7 ms·

Same thing happened to me at my last company. I was over worked, wore too many hats, and was paid significantly less than my team mates who were more junior tha

Same thing happened to me at my last company. I was over worked, wore too many hats, and was paid significantly less than my team mates who were more junior than I was (and had less responsibility). I had a handful of conversations that never amounted to anything. As soon as I put in my notice with a new offer in hand suddenly I was able to "set my price". I left for other reasons as well, but it really shone a light on how management thought of ICs. Managers: proactively reward your ICs, don't wait until they're halfway out the door. I would honestly take a less aggressive adjustment in comp if it was done proactively, rather than waiting until I'm fed up and on my way out.

steveBK123 5y ago
Too many roles / too many hats is far too common and why I find it hard to stay anywhere more than 4-5 years. As a senior IC in a super-flat & growing org.. I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one. Management administrivia I accumulate administrative things my manager doesn't want to do & pushes down I do unofficially own a part of the team Dotted lines of devs in my "team" that can be rolled in & out sprint by sprint Customer success / product / architecture I collect customer requirements, translate them into stories & documentation I manage customer/manager expectations with status meetings & reports I project plan out 3 months of work with JIRA hierarchies/Gantt chart I design solutions given the requirements Scrum I run our standups, sprint plannings, backlog refinements Corporate citizenship I am involved in recruiting 5-10% of my week I run working groups / long running cross team tech org Development I do IC work - directly assigned sprint deliverable tickets (analysis, development, infra creation) I need to accomplish I've been looking at moving to a more official management role elsewhere so I can focus at being good at a few things instead of decent at all the things.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Sounds like you could co-found a company, which could also be cool but in the other direction.
- strgcmc 5y ago
  TBH, reading this as a manager, I have to admit I feel like asking my engineers to take on SOME of these beyond-just-the-code duties... is a good thing? Obviously there are a bunch of caveats, and nuances to whether you want an IC engineer to be 100% coding and 0% talking to customers or doing admin (this seems bad), or is it 90% vs 10% (maybe okay), or 80/20 (sweet spot?), 50/50 (concerning), 20/80 (bad again), etc. That being said, if you are doing all of these things, and not being fairly compensated for it, then that's definitely a problem. A $50k/year web dev position at some random agency, doesn't deserve this level of work from you, esp. if you could instead take all these responsibilities, and do them at a serious technology company or start-up, for 2x-5x the comp.
  - chris11 5y ago
    Same. As an IC I like ownership. I'd be fine with most of that list assuming it was related to something I owned. I may not specifically like some task, but I'm fine doing it if it's because I'm the person responsible for something. The biggest issue I would have with that list is the description of the scrum setup, and being directly assigned tickets. I find it more engaging if I'm given or find bigger problems to solve, completing individual tickets isn't as interesting.
    - steveBK123 5y ago
      Yes I love ownership as an IC. It's more that I spend near-zero time on any coding anymore, but also have very little visibility into the wider strategy (because there kind of isn't one). So I am tasked to have work for my customer(s) / 2-3 devs on loan to me, planned out for a few months. However my manager doesn't really give us what his quarterly goals are most quarters. Product team doesn't publish them very often either. In order of time spent in applications top to bottom it looks something like - Zoom, Slack, Email, Jira, Confluence, Sharepoint, Gitlab, VSCode.
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    Right, I'm rather experienced and make many multiples of 50k/yr, so its not really a compensation thing. It's more that it feels very ephemeral / tenuous as none of it is in an org chart or official. It is basically what problems management has to solve and what seniors are available at the moment. I am, officially in title and org chart an IC. In reality 10-20% of my time is IC dev work. 6 months ago it was 50%, 6 months before that it was 0%. Further it feels like too much of a time split to really get any better at any of the aspects - software dev, tech lead, product, people management of this role. What does this look like in FAANG?
- maxsilver 5y ago
  > I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one. This is also me. Except I really like it. But I'm not sure what to do about it, it can reflect super poorly on a resume for some reason. "Oh, your applying to be a Senior Engineer? Look at all this product management and developer manager experience on your resume, you must not really be serious about coding, you aren't strong enough technically, the developers won't trust you" "Oh, your applying to be a Product Manager / Product Director. Look at all this programming and tech experience on your resume, you are really just a developer, you should just be pulling tickets from JIRA/Asana/Linear, you probably wouldn't be able to speak in non-technical terms in front of customers/clients/etc" (loop on repeat) I've not heard of a job name/title/role that accurately represents this sort of work, even though companies generally seem to like it, if I can somehow get through their application process.
  - travisjungroth 5y ago
    I believe you, but that's surprising. I've generally had my well-roundedness very well-received.
    - b112 5y ago
      The problem is, some cannot believe that high performers, can be experts in multiple branches of a field. Their development slows to a crawl, as they get stuck in one role. Yours, and others like you, just keep that intense growth happening. It isn't necessarily their fault, either. Circumstances can keep someone slotted deep in a role, with no way to expand laterally. So, they may literally think such breadth and depth of experience is just overstatement.
      - jrumbut 5y ago
        The other aspect is organizational appetite for risk. The first company I worked for let anyone grow into any role they proved they could do. If you solved the hard problems you were the senior developer, if you took the reigns you were quickly promoted to lead/manager. Seniority didn't count for anything and roles were very fluid. That's an uncommon situation and what I've learned is it's hard to imagine if you've spent a career in more traditional organizations.
- autarch 5y ago
  What you're describing is a Staff or Principal Engineer title and should be compensated accordingly.
  - cellis 5y ago
    Not even. This is far past what is expected of a staff, senior staff, or even principal engineer. This is a full-on technical cofounder, or hybrid cto/vpoe.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  I have 2 yoe and end up doing all of these. Startup life I guess haha
- FpUser 5y ago
  My last title before I went on my own was CTO/Architect. And I was doing all the things you mentioned down to coding. I could not complain about compensation as it was very fair - $250K in 2000 (the last year). But I was becoming a wreck. Now I have my own company and I still do all those things, LOL. Big difference being I choose what I do, how I do and obviously the size so I can chew it on my own or with my few trusty subcontractors. It is basically development of new products from scratch either for clients or for my own company and once in a while some very short hit and run type jobs. I now also leave plenty of time for myself to enjoy whatever activities make me tick.
t-writescode 5y ago
> and was paid significantly less than my team mates who were more junior than I was This is the kind of thing that any company doing this should be named, shamed and blocklisted. There is no reason other than greed that a higher ranking employee shouldn't make at least as much as a lower ranking employee in total compensation. "Person was hired earlier and is okay with the lower wage" is, frankly, a reflection of a company hating their employees. It's a shame and an embarrassment.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm not trying to say anything about or against your parent here. This can be a very subjective thing. How do you 'rank'? This is not something that is completely clearcut, cut and dry and you are 100% accurate without fail. Example: I have a guy on my team that is 'more junior' than some others. He's killing it though. He's consistently behaving like he's got 10 more years of experience than he does and people that had 20 more years of experience than him couldn't do 10% of what he does without fail. Of course you could say that the Senior developer should never have been hired if he was actually a Junior developer that's just been around for some time already but hiring practices aren't perfect, people get hired on one team and move to another and you're the first to actually do something about it etc.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Ranking can be hard for sure, but once that ranking existsz paying the lower ranked person more is indeed unethical. If the lower ranked person deserves more money, give them the promotion and title.
  - wbl 5y ago
    In six months are you going to promote him? If not why not?
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      You are missing a few other questions and are assuming this can only go one way. Are you going to promote him? If so, why? Are you going to give him a meager raise? If so why? Are you going to give him a proper raise? ... FWIW, the "Senior" is no longer in play. I do not tolerate such incompetence for long. And yes I am doing everything I can to get the 'junior' a proper raise and a large bonus.
dvtrn 5y ago
proactively reward your ICs, don't wait until they're halfway out the door. [Insert frustrated comment here about how capable, sufficient and well-performing ICs are absolutely rewarded.....with more work and additional duties]
minton 5y ago
IC = independent contractor?
- Thorrez 5y ago
  Individual contributor. So writing code yourself, not managing other people.
  - minton 5y ago
    Thanks. I have never heard that term. At my company, we’d just call that a programmer/developer/engineer.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
It's really hard to justify with management. Instead saying "X left, we need extra budget to replace it" will often work. It's idiotic and expensive for the company but what can you do.
- roguecoder 5y ago
  I swear at some of these companies it is going to take engineering managers going on strike before corporate actually respects that we know how to run effective teams for the good of the business.
- hinkley 5y ago
  You get what you measure, and the only thing they know how to measure is negative outcomes. You can't prove that giving me an extra 5k made me stay long enough to pay it back at >= our revenue targets. The semi-healthy version I see play out is when people who want to be better use the loss of a customer or a coworker as fodder for pushing their agenda. Essentially it's one class of teachable moment. People learn from pain when nothing else works, and you can amplify or dull that sense of pain.
- shuntress 5y ago
  Here's what you can do: Hold and express sincere trust in and appreciation of your employees.
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    Sincere trust and appreciation doesn't make my retirement any closer. Show your appreciation with cash.
    - rudyfink 5y ago
      Do both?
    - dwaltrip 5y ago
      The comment said “employees”, not “employers” :)

steveBK123 5y ago

Too many roles / too many hats is far too common and why I find it hard to stay anywhere more than 4-5 years. As a senior IC in a super-flat & growing org.. I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one. Management administrivia I accumulate administrative things my manager doesn't want to do & pushes down I do unofficially own a part of the team Dotted lines of devs in my "team" that can be rolled in & out sprint by sprint Customer success / product / architecture I collect customer requirements, translate them into stories & documentation I manage customer/manager expectations with status meetings & reports I project plan out 3 months of work with JIRA hierarchies/Gantt chart I design solutions given the requirements Scrum I run our standups, sprint plannings, backlog refinements Corporate citizenship I am involved in recruiting 5-10% of my week I run working groups / long running cross team tech org Development I do IC work - directly assigned sprint deliverable tickets (analysis, development, infra creation) I need to accomplish I've been looking at moving to a more official management role elsewhere so I can focus at being good at a few things instead of decent at all the things.

robertlagrant 5y ago
Sounds like you could co-found a company, which could also be cool but in the other direction.
strgcmc 5y ago
TBH, reading this as a manager, I have to admit I feel like asking my engineers to take on SOME of these beyond-just-the-code duties... is a good thing? Obviously there are a bunch of caveats, and nuances to whether you want an IC engineer to be 100% coding and 0% talking to customers or doing admin (this seems bad), or is it 90% vs 10% (maybe okay), or 80/20 (sweet spot?), 50/50 (concerning), 20/80 (bad again), etc. That being said, if you are doing all of these things, and not being fairly compensated for it, then that's definitely a problem. A $50k/year web dev position at some random agency, doesn't deserve this level of work from you, esp. if you could instead take all these responsibilities, and do them at a serious technology company or start-up, for 2x-5x the comp.
- chris11 5y ago
  Same. As an IC I like ownership. I'd be fine with most of that list assuming it was related to something I owned. I may not specifically like some task, but I'm fine doing it if it's because I'm the person responsible for something. The biggest issue I would have with that list is the description of the scrum setup, and being directly assigned tickets. I find it more engaging if I'm given or find bigger problems to solve, completing individual tickets isn't as interesting.
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    Yes I love ownership as an IC. It's more that I spend near-zero time on any coding anymore, but also have very little visibility into the wider strategy (because there kind of isn't one). So I am tasked to have work for my customer(s) / 2-3 devs on loan to me, planned out for a few months. However my manager doesn't really give us what his quarterly goals are most quarters. Product team doesn't publish them very often either. In order of time spent in applications top to bottom it looks something like - Zoom, Slack, Email, Jira, Confluence, Sharepoint, Gitlab, VSCode.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Right, I'm rather experienced and make many multiples of 50k/yr, so its not really a compensation thing. It's more that it feels very ephemeral / tenuous as none of it is in an org chart or official. It is basically what problems management has to solve and what seniors are available at the moment. I am, officially in title and org chart an IC. In reality 10-20% of my time is IC dev work. 6 months ago it was 50%, 6 months before that it was 0%. Further it feels like too much of a time split to really get any better at any of the aspects - software dev, tech lead, product, people management of this role. What does this look like in FAANG?
maxsilver 5y ago
> I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one. This is also me. Except I really like it. But I'm not sure what to do about it, it can reflect super poorly on a resume for some reason. "Oh, your applying to be a Senior Engineer? Look at all this product management and developer manager experience on your resume, you must not really be serious about coding, you aren't strong enough technically, the developers won't trust you" "Oh, your applying to be a Product Manager / Product Director. Look at all this programming and tech experience on your resume, you are really just a developer, you should just be pulling tickets from JIRA/Asana/Linear, you probably wouldn't be able to speak in non-technical terms in front of customers/clients/etc" (loop on repeat) I've not heard of a job name/title/role that accurately represents this sort of work, even though companies generally seem to like it, if I can somehow get through their application process.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  I believe you, but that's surprising. I've generally had my well-roundedness very well-received.
  - b112 5y ago
    The problem is, some cannot believe that high performers, can be experts in multiple branches of a field. Their development slows to a crawl, as they get stuck in one role. Yours, and others like you, just keep that intense growth happening. It isn't necessarily their fault, either. Circumstances can keep someone slotted deep in a role, with no way to expand laterally. So, they may literally think such breadth and depth of experience is just overstatement.
    - jrumbut 5y ago
      The other aspect is organizational appetite for risk. The first company I worked for let anyone grow into any role they proved they could do. If you solved the hard problems you were the senior developer, if you took the reigns you were quickly promoted to lead/manager. Seniority didn't count for anything and roles were very fluid. That's an uncommon situation and what I've learned is it's hard to imagine if you've spent a career in more traditional organizations.
autarch 5y ago
What you're describing is a Staff or Principal Engineer title and should be compensated accordingly.
- cellis 5y ago
  Not even. This is far past what is expected of a staff, senior staff, or even principal engineer. This is a full-on technical cofounder, or hybrid cto/vpoe.
moneywoes 5y ago
I have 2 yoe and end up doing all of these. Startup life I guess haha
FpUser 5y ago
My last title before I went on my own was CTO/Architect. And I was doing all the things you mentioned down to coding. I could not complain about compensation as it was very fair - $250K in 2000 (the last year). But I was becoming a wreck. Now I have my own company and I still do all those things, LOL. Big difference being I choose what I do, how I do and obviously the size so I can chew it on my own or with my few trusty subcontractors. It is basically development of new products from scratch either for clients or for my own company and once in a while some very short hit and run type jobs. I now also leave plenty of time for myself to enjoy whatever activities make me tick.

t-writescode 5y ago

> and was paid significantly less than my team mates who were more junior than I was This is the kind of thing that any company doing this should be named, shamed and blocklisted. There is no reason other than greed that a higher ranking employee shouldn't make at least as much as a lower ranking employee in total compensation. "Person was hired earlier and is okay with the lower wage" is, frankly, a reflection of a company hating their employees. It's a shame and an embarrassment.

tharkun__ 5y ago
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to say anything about or against your parent here. This can be a very subjective thing. How do you 'rank'? This is not something that is completely clearcut, cut and dry and you are 100% accurate without fail. Example: I have a guy on my team that is 'more junior' than some others. He's killing it though. He's consistently behaving like he's got 10 more years of experience than he does and people that had 20 more years of experience than him couldn't do 10% of what he does without fail. Of course you could say that the Senior developer should never have been hired if he was actually a Junior developer that's just been around for some time already but hiring practices aren't perfect, people get hired on one team and move to another and you're the first to actually do something about it etc.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Ranking can be hard for sure, but once that ranking existsz paying the lower ranked person more is indeed unethical. If the lower ranked person deserves more money, give them the promotion and title.
- wbl 5y ago
  In six months are you going to promote him? If not why not?
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    You are missing a few other questions and are assuming this can only go one way. Are you going to promote him? If so, why? Are you going to give him a meager raise? If so why? Are you going to give him a proper raise? ... FWIW, the "Senior" is no longer in play. I do not tolerate such incompetence for long. And yes I am doing everything I can to get the 'junior' a proper raise and a large bonus.

dvtrn 5y ago

proactively reward your ICs, don't wait until they're halfway out the door. [Insert frustrated comment here about how capable, sufficient and well-performing ICs are absolutely rewarded.....with more work and additional duties]

minton 5y ago

IC = independent contractor?

Thorrez 5y ago
Individual contributor. So writing code yourself, not managing other people.
- minton 5y ago
  Thanks. I have never heard that term. At my company, we’d just call that a programmer/developer/engineer.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

It's really hard to justify with management. Instead saying "X left, we need extra budget to replace it" will often work. It's idiotic and expensive for the company but what can you do.

roguecoder 5y ago
I swear at some of these companies it is going to take engineering managers going on strike before corporate actually respects that we know how to run effective teams for the good of the business.
hinkley 5y ago
You get what you measure, and the only thing they know how to measure is negative outcomes. You can't prove that giving me an extra 5k made me stay long enough to pay it back at >= our revenue targets. The semi-healthy version I see play out is when people who want to be better use the loss of a customer or a coworker as fodder for pushing their agenda. Essentially it's one class of teachable moment. People learn from pain when nothing else works, and you can amplify or dull that sense of pain.
shuntress 5y ago
Here's what you can do: Hold and express sincere trust in and appreciation of your employees.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  Sincere trust and appreciation doesn't make my retirement any closer. Show your appreciation with cash.
  - rudyfink 5y ago
    Do both?
  - dwaltrip 5y ago
    The comment said “employees”, not “employers” :)