> The Lake Wobegon Strategy famously coined by Google and Peter Norvig claims that you should always hire above your team average. Doing so increases the quality of your team.
Ugh, not this again. Obviously don't hire people who aren't good at their job. But most improvements come from investing in your team.
> are they putting their code up for review [...]
Missed one: Are their code reviews/pull requests high quality? I.e. do they go out of their way to document how they tested it? Reproduction steps? Do they invest time in making code reviews as easy to review for other people as possible? Or does their code reviews always take multiple rounds of review due to sloppiness?
Investing in workers is hard. I'm in a mentoring/leadership position. I approach this in two ways. One is the general mentoring everyone gets during regular stuff like code reviews. The other way is sometimes I see someone who I think has real promise and kind of take them under my wing, give them lots of 1on1 attention, etc. They improve exponentially and then leave. One guy I mentored had been with the company for over 10 years. No one had ever "invested" in him. He had a great attitude and work ethic, but terrible skills. I taught him how to program. He left the company and doubled his salary. That was a year and a half ago. This week he called me to thank me because he was changing jobs again and doubling his salary again.
So my current employer went from a low skill high dedication worker to no worker because I invested in him. I'm going to continue help/mentoring people because I find it fulfilling, but if I'm honest it's bad for my employer. They currently pay good salaries in line with the market. There's no way they can justify giving a person who's been with the company for 10 years 4x salary growth in 2 years. How could they even reasonably measure the market value of his skills changing so much so quickly?
> They currently pay good salaries in line with the market.
> There's no way they can justify giving a person who's been with the company for 10 years 4x salary growth in 2 years.
One of these must be false. According to "the market", this employee is now worth 4x previous salary, so then how can your company be paying "in line with the market?"
Ok, so it's more like the business is in the market for a $80k/yr developer, and not a $300k+ developer. The words changed but the result is the same. The work they're doing, it honestly doesn't make sense to pay anyone that much.
Maybe it's not so bad for the employer in the long term if it leads them to realize "Hey, we need to do better about assessing the value of our employees."
I'm curious what the data point is that leads you to think your company's paying a good salary if the hard-working, motivated, skilled people can easily find work that pays quadruple, because that sounds like the market is saying otherwise (unless the missing variable is location, like moving from Nebraska to Silicon Valley or something).
It's not bad for your employer. It's the truth. Your employer is bad for your employer if they let someone remain at the company for 10 years, paying salary without investing in said employee nor treating them like an investment.
If this dev's trajectory is true, it's also something worth discussing with your management. There might be candidates for this kind of trajectory in your current dev pool, and any feelings contrariwise are to the detriment of your company.
Too often there's an emotional component to how employees are viewed. The employee today will be the same employee forever, if seen through the lens of a limited manager.
I'll say this: if you can do this 2-3 times, you should find your way to an org that can support and appreciate the lift you're able to provide. You shouldn't be holding yourself down to the poor standard of your current employer.
Honest question: are there places where you can be a mid-level developer making $80k/yr and over the course of two years get raises and promotions lifting you up to $300k+? I've never heard of such a thing happening. In my experience, industry-wide, the only way to make that kind of raise is to leave.
In my brother’s company, they don’t pay anyone that much (yet), but what they’ve done to keep most of their juniors is to bump their compensation quite a bit when it’s clear that they have high potential and are realizing it. So raises end up being on the order of $10k+ a year in some cases. Combined with increased benefits (time off, etc) the longer you stay with the company, and they’ve found a formula that keeps their employees from jumping.
If you think about it from the perspective of the employee, you are working for an employer who is giving you sizable raises, continual career growth, long term benefits, and a team you enjoy working with. You can perhaps maximize your pay by going through the whole interview cycle and ending up with $10-20k bump, but is that worth it? There is no certainty that the next employer gives such large raises or invests in employees.
As for your case - $80k to $300k jump - that is exceptional. It is not going to be the norm. Not if continual investment happens. Based on your example (10 yrs experience), if they kept investing in that employee, they would have surpassed $100k long ago. If they hit the salary ceiling after 4-5 years, then conversations would shift. Maybe more days working from home, etc.
In my opinion, if you see such jumps happening regularly, then it is 100% on the employer for creating an environment that breeds large wage-skill gaps.
> There's no way they can justify giving a person who's been with the company for 10 years 4x salary growth in 2 years. How could they even reasonably measure the market value of his skills changing so much so quickly?
If he was doing the same job I could see why he would get the same pay. If he had taken on greater responsibilities or become more productive though, why not?
"Most improvements come from investing in your team"
Very well said. Completely agree. Which is why I think the ability to "learn" as you go is so valuable. You don't want to hire a Know-it-all. You want to hire a Can-learn-it-all.
> “But most improvements come from investing in your team.”
I agree on this but you have to cut your losses at some point. Some people just aren’t motivated. A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite, etc whatever motivational strategies you have may provide some short term result, and that could be sufficient if your goal is just X and it’s in the line of sight, but sometimes raising the bar on your team means finding a different spot for the unmotivated folks, and if they’re not investing even in that, then cut your losses and let them go.
> A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite
I don't think any of those things will increase team productivity at all.
Mentoring and training and encouraging learning new things and constantly giving new challenges and expanding responsibility and tying company financial success directly to employee paychecks, are the kind of investments that can improve a team's performance.
Absolutely agree. Some people are just beyond saving. Sometimes this a matter of skill, and sometimes a matter of will but the result is the same. If you're hiring pipe-hitters and grafting them onto a JV squad the results will often not be what you'd hoped for, unless you have a particularly high-tolerance for projects being over (time-)budget.
Having personally burned myself down in such an environment, a good interview question to ask is if everyone has gone through the same hiring process and if not ask what the previous process was and why things have changed.
Hiring people is very expensive. Finding and qualifying leads, creating job description, interviewing, on boarding, orientation, training, introduction to and getting familiar with the existing code base. Firing requires distributing that team member's work to other team members.
This can take months and a big investment from existing team members, to go from wanting to hire someone to a fully productive team member. And that's assuming your hiring process never accidentally hires someone even more incompetent than your "poor" team members.
Compare that to investing in improving existing team members to help them improve. Is that really more expensive than hiring and firing?
Exactly. Spolsky did enormous harm to us all with his assertion, blindly accepted, that a single bad hire will destroy your company overnight. All the toxicity in the current hiring process should be laid at his door.
This Spolsky quote is so outdated. The average great developer will apply for 4 jobs unless he is trying to work remotely which will require 100 aplications / 50 tests / 75 take home assignmennts / 14 interviews per position and one job offer for below market rate for the third world.
"The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career."
You say that like it's some sort of epiphany, but do you honestly believe that there's anybody who wasn't trying to hire better people in the first place? If the problem is the quality of the people you've been hiring, maybe your boss should consider replacing you with somebody who's better at finding better people to hire, eh?
I've been on many interview debriefs where the discussion came down to a question of our team's appetite for taking on a more relatively junior hire vs holding out for a more solid candidate. Some "weaker" hires can be OK, but in order to be fair to them (and the team) you have to make sure you have the resources to develop them by giving them the opportunity to work with more experienced people and get one-on-one mentoring. So yes, the extent that you want to "hire better people" is very much an intentional judgment, and you can calibrate your hiring process accordingly based on your current team composition and the work on your plate.
I wonder if that happens. Some hiring processes are flawed so they filter out the better candidates at the HR levels and the engineers filter out the candidates who are left over. This can go on for a long time until the company is so understaffed they hire anyone and it works out..
Careful. How did the team get there in the first place? Why would better people want to join if the manager can't coach an existing team? You can argue that it doesn't matter and you just need to clean house. But that runs the risk of cover up the root cause and not addressing it.
Ugh, not this again. Obviously don't hire people who aren't good at their job. But most improvements come from investing in your team.
> are they putting their code up for review [...]
Missed one: Are their code reviews/pull requests high quality? I.e. do they go out of their way to document how they tested it? Reproduction steps? Do they invest time in making code reviews as easy to review for other people as possible? Or does their code reviews always take multiple rounds of review due to sloppiness?