3 ms·

“ We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on years of relevant experience. We had three levels,

“ We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on years of relevant experience. We had three levels, each with a single, non-negotiable salary that was the same across locations, and everybody was assigned to one of those levels. We've always been completely remote” I guess the main question that comes to mind is “why would a strong-performing, early-in-career engineer want to join?” In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%?

dolni 4y ago
Normalizing pay to years experience is a bad move in general, IMO. You are going to have a distribution of high and low performers at all levels of experience. If you pay all the senior people the same, you have less money to pay your high performers. And maybe they go get that pay from elsewhere. There's a difference between having 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  If your manages appropriately manage the employees, it'd require letting go poor performance.
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    Even if you let go the poor performers, there's still a wide range of ability in the rest. It also means people will do just enough work to not get layed off (or appear to do that much work), because there's no benefit to doing better.
    - bjt 4y ago
      While I see your point, I'd argue with "there's no benefit to doing better." People are motivated by more than money. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose come to mind.
      - RHSeeger 4y ago
        I would expect the majority of people are more motivated by having some skin in the game than they are by the rewards of doing the work itself. I get great joy out of making my clients happy and solving hard problems (I enjoy rabbit holes), but even I get frustrated when there's no real advancement (financial or otherwise) for doing a better job.
- lanstin 4y ago
  The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. Just have some livable base salaries, and then give everyone a big chunk of the profits each year. I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together. And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with.
  - dolni 4y ago
    > The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. This is an awful idea. Rewarding individuals based on the group outcome is a great way to drive rockstars away from the team. Why would any high performer want to anchor themselves to lower performing team members? That is a surefire way to get a lower bonus. Why would I volunteer to take on a crummy or particularly hard task when I can just hope someone else does it and I reap the rewards? > I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together. Peoples' performance changes for every reason under the sun from "I decided to stay out late and drink on a Wednesday" to "my boss is an asshole" to "I just don't feel like working today". Personally, I want control over my own destiny and my own bonus. I don't want to feel obligated to push myself harder for someone else's bonus. And just the same, I don't want someone else's shortcomings to tank my bonus. The actual answer here is to make sure that your review process accounts for how individuals impact the group dynamic. > And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with. This is a super ignorant take. Any person who has a family and works to support them wants to provide the best they can for their family. That's not greed. Kids are fucking expensive by themselves, let alone trying to send them to college.
pavlov 4y ago
For one thing, Daily (intentionally) doesn't have a lot of junior engineers, so I don't really know firsthand how they feel about the system. It may well be that this appeals more to mid-career people with families and other life to worry about. But consider that Daily is fully remote, hires globally paying SV-level salaries, doesn't do whiteboard torture interviews, and has an interesting product space where you can make a visible impact. I'd imagine this combination would be appealing to early-career people, especially if they don't live in a FAANG hiring market or aren't set on acquiring that kind of résumé.
gowld 4y ago
> In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%? Why do you think you need the top 40%?
rsanek 4y ago
They mention this potential downside explicitly in the blog post. It sounds like they actually believe this is a good thing as it signals to junior employees that would need alot of support that they cannot provide it: > The way we’ve set up our levels, people in the early stages of their careers can get bigger titles and raises more quickly at other orgs than they can at Daily. This will likely be a deterrent to some early-stage candidates, but we are ok with that for now. While we are excited to bring in early-career people once we have the structure to support them, we aren’t there yet, and probably won’t be for a while. We don’t want to make the mistake of hiring high-potential people we then under-serve, especially if they’re from groups typically excluded from tech.

dolni 4y ago

Normalizing pay to years experience is a bad move in general, IMO. You are going to have a distribution of high and low performers at all levels of experience. If you pay all the senior people the same, you have less money to pay your high performers. And maybe they go get that pay from elsewhere. There's a difference between having 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times.

cyanydeez 4y ago
If your manages appropriately manage the employees, it'd require letting go poor performance.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  Even if you let go the poor performers, there's still a wide range of ability in the rest. It also means people will do just enough work to not get layed off (or appear to do that much work), because there's no benefit to doing better.
  - bjt 4y ago
    While I see your point, I'd argue with "there's no benefit to doing better." People are motivated by more than money. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose come to mind.
    - RHSeeger 4y ago
      I would expect the majority of people are more motivated by having some skin in the game than they are by the rewards of doing the work itself. I get great joy out of making my clients happy and solving hard problems (I enjoy rabbit holes), but even I get frustrated when there's no real advancement (financial or otherwise) for doing a better job.
lanstin 4y ago
The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. Just have some livable base salaries, and then give everyone a big chunk of the profits each year. I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together. And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with.
- dolni 4y ago
  > The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. This is an awful idea. Rewarding individuals based on the group outcome is a great way to drive rockstars away from the team. Why would any high performer want to anchor themselves to lower performing team members? That is a surefire way to get a lower bonus. Why would I volunteer to take on a crummy or particularly hard task when I can just hope someone else does it and I reap the rewards? > I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together. Peoples' performance changes for every reason under the sun from "I decided to stay out late and drink on a Wednesday" to "my boss is an asshole" to "I just don't feel like working today". Personally, I want control over my own destiny and my own bonus. I don't want to feel obligated to push myself harder for someone else's bonus. And just the same, I don't want someone else's shortcomings to tank my bonus. The actual answer here is to make sure that your review process accounts for how individuals impact the group dynamic. > And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with. This is a super ignorant take. Any person who has a family and works to support them wants to provide the best they can for their family. That's not greed. Kids are fucking expensive by themselves, let alone trying to send them to college.

pavlov 4y ago

For one thing, Daily (intentionally) doesn't have a lot of junior engineers, so I don't really know firsthand how they feel about the system. It may well be that this appeals more to mid-career people with families and other life to worry about. But consider that Daily is fully remote, hires globally paying SV-level salaries, doesn't do whiteboard torture interviews, and has an interesting product space where you can make a visible impact. I'd imagine this combination would be appealing to early-career people, especially if they don't live in a FAANG hiring market or aren't set on acquiring that kind of résumé.

gowld 4y ago

> In other words, aren’t you capping junior hires to come from the bottom ~60%? Why do you think you need the top 40%?

rsanek 4y ago

They mention this potential downside explicitly in the blog post. It sounds like they actually believe this is a good thing as it signals to junior employees that would need alot of support that they cannot provide it: > The way we’ve set up our levels, people in the early stages of their careers can get bigger titles and raises more quickly at other orgs than they can at Daily. This will likely be a deterrent to some early-stage candidates, but we are ok with that for now. While we are excited to bring in early-career people once we have the structure to support them, we aren’t there yet, and probably won’t be for a while. We don’t want to make the mistake of hiring high-potential people we then under-serve, especially if they’re from groups typically excluded from tech.