> Saying "we can only give you this much because your title is X and we don't have an open management position, but we really value you!" is a great way to lose your best people.

This resonates with me so much. I've left a few companies after having conversations which ended with my manager saying exactly this. In most cases they have ended up hiring somebody else at a salary higher than mine.

It really confuses me. I usually don't want to leave these companies because the work is good and finding a new job can be stressful. They usually don't want me to leave because I do good work and finding a replacement is costly. I don't understand why all this bureaucracy and nonsense about job titles has to get in the way of finding a middle ground.

I don't want to sound like a new age hippy here, but if you were to think of emotional capital as something you have to expend when you make hard decisions, I think managers have to expend a lot more emotional capital on decisions like this then they would like. And if they have to do that, it distracts them from other things.

So, to avoid expending that emotional capital, they create abstract rules and entities that they can point to and say "aww shucks, I wish we could give you more money, but This Other Thing won't let me" (whether that be HR, or a pay scale, or other things). It's usually phrased in a way to say that it's about promoting fairness or organizational principles or something like that, and it is to a point, but I think it's just as much about avoiding the hard work of managing.

The problem is that at a certain point, these abstract entities (HR and "the rules") gain more power than the managers themselves, and now the organization is incapable of doing what it needs to do because the structure it has put into place is more suited to protecting the status quo than it is to making hard but rational decisions.

That is what you get when you isolate decision maker from consequences of his decisions. HR does not feel the pain of you leaving, so he does not care. However, he has trouble to find a new person for low salary, so he is forced to raise the offer.

HR may not see the loss of institutional knowledge of high worker turnover, but they do see a lot of the more monetary costs: with all that constant hiring of replacements going on, HR sure needs a bigger budget next year! We might be looking at an incentive problem, amongst others.

a couple decades back, when my dad was working for one of the big telecom companies, they invented a new job title specifically so they could promote him with the appropriate pay bump while also keeping him coding instead of managing. (They later hired/promoted others with the same title.)

I thought it was a great solution. If a dinosaur like a telecom company can do it, why can't others?

Yeah, this is a fairly common compromise, and even helps in the stupid cases where you can't give person A a job title higher than person B who will be mortified if they don't have the best sounding job title, but you still need to give person A a raise and a feeling of advancement (so glad I don't work at a place like this anymore). So you give them some variation on their current job title (it's not a promotion over you, person B!) and a raise, and call it a day.

It depends on how effectively bureaucratic the bureaucracy is. If all workers have to have a job title that's already in the database, and all job titles have an assigned salary, then you're out of luck.

This has been extremely fascinating reading about job titles. I'll never understand why people care about them.

You should care about them. They facilitate movement in between companies. If you're a "manager" at a major organization but are actually doing VP level work and are getting paid like a VP, it will be very difficult for you to convince another company that they should hire you as a VP. You'll also get lots of cold calls from recruiters about jobs that you are severely overqualified for.

>>I think that's pathological for managing developers because developers aren't interchangeable.

Actually in most cases we are super easily interchangeable. Java related technologies, that involve interacting with databases and presenting data in some way(HTML etc) is what most business software is out there. Developers working in such domains are pretty easily replaceable. Almost like cogs in a wheel.

Pay is based on title because managers are perceived as decision makers, who direct the overall direction of the company. Maintain business contacts and relationships and are supposed be the one's who replace the cogs in the wheel.

This is really dependent on how much of the "developer" role is developing and how much is software engineering. Are the developers literally taking design documents (UML diagrams, use cases,etc) and just typing in the code or are they actually doing some analysis.

There is also the domain knowledge acquired by the developers over the course of time. I will tell you that I was part of a transition to an outside contracting company for a legacy site. The business knowledge gained and the ability to deliver solutions as a result of that enabled a much faster time to market than these guys could ever provide.

HR but mostly due to computing being still a young trade and with that unlike many other long estabilished trade they are far more protected and clearer qualifications/rewards. Take construction, a contract builder for example in the UK can pay a couple of hundred pound to cover there National Insurance TAX and that's it for the year, no matter what they earn. IT contractors will not only not have access to a equivalent system but now on many contracts get classed by the TAX laws under a law just for them called IR35 that they pay a vastly higher rate without any flat rate option.

But when many trades can do one recognised exam and that's it and IT those exams change every year and so do the ones you need with there being no single acknowledged qualification that carries with time. Well you can see how as an industry it is a nightmare when you compare it towards other trades.

Put it another way, people will happily pay almost half the cost of the car to have it fixed and the time and parts all get paid for at a rate the garage and part makers all do well.

Have a problem with a PC and the true cost in time and effort to fix it can if properly paid for outstrip the total cost of a PC. Yes there is much waiting but the distractions etc do eat more time on an install than if truly costed would not be as cheap. Hence shops will do this in batch's and automate as much as possible, but still. Often easier to reinstall than clear out and de-virus some users PC and they treat you as if you built it and wrote the operating system and thing everything is a 5 second quick fix as computers are fast.

But as for HR, well they are in many companies a liability regarding IT staff. Personally had an interview were I had two interviews, one IT manager recruiting and tech geek and the other with HR. HR interview was first and she (mostly women in HR, some gender imbalance their that gets ignored unlike other trades) said, your bit too young for the type of money your asking for and was very belitterling in attitude.

Had tech interview, wiped the floor and was offered more than I was asking for, turned it down as no way was I going to expose myself to such an HR department like that. But sadly seen many unsuitable people in HR regarding IT staff and it is as you say an issue more than people truly admit. How else do you explain rejections for being over-qualified -- those are most of the time HR filtering and you never even make the tech managers desk, though not like the manager is technical these-days either.

What you say about IR35 is a bit misleading. The point of IR35 was to close a massive tax loophole where people who were in effect employees working for a single employee avoided national insurance payments by being working for their own company, and paying themselves most of their income via dividends, this avoiding NI.

This is no way affected only IT.

Some contracts ends up getting taxed higher if you run them via an intermediary company (because the company gets charged employers national insurance contributions), but this reflects the fact that the contracting company gets away without paying NI, and so a contractor can generally get away with demanding a higher hourly/daily fee even for long term contracts.

There may certainly be some people that get unfairly affected, but the situation prior to IR35 was also quite negative, in that some people could drastically cut their taxes just by spending a couple of hundred pounds setting up a company, and bill their employer and pay themselves dividends, instead of being a paid employee of the same company.