Comment by JustExAWS
3 days ago
That sounds like an incentive issue.
My evaluations are based on quarterly goals and quarterly deliverables. No one at a corporation cares about anything above how it affects them.
Bringing junior developers up to speed just for them to jump ship within three years or less doesn’t benefit anyone at the corporate level. Sure they jump ship because of salary compression and inversion, where internet raises don’t correspond to market rates. Even first level managers don’t have a say so or budget to affect that.
This is true for even BigTech companies. A former intern I mentored who got a return offer a year before I left AWS just got promoted to an L5 and their comp package was 20% less than new hires coming in at an l5.
Everyone will be long gone from the company if not completely retired by the time that happens.
> Bringing junior developers up to speed just for them to jump ship within three years or less doesn’t benefit anyone at the corporate level.
What? Of course it does. If that's happening everywhere, that means other companies' juniors are also jumping ship to come work for you while yours jump ship to work elsewhere. The only companies that don't see a benefit from mentoring new talent are those with substandard compensation.
That’s true, but why should I take on the work of being at the beginning of the pipeline instead of hiring a mid level developer. My incentives are to meet my quarterly goals and show “impact”.
To a first approximation, no company pays internal employees at market rates in an increasing comp environment after a couple of years especially during the first few years of an employee’s career where their marker rate rapidly increases once they get real world experience.
On the other hand, the startup I worked for pre-AWS with 60 people couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t have paid me the amount I made when I got hired at AWS.
> That’s true, but why should I take on the work of being at the beginning of the pipeline instead of hiring a mid level developer.
Nominally, for the same reason that you pay taxes for upkeep on the roads and power lines. Because everyone capable needs to contribute to the infrastructure or it will degrade and eventually fail.
> My incentives are to meet my quarterly goals and show “impact”.
To me, that speaks of mismanagement - a poorly run company that is a leech on the economy and workforce. In contrast, as a senior level engineer at a large technology company that has remarkably low turnover, one of my core duties is to help enhance the capabilities of other coworkers and that includes mentorship. This is because our leadership understands that it adds workforce retention value.
> To a first approximation, no company pays internal employees at market rates in an increasing comp environment after a couple of years especially during the first few years of an employee’s career where their marker rate rapidly increases once they get real world experience.
That's why I mentioned it being a cross-industry symbiotic relationship. Your company may not retain the juniors that you help train, but the mid level engineers you hire are the juniors that someone else helped train. If you risk not mentoring juniors, you encourage other companies to do the same and reduce the pool of qualified mid level engineers available to you in the future.
> On the other hand, the startup I worked for pre-AWS with 60 people couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t have paid me the amount I made when I got hired at AWS.
While unrelated to my point, I do have a different experience that you may find interesting in that the most exorbitant salary I have ever been paid was as a contractor for a 12-person startup, not at the organizations with development teams in the hundreds or thousands.
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