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Another perspective to consider as well: while you are spending the time investing into and training people who needs the training and investment, your competit

Another perspective to consider as well: while you are spending the time investing into and training people who needs the training and investment, your competitors are throwing money luring away the ones you have already trained, and leaving you in the dust in terms of velocity. Turtles all the way down. Once a game shifts into zero-sum, it's not gonna stop getting played until it collapses. Normally, I would say to avoid entering into any zero-sum games. But the world has made a sharp turn towards zero-sum over the past 5 years, so that advice has rapidly become impractical in today's climate.

Apocryphon 7y ago
Not every business needs to be aiming for hyper-growth. Perhaps some tech startups can take a breather and reconsider whether they need to be engaged in the same zero-sum game as everyone else. Because grow at all costs doesn’t just harm untrained juniors- it also leads to corner cutting and short-term thinking that could bite the business in the back later on.
- LordFast 7y ago
  I agree with you, but from what I've seen there's been a steady and increasing stream of pressure from the capital side of things. Wisdom shall lead again at some point, but I don't clearly see when. Threads like this one though are a promising sign.
- scarface74 7y ago
  By definition if you are a VC backend startup, you are expected to concentrate on “hyper growth”.
no_wizard 7y ago
Or is it? I think this ignores the human psychology factors. Like actually following through with being loyal to employees, training as a benefit etc. Also if you are going to lose employees because you can’t match competitive salaries than i would say you are losing them if all other things are equal. In another words this greatly oversimplified version of events here only allows for you to come to that conclusion and dismisses how an organization could adopt different practices, values and foster organizational culture that combats these issues differently which I think training is an essential component. I actually think this is a good argument for licensure like civil engineers etc have to have, because one thing it mandates is required training hours (among other reasons I won’t diverge into here for the sake of staying on topic) You can debate what that should look like and I encourage that but I see little downside to forcing employers to acknowledge that all employees may need some time just to train on new things and different concepts away from the day to day work. I know this is a little bit of a tangent here but it’s something I see so often at every level of an engineers career path yet organizations so rarely set aside adequate time for it.
- scarface74 7y ago
  When you are early in your career, it’s quite easy that within two or three years your market rate can easily go up 20-30%, but your HR policies don’t allow more than a 5% raise. Why wouldn’t a developer leave for more money and more learning opportunities?
  - no_wizard 7y ago
    1. Not saying they should or shouldn’t and as I noted if you can’t match salary and all other things are equal you may as well take the raise. 2. If that’s HR policy and you request for an exception and it’s denied, that may be a sign to start asking more questions. 3. You’re assuming that’s HR policy. Again, example dictates you have one option without actually thinking through how an organization could position themselves differently. Of couse salary is a component and rightly so, but at a certain point it’s just not everything Think of it this way: lifestyle, ancillary benefits, “perks” etc can be all valid reasons to stay a place that treats you well and displays real loyalty (which is often displayed in more generous long term planning like big 401K contributions and fully paid health insurance for the family, open source software time etc). Can’t say I would just arbitrarily leave that for an extra 20% because that 20% can be easily eaten in other ways. Not to mention transparently knowing that your job won’t evaporate if the economy gets soft is a win. All this salary gloating is fine until that happens. 1999-2001 was not a fun time to be in the upper band taking pay cuts Let’s not grossly oversimplify this. I’m never going to say don’t maximize your value, you should, I’m saying there is more than one (salary) way of doing that. FAANG or not. Oh and one dirty secret FAANGS don’t tell you? They happily underpay on salary once you’re in, or freeze you into a specific department etc. it’s not all roses.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      You’re probably speaking as someone who is not early in their career. But we are talking about junior developers. I’m nowhere near west coast salaries but just big city America salary for context. At my age now in my mid 40s, married, making about the average salary of a top IC in my market, with the big house in the burbs (again not bragging, any developer with 5-10 years of experience could easily afford it), with the white picket fence and 2.1 kids, yeah 20K more wouldn’t make a difference in my lifestyle. But, when I was just starting out in 1996 making $33K a year, $20K meant a lot. But salary compression and inversion are real phenomena where HR policies don’t allow for raises to keep up with the market. I was working during both 1999-2001 and 2008-2011. In 2000, it was very much just a dot com thing. If you worked in corporate America as a standard Enterprise Developer you weren’t really affected. 2008 was rough, but still there was no such thing as job stability. Companies were laying off left and right. I survived three rounds of layoffs - barely. But even then you could find contract gigs if you were the perfect fit.
rekabis 7y ago
>while you are spending the time investing into and training people who needs the training and investment, your competitors are throwing money luring away the ones you have already trained That is a zero-sum attitude that does not hold up when a company does other things well. If you are training your employees, you are likely to be doing the other things that help retain employees (https://www.bayshorestaffing.com/images/uploads/Blog_Image.jpg https://www.bayshorestaffing.com/images/uploads/Blog_Image.j...). And if you are focusing on and actually delivering all ten of those benefits, employees are extremely unlikely to be jumping ship unless they are either a poor employee or have poor character (which you don’t want anyhow), or the competition is paying not only well above market rate, but well above your rates. Which means that they are now at a strategic disadvantage because an inordinate amount of funding needs to be diverted to payroll - much more so than in a company like yours. Any company can make an end run around zero-sum thinking by fully and honestly employing those ten benefits. Employees can and will rise to the occasion, bringing a competitive advantage to your company that is well in excess to their numbers.

Apocryphon 7y ago

Not every business needs to be aiming for hyper-growth. Perhaps some tech startups can take a breather and reconsider whether they need to be engaged in the same zero-sum game as everyone else. Because grow at all costs doesn’t just harm untrained juniors- it also leads to corner cutting and short-term thinking that could bite the business in the back later on.

LordFast 7y ago
I agree with you, but from what I've seen there's been a steady and increasing stream of pressure from the capital side of things. Wisdom shall lead again at some point, but I don't clearly see when. Threads like this one though are a promising sign.
scarface74 7y ago
By definition if you are a VC backend startup, you are expected to concentrate on “hyper growth”.

no_wizard 7y ago

Or is it? I think this ignores the human psychology factors. Like actually following through with being loyal to employees, training as a benefit etc. Also if you are going to lose employees because you can’t match competitive salaries than i would say you are losing them if all other things are equal. In another words this greatly oversimplified version of events here only allows for you to come to that conclusion and dismisses how an organization could adopt different practices, values and foster organizational culture that combats these issues differently which I think training is an essential component. I actually think this is a good argument for licensure like civil engineers etc have to have, because one thing it mandates is required training hours (among other reasons I won’t diverge into here for the sake of staying on topic) You can debate what that should look like and I encourage that but I see little downside to forcing employers to acknowledge that all employees may need some time just to train on new things and different concepts away from the day to day work. I know this is a little bit of a tangent here but it’s something I see so often at every level of an engineers career path yet organizations so rarely set aside adequate time for it.

scarface74 7y ago
When you are early in your career, it’s quite easy that within two or three years your market rate can easily go up 20-30%, but your HR policies don’t allow more than a 5% raise. Why wouldn’t a developer leave for more money and more learning opportunities?
- no_wizard 7y ago
  1. Not saying they should or shouldn’t and as I noted if you can’t match salary and all other things are equal you may as well take the raise. 2. If that’s HR policy and you request for an exception and it’s denied, that may be a sign to start asking more questions. 3. You’re assuming that’s HR policy. Again, example dictates you have one option without actually thinking through how an organization could position themselves differently. Of couse salary is a component and rightly so, but at a certain point it’s just not everything Think of it this way: lifestyle, ancillary benefits, “perks” etc can be all valid reasons to stay a place that treats you well and displays real loyalty (which is often displayed in more generous long term planning like big 401K contributions and fully paid health insurance for the family, open source software time etc). Can’t say I would just arbitrarily leave that for an extra 20% because that 20% can be easily eaten in other ways. Not to mention transparently knowing that your job won’t evaporate if the economy gets soft is a win. All this salary gloating is fine until that happens. 1999-2001 was not a fun time to be in the upper band taking pay cuts Let’s not grossly oversimplify this. I’m never going to say don’t maximize your value, you should, I’m saying there is more than one (salary) way of doing that. FAANG or not. Oh and one dirty secret FAANGS don’t tell you? They happily underpay on salary once you’re in, or freeze you into a specific department etc. it’s not all roses.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You’re probably speaking as someone who is not early in their career. But we are talking about junior developers. I’m nowhere near west coast salaries but just big city America salary for context. At my age now in my mid 40s, married, making about the average salary of a top IC in my market, with the big house in the burbs (again not bragging, any developer with 5-10 years of experience could easily afford it), with the white picket fence and 2.1 kids, yeah 20K more wouldn’t make a difference in my lifestyle. But, when I was just starting out in 1996 making $33K a year, $20K meant a lot. But salary compression and inversion are real phenomena where HR policies don’t allow for raises to keep up with the market. I was working during both 1999-2001 and 2008-2011. In 2000, it was very much just a dot com thing. If you worked in corporate America as a standard Enterprise Developer you weren’t really affected. 2008 was rough, but still there was no such thing as job stability. Companies were laying off left and right. I survived three rounds of layoffs - barely. But even then you could find contract gigs if you were the perfect fit.

rekabis 7y ago

>while you are spending the time investing into and training people who needs the training and investment, your competitors are throwing money luring away the ones you have already trained That is a zero-sum attitude that does not hold up when a company does other things well. If you are training your employees, you are likely to be doing the other things that help retain employees (https://www.bayshorestaffing.com/images/uploads/Blog_Image.jpg https://www.bayshorestaffing.com/images/uploads/Blog_Image.j...). And if you are focusing on and actually delivering all ten of those benefits, employees are extremely unlikely to be jumping ship unless they are either a poor employee or have poor character (which you don’t want anyhow), or the competition is paying not only well above market rate, but well above your rates. Which means that they are now at a strategic disadvantage because an inordinate amount of funding needs to be diverted to payroll - much more so than in a company like yours. Any company can make an end run around zero-sum thinking by fully and honestly employing those ten benefits. Employees can and will rise to the occasion, bringing a competitive advantage to your company that is well in excess to their numbers.