Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago. Example - when you new grad starts in i-banking, they're in training for 4-6 weeks. Not doing anything productive, just training to do the job. Not the case in engineering, you are assigned user stories day one and your training is doing the work. So new i-banks are highly paid (so they don't leave because talent is perceived to be scarce and valuable) and they're companies invest in them (through training early on).
Right now, corporate managers are vomiting in their mouth when the have to look at how much they need to pay to keep their engineers from leaving. It's because of the perception of engineers - they're seen as semi-skilled labor (cost center, not strategic to the business) and are easily replaceable (no, they're not). Culturally, they have been conditioned to think this way, so no wonder turn over is so high every where.
Except, in this case, the programmers in question had decades' worth of hard-won domain expertise that was absolutely critical to their job function. And, this product targeting a niche industry, it was relatively uncommon domain expertise. So much so that the only people on the job market who had it were these folks whom they were ousting. All of whom had found positions at competitors within a day or two.
So then the company lost their ability to maintain the product in any meaningful way, and, within a year or two, customers started moving on as well.
If they were the only people anywhere who had the critical domain expertise, then how could there be any competitors to snap them up?
This story doesn't sound internally consistent to me.
Also, it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants. The latter two are directly making money for the firm.
This depends to an incredible degree on what kind of "consultant" you're talking about. For the traditional "strategic consulting" type consultants it seems basically as impossible to quantify as for software developers, or rely most other people working in large companies.
I’d personally disagree with the cost effectiveness argument though. Unless your engineering work really cannot benefit from more skill (and as often as I’ve heard management think their work is relatively simple, in practice I’ve rarely seen it) then you’d have to replace a highly skilled engineer with a small team that would likely cost more than $500k. Packing your engineering firepower into as few bodies as possible is a highly cost efficient strategy, as most of the successful techs know.
On the other hand, a small team is less vulnerable to getting hit by a bus or hired out.
Yes, it is difficult, but possible.
Here's quick and dirty analysis - consider Sears, Walmart, and Amazon:
- Amazon pays its engineers near top of market - $1.5T market cap.
- Walmart has a pretty good engineering culture. They acquired a tech company to start Walmart Labs for data science stuff and they even have popular open source software (Hapi.js) - they're the largest company by revenue and $370B market cap.
- Ever been to Sears.com? Me neither - largest retailer in 1980 to bankrupt in 2018, stock price at $0.23 and $94M market cap.
I deduce that investment in software engineers == higher stock price.
* competing for talent by paying very well and wiling to do so
* investment in training early on
Two things that tech workers do not benefit from as much.
* No training (Not just for engineers but for anyone, including for specialty positions that simply don't exist outside the business)
* No focus on employee retention
* No significant raises / bonuses (Lucky to get a cost of living raise these days)
* No consideration for employees' goals
* Stressing employees unnecessarily with shit vacation benefits and no sick time
* Stressing employees with shit equipment
* Stressing employees with shit hours
* Stressing employees with shit office conditions
* Reducing benefits to slightly cut costs
The list goes on and on. Businesses succeed despite their own best attempts at hurting themselves, not because of it. Owners, executives, and other stakeholders are deluding themselves into thinking this isn't the case and often driving the business into actual bankruptcy or just below mediocre performance.
It's no wonder most employees are disengaged from their work. When you treat employees like shit, they will treat your business like shit to the greatest extent possible. They will do the minimum and it's extremely hard to change that course once it's been set. Employees are humans. Most businesses treat them like slaves, or machines at best.
That said, there are a lot of failing companies these days thanks to cheap and readily available debt.
Indeed.
You should engineer your systems as if everyone is replaceable (including yourself) but treat your employees as if they aren't (even though they are, just not _easily_).
Life is not that simple, and cannot be boiled down into "it's a market."
People are messy. They leave companies for all kinds of reasons. They just broke up with someone and want to start a new life. They don't like the weather. The have to take care of an ailing relative. They've picked up a hobby (surfing, hiking, skiing) that is inconvenient where you are, or more important to them than money. Very often they just want a change.
It's common for HN-types to try to reduce everything to a numbers game, but people aren't numbers. They're not strings of attributes that can be quantified by an AI. They're human beings, and human beings will always be unpredictable.
Money and Management are the real reasons people move, everything else is an outlier.
Do you actually get a certificate? That would be equivalent(and would actually be a good idea).
That might result in the engineer being paid more than the value of their contribution at their current employer.
Many things could cause this, e.g.
- the new employer is much more productive, can make better use of the engineer, and so can afford to pay more and still make money
- the new employer over-estimates engineer's skill level and likely contribution
As a hiring manager, though, I'm stuck in the middle between developers and executive leadership. Executives tend to form a notion of what different roles should be paid, and they just won't bend, even if it means losing talent and spending $1 million+ replacing them over time. The problem is that replacement cost is abstract and easy to ignore, whereas paying a single developer $500k/year to retain them feels very real. Never mind the fact that losing them means multiple projects will be derailed, you'll spend a year looking for a replacement to hire at twice their salary, that replacement will take 3 additional years to reach the same level of domain expertise, it turns out that replacement never takes on the same degree of leadership or earns the same level of trust from colleagues, and in the midst of all of this the absence of your top performer causes two other talented engineers to leave in the following year.
$500k starts to look reasonable in retrospect, but you'll never be able to sell it, so you'll do the above dance instead and spend more money in the end.
>> Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago.
That only works if your business makes piles of money, like investment banks. Or FAANG.
The rest of us have a % of money to spend on talent.
If the % of money allocated to talent is so low that the business cannot survive, then the business has no intrinsic right to survive. One possible exception to this would be a mission-driven non-profit, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Managers know that it's not the most likely case, but it's still possible.
And a grace period that isn't taken advantage of is functionally equivalent to your employee being hit by a bus.
Unless you really burn a bridge with your workers they should have at least a week or 2 to transfer knowledge!
I always try and cross train people enough that I can quit at any point and it’s not an issue.
All processes are kept automatic where no one is crucial to keep it running.
Mostly it’s useful for vacations. In the past I went on a cruise. And I wasn’t sure the company will be online without me to baby them through.
After that I got extremely serious about investing in the team and tools to never let that happen again.
* Early startup employees have golden handcuffs regarding switching jobs. Sure, Facebook is offering them $500k but they'd be on the hook for $200k in taxes if they exercise their options and they leave a bunch more un-vested options on the table.
* You can mitigate them leaving by having a better work environment, equity and so on. Not much you can do about a bus.
* You can pay them to stay on for another month or to consult after the fact. No amount of money get's you an hour long phone call to the afterlife.
edit: Also, the article underestimates the effort needed to get a FAANG job. They don't just call you up and offer you a job. They offer you the chance to take a grueling set of white board interviews that require months of studying to pass.
I'm probably okay with losing out on a sale event with a startup I've left, especially if my stake is <1%, if the big tech company pays as well as it's reported. YMMV.
- ownership of the product and process
- less red tape and politics
- good work life balance
- location other than Silicon Valley
- boss who pays attention to engineer needs and wants
Money is a huge factor but it isn't the only one!
9 years at a FAANG and I'd willingly trade plenty of my money and golden handcuffs for a workplace that was more productive, creative, with better communication, and so on.
But when I look I just find shops with distorted work life balance, pointless whiteboard coding interviews, egotistical pseudo-feudal lord bosses with an illusion of hierarchical dominance, and a bunch of 25 year olds insisting on the merits of the latest JS framework flavor of the month.
Want experienced engineering talent (well, maybe they don't)? Money is not the only factor. Smaller companies are shorter on cash, but there are plenty of other things at work that smaller companies can control for...
Maybe this can be true if you're going from like $250k to $270k from FAANG to FAANG.
But most of the time we're talking about something like $180k to $250k when getting poached to a FAANG. It would take a huge amount of perks or otherwise to make that gap worth it.
(Of course this isn't true for everyone. But it's true for most)
In the last couple years we're talking 2-3x from our BigCo's $150-250K. Getting such an increase people do feel like being hit by a bus - at least my friend looked that way for a few days after getting such 3x offer couple years ago from a FAANG style company :) Our managers don't even try to match - during the 2019 not FAANGs gave 2x, 2x and 1.5x (that one still got lucky as his RSUs value almost doubled because of acquisition right before his first year cliff) to the other 3 acquaintances, and beginning of this year a teammate got 2x from Apple after concurrents with another FAANG and couple non-FAANGs.
I can only offer the anecdote of myself, but I've floated the idea several times of taking a pay _cut_ to obtain more autonomy. No manager has ever taken me up on it.
I work at FAMANG, and I feel ownership over my product and process. I set priorities for it, I set how work will get done on it, my team collectively determines what kind of processes we follow, and my manager just sanity checks that things are on-track.
> - less red tape and politics
Red tape, sure, politics, there's no guarantee of less politics in a smaller company. If anything, when politics happens, you don't even have the chance to keep your head down and avoid it.
> - good work life balance
There are hundreds of thousands of FAMANG engineers who have good work-life balance. There are many who don't, but there's an pretty big upside to working at a firm/on a project, where you aren't just an expensive cost center (non-eng-firms who generally don't give two damns about their engineers), and where you firm/project isn't default-dead (startup).
> location other than Silicon Valley
Large branch offices exist. Not in the mid-west, but the software jobs in the mid-west tend to be of the 'expensive cost center' variety.
> boss who pays attention to engineer needs and wants
Why would you think you can't find this at FAMANG?
FAANGs have been embracing permanent work from home/anywhere over the past 5 months.
Not sure if that was the intended message.
What happens when one of your fungible junior engineers happens to be smart enough to do some tricky things even with Rails?
And then she gets hired by Netflix to do something more career-enhancing than copy-pasting Ruby code from StackOverflow.
Now you're stuck with your revolving door of undercompensated junior developers and a complicated Rails application. Uh-oh!
as a fullstack guy who's worked w/ rails, laravel, etc... and who's done my share of frontend stuff, I'd say focusing on the frontend might be a bigger sell, cause that shit is VERY opinionated lately.
Vue vs React vs Vanilla vs Alpinejs. Do you use bootstrap or tailwinds? Backend code is rudimentary but nailing the ui stuff and also cross platform if needing mobile or w/e is much harder personally.
Any member of your team could win a life-changing amount of money in the lottery, inherit it, win a gambling bet, etc. Frame it as a good thing rather than a death or a change of hire - somebody might just flat out retire because they don't financially need your employment anymore.
I don't really see why framing it as a positive thing or negative thing matters, no one is actually getting hit by a bus, it's just a hypothetical scenario.
Might, or they might not. Just as if someone were hit by a bus, they might be able to communicate from their hospital bed...or they might not. Hope is not a strategy.
If your team members who won the lotto would just give their two weeks and quit, then your company/team has a substantial morale/motivation problem.
Such a company is not creating an environment where people enjoy being a part of it.
And I wouldn't expect anyone in that position to give me two weeks. Two weeks is about not burning bridges. If I never need to cross that bridge again, what do I care if it burns?
An employee getting hired by another company (doesn't need to be FAANG) is on the contrary a rather common occurrence, and a lot of people understand the importance of preparing for that.
> Everything gets a lot easier if you select the right software and framework
Huh? Domain knowledge doesn't refer to your tech stack or coding practices. It refers to why you've built things the way you've built them -- customer requirements, business requirements, technical requirements.
Ruby on Rails may improve onboarding time, but it has zero to do with domain knowledge.
1. It's click-baity. From the headline you'd think it would be a discussion about why engineers hop jobs so frequently, why in particular FAANGs seem to be so attractive, and what we could do to increase retention. Instead, the post just quickly summarises what we've known for ages (turnover is a big problem), very briefly goes off on a completely irrelevant tangent (that it's more likely for an engineer to change the company than to be hit by a bus, which is true, but pointless) and then tops it off by the insane suggestion that "just use Rails" is the answer to all of your turnover woes (more on that below).
2. There is an interesting discussion here to be had: why exactly do companies suck so badly at retaining talent? My take on it is that we all (companies, developers, etc.) routinely emphasise the wrong things (office perks, showing off tech skills, etc., instead of a good understanding of the product) and burn people out, but as said: this is a much larger discussion. More importantly though I disagree with the received wisdom that "developers are developers" and domain knowledge is worth nothing. Of course, you always should be prepared for the worst (i.e. the proverbial bus), but it should still be the companies' priority to retain good people as long as possible because once somebody leaves, so much knowledge just goes to waste and has to be reacquired. At my last company, my whole team was fired because they thought that some other team would be just as good for the product, ignoring the fact that we'd built up the product ourselves and all the knowledge for two years. But to the higher-ups, the view was that developers are exchangeable.
3. The author just really comes across as immature and uniformed with their unilateral praise of Rails. I've worked on Rails apps so messy that they were almost impossible to understand. And, by now, Rails is by far not the only framework with strong conventions and a lot of out-of-the-box support for many common things - Spring Boot for example (whatever its faults) arguably supports even many more requirements. But more importantly, for any kind of non-trivial app, the complexity is not just in the technology: it's in the (often contradictory) requirements, the different architectural tradeoffs, the little gotchas, the personalities in the team, etc. etc.
Rails has an incredibly large community but I think this statement would be equally true for any tool you're well versed in
However, lately I'm thinking more about performance so would love to work more with rust or golang, though I find rust harder to grok mentally. Golang is nice though, and easy to follow most code samples.
Not to knock on using libraries or anything like that, but we've definitely felt the pain of putting tools / convenience ahead of architecture.
Not only must you compensate your talent at the top of the market and then some (including generous equity), but you must give your employees an amazing work environment with excellent work/life balance, while providing something for them to work on that motivates them on an ideological level.
When any part of this aegis cracks, poaching has the potential to ravage your ranks.
I would say that in the case of especially valuable or world-class talent, it's the founder's responsibility to know as much as they can about that person, and to truly pitch them on a level that fully aligns across all dimensions of that person's life. Give them not only excellent comp, but fulfillment and purpose that is congruent or even symbiotic with their personal lives and overall ambitions.
Deep down, most people aren't pawns that you can simply acquire with a number and expect the highest quality work from.
In practice, it is extremely rare to find managers who effectively practice this. When you do, it's pretty amazing to watch in action.
I've only seen one such manager out of hundreds I've encountered consulting. That manager's team members won't leave the team for even 2X pay increases, because they figure the additional anticipated stress and job insecurity is not worth it. The amount of trust between that manager and the individual team members is higher than I've ever seen elsewhere, and that manager redefined for me what was possible with people skills superpowers. RDF doesn't even begin to describe it, and this field was accomplished without Jobs' infamous tantrums.
While I've no experience in the corporate world proper, as a solo founder 7 years into the same project I've a similar game plan with respect to talent, and just hope one day to have the privilege of giving it a go. Further (albeit slightly outdated) context in the link below.[0]
My scenario is more to do with how to put together a dream team, and convince people to join that team. With world-class talent, you have to consider that some of the people you want to hire are already quite wealthy and/or famous. Therefore, if you want any hope of landing let alone retaining them, you have to dig deep and discover what motivates them, and understand what aligns with their existing pursuits and goals.
If I ever do get the chance to hire any of these people, I'm not that worried about the sell. I've probably had countless imaginary conversations with each of them over the past few years. To even have the opportunity to talk to any of these people would be an honor, so the notion of somehow mistreating them, or failing to both compensate and appreciate them to the maximum extent possible just doesn't compute. That extends to the non-wealthy, non-legendary hires as well; if anything it's a healthy model to approach how you treat all people in your employ.
As an aside, one of the biggest problem I face with respect to hiring (minus funding and, you know, actually getting off the ground) is: who to approach first? Dream team assembly dynamics are very delicate from a game theoretical point of view, and I've begun to think this is perhaps the wrong way to approach thinking about the problem. Elizabeth Holmes infamously used the "If I get person X, then getting person Y will be easier." strategy to great effect, but she was a complete fraud.
There's a few ideas I have here that aren't fully elucidated, but probably could be thought of as consensus-based offers. Pitch people individually and in a personalized fashion, but with no expectation they accept the offer unless certain conditions are met, such as others on the prospective dream team agreeing to the same understanding, or even making it contingent on funding itself.
Assembling a ~50 person team pre-funding certainly is putting the cart before the horse in so many ways, but I think it can be done. The look on the VC's faces would something. "Here is the vision, here is the prototype, here's a team of 50 exceptional people—some of whom are legends—that have agreed to build this thing together, contingent on funding. Just need the money."
How is that actionable advice for companies competing with the richest companies in tech? You can indeed (hopefully) do the other things you say but you may simply not be able to afford to compensate them at top of market if that market includes Google or Netflix.
Most startups offer joke equity that's subject to dilution games with salaries below market, while claiming they hire only the best.
In 2014, Google had around 28,500 software developers. [1]
In 2016, it was estimated that the US had around 3.87 million professional software developers. [2]
So around that time, about 0.75% of all software developers in the US worked for Google alone. If your organization employs a few dozen skilled developers, there is a very strong chance that some of them could find a placement within FAANG. It's likely that these are the engineers that you rely on the most.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...
Like you said, 99% of software developers are NOT the top 1%. ;-)
EDIT: I removed some snark after reading Zenbit_UX's reply.
Here's my case:
Devs who work in a team with others are constantly exposed to the skills, cleverness and ingenuity of their colleagues. Most interns and juniors look at sys architects and senior devs with awe, not down on them.
Obviously we're all exposed to incompetent dev's at similar rates, but I feel like when you become the best dev in a company most realize they're unlikely to learn much more and should consider moving on, if not out of à desired to learn more, than likely out of frustration.
The wildcards are the "1 man shows", a dev in a department of 1. These people are often either incredibly brilliant and don't need any help or so stunted in their development and inflated I'm ego that they genuinely do believe they're the 1%.
As a 1 man show dev myself, I often have to remind myself I have no baseline reference for how good I am - despite my talents being sufficient for my employer to not need to hire others. To combat this, I just have to read HN and get a frame of reference for what others in the industry are accomplishing. It's quite humbling.
This is written to business leaders, but I feel like if phrased differently would sound familiar and accepted by HN. Namely, don't adopt esoteric technologies no one else knows. Document production process. Never let mission critical operations exist solely in your lead engineer's head.
The fact is that it's never a good time for your best people to leave, but that's inevitable on a long enough timeline. It's the duty of business leaders to be prepared for that so they don't have to resort to dirty tactics to convince them to stay.
- A safe software stack
- Make code understandable (industry best practices)
- Focus on employee ramp up time
I was confused when some companies stressed different things, and I didn't quite realize until reading this post that it might be coming from a place of fear of losing engineers.
What I've seen:
1) Committees for coding standards
2) Teamwork over code ownership
3) Peer code reviews to enforce quality
Sounds like these things would help increase code quality and reduce the bus factor. But I think there are some dangers.
1) Committees can mean that no individual is responsible for bad decisions
2,3) Teamwork is great if people have separate roles. Too many cooks can become a real problem otherwise.
I suspect people afraid of responsibility are more likely to embrace committees and teamwork. Dickheads incapable of working with others are more likely to take ownership (or else they'd be completely unemployable).
I also suspect many startups cargo cult practices that work well for giants, but are net negatives that encourage your employees to leave if you're small. Lacking ownership but getting paid super well is a better tradeoff than lacking ownership AND lacking amazing pay.
It's mostly a numbers game, so keep putting in the time - but not mindlessly: keep optimizing your CV/presentation/skills and it will eventually happen.
You could make the reverse argument. Using "industry standard" tools makes your top performers much more likely to get poached. Using unusual (but enjoyable) technologies might increase employee loyalty.
Personally, I think trying to reframe it as happy and positive and coming with a grace period is a little frivolous. Your team should be prepared to transition someone's responsibilities in the context of a sudden, wrenching, and traumatic change.
Salaries? Not at all. Total compensation? Well, it depends.
Software engineers with < 10yrs of experience routinely make this much at FAANG. The total compensation number usually includes the following:
* Salary
* Bonus (anywhere between 15-25% of salary)
* Initial grant that vests over 3-4yrs
* Stock "refreshers" that you get annually
* General equity appreciation due to a bull market
For senior engineers, the equity portion of their compensation far outweighs their salary.
This one can theoretically cut both directions
I recently took one of those offers from a FAANG, swapping a bunch of illiquid startup RSUs for liquid equity compensation.
I guarantee no one needed the author to explain that "hit by a bus" applies to more than tragic accidents.
I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's a loaded word with negative connotations, but what it really means here is "offer someone a better situation than you offered them". Employees have agency, they aren't wild elephants who need your "protection" from "predators" who just want to pay them more.
It's intentional language used by employers because it has preconceived notions and they succinctly communicate a story that benefits the employer.
When you hear poached, you think illegal and victims. It makes you think that the employer has been wronged in some way and that the employee was both participatory in something illegal or at least underhanded and at the same time being taking advantage of.
The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value.
But that's the nature of the employer/employee relationship, it's never truly balanced and one party is always benefiting more than the other.
In the vast majority of cases, I agree. If someone is working at CompuTech for $100K per year, and gets an offer from TechuComp for $110K per year, that's market forces working in favor of the developer. This is a good thing.
But there is the possibility for entities the size of Google to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves. For example, a guy working on self-driving cars might command a salary of $400K in most cases, but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them.
Most companies couldn't afford to do that, but FAANG are so vastly wealthy that they can hire entire engineering teams as a loss leader.
This is still good for the developers involved, at least in the short term, but it isn't so great for the market, or society, overall.
I think back fondly about the managers that genuinely wished me well at those exciting but scary junctions, even if I had my frustrations with them while I worked there. And if I'm being honest I still hold grudges against the ones that tried to make me feel bad and acted like I was betraying them for taking another job that I felt was the right decision for me at the time.
Even from a purely self-interest perspective, it seems to me that it's in every manager's interest not to try to guilt employees that are leaving or talk negatively about them. It's the last chance you have to leave a good impression, it costs you nothing at that point, and you never know when you may cross paths again, or the employee that left may be friends with someone you want to hire in the future and warn them not to join you, etc.
Employee value generation isn't fixed. It is entirely possible that the employee can generate more value in the same role at a different company. For example, if the product is more valuable, so is the work.
It is also possible that the "poacher" has such a ridiculous amount of money at their disposal that they're able to suck a talent pool dry with "so-much-money-you-can't-refuse" offers. I think, however, that enough employees are getting wise to the fact that a FAANG offer isn't an automatic "yes".
People do turn down offers even if the money is crazy high, especially older folks who have gained some control over their career path, have job-satisfaction, and don't want to stage-dive into a competitive hellscape of Type-A 20-somethings.
What other word would you recommend? Lured? Hired? They're not as precise.
I responded that I wasn't owned by my employer and just as they were free to let me go, I was free to leave on my own. The real reason was that since employers pay them and talent does not, they don't want to risk their income stream. Since that day, when this agency emails me to ask if I'm looking for new opportunities. I remind them of that incident and request that they don't contact me again.
It took about 8 years to finally sink in that I would NEVER have any dealings with them and they eventually stopped emailing me.
I was a SWE for a large corp for a while, and after that transitioned to a role of manager.
As I was very eager to build a good team, and the company HR looked slow and unefficient I tried doing recruting myself, at least the part of meeting people and talking them into come to work for us.
What I could decide (up to a point) the salary and benefits but people had to go thru testing with the people from HR (IQ tests, personality tests etc)
Anyway I was pretty successful in finding experienced engineers but the thing fell apart when it came to HR testing. "He/She is not a good fit for the company" they would told me.
This was going on for months. I did more than 300 interviews in my free time in maybe 5 months and only about 5 people where "ok".
At some point a guy from HR told me: 'you must stop sending employees from companies X,Y,Z to testing, we have a deal with them that we don't take each other's people' 0.o
The deal was not only no to stop "poaching" but when someone form those companies applied to a job posting they would call up the other companies HR and told them about it.
And there was more than 10 of companies they told me about that where forbidden.
Imagine all the people that applied for job at some company not knowing that their boss, the HR etc. would know about it.
It's seems counterproductive to blacklist them for behaving ethically just because it worked against you in one scenario. No recruiting agency is ever going to act in your best interests because you aren't the one paying them. One that behaves ethically is about the best you can ever hope for.
For example, some agencies only limit themselves to not representing a previously placed candidate if they are still the role where they were placed by the agency. Outside of that, if a candidate wants to move from one client company to another, the agency may even act as a catalyst, especially if the candidate would be a great fit for the new role.
That's a failure of American governance. Economists used to all know that markets needed to be regulated to make competition fair --- and efficient. But the American right has pushed for 50 years to deregulate everything, and the FAANGs have benefited from this rollback of anti-trust.
I'm not sure 'poaching' is the right word, but what the FAANGs are doing is unfair. And it's unfair because they benefit from deregulation and monopoly power that hurts anyone at a small business.
If you, as a founder, don’t want to give up equity, who’s fault is that? You’re expecting employees to work for a pittance of what they can make elsewhere and take on the risk without upside.
If employees are look at your business and decide the probability of their equity being worth anything is too low, who’s fault is that? You’re trying to dupe them into taking a bad deal, or failing to communicate the opportunity.
If your company cannot scale to provide market-rate salaries, whose fault is that? You’re expecting your employees to give up their salaries and their financial security to subsidize a non-competitive lifestyle business that suits you, not them. You’d better figure out some incentive where that equation makes sense.
There isn't an infinite maw for staffing at FAANGs, they aren't going to suck out all the air for all the technical talent in the room. Just the air for other members of FAANG and maybe the second-tier competitors. Startups that want to pay less than F500 compensation packages for greater job insecurity only think they're in the anoxic depths of available technical talent. They're really swimming in a talent-rich pool, they just want a McLaren for a Toyota price.
You can get a helluva lot done with a well-managed fleet of Toyotas, and done right, you'll get to the point where you will afford that McLaren cash-over-the-barrel should you really have your heart set on such managing such talent. Not every problem in the world requires world-class problem solvers, and in fact, most problems are solved every day by everyday people with sufficient time and determination. It just doesn't make for good copy for VC's to read about in the pitch deck.
In any case, rare is the startup I've seen that can even supply the right infrastructure to leverage FAANG talent. Their benefits aren't delivered de novo like Athena leaping from Zeus' head. For example, if you have a Free Electron personally grinding out non-core code and manning your most senior-level support desk fielding rando calls, instead of teaching more junior engineers and wading in only for the most difficult project-endangering parts, you're wasting your and their time, whether you're a startup or a FAANG.
Complaining about not being able to hire FAANG talent with sub-FAANG compensation packages without any discussion of the infrastructure is cargo-culting the effects of FAANG talent.
If you're a startup that must have FAANG-grade talent in specific positions, then pay the market price for that talent. Otherwise, you'll accommodate for lower-skilled staff like nearly any other manager in the world does, and adjust accordingly. The market has evolved so FAANG talent obtains competent legal and financial advice now, so promises without founder-level or even VC-level protections against dilution and other valuation clawback mechanisms are more correctly priced towards the market-priced zero.
Not from the employer's perspective.
Is this really a thing? Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado? Even factoring in my stock grants, I'm nowhere close to that number.
Netflix median engineer pay is around $400 - 500k, because they only really hire engineers who would be E5/L5 or above. Apple and Amazon also pay this at the titles which map to E5/L5, as does Microsoft, Uber, Square, Snap, Pinterest, etc.
This does not include stock appreciation, but stock appreciation certainly helps inflate the comp even further.
Going further out from FAANG: if you include non-liquid compensation, many pre-IPO companies pay comparably (or better, with the tradeoff of uncertainty); including Airbnb, Stripe, and Snowflake.
Source: I earn about that myself, I have friends at almost all of these companies, and I have worked at or received offers from some. Also, see levels.fyi.
I can't tell you what you should do, but from a cost of living perspective: people who make at least $300k in SFBA or NYC will very often come out ahead compared to making maybe half that in a significantly cheaper area, despite the higher cost of living.
I'm in my 30's now, with a family. There is no reasonable amount of money that could convince me to uproot and go to the valley. Sure I could come out ahead financially, but at what costs? Commuting for hours each day, working long hours, living in a smallish house with no yard, high crime, high pollution, etc. Those are just some negatives, but there are of course some positives too. For me, my time with family is my most valuable asset, and I don't think I'd sell it for $500k.
Sure you could go there and make a lot of money and basically retire in 10 years, but I'd rather have those 10 years back in time at the end I'm sure.
There's outrageous equity offered by like 5 companies. Everybody else is getting stock option grants worth 5-10% of what Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are offering (the situation is a little different for Netflix).
> Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado?
Probably not, Colorado is great.
Man I'd happily take up one of those Google jobs, but being an embedded software guy, I'm not even sure what they'd want me for. It seems like a lot of silicon valley companies are a great place if you're a web dev, or use C#/Java all the time.
You're in a lower cost-of-living location, and one where there's less competition; employers don't pay as much there because they don't have to. That said, if you like where you are, you might start by looking for remote work that pays better (from companies that don't say "we can pay you half as much because you're not in California").
Also, look for employers that have a robust technical job ladder for advancement; that's part of how you get a salary like that, and even higher. (I know software architects making 7-figure salaries.)
An interesting analogy is how many people uprooted and moved to LA in time's past to become movie stars, and how many succeeded.
Times are changing though and you can now apply to some major tech companies remotely, more will follow as Cali is now the hardest hit state and the desire to move their cools off.
It makes sense to pay a few that much so that you can have riches of people to choose from (and exploit?)
The best way to protect your prized employees is to treat them so well they'd be crazy to look elsewhere. If you, the business owner, can't afford that then you just aren't as competitive or successful as you think you are.
I think your analogy is only slightly apt. I rather see the company being raided for talent as the prey. The employee as its ivory.
First, elephants are usually not being protected from predators, but rather from hunters (illegal ones). I know it might sound like a nitpick because the two words can be synonymous, but since this is about terminology, I think it's appropriate. At the time you lose an employee due to "poaching", they're often not unhappy with the conditions you've given them and are not actively looking for another position. But they have been spotted by a "head hunter" hired to find talent for a specific role in a different company.
Second, employees might not belong to a company, but some companies spend a lot of time nurturing their talent through various programs (knowledge transfer, mentoring, experimental projects, personal time), because they hope it will benefit them in the future. Time is not free, it's even dearer than money, but it's the currency we all have the same amount of. If we don't consider another company just swooping in at the 11th hour to simply reap what should've been your benefit as a form of legal "theft", then what should we consider it?
Maybe the solution for companies would be to put some of their employees under contract, like in sports. They'd pay substantially more for those services, but a clause would include them if another company was interested to acquire their talent. That or maybe some insurance companies may start offering some compensation against poaching.
Poaching, on the other hand, usually does not mean that. It means targeting key people at competitors and specifically courting them to make them switch. Hence the analogy with hunting on someone else's land. I would also agree that the term tends to be overused.
Not discussing salaries is the exact same thing - the employer doesn't want everyone to know how much their peers are making, lest it result in higher overall salaries. I always think of offering candy to a kid but saying "Don't tell anyone I gave you this". It's pretty clear someone is trying to be manipulative if they don't want anyone else to know the details of the deal.
> Never underestimate how much better a person's life can be by working for a FAANG instead of working for you
Edit: For those who are downvoting, I'm simply saying this is what's implied by the quote. I'm not making a statement about FAANGs.
FTFY.
(e.g. China recently hired away a few thousand engineers from TSMC this way)
Given that these folks are instead going to become apologists for obvious abuses of power in the name of "making a difference in the world", perhaps radicalized would be a better word choice :-)
Headhunters, poaching, they are clearly idioms because we don't live in the safari or a conflict zone with hostile tribes (because we won.)
Pull request rejected and closed.
2
a: to take (game or fish) by illegal methods
b: to appropriate (something) as one's own
>>> c: to attract (someone, such as an employee or customer) away from a competitor <<<
It dehumanizes the employee by comparing them to an owned animal.
Some people would similarly have a problem with claiming a higher salary equals a 'better situation'
These are called figures of speech for a reason, being literal about them is not admirable nor worthwhile.
But they are quite happy to leave for Netflix and given turnover rates in tech, are almost guaranteed to leave in a few years.
