Except you rarely get inflation-matching pay rises, so the only way to prevent the annual erosion of your situation is the constant team growth and never-ending promotions.
I learned that the hard way a few years back, then got my act together and made sure I’m always perceived unhappy with salary - to pull that off, you need to be backed by delivering stuff and being seen. Do your homework, and ask for the recognition, that’s my tip.
The prevailing engineer perspective is that this behavior causes the smartest engineers with options and ambitions will move on. Other top engineers will leave simply because they prefer working with other great engineers. Three years of small plays like this from management is enough to cause complete brain drain, as even those waiting for more vesting will lose optimism. It's one thing to have 6% churn from engineering/product in a year. It's another if you lose the most qualified and respected 6%.
2. If we wanted to use a number with authority we would probably use 6.5%, which is the US Buerau of Labor Static's number for 2022 CPI.
3. My level of precision (one digit) should have been an informal indicator that I was using a rough estimate.
I doubt that’s the case. The people deciding to lay off are just getting rid of 6% of their ‘resources’, they don’t consider that those 6% might be doing 50% of the work.
So 3 years on they’re just wondering why their engineering team is so useless, and thinking back to the good old times.
2. My comment described a process in which talented engineers self select to leave companies, and management only had indirect input on which engineers leave.
I have noticed that recruiter outreach to me has picked back up. I'm pretty senior and they're offering me senior roles that could pay more. My current employer has benefitted from current events though so I'm staying put. But if I ever want to fuck off, I easily can.
I have a friend who is very junior. He got promoted but still fucked off to a new better job because his current employer treated him poorly.
I think people are gonna start remembering they can fuck off again, and we're gonna end up somewhere between here and where we were when the job market was on fire pandemic and pre-pandemic.
It's also important to note that wage inflation and the inflation of goods and services are separate and not always correlated. Just because milk and bread and cars cost more doesn't mean that the value provided to a company by an hour of an employee's time has risen by the same amount (or at all). I'd love raises that beat inflation every year, and for most of my career I've gotten them, but now that I'm not it doesn't necessarily mean the company is just trying to screw its employees.
Also, critical parts of employee retention include "keep the worker alive" and "keep the worker satisfied". If housing goes up 20%, the wage better increase by 20% as well. Homeless or unstably housed engineers are not productive engineers.
These are all very good arguments for why people making $15/hr should get regular raises to keep pace with inflation as a matter of course, not a very good argument for why someone making $200k copy-pasting JavaScript from StackOverflow should.
That's an unfounded assertion. I know plenty of software devs & other tech industry folks who cannot afford a house and are being squeezed by relentless rent increases (myself included). Many on the lower end of the pay range are a layoff away from homelessness.
By “employees” in your first sentence I assume you mean the C-suite?
Those who complain are usually cast as “negative thinking folks” and get subtle punishments.
If you are on a mid career senior salary range, are you going to pick a fight and risk being punished or carry on getting your good salary, bonus, stocks, insurance, retirement plan and perks - in exchange for slighly useless work?
And most of them face no real consequences. They don't have to maintain or repair some grossly abomination of a system, that's the engineers job. They'll be leading new feature dev new business dev forever & ever.
Eg. You can build a section of a tunnel to be wider where you think there should be a subway station, even if the president's wife doesn't think there should be a station there. Eventually the station will exist
And what is your explanation for why it took you twice as long as it did Bob who just plowed that thing with uniform width?
For startups, it's the investors who know only to measure growth because there is no expected profit until the bing bang happens.
My pace has almost always felt a bit off, but I've always hated shipping subpar systems. Whether it's other engineers or some local managers or the business, there's always been extreme pressure in competition with my desire to just do a good damned job.
It's been isolating & draining. Sometimes it's just a matter of spending 3x as long as it would have taken to line up the 300 reasons why at each spot the shit slapdash plan is shit and the good plan is good. Trying to be OK with the process, walking through people who really barely can understand any of... You have to just keep saying to yourself, fine, this is my job, I'm the expert, it's OK that you don't know, & I'm not sure that you do need to know, but here we are & this talking it through is how we're going to decide where we go I guess.
The primary job of an executive is risk management. Let’s say I run an engineering team where people have good ideas 70% of the time, and bad ideas 30% of the time. Famously, it takes 10x the number of resources it originally took to develop and deploy, to remove a bad system from production and replace it.
.7 * 4 + .3 * 3 = 3.7
.3 * 11 + 0.7 = 4.0
An engineering team that doesn’t take 3x the time it takes to do something to verify it ahead of time is actually slightly less efficient overall ( assuming that 3x the time it takes reduces the error rate to 0)
Yea there are lots of simplifying assumptions here, these are all averages, plans don’t all take the same time, etc, etc, etc, and a more sophisticated system would take it all into account. But the results don’t usually change, unless in very special circumstances.
If you stopped paying them, would they stay?
Say you took pride in your skill as a smith. That’s hardly incompatible with finding an employer who will pay for making quality armor.
Pride in the end product might, but most companies make nothing to be proud about, except the skill itself.
So, let's be real, they are at the company to make money, and if they have a better chance, they'll take it. Lack of those, good enough salary already, inertia, and "the devil you know" is closer to the reason they stay.
I can take pride in my skill anywhere I want. What I care about is that my employer takes pride in my skill.
Even if another pays more, I’d prefer working for someone that appreciates my skill (and shows that in ways not necessarily salary based).
Of course there’s a limit to this, but it’s generally true.
I also have to tell, honestly, they give me shit. They act like “Yeah we don’t care that your business survives, it’s your job to make your company earn money. At worst we’ll find a job elsewhere.” I’m constantly tempted to fire them before they tank my company.
* What response do you get from the candidate?
* How do you account for candidates who might be faking enthusiasm due to need for a job?
* How are you measuring this enthusiasm within the company (ie are you having high employee survey scores compared to what you are paying them)?
Like seriously the "we are making the world a better place" only goes so far - especially in a climate where employers have shown who they truly care about. And may be you are suggesting that you might not be messaging that you are making the world a better place and instead everybody gets to be a davinci?
I personally do care about doing good work and ensuring what I do is well thought out and performant. However that does not mean I always care about the company. And what little care I do have can rapidly be eroded.
Workers nowadays are more aware than ever that you pay a passion tax. If you want to work where you really want to work, then companies know this and will take advantage of it.
I care about the quality I'd work I do, I feel it's a reflection of me, even though it find the product to be pointless
Right - it isn't altruism; it's basic professionalism - and the only psychologically healthy thing to get through the day, actually.
"They're paying me decently, they don't take me for granted, don't get in my way of helping them and they definitely aren't jerks. So why not do a good job?"
Actually caring about the product/company doesn't need to factor into it.
I'd add to that: for all but the most intractably huge companies, there's a somewhat different, or additional, atmosphere that I think is even more important: everyone is focused on the success of the project/company.
Put another way: if you could somehow omnisciently and top-down get each person individually coordinated such that all they need to do is their complete their assigned tasks on schedule and with high quality, that'd be great. But, realistically, you can't (well, not in innovative startups, nor in a lot of tech work). So, if you can get people thinking and coordinating towards goals beyond whatever task someone told them to do, then then you can be more effective collectively.
Maybe you the craft you had in mind already implicitly encompassed this focus towards larger goals. But if you look at popular modern methodologies, organizational incentives, etc., it's pretty clear that's not implied many places.
We need to get a handle on inflation and the housing bubble first before we can figure out what reasonable salaries are again, and that’s going to hurt all around.
The fact is that in the modern day even on a FAANG salary a lot of people cannot afford to buy a home of their own. And the salary band at those companies is incredibly wide, owing in fact due to the wide disconnect in salary between engineers, middle management and the c-suite.
But how do we do this?
[0] : https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
[1] : https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
I'm not a FAANG worker; I make well below what they make. I simply do not ascribe to the crab-in-a-pot mentality that a lot of posters here seem to have in attempt to further divide what is ultimately a large range of middle class workers. Total compensation also only matters depending on the total CoL because a lot of those companies require you to live in areas with incredibly high rent, especially with the attempt to remove remote work. And even with FAANG the salary between an engineer at Amazon and one at Google is going to vastly differ, especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at.
For reference, Pew Research defines middle class as 1.66 - 2x the median salary in America. That would make most tech workers middle class, and FAANG engineers in the lower upper class. In places like San Francisco where the cost of living is significantly higher, you would need to be earning ~230k a year to be in the upper middle class [1]. Though that's by one narrow definition.
The fact is that even your senior tech worker making ~200k a year is barely a blip on the radar compared to how much executives and investors are stealing. If you want to fall for their rhetoric and wonder why things are getting worse for everyone then you shouldn't be surprised.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/02/middle-class-income-in-major...
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
In your CNBC article everything is based on household income. Many SWEs would be classed as not middle class based on their own income let alone household income.
The median SWE salary in the US is $110k: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/....
If you take increased salary due to location and partner salary into account, the majority of SWEs are easily upper middle class.
> In places like San Francisco where the cost of living is significantly higher, you would need to be earning ~230k a year to be in the upper middle class
A solo entry level FAANG engineer basically qualifies for upper middle class. Add a partner and you're definitely upper middle class.
> And even with FAANG the salary between an engineer at Amazon and one at Google is going to vastly differ, especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at
What are you talking about with "especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at"? As far as I've seen Retail vs AWS doesn't have different comp.
Google and Amazon also have pretty similar comp: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon&track=Software....
Their comp bands likely have a lot of overlap. Differences are more likely to be based on negotiation than working for Google vs Amazon.
My argument has always been that they exist in the middle class. The fact that median income being low isn't indicative of them not being middle class, but rather that the continued squeeze on salary among all middle class workers has resulted in a shrinking of who actually is middle class and what that income means.
> Sites like what you share are often going to be representative of the upper band of the salary range since that's who self-reports
Many people have corroborated that levels.fyi is accurate for large tech companies like Amazon and Google. It's accurate for my company as well.
If FAANG comp is middle class, at what point does it become upper middle/upper class? I believe ~$500k is 1% income in the US. Some SWEs who are "workers" break that. Is someone who has top 1% income really middle class?
A lot of SWEs also receive equity compensation (I.e. ownership), which is very much not a middle class phenomenon.
The point is that salaries should have increased for everyone. Middle class is not struggling to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck. It is living a modest life with modest savings and a discretionary income.
This random article claims the 90th percentile in the Bay Area is $384K. https://www.kqed.org/news/11799308/bay-area-has-highest-inco...
I am not sure how that helps make this clearer though. It almost doesn’t matter at this point. We all know making $55K/yr in the Bay Area is rough. People are getting screwed over.
From that perspective, yes a lot of people make less, but that just means life is becoming impossible for most people making normal salaries.
Not really. Housing is simply becoming more expensive to construct, even in places where land is cheap and building regulations are open. But let's say even if NIMBYism was significant factor: why are all the good jobs where people want to live correlated with higher factors of NIMBYism? Why doesn't everyone just want to move to Houston (which is losing population these days, even if the metro is gaining)?
What a strange question, as if it reverses the correlation. People who buy a property before new people come in, such as SF during the 60s, will inevitably see their home prices rise and want to capture that value without wanting to build more housing. The places where people don't want to live simply...don't see this phenomenon, because people don't want to live there. Of course supply and demand still matters, you can't just build houses in some random part of the country and expect people to move there. You need to build where people want to move. This doesn't really have to do anything with not building more housing, and indeed NIMBYism explicitly denies housing construction approvals.
> You need to build where people want to move. This doesn't really have to do anything with not building more housing, and indeed NIMBYism explicitly denies housing construction approvals.
Just because everyone wants to live in SF, which has a density much higher than Houston, doesn’t mean everyone can live in SF. If SF was a dense as Manhattan, it wouldn’t be any cheaper than it is now, it might even be as expensive as Manhattan.
No one is asking for endless growth on the employee side. But growth should match responsibilities, and if I gain more responsibility over time then pay should match. And if my salary can't match inflation at minimum then you're telling me I should be paid less for my current work.
This isn't the case because companies prefer to funnel that money to investors. Note that privately owned companies or worker owned companies avoid this issue more often.
Employees in tech wanted, and were fine with, and even cherished "a sustainable and resilient business". That's the golden age IBM, Intel, AT&T, and so on employee for example.
Then companies started being about the stock market, and short term profit, throwing them under the bus whenever they had a chance, while still paying nice bonuses to the C-level and middle managers even when they run the companies to the ground.
So, yes, they felt little loyalty not to "jump ship" to a company didn't give a shit abotu them. Hell, the C-level execs that are paid 10-100x better than the employees would not think twice to jump ship at any chance they got, and somehow the employees are at fault for doing the same?
I mean I half agree. There's been factions in side the tech industry for years trying to get people to think about what would happen in this sort of scenario, to understand that "tech workers" have more in common with working-class factory workers in the 50s and 60s that with Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. That faction has pointed how IBM or HP acted when they were on a downward slope. To think about collective action, solidarity, other measures that might help ensure that good jobs don't become bad jobs become no jobs to further enrich a handful of factory owners.
But the braying voices places like here have always shouted those down. Always.
It’s not that activist billionaire, shareholders are demanding layoffs. It’s the workers fault for wanting a share of the pie and not just taking what they’re given quietly and meekly.
You’re right, it’s not a class struggle. For it to be a struggle both parties have to recognize that it’s actually a struggle.
This argument would make sense if the companies doing the layoffs were largely unprofitable, and not spending huge sums of money on stock buybacks and inflated executive salaries.
I keep seeing this idea that people need to work harder and you’ve got the Mark Zuckerberg‘s of the world pushing this idea that the Meta employees aren’t working hard enough and that’s why they are flailing. Not that the actual core strategy and shit like the Metaverse are bullshit. Or Google that has had some thing like 3 to 5 different chat systems over the past 10 years and utterly baffling product strategies along with a reputation of killing products or neglecting them.
But it’s clearly the employees fault and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with completely bullshit leadership.
Tech leadership bears blame for nourishing that "there's no tomorrow" / "growth will continue forever" culture, but it's such an unhelpful take to portray this as some sort of a class struggle with shareholders. Especially since for a good number of big tech companies, shareholders don't actually have much say and founders hold controlling interests.