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People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of th
by ng12 8y ago
People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA".
One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surprising that devs are the ones who left because by hard capping their pay you are reducing their reluctance to go work somewhere else with higher pay.
- mikeash 8y agoWhat’s the difference between motivation to stay and reluctance to leave?
- aikinai 8y agoI think that should have been “motivation to work.”
- rodiger 8y agoIf I had to guess, differing incentives. Both are synonymous for "why they stay" but with different base reasons.
- fossuser 8y agoI view this generally: Motivation to stay is being directly excited by the work you’re doing or the thing you’re building. You want to work where you are. If another opportunity comes along you probably wouldn’t consider it. Resistance to leaving means you’re at a pleasant place to work, the money is good, and you like your job, but you’re not super excited about the thing you’re building. If another opportunity came along you might jump if it’s something you really want to do (this is harder if your current pay is high and job is pleasant).
- ng12 8y agoThink about someone who works at an non-profit NGO versus someone who works an 80 hour week at an investment bank. The NGO worker might only be making $30k/year but he stays because he really cares about his work. The investment banker might hate his job and hate the long hours but stay because of the high salary he'd be unlikely to match elsewhere. The NGO worker has high motivation and low reluctance, the i-banker has the opposite. The actual technical term for this is motivation vs. hygiene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory
- user5994461 8y agoWell, ibanker making 300k and working 9-6 is a thing. Get the best of both worlds.
- jib 8y agoI think they are referring to Herzberg? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory Sounds like a different way to express that.
- ng12 8y agoYes, thank you. This is what I was looking for.
- didibus 8y agoI think motivation to stay is the positive. Like you genuinely like going to your job. Reluctance to leave is that even if you don't like your job, leaving is even more painful, maybe due to the loss of salary, or because the interview process is too much of a hassle, or other opportunities are just as bad if not worse, etc.
- war1025 8y agoThe way I think about it is motivation relates to the things you actively enjoy about your job. These are the "here are the neat things I do at my work" type of items. Reluctance to leave is the sum of things that make you want to stay where you currently when someone else tells you about all the exciting things they do at their work. It's more like friction keeping you where you are.
- tootahe45 8y agoDo you need the best devs in the world to be the n-0000th domain registrar?
- sa46 8y ago> Entirely non-surprising that devs are the ones who left because by hard capping their pay you are reducing their reluctance to go work somewhere else with higher pay. The surprising part is that their dev retention (article notes small sample size) of ~3 years matches Google at 3.1 years and surpasses Uber, Dropbox, Tesla, Facebook and Airbnb. [1] That suggests that the culture created by the one-salary experiment increases the motivation to stay enough to offset the incentive to leave. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-retention-at-top-tech-companies-2018-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...
- chrisco255 8y agoiwantmyname says they've had ~20 employees. You can't compare a company like that to Google, Uber, Tesla, etc, who've got multiple orders of magnitude more employees.
- village-idiot 8y ago20 employees is down in the range where noise dominates. I’m not sure exactly how many employees are required for statistical significance, but it has to be in the hundreds.
- tfehring 8y agoTotally depends on the effect size and the threshold at which you're evaluating statistical significance. If their churn were 10x higher than Google's, 20 employees over 10 years would probably be enough to confirm the difference at a high level of confidence. But if their "true" long-run churn is "only", say, 10% higher than FAANG and friends, you would need a much larger sample to identify that. N.B.: Even a 10% increase in employee churn is expensive in general, and even more so when your recruiters make as much as your senior engineers.
- shhehebehdh 8y agoWell, maybe. Or it shows that they hired people who were relatively comp insensitive, possibly due to being unable to command higher wages elsewhere. Hard to know.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI can see that. A business is in business to make money. If we’re making money and the executives are getting bonuses and raises and I don’t get raises, I’m out. And if you tell me I’m not getting a raise because we’re “family” Im gonna puke on ya on the way out.
- protomyth 8y agoOne of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees Grow up poor, and see how much pay motivates you. I think never is too strong a word.
- a_imho 8y agoThis myth is perpetuated by people who never tried to motivate people with money.
- mrguyorama 8y agoWorse, they've tried to motivate people with pathetically small amounts of money >I gave you a 25 cent raise over minimum wage! Why aren't you happy!
- gopalv 8y ago> One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Having talked to a crowd of senior people who were leaving their jobs recently, I think there's a lot to be said about money as a 3rd factor when switching jobs further down in your career. Raising someone pay to match only works when the other factors for their departure are going to be addressed (and there, I've had people tell me "Deciding to leave was very hard and changing it back is even harder"). However, motivating people to perform at their best is entirely independent of that - most of the good people I worked with merely wanted to make an impact and receive the help they need in doing that. Pay is one of those things, because money enables people - when someone is having a new baby & a salary bump helps her with daycare needs, can be a win-win.
- vonmoltke 8y agoI have switched companies four times in my career. Every time so far pay has been one of the top two drivers.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoSwitch the topic to executive compensation, and all of the reasonable research-based arguments about how much does money really motivate a person go out the window.
- yc-kraln 8y agoI've been in the situation where I was able to build a team with salaries 20-30% over market. It was great while things were great, but after the commercial side of the business went to hell, the higher salaries kept a bunch of unmotivated people from seeking greener pastures. Double-edged sword to be sure.