Yeah, this is less of an issue in tech where it’s not super common for people to be waiting on lifers to retire but a lot of my peers in your typical corporatey jobs have suddenly been tempted by a surge of openings for more senior positions that they have been, on paper, qualified for the last like 3-5 years ish.
I think FOMO and the rumours of how easily FAANG paygrade is achieved has an effect.
I stayed in the not for profit sector knowing it was lower down the payscale. Enough years, it doesn't matter. It helps that it pays well above normal non-dentist non-doctor non-lawyer non-podiatrist salary, even if it's below FAANG rate.
I achieved my financial goals. They just don't run to a Tesla or a holiday home.
So, I'm hardly
poor or underpaid. To the contrary: I'm in the top 3% But if I was 20 or 30 years younger I could understand "I'm sorry I'm worth more" I haven't been paid more than a CPI raise in a decade but I did get sweet bonuses which probably made up for it.
The FIRE movement may have a lot to do with it too. Not all FIRE believers want to be insta and vanlife. Some just want to drop out in a more mainstream manner.
I make good money compared to nearly everyone on this planet. However, I am absolutely sick of the woke authoritarianism embraced by western corporations. I am tired of being treated like a child by executives and managers. Work is a place to get work done, not be preached to about social justice issues and not to be implicitly accused of being an Evil White Male.
I'll be placed on unpaid leave on February 1 for not abiding by my employer's injection mandate despite being 100% remote, then fired on March 1. They also denied my accommodation demand. I just want to work. I am sick of politics and sick of manipulation.
My wife and I will be starting our own business where we can focus on building a great product devoid of politics. This is how life should be. I refuse to be perpetually angry and defeated.
Compensation stagnation may be a component, but it's likely only one of many factors. From what I can see, culture shift seems to be the primary driver of the Great Resignation.
We certainly need more people who focus on "the work". It is tragic to see young minds be thrown into a culture where they think it is "normal" to abuse anyone based on race, white or black. The fact that this happens routinely in the valley is a pathetic narrative on how the justice system has turned cowardly instead of upholding the law.
That said, as someone who has seen the effects of this virus . . which i do not believe everyone who refuses the shot appreciates, please, please consider getting vaccinated.
Not judging you personally as genuine or not but it is in the OPs best interest not to share these details lest you or someone else on this thread that is a social justice warrior make a point to try and sabotage his solo adventure in the startup phase. The woke know no bounds when it comes to demolishing individuals.
You are correct, of course, that vaccination should be completely apolitical. However you can’t deny that covid vaccines have become the favored political bludgeon in the last couple of years.
ONly to those who've made it such... it's a public health concern.
If you're going into the military you're often required to get vaccinated.. nothing different.
I think it's pretty sad when you can be a huge rock star, and die anti-vax and anti-mask with covid, and that's all you'll ever be remembered for. (I'm talking about Meatloaf).
All because some people decided "science" is a political issue. No. It's not. The vaccines work. They save lives. It's stupid not to use them.
For celebrities, it’s really easy to be surrounded by sycophants and not realize how kooky you are. Then their fans ape them blindly. Thus a stupid movement is born.
It felt really good to see Djokovic ejected from AO. What a complete fucking moron.
The current Covid vaccines are reasonably effective at protecting the person being vaccinated from dying, but that makes a really poor basis for a mandate - the idea that everyone is obligated to minimise their personal risk of dying only exists in dystopian fiction. Instead, the push for vaccine mandates is based on partisan lies about how vaccinated people don't spread Covid, how it could all be over now and we could have herd immunity if it wasn't for the evil people not getting vaccinated, how all the anti-vaxers in the US are the partisan opponents of the current leader and it's the previous president's fault for not supporting vaccines (when we all saw the same people attacking Trump for pushing for vaccines), and so on.
Not by enough to stop pretty much the entire population being infected, which makes it a very questionable benefit. Mostly they just spread out the period over which everyon gets infected and that has some obvious downsides itself - the effectiveness of the vaccines against both infection and death declines rather too quickly, meaning that delaying infections can in theory lead to more deaths. As I understand it slower spread should make it easier for more infectious and vaccine-evading variants to evolve too since each intermediate step in their evolution has more of a chance to get established and outcompete the existing variant, but vaccination is still sold as a solution to the problem of new variants as well.
But everyone is obligated to minimize their risk of dying in most companies!
You don't see people expressing their freedom to do as they please when working with high voltage equipment, chemicals, or anything remotely hazardous. Even when it's only themselves who'd be affected.
Ireland has a 96% vaccination rate amongst adults and about 75% boosted.
Yesterday, the government removed all social distancing and hospitality restrictions.
It's not purely because of the vaccines but they are a major factor.
The risk of deaths and hospitalisations overwhelming the health services have been the primary driver of restrictions and vaccines help massively in preventing this.
I can understand that it is annoying and I haven't been to the US for a while to understand how things became but I think you are missing that for minorities and women work was never just a place to get work done, but also a place to have to fear discrimination, sexual harassment, glass ceilings and power balances tilted to old white men.
I think your discomfort with corporate measures to somewhat balance this might be a tenth of the discomfort of the old days even when they didn't affect you.
> I think you are missing that for minorities and women work was never just a place to get work done, but also a place to have to fear discrimination, sexual harassment, glass ceilings and power balances tilted to old white men.
Maybe for some women minorities, but this is not a universal perspective. The most successful people I know are all women and/or minorities/immigrants.
And I pointed out that your statement doesn't actually contradict the categorical. The successful minorities you know may well be successful despite such challenges.
So you're saying that your first and second sentences are totally unrelated (in which case your post amounts to "I disagree" without any basis and a tangent)?
To be clear, I'm reading your comment:
> Maybe for some women minorities, but this is not a universal perspective. The most successful people I know are all women and/or minorities/immigrants.
To be saying that your belief that this isn't universal is based on your observation that the most successful people you know are minorities. I think that's by far the most natural reading. If you're instead basing that claim on some other observation, well...what is it?
Women are still underpaid when you look at wages across the economy. That you know of many successful women doesn’t really mean much. Even in tech, we’ve seen so many instances of outright harassment, persistent wage gaps, and women leaving the field in droves because of hostility and glass ceilings in the workplace.
I can fill you in. My workplace tried to get us to stop using "master branch", "blacklist/whitelist", "dummy value", and "sanity check" among others.
The doublethink involved with having mandatory third-party security training that uses "blacklist/whitelist" and then having to mince your words to discuss the curriculum in the office... it's lovely.
Master, as in master tape makes sense to me. There is no business value derived from spending time on what was obviously a virtue signalling task. He wasn't doing it because it made sense, he was doing because a bunch of people on the internet had told him it was virtuous.
This is a ridiculous narrative and I'm genuinely sorry that you've been indoctrinated by your feminist role models. I understand that it's easy to believe people telling you "your group is suffering, join the fight", but this is no excuse to believe lies for an extended amount of time.
Before I got interested in politics I also believed feminist bs simply because it's the default narrative and everyone who doesn't believe it is a sexist pig; how can it be false?
A tiny minority of white men got insanely rich and successful. The majority of men face terrible conditions.
Mens are more likely to end up in jail, to fail academically, to die of suicide, to die in war or in a dangerous jobs.
Besides the narrative that success is not merit based is ridiculous. Why would the Asian "minority" be so successful since before wokism, if it was all a gender stereotype?
They're not white males!
Sure, but they are high in conscientiousness, have a solidity family structure (the same one you want to dismantle with feminism) and they work hard.
No. They are meant to educate employees. I learned a lot about implicit bias and things that are and are not considered ok in the workplace. Am I supposed to learn this magically somehow? It’s really great to be explicit about workplace etiquette.
Are you okay with Drug tests? Because vaccine mandates are about as authoritarian as mandatory drug tests. Personally I'm for legalizing all drugs, and doing away w/ drug tests...but I'm also for doing everything it takes to end this damn pandemic, vaccines are part of that.
The pandemic will never end. It’s endemic and has several animal reservoirs. You will likely catch it several times over the next many decades of your life.
> Because vaccine mandates are about as authoritarian as mandatory drug tests.
When it comes to health risks, efforts to curb them are hardly authoritarian. That’s why there are work safety laws.
Drug testing has _nothing_ to do with public health. A big store employee smoking pot on a day off is not putting anyone at risk in their place of work.
I think it's fair. You should review your opinions a little and try being more humble and adult about it. Losing a high paying job for a vaccine is a bit ridiculous.
There is a lot of income inequality, and even the homeless are getting vaccinated.
To see high income not getting vaccinated and losing their job because of it has a bit of a sweet taste. Not to mention the anti-woke and political sentiment which you often hear from conservatives.
Obviously, if one person is really 100% remote, there is no direct infection risk. But this might not apply to most employees, there are probably a lot, which mostly work from home and still meet coworkers or customers from time to time. I can very much understand a company not wanting to differentiate in their mandate on a per person basis. Especially as this also would raise the question of enabling 100% home office for all employees and so on.
Also, with omicron, the point of vaccines becomes less about transmission, but also about personal health. Not sure why home workers should be treated differently here than the colleagues.
Disclaimer: I am from Germany, it would be impossible here for a company to require vaccinations. But if it were, I could understand that they would require vaccination from all employees.
Vaccines have been repeatedly shown to protect people from severe illness and death so the employer wanting their employees to get vaccinated is arguable all about protecting their employees.
This is a tale as old as time: The Incumbents in the early 90s were challenged by newer culture, they sneered. Smart people went to work for the newer culture and industries and refused to conform to wearing suits and playing corporate house.
Many of the tech firms that are bleeding out have become everything they fought against. The MBA-isation of big tech is so jarring when you land in the valley coming in from Florida, Colorado or many a foreign country where the rules of engagement and speech are still "normal" ie, casual, ie, ideas win respect not rank, ie there are perspectives outside of what the headlines in techmeme alone speak to.
If you work at a large tech firm today, you will see this play out every 6 months in the promotion discussions that have essentially dissolved into political horse trading and are the single most important events to anyone not directly involved in very very senior roles (Where you speak to investors or are involved in company-level change)
This is so strange to live through as a mid/mid-senior level VP, Manager, Lead what have you. Here you are, apparently at the pinnacle of your achievement, having beaten thousands of intelligent people in competitive exams and studied at the most prestigious institutions only to . . . spend a significant portion of your promotion cycle trying to play the Game of Thrones with a bunch of MBAs ?
Compensation is not a significant differentiator anymore as it has been in the past, infact, one may argue, for the top 10-15% of the company that handles the most crucial products, quitting and starting up would easily get them overnight valuations orders of magnitude returns over their expected 20 year earnings were they to continue climbing the corp ladder (Nuvia, anyone?)
So, in short, the environment externally has changed. The environment internally has absorbed a lot of the lifers and MBAs from "Successful" incumbents to the point where the internal culture reflects everything that was wrong with those guys that these firms "Disrupted" and there's plenty of money to go around.
This is as old as the dinosaurs, wherever there's money, or potential for high salaries, the talentless but highly vocal sociopaths will progressively rise to the top.
It's not about MBA's or generational issues, it's all about your abilities to talk the talk, nothing more.
I have to add a correction there: "Wherever there's money . . .AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF PERFORMANCE . . . "
You don't see this in crucial roles in sport, for example, where athletes who once possessed the talent for glory can't hide it when they perform poorly or are past their prime.
Thankfully, there are no deteriorations in performance for physical ability alone in tech, rather, mental abilities improve over time (Except for roles where the grind is important), but in the early tech days, "Winning" meant creating things that were measurable and clearly showed that.(Mostly at least, there will always be exclusions to the norm).
The past decade and a half have been near unbearable with the progressions in tech culture at companies resembling what internet memes on corporate culture are made of. Heavily verbose emails and pointless discussions of low intellect for the most minor of issues or features.
Power is concentrated not in software engineering ability, but in the boardrooms of clueless MBAs and while you say it isn't about that, what i see indicates it is largely because of that.
Tom is being disingenuous here. And he's well aware where the sleight of hand lies.
The VPE today is getting more equity but the startup is overvalued and won't exit to the public market at the save growth rate. 10 years ago, you'd get less equity but the valuation is also lower so your multiplier is significantly higher.
Case and point, Peter Thiel's investment into FB at 5m valuation at today's market is likely a multi hundred million dollar valuation. Which VPE do you think is getting the better deal?
If I were homeless, and getting a job wouldn't get me a home...yeah i probably might do odd jobs here and there for food/etc but that's it. Bare minimum.
A lot of employers took emplyees for granted during the pandemic using that as an excuse to cut salaries while still taking home immense salaries themselves. That's where it started. To add even more fuel to the fire in the tech enabled industries, the companies themselves reported great earnings.
They also didn’t produce as good work as before the pandemic. The boredom of being home kills the creativity (Yes, I know, “not me”), the reduced communication killed collaboration effects (everyone became more siloed), and a lot of people got depressed. There is a reason why people pay more for butts-in-seats.
It’s no surprise that companies with broken cultures that value “butt in seats” struggled to adapt during the shift to remote work during pandemic. But that’s a problem with the companies, not remote work.
If we anchor inflation in some stable asset, like gold, data are very different. Gold is remarkably stable indicator, per hour salary of shoemakers in 15th and 20th century in gold are very similar.
I recently moved on from a place where I'd built core systems I was very proud of, where I'd started my dev career 12 years previous.
Why? Because when I'd ended up with full custody of my children two years prior to the pandemic, I needed to reduce my hours in the office, but I'd make them up at
home.
After a decade of doing unpaid overtime (prod problems, talking to product owners in a different timezone), I figured they knew I was good for it.
But, no, it was a huge problem apparently.
But then the pandemic happened, and working from home all the time was absolutely okay.
I grew resentful that full time remote was quickly okay, but I'd been hauled over coals for wanting to leave an hour earlier to pick my youngest up from daycare before it closed.
Work-life balance is much more important than money.
This isn't the 1950s anymore people want to be involved in their kid's upbringing and have a social life.
Yeah, any feelings of loyalty to a company are absolutely one-sided. They do not care about you at all; don’t think that “going above and beyond” will be rewarded.
I got a promotion recently... without a raise. I have seen some coworkers burn out after going through the same thing. In this industry it's really difficult to stay at some company for more than two years, because most of them have their special way of screwing over their employees.
I know, right. I called that shit out to HR and management. I sell my time for money, and I'm working more hours than ever, and those hours are more stressful than they used to be.
This is the exact reason I haven't told them to fuck off yet. It's the first time I have that title, and it could help me get a better job in a few months.
My current company does this. In everything else they are really great employers, best I've come across but I've only just found this out and I'm up for promotion. I'm actually furious. I dont understand what kind of stupid thinking made them conclude it's ok to promote with no salary increase. Hey expect more of me for the same money!
No. I'm CEO of an early stage startup (robusta.dev) and we've been extremely successful in bringing talented engineers. It's the accomplishment I'm most proud of, more then our product or anything else.
We pay competitive salaries and offer generous option grants, but it's not the reason why people join. I know this, because we typically work out the compensation once people have already decided to join (contingent on a fair offer, of course)
Developers (at least the ones we're trying to hire) want end to end responsibility, to do meaningful work, to not be micromanaged, and to have their voice and opinion heard and taken into account. They don't want to be another cog in the machine turning out code according to preprocessed requirements.
Our developers write their own user stories, go on calls with customers so they have the full picture, and can take on any responsibility in the company that isn't currently being handled well.
We also let you work from home and manage your own hours. You're an adult, we don't want to decide for you how you work best.
I'm open to hearing contrary opinions, but this has worked very well for us
> We pay competitive salaries and offer generous option grants, but it's not the reason why people join. I know this, because we typically work out the compensation once people have already decided to join (contingent on a fair offer, of course)
It does sound like money is a big factor.
Did any of your employees take your offer with a significant pay cut from their previous job?
We've had employees choose us over other offers with higher salaries.
An unfair offer can make people avoid your company, but a higher salary is rarely the reason why people say yes.
Fwiw, my personal experience as a developer also matches this. Before starting Robusta, I turned down a very high offer from Microsoft to go to a development job at a startup because I preferred a high impact job over better compensation.
> We've had employees choose us over other offers with higher salaries
I guess the question here is, how much higher?
If I was offered a good package with sizeable equity and/or options, in a startup with a good outlook and decent valuation, I could forsake a slightly better cash offering.
But if I was to be paid say 25% more in cash, I doubt I would have gone for the startup gig.
Mostly because I have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. I would love not to have to think about money, but realistically, I can’t afford to say “no” to cash.
That's an interesting question — this kind of hiring probably ends up biasing the hiring process towards a certain kind of people.
Not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying that this type of situation (giving up higher wages for opportunity or mission) definitely selects for certain types of people in certain situations.
Time will tell, but I'm not convinced! One third of our employees are parents.
Money isn't everything and there are more ways to be family friendly than offering the highest salary. For example, we offer 1 month of paid parental leave (at 75% salary) for all genders.
We're possibly the smallest startup in the world to offer something like this. But I think it's morally correct, not damaging from a business perspective (employees aren't focused on work anyway with a new child), and it certainly helps us compete with companies that are much bigger and even give higher compensation.
*Depending on your country and your gender, you might get better benefits for a longer period of time. This is the minimum you'll get (at our expense)
> Time will tell, but I'm not convinced! One third of our employees are parents.
What’s the distribution, though.
When I started as an engineer in a small startup over a decade ago, the ratio was similar, but mostly the higher ups were parents. The vast majority of engineering, sales and marketing were either unmarried or childless.
> Money isn't everything and there are more ways to be family friendly than offering the highest salary. For example, we offer 1 month of paid parental leave (at 75% salary) for all genders.
Many companies offering high salaries also have parental leave, so this may not be a factor either.
This matches my experience. Last time I changed jobs, the questions I asked were all thinly veiled scenarios to draw out whether as a developer I’d have the agency to do things without micromanagement. My now team lead saw through this pretty quickly and said he doesn’t believe in involving anyone in a decision who can’t add value to the discussion. That answer pretty much convinced me to join.
Wow, that’s exactly what I want and haven’t been able to quite put into words. And you’re the only person in a leadership position that I’ve seen who gets it. Maybe I should work for you!
Not if your next company has customers in more than one timezone and one of them is polar opposite of yours and by "manage your own hours" the implicit expectation from you was that "manage customers as well whether it's your sleeping hours or waking hours".
That's exactly how my company played its cards by allowing "flexibility" and then later confidently telling "well, it's your responsibility" while hiring in other timezones has been "on the cards" since 2+ years now.
Some CEOs tell devs at the time of hiring - "we are a family", "we don't differentiate between day and night", "we are hustlers".
Anyway, besides the bleak possibility I painted I hope OP's company does it better.
From my perspective, in a perfect world, culture would be more important than salary... but it is much easier to lie about the culture at the interview, and also much easier to change the culture later. The information about salary is more reliable.
That's how I hire and run software development projects. I hire with this management style in mind. Hiring people who can't work this way raises the risk that person will not work out for other reasons. There are big companies throughout tech that over-control their developers and other key workers. I don't know how they arrived at the theory that they can get more work, more reliably, out of coders by "managing" them with over-formalized project management styles.
There is some aspects of process, like creating adequate test code and root cause analysis, that needs to be formalized. But apart from the it makes no sense for coders in a first tier tech company to be managed by bureaucratic methods like SAFe. I recently recruited a very high achieving engineer out of an organization that I would not have thought would be so bureaucratic.
I'm glad this works for you, but I don't think your case study is sufficient evidence to prove the author's proposed hypothesis as outright wrong. I see another user mentioned this and was flagged for some reason.
The closer you get to an IPO the less options you get (in terms of equity percentages). On the other hand, there is far more certainty that those options are worth something.
At an early stage startup you can get very substantial equity, but in exchange for higher risk.
This is where being open to remote helps, i work for a cool SF company which is a startup, i get paid probably slightly lower than their engineers in SF. I'm fine with that only because i live in a low col area, if i lived in SF, i would feel an anxiety that i would never be able to afford to live there on startup salaries, which is both true and kinda sad.
More and more responsibility with no increase in pay. I have seen people take on all the responsibility of a position without getting a promotion with the excuse, “they aren’t ready yet.” Well, then they shouldn’t be doing the job full time then. It certainly seems like you are just making excuses not to pay someone.
I didn’t resign because of the pay. I resigned because they never replaced other people that quit, fired, or promoted, so those remaining continued to get more work with no increase in pay. Not that I would have stayed if they even doubled my salary, it was simply an absurd, impossible amount of work and stress and nobody there gave a damn about the toll that it was taking on us. So I found a new job and told my old job to kick rocks. My new job is actually more pay and less work, go figure.
The real equation is how much of your life do you trade (contracted hours, overtime, life-shortening stress, compromising your hopes and dreams) for financial compensation.
If the money stays the same, but the job got worse, the pay got worse.
I would be very curious to see a breakdown of average age per rank.
I think a lot of us have been looking up the ranks for years seeing very little mobility, and all of the sudden there has been a shift up.
I’ve been effectively managing r&d and production (I work in electronics) operations for small companies for about 4 years now, of course without the actual “title”. The amount of offers I’ve been getting for big managing positions has shot up significantly during the last year.
In the companies I visit and work with, the “old timer that still holds the job at 70” figure has disappeared. I guess part of it was COVID, but something tells me going remote has also shown a lot of them the truth that they were holding the company back in some aspects.
The ones who did it still visit and work on reduced schedules, but have become less hands on and are more trusting towards younger coworkers.
People are resigning because there’s a bug reshuffling of the labor markets.
My only fear right now is that, at least here in Spain, every company seems eager to go back to 5 days in the office, while everyone I know wants to keep some form of remote work(from full remote to 3 days remote 2 in office). We’ll se where everything lands on, but labor markets here have been always been a “buyers” market..
How is this even a question when jumping ship is a 10 to 20% pay bump minimum and satying on a meager 5% or having increased responsibility for a year or longer before making a promotion official?
My reason was a new middle-manager who destroyed the team dynamics. I quit the manager, not the job. More followed behind me. More pay was just a nice side effect.
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