Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that certain people in company leadership have a genuine interest in offering fair compensation for engineers — to improve retention or morale, or to attracts better engineers, or maybe even just because is the right thing to do (🤣) (And leave aside that it might be an uphill battle for them because other leaders do not share this interest. Hypothetically.) What resources can I share with leadership to help them understand what average/good/fair comp looks like for high performers with a given set of responsibilities? They seem to mistrust Glassdoor because it hurt their feelings (bad company gets bad reviews, weird), plus “Know Your Worth” requires an accurate job title, and this company tends to assign incorrect or overly-specific ones that have extra duties tacked on. Basically I would like to know if there are resources I could point them to that would help them understand what it takes to hire and retain good employees, and what it costs not to, and do that *before* people start hating their jobs and threatening to quit. I’d say there are no bad ideas but this is Blind, so here we go....
The concept of "fair" compensation doesn't exist in a capitalist economy. Companies have compensation models depending on what works best for them. This might include letting go of rockstar engineers because they are too expensive to hire.
I agree capitalism is a broken system, but the company totally could’ve afforded to pay me what I wanted. They just dragged their feet for so long that I decided I wanted more. I guess I have two objectives: 1. I want the company to realize that the goalposts are constantly moving, and they need to stay ahead and move with them. 2. I want to give the company the resources it needs to understand just how far behind those goalposts they already are, and what they’ll need to do in order to catch up.
What makes you think that the goalposts you define are the ones that the company defines? It's not about what they can afford, they have no incentive to pay you more if you are going to work for less (however unwillingly) or if your work can be done by someone else who will work for less.
There are businesses that collect pay info for roles and that is how we end up with Corp speak like “you’re already being paid above avg” and etc. I can’t remember what it was called. It isn’t hidden and you could find it with some googling. I saw it in the new mgr training for that software company
Oh, good point — establishing a baseline like that could backfire in the long run, if some faction of leadership starts using that to defend some new set-point and the reporting falls out of date. And they could game it by starting out with low pay. (For example, the “average salary” for my role plummeted when I posted my TC on Glassdoor...)
So, I don’t believe there are real budget constraints preventing us from being able to afford “rockstars”. I don’t really want to work with “rockstars” anyway, though. I want to work with people who care about their work, are good at what they do, and collaborate well with the rest of the team. But... here’s what’s happened so far. 1. Following a glowing performance review I asked about getting a raise. 2. I did not get a raise. 3. I found this disappointing and demoralizing, and I said so. 4. They offered me a tiny raise. 5. I found this disappointing and demoralizing, and I said so, and I pointed out that my current job is bigger than the one I was hired for but I’m still doing well, and that I’m making far less than market rate for the skills I’m offering and the work I’m doing. I did not give numbers, I just said “market rate” a bunch. 6. They asked what salary I would be satisfied with. 7. Manager: “So anything less than $X would be a failure.” 8. Meanwhile I interviewed for 4 jobs, got 3 offers, and accepted the lowest because I dig what that company does. 9. Manager got back to me and offered $X+0 which is less than the low offer from (8). 10. I announced my resignation, they asked what they could do to keep me, I discovered they were willing to offer me more, and I turned them down. The moral of this story, as I see it, is that the company could have kept me if it had been more proactive about salary. I wouldn’t have gotten as far as the interviews, let alone the offers, if they’d started with $X. But they decided instead to play this stupid “price is right” game, and they lost me. Some of the leadership has indicated an interest in understanding how this happened. Under the (generous) assumption that they are sincere, I want to be able to answer them as accurately as possible. What I have laid out for them so far is that, if they compiled a list of even just the things they’ve directly observed me doing, and produced a job description based on that, there exist public job postings with public salary data that line up with that description. I know this because these are the kinds of jobs I applied for. However, that doesn’t generalize very well. Each of my coworkers does something a little different. Since the company leadership doesn’t even know enough right now to come up with accurate job titles, it’s hard to give general advice on comp research.
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Very good question. Really have this thought. Microsoft problem is huge variation in the employees. There are ppl who think 100k Tc is decent and ppl who aspire salaries that of fang. There are teams that have huge impact versus teams that maintain legacy code (not to say one is better than other). With that variations we have standard level and bonus or stocks per level and that being same irrespective of team you work on. Ssa or higher allocation of bonus doesn't come any where close to what people get outside. Hard problem to solve. But curious to know what are thoughts from LT OR hr