we work with TCS and the contract states that we can't hire their employees and that TCS can't hire our employees, at least not to work within the partnership. We partnered with another company and as part of that contract we are transferring people them with the promise that we will not hire them back for a year or two depending on their position.
My decision to make them persona non grata was about not rewarding them for behavior that negatively impacted me.
That's why I strongly prefer reaching out to companies without any middlemen. The more people are involved, the worse for me.
Like in retail, it depends on location, location, location; a regular developer will never make that much in Europe - remote (for a EU company) or not.
- Snap
- Lyft (though their stock is hurting right now, they still have top-band comp)
And then there's HFT, where $500k is probably considered average, but I guess that may as well be a completely different industry.
If we want to drop down to approaching $400k, you can add:
- Dropbox
- Square
Also I don't think Microsoft should be on your list unless you're specifically referring to LinkedIn's SF and Sunnyvale offices.
Note that getting $500k+ TC offers as a senior is still exceptional even in the Bay Area (look at levels.fyi). Netflix is supposed to be the most consistent when it comes to giving offers in that range (and all-cash too). Whereas if four senior engineers got four offers each from other companies on the list, they would likely range between $300k and $500k before negotiation.
What I wanted to emphasize, mostly, was that there exists a tier of companies that offer stratospheric compensation primarily through equity, but there are many more people working at other publicly-traded companies that offer RSUs that are worth closer to what you might consider to be a yearly bonus.
I don't mean to be malicious or anti-capitalist, but this seems like another example where companies want free markets when it involves taxes or costly regulation. But they oppose free markets when it causes labor costs to go up or reduces barriers to entry. It's a logical position for a corporation to hold but there is no ideological justification.
It's all platitudes of free market competition and meritocracy until the going gets tough and the competition (be it other businesses or labor) gets ahead of you. Then it's sob stories for bailouts, anti-competitive practices, and "but we're like a family here" drivel.
And why not? Are you saying that a market of free and voluntary exchange where every part has access to equal information cannot exist?
An exchange where a part is better informed than the other and thus gains profit, is the exact definition of "taking advantage". Wait, isn't that how all exchanges work in the capitalist's workplace?
Outside of very limited circumstances, how could it? Only for the simplest of products can you really grok them as well as the people making them.
Their behavior wasn't ethical. They didn't approach me. I found their job posting and approached them.
* Commute/housing: you can afford a lot of house in a good location on $500k (or even 250-300k which might be more attainable).
* Long hours: varies a lot from team to team, and company to company. From my own experience, there's not a lot of correlation between long hours and salary, and a lot of people who work long hours do it because they want to.
* Crime: crime in the US is at historic lows, not sure what you're worried about here.
I include commute time into long hours. Many people I knew there, admittedly NOT at FAANG, would spend an hour or more each way on a bus or train, plus 8 or more hours working, that's a huge chunk of the day. I'm remote, if that helps give a frame of reference.
As for crime, I guess it's just culture shock. I've had people tell me not to drive, and if you do drive and park, to leave your doors unlocked and empty your car, or else someone will break the windows and take things. And I've seen the broken windows. That, along with being harassed by mentally ill folks, was just a big turn off to me. Though, this may just be more of a SF thing specifically.
I've even seen this internally. If I want to go to another team, why would my manager use their budget or political influence to promote me when they can use it on someone who is staying on their team.
In a perfect world, your manager should not care and your company should not treat you any differently for looking, but this is rarely the case.
At my company, internal postings notify your manager when you apply, so there's no avoiding it. It's generally better to talk to them first so they aren't blindsided by the posting. Otherwise, if you don't get the new position that could create some friction with the existing one. My company can also trap you in your current position if they designate you as a "key resource".
1. https://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-payi... (adding to the confusion, Venture Beat incorrectly calls it a fine)
American English is a high context language. The GP was illustrating the current parlance, which Webster is lacking.
That said, I understand why people object to it and it may be one of those terms it's better to avoid even if it's used playfully.
E.g. https://www.unitedlanguagegroup.com/blog/communicating-high-...
You’re in 100% agreement with myself and GP if you say that “poaching” is commonly used to mean trying to hire someone from another company. But that has nothing to do with what GP is talking about. They are saying they really wish people wouldn’t use that term, despite it being commonly used.
Understood?
Or maybe you already knew that but really like putting people down on the internet.
I am not sure, hence my reference to the dictionary. In my opinion the whole discussion is because people only know one usage and think the other one is a hyperbole. Otherwise you'd been actually arguing about the meanings of words with the dictionary, which looks rather stupid.
To use an offensive example: This dictionary has a 4th definition for the word “Jew” meaning “to bargain sharply with”: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/jew
If somebody said “Maybe we shouldn’t use “Jew” as a verb to mean this, since it has negative connotations”, would you also cite this dictionary link to say that it’s perfectly fine? (I would charitably assume no.)
The discussion is, to me, very clear. We all know that “Poach” can mean hiring someone from a competitor. But some of us feel that using it in that regard creates the wrong connotation, and although it’s commonly used, and even in the dictionary, maybe we ought to not use it that way.
Do you see why citing the dictionary is counterproductive here?
Yes, literally speaking, it's "worth it" to Google, or they wouldn't do it. Being so large, Google can throw advertising money on their self-driving car division, no problem. They can take a loss for 5-10 years, no problem. However, it's extremely anti-competitive, which is the problem others are pointing out here.
This is not possible according to the usual definition of "market rate".
If Google is willing to pay X, that is the market rate.
I don't think what you're describing is anti-competitive behavior, rather it's omni-competitive. Pretty much all the money Google throws at anything is "advertising money" but if they are really trying to make self-driving cars, what's wrong with that?
Should my Brad Pitt Summer Blockbuster profits not be able to bankroll my Teletubbies Christmas Special?
There's plenty of antitrust fodder already with their stranglehold over the web and the behavior they've taken to protect their search/ad business. But if they're hiring people away in cutting edge areas of research simply to destroy startups, that's abhorrent. That means they're pouring their obscene wealth from advertising into unrelated fields in order to dominate them.
Monopoly.
This doesn't mean that the market price of a McDonalds burger is $0
If all I can afford to pay a developer is minimum wage, is he or she now obligated to work for me at my "market rate?" At what point does it go from not having enough money to afford a highly qualified developer to becoming "poaching?"
ed: Toned it down a little. I think tech is making an absurd amount of money and it's exasperating to see people complain about paying their workers too much.
The market will correct very quickly, as competitors will immediately head over to McDonalds to purchase $\infty$ burgers at $0, killing MCD dead in seconds.
The moment McDonalds applies a purchase limit (Free burgers! Limit 5 per customer), the burgers have non-zero cost, as they require a person's time in order to purchase.
If McDonalds does have enough capital to buy long-term customers and kill off competition with free burgers, perhaps they should consider it. I assume that they've considered such a strategy on occasion and concluded that it isn't worth it. Burgers are probably worth more than $0 to McDonalds, too.
If walmart takes its surplus capital and decides to sell toilet paper at a loss, to run everyone else out of business (till they're the last man standing), I'm not sure its correct to say that the market value of TP has reduced during that time period. Walmart has undercut the market value (the point where buyer and sellers generally meet) -- it hasn't actually changed the market value, except temporarily, in whats effectively a hack. The permanent shift in this case would occur when the dust has settled, and all competition has been eliminated
All market values are temporary. Walmart absolutely has changed the market value in this scenario. It might be anticompetitive in the Walmart example, but in the case of one company paying their staff better than another I don't think the company paying less and complaining about it is going to get much sympathy :)
I think the S&P is overvalued today. The market thinks otherwise. No matter how much I would like to purchase reasonable stocks at P/Es of 15, by and large, I can't. If someone else wants to buy them at P/Es of 21, they are going to attract every single seller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
And if a bunch of homeowners are willing to drive up housing costs and prevent building out an adequate supply of housing in an area, that's just the market.
I don't have a horse in either race, but I think there is an appreciable difference between paying a premium for a resource that you use, vs paying a premium solely to prevent someone else from having access to it.
but as a contrapoint; in capitalism there's a trend of selling a product or service substantially below market rate as a way of gaining significant adoption, once you have significant adoption- you raise the price as best you can.
This is called: undercut, corner and squeeze.
Often this results in monopoly positions or at least significant leads which are hard to overcome. (Uber, is a famous example).
Obviously this is only possible with significant financial capital, which google have.
I can see how the undercutting analogy has synergies with overpaying for talent. It's worth making a loss on hiring me if it means that someone else doesn't get the (lesser) value of me.
Arguably. But, if 10 average people are worth $200k and one exemplary person is worth $500k... and the company pays the 10 average people $100k instead, then the company can hire two exemplary people where it only needed one.
Scale it down to minimum wage and you end up with people who are worth way more than they're paid -- you literally don't have a business without their work -- who are held under by telling and treating them like they're worthless.
That's what predatory behavior disguised as a market looks like.
On the other hand, does it mean that some employers won't have money to hire talent? And will that result in some businesses failing? And is that ultimately bad for developers? I don't know, but it feels like it's such a big system that it will balance itself if that is the case.
Long term, however, there's a risk of a monopoly forming, which isn't good for developers or society. FAANG are willing to pay big salaries because they are competing. If they use their power to destroy the competition, that market force goes away.
After the first $100k or so in salary - enough for living expenses, soft things like culture fit, are able to become more important to employees, and by offering services like on-site massages directly, employers are able to offer more value than employees could capture themselves. (On-site massages are also used to keep employees on campus longer, but once you start getting "free" massages, they're hard to give up!)
I'm not sure I think this is bad but I believe this is the argument.
This arguments fails on so many dimensions that it must just be a meme. I’ll use Google as the example. For it to work Google has to be able to monopolise the buying of talent.
Most damning, the premise itself is self defeating. Somehow Google is picking the most talented people (delivering far in excess of say $1M marginal returns), yet somehow it is paying well below that to steal that talent and furthermore Google is then wasting that talent (employee delivering value below their pay+overhead). To assume Google chooses to waste talent merely to achieve some low value outcome (damaging a competitor by $1 doesn’t magically enhance Google’s returns by $1 so the factors are way out here) seems to assume the Google is somehow acting against their best financial interests. I don’t think Google is as poorly run as that.
Also:
1. Occam’s razor: Could it be that a Google is actually getting good value by paying very high salaries?
Yes. The average revenue per person for Google is about 160G$ / 115kiloemployees = 1M4 per employee. I do note that using an average is silly because the value distribution is not flat, but neither is the employee salary distribution flat. But the figure is so large, average does say something useful for back-of-envelope calcs.
2. Can Google monopolise by buying power alone?
No. Other companies have similarly high returns per employee (Apple is 260G$/160kiloemployees, Netflix is 20G$/20kiloemployees) so for Google to outbid them, it needs to outbid above the marginal revenue per employee, which clearly is well above a 600k$ salary.
3. Can Google corner the market for talent by restricting supply?
No. We know that there are plenty of talented developers because Google isn’t the only company making over $1M revenue per employee. Google employs about 115000 people. Let’s say 50000 of those were “overpaid“ to remove them from the competitors. If the total pool of equivalent talent were as small as 250000, then Google couldn’t monopolise talent. Yet other companies with high revenues per employee have a sum total of employees higher than 250000. Furthermore Google’s returns per effective employee become ~$2.8M/employee, so Google can obviously afford to pay $1M for talent it really wants!
> just to prevent competitors from having access to them
They don't ignore the market, they use their resources earned from participating in that market to keep and/or improve their current market positioning. Which is exactly what their shareholders want, and is fair game until treated as a monopolist.
Those are still market forces. They aren't paying the worker value, but the damage they will cause to competitors. Welcome to capitalism.
Big companies have been overpaying developers for almost a decade now. It is not going away. It is not some short term thing. Instead, that is what these elite tech companies pay.
It is not some singular company, that is buying up all of the tech talent. Instead, it is a whole bunch of elite tech companies, paying lots of developers lots of money.
The idea that there is one singular company, that is a monopoly on developer talent, that is false, given that there are a whole bunch of them doing it.
If the companies sell ads, ads get more expensive. Then the items those ads promote get more expensive, working its way down to the rest of the population again.
Those developers will also see the increasing prices, but the extra cash will hopefully keep them happy for a while.
On the other hand, capitalism has this great thing where going bust is not the end of the world (or life), compared to previous eons.
A system which allows (and encourages) failing is great.
Googled: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It’s called predatory pricing in that case and legality is unclear. It seems you probably get away with it in the US.
But there is competition among those companies even if "everyone" else pretty much doesn't even try to compete with them based on comp. (Which makes talking market price a bit odd in this case. I imagine an economist has some term for it. I guess there's a market price for developers who can get a FAANG offer and then there's a market price for everyone else.)
Let's say you're a company in a field, competing against other companies in that same field. Everyone is basing wages on how much money they expect to make and so on. Not everyone has the same estimations, but in the end they're all grounded in that market.
Now comes a company with virtually limitless from some other market, who doesn't care about making money but about achieving dominance. All of the sudden, they're throwing wages around you can't compete with because they're not trying to be profitable.
Did I miss something?
a) These companies are much bigger than they were, which increases the impact a programmer can have. This means the amount of money a programmer can bring in for one of these companies is much higher than previously, and so they're willing to pay more.
b) Previously, programmers were capturing a much smaller share of the value they were creating for their employers. Either through explicit collusion to keep employee salaries down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) or because the threat of startup founding (which is both easier and more normal relative to 10y ago) has pushed salaries up.
I'm pretty sure they should not consider it, because it is generally illegal.
It is really not. At least in America. In America, where laws are based on consumer benefit, it is extremely difficult to prosecute companies for having too awesome of a service, that they give away for too good of a price, in a way that helps consumers too much.
It really just isn't something that gets prosecuted, except in absolutely exceptional circumstances.
That's the crux of the argument, though. Google can afford to take a loss on the employee's salary for years, just to keep them from a competitor. We're not talking about Google arbitrarily paying a developer more than their competitors, we're talking about Google diverting funds from other business units to cover costs.
Then the Goog enters the picture and is willing to add another $200k premium to that, in order to prevent you from working for that employer. This isn't sustainable; you're still you and your direct value to Goog is only $100k. The additional amount represents how much damaging a competitor is worth to Goog. As soon as the competitor goes out of business or Goog stops having piles of cash laying around to fight with other companies, that additional value evaporates.
If you decide to leave Goog, you should probably not expect to get $300k or more. In fact you may get less than $100k, if Goog has eliminated the competitors to whom you are valuable.
"Market rate" is extremely unstable.
This is true of everyone of course. Even a more or less commodity junior Javascript developer isn't worth much more than their generalized ability to do random tasks to a company that doesn't do any software development.
But some people have a skillset and track record that is very valuable to some companies but that would make it hard to be hired at most.
Imagine some market where 10 companies sell bread and it costs $5. And lets assume that the costs are $4 and $1 is profit.
Then comes a company that makes its money on selling water and it is doing very well. It comes to a bread market and starts selling bread for $3.
The competition is quickly destroyed and the bread prices rise.
Edit: as a sibling comment mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
Maybe 50 of the other 99 bakers at the 10 bread-selling companies are also capable of making good bread and will feel bad, maybe the company that lost the baker will feel bad, maybe that company will even fail because it turns out that really was their best baker... but in that case, it just proves that the water company was paying the market price for that baker. Which they were.
Spending more on talent is not predatory pricing.
Yes it does: Google makes money from advertising, not from self-driving cars.
But of all the things that Uber has gotten in trouble with, do you know what they have not been prosecuted for? They have not been prosecuted for selling taxi services for too low of a price to consumers.
Breaking taxi laws = yep prosecuted
But price dumping = nope, not in trouble for that.
edit - I see how my post was misleading. I should have said X is a "lower bound" for the market rate.
This puts Google in the position of being a monopsony for the labor of programmers; that is, they're the only or primary buyer of that commodity. Part of antitrust laws is preventing that, so, yes, there is a problem if a monopsony arises, but Google isn't in that position anyway because jobs aren't completely interchangeable the same way programmers aren't completely interchangeable. For example, companies can compete on the basis of not being Google, which attracts some people. Companies can compete on the basis of being based in some other geographic location, or having other things to work on, or having a different mix of salary and benefits.
Google offering the highest salary doesn't mean they automatically get everyone. It means they get people who want the highest salary to do what Google's interested in as opposed to wanting to work on some kinds of technology Google isn't pursuing.
Single-firm anticompetitive behavior, as defined by FTC: (https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices)
Single Firm Conduct:
"It is unlawful for a company to monopolize or attempt to monopolize trade, meaning a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry. It is important to note that it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge “high prices,” or to try to achieve a monopoly position by aggressive methods. A company violates the law only if it tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods."
Horizontal Conduct:
"It is illegal for businesses to act together in ways that can limit competition, lead to higher prices, or hinder other businesses from entering the market. The FTC challenges unreasonable horizontal restraints of trade. Such agreements may be considered unreasonable when competitors interact to such a degree that they are no longer acting independently, or when collaborating gives competitors the ability to wield market power together. Certain acts are considered so harmful to competition that they are almost always illegal. These include arrangements to fix prices, divide markets, or rig bids."
Staff aren't a product or commodity.
I have a relative who bought a very nice beach house from his legal fees suing a hospital network for doing something similar.
Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago. Example - when you new grad starts in i-banking, they're in training for 4-6 weeks. Not doing anything productive, just training to do the job. Not the case in engineering, you are assigned user stories day one and your training is doing the work. So new i-banks are highly paid (so they don't leave because talent is perceived to be scarce and valuable) and they're companies invest in them (through training early on).
Right now, corporate managers are vomiting in their mouth when the have to look at how much they need to pay to keep their engineers from leaving. It's because of the perception of engineers - they're seen as semi-skilled labor (cost center, not strategic to the business) and are easily replaceable (no, they're not). Culturally, they have been conditioned to think this way, so no wonder turn over is so high every where.
Except, in this case, the programmers in question had decades' worth of hard-won domain expertise that was absolutely critical to their job function. And, this product targeting a niche industry, it was relatively uncommon domain expertise. So much so that the only people on the job market who had it were these folks whom they were ousting. All of whom had found positions at competitors within a day or two.
So then the company lost their ability to maintain the product in any meaningful way, and, within a year or two, customers started moving on as well.
If they were the only people anywhere who had the critical domain expertise, then how could there be any competitors to snap them up?
This story doesn't sound internally consistent to me.
Also, it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants. The latter two are directly making money for the firm.
This depends to an incredible degree on what kind of "consultant" you're talking about. For the traditional "strategic consulting" type consultants it seems basically as impossible to quantify as for software developers, or rely most other people working in large companies.
I’d personally disagree with the cost effectiveness argument though. Unless your engineering work really cannot benefit from more skill (and as often as I’ve heard management think their work is relatively simple, in practice I’ve rarely seen it) then you’d have to replace a highly skilled engineer with a small team that would likely cost more than $500k. Packing your engineering firepower into as few bodies as possible is a highly cost efficient strategy, as most of the successful techs know.
On the other hand, a small team is less vulnerable to getting hit by a bus or hired out.
Yes, it is difficult, but possible.
Here's quick and dirty analysis - consider Sears, Walmart, and Amazon:
- Amazon pays its engineers near top of market - $1.5T market cap.
- Walmart has a pretty good engineering culture. They acquired a tech company to start Walmart Labs for data science stuff and they even have popular open source software (Hapi.js) - they're the largest company by revenue and $370B market cap.
- Ever been to Sears.com? Me neither - largest retailer in 1980 to bankrupt in 2018, stock price at $0.23 and $94M market cap.
I deduce that investment in software engineers == higher stock price.
* competing for talent by paying very well and wiling to do so
* investment in training early on
Two things that tech workers do not benefit from as much.
* No training (Not just for engineers but for anyone, including for specialty positions that simply don't exist outside the business)
* No focus on employee retention
* No significant raises / bonuses (Lucky to get a cost of living raise these days)
* No consideration for employees' goals
* Stressing employees unnecessarily with shit vacation benefits and no sick time
* Stressing employees with shit equipment
* Stressing employees with shit hours
* Stressing employees with shit office conditions
* Reducing benefits to slightly cut costs
The list goes on and on. Businesses succeed despite their own best attempts at hurting themselves, not because of it. Owners, executives, and other stakeholders are deluding themselves into thinking this isn't the case and often driving the business into actual bankruptcy or just below mediocre performance.
It's no wonder most employees are disengaged from their work. When you treat employees like shit, they will treat your business like shit to the greatest extent possible. They will do the minimum and it's extremely hard to change that course once it's been set. Employees are humans. Most businesses treat them like slaves, or machines at best.
That said, there are a lot of failing companies these days thanks to cheap and readily available debt.
Indeed.
You should engineer your systems as if everyone is replaceable (including yourself) but treat your employees as if they aren't (even though they are, just not _easily_).
Life is not that simple, and cannot be boiled down into "it's a market."
People are messy. They leave companies for all kinds of reasons. They just broke up with someone and want to start a new life. They don't like the weather. The have to take care of an ailing relative. They've picked up a hobby (surfing, hiking, skiing) that is inconvenient where you are, or more important to them than money. Very often they just want a change.
It's common for HN-types to try to reduce everything to a numbers game, but people aren't numbers. They're not strings of attributes that can be quantified by an AI. They're human beings, and human beings will always be unpredictable.
Money and Management are the real reasons people move, everything else is an outlier.
Do you actually get a certificate? That would be equivalent(and would actually be a good idea).
That might result in the engineer being paid more than the value of their contribution at their current employer.
Many things could cause this, e.g.
- the new employer is much more productive, can make better use of the engineer, and so can afford to pay more and still make money
- the new employer over-estimates engineer's skill level and likely contribution
As a hiring manager, though, I'm stuck in the middle between developers and executive leadership. Executives tend to form a notion of what different roles should be paid, and they just won't bend, even if it means losing talent and spending $1 million+ replacing them over time. The problem is that replacement cost is abstract and easy to ignore, whereas paying a single developer $500k/year to retain them feels very real. Never mind the fact that losing them means multiple projects will be derailed, you'll spend a year looking for a replacement to hire at twice their salary, that replacement will take 3 additional years to reach the same level of domain expertise, it turns out that replacement never takes on the same degree of leadership or earns the same level of trust from colleagues, and in the midst of all of this the absence of your top performer causes two other talented engineers to leave in the following year.
$500k starts to look reasonable in retrospect, but you'll never be able to sell it, so you'll do the above dance instead and spend more money in the end.
>> Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago.
That only works if your business makes piles of money, like investment banks. Or FAANG.
The rest of us have a % of money to spend on talent.
If the % of money allocated to talent is so low that the business cannot survive, then the business has no intrinsic right to survive. One possible exception to this would be a mission-driven non-profit, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Managers know that it's not the most likely case, but it's still possible.
And a grace period that isn't taken advantage of is functionally equivalent to your employee being hit by a bus.
Unless you really burn a bridge with your workers they should have at least a week or 2 to transfer knowledge!
I always try and cross train people enough that I can quit at any point and it’s not an issue.
All processes are kept automatic where no one is crucial to keep it running.
Mostly it’s useful for vacations. In the past I went on a cruise. And I wasn’t sure the company will be online without me to baby them through.
After that I got extremely serious about investing in the team and tools to never let that happen again.
* Early startup employees have golden handcuffs regarding switching jobs. Sure, Facebook is offering them $500k but they'd be on the hook for $200k in taxes if they exercise their options and they leave a bunch more un-vested options on the table.
* You can mitigate them leaving by having a better work environment, equity and so on. Not much you can do about a bus.
* You can pay them to stay on for another month or to consult after the fact. No amount of money get's you an hour long phone call to the afterlife.
edit: Also, the article underestimates the effort needed to get a FAANG job. They don't just call you up and offer you a job. They offer you the chance to take a grueling set of white board interviews that require months of studying to pass.
I'm probably okay with losing out on a sale event with a startup I've left, especially if my stake is <1%, if the big tech company pays as well as it's reported. YMMV.
- ownership of the product and process
- less red tape and politics
- good work life balance
- location other than Silicon Valley
- boss who pays attention to engineer needs and wants
Money is a huge factor but it isn't the only one!
Not sure if that was the intended message.
What happens when one of your fungible junior engineers happens to be smart enough to do some tricky things even with Rails?
And then she gets hired by Netflix to do something more career-enhancing than copy-pasting Ruby code from StackOverflow.
Now you're stuck with your revolving door of undercompensated junior developers and a complicated Rails application. Uh-oh!
as a fullstack guy who's worked w/ rails, laravel, etc... and who's done my share of frontend stuff, I'd say focusing on the frontend might be a bigger sell, cause that shit is VERY opinionated lately.
Vue vs React vs Vanilla vs Alpinejs. Do you use bootstrap or tailwinds? Backend code is rudimentary but nailing the ui stuff and also cross platform if needing mobile or w/e is much harder personally.
Any member of your team could win a life-changing amount of money in the lottery, inherit it, win a gambling bet, etc. Frame it as a good thing rather than a death or a change of hire - somebody might just flat out retire because they don't financially need your employment anymore.
I don't really see why framing it as a positive thing or negative thing matters, no one is actually getting hit by a bus, it's just a hypothetical scenario.
Might, or they might not. Just as if someone were hit by a bus, they might be able to communicate from their hospital bed...or they might not. Hope is not a strategy.
An employee getting hired by another company (doesn't need to be FAANG) is on the contrary a rather common occurrence, and a lot of people understand the importance of preparing for that.
> Everything gets a lot easier if you select the right software and framework
Huh? Domain knowledge doesn't refer to your tech stack or coding practices. It refers to why you've built things the way you've built them -- customer requirements, business requirements, technical requirements.
Ruby on Rails may improve onboarding time, but it has zero to do with domain knowledge.
1. It's click-baity. From the headline you'd think it would be a discussion about why engineers hop jobs so frequently, why in particular FAANGs seem to be so attractive, and what we could do to increase retention. Instead, the post just quickly summarises what we've known for ages (turnover is a big problem), very briefly goes off on a completely irrelevant tangent (that it's more likely for an engineer to change the company than to be hit by a bus, which is true, but pointless) and then tops it off by the insane suggestion that "just use Rails" is the answer to all of your turnover woes (more on that below).
2. There is an interesting discussion here to be had: why exactly do companies suck so badly at retaining talent? My take on it is that we all (companies, developers, etc.) routinely emphasise the wrong things (office perks, showing off tech skills, etc., instead of a good understanding of the product) and burn people out, but as said: this is a much larger discussion. More importantly though I disagree with the received wisdom that "developers are developers" and domain knowledge is worth nothing. Of course, you always should be prepared for the worst (i.e. the proverbial bus), but it should still be the companies' priority to retain good people as long as possible because once somebody leaves, so much knowledge just goes to waste and has to be reacquired. At my last company, my whole team was fired because they thought that some other team would be just as good for the product, ignoring the fact that we'd built up the product ourselves and all the knowledge for two years. But to the higher-ups, the view was that developers are exchangeable.
3. The author just really comes across as immature and uniformed with their unilateral praise of Rails. I've worked on Rails apps so messy that they were almost impossible to understand. And, by now, Rails is by far not the only framework with strong conventions and a lot of out-of-the-box support for many common things - Spring Boot for example (whatever its faults) arguably supports even many more requirements. But more importantly, for any kind of non-trivial app, the complexity is not just in the technology: it's in the (often contradictory) requirements, the different architectural tradeoffs, the little gotchas, the personalities in the team, etc. etc.
Rails has an incredibly large community but I think this statement would be equally true for any tool you're well versed in
However, lately I'm thinking more about performance so would love to work more with rust or golang, though I find rust harder to grok mentally. Golang is nice though, and easy to follow most code samples.
Not to knock on using libraries or anything like that, but we've definitely felt the pain of putting tools / convenience ahead of architecture.
Not only must you compensate your talent at the top of the market and then some (including generous equity), but you must give your employees an amazing work environment with excellent work/life balance, while providing something for them to work on that motivates them on an ideological level.
When any part of this aegis cracks, poaching has the potential to ravage your ranks.
I would say that in the case of especially valuable or world-class talent, it's the founder's responsibility to know as much as they can about that person, and to truly pitch them on a level that fully aligns across all dimensions of that person's life. Give them not only excellent comp, but fulfillment and purpose that is congruent or even symbiotic with their personal lives and overall ambitions.
Deep down, most people aren't pawns that you can simply acquire with a number and expect the highest quality work from.
In 2014, Google had around 28,500 software developers. [1]
In 2016, it was estimated that the US had around 3.87 million professional software developers. [2]
So around that time, about 0.75% of all software developers in the US worked for Google alone. If your organization employs a few dozen skilled developers, there is a very strong chance that some of them could find a placement within FAANG. It's likely that these are the engineers that you rely on the most.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...
This is written to business leaders, but I feel like if phrased differently would sound familiar and accepted by HN. Namely, don't adopt esoteric technologies no one else knows. Document production process. Never let mission critical operations exist solely in your lead engineer's head.
The fact is that it's never a good time for your best people to leave, but that's inevitable on a long enough timeline. It's the duty of business leaders to be prepared for that so they don't have to resort to dirty tactics to convince them to stay.
- A safe software stack
- Make code understandable (industry best practices)
- Focus on employee ramp up time
I was confused when some companies stressed different things, and I didn't quite realize until reading this post that it might be coming from a place of fear of losing engineers.
What I've seen:
1) Committees for coding standards
2) Teamwork over code ownership
3) Peer code reviews to enforce quality
Sounds like these things would help increase code quality and reduce the bus factor. But I think there are some dangers.
1) Committees can mean that no individual is responsible for bad decisions
2,3) Teamwork is great if people have separate roles. Too many cooks can become a real problem otherwise.
I suspect people afraid of responsibility are more likely to embrace committees and teamwork. Dickheads incapable of working with others are more likely to take ownership (or else they'd be completely unemployable).
I also suspect many startups cargo cult practices that work well for giants, but are net negatives that encourage your employees to leave if you're small. Lacking ownership but getting paid super well is a better tradeoff than lacking ownership AND lacking amazing pay.
It's mostly a numbers game, so keep putting in the time - but not mindlessly: keep optimizing your CV/presentation/skills and it will eventually happen.
You could make the reverse argument. Using "industry standard" tools makes your top performers much more likely to get poached. Using unusual (but enjoyable) technologies might increase employee loyalty.
Personally, I think trying to reframe it as happy and positive and coming with a grace period is a little frivolous. Your team should be prepared to transition someone's responsibilities in the context of a sudden, wrenching, and traumatic change.
Salaries? Not at all. Total compensation? Well, it depends.
Software engineers with < 10yrs of experience routinely make this much at FAANG. The total compensation number usually includes the following:
* Salary
* Bonus (anywhere between 15-25% of salary)
* Initial grant that vests over 3-4yrs
* Stock "refreshers" that you get annually
* General equity appreciation due to a bull market
For senior engineers, the equity portion of their compensation far outweighs their salary.
This one can theoretically cut both directions
I recently took one of those offers from a FAANG, swapping a bunch of illiquid startup RSUs for liquid equity compensation.
9 years at a FAANG and I'd willingly trade plenty of my money and golden handcuffs for a workplace that was more productive, creative, with better communication, and so on.
But when I look I just find shops with distorted work life balance, pointless whiteboard coding interviews, egotistical pseudo-feudal lord bosses with an illusion of hierarchical dominance, and a bunch of 25 year olds insisting on the merits of the latest JS framework flavor of the month.
Want experienced engineering talent (well, maybe they don't)? Money is not the only factor. Smaller companies are shorter on cash, but there are plenty of other things at work that smaller companies can control for...
Maybe this can be true if you're going from like $250k to $270k from FAANG to FAANG.
But most of the time we're talking about something like $180k to $250k when getting poached to a FAANG. It would take a huge amount of perks or otherwise to make that gap worth it.
(Of course this isn't true for everyone. But it's true for most)
In the last couple years we're talking 2-3x from our BigCo's $150-250K. Getting such an increase people do feel like being hit by a bus - at least my friend looked that way for a few days after getting such 3x offer couple years ago from a FAANG style company :) Our managers don't even try to match - during the 2019 not FAANGs gave 2x, 2x and 1.5x (that one still got lucky as his RSUs value almost doubled because of acquisition right before his first year cliff) to the other 3 acquaintances, and beginning of this year a teammate got 2x from Apple after concurrents with another FAANG and couple non-FAANGs.
I can only offer the anecdote of myself, but I've floated the idea several times of taking a pay _cut_ to obtain more autonomy. No manager has ever taken me up on it.
Sure you might be able to sock away an extra $10k/yr but the valley is gonna eat most of your raise and leave you miserable if you don't drink the kool-aid.
I work at FAMANG, and I feel ownership over my product and process. I set priorities for it, I set how work will get done on it, my team collectively determines what kind of processes we follow, and my manager just sanity checks that things are on-track.
> - less red tape and politics
Red tape, sure, politics, there's no guarantee of less politics in a smaller company. If anything, when politics happens, you don't even have the chance to keep your head down and avoid it.
> - good work life balance
There are hundreds of thousands of FAMANG engineers who have good work-life balance. There are many who don't, but there's an pretty big upside to working at a firm/on a project, where you aren't just an expensive cost center (non-eng-firms who generally don't give two damns about their engineers), and where you firm/project isn't default-dead (startup).
> location other than Silicon Valley
Large branch offices exist. Not in the mid-west, but the software jobs in the mid-west tend to be of the 'expensive cost center' variety.
> boss who pays attention to engineer needs and wants
Why would you think you can't find this at FAMANG?
FAANGs have been embracing permanent work from home/anywhere over the past 5 months.
If your team members who won the lotto would just give their two weeks and quit, then your company/team has a substantial morale/motivation problem.
Such a company is not creating an environment where people enjoy being a part of it.
And I wouldn't expect anyone in that position to give me two weeks. Two weeks is about not burning bridges. If I never need to cross that bridge again, what do I care if it burns?
In practice, it is extremely rare to find managers who effectively practice this. When you do, it's pretty amazing to watch in action.
I've only seen one such manager out of hundreds I've encountered consulting. That manager's team members won't leave the team for even 2X pay increases, because they figure the additional anticipated stress and job insecurity is not worth it. The amount of trust between that manager and the individual team members is higher than I've ever seen elsewhere, and that manager redefined for me what was possible with people skills superpowers. RDF doesn't even begin to describe it, and this field was accomplished without Jobs' infamous tantrums.
While I've no experience in the corporate world proper, as a solo founder 7 years into the same project I've a similar game plan with respect to talent, and just hope one day to have the privilege of giving it a go. Further (albeit slightly outdated) context in the link below.[0]
My scenario is more to do with how to put together a dream team, and convince people to join that team. With world-class talent, you have to consider that some of the people you want to hire are already quite wealthy and/or famous. Therefore, if you want any hope of landing let alone retaining them, you have to dig deep and discover what motivates them, and understand what aligns with their existing pursuits and goals.
If I ever do get the chance to hire any of these people, I'm not that worried about the sell. I've probably had countless imaginary conversations with each of them over the past few years. To even have the opportunity to talk to any of these people would be an honor, so the notion of somehow mistreating them, or failing to both compensate and appreciate them to the maximum extent possible just doesn't compute. That extends to the non-wealthy, non-legendary hires as well; if anything it's a healthy model to approach how you treat all people in your employ.
As an aside, one of the biggest problem I face with respect to hiring (minus funding and, you know, actually getting off the ground) is: who to approach first? Dream team assembly dynamics are very delicate from a game theoretical point of view, and I've begun to think this is perhaps the wrong way to approach thinking about the problem. Elizabeth Holmes infamously used the "If I get person X, then getting person Y will be easier." strategy to great effect, but she was a complete fraud.
There's a few ideas I have here that aren't fully elucidated, but probably could be thought of as consensus-based offers. Pitch people individually and in a personalized fashion, but with no expectation they accept the offer unless certain conditions are met, such as others on the prospective dream team agreeing to the same understanding, or even making it contingent on funding itself.
Assembling a ~50 person team pre-funding certainly is putting the cart before the horse in so many ways, but I think it can be done. The look on the VC's faces would something. "Here is the vision, here is the prototype, here's a team of 50 exceptional people—some of whom are legends—that have agreed to build this thing together, contingent on funding. Just need the money."
How is that actionable advice for companies competing with the richest companies in tech? You can indeed (hopefully) do the other things you say but you may simply not be able to afford to compensate them at top of market if that market includes Google or Netflix.
Most startups offer joke equity that's subject to dilution games with salaries below market, while claiming they hire only the best.
Like you said, 99% of software developers are NOT the top 1%. ;-)
EDIT: I removed some snark after reading Zenbit_UX's reply.
Here's my case:
Devs who work in a team with others are constantly exposed to the skills, cleverness and ingenuity of their colleagues. Most interns and juniors look at sys architects and senior devs with awe, not down on them.
Obviously we're all exposed to incompetent dev's at similar rates, but I feel like when you become the best dev in a company most realize they're unlikely to learn much more and should consider moving on, if not out of à desired to learn more, than likely out of frustration.
The wildcards are the "1 man shows", a dev in a department of 1. These people are often either incredibly brilliant and don't need any help or so stunted in their development and inflated I'm ego that they genuinely do believe they're the 1%.
As a 1 man show dev myself, I often have to remind myself I have no baseline reference for how good I am - despite my talents being sufficient for my employer to not need to hire others. To combat this, I just have to read HN and get a frame of reference for what others in the industry are accomplishing. It's quite humbling.
We rewrote something in React and adding a feature to it took 2-3 hours but doing the same to the legacy Java code took 3 weeks. This cost was easy to quantify and strengthened proposals to remove the legacy Java code.
Well yeah, that's why the whole scenario in the first place is that they're hit by a bus and instantly killed.
Maybe it should be rephrased as "blown to a million pieces" then there's no question you're discussing a situation in when there's an immediate and irreversible loss of knowledge.
The idea that there is a single solution is absurd.
There are plenty of viable business solutions that don't require paying every engineer 500k+.
Easy to do when you cherry-pick three companies.
Run your analysis on 10,000 companies large and small and you might have something.
* Netflix vs Blockbuster
* Uber / Lyft vs taxi cabs
* Airbnb vs hotels
* Blogs vs print media
* Youtube /Instagram vs TV
* porn tube sites vs porn studios
I could keep going.
I've also tried the corollary - companies that are successful while cutting cost in tech, but I can't think of any successful companies that are cutting investment in tech.
Would it prove or disprove this statemenet?
Of course there is still meaningful signal you can use to differentiate developers, but it's going to be fuzzy. I-banking and consulting increase wages for their employees by firing everyone who doesn't meet a certain bar. In addition to creating a toxic work environment, this practice isn't possible with only fuzzy signals.
Yes, actually $x * 20%.
Oh It was so painful when it happened.
Part of the mitigation discussion here is a tech stack that is transferable.
To summarize: yeah, I suppose $500K 4-5 years out of school isn't achievable, but within 10 it is.
So the skills in question, while niche, still enjoyed a supply/demand ratio that ensured that the structural unemployment rate for people who had them was 0%. And most companies know to get who you can and then make sure they stay happy.
Unfortunately, large conglomerates tend to be very credientialist. So leadership positions tend to be filled with people who have diplomas from schools with a lot of name recognition, rather than people who have enough of their own domain expertise to understand the product's business environment.
That's a very nebulous term, as this whole thread bears out. I feel sometimes like my comments are abducted by aliens.
To me, it isn't particularly nebulous, it just means, "People who are currently looking for a new job." Which would roughly be composed of people who are currently unemployed, and people who have jobs but are looking for a new one. I suppose the developers in the story I relate would actually be sort of the latter group looking to avoid becoming the former group, but that's perhaps diving a little bit too deeply into the semantics for a conversation that doesn't involve someone playing bongos or a djembe.
I suppose you could expand that to include, "People who are happy with their job, but could be lured away if you offer them enough money." But it's pretty obvious that that's not a useful subcategory of people for the purposes of the company in the story I'm relating.
The rest of the traits you list I can usually figure out, but how can you get at that one from just a couple interviews at a company?
Also describes almost every job I had before coming to Google.
The problem is that when I'm applying for a job, I have no idea if the hiring manager is being honest with me, or if they are just telling me what I want to hear. Any claims of 'no politics' and 'you own the process' should be taken with a lot of salt.
It's fairly clear to me (who doesn't (and haven't applied to) work at a West Coast tech giant) that if you can get a job at such, you will make more money. That's just the way things are. Of course, there are reasons to work elsewhere, but making the most money is probably not one of them.
Just saying it's a really effective tool when combined with ideological motivation to fend off the unlimited pockets of FAANG-scale companies.
Most senior devs I know aren't breaking $130 in a flyover. To be clear, a lot aren't breaking $100,000.
I lucked into a great job with a good, generous boss that values technical expertise and domain knowledge who also built a growing, successful business with high margin, recurring revenue.
I'm getting close to $250k as the lead dev/CTO. I wouldn't take a FAANG job for $350k. Maybe 2x/$500k.
Though I'd be afraid I wasn't cut out for it, and frankly, I'm not going to put in the work to get an interview and 2x offer from a FAANG so it's a moot point.
I expect if I ever have to change jobs I'll be taking a pay cut.
Our mid-level devs are getting $120-150k. We'll hire a junior - as in their first dev job - at like $70k but they'll be hitting $100k in 2 years. Raises slow down some after that but 10%/year is common. No grind culture, flex schedule & location (we have some people who live out of state).
This is the reason I have a really hard time with the "cost of living" arguments people make when talking about living in the bay area. $2.5k/mon rent is 30k. Even if I'm getting free housing elsewhere, it's generally not worth it.
The base at senior typically varies between 160k to 220k where the majority of compensation comes from stock. Seniors at FB tend to make between $300k to $450k. This also includes generous perks like 401ks, health insurance, etc.
At Netflix it can even be astronomically higher.
Levels is a cool site, had no idea how high some salaries can be. Kinda motivates me to get on the leetcode grind.
This is total comp. I don't know Apple specifically but I'm basing this off of a few of the FAANGs that I have experience with.
And they will make you rich. Someone who works for these companies at a non-junior level for more than 5-10 years and is reasonable about expenses can quite easily become a millionaire if they work in their offices in developed countries. 5 years for senior positions, 10 years for regular positions.
You may have restrictions on when you can sell depending on your position in the company and other rules.
But that mostly sums it up at a high level.
I agree, options would worthless. They only seem valuable for startups where you’re paying pennies against the potential of a $10/share IPO.
IMO that makes them an asshole.
But, to your point, sure. If I have FU money then depending on a lot of things including what arrangements I could make with an employer, I might well choose not to work for someone else.
You don't actually need to work at Facebook to sink 100k into buying Facebook stock (That you then forbid yourself from selling for 4 years).
So, it is actually a bit more complicated, and better than that, and long term stock grants act as a psuedo stock hedge.
This is a simplification, but imagine that there is stock worth X, that hs a 50% chance of the stock doubling in value, and a 50% chance of it crashing to 0$. You might think that this would be equivalent in expected value to X, but that is not true.
It is not true, because if the stock goes way down, you don't have to "accept" those losses. Instead, you can jump to another company, mid way through, and get back your previously high salary.
In that way you can capture the upside potential, while also being protected against the downside losses, in that if the stock goes down, you just jump ship, and get a high salary somewhere else.
[0]: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
As far as I am aware, the data powering these sites (and HN's comments) are voluntary and self-reported, and there is no correction for this self-selection bias. Few people making average or below average compensation really want to admit it or post about it in public, so you're only going to see evidence of above-average salaries, biasing the resulting average figures.
Senior devs don't get those numbers on average in the bay either. Facebook/Google are the top (NFLX too but they only hire senior engineers) and few other companies close behind like amazon, apple and some fintech. I'm saying you can get those numbers because I myself am making 5% below those numbers (245k for mid level) in Chicago for what levels.fyi is showing what FB is paying for their engineers.
This is because if the stock goes way down, and you are 1 year into your 4 year vest, then you can leave the company, and get a high compensation package somewhere else.
Do you understand how this makes it so you have free downside protection, from those other 3 years, because you can leave and get the high salary somewhere else, if the stock crashes?
There's no advantage to RSUs. Cash is better in every way, because, at worst, you can invest it in the exact same allocation that your RSUs are invested in. Any gain from them rising in price could have been realized by investing cash. Any loss from them falling in price is a real, not a paper loss. [1]
I'll take $100 of cash over $100 of RSUs any day. I probably wouldn't take $80 of cash over $100 of RSUs, though.
[1] Unless for some weird reason, you are accounting your personal finances, where a 4-year stock grant is realized in year 1. If you are doing this, you should stop, because it is not an accurate way to do accounting.
You still dont understand. Let me work this out for you, year by year.
Lets say that the stock grant is 25k a year, over 4 years. But there is a 50% chance, after year 1, of the stock doubling and staying there, and a 50% chance of it going to 0. IE, it will be worth 50k or 0$, which is an expected value of 25k.
So you have 100k of stock, and 25k vests on year 1.
Situation 1: you win the coin flip, and the stock doubles. Your 25k that you received, is now worth 50k. BUT, you now have an ADDITIONAL 150k that is unvested. The unvested stock has increased in value! If you stay for 3 more years, you get 200k in total.
Total value: 200k, over 4 years.
Now, lets look at situation 2.
In situation 2, the stock crashes to 0, after 1 year. Your 25k vest, is now worth 0$. As is, the next 3 year vest is also worth 0.
But here is the trick. What you do now, is that you quit your job. You do not stay at the company for 3 more years, to get the 0$ of stock. Instead, you get different job with stock that vests at 25k a year.
Total value: 0$ for the first year, + 25k/year at job 2. Which equals 75k.
Do you see how this is different?
You absolutely could NOT get the same value as this, if you were paid in cash. Because if you were paid in cash, then you would realize the full losses of situation 2.
> Any gain from them rising in price could have been realized by investing cash
No, actually. In situation 1, I receive 200k, and in situation 2 I receive 75k, because I am protected by the downside risk, by the fact that if the stock crashes to 0, I can leave the company and get my salary higher again.
This is not possible by investing 100k from the beginning.
Once the four year vesting cliff is done, though, the annual top-ups aren't much different from cash (Because if the stock inflates fantastically, you will get fewer RSUs next year).