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Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

I kept scanning this article for talks about money, but there were none. It isn't even about underpaying - it's that changing jobs supplies one of the best sources for engineering pay raises.

There are evolutionary flows through the work force that don't require this (moving into leadership positions) but as they mentioned, generally hiring into the top levels comes from a tight circle of people, having gone to the same school, or some other such limitation. So if you didn't go to Stanford, what's your play?

I could understand why someone running a company wouldn't want to address this, but paying your engineers solidified salaries while company profits rise, and possibly with limited amounts of share in the company, is a good way to guarantee that they'll have to jump ship at some point, just to keep up with inflation.

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But then you deal with the wage problem -- managers (especially ones without a tech background) are often of the "my reports make less than me" school of thought. More money = more power = more respect. So when a manager who makes $90k/yr is talking with a 30yo who wants $150k/yr, he might be insulted or put off. And let's not forget that a lot of developers probably should be in the 200-250 range.

The only thing to look for in a company, in my eyes, is how well they pay their employees. They can glad-hand all they want about open workspaces and ping-pong tables and catered lunches, but none of that matters. Show us the money.

One possible approach to this problem is to separate day-to-day management from staff budget/pay negotiations. If you're employing line managers who are worth only $90k a year and have the attitude you describe, someone else needs to be making those staffing decisions. That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't be employing those line managers, but you need to think carefully about the nature of the role. The traditional all-in-one hierarchy probably isn't appropriate in that situation.

Your manager should make more - because nobody should be a manager of software devs who is not a software developer himself and should be able to command more than a young engineer.

You shouldn't get to be an officer unless you were first enlisted.

That would be nice, huh? I've worked for plenty of places where the dev manager was a glorified scrum master and PM

Managers should rarely have sole power over the people hired on their team, for exactly that reason. It's easy to fall into "empire building" mode, and you want checks and balances for that.

Salary envy is just a minor side problem of that approach. One of the bigger issue is that bad managers surround themselves with yes people, compounding any possible damage.

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