7 ms·

Strong disagree with basing salary on years of experience. I see almost no correlation between output, skill, and years of experience. I actually consider this

Strong disagree with basing salary on years of experience. I see almost no correlation between output, skill, and years of experience. I actually consider this an anti-pattern that actively encourages coasting.

ct0 5y ago
Experience is relative here. While I agree, there should be an adjustment that captures something like "years of performance", but its harder to quantify.
sokoloff 5y ago
I think there’s a large correlation in the 0-3 years window. I agree there’s almost none in the 12-15 years window.
- cindarin 5y ago
  Amusingly to me, I think the opposite.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    That’s fascinating to me. I’d love to chat more deeply about that, but I can’t see a way to get at the essence of the difference in an HN thread.
    - pc86 5y ago
      I tend toward your side of things. In your first 0-n years of experience, you're growing extremely quickly (hopefully). You're working with a lot of new tech, new people, if n is greater than 4 or 5, hopefully at least two companies if not three. But by the time you have n-teen years of experience, it's much more like you've been repeating the same year of experience over and over again. Growth, especially if you have a decade of experience (and not one year ten times), is hard. I think especially at the upper end it takes dedicated effort.
      - throwawaygjdbsj 5y ago
        About 15 years into my career here. I stopped learning programming skills on the job about 7 years ago. Today, Im still learning new languages, frameworks and libraries. I'm also still growing in regards to, Management skills, project skill, leadership skills, self time management, effective habits, not to mention work life balance things as my life now requires it.
    - clusterhacks 5y ago
      One thing I have noticed is that (prior to the pandemic) new positions in my geographic area were almost always limited to the kind of roles that could be successfully handled by programmers with 3-5 years of experience. There simply weren't many higher-level roles available. I'm in a standard tech area outside of Silicon Valley - plenty of standard enterprise Java jobs with a slightly smaller number of C# positions. My experience here has been that I seem to be able to make lateral moves into similar jobs that don't particularly offer more technical or career growth. This relates back to your original comment about not seeing correlation to gains in output and skill versus experience in years 12-15 for working engineers. Most job roles in my area simply don't require more output or skill than a software developer gains in those first 3-5 years. I would guess that for people who do observed a significant correlation in growth in output and skill over those longer years of experience are biased by seeing engineers who were in positions that required growth in output and skill. Another weird effect (at least in my group - which tends to have long tenured employees - I've been here 12 years) is that I see engineers get stuck in specific responsibilities centered around institutional knowledge. For example, being the devops type for three legacy systems that will exist forever. If a new need comes up, my group seems to prefer hiring a totally new person to own that new project. We have actually lost a couple of employees who (rightly) were frustrated by not being able to get off of legacy support projects. These are the programmers with 20 years of experience but really have that initial 3-5 years plus the same year of experience * 15. In my case, I had personal reasons for staying in the area and have had to manage my own tech growth. Typically by side study and programming. Some of this has led to new work in the day job but I realize I traded career growth that I would have very much enjoyed for stability. I have also have enjoyed a tremendous amount of flexibility, some autonomy in choosing dev stacks, and collaborating with medical researchers.
    - darkerside 5y ago
      I just want to say I'm impressed by your intellectual generosity here!
deepsun 5y ago
I've yet to see anything better than years-of-experience (or years-in-company). I've worked in both FAANG and startups plenty, and personally I've seen worse outcomes from "impact-driven" OKRs, nepotism, team-surfing, than from coasting. Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs (which I consider a healthy lifecycle for any company). "Coasters" at least know that what they do today they might have to support for N years following, so design accordingly. (Although I've also heard horror stories when they make it intentionally hard to understand for job security reasons, fortunately never seen myself).
- tcbawo 5y ago
  A part of me wonders whether certain organizations tolerate "coasters" as a talent reserve of sorts, expected to engage when things get busy or new/interesting challenges emerge. For whatever reason, many businesses fire underperformers, promote overachievers but treat the 80% in the middle very generically. Why work to be a top 20% performer when you are treated the same as the bottom 20% performer? Coasting seems like a natural outcome.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Your best employees should always be working on the least important projects. Thus they will seem like coasters. By making the best be on unimportant projects you get the following benefits: Nobody worries about interrupting them if they have a problem - who cares if you make the unimportant project take more time. Your second best people get to experience leading important projects and thus you grow them into the best people (sometimes the previous best people may need to take a turn leading, other times the third best get promoted). See above about asking questions - the best people can mentor them as needed - again nobody cares if it makes their project late. Unimportant projects sometimes turn into next years most important project - and your best people have been creating a good base to throw lots of people at. When sales/marketing discovers an sudden opportunity that needs people now - you have experienced engineers to take it over without killing progress on what was the most important project. (be careful about this one - if they only rarely have such requests it is fine, but if such requests take up too much time you probably should either have a dedicated department of engineers for this - with a real budget and management to ensure the requests are really valuable enough to be worth the time - or you need to tell sales not to make such promises)
smallerfish 5y ago
Coasting can be compensated for by a "we're expecting you to be productive or we'll help you move on with our thanks & good will" policy. Make it easy for managers to fire and replace at market levels.
- parkingrift 5y ago
  What metrics would you use to evaluate performance? I know what I would do, but I don’t use tenure to determine pay. If the company has some metrics they’re using to evaluate performance for the purposes of moving on from low performers… why not just use those metrics to move people up/down instead of years of tenure?
rr808 5y ago
As someone with 20+ yoe this is true, I'm probably as good as a guy with 5 yoe and honestly I want to apply for jobs like that. Honestly tech has changed so much I'm skeptical anyone really has 20 years experience now. Its hard though when people see my work history they only let me interview for very senior roles which I usually aren't good enough to do.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  I’d like advice on how to tackle this as well.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Do you need to divulge your whole work experience? You can just share the last 5-10 years ( most relevant), and then you wouldn't be put up for jobs you don't feel up to.
- darkerside 5y ago
  I'm gonna be real with you here. You're not as good as a 5yoe employee, because people are expected to grow. Nobody hires a junior dev because they want a junior dev for 20 years. They hire a junior because they think the person has potential to grow into a senior dev over time. Over 20 years, you've not demonstrated that growth, and so it makes more sense for a prospective employer to assume that lack of growth will continue. Compare to a junior dev who can bring the same productivity today, but could rise to the level of principal or staff over the long term. For the record, I would bet that this picture doesn't match reality. My guess is that you've developed knowledge and skills that would make you much more valuable than you might think. But, you are expected to demonstrate them and use them on the job. Good luck!
  - rr808 5y ago
    I kinda agree, but as its common for people to change jobs every year or 3 I'm not convinced employers really look for people to develop.
mbg721 5y ago
For "individual contributors" that breaks in a way that seems obvious, but managers deal in unmeasurable fuzziness almost by definition (since humans are complicated and they're in the business of humans), and there's significant pressure to become a manager after a few years.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
They address this in the article by saying it is "relevant" experience. They've given themselves some wiggle room there and I'm assuming they will trust their hiring practices to make sure they don't hire someone with 10 1 year experiences.
- parkingrift 5y ago
  I’m more referring to the culture this would create. If I’m at L3 the only thing I can do to get to L4 is… wait two years. Why would I do anything but the bare minimum to hit that tenure benchmark? More importantly, why would I stick around and wait?
Spooky23 5y ago
It’s really the opposite. You hire people at a discount and give the 3-7% raises within a band. It’s a forward process that incentivizes performance. I find it funny that people in tech get squirrely over annual raises, but don’t have a problem with multi-year vesting schedules with massive payouts.
vehemenz 5y ago
On the other hand, significant merit raises (over 3%) are mostly a thing of the past. Workers that gradually improve at their job are paid less and less each year. If you increase pay regularly on a semi-fixed schedule, you at least solve this problem and improve your employee retention.
rowls66 5y ago
The OP did not say that they were basing salary on years of experience, but that they were using "years of relevant experience". That is a big difference, and relevant experience is a pretty arbitrary measure.

ct0 5y ago

Experience is relative here. While I agree, there should be an adjustment that captures something like "years of performance", but its harder to quantify.

sokoloff 5y ago

I think there’s a large correlation in the 0-3 years window. I agree there’s almost none in the 12-15 years window.

cindarin 5y ago
Amusingly to me, I think the opposite.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  That’s fascinating to me. I’d love to chat more deeply about that, but I can’t see a way to get at the essence of the difference in an HN thread.
  - pc86 5y ago
    I tend toward your side of things. In your first 0-n years of experience, you're growing extremely quickly (hopefully). You're working with a lot of new tech, new people, if n is greater than 4 or 5, hopefully at least two companies if not three. But by the time you have n-teen years of experience, it's much more like you've been repeating the same year of experience over and over again. Growth, especially if you have a decade of experience (and not one year ten times), is hard. I think especially at the upper end it takes dedicated effort.
    - throwawaygjdbsj 5y ago
      About 15 years into my career here. I stopped learning programming skills on the job about 7 years ago. Today, Im still learning new languages, frameworks and libraries. I'm also still growing in regards to, Management skills, project skill, leadership skills, self time management, effective habits, not to mention work life balance things as my life now requires it.
  - clusterhacks 5y ago
    One thing I have noticed is that (prior to the pandemic) new positions in my geographic area were almost always limited to the kind of roles that could be successfully handled by programmers with 3-5 years of experience. There simply weren't many higher-level roles available. I'm in a standard tech area outside of Silicon Valley - plenty of standard enterprise Java jobs with a slightly smaller number of C# positions. My experience here has been that I seem to be able to make lateral moves into similar jobs that don't particularly offer more technical or career growth. This relates back to your original comment about not seeing correlation to gains in output and skill versus experience in years 12-15 for working engineers. Most job roles in my area simply don't require more output or skill than a software developer gains in those first 3-5 years. I would guess that for people who do observed a significant correlation in growth in output and skill over those longer years of experience are biased by seeing engineers who were in positions that required growth in output and skill. Another weird effect (at least in my group - which tends to have long tenured employees - I've been here 12 years) is that I see engineers get stuck in specific responsibilities centered around institutional knowledge. For example, being the devops type for three legacy systems that will exist forever. If a new need comes up, my group seems to prefer hiring a totally new person to own that new project. We have actually lost a couple of employees who (rightly) were frustrated by not being able to get off of legacy support projects. These are the programmers with 20 years of experience but really have that initial 3-5 years plus the same year of experience * 15. In my case, I had personal reasons for staying in the area and have had to manage my own tech growth. Typically by side study and programming. Some of this has led to new work in the day job but I realize I traded career growth that I would have very much enjoyed for stability. I have also have enjoyed a tremendous amount of flexibility, some autonomy in choosing dev stacks, and collaborating with medical researchers.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    I just want to say I'm impressed by your intellectual generosity here!

deepsun 5y ago

I've yet to see anything better than years-of-experience (or years-in-company). I've worked in both FAANG and startups plenty, and personally I've seen worse outcomes from "impact-driven" OKRs, nepotism, team-surfing, than from coasting. Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs (which I consider a healthy lifecycle for any company). "Coasters" at least know that what they do today they might have to support for N years following, so design accordingly. (Although I've also heard horror stories when they make it intentionally hard to understand for job security reasons, fortunately never seen myself).

tcbawo 5y ago
A part of me wonders whether certain organizations tolerate "coasters" as a talent reserve of sorts, expected to engage when things get busy or new/interesting challenges emerge. For whatever reason, many businesses fire underperformers, promote overachievers but treat the 80% in the middle very generically. Why work to be a top 20% performer when you are treated the same as the bottom 20% performer? Coasting seems like a natural outcome.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Your best employees should always be working on the least important projects. Thus they will seem like coasters. By making the best be on unimportant projects you get the following benefits: Nobody worries about interrupting them if they have a problem - who cares if you make the unimportant project take more time. Your second best people get to experience leading important projects and thus you grow them into the best people (sometimes the previous best people may need to take a turn leading, other times the third best get promoted). See above about asking questions - the best people can mentor them as needed - again nobody cares if it makes their project late. Unimportant projects sometimes turn into next years most important project - and your best people have been creating a good base to throw lots of people at. When sales/marketing discovers an sudden opportunity that needs people now - you have experienced engineers to take it over without killing progress on what was the most important project. (be careful about this one - if they only rarely have such requests it is fine, but if such requests take up too much time you probably should either have a dedicated department of engineers for this - with a real budget and management to ensure the requests are really valuable enough to be worth the time - or you need to tell sales not to make such promises)

smallerfish 5y ago

Coasting can be compensated for by a "we're expecting you to be productive or we'll help you move on with our thanks & good will" policy. Make it easy for managers to fire and replace at market levels.

parkingrift 5y ago
What metrics would you use to evaluate performance? I know what I would do, but I don’t use tenure to determine pay. If the company has some metrics they’re using to evaluate performance for the purposes of moving on from low performers… why not just use those metrics to move people up/down instead of years of tenure?

rr808 5y ago

As someone with 20+ yoe this is true, I'm probably as good as a guy with 5 yoe and honestly I want to apply for jobs like that. Honestly tech has changed so much I'm skeptical anyone really has 20 years experience now. Its hard though when people see my work history they only let me interview for very senior roles which I usually aren't good enough to do.

aiisjustanif 5y ago
I’d like advice on how to tackle this as well.
sofixa 5y ago
Do you need to divulge your whole work experience? You can just share the last 5-10 years ( most relevant), and then you wouldn't be put up for jobs you don't feel up to.
darkerside 5y ago
I'm gonna be real with you here. You're not as good as a 5yoe employee, because people are expected to grow. Nobody hires a junior dev because they want a junior dev for 20 years. They hire a junior because they think the person has potential to grow into a senior dev over time. Over 20 years, you've not demonstrated that growth, and so it makes more sense for a prospective employer to assume that lack of growth will continue. Compare to a junior dev who can bring the same productivity today, but could rise to the level of principal or staff over the long term. For the record, I would bet that this picture doesn't match reality. My guess is that you've developed knowledge and skills that would make you much more valuable than you might think. But, you are expected to demonstrate them and use them on the job. Good luck!
- rr808 5y ago
  I kinda agree, but as its common for people to change jobs every year or 3 I'm not convinced employers really look for people to develop.

mbg721 5y ago

For "individual contributors" that breaks in a way that seems obvious, but managers deal in unmeasurable fuzziness almost by definition (since humans are complicated and they're in the business of humans), and there's significant pressure to become a manager after a few years.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

They address this in the article by saying it is "relevant" experience. They've given themselves some wiggle room there and I'm assuming they will trust their hiring practices to make sure they don't hire someone with 10 1 year experiences.

parkingrift 5y ago
I’m more referring to the culture this would create. If I’m at L3 the only thing I can do to get to L4 is… wait two years. Why would I do anything but the bare minimum to hit that tenure benchmark? More importantly, why would I stick around and wait?

Spooky23 5y ago

It’s really the opposite. You hire people at a discount and give the 3-7% raises within a band. It’s a forward process that incentivizes performance. I find it funny that people in tech get squirrely over annual raises, but don’t have a problem with multi-year vesting schedules with massive payouts.

vehemenz 5y ago

On the other hand, significant merit raises (over 3%) are mostly a thing of the past. Workers that gradually improve at their job are paid less and less each year. If you increase pay regularly on a semi-fixed schedule, you at least solve this problem and improve your employee retention.

rowls66 5y ago

The OP did not say that they were basing salary on years of experience, but that they were using "years of relevant experience". That is a big difference, and relevant experience is a pretty arbitrary measure.