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That's kind of a chicken and egg issue, isn't it? Why is it that employees can get more money/promotions from a company they have no relationship with, than fro

That's kind of a chicken and egg issue, isn't it? Why is it that employees can get more money/promotions from a company they have no relationship with, than from a company where they've already been working for multiple years and have more company-specific knowledge than their replacement will? Unlike with government work, years at the company isn't really considered when deciding who layoffs are going to hit. You're proposing that tech workers should loyally stay at the same company for 10 years, make less money, and then get laid off just as easily anyway?

shagie 2y ago
> Why is it that employees can get more money/promotions from a company they have no relationship with, than from a company where they've already been working for multiple years and have more company-specific knowledge than their replacement will? Short form: Lack of headcount at the various levels, and the responsibilities at the different levels would skew to "staff developers doing junior tasks because there are no juniors." -- Many times promotions need an available headcount at that level. The promotion also reflects a change in responsibilities. The company couldn't have an entire team of staff engineers thinking about things without writing code - so there's an entire setup for "this is how much is budgeted for these roles and these responsibilities." You could have headcount for 20 developers (1:3 junior to mid), two tech leads, and a staff level architect. That doesn't you could hire / promote 23 staff and have them writing code. So when a mid level progresses, it isn't always possible to say "you're a tech lead now" as that would mean fewer developers writing code... Unless you're also going to get to the point where your 23 staff engineers are also being tasked with writing the unit tests as if they were a junior developer still learning the codebase. So in many cases, the mid level developer looking for more has to go somewhere else. This isn't as much of an issue in a large company where there's more room to move between teams and new positions opening as attrition happens (in the organization I work for, attrition is most likely to happen from retirement). There's also the aspect of not every company has the same revenue. If you are at the point where you want to make more and the company can't budget for that... then you're looking somewhere else.

shagie 2y ago

> Why is it that employees can get more money/promotions from a company they have no relationship with, than from a company where they've already been working for multiple years and have more company-specific knowledge than their replacement will? Short form: Lack of headcount at the various levels, and the responsibilities at the different levels would skew to "staff developers doing junior tasks because there are no juniors." -- Many times promotions need an available headcount at that level. The promotion also reflects a change in responsibilities. The company couldn't have an entire team of staff engineers thinking about things without writing code - so there's an entire setup for "this is how much is budgeted for these roles and these responsibilities." You could have headcount for 20 developers (1:3 junior to mid), two tech leads, and a staff level architect. That doesn't you could hire / promote 23 staff and have them writing code. So when a mid level progresses, it isn't always possible to say "you're a tech lead now" as that would mean fewer developers writing code... Unless you're also going to get to the point where your 23 staff engineers are also being tasked with writing the unit tests as if they were a junior developer still learning the codebase. So in many cases, the mid level developer looking for more has to go somewhere else. This isn't as much of an issue in a large company where there's more room to move between teams and new positions opening as attrition happens (in the organization I work for, attrition is most likely to happen from retirement). There's also the aspect of not every company has the same revenue. If you are at the point where you want to make more and the company can't budget for that... then you're looking somewhere else.