It's not managers. The board sets a budget, the budget gets subdivided, and by the time low-level managers have an opportunity to chime in, an Overton window has been established and I have the power to give a 0-9% raise.

Upper management doesn't have the visibility or the introspection to know one single individual contributor is truly worth 30% more to their business.

I coach my reports to sell themselves. Tell the directors how they individually are adding value to the company. They are completely allowed to speak with higher ups, and usually they're more than willing to take 15 minutes and listen to ICs on virtually any topic they wish to speak about. Then, the directors will remember you when it comes time to making pay decisions. Most engineers are modest, but nobody gets penalized for communicating and highlighting the great work they do.

I mean, this may be true where you are, and it may be true in some other similar companies, but it's definitely not universally true.

Some companies are smaller than yours, or have better visibility, or give managers more budgetary latitude. Speaking as if this is The One Way It Always Works is unhelpful.

We (tech people) are replaceable, just that replacing us takes a lot of time, effort and money.

I know it feels like nitpicking, but I never felt that any of the developers were actually hard to replace: it takes some money, time spent on recruiting, interviewing, then training, but in the end, the new people catch up in a matter of months and the resources needed to invest in a replacement can be relatively easily estimated.

I usually don't see that with very good business and product people. When they left the company, the team became demotivated, the lack of company and product vision caused frustration, the company couldn't find a replacement at all, caused turnover. In my experience, good business people leaving is the early sign of the company going south.

The causation can go in both directions, though: 1. product and business people are the first to see if a product/business model isn't working out, so they leave. 2 they leave, then they can't be replaced, replacement is only half as good, people quit because of lack of vision, things go even worse, more people quit, company has to shut down.

Senior leadership is the hardest to replace. Marketing managers or sales agents or the director of HR or a jr accountant or product managers are easy to replace and change happens often. Changing the CEO can be a big transition but replacing the product owner on the main app shouldn't be too difficult and happens often enough.

In your example if the product manager sees the plan is not working out so they leave. Is it their business model? If so they are running away from a mess they created. If the model comes from above than senior leadership is lacking.

Not being able to replace would point to a problem with either HR or senior leadership .

> Senior leadership is the hardest to replace.

[Citation needed]

I'm sure there are senior leaders who are amazing, and would be extremely difficult to replace. My experience of "senior leadership", however, has been, almost universally, that they're in that position because they were born into money, their organizational skills are crap, and they think "vision" means "sticking with the status quo (with maybe one oddball quirk) and "leadership" means "yelling at people until they do what you want."

That kind of "senior leadership" isn't hard to replace at all.

I see where you're coming from, but consider the cost of the replacement process itself: it can be chaotic jumping from one set of crap organizational skills to another. Point being, it's not so much that the person is very valuable themselves, but more that higher position = bigger disruption.

In fact there might be a slightly counterintuitive relation here: assuming good intent on all sides, transition from a leader with good organizational skills would be less disruptive.

You're not wrong, and I think that your last point is actually very true—and that this is part of what lets the leaders with crap organizational skills get away with it. It's not immediately obvious that their terrible leadership is ruining the organization.

What's needed, IMO, is a cultural shift away from the idea that we need a singular, extremely powerful CEO/president/chairman, and toward more group-oriented decision-making processes and devolution of both responsibility and power.

We abandoned absolute monarchies for a lot of very good reasons, and one of them is that having one guy who can just walk into any room in the kingdom/company and exercise the power of (in this case, financial, but that often becomes very literal) life and death over anyone else in there is a bad thing.

A lot of the ability for senior leadership to get things done is due to the network they've built inside the company, and their understanding of the power dynamics within that company. This is less and less true the lower you go in the ranks. Therefore it might cost some extra money to replace that IC, but nothing like the hit to productivity that switching senior management could cause. One way to guard against that would be to adopt a model where senior management are routinely switched so that the working level becomes robust against changes in management.

Lol, no. They understand exactly how in demand developers are. But they also understand that most people are reluctant to switch jobs because of the effort, the uncertainty, and the bad feeling of letting your teammates down.

You can save a lot of budget by not giving competitive raises.

This, especially with women, they don’t quit as often and are much more likely to stay, even if the environment is bad.

The demand in Montreal is... different. I'm in tech in Canada and I consider it from time to time -- Montreal, I mean -- and it's often a no-go. My wife is French-Canadian, ethnically speaking, and kinda interested, and I'd like the city all of the times we've visited.

Taxes are high in Canada but are the highest in the QC. By a lot. You get good stuff, like free or subsidized daycare, but you lose a lot of $$$ out of that paycheck.

COL in Montreal is low, but it's a cold place. Like, why go to Canada when I could go to Austin or the NC Research Triangle? Low COL means lower salaries. "Easier to be a human but harder to be a consumer" is what I've heard about COL and taxes in QC.

The CAD is weaker than the USD by around 20-30%, which makes it less cool for US-based devs. You can work around that by upping that CAD number, but remember the taxes are much higher and you'll be paying comparatively more, %-wise, at 210k CAD than you would at 150k USD.

Most jobs expect some degree of French, ranging from "learning but can get by" to "full-fluency in English and French". The city as a whole is kind of like that.

So yeah, of course there are jobs. They pay mediocre rates, need a second language, and mean you'll get taxed a lot. And if you're not in Canada, moving north presents logistical issues on top of months of snow.

I can't disagree with much of what you're saying, and still as a Canadian there is no realistic amount of money that could incentivize me to move to the US.

For Montreal, the French thing is largely true, meaning you would generally have to at least pretend to be learning French. I find that the requirement gets ignored regularly however when yours is the only decent CV in the pile.

I’m not sure that’s true. Anyone who has had any attrition knows the cost of turnover.

Has it actually been established to matter all that much?

As attrition rates are surging throughout society. People are quitting faster. More and more people are on temp contracts. I find it kinda nuts that the sign that it is time to leave a company for a raise is hitting a productive stride. It is common knowledge that the best way to get a raise is to switch employers.

Yet absolutely nothing is being done with this information by employers. It isn't secret. So they seemingly have determined that preventing attrition isn't worth it.

No one wants to pay more for what you already have even though it is offering more. We see this with cable bills. Everyone expects more channel but static prices. Companies expect more out of a developer who has been with them 5 years over someone who has been there a year. But they want to continue to pay them the same as they did 5 years ago so they never give them raises.

If company Y is willing to pay 50% more to hire someone from company X, it's often because they want to bring in someone with external experience. A person already working at company X has that to offer to company Y, but not to their current company.

If company X isn't looking for external experience (because they figure they already have that experience in their senior management, other team members, etc), then they'll be happy to let the person leave for company Y and hire some new entry level / fresh grad / minimally qualified person for the position and start over.