I agree with the author's point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That's how labor economic works - it's a market.
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.
Somewhat related to this point: A large conglomerate I worked for managed to kill one of their major products by making the mistake of assuming that programmers are easy to replace with any other skilled programmer. So they moved a product team to a new office, knowing that the highest-paid people on the team would not choose to relocate, and assuming it would be easy to backfill them with inexpensive new hires at the new location.
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.
Sounds similar to what happened to my team. In our case, it was "only" two years of hard-won domain expertise, but we were also "trained" by the original founders (who had left at some point after the acquisition). The new team had zero domain knowledge and while we tried to hand everything over as well as we could, it seemed like a lost cause to me. A couple of months later, we found out our old company ended up buying the competition.
>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.
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.
Not all companies need $500k engineers or can afford them. An optimization at Netflix that improves performance by 1% may save them millions of dollars. The same optimization at a medium-size company may only save them a few thousand.
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.
> it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants.
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 mean, "treating your employees better" doesn't necessarily always mean "paying them more". For one, giving good employees more autonomy and decision power, treating people like adults, focusing on their career development, etc., goes a long way too.
I think as an employer you need to know when you have such an engineer, though, or be prepared to lose them.
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.
> 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.
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.
Investment Banks are a terrible example of low attrition workplaces, as attrition is quite high. It used to be the case (not sure if it still is) that expected attrition was ~100% after the first 2 years as an analyst as you were expected to go to B-school, the buyside or somewhere else.
You're asking that businesses think about long-term goals, efficiency, and what is best for the business. After having worked at over a couple dozen companies, I've never seen such an attitude from any business. Industry and size are irrelevant. Occasionally things line up by accident and the business does well, but every single business I've ever worked at or seen has a culture of shooting itself in the foot:
* 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.
> Only failing companies in 2020 view their engineers as easily replaceable.
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_).
The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That's how labor economic works - it's a market.
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.
Very few reasons for leaving aren't connected to an implicit "and I'm making more money." Very few people take significant pay cuts for reasons that don't boil down to "obscenely toxic workplace."
Money and Management are the real reasons people move, everything else is an outlier.
While this is all true, comparing the turnover in the tech industry with other sectors - even high-paying sectors - our industry does seem a bit crazy, so it's worth figuring out why this is happening and what we could do to fix it.
Even if you have the best compensation in the market, sometimes people leave just because they want something different. I agree with your general point that we should be willing to pony up to keep people, but ensuring your system is straightforward for other people to pick up and maintain is also a good practice.
The tech companies do invest a certain amount into new-grads. If you are a new grad in Microsoft working on most products you will get a weeklong training on how to build apps on azure (equivilant to azure level 1 certificate). You will also get invited to these pretty cool speaking events where they bring in people who have had TED-talks to discuss your transition.
> If you are a new grad in Microsoft working on most products you will get a weeklong training on how to build apps on azure (equivilant to azure level 1 certificate)
Do you actually get a certificate? That would be equivalent(and would actually be a good idea).
"The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market."
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
While this is possible, it's relatively unlikely. Top performers can generate enormous amounts of value for a company. As a hiring manager, I absolutely believe in the existence of 10x engineers. The reason the term has been so mired in controversy is because folks think the 10x part refers to raw coding ability, but it doesn't. It refers to soft skills, communication, leadership, domain knowledge, business acumen, customer relationships if relevant, and dedication -- overall impact on the company. It's actually quite easy for one developer to have 10x as much positive impact on a small company compared to another.
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.
>> The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market.
>> 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.
> 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.
The rest of you waste more money hiring 5-10x more mediocre engineers to try to mitigate the bus factor or whatever. And it's still not as good a product as it will be built by a handful of good, over paid and over worked engineers who really know what they're doing.
The "hit by a bus" thing is used for the most dramatic effect: there's nothing you can do, there's no grace period where a "poached" developer can give some wisdom to his/her successor etc.
Managers know that it's not the most likely case, but it's still possible.
Keep in mind that an organization that doesn't appreciate their top performs (hence them leaving) is also more likely to not take advantage of their limited time left when they give notice.
And a grace period that isn't taken advantage of is functionally equivalent to your employee being hit by a bus.
I'm picking up from a senior colleague who wasn't hit by a bus, but did die suddenly out of the blue, with absolutely zero warning. Reconstructing everything that he was doing, and why things are the way they are, has been an interesting challenge to say the least.
In practice, "knowledge transfer" is pretty much a joke anyway. Unless they have been documenting important things to know along the way it's usually at best an ad-hoc, partial data dump of the most recent thing they were working on.
There's several reasons a bus is seen as worse than them being poached:
* 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.
As a counter point: the golden handcuffs for startups/companies aren't guaranteed to pay off, so the employee may decide that the options are still worth $0 and not bother with incurring taxes by exercising.
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.
I think an important part of the "golden handcuffs" is the employee's sense of deep expertise and importance at their current company, especially if they were a very early hire. Coupled with a bit of impostor syndrome, this can create a huge gravitational well where the employee sticks around even in a bad situation. They are afraid that by switching they will take a huge "demotion" in terms of their overall importance and the weight of their decisions in a new team/company.
Options for most startups are mostly way overrated. The opportunity cost to hang around for 5-10 years to maybe get to a liquidation event is very high.
ive worked for 2 fortune 50s and in both cases i had lots of autonomy and ownership of the product and process.. however other teams in the same org were clearly being burned out and worked to the bone by their bosses. its a management thing. smaller companies have fewer managers so your odds of working under a bad one go up.
It's also a good signal that there's something wrong with the management at the startup and/or the startup is not doing well enough to hire the resources they need.
You paint a false dichotomy here. These compensation numbers are just as likely in NYC. Work life balance at many of the FAANG companies tends to be better than other companies (especially startups), and I've had plenty of bosses that pay a great deal of attention to my needs.
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...
I feel like people try to tell themselves this, but money is BY FAR the most important factor. And FAANGs pay a ton.
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)
>But most of the time we're talking about something like $180k to $250k when getting poached to a FAANG
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 feel like people try to tell themselves this, but money is BY FAR the most important factor
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.
I feel like people tell themselves the opposite so they can justify continuing to run the SV rat race.
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?
I don't mean to generalize that Big Tech has awful work life balance or other problems (I am sure it is mostly the opposite!), but rather there are lot of things smaller companies can and should offer to be more appealing.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Rightly or wrongly, people who have the things you mention start to value them less, and when a FAANG waves a huge stack of green at them it can look very tempting.
Do they pay as much for an Alaska-based dev as for a SV-based dev though? I'd be surprised if that was standing policy outside of a few smaller companies (Basecamp is fairly famous for paying SV salaries to all remote employees)
The author makes it sound like Rails is the recommended way to build software that is maintained by a revolving door of junior developers whom you don't have to motivate or compensate, because you can just hire another cog-in-the-machine when the old ones inevitably wise up to your game.
yeah, kind of read it that way, or as an ad for their rails churn 'shop'. More than anything seems like an ad for rails developers, nothing else.
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.
Thanks for this perspective. I believe it takes developers at all levels to maintain a piece of software. A developer of 10 years experience may not get professional fulfillment out of form validation changes, but a bootcamp grad shouldn't run the SOC2 audit.
Instead of "hit by a bus," I prefer the term "win the lotto."
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.
Sure, but even someone retiring after winning the lottery might deign to write a few things down for you. The point of the bus scenario is that there is not even the possibility to ask them a question you might get an answer to.
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.
> Sure, but even someone retiring after winning the lottery might deign to write a few things down for you.
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.
Yea sorry that's bullshit. I certainly don't need the stress of a job in my life if I have other options. I don't care how much I like my job, it's still a job and the only reason I'm doing it is to make money. Otherwise I'd be spending time with my family and doing hobbies, of which one would likely still be writing software.
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?
What would you expect someone who just won the lottery to do? Continue working and not enjoy a vacation, etc? Keeping contact with friends made in the workplace is completely orthogonal to giving notice after winning the lottery, and taking a long vacation.
I always call it the "lottery problem" instead of the "bus problem" because it's more positive. Also for some people, getting hired at a FAANG is like winning the lottery so it jives with OP's article.
The problem with either of those is that the chances of either of those things happening are incredibly low, so the urgency to act on it isn't there. If someone would tell you that you have to prepare to the one in a few million chance of winning in the lottery, you would likely also ignore it.
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.
> you want more than one person in your business to have domain knowledge
> 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.
Readit News
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.
Deleted Comment
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.