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> “ The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, signific

by mlthoughts2018 6y ago

> “ The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study.” When oh when are midrange tech companies going to get their shit together with raises and bonuses. 10% should be mostly seen as a (shock) _normal_ raise when the company is doing well, above and beyond annual equity and a bonus at least in the range of 10-15%. Stop giving people reasons to job hop every few years. If you want loyalty and you want your investment in employees to pay off over time, give them good stuff! Give it to them before they reach any point of questioning if they want to go to the next company down the street for that extra 15% raise you were too stingy to give them on merit. As a manager, I can safely say the worst compensation mistakes I made were cases of not giving enough compensation sooner rather than later, and giving good people a reason to leave over money. I learned my lesson fast, and can say later in my career I take compensation planning much more seriously and absolutely do not ever settle for company pay band crap and scheduled 3% / 5% raise crap. If someone is doing good work for you, pay them!

darth_avocado 6y ago
^This. I've always had the philosophy that if you want to retain good employees, pay them more before they ask for more. If they have reached a point where they had to ask for more, they're probably going to leave soon. I don't understand how do companies fail to realize this. Say an engineer leaves because you didn't get him that 20% pay bump. Even in the highest ranks of engineering, that's like what a 100k? 30k-40k on an average. Now imagine you go through the whole recruitment cycle. You have anywhere between 8-12 weeks of productivity loss of an engineer. Then you waste time from the productivity of recruiter, hiring manager, hiring engineers on the team, etc., all of whom are highly paid. You cycle through 8-10 candidates. Then you finally get the person you need. In my experience, it takes at least a month to get onboarded, usually more. And it takes at least 6 months to get to productivity levels of the engineer that just left if your new candidate is good. All in all you wasted almost 6 months of engineering time worth of productivity, which easily exceeds the money you saved not giving that 20% raise. All of this, assuming the new guy didn't negotiate more than the previous one. Seriously, get your shit together.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  It's basic economics. Everyone acts in their rational self interest, including your boss. Your boss doesn't get in trouble if you decide to leave. Your boss gets in trouble if his budget gets way out of control by giving promotions and raises left and right. On the converse, your boss doesn't pay the cost of hiring new people. It doesn't come out of his pocket. But giving 20% raises to everyone he has the suspicion of leaving will get him canned real quick, imposing a real and sizeable cost on him. The tippy top dogs of the company aren't completely stupid for running things this way. Budgets would get out of control in a hurry if they let managers do whatever they want with wages. Nepotism would run rampant without costly oversight and surveillance. Employees would learn to take advantage of easy raises. So the company bears a smaller cost (employee turnover) rather than the bigger and unpredictable costs of frequent and decentralized wage raises. There's not a great solution to this. It's an example of market failure. Everyone acting in rationally on an individual scale does not lead to group rationality.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    In every company I’ve worked in, a manager gets in much worse trouble if a good engineer reporting to them leaves rather than exceeding budget. Most typically middle managers are not allowed to significantly alter budget for bigger raises that retain important people, yet are then punished or admonished over the comparatively worse budget loss taken through recruiting and onboarding to hire a backfill, as well as getting a reputation for being a bad manager if you can’t work miracles and retain people who deserve raises without giving them raises. The economics don’t work out the way you describe at all, and few parties in the situation act rationally.
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      Acting rationally is not what I said. I said that they act in their rational self interest. That's a specific concept.
      - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
mnm1 6y ago
Yeah, I agree. The people that don't hop put in minimal effort. Like me a lot of the time. My minimal is still better than any other engineer's average usually, but still. I haven't been motivated by anything other than the tech itself in awhile and it's gotten to the point where I no longer care what the best decision is for the company but only for myself. Hey, that's what they're paying for. Due to inflation and new policies, I make less money, have half the vacation, and much shittier health insurance than when I started over half a decade ago. So overall, I have decreased my time, dedication, passion, and performance to compensate. If that's the only way I can get a raise, that's how I'll get it. I wish more managers/executives would understand what you just explained and how badly it hurts their business to constantly have employee turnaround. I have yet to meet a manager or executive who consistently understands motivation and rewards it properly in the way you describe. There are other handcuffs though, especially in the software industry: tech stack, pay available in the area, remote work, flexibility, and now corona.

darth_avocado 6y ago

^This. I've always had the philosophy that if you want to retain good employees, pay them more before they ask for more. If they have reached a point where they had to ask for more, they're probably going to leave soon. I don't understand how do companies fail to realize this. Say an engineer leaves because you didn't get him that 20% pay bump. Even in the highest ranks of engineering, that's like what a 100k? 30k-40k on an average. Now imagine you go through the whole recruitment cycle. You have anywhere between 8-12 weeks of productivity loss of an engineer. Then you waste time from the productivity of recruiter, hiring manager, hiring engineers on the team, etc., all of whom are highly paid. You cycle through 8-10 candidates. Then you finally get the person you need. In my experience, it takes at least a month to get onboarded, usually more. And it takes at least 6 months to get to productivity levels of the engineer that just left if your new candidate is good. All in all you wasted almost 6 months of engineering time worth of productivity, which easily exceeds the money you saved not giving that 20% raise. All of this, assuming the new guy didn't negotiate more than the previous one. Seriously, get your shit together.

missedthecue 6y ago
It's basic economics. Everyone acts in their rational self interest, including your boss. Your boss doesn't get in trouble if you decide to leave. Your boss gets in trouble if his budget gets way out of control by giving promotions and raises left and right. On the converse, your boss doesn't pay the cost of hiring new people. It doesn't come out of his pocket. But giving 20% raises to everyone he has the suspicion of leaving will get him canned real quick, imposing a real and sizeable cost on him. The tippy top dogs of the company aren't completely stupid for running things this way. Budgets would get out of control in a hurry if they let managers do whatever they want with wages. Nepotism would run rampant without costly oversight and surveillance. Employees would learn to take advantage of easy raises. So the company bears a smaller cost (employee turnover) rather than the bigger and unpredictable costs of frequent and decentralized wage raises. There's not a great solution to this. It's an example of market failure. Everyone acting in rationally on an individual scale does not lead to group rationality.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  In every company I’ve worked in, a manager gets in much worse trouble if a good engineer reporting to them leaves rather than exceeding budget. Most typically middle managers are not allowed to significantly alter budget for bigger raises that retain important people, yet are then punished or admonished over the comparatively worse budget loss taken through recruiting and onboarding to hire a backfill, as well as getting a reputation for being a bad manager if you can’t work miracles and retain people who deserve raises without giving them raises. The economics don’t work out the way you describe at all, and few parties in the situation act rationally.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    Acting rationally is not what I said. I said that they act in their rational self interest. That's a specific concept.
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago

mnm1 6y ago

Yeah, I agree. The people that don't hop put in minimal effort. Like me a lot of the time. My minimal is still better than any other engineer's average usually, but still. I haven't been motivated by anything other than the tech itself in awhile and it's gotten to the point where I no longer care what the best decision is for the company but only for myself. Hey, that's what they're paying for. Due to inflation and new policies, I make less money, have half the vacation, and much shittier health insurance than when I started over half a decade ago. So overall, I have decreased my time, dedication, passion, and performance to compensate. If that's the only way I can get a raise, that's how I'll get it. I wish more managers/executives would understand what you just explained and how badly it hurts their business to constantly have employee turnaround. I have yet to meet a manager or executive who consistently understands motivation and rewards it properly in the way you describe. There are other handcuffs though, especially in the software industry: tech stack, pay available in the area, remote work, flexibility, and now corona.