6 ms·

Once they're trained up to a point where another company is willing to pay them more for a more senior position, you could give them a raise? Congrats! You trai

Once they're trained up to a point where another company is willing to pay them more for a more senior position, you could give them a raise? Congrats! You trained a junior dev and they turned into a senior dev.

Terr_ 9y ago
That's true but it also misses the point: A portion of the limited money-pool you could have used for their raise is already gone, spend in the extra costs (direct or opportunity) of the training period. There isn't much of a "raw mercenary economics" argument for training (which the MBA types prefer), you've got to talk about intangibles like loyalty, goodwill, social connections, etc.
- crooked-v 9y ago
  But if they leave, now you have to pay to train a new junior dev, and you still have to pay full price for a different senior dev.
- Declanomous 9y ago
  That doesn't make sense to me. Let's say you train someone whose salary is [x]. After training, their market salary would be 30% higher; [1.3x]. Are you suggesting that if they end up with a hypothetical 10% raise, to [1.1x] because [.2x] was spent on training? That's absurd. You can't just walk out on the street and hire a person who is already trained for [1.3x]. You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered. I honestly think the difference in the second example is that the expenses in the second example are paying the kinds of people who make stupid personnel decisions like this. I'm obviously cynical about the whole thing, but it seems that MBA-style thinking is almost deliberately evil. I have friends who have gotten MBAs from top schools, and friends who work in management consulting for the Big 4, and I've talked at length with them about their feelings about business practices that they implement and support. I literally have never gotten an answer that justifies philosophical objections to their work, beyond perhaps "well, it's just the way it's done." I think it's a myth that organizations have to behave in a deliberately sociopathic manner in order to be successful. I mean, to a certain extent being a sociopath is an advantage, but I really don't think that's really a necessity. On the flip side, I acknowledge that I am not very good at divorcing who I am from what I do. It's why I've made a career helping non-profits and social enterprises. I'd probably be a healthier person if I were able to get less invested in what I do.
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    > Are you suggesting that if they end up with a hypothetical 10% raise, to [1.1x] because [.2x] was spent on training? Either that, or the company makes cuts somewhere else which -- all else being equal -- puts it at a competitive disadvantage. Budgets are generally zero-sum at a particular moment in time. > You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered. If you can prove that to the bean-counters, by all means spread the good word. However even if true you must consider a third potential outcome: You train up the junior employee, and then they don't stay with your market-rate offer for whatever reason, and you have to incur the hiring-process costs anyway for the empty senior position. That scenario is always be more expensive than the other two, and it can only strike junior-trainer companies. Senior-poacher companies don't have to even worry about the odds of it occurring.
- joncrocks 9y ago
  The "raw mercenary economics" argument is saved money on recruitment/and allowing better calibration of performance to salary. Consider the costs associated with recruiting for a single role. You have to either advertise a role/filter out candidates or engage a recruiter (which costs time or money). You have to interview a number of people, taking time (money). You then have to onboard that person, and choose a salary based on your limited knowledge about them. And even then you could still hire a lemon (although admittedly it could go the other way and you hire someone better than expeceted). You then have to wait for them to become productive in the new organisation. You also have much better information about someone who has worked at your organisation for a longer period of time and can therefore tailor their salary better to their skills than for someone who you know nothing about. Spending money on training is a predictable cost vs. an unknown future cost of hiring. And yes, people will also appreciate it as an intangible, which if you are 'mercenary' you can enumerate as a supplement to a certain amount of salary.
aerotwelve 9y ago
This is the answer, but they just won't listen. Management at so many firms have convinced themselves that developers leave because of all these magical reasons that aren't either 1) they're dissatisfied with their pay and you're not listening 2) they're dissatisfied with their working conditions (bullpens or open offices anyone?) so they'll never keep their best people and they'll never learn.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > This is the answer, but they just won't listen Is there a counterfactual? A company with a strong culture of promoting from within that outperforms as a likely result of this attribute?
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    In my experience promoting from within is still insufficient. Getting a promotion means maybe a 10% raise. Quitting means a 50-100% raise. I've got a guy on my team in a junior-ish position making 80 who is about to leave to make 160. There's no promotion path in the company to get that kind of raise over night.
    - tobyhinloopen 9y ago
      Well that sucks time to change the company...
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        I've personally never heard of any company doubling a developer's salary like that. Have you?
        thedufer 9y ago
        It's certainly rare, but my employer is aggressive about keeping compensation appropriate. Top performing new hires can see their comp double in 2-3 years.
Trundle 9y ago
If you're going to end up paying market rate anyway, why not just skip the training cost and hire them after someone else has put in the hard yards?
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  That's true. Presumably the junior developer is cheaper while they're junior, but if nobody's hiring them anymore then I guess they're not cheaper enough to compensate for needing to train them. Maybe by creating a workplace where developers want to stay you could keep them around at slightly under market rate? Not everyone is looking to job hop every 6 months. But the amount below market rate that you seem to end up by staying in one job feels like it's unreasonably large.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Because the problem domain, process and tooling is specific to your company and a senior person also needs time to learn them.
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    Plus, turning a junior into a senior developer isn't exactly a boolean switch, that is turned over night. It's a process and that junior developer will spend a lot of intermediate time between both states, in which he's still very useful, yet affordable since he's probably paid below senior level.
aczerepinski 9y ago
Even if you're a savvy manager who is totally on board with this idea, you have to work within the rules HR gives you. There are lots of companies that cap promotion raises at 10% and need VP level sign off above that. How many companies allow a manager to make a habit out of 50% raises - not just for the once a generation talent who made the company 10x their salary this year, but for "pretty good" employees who are progressing as expected? For whatever reason, letting them walk and paying that same 1.5x salary to a new mid-level hire is easier for everyone to swallow. And from the employee's perspective, saying "yes" to a recruiter who expects to pay market rate sounds like a lot less hassle and stress than preparing a presentation on why your current company should change or make an exception to its HR polices for you.
mightybyte 9y ago
Awhile back I left my first software job (they did have systematic hiring of new grads) at a very large corporation because I was moving to another city. As it happened, that company also had an office in the city I was moving to. I applied for a position at the new location and they gave me an offer. But their offer was something like 15-20k lower than just about all the other offers I had. Apparently there was some limit on how much you could increase someone's compensation that was preventing them from offering me more. I heard a rumor that my previous boss (one of only two level 6 software engineers in the company's whole eastern region) made some noise about how ridiculous it was given that hiring me was way less risky than hiring someone else since my track record at the company was well established. But it was all to no avail. He couldn't move the bureaucracy. So of course I took the highest paying offer with another company.
- JimboOmega 9y ago
  Absolutely happened at my first job, too. There was a huge fuss over how much a raise they could give me and how they were capped to a certain limit. It's great you love my work but it's not enough of a reason that I shouldn't walk across the street to your competitor and get paid 20% more.

Terr_ 9y ago

That's true but it also misses the point: A portion of the limited money-pool you could have used for their raise is already gone, spend in the extra costs (direct or opportunity) of the training period. There isn't much of a "raw mercenary economics" argument for training (which the MBA types prefer), you've got to talk about intangibles like loyalty, goodwill, social connections, etc.

crooked-v 9y ago
But if they leave, now you have to pay to train a new junior dev, and you still have to pay full price for a different senior dev.
Declanomous 9y ago
That doesn't make sense to me. Let's say you train someone whose salary is [x]. After training, their market salary would be 30% higher; [1.3x]. Are you suggesting that if they end up with a hypothetical 10% raise, to [1.1x] because [.2x] was spent on training? That's absurd. You can't just walk out on the street and hire a person who is already trained for [1.3x]. You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered. I honestly think the difference in the second example is that the expenses in the second example are paying the kinds of people who make stupid personnel decisions like this. I'm obviously cynical about the whole thing, but it seems that MBA-style thinking is almost deliberately evil. I have friends who have gotten MBAs from top schools, and friends who work in management consulting for the Big 4, and I've talked at length with them about their feelings about business practices that they implement and support. I literally have never gotten an answer that justifies philosophical objections to their work, beyond perhaps "well, it's just the way it's done." I think it's a myth that organizations have to behave in a deliberately sociopathic manner in order to be successful. I mean, to a certain extent being a sociopath is an advantage, but I really don't think that's really a necessity. On the flip side, I acknowledge that I am not very good at divorcing who I am from what I do. It's why I've made a career helping non-profits and social enterprises. I'd probably be a healthier person if I were able to get less invested in what I do.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  > Are you suggesting that if they end up with a hypothetical 10% raise, to [1.1x] because [.2x] was spent on training? Either that, or the company makes cuts somewhere else which -- all else being equal -- puts it at a competitive disadvantage. Budgets are generally zero-sum at a particular moment in time. > You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered. If you can prove that to the bean-counters, by all means spread the good word. However even if true you must consider a third potential outcome: You train up the junior employee, and then they don't stay with your market-rate offer for whatever reason, and you have to incur the hiring-process costs anyway for the empty senior position. That scenario is always be more expensive than the other two, and it can only strike junior-trainer companies. Senior-poacher companies don't have to even worry about the odds of it occurring.
joncrocks 9y ago
The "raw mercenary economics" argument is saved money on recruitment/and allowing better calibration of performance to salary. Consider the costs associated with recruiting for a single role. You have to either advertise a role/filter out candidates or engage a recruiter (which costs time or money). You have to interview a number of people, taking time (money). You then have to onboard that person, and choose a salary based on your limited knowledge about them. And even then you could still hire a lemon (although admittedly it could go the other way and you hire someone better than expeceted). You then have to wait for them to become productive in the new organisation. You also have much better information about someone who has worked at your organisation for a longer period of time and can therefore tailor their salary better to their skills than for someone who you know nothing about. Spending money on training is a predictable cost vs. an unknown future cost of hiring. And yes, people will also appreciate it as an intangible, which if you are 'mercenary' you can enumerate as a supplement to a certain amount of salary.

aerotwelve 9y ago

This is the answer, but they just won't listen. Management at so many firms have convinced themselves that developers leave because of all these magical reasons that aren't either 1) they're dissatisfied with their pay and you're not listening 2) they're dissatisfied with their working conditions (bullpens or open offices anyone?) so they'll never keep their best people and they'll never learn.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> This is the answer, but they just won't listen Is there a counterfactual? A company with a strong culture of promoting from within that outperforms as a likely result of this attribute?
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  In my experience promoting from within is still insufficient. Getting a promotion means maybe a 10% raise. Quitting means a 50-100% raise. I've got a guy on my team in a junior-ish position making 80 who is about to leave to make 160. There's no promotion path in the company to get that kind of raise over night.
  - tobyhinloopen 9y ago
    Well that sucks time to change the company...
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      I've personally never heard of any company doubling a developer's salary like that. Have you?
      - thedufer 9y ago
        It's certainly rare, but my employer is aggressive about keeping compensation appropriate. Top performing new hires can see their comp double in 2-3 years.

Trundle 9y ago

If you're going to end up paying market rate anyway, why not just skip the training cost and hire them after someone else has put in the hard yards?

wlesieutre 9y ago
That's true. Presumably the junior developer is cheaper while they're junior, but if nobody's hiring them anymore then I guess they're not cheaper enough to compensate for needing to train them. Maybe by creating a workplace where developers want to stay you could keep them around at slightly under market rate? Not everyone is looking to job hop every 6 months. But the amount below market rate that you seem to end up by staying in one job feels like it's unreasonably large.
adrianN 9y ago
Because the problem domain, process and tooling is specific to your company and a senior person also needs time to learn them.
- thirdsun 9y ago
  Plus, turning a junior into a senior developer isn't exactly a boolean switch, that is turned over night. It's a process and that junior developer will spend a lot of intermediate time between both states, in which he's still very useful, yet affordable since he's probably paid below senior level.

aczerepinski 9y ago

Even if you're a savvy manager who is totally on board with this idea, you have to work within the rules HR gives you. There are lots of companies that cap promotion raises at 10% and need VP level sign off above that. How many companies allow a manager to make a habit out of 50% raises - not just for the once a generation talent who made the company 10x their salary this year, but for "pretty good" employees who are progressing as expected? For whatever reason, letting them walk and paying that same 1.5x salary to a new mid-level hire is easier for everyone to swallow. And from the employee's perspective, saying "yes" to a recruiter who expects to pay market rate sounds like a lot less hassle and stress than preparing a presentation on why your current company should change or make an exception to its HR polices for you.

mightybyte 9y ago

Awhile back I left my first software job (they did have systematic hiring of new grads) at a very large corporation because I was moving to another city. As it happened, that company also had an office in the city I was moving to. I applied for a position at the new location and they gave me an offer. But their offer was something like 15-20k lower than just about all the other offers I had. Apparently there was some limit on how much you could increase someone's compensation that was preventing them from offering me more. I heard a rumor that my previous boss (one of only two level 6 software engineers in the company's whole eastern region) made some noise about how ridiculous it was given that hiring me was way less risky than hiring someone else since my track record at the company was well established. But it was all to no avail. He couldn't move the bureaucracy. So of course I took the highest paying offer with another company.

JimboOmega 9y ago
Absolutely happened at my first job, too. There was a huge fuss over how much a raise they could give me and how they were capped to a certain limit. It's great you love my work but it's not enough of a reason that I shouldn't walk across the street to your competitor and get paid 20% more.