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I worked in an area where the nearest competition was hundreds of miles away. When the engineering staff would question upper management and HR during annual me

by jecxjo 8y ago

I worked in an area where the nearest competition was hundreds of miles away. When the engineering staff would question upper management and HR during annual meetings about competitive wages they would always state that we were extremely competitive for our location. After working there for nearly a decade and a half I moved to another state, about 300 miles away and my pay nearly doubled. Doing my exit interview I stated that the reason I was leaving was because management had this goofy view of the world and it was the reason why we struggled finding talent. They felt that because there was no physical competition in the area they could pay a fraction of what their competitors in the field pay and still retain talent. They also felt that it was appropriate to create a convoluted scheme where you could never really get a promotion, just be given more responsibility w/ almost no increase in pay. (You can only move up a level if you have 1 or fewer "needs improvements" while the managers were told that all employees should have no less than 2 "needs improvements" as they should have things to work on over the coming year). Most people I talked to about that whole situation would offer the "well why didn't you just move" advice not understanding that the pay was just enough to pay for room and board, college loans, and then choose to put the last few dollars into a 401k or into savings to escape that job. I opted for the former hoping I would work my way up to not have this problem. I made the wrong choice.

jorblumesea 8y ago
It seems like a really backwards view to see your company as the "only game in town". Physically, it might be true, but you're competing with remote only companies, and regional competing cities. You're also indirectly competing with hubs such as California or Seattle where jobs are plentiful. This is a really interesting comment, thanks for sharing.
- PeterCorless 8y ago
  Exactly. In Engineering, you are competing with Silicon Valley and NYC as well as the scrappiest folks in Sao Paolo, Lagos, Novosibirsk, Chennai or Zagreb. The best coders with the best management team wins. But only if they get paid to stick around long enough to reach production. Otherwise folk walk. Human expertise and intellectual capacity has a value; you've got to be willing to pay what the market demands.
  - VRay 8y ago
    I wish these market forces were a hell of a lot stronger I seem to be able to get $250k+ in Silicon Valley and ~$200k in Seattle (which is almost the same after cost of living and state tax), but last time I looked in Tokyo I couldn't get any offers for over 15M JPY/year and even that was a stretch (150k USD at a 100-1 exchange rate, but more like 130k USD at the time) Likewise, I haven't been able to rustle up any remote job offers for over $150k. I'd LOVE to work from home on a giant ranch out in Flyover, USA for the same mortgage cost as a grungy condo in San Jose, but not if it's going to set back my retirement plans by 10 years And I've got a news flash for you remote-friendly entrepreneurs: You're competing with people paying $250k/year in the bay area whether you like it or not. Sooner or later some top-paying behemoth is going to put an elite 5 man team on it and make a product that puts your 50 person company out of business. By all means, try to lowball people into $120-$150k/year offers if you can, but if they're not having it, you should consider ponying up.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  But that same dynamic is even more prevalent in non-tech sectors. My wife had two such jobs so far. In the first case, the boss was quite explicit about abusing the scarcity of office jobs in the area (a cluster of small villages and towns). Forced overtime, late paychecks, bad working conditions and verbal abuse were all maintained by a simple threat - "where else will you go?". In the second case, the job had decent working conditions, but the management had constant troubles finding wood workers (leading them to shutting down a promising department, in which my wife was doing design work), mostly because they tried to low-ball salaries - thinking that in this part of the country, there are lower costs of living and few other jobs for this kind of production, so they can offer below-market pay. Both businesses are still thriving to this day, and still have mentioned problems.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    If I was a slightly less calm person I’d have already beaten the shit out of my partners boss, he is making her absolutely fucking miserable though his ineptness. I keep telling her to quit, we can live on my salary indefinitely while she finds another job but she won’t. What makes it doubly annoying is that she is conscientious and has a work ethic. I fucking hate it to be honest, you’d think by now large companies would have figured out the trickle down effects of bad management and have better systems in place to weed it out. The first thing I’d look at as the boss of a large company is a) department sickness rates, b) department turnover rates
    - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      My wife was like this, staying at a job with a dipshit boss. I told her to quit because we could live on my income but she refused. She brought her stress home and it impacted our marriage for the worse. If I could go back in time I would work harder to convince her to quit. It takes 2 to make an employment relationship. The employee has just as much if not more power than employer. Personally, I can't put up with a sliver of bullshit from anyone without going postal on them. This is the reason I stay in consulting, setting my own rules.
      - 8y ago
- jecxjo 8y ago
  Remote doesn't always work for every sector of development. I had a huge cubical full of industrial hardware, had a lab with even more hardware, a plant for assembling and testing hardware, etc. We had a "no remote" policy because it just wasn't possible to get things done without actually being in the office. And after spending years doing embedded systems, industrial control, communications...I was pretty much the opposite of a Web/Mobile developer. Trying to get a remote gig while having none of those skills was difficult (yes there are other industries that can do remote too, but what I was "good at" was not remote friendly tech). I had to create a side job, make a real world project and go around showing that I knew the tech just to get my foot in the door to places that would allow remote work.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    After a company I was working for writing Windows Mobile apps for ruggedized devices went out of business, I got a contract with one of their former customers located in another state. I had close to $30K of devices and ancillary equipment in my home office.
- sjjshzvuiajhz 8y ago
  It’s true that every employer is competing in a global marketplace. The wealth-maximizing outcome is for the most productive programmers to work at the companies with the biggest money faucets to optimize. It makes sense for those companies to pay gobs of money for programmers from all over the world. And if paying them even more to move to Mountain View makes them 5% more productive, it’s worth it. This is definitely true for programmers that are working on systems that generate billions of dollars and get bigger every year. On the other hand, there are lots of less-productive companies out there that don’t generate billions of dollars through carefully-tuned funnels, but who still need to employ software engineers. They can’t afford to pay $300k+ to thousands of people like the top companies do. But if they can find some solid talent who happen to have attachments to a lower cost of living area, or maybe are worse at interviewing, etc. they can get away with paying a lot less.
gcb0 8y ago
well, their plan seems to have worked out perfectly. they got you for 15yrs on half the pay! sadly the world is run by bean counters :(
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Sadly, yes. They were not exactly wrong in their approach.
souprock 8y ago
This isn't enough info to tell if you were being ripped off. Normally, companies pay more in expensive areas, but not enough to make up the difference. If the pay was half, we might expect the cost of living to be a third. Was it? (that is: by moving you doubled your salary and tripled your costs)

by jecxjo 8y ago

jorblumesea 8y ago

It seems like a really backwards view to see your company as the "only game in town". Physically, it might be true, but you're competing with remote only companies, and regional competing cities. You're also indirectly competing with hubs such as California or Seattle where jobs are plentiful. This is a really interesting comment, thanks for sharing.

PeterCorless 8y ago
Exactly. In Engineering, you are competing with Silicon Valley and NYC as well as the scrappiest folks in Sao Paolo, Lagos, Novosibirsk, Chennai or Zagreb. The best coders with the best management team wins. But only if they get paid to stick around long enough to reach production. Otherwise folk walk. Human expertise and intellectual capacity has a value; you've got to be willing to pay what the market demands.
- VRay 8y ago
  I wish these market forces were a hell of a lot stronger I seem to be able to get $250k+ in Silicon Valley and ~$200k in Seattle (which is almost the same after cost of living and state tax), but last time I looked in Tokyo I couldn't get any offers for over 15M JPY/year and even that was a stretch (150k USD at a 100-1 exchange rate, but more like 130k USD at the time) Likewise, I haven't been able to rustle up any remote job offers for over $150k. I'd LOVE to work from home on a giant ranch out in Flyover, USA for the same mortgage cost as a grungy condo in San Jose, but not if it's going to set back my retirement plans by 10 years And I've got a news flash for you remote-friendly entrepreneurs: You're competing with people paying $250k/year in the bay area whether you like it or not. Sooner or later some top-paying behemoth is going to put an elite 5 man team on it and make a product that puts your 50 person company out of business. By all means, try to lowball people into $120-$150k/year offers if you can, but if they're not having it, you should consider ponying up.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
But that same dynamic is even more prevalent in non-tech sectors. My wife had two such jobs so far. In the first case, the boss was quite explicit about abusing the scarcity of office jobs in the area (a cluster of small villages and towns). Forced overtime, late paychecks, bad working conditions and verbal abuse were all maintained by a simple threat - "where else will you go?". In the second case, the job had decent working conditions, but the management had constant troubles finding wood workers (leading them to shutting down a promising department, in which my wife was doing design work), mostly because they tried to low-ball salaries - thinking that in this part of the country, there are lower costs of living and few other jobs for this kind of production, so they can offer below-market pay. Both businesses are still thriving to this day, and still have mentioned problems.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  If I was a slightly less calm person I’d have already beaten the shit out of my partners boss, he is making her absolutely fucking miserable though his ineptness. I keep telling her to quit, we can live on my salary indefinitely while she finds another job but she won’t. What makes it doubly annoying is that she is conscientious and has a work ethic. I fucking hate it to be honest, you’d think by now large companies would have figured out the trickle down effects of bad management and have better systems in place to weed it out. The first thing I’d look at as the boss of a large company is a) department sickness rates, b) department turnover rates
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    My wife was like this, staying at a job with a dipshit boss. I told her to quit because we could live on my income but she refused. She brought her stress home and it impacted our marriage for the worse. If I could go back in time I would work harder to convince her to quit. It takes 2 to make an employment relationship. The employee has just as much if not more power than employer. Personally, I can't put up with a sliver of bullshit from anyone without going postal on them. This is the reason I stay in consulting, setting my own rules.
    - 8y ago
jecxjo 8y ago
Remote doesn't always work for every sector of development. I had a huge cubical full of industrial hardware, had a lab with even more hardware, a plant for assembling and testing hardware, etc. We had a "no remote" policy because it just wasn't possible to get things done without actually being in the office. And after spending years doing embedded systems, industrial control, communications...I was pretty much the opposite of a Web/Mobile developer. Trying to get a remote gig while having none of those skills was difficult (yes there are other industries that can do remote too, but what I was "good at" was not remote friendly tech). I had to create a side job, make a real world project and go around showing that I knew the tech just to get my foot in the door to places that would allow remote work.
- scarface74 8y ago
  After a company I was working for writing Windows Mobile apps for ruggedized devices went out of business, I got a contract with one of their former customers located in another state. I had close to $30K of devices and ancillary equipment in my home office.
sjjshzvuiajhz 8y ago
It’s true that every employer is competing in a global marketplace. The wealth-maximizing outcome is for the most productive programmers to work at the companies with the biggest money faucets to optimize. It makes sense for those companies to pay gobs of money for programmers from all over the world. And if paying them even more to move to Mountain View makes them 5% more productive, it’s worth it. This is definitely true for programmers that are working on systems that generate billions of dollars and get bigger every year. On the other hand, there are lots of less-productive companies out there that don’t generate billions of dollars through carefully-tuned funnels, but who still need to employ software engineers. They can’t afford to pay $300k+ to thousands of people like the top companies do. But if they can find some solid talent who happen to have attachments to a lower cost of living area, or maybe are worse at interviewing, etc. they can get away with paying a lot less.

gcb0 8y ago

well, their plan seems to have worked out perfectly. they got you for 15yrs on half the pay! sadly the world is run by bean counters :(

james_s_tayler 8y ago
Sadly, yes. They were not exactly wrong in their approach.

souprock 8y ago

This isn't enough info to tell if you were being ripped off. Normally, companies pay more in expensive areas, but not enough to make up the difference. If the pay was half, we might expect the cost of living to be a third. Was it? (that is: by moving you doubled your salary and tripled your costs)