This is assuming your engineers don't leave for higher-paying roles elsewhere. The market might be cold generally but for engineers working at these frontier AI companies it's red-hot.

And most executives are figuring this into their calculus right now because they were burned badly during COVID. Meta, Google, etc were loose with hiring and engineers flocked from their lower-paying companies in droves. The brain drain was real.

One public company I was at lost nearly 2/3rds of their engineers and mostly to Meta (granted, they had other problems but it was mostly about money -- the offers were excessive). Then market conditions forced them to freeze hiring and they've had a slow exodus of senior talent since as the firefighting has become constant.

AI adoption has only accelerated problems for them.

We've taken this "only two years and then leave" philosophy to an extreme and now companies are totally justified in not investing in their engineers anymore.

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ambicapter 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The job-hopping followed from companies not investing in their engineers, not the other way around. It was billed as the only way to get a promotion (which usually would come every 1-2 years).

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busterarm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I've been in this industry for a few decades at this point and I was around when this meme was started.

It was purely about maxing your compensation because changing jobs nets you more than promotions & raises.

I've never met an engineer in my life who truly earned a promotion every year and very few every two. Very few companies have org charts that even support that or have that many levels. This logic/advice only really applies at a few companies and people have adopted it no matter where they work. There's not enough growth/hiring at 95% of companies to even come close. The Peter Principle is also a real thing. Everyone's competence has a ceiling.

There's even an implicit understanding of this that people at smaller companies have inflated titles and you typically rank them down 1-2 levels when hiring/acquiring at larger companies.

Now I do agree that companies haven't been investing in their engineers, but that doesn't also mean this isn't a vicious cycle. Employers and employees are in a mexican standoff and things are only going to get worse until one side comes to its senses. Employers have all the leverage for it to not be them.

For the vast majority of companies the average tenure of an engineer sits between 18 and 30 months. They're also mostly hiring young engineers in their 20s. As an employer what is your upside to making such investments before they're at least mid-career? A lot of people seem to want the world and offer nothing in return for it.

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swiftcoder an hour ago | parent [-]

> It was purely about maxing your compensation because changing jobs nets you more than promotions & raises.

You don't view it as a problem that companies consistently compensate new hires higher than they are their experienced employees?

Hell, I would have been perfectly happy to never change employers in my entire career to date, if my salary had anywhere near kept pace with my peers who were job-hopping.

	▲	busterarm 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> You don't view it as a problem that companies consistently compensate new hires higher than they are their experienced employees? It depends on the current employee and the incoming employee. They are not interchangeable cogs. Also not everyone consistently provides good value over their tenure -- a lot tend to work hard early and then for various reasons taper off. It's not necessarily their fault, but companies definitely are aware of this. Personally I tend to value growth of my skillset over growth of income and that has largely informed my movement. I move when there's no longer interesting work if the compensation is at least fair. I've never been about comparing myself to others -- especially when most of my peers' left the industry after 5-10 years.