18 ms·

> Your mentees will support you and promote you for the rest of your life. The problem I've seen is that this is rarely true. We've had a big set of grads we'v

by rb808 8y ago

> Your mentees will support you and promote you for the rest of your life. The problem I've seen is that this is rarely true. We've had a big set of grads we've trained that quit for a 20% pay rise, or a project that they happen to like better. Many regretted it but it didnt stop the next guys from doing the same. I'm really burnt out over teaching green newbies again and again.

chrisseaton 8y ago
Why don't you match their pay rise? Or give them projects they're more keen to work on?
- madrix999 8y ago
  Cant lower the CEO's paycheck 8) (mostly serious sarcasm)
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Put yourself in the shoes of the board of directors and you'll find they too don't want to overpay for CEOs. But paychecks are market driven, and lowering the pay means you'll end up with a less experienced or worse CEO.
    - learc83 8y ago
      Executive pay hasn't been shown to correlate strongly with performance, and the board members and CEOs tend to have somewhat incestuous relationships.
      - chillacy 8y ago
        I guess that would be a problem if board members were willing to take a hit on profitability to load up their pal. Maybe shareholders don't notice, or while the market is doing well they don't question it.
    - IndrekR 8y ago
      I do not have statistics to back it, just my meandering experience, but could it not be that great CEOs are raised, not hired?
    - TheHegemon 8y ago
      Except the fact that higher paid CEOs actually perform worse [0]. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highest-paid-ceos-are-the-worst-performers-new-study-says/#5a2f4ad97e32 https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highe...
      - chillacy 8y ago
        > the companies run by the CEOS who were paid at the top 10% of the scale, had the worst performance. How much worse? The firms returned 10% less to their shareholders than did their industry peers By that metric isn't Amazon the worst company there is?
        beastcoast 8y ago
        To their credit, Amazon is pretty diligent about making sure that high performing employees get pay raises to match their market. My record is a 30% raise, mostly by switching job functions from non-tech to a tech role.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- rb808 8y ago
  I'd love to give everyone around me huge pay rises each year and only work on really fun new projects but unfortunately the boss doesn't agree. :)
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    Right but you're already paying out the money it sounds like, in terms of burnout and churn in employees. 20% could be cheaper. And I guess people are grateful for training, but not if they're effectively paying 17% of their pay for that training indefinitely. They'd be idiots to take that deal.
    - rhizome 8y ago
      Can't afford a good raise, but can afford to spend 60% of their time interviewing people every 6mos. Does anybody track the lost wages from the hiring process as a cost of employee churn?
      - vonmoltke 8y ago
        Don't forget "can afford to pay replacements 20% more after people quit".
  - cookiecaper 8y ago
    You should be following their lead. There is no reason to expect mentees to stick around for a long time if they can go command a meaningful salary and quality-of-life bump somewhere else. I understand the psychology around not putting more resources into your existing staff -- it's basically "why buy the cow when you're getting the milk for free?" -- but as long as this "5% per year is a great raise!" crap is going around, no one a) upper-mid-level or lower; with b) market value; and c) corresponding self-esteem; is going to stay in a specific job more than 2-3 years. There's no reason to expect anything else. If this is going to change, companies are going to have to start working hard to curb the "impulse buy" psychology at work in racing to get $BUZZWORDY_CANDIDATE_X. Despite this, there is great personal value in mentoring people. You learn a lot and establish a supportive substructure within the community. It's better to have your mentees move around. That way, they can throw you an escape line if you need it. People who stay at one company for too long end up with a rusty skillset and a heavily distorted perspective on how things operate. Companies may not notice it, but their cheapness is probably a much better thing for the goose than it is for the gander. Circulation is healthy.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Assuming a perfect market (or good enough market), you could just raise the pay for the position and hire someone experienced enough to justify that price rather than grow someone into that role. Otherwise said, at-will employment doesn't incentivize intensely investing in growing people.
  - cookiecaper 8y ago
    The market incentivizes this behavior perfectly well. People are just unwilling to admit the true cost of turnover, mostly for psychological reasons. There's a lot of ego to protect when a colleague says "I'd rather work somewhere else".
- vetinari 8y ago
  Usually, the teaching/mentoring is not free either. So you can a) hire someone who needs training and then train them, or you can b) hire someone who is productive since day 1. The people in a) cannot expect the same salary as b). Otherwise, there would be no point in incurring the costs of training them. Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). You incur the loss, someone else benefits.
  - waiseristy 8y ago
    I don't see why this rules out giving A.) developers who have now become B.) developers a raise to match their increased value
    - vetinari 8y ago
      Because it is still more expensive than just hiring b). If you decreased a) wages during their initial training to cover the costs and be able to break even with b)-like wages at the end of the training, you wouldn't be able to hire anyone as a) at all.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    > Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). But this "someone" includes the current employer.
  - brandall10 8y ago
    This is simple - pay people by the value they bring to the company upon every annual compensation review. Yes, it costs money to train people. Consequently they get paid less during that period. But once they can fly on their own, treat them as if you hired them like that.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      > Consequently they get paid less during that period. But once they can fly on their own, treat them as if you hired them like that. That's too early. You made an investment, that investment has to break even. With your suggestion, it would never break even.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Sometimes their value to you is less than their value to someone else. You may need them, but the value they bring to the business has to pay off. That puts a hard limit on what you can pay for that skill. It can suck to run a business - sometimes there's no good solution. I'd suggest more contracting for necessary-but-non-critical skills, but contracting's a jungle too.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Takes a while for people to learn. That time is way more expensive for everyone involved because it also costs you on the mentor side. I've figured out a thing: lots of strong engineers want to work with other strong engineers. They want to execute. So I give them that and they leave places where they spend most of their time trying to support or teach other people. And if someone is too junior based on our initial phone call, I just direct them elsewhere and hit then up two years later when those guys have mentored them. Way easier.
dfrage 8y ago
In my experience, if you narrow the focus of "you" from the company to you the mentor, "will support you and promote you for the rest of your life" can happen. Although it sounds like a certain amount of delicacy is required in the vast majority of companies like your current one where they have to move to get rewarded for their increased value. There also might be some relevant variations in corporate cultures around the world, what you say rings true for the US, but the author is in Estonia.
eu 8y ago
There is a saying about getting a raise: The only way up is out.
crdoconnor 8y ago
Of the people I've mentored I usually remain friends after we've both left the company. The relationships I've formed with people have always been more valuable than the relationships I've had with companies.
jsty 8y ago
In fairness, all other things being equal, wouldn't you move for a 20% pay rise? Especially at the more junior level, where that kind of increase could probably afford them a significant boost in living standards.
- rooam-dev 8y ago
  I don't want to sound harsh, but junior devs that think about living standards while being junior will remain junior or average at best.
  - robwilliams 8y ago
    I don't understand. Shouldn't everyone care about their standard of living? Are you implying that junior developers shouldn't?
    - pjgrad 8y ago
      His point may be that devs that are constantly job-hopping for better pay will "experience the same year 10 times" and not grow in skills. I'm not sure I agree with that viewpoint.
      - rooam-dev 8y ago
        Not devs, but junior devs in particular. Jumping 10 times a year may be for different reasons for experienced people, although some may see it as a red flag. There is a huge difference between devs that do development for the money and devs that do development because it's engineering. Nothing wrong with this, but it's not a recipe for becoming great developers. Would you want to work with code monkeys that do whatever they are told to keep/get job or craftsmen that care about what they do? All of the above is IMHO of course.
        scarface74 8y ago
        Why is it either or? Yes I work for the money first and foremost. I don’t learn anything that isn’t going to either make me more money by being better at my job, keep me competitive in the market, or make more money in the future. Yes I started programming in the mid 80s in my bedroom. But I keep up to date strictly for the money.
scruple 8y ago
It's absolutely challenging when you're mentoring people and work starts to look like a revolving door. I've learned over time to reframe my thinking around mentoring and I believe that it has led me to a better place (or, I'm perfectly willing to accept that perhaps I've just deluded myself). I mentor the juniors and intermediates on my team (and others in the company), but I also consider the activity to be a sort of mentorship for myself, in an abstract way. By mentoring, I'm frequently discovering better ways to teach and better ways to learn. I also seek their feedback about designs and code on the spot and those conversations that I have, with people who aren't encumbered by a lengthy career in technology, help me keep a sort of "beginner's mind," as it were. The primary motivators that most people appear to have when they talk about mentorship, i.e., tangible benefits to the company, on-boarding, leveling up juniors, etc... are the side-effects to me. The primary motivator that I have when I mentor others is instead the learning and growth, career and otherwise, that I get to experience that would otherwise be off limits to me. edit/ words.
freyir 8y ago
I feel for you, but then again, why do you keep hiring newbies? You get what you pay for. Also, maybe the employee is worth the 20% pay bump after you’ve trained them? It sounds like you’re letting another company enjoy the fruits of your labor at a relatively cheap price.
watwut 8y ago
The issue here is that they should got that raise in company. It happened to me and I did stay long in that place.

by rb808 8y ago

chrisseaton 8y ago

Why don't you match their pay rise? Or give them projects they're more keen to work on?

madrix999 8y ago
Cant lower the CEO's paycheck 8) (mostly serious sarcasm)
- chillacy 8y ago
  Put yourself in the shoes of the board of directors and you'll find they too don't want to overpay for CEOs. But paychecks are market driven, and lowering the pay means you'll end up with a less experienced or worse CEO.
  - learc83 8y ago
    Executive pay hasn't been shown to correlate strongly with performance, and the board members and CEOs tend to have somewhat incestuous relationships.
    - chillacy 8y ago
      I guess that would be a problem if board members were willing to take a hit on profitability to load up their pal. Maybe shareholders don't notice, or while the market is doing well they don't question it.
  - IndrekR 8y ago
    I do not have statistics to back it, just my meandering experience, but could it not be that great CEOs are raised, not hired?
  - TheHegemon 8y ago
    Except the fact that higher paid CEOs actually perform worse [0]. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highest-paid-ceos-are-the-worst-performers-new-study-says/#5a2f4ad97e32 https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highe...
    - chillacy 8y ago
      > the companies run by the CEOS who were paid at the top 10% of the scale, had the worst performance. How much worse? The firms returned 10% less to their shareholders than did their industry peers By that metric isn't Amazon the worst company there is?
      - beastcoast 8y ago
        To their credit, Amazon is pretty diligent about making sure that high performing employees get pay raises to match their market. My record is a 30% raise, mostly by switching job functions from non-tech to a tech role.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
rb808 8y ago
I'd love to give everyone around me huge pay rises each year and only work on really fun new projects but unfortunately the boss doesn't agree. :)
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  Right but you're already paying out the money it sounds like, in terms of burnout and churn in employees. 20% could be cheaper. And I guess people are grateful for training, but not if they're effectively paying 17% of their pay for that training indefinitely. They'd be idiots to take that deal.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Can't afford a good raise, but can afford to spend 60% of their time interviewing people every 6mos. Does anybody track the lost wages from the hiring process as a cost of employee churn?
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      Don't forget "can afford to pay replacements 20% more after people quit".
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  You should be following their lead. There is no reason to expect mentees to stick around for a long time if they can go command a meaningful salary and quality-of-life bump somewhere else. I understand the psychology around not putting more resources into your existing staff -- it's basically "why buy the cow when you're getting the milk for free?" -- but as long as this "5% per year is a great raise!" crap is going around, no one a) upper-mid-level or lower; with b) market value; and c) corresponding self-esteem; is going to stay in a specific job more than 2-3 years. There's no reason to expect anything else. If this is going to change, companies are going to have to start working hard to curb the "impulse buy" psychology at work in racing to get $BUZZWORDY_CANDIDATE_X. Despite this, there is great personal value in mentoring people. You learn a lot and establish a supportive substructure within the community. It's better to have your mentees move around. That way, they can throw you an escape line if you need it. People who stay at one company for too long end up with a rusty skillset and a heavily distorted perspective on how things operate. Companies may not notice it, but their cheapness is probably a much better thing for the goose than it is for the gander. Circulation is healthy.
chillacy 8y ago
Assuming a perfect market (or good enough market), you could just raise the pay for the position and hire someone experienced enough to justify that price rather than grow someone into that role. Otherwise said, at-will employment doesn't incentivize intensely investing in growing people.
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  The market incentivizes this behavior perfectly well. People are just unwilling to admit the true cost of turnover, mostly for psychological reasons. There's a lot of ego to protect when a colleague says "I'd rather work somewhere else".
vetinari 8y ago
Usually, the teaching/mentoring is not free either. So you can a) hire someone who needs training and then train them, or you can b) hire someone who is productive since day 1. The people in a) cannot expect the same salary as b). Otherwise, there would be no point in incurring the costs of training them. Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). You incur the loss, someone else benefits.
- waiseristy 8y ago
  I don't see why this rules out giving A.) developers who have now become B.) developers a raise to match their increased value
  - vetinari 8y ago
    Because it is still more expensive than just hiring b). If you decreased a) wages during their initial training to cover the costs and be able to break even with b)-like wages at the end of the training, you wouldn't be able to hire anyone as a) at all.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wool_gather 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). But this "someone" includes the current employer.
- brandall10 8y ago
  This is simple - pay people by the value they bring to the company upon every annual compensation review. Yes, it costs money to train people. Consequently they get paid less during that period. But once they can fly on their own, treat them as if you hired them like that.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    > Consequently they get paid less during that period. But once they can fly on their own, treat them as if you hired them like that. That's too early. You made an investment, that investment has to break even. With your suggestion, it would never break even.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Sometimes their value to you is less than their value to someone else. You may need them, but the value they bring to the business has to pay off. That puts a hard limit on what you can pay for that skill. It can suck to run a business - sometimes there's no good solution. I'd suggest more contracting for necessary-but-non-critical skills, but contracting's a jungle too.
scarejunba 8y ago
Takes a while for people to learn. That time is way more expensive for everyone involved because it also costs you on the mentor side. I've figured out a thing: lots of strong engineers want to work with other strong engineers. They want to execute. So I give them that and they leave places where they spend most of their time trying to support or teach other people. And if someone is too junior based on our initial phone call, I just direct them elsewhere and hit then up two years later when those guys have mentored them. Way easier.

dfrage 8y ago

In my experience, if you narrow the focus of "you" from the company to you the mentor, "will support you and promote you for the rest of your life" can happen. Although it sounds like a certain amount of delicacy is required in the vast majority of companies like your current one where they have to move to get rewarded for their increased value. There also might be some relevant variations in corporate cultures around the world, what you say rings true for the US, but the author is in Estonia.

eu 8y ago

There is a saying about getting a raise: The only way up is out.

crdoconnor 8y ago

Of the people I've mentored I usually remain friends after we've both left the company. The relationships I've formed with people have always been more valuable than the relationships I've had with companies.

jsty 8y ago

In fairness, all other things being equal, wouldn't you move for a 20% pay rise? Especially at the more junior level, where that kind of increase could probably afford them a significant boost in living standards.

rooam-dev 8y ago
I don't want to sound harsh, but junior devs that think about living standards while being junior will remain junior or average at best.
- robwilliams 8y ago
  I don't understand. Shouldn't everyone care about their standard of living? Are you implying that junior developers shouldn't?
  - pjgrad 8y ago
    His point may be that devs that are constantly job-hopping for better pay will "experience the same year 10 times" and not grow in skills. I'm not sure I agree with that viewpoint.
    - rooam-dev 8y ago
      Not devs, but junior devs in particular. Jumping 10 times a year may be for different reasons for experienced people, although some may see it as a red flag. There is a huge difference between devs that do development for the money and devs that do development because it's engineering. Nothing wrong with this, but it's not a recipe for becoming great developers. Would you want to work with code monkeys that do whatever they are told to keep/get job or craftsmen that care about what they do? All of the above is IMHO of course.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Why is it either or? Yes I work for the money first and foremost. I don’t learn anything that isn’t going to either make me more money by being better at my job, keep me competitive in the market, or make more money in the future. Yes I started programming in the mid 80s in my bedroom. But I keep up to date strictly for the money.

scruple 8y ago

It's absolutely challenging when you're mentoring people and work starts to look like a revolving door. I've learned over time to reframe my thinking around mentoring and I believe that it has led me to a better place (or, I'm perfectly willing to accept that perhaps I've just deluded myself). I mentor the juniors and intermediates on my team (and others in the company), but I also consider the activity to be a sort of mentorship for myself, in an abstract way. By mentoring, I'm frequently discovering better ways to teach and better ways to learn. I also seek their feedback about designs and code on the spot and those conversations that I have, with people who aren't encumbered by a lengthy career in technology, help me keep a sort of "beginner's mind," as it were. The primary motivators that most people appear to have when they talk about mentorship, i.e., tangible benefits to the company, on-boarding, leveling up juniors, etc... are the side-effects to me. The primary motivator that I have when I mentor others is instead the learning and growth, career and otherwise, that I get to experience that would otherwise be off limits to me. edit/ words.

freyir 8y ago

I feel for you, but then again, why do you keep hiring newbies? You get what you pay for. Also, maybe the employee is worth the 20% pay bump after you’ve trained them? It sounds like you’re letting another company enjoy the fruits of your labor at a relatively cheap price.

watwut 8y ago

The issue here is that they should got that raise in company. It happened to me and I did stay long in that place.