The Industry has idiotic compensation philosophy
At Amazon new hires paid more than existing hires despite lacking literally the most important distinguishing factor for any software developer:
Domain knowledge.
Literally tribal knowledge is the only reason anyone should be paid well. Software engineering skills themselves are basic shit any bootcamp grad knows. Any idiot can leetcode or gork system design interview. A senior engineer is tested for same coding skills as an intern. By not paying for tenure Amazon and other companies like it deliberately discourage learning actual job skills and damage their own business. It takes a year to onboard a leetcoder to be fully productive in a large company because domain knowledge is critical for success of any business.
I agree with the sentiment people have right now that the only reason to stay at a job past 1 year is if you hate money or shackled by visa. When companies cry about lack of loyalty it rings so hollow because their entire compensation model is designed to discourage and punish loyalty. If companies rewarded loyalty there would be more loyalty but the reality is they donโt. They end up paying more for a worse employee as nobody talented and familiar with the company system will stay and be paid 1/2 of the new guy that knows nothing other than general software skills that everyone knows.
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Haha, this made me laugh. I'm a TT SDE3 getting ready to start the PE promo process. A few months ago I poked my head out from under a rock, realized I was way under paid, and asked for a comp adjustment. The org ended up doing an adjustment for all top performing SDEs.
My TC adjustment was about 20%, with the first batch of stock vesting this year. 20% is great, except I figure it actually needed to be 70% to be market competitive. I could leave and boomerang back the next day and make considerably more than my new adjusted TC.
Clearly they aren't that interested in keeping me.
adjusted TC 430k
YOE 17
Were you expecting to double your salary ๐
One hypothesis could be that amidst this continuous churn from existing employees and luring new hires with fat paychecks, there might be a decent chunk of employees who find their comfort level with the company, team, compensation, etc. and stick around long enough with lower compensation compared to the industry that it justifies this circus. These rest and vesters are there to manage risks and keep the machine going, and the new hires are just turbo charges that help accelerate it as usually they work harder in the initial 1-2 years. Seems far fetched but thatโs all I could think of.