> Some companies will give very large out of band bonuses to people, but that work wasn't for a company that does a lot of that kind of thing, so there's nothing the company could do to indicate that it valued additional work once someone did "enough" work to get the best possible rating on a performance review. From a mechanism design point of view, the company was basically asking employees to stop working once they did "enough" work for the year.
and
> This also happened in another way. As is common at a lot of companies, managers were given a team-wide budget for raises that was mainly a function of headcount, that was then doled out to team members in a zero-sum way. Unfortunately for each team member (at least in terms of compensation), the team pretty much only had productive engineers, meaning that no one was going to do particularly well in the zero-sum raise game. The team had very low turnover because people like working with good co-workers, but the company was applying one the biggest levers it has, compensation, to try to get people to leave the team and join less effective teams
are pretty important points to note.
Accepting that organizations are incentivized to extract the maximum amount of value from you means you should be:
1. Aware of the value you produce
2. Know how to sell it
This also comes up during promotion season in places that require that you perform at 50%+ of the next "level" to be eligible for a promotion. The unsaid part is that you will be under compensated for that 50% "next level" and when the promo comes, you'll be at the bottom of the comp band at the new level (no wonder people tend to quite shortly after a large promotion)
> This also comes up during promotion season in places that require that you perform at 50%+ of the next "level" to be eligible for a promotion.
There is no objective criteria for the next “level”, despite the fact that corporations pretend otherwise. Level is more related to years of experience than actual skill from what I’ve observed. Working extremely hard for a promo and then being compensated far less than external hires who can barely code but managed to pass the leetcode interviews is a real morale killer. And that’s if you get lucky and get promoted instead of passed up for promo, since promos tend to be given for exaggerating impact “metrics” instead of actual total impact which is unmeasurable.
> to try to get people to leave the team and join less effective teams
From a director-level perspective it probably makes sense to have one or two of your best people on each team, rather than some wholly excellent teams and some wholly mediocre teams.
From the standpoint of providing skill-mentorship opportunities it makes sense. A few strong engineers on a team can really help everyone grow. Naturally personalities and preferences should be accounted for, however one of the best moves I ever made was to break up a "ninja squad" (what they called themselves) of high functioning devs when their big project wrapped up. The squad was small (3) and each person was very well liked by the entire engineering team (13). We had several green-field projects starting up, so none of them felt banished to the salt mines of legacy maintenance tasks for instance. The general quality and velocity improved across the teams and we gained more consistency in our codebase when it came to patterns.
> Accepting that organizations are incentivized to extract the maximum amount of value from you
Perhaps that is true at start ups, but in my career as a developer at very large corporations this has been almost never true. Most of my career has been waiting around wasting time or working on side projects to do my job for me. That time waste is due to any of the following:
* Unnecessary build jobs, such as a build job that takes 90 minutes. In that extreme example Java was the center-piece technology at a web travel company even though Java is not a web technology. As a front-end developer if I wanted to make a code change and test it in the browser I would need to rebuild and wait 90 minutes, because the front-end code that the Java developers don't care about is at the end of the funnel. No incentive to hurry and certainly no maximum value extraction.
* When I was working as a strategy consultant to a different giant web travel company I was there because they sucked. Let's be honest, if they were awesome they wouldn't be spending huge bags of money on an outside consultant for advise. Because the most sucky developers there were supremely insecure and their management was at war with another department they didn't really want me to do work. I really tried to justify the money they were paying to my employer for my time there, but it was really just an exhaustive exercise in keeping busy so I wouldn't be bored all day. Eventually that faded away and I just started taking long walks out of the office. No value extraction there either.
* A more common scenario I have experienced is death by process. Its like bleeding out from a thousand tiny paper cuts such that you are in agony forever, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel. I have reasoned this madness occurs because the organization lacks a qualified architect and the wrong personalities were put in charge of the technology decisions. In nearly all cases management looked around and said to themselves "who here mindlessly works themselves to death" and then that person gets put in charge and now everybody is working themselves to death but nothing is being produced. Nothing says working hard like running as fast as you can on a mouse wheel. In these cases there is need to be constantly in a hurry, but nothing gets done and everybody knows it and morale is destroyed.
* The most common failure I encounter is fear of writing original code. As a front-end developer there are only 2 APIs on the front-end: DOM and the Web APIs. Instead of writing a fast performing solution in the fewest possible instructions you typically need to write the code to conform to a very specific, though not documented, code style on top of a giant monster framework with a 1000 dependencies. Then you need to compile the code more than once just for good measure. Even though the problem could be solved slowly in 30 minutes with an additional hour for testing in multiple applications/environments it will likely take a week or more in the framework. Sometimes people claim there is a great hurry to ship product changes, but as a developer working on a framework made out of toothpicks and duct tape the hurry is clearly somebody's self-serving imagination.
* I think everybody's favorite value destroyer is death by JIRA. So, JIRA is an Agile planning and assignment tool that the corporate world has fallen in love with. When everything is a story point and nothing else matters your personal goal becomes completing story point assignments and then doing nothing else.
Perhaps the only times I have ever experienced a big corporate employer making any attempt to extract the maximum amount of value from me is when work used the old waterfall methodology, because the work was constantly coming in without regard for schedule cycles or administrative nonsense. The time I was most most valued is when I was told to go as fast as possible as the A/B test engineer for Travelocity and all restrictions were on productivity, aside from Q/A and defect resolution, were eliminated.
---
> 1. Aware of the value you produce 2. Know how to sell it
I, and most people I have worked with, have spent so much time undervalued that we clearly had time to really and continuously sell ourselves like a product on a shelf, but nobody almost wants to. The people that spend the most energy selling themselves instead of writing code or solving problems tend to use charisma as for bad self-promotion. If developers wanted to spend the majority of their energy in marketing they wouldn't waste time solving hard technology problems. It reminds me of end of year evaluations that most developers dread.
> Accepting that organizations are incentivized to extract the maximum amount of value from you means you should be: 1. Aware of the value you produce 2. Know how to sell it
Do you think this is important even if one is already satisfied with one's compensation and mainly cares about the positive impact that they're making for end-users of the company's software?
You are donating a lot of money to your employer’s shareholders if you knowingly work for below market rates. I hope you have an excellent work environment but even if you do you should interview at least yearly to see if there’s anything really attractive around. Other companies have end users too.
What matters in the end is that you're content/happy with where your life is and the trajectory you're on - whether that's making 200k a year or having enough time off at work so you can do other interesting stuff
and
> This also happened in another way. As is common at a lot of companies, managers were given a team-wide budget for raises that was mainly a function of headcount, that was then doled out to team members in a zero-sum way. Unfortunately for each team member (at least in terms of compensation), the team pretty much only had productive engineers, meaning that no one was going to do particularly well in the zero-sum raise game. The team had very low turnover because people like working with good co-workers, but the company was applying one the biggest levers it has, compensation, to try to get people to leave the team and join less effective teams
are pretty important points to note.
Accepting that organizations are incentivized to extract the maximum amount of value from you means you should be: 1. Aware of the value you produce 2. Know how to sell it
This also comes up during promotion season in places that require that you perform at 50%+ of the next "level" to be eligible for a promotion. The unsaid part is that you will be under compensated for that 50% "next level" and when the promo comes, you'll be at the bottom of the comp band at the new level (no wonder people tend to quite shortly after a large promotion)