[HN Gopher] Cost of Attrition
___________________________________________________________________
Cost of Attrition
Author : benjiweber
Score : 231 points
Date : 2022-01-13 17:07 UTC (1 days ago)
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| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Thank you for posting the blog version
| cwillu wrote:
| "This post is also available as a Twitter Thread" struck me as
| nonsensical as a restaurant saying "This meal is also available
| as a taxi ride".
| rob74 wrote:
| More like "this meal is also available to go, but we put it in
| 15 packages, each containing three spoonfuls"...
| angarg12 wrote:
| The article doesn't mention the double whammy of losing well
| connected engineers: morale and ripple effect. When a high
| performed with a good network leaves a company, it usually
| encourage others to leave as well.
| enord wrote:
| Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost.
|
| Pay developers like it's monopoly money.
|
| You could call this "The benefit of retention", though that may
| be a bit reductive.
| throw8932894 wrote:
| More accessible option is to pay former developers for
| consulting.
| daemin wrote:
| I would say that's because they would prefer the employees to
| create another project internally than leave and potentially
| create a competitor or even a more successful service that
| they'll need to spend billions on to purchase.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost.
|
| That isn't true at all. FAANG pays a lot for you to join them
| and give good raises, but they don't pay extra to make you stay
| instead of leaving for another FAANG. So there is still a lot
| of churn at FAANG.
| enord wrote:
| Well, you've reduced competition for employees from THE REST
| OF THE WORLD to a handful of companies, the executives of
| which you met for golf and sherry last Tuesday.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > FAANG pays a lot for you to join them and give good raises,
| but they don't pay extra to make you stay instead of leaving
| for another FAANG
|
| No, they just choose who to reward according to whatever
| their metrics are and how someone's management chain chooses
| to apply those metrics. These rewards are explicitly stock-
| based to help with retention.
|
| Some examples:
|
| - Have a "top talent" marker, managers get N% of their
| headcount to distribute each year. Anyone with the marker get
| more comp than their peers. - Create stock and bonus bands
| based on your rating and level, then heavily reward high
| senior bands compared to others. - Create a special retention
| program for specific areas of tech (eg ML) or for senior
| engineers who "cap out". Anyone in these programs gets a
| boost to comp.
|
| These things can be combined such that you can have 2x-5x
| differences in compensation for two engineers in the same
| department at the same nominal level, sometimes with small
| differences in performance ratings.
|
| When used correctly as intended programs like this reward
| people who work the hardest, are the best at what they do, or
| who will cause the most pain if they leave the company. If
| used incorrectly they become a tool for managers to reward
| their friends/sycophants. If a manager doesn't think about
| how to use them at all then it becomes a random walk, biased
| toward whatever you happened to do around review time.
|
| But no the FAANG companies are absolutely aware of the
| effects of retention and deploy resources to retain employees
| they think are important, at least at a high level. Sometimes
| those efforts don't reach the right people and sometimes your
| estimation of who is important is not aligned with the
| company's view.
| Jensson wrote:
| Doesn't mention the benefits of attrition. A network can be
| robust since none of the pieces leaves, but what is even more
| robust is a network that constantly renews itself and gracefully
| handles the process of swapping out parts. Constant attrition
| means that your company never starts relying on individuals,
| instead the process survives and thrives on its own, hiring new
| people who then hire new people before they leave etc. Such a
| process isn't very attractive to individuals, of course, but they
| are very attractive to the owners.
| Melkman wrote:
| I don't think it works like that. Constant attrition does not
| prevent your company from relying on individuals. You don't
| fire you good employees and they won't leave if it's a
| worthwhile job. With constant attrition you get a core group
| you rely on. However that group is not as productive as they
| could be because they spend a lot of time training and
| integrating new employees that don't stay.
| ikr678 wrote:
| That sort of anti-fragility isnt a guaranteed outcome of
| attrition though. You can just as easily be left with a pool of
| under-performers that can't/won't leave, while talent moves to
| organisations that invest more in staff vs processes.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's a management pipe dream. The software verification teams
| at my company have very high attrition rates and it's getting
| really tiring to deal with newbies who don't understand the
| product or why things are the way they are. You can't really
| replace experience with process. It works well only in very
| simple and well understood cases.
| tangjurine wrote:
| Think about having a robust network like being able to fly.
|
| You don't develop the ability to fly by placing yourself in
| positions that require flying...
|
| Most companies that have lots of attrition have bad processes
| in place and are suffering due to attrition, although I think
| there are some companies that are developed enough to benefit
| from attrition like you described.
| jackblemming wrote:
| Do you have any evidence to your claim? It's possible to ad hoc
| rationalize pretty much anything.
|
| A real statistic _against_ your claim is one of the highest
| predictors of defects in a code base is whether or not the
| original team is still working on it.
| Jensson wrote:
| > highest predictors of defects in a code base is whether or
| not the original team is still working on it.
|
| Defects is a metric businesses doesn't care much about. If
| you have a good team that can create products customers
| wants, then it is better to have them keep making new
| products rather than maintain what they already have, then
| you can have less productive engineers perform maintenance,
| defects might go up but this way you will have way more
| products which businesses seems to care more about.
|
| You would have a point if maintenance was something companies
| cared deeply about, but they don't. They want new products,
| and company specific knowledge doesn't seem to be very
| valuable there.
| enord wrote:
| >Defects is a metric businesses doesn't care much about.
|
| This depends on both the defect and the business. Just
| because critical regressions and recurring denial of
| service has become normalized as somehow par for the course
| in our line of business does not mean it comes without
| cost. It's all situational and subject to calculated
| tradeoffs but every shop i've worked with/in has classes of
| defects on the "Never Again" list, and sometimes on the
| "NEVER EVER EVER AT ANY COST" list.
| bdavis__ wrote:
| from a different angle: "non original team" might have
| higher defects, but i propose that "non original team"
| without process or time to understand the code base would
| be more accurate.
|
| changing people requires a time investment. and the
| learning curve is steep at the beginning
| bncy wrote:
| Not to mention vision that will change due to new ideas or
| influence that new staff brings to the team. It's not always
| beneficial for the project. It can go wrong in so many ways
| that it ends up being dead.
|
| Don't get me wrong, change is good but too much change is
| just too much to handle sometimes.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| I think the rate of attrition matters. Too little change and
| you get stagnation -- you do need that ongoing renewal you call
| out, and the incentive to create good processes. There is a
| tipping point though, where attrition isn't renewal, it's
| erosion. It's the difference between "small fires that clear
| out the undergrowth and a few large trees" vs "large fires that
| denude a hillside that then destabilizes into a mudslide."
| nindalf wrote:
| > very attractive to the owners
|
| And yet I've worked at software companies that will go to great
| lengths to avoid attrition. For exactly the reasons mentioned
| in the post, they encourage people to move to other teams to
| build up the inter connectedness of teams while keeping
| employees motivated and engaged. In fact, even if you weren't
| looking HR would reach out and ask if you were interested in
| looking at other teams within the company because you had been
| in your current team for 18 months.
|
| Side note I don't know if I've just been lucky but I can't
| relate to this talk of "companies are evil and act maliciously
| against their employees at every opportunity". That hasn't been
| true _in my experience_.
| Jochim wrote:
| > Side note I don't know if I've just been lucky but I can't
| relate to this talk of "companies are evil and act
| maliciously against their employees at every opportunity".
| That hasn't been true in my experience.
|
| I think this heavily depends on the type of industry you work
| in. In some industries the abuse is so normalised that
| everyone takes it for granted.
|
| In retail you have the example of companies scheduling
| workers just under the number of hours at which they'd
| qualify for insurance or other benefits.
|
| Hospitality work often expects you to be available any time
| they're short staffed, if you aren't you'll probably find
| your shifts cut.
|
| On the white collar side last year we heard about junior
| analysts at Goldman Sachs being made to work 100+ hour
| weeks[1].
|
| Game development is widely avoided due to a similarly toxic
| work culture, where you'll often be forced to "crunch" for
| long periods of time[2]. The worse places will also lay you
| off after the game has shipped.
|
| At the software companies I've worked the biggest issues have
| been terrible raises for current employees, to the point that
| graduates were being paid the same or much more than people
| with 3+ years of experience.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/18/group-
| of-ju... [2] https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyber
| punk-2077-re...
| wbl wrote:
| My past company tried to present these moves as a career
| option while failing to come up with a guide to promotion,
| and not really having the higher level of technical job. I
| changed jobs and got three promotions in five minutes by
| accident.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _Side note I don't know if I've just been lucky but I can't
| relate to this talk of "companies are evil and act
| maliciously against their employees at every opportunity".
| That hasn't been true in my experience._
|
| I think there's a combination of some people with really bad
| experiences and a larger group of people that exaggerate.
|
| That said, it's a fact of the contemporary employment market
| that most companies do compensation such that sticking around
| in one place means making significantly less money then
| moving around all the time. Companies bring new people in at
| higher comp but don't push the comp of existing people doing
| those jobs to the same level even if those existing employees
| are performing well. I don't think this is evil or malicious
| but it certainly feels hostile.
| Jensson wrote:
| > For exactly the reasons mentioned in the post, they
| encourage people to move to other teams to build up the inter
| connectedness of teams while keeping employees motivated and
| engaged.
|
| That isn't to avoid churn, that is to have more people around
| in general. If you leave your old team it means you no longer
| use your knowledge, the important part is to have engineers
| around, not to have the same engineers working on the same
| tasks.
|
| For example, Google encourages churn by making it really easy
| to move to other teams in other areas. You don't talk to your
| old team again, so that is effectively the same thing as you
| leaving the company and them getting a new engineer, ie for
| the teams it is equivalent to churn.
| enord wrote:
| Military veterans of some theater of war are desired
| exactly because they will perform well in the next theater
| of war.
|
| I don't think i can fully appreciate how mind-bogglingly
| huge a company like Google is, so it might well be the case
| that tacit knowledge, skills and relations acquired in one
| team don't transfer meaningfully to another. I would have
| to see it to be convinced however, even more so to make me
| believe this kind of transfer was the norm.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If you leave your old team it means you no longer use
| your knowledge,_
|
| If you move from Team A to Team B, you may not use your
| knowledge of the details of their codebase.
|
| But you know precisely how to sort out the problems caused
| by the company's weird internal certificate authority, and
| their weird internal deployment tools, their weird internal
| inter-service auth system, and their weird internal multi-
| cloud system. That 'secure' way of managing secrets in
| production that makes 'unauthorized' errors almost
| impossible to debug? You know how to debug it. You know how
| to operate the purchasing system so your orders go through
| right the first time. You know precisely what the criteria
| are to get your subordinates promoted, and how to coach
| them to meet the criteria.
|
| That can be worth a lot, when it comes to getting things
| done.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hmmm...I and a few other top developers on a corporate team
| just left a project and company because we were being
| mindlessly driven by management.
|
| Management really tried to be accommodating, transparent, and
| woke in their treatment of employees but the work load was just
| too much. One sprint into the next without any breath in
| between.
|
| Tenure averaged about one year on the team. The project has
| been going without release for three or four years.
|
| The only people left are juniors (college grads basically) who
| don't realize how bad it is wrecking their health.
|
| The only thing keeping their main SME dev is the generous PTO.
| She is always out sick, randomly. A lot of it was obviously the
| stress. She would always let out this lengthy loud exhale on
| calls and in grooming sessions. When I started doing that I
| began the exit.
| mooreds wrote:
| This is very true. Attrition helps with cross pollination as
| well as enforcing process and knowledge sharing.
|
| However, I'd submit that it doesn't matter how good the docs
| and process are, you're going to lose a lot when an engineer
| who has been at a company for, say, 3+ years leaves:
|
| * historical knowledge * personal relationships * intuition
| about the systems
|
| Some things you can't get except by putting in the time.
| gostsamo wrote:
| In order for a part to be entirely interchangible, you should
| choose the smallest common denominator of all parts to rely on
| as the highest value that you can get from one. I think that
| one must find an equilibrium but it requires active management
| and careful thinking to be executed properly.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Or to have great onboarding, people learn a lot, are
| effective quickly, and leave after learning enough. The know-
| how is then embedded in the process not in people, which
| guarantees stability, while people are guaranteed to change.
| gostsamo wrote:
| If you can embed all of your organization's knowledge in a
| few weeks of a single person's study, then you don't have
| much knowledge to begin with. Such stuff might be good for
| a small factory, but for nothing more complex than that.
| enord wrote:
| I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true (I
| wouldn't know, never did it). But for what one might reasonably
| categorize as "knowledge work", my experience is that knowledge
| reigns supreme. Some of that knowledge is shared by a whole
| community of practitioners, other parts of it is local and
| contextualized. This part probably makes up a sizable
| proportion of an organizations competitive advantage.
|
| To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge
| you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire. Remember:
| Management (up to owner-management) are also workers, so
| running some kind of special culture-and-knowledge preserving
| uber-organization is predicated on somehow retaining the
| structures that support and maintain this secret sauce.
| Military services around the world have researched this
| extensively (for obvious reasons), then again, we refer to a
| well-seasoned and experienced practitioner as a _veteran_.
| Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any
| other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at
| your own peril.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true
|
| Not there either. You mess up more in the beginning.
| Experienced workers have better flow.
| enord wrote:
| I would assume this as well, when i think about it. I guess
| learning about the industrial revolution in school kind of
| messed up my preconceptions.
|
| Anyhow, this military comparison just keeps sprouting
| thoughts in my head. Isn't an owner-management almost
| perfectly comparable to aristocratic officership? Is GGP's
| theory of defensible churn basically a modern incarnation
| of feudalism and aristocratic privelege?
| jack_riminton wrote:
| In the military attrition is even worse because you can't
| fill gaps by hiring from any competitors!
| fishnchips wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army
| odiroot wrote:
| French Foreign Legion would like a word.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the
| knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire.
|
| Fortunately, we developed systems of writing, so that the
| limit to this relearning is higher now than a few millennia
| ago. (Society does the ultimate "rehiring" continually.)
|
| I think that far too many companies (including my own) rely
| much too heavily on "things that are in people's heads" and
| don't spend enough time and money on making the company
| knowledge effectively outlast any individual employee, making
| it easier to put the essential knowledge into new people's
| heads.
|
| Society doesn't rediscover pi, e, I, and calculus from first
| principles every half-century, but rather we've instituted
| that knowledge into books and mechanisms of teaching.
| enord wrote:
| Well yes, if we could only train new employees for 20 years
| in the specific curricula of the organization, as that is
| how long we spend getting pi and calculus into the heads of
| kids.
|
| On the scale of lifetimes, I don't think we can refer to it
| as "churn" as understood in the context of a modern
| company.
|
| I'm being facile, of course. Developing a good library of
| knowledge as you propose is _hard_ , takes a long time and
| many iterations and there is the unfortunate matter of time
| taking it's toll on the relevance of such recorded
| knowledge (esp. in our line of work). Not to mention costs.
| Even academic institutions, who are in the business of
| doing _exactly_ this, guard their staff with tenure (some
| of the staff anyway, the big boys)
| Kye wrote:
| It takes 20 years because kids come from all kinds of
| backgrounds and there isn't enough funding for
| individualized support. A company _should_ be able to get
| someone up to speed faster since that person is
| presumably chosen for that role based on existing
| proficiency. It 's easier to piece together an
| understanding of the system from the napkin scratch notes
| of the person who got hit by a bus than it is to hope
| they come out of the coma before the business fails.
| Imperfect documentation is better than none.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "I think that far too many companies (including my own)
| rely much too heavily on "things that are in people's
| heads" and don't spend enough time and money on making the
| company knowledge effectively outlast any individual
| employee"
|
| Totally agree but I have never seen a company implement
| this consistently. They seem to expect that while you are
| under constant deadlines you also have time to document
| your stuff thoroughly. We also need systems to organize the
| documentation so you need to hire tech writers who do that.
| If you put this on engineers they most likely won't do it
| because they don't have time.
| mellavora wrote:
| True enough, but look at your last point.
|
| > Society doesn't rediscover pi, e, I, and calculus from
| first principles every half-century, but rather we've
| instituted that knowledge into books and mechanisms of
| teaching.
|
| How long and how many resources does it take to train
| someone to understand pi, e, and calculus?
|
| Or, to apply your nice analogy to the topic under
| discussion.
|
| what are the expected costs (time + training support) to
| get a new hire trained on all of the written materials
| which describe the system?
|
| For a non-trivial system, those costs can be very high.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in
| any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management
| at your own peril.
|
| I never said that experience isn't valuable. The question was
| whether experience at a particular company was more valuable
| than experience outside of it. Every time you hire a senior
| engineer from another company you learn a bit of their secret
| sauce, making your company stronger. Participating in that
| knowledge trade is extremely valuable, and without churn you
| will be left out as most of your engineers will have mostly
| experience from your company, that is a really bad thing.
| ozim wrote:
| I don't think that hiring people to get outside knowledge
| is that useful in IT.
|
| From what I understand there is no such other occupation
| that is sharing so much information between people. You
| have blogs, loads of free and paid materials, you have
| loads of conferences where you can send your staff to see
| "how others are doing it".
|
| Other thing that I often see ... a lot of developers really
| invest in "outside knowledge" and common problem in dev
| teams is building stuff with new shiny tech or in a new way
| they saw on the conference.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| If your business requires a lot of knowledge specific to
| your products, think adobe Photoshop, it is hubris to think
| a new hire experienced even in relevant fields could
| meaningfully contribute for a long time. If your product
| uses an industry standard framework or standard, think
| adobe reader, then yeah, you can probably have someone hit
| the ground running. But a bigger problem is that when a new
| hire leaves after 2-3 years and you replace them with a
| couple people fresh out of school, so that anything they
| don't come out knowing has to get taught again. And if it
| takes some large fraction of the 2-3 years to learn your
| domain specific knowledge you are done for.
| enord wrote:
| Excellent point IMO! For an organization to believe itself
| the sole proprietor of relevant and useful knowledge within
| it's domain of operation is pure hubris.
|
| So too is believing it is anything more than a community of
| individuals, cooperating on the basis of shared- and tacit
| knowledge as well as skill to perform the different tasks
| that comprise business operations. Tacit knowledge and
| skill resides in the specific individuals, and shared
| knowledge in the specific relations between individuals.
| Losing an individual is losing part of aggregate tacit
| knowledge and skill, as well as all the specific relations
| shared by the individual. The organization as a thing-in-
| the-world loses part of itself not captured by it's charter
| and governing contracts (or share value, or business
| strategy, i could go on). These things are hard to quantify
| on the best of days, so to assume (or even _mandate_ ) that
| this cost is incurred with net benefit (by, as you say,
| hiring some industry heavy-hitter who is expected to bring
| the goods) is fraught with unknowns, and on balance likely
| hubris.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Sounds like wasted effort. Relying on individuals are good,
| since it means they are somebody to rely on.
|
| Anyways, hand over in high turnover places is shitty anyways,
| since they are shitty places to work at.
| ozim wrote:
| I have to ask one important question, even though talent is more
| valuable than money, companies still don't have infinite amounts
| of money to simply rise pay for everyone.
|
| Some companies operate in not that profitable markets or have
| bunch of other issues.
|
| Cost of attrition is still dispersed over the time and while you
| loose the knowledge at hand it still might be cheaper to build it
| back over a year than drop cash on people right here right now.
|
| There is such thing as time-value of money and company might
| prioritize other investments that in long term will outweigh
| knowledge lost as knowledge can be rebuilt and gains from other
| investment might not.
|
| Of course one can say - there will be some knowledge that will be
| gone. From practical point of view, if that knowledge that is
| lost would be so valuable it would most likely resurface or would
| be rediscovered quickly by new hires. Maybe not ideally but still
| in a way that company can continue.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Teams can be growing but have dropping tenure.
|
| It seems like any team that's growing (by a non-trivial amount)
| _would_ have dropping tenure.
| fche wrote:
| If it's enshrined woke culture that's driving people away, mere
| $$$ won't fix it.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Arguments of attrition aside, I don't agree with this model.
|
| Maybe I'm not understanding what an edge is supposed to be, but
| the author implies that "something" is lost when the edge
| disappears. That doesn't make sense. Knowledge live in the node,
| not the edge. You don't just forget a project you worked on just
| because someone left. If you lose access to knowledge when
| someone leaves, that's because you did a bad job of preventing
| silos.
|
| Further, someone who has deep domain knowledge is valuable even
| with 0 connections.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Unless every piece of knowledge is documented in a clean and
| understandable fashion, then the edge represents the ability
| for team members to collaborate with the node to either resolve
| issues or develop future improvements on the project. While you
| don't forget a project you worked on, it is unlikely that you
| worked on the specific pieces that others in your team were
| assigned to.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Nice. But remember: the cost of non attrition can be keeping
| idiot coworkers around. Who actively destroy work with their
| anti-work, and waste time with idiotic discussions.
| jader201 wrote:
| As others have said, the people you describe don't leave
| companies.
|
| This is actually the opposite problem of what the article is
| covering: instead of companies not being able to keep good
| people, (some) companies are not able to get rid of bad people
| (whatever subjective definition of "bad" you choose to use).
|
| I've worked at some companies where it's almost impossible to
| get rid of people that are only causing a net loss for the
| company, or at the very least, are consuming headcount that
| could be used to hire someone much better.
|
| Attrition is about people leaving. "Idiotic coworkers" don't
| leave -- they have to be pushed out. And, again, that's a
| completely different problem when companies can't and/or choose
| not to push people like that out.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Define idiot coworker and idiotic discussions. I have only
| worked in small teams so I'm not sure I've met such a person.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Incessant bike shedding about every project concern or
| business case. All with a tinge of negativity and scepticism
| leading into rather unimportant arguments because... "last
| time we tried this." They are often 100% correct but nobody
| wants to hear yhier shit because the team has marching
| orders, funding, and they want to complete the project
| without a bunch of stress and drama.
|
| They have been at the company too long and aren't really
| happy about it. They don't get a new job because it's viewed
| as far too distruptive to their life. Again, they are
| probably 100% correct.
| alexashka wrote:
| "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in
| the first half hour at the table, then you _are_ the sucker.
| '
| bagacrap wrote:
| I recently had to give up trying to convince a coworker that
| the observer pattern was useful, because he refused to budge
| from the position that it made code harder to read as it was
| not "all in one place". Naturally as a stubbornly helpful
| person it took several hours over a couple weeks before I
| reached the point of surrender. Meanwhile there are a number
| of related decisions he's inflicting on the codebase that no
| one else would make, but find it easier to accept than
| resist, and which are ultimately
| unsustainable/ungeneralizable. If he left the team tomorrow
| the rest of the team would slowly revert these decisions. In
| the meantime, he's kind of just randomizing the code.
|
| Not really a definition, but there's an example for you.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I once came in to work on a Monday to find a 200 email
| thread from a clique of idiot coworkers who had been
| feverishly working on a bug over the weekend, only to
| discover that our locks were fundamentally flawed, though
| that was at email 50. Around email 52, someone who actually
| knows how to use a RW lock (and has written research papers
| on lockless data structures) says, "no, they are fine,
| you're just doing it wrong, see [link]". The rest of the
| 150 emails were the idiots talking among themselves
| learning how locks work, and convincing themselves they now
| knew how to "work around" the bug (i.e. use the lock
| correctly).
|
| This is not a thread about idiots, and actually these guys
| were trying their hardest to be conscientious employees...
| It was just a noisy and stupid way for several people who
| should have known better to learn how to do a simple and
| fundamental part of their job. (The one who falsely
| diagnosed the bad locking code was a 15 year veteran
| "senior" engineer. <scoffs>)
| [deleted]
| grayfaced wrote:
| Attrition usually loses the top-performers because they can get
| much better offers. The poor-performers don't have any good
| options to leave.
|
| Proactive management would reward the top performers and
| reprimand/fire the poor performers. That's the opposite of
| attrition.
| soheil wrote:
| Wait so according to your model of the world top-performers
| become idiots in their next job? Where are all these top-
| performers who do get compensated enough and what companies
| do they work for that have no attrition?
| ozim wrote:
| World is much bigger than you can imagine. If you hop jobs
| every 2 years in 30 years it is only 15 companies.
|
| I have something like 10 years of experience and was
| working or collaborating already with something between 10
| and 13 companies.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| those type of people are lifers at a company
| bartread wrote:
| I don't know. This is a nice piece of thinking, although I did
| get a bit bored after the first few points, but it perhaps
| ignores a couple of key realities:
|
| 1. Most obvious, people are going to leave, so you need to take
| that into account. You can't keep everyone and I'd argue you
| shouldn't try.
|
| 2. The impact of someone leaving is highly variable. Sometimes
| it's a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's
| pretty neutral. Different people add different amounts of value,
| and not all relationships are equal.
|
| Of course high attrition can be a yellow or red flag - certainly
| a warning that you need to look at how management and leadership
| work - but some amount of attrition is a reality, and the outcome
| of that reality is not universally a "cost".
| jurassic wrote:
| I've come to think a certain amount of attrition is needed to
| keep a product and the individuals working on it healthy. Back in
| my consulting days I worked with a few enterprise software
| companies that had a lot of highly tenured employees (think 10+
| years). All the long-timers I met were skilled fiefdom builders
| with a strong bias toward opposing every change and maintaining
| the technical status quo because a lot of their value was in
| their vast knowledge of the way things already are. Without
| attrition you end up accumulating people you don't want. Overall
| it seems like a path to ossification/stagnation for your people
| and product.
|
| From the individual perspective, staying too long slows down your
| rate of learning because you aren't coming into contact with new
| people and technology at the same rate. Anecdotal, but lately
| I've interviewed some 8+ year tenured candidates that I wouldn't
| rate above SWE II because it was literally a "one year of
| experience 10 times" situation. I try to change things up every 4
| years or so to avoid ending up this way myself.
| Atlas26 wrote:
| > From the individual perspective, staying too long slows down
| your rate of learning because you aren't coming into contact
| with new people and technology at the same rate. Anecdotal, but
| lately I've interviewed some 8+ year tenured candidates that I
| wouldn't rate above SWE II because it was literally a "one year
| of experience 10 times" situation. I try to change things up
| every 4 years or so to avoid ending up this way myself.
|
| Should be noted, this is applicable to the same position
| specifically, not any one company. Some of the best engineers
| in the world have only ever worked at places like Google,
| Microsoft, an academic institution, etc, but they make sure
| they're constantly learning, working with new teams, switching
| to new positions once they've mastered their previous one, etc.
| In many cases these folks actually have a big leg up vs new
| external hires due to product and institutional knowledge,
| while also constantly learning new technologies.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| What is your argument that encouraging attrition would cause
| these people to leave rather than the employees you might value
| more? That is, why wouldn't doing things that lead to higher
| attrition lead to having a all the people you want leaving and
| the people you don't want continuing to stay because e.g. it is
| harder for them to go elsewhere.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I think you have to fire them. If you just non-selectively
| "do things that lead to higher attrition", you're right,
| you're going to lose the best employees and just make things
| worse. It's painful and it's actively painful in a way that
| "let's just not pay so much everyone sticks around forever".
| You'd have to yank out someone that has convinced everyone
| they're essential to the company, but they're mostly
| essential through a situation they created.
|
| I wouldn't overapply this though. I think terminal mid-levels
| might be undervalued in a way. A separate conversation, but I
| think "developer assistant" could be a role in the way
| "dental assistant" is (but not as much based on gatekeeping).
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know what goes on in manager meetings, but I think
| it's a little too convenient that in many orgs very senior
| ICs get forced into management positions, which has the
| same effect. Trying to be both is politically and
| emotionally fraught, and some people hate it and quit.
|
| You might say it's constructive dismissal at its sneakiest.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I believe in early days Amazon(and possibly even now) Bezos
| did not want employees to stay for more than 2 years, for
| the hope that Amazon was a stepping stone to other places
| for people.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is only necessary for single-product companies.
| Otherwise, just do mandatory career broadening assignments
| like the military does. You have to learn about and work on
| many parts of many stacks and regularly change teams and
| product lines. There is no need to fire people to keep them
| working in one position forever and building fiefdoms.
|
| Heck, militaries even have interbranch and even
| international exchange programs. There is no reason in
| principle companies can't do the same and temporarily trade
| out employees every now and again to learn how things work
| elsewhere. It would have to be subject to pretty strict
| NDAs and limitation of sensitive data access, but given the
| sensitivity of classified defense data, if the military can
| make it work, private companies should be able to make it
| work, too.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| That handles the specific problem of people not
| broadening their skills and I certainly wouldn't say that
| firing people is the best way to get more perspectives in
| your company. There's a general question of how to get
| rid of employees that are entrenched, want to stay, but
| aren't providing enough value.
| hinkley wrote:
| I noticed early in my career that relentless refactoring ended
| up as de facto empire building because some people would just
| give up on tracking the changes I was making and abdicated that
| domain to me.
|
| I think I have a very different way of organizing knowledge,
| where I worry more about how to answer questions than knowing
| the answers. This makes me very popular with young and new
| employees, and quite unpopular with those who think you make
| Important Decisions by locking everyone in a room until they
| are made. Oh and using a computer in a meeting is disrespectful
| so we will make all decisions from memory, then have another
| meeting when we discover our memory was faulty.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I think some developers don't realize that corporations have a
| target attrition rate and it is fairly easy for them to
| enforce.
|
| I would say that Attrition actually benefits employees and
| companies. The Employees who stay take a pay cut each year
| either to inflation or to the fact they just don't get paid
| more. Employees get better pay once they change jobs and
| companies get to have new people at a lower rate and they in
| turn may have a different perspective. Avoiding change I think
| it isn't necessarily the people who will stay for long periods
| of time but it might be corporate culture instead.
| ghaff wrote:
| Depending upon the specifics, there probably tends to be some
| happy medium (from both a company and employee perspectives)
| between constant churn and very little change over the course
| of a couple decades. There are exceptions of course.
| mathattack wrote:
| Can companies get around this by active transfers? This doesn't
| work everywhere.
| [deleted]
| ericmcer wrote:
| That's maybe why most stock starts vesting after a year (when
| employees become very effective) and stops after 4 years.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > All the long-timers I met were skilled fiefdom builders with
| a strong bias toward opposing every change and maintaining the
| technical status quo because a lot of their value was in their
| vast knowledge of the way things already are.
|
| So all German IT organizations? :)
| gigaflop wrote:
| I worked at the US hq of a .DE manufacturing company, and can
| attest to this.
|
| My team was about 3 people (Americans, with our manager
| having worked in the German HQ for a few decades), who worked
| mostly on separate projects, and most of the headaches I had
| were due to change being opposed. I would try to do
| something, or request some sort of access to perform some
| task, and would get blocked by red tape that wasn't made
| visible until I was being told that I wasn't following a
| process that wasn't explained to me in advance.
|
| There was one person whose sole task was managing the
| company-wide JIRA instance. If you wanted your team's board
| structured slightly differently, good luck. When I requested
| permissions to create a Component, the denial went to my
| manager instead of me, and I got a stern talking-to about
| 'the way things need to be done'.
|
| On top of that, for a team of 3 people working on projects
| that are exploratory in nature, I'd expect that the local SQL
| server install (We didn't have the license key anymore, btw)
| would allow for us to have admin or developer rights. It
| originally did, until someone decided to change it, and I was
| the only member of the team who lacked that access.
|
| I tolerated it for about 2.5 years (First job), but Covid
| gave me a great reason to quit!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The author's points are absolutely correct.
|
| However, I don't think that it makes any difference.
|
| The entire industry has now shaped itself into a transient,
| mercenary, loyalty-free community.
|
| It will take a long time to change that.
|
| A lot of the trouble is the "You go first." mentality. Who will
| be the one to stay at a company for many years, getting only 3%
| raises; regardless of their performance, as their company's CEO
| keeps raking in millions of dollars, and lives a lavish, high-
| profile life?
|
| Who will be the company that starts to treat their employees in a
| manner that proves they are worth staying at? This may mean
| higher pay raises, the CEO taking some of their profit (and the
| shareholders and VCs), and sharing it with the employees. Letting
| employees unionize, etc.
|
| As people or companies are doing that, their competitors are
| running riot; acting as selfish, destructive and greedy as
| always. Many times, the competitors can crush the people trying
| to do the right thing.
|
| So that generally means that governments need to step in, and
| help the people and companies to do the right thing.
|
| As everyone knows, that's pretty much a non-starter, these days.
|
| The tech industry makes crazy money. When an industry makes money
| like that, everyone "looks the other way," at truly awful
| behavior. The finance industry has been like that, for decades.
| Whereas industries that don't make much money, like public
| education, social services, etc., are regulated up the wazoo,
| with an iron fist.
|
| I was a manager for over 25 years. I feel that I was a good one.
| My employees seemed to agree. I kept many of them on board for
| decades, and these were folks that could walk out the door, and
| get huge pay raises (my company paid "competitive" salaries). I
| certainly never made that much, compared to what people are
| doing, these days. many new hires out of college make more than I
| ever did, as a senior manager.
|
| I worked hard at being a good manager; and that often meant
| working around a company with a fairly rapacious HR policy (HR
| was run by lawyers). Most folks here, would (and have) sneer at
| me, for staying so long, and for doing the things that I needed
| to do, in order to be a good manager.
|
| In my case, it was personal Integrity thing. I have a _really_
| stringent Personal Code. I know that 's unusual, and we can't
| expect it from most managers.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| On the employee end, I think it's obviously fine to leave for
| somewhere else for more money/better perks/whatever.
|
| For companies, certainly some do value retention and this is
| obvious from things that can be observed (eg the turnover rate)
| and incentive structures (ie being willing to pay to avoid
| attrition).
|
| So I think it isn't true that no companies value attrition.
| Even Amazon which usually have a reputation as a bad place to
| work as an engineer seem to do things to reduce attrition (an
| alternative way of looking at their 'weight vesting schedule
| towards later years' is that they are trying to encourage
| people to stay for longer, rather than that they are trying to
| save money on a high turnover rate).
|
| It feels to me that a lot of it is cultural. For example, lots
| of people in senior positions may believe that a certain level
| of attrition (or 'unregretted attrition') is good because it is
| like an easy way of firing people. But regretted attrition can
| be a lot worse than not having so much I regretted attrition. I
| say it's cultural because opinions in management could change--
| certainly other countries can be different--just like other
| aspects of company management have changed over time too.
|
| I think another aspect is that if your company is growing very
| quickly, like many of today's big tech companies did, then most
| people will be recent hires and it is perhaps hard to have a
| culture that values or takes advantage of people with a lot of
| internal experience.
| thewarrior wrote:
| This is a game setup by company management which is heads we
| win tails you lose.
|
| If people stay on in the company they under pay people and save
| money. If people are constantly job hopping there's no longer
| any long term obligations towards employees and you have a
| constant pool of replacements thereby saving even more money.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Here's a relevant MonkeyUser:
| https://www.monkeyuser.com/2020/new-hire/
| pdimitar wrote:
| Well said and I agree. Let me only rant about this a little:
|
| > _The entire industry has now shaped itself into a transient,
| mercenary, loyalty-free community._
|
| This is sadly inevitable and it's a classic example of a race
| to the bottom and EXACTLY the thing you said: "you go first".
| As a contractor myself, I was effectively forced into being a
| contractor and not a loyal employee by the virtue of being
| screwed over many times. I learned to always shop around for
| the next gig while the current one is still going -- not
| because I love that, _I hate it with all my soul_ , but because
| I have to protect myself and my family.
|
| I was loyal throughout most of my 20-year career. I ignored my
| family, I ignored my own health even, I saved companies on the
| brink and only ever felt a pat on the back on the company's
| Christmas party, and a single 500 EUR bonus (if even that). And
| something similar happened several times, not just one.
|
| One day you get seriously sick and you need a safety net which
| you of course don't have. It changes your perspective
| DRAMATICALLY.
|
| ---
|
| _WORK FOR YOURSELF regardless of where you are or what is
| written in your contract._ You are your own top priority.
| Invest in contacts. Talk to people and don 't assume that a
| conversation is useless. Just enjoy talking with people. You'll
| both have fun and will have the nebulous possibility of
| somebody calling you 5 years down the line.
|
| I don't leech off of companies. They leech off of me. I am
| giving them only as much as they give me in terms of money and
| work-life balance and stress(-free) environment. I don't go an
| inch over that anymore.
| arnvald wrote:
| Well said!
|
| Companies destroyed employee loyalty - by letting people go
| while paying bonuses to executives, by giving 3% raises while
| offering way higher salaries to new hires, by saying "we are a
| family here" only when they need employees to make sacrifices.
|
| From the perspective of an engineering manager, attrition
| sucks. Whenever a season engineer leaves my team, I dread the
| next couple of weeks, because there's a chance others will
| follow. The hiring and onboarding is draining and often slows
| down the whole team for months. But whenever someone tells me
| they're leaving, I tell them I understand it. They need to
| think about their own career.
|
| Employers destroyed the loyalty and they need to fix it.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Don't forget or discount the destruction of the social
| contract between employer and employee. Massive layoffs,
| insolvent pensions, etc were just the start.
|
| Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a
| reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home
| in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre.
|
| When all that goes away and I have to work harder for less
| than my parents got then what is the point of being loyal to
| psychopathic companies with excruciatingly well documented
| histories of treating employees like interchangeable chattel?
| Loyalty ain't gonna give these monsters any pause when they
| put the squeeze on me and the other numbers on their screen
| while they fantasize about how to blow their ill gotten
| gains.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work
| hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a
| parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre.
|
| Pensions are not relevant anymore. I see no reason to pay a
| defined benefit pension fund's employees and expenses when
| I can simply buy VOO or a target date fund at one of many
| brokerages for basically free. And I get to avoid the risk
| of a corrupt employee of the employer messing with it, or
| to risk the employer not being around 50 years later.
|
| The other parts of the post have so many factors that
| contribute that it is not related to employer employee
| social contracts. Birth rates, relative developed-ness of
| other countries, supply and demand of labor, automation,
| political winds, societal changes, etc.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| > Pensions are not relevant anymore. I see no reason to
| pay a defined benefit pension fund's employees and
| expenses when I can simply buy VOO or a target date fund
| at one of many brokerages for basically free.
|
| These are very different with respect to longevity risk.
| There are many people who can't save enough individually
| for the longest lifespan. (Or the 80th percentile) But
| could save enough for the cohort.
|
| Pensions are far superior in this scenario. That's part
| of the reason why 401ks make sense for highly
| compensated, but not the majority.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions, aka Social
| Security in the US, is the solution for people not
| earning enough money to save.
|
| There is no reason to have a ton of employers get
| involved in the wealth transfer system. It adds so much
| unnecessary complexity, bureaucracy, agency risk, not to
| mention the longevity risk of a single employer surviving
| for 50 more years. And on top of that, the only thing the
| employer's pension fund is doing is investing it in the
| same market that the beneficiaries can invest in
| themselves without having to pay overhead.
| ghaff wrote:
| >not to mention the longevity risk of a single employer
| surviving for 50 more years
|
| There are various protections in place. I'll be
| collecting a pension from a long gone employer.
|
| I'm not really going to argue for defined benefit
| pensions. There's a certain paternalistic attitude to
| them that your employer is at least partly responsible
| for looking after your retirement savings. And you're on
| the hook for being a loyal long-term employee to get that
| benefit.
|
| Still, it will be nice to collect a decent payout from a
| benefit I probably didn't ever really think about at the
| time. I even know people who completely forgot that they
| even had a pension.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The only protection is the PBGC, which is woefully
| underfunded, and could not even handle the recent multi
| employer pension fund failures. They just got bailed out
| again Mar 2021 in the American Rescue Plan legislation:
|
| https://www.pbgc.gov/american-rescue-plan-act-of-2021
|
| The real bailout is the backstop the federal government
| provides on asset prices at the expense of purchasing
| power of the currency.
|
| I understand that you are not arguing for DB pensions. I
| am just trying to make it clear that US society has moved
| past DB pensions because we now have an explicit promise
| of bailouts at the expense of the dollar, and if we are
| going to do that, then cut out all the actuary and
| investment fund fees, and just drop it in social security
| or target date funds.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Pensions are binding in their payments, the stock market
| is not. It's clear why some people would prefer it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They are binding until the money is not there decades in
| the future, and you do not have enough political power to
| get a full bailout, and end up having to take a haircut.
|
| I would take a defined benefit pension from the federal
| government (or any other entity that can print money),
| but any other payout promised decades in the future is
| just as, if not more, risky as investing in an index
| fund, because you give up control of the money.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| When I left my company, after 27 years, I chose to take
| my pension in a lump sum. I had plenty of money in other
| investments, so I wasn't too worried about it.
|
| I used the money to fund one of my companies, and tossed
| the rest into an index fund.
|
| I made back the money I used to fund the company in a
| couple of years; just from the portion in the index fund
| (it's been crazy).
|
| Earlier this year, my ex-employees told me that the
| company is shutting down their pension plan. I don't
| think that they are siphoning off the money, Jimmy Hoffa-
| style, but I think that I'm glad I took the cashout.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You made the smart choice. In a political environment
| where purchasing power is constantly being eroded, the
| only option is to stay ahead or on top of the wave by
| keeping assets invested and investing in new cash flow
| producing ventures.
|
| A non COLA adjusted defined benefit just means you will
| continuously lose purchasing power, and even the COLA
| adjustments are subject to understatement due to
| political influences. Even Social Security is not immune,
| because at the end of the day, a smaller proportion of
| labor suppliers to labor buyers means less supply of
| labor per buyer, which means it has to get rationed
| somehow (for whatever amount does not get offset by
| automation/immigration).
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| >Pensions are not relevant anymore.
|
| Stated as fact without evidence. Many people are still
| paying into pensions and many more would like too. Think
| blue collar and gig workers who scrape by on a small
| fraction of what many outspoken people here take home.
|
| >I see no reason to pay a defined benefit pension fund's
| employees and expenses when I can simply buy VOO or a
| target date fund at one of many brokerages for basically
| free.
|
| Because you're highly compensated and have the buying
| power of X median income households. Median income
| households need to retire too. What's your solution for
| them if not pensions.
|
| >And I get to avoid the risk of a corrupt employee of the
| employer messing with it, or to risk the employer not
| being around 50 years later.
|
| Pensions are supposed to legally outlast employers.
| Judicial failure to enforce that is evidence of a corrupt
| and politicized judicial branch that is actively waging
| class war against those with lower economic status.
|
| >The other parts of the post have so many factors that
| contribute that it is not related to employer employee
| social contracts. Birth rates, relative developed-ness of
| other countries, supply and demand of labor, automation,
| political winds, societal changes, etc.
|
| All of these factors you mentioned have been politicized
| and exploited to manufacture consent in the American
| public to vote against their own interests as bought and
| paid for politicians, judges, journalists, prosecutors,
| and lawyers sell out their own economic cohort to, for
| the sake of brevity, make the rich, richer.
|
| I'm happy to flesh out how each factor you named has been
| weaponized if you're genuinely curious.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Median income households need to retire too. What's your
| solution for them if not pensions.
|
| The government redistributing wealth, i.e. Social
| Security. A federal defined benefit pension plan, if you
| will. And if it were up to me, I would take it even
| further and make it universal basic income.
|
| > Pensions are supposed to legally outlast employers.
| Judicial failure to enforce that is evidence of a corrupt
| and politicized judicial branch that is actively waging
| class war against those with lower economic status.
|
| Decades and decades of evidence indicate that the system
| does not work. But more importantly, automation and
| technology have obviated employer sponsored defined
| benefit pensions.
|
| There is no value add from having employers in the middle
| of the wealth transfer chain. It is just extra paperwork
| and overhead and chances for corruption.
|
| The pension funds invest in the same place as everyone
| else, the stock and real estate market. And then the
| government comes and bails out asset owners time and time
| again, so that the pension recipients get bailed out. But
| then why not hand the pension recipients the cash
| directly?
| ghaff wrote:
| The problem is that many people aren't replacing their
| defined benefit pension with savings. They're replacing
| it with nothing.
|
| That said, defined benefit pensions were always designed
| around the idea that you'd be staying in the same place
| for maybe decades. Federal government pensions are
| perhaps the most obvious example but it applied to many
| companies as well. And that just doesn't represent
| typical behavior--especially among professional workers--
| these days.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| I would contend for any job that is not high paying,
| individuals cannot save enough to cover longer than
| expected age in retirement, but could cover the average.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The solution to that problem should not involve an
| employer. It might look something like legally mandated
| defined benefit pensions, aka Social Security in the US.
| ghaff wrote:
| So you're just reinventing Social Security in the US.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's how us techies do it :-). We invent something
| "disruptive" only to learn that this was already known
| for decades.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am saying that is the name of the fix for people not
| choosing to save enough money in the US. No employer is
| needed in the picture.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Employers destroyed the loyalty and they need to fix it._
|
| I agree. I don't think that there's any incentive to do that,
| though.
| alex_anglin wrote:
| Reducing attrition is a good incentive, especially these
| days. Whether it's enough is another question.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Do companies care? Their solution seems to be to hire
| more recruiters.
| willcipriano wrote:
| My wife is a tech recruiter, my bread gets buttered on
| both sides. It's a really funny market.
| cogman10 wrote:
| There's a lot of incentive. The problem is HR and employers
| have decided to turn a blind eye to it in favor of looking
| at the next quarter.
|
| Why give someone a 10% raise because the market has spoken
| when you might be able to retain them with a 5% raise? Even
| if you hire new employees at a premium, some contingent of
| older employees will stick around just because switching
| jobs is a hassle. This sort of thing drives down quarterly
| costs which ultimately makes you look good to shareholders
| who can't see the internal destruction.
| rr808 wrote:
| True, I work in a corporate like this with not much stress,
| lots of vacation days, interesting work. It is paid similar to
| other professionals in the office. However people can earn 2x,
| 3x at a tech company so are just walking out. Its just tech
| firms are paying so much money yet making no profits its crazy.
| mooreds wrote:
| > A lot of the trouble is the "You go first." mentality. Who
| will be the one to stay at a company for many years, getting
| only 3% raises; ...
|
| If the author's premise is correct, there should be a lot of
| money to be made in retaining talent. Some of that should
| filter down to more than 3% raises.
|
| So if you believe in humans as rational economic actors, there
| is "$20 bills lying on the street" if you build a tech company
| that hires, increases comp, and retains, rather than the
| current model of hire, churn, poach.
|
| I realize that double-digit raises at the same company is a big
| culture shift, but I've seen it done. If everyone benefits, why
| wouldn't it happen?
| thewarrior wrote:
| Yes there's a lot of money in retaining talent at any cost.
| That's what FANG companies are basically. The only problem
| being these firms are so good at making money they've sucked
| out a lot of the oxygen.
|
| Most companies aren't as good at using their retained talent
| to make money.
| ghaff wrote:
| Especially with remote work breaking down geographical
| moats at least within countries/regions, it's entirely
| possible that for most people salary-maximizing, they go
| with one of the big West Coast employers (or something like
| an HFT) if they can get in. And most other companies
| compete to hire everyone else.
|
| Of course, hiring practices are sufficiently random in many
| cases that it's not really a matter of those firms skimming
| all the cream (and salary is only one factor that many go
| by anyway). But it is harder for other companies to salary
| match the likes of Google and Facebook.
| [deleted]
| bumby wrote:
| > _So if you believe in humans as rational economic actors,_
|
| 1) They're not.
|
| 2) Even if they were, it may be the case they are short-term
| biased, meaning they're willing to forgo $20 tomorrow for $10
| today.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| In companies, perception is more important than reality -
| this is why easily measured variables are treated as more
| important than difficult-to-measure ones - you can justify
| decisions by pointing to hard data even if that data is
| barely related to the problem at hand. Imagine trying to
| justify giving a developer a large raise (a measurable
| impact) and justifying it with an argument that retention is
| probably more profitable than churning (hard to measure).
| You'll be laughed out the door.
|
| People aren't rational actors in the sense of "they aim for
| the objectively best action given a goal" - we generally aim
| to minimise risk, prefer things that are simple, and prefer
| doing what everybody else is doing. Homo economicus isn't
| even used in modern economics let alone being anywhere near
| to reality.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I think right now it is vital to double-digit raise your
| engineers if needed, because hiring is super difficult
| right now. You not only stand to lose an employee, you
| stand to lose the profit of having any employee there for
| months.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Imagine trying to justify giving a developer a large
| raise (a measurable impact) and justifying it with an
| argument that retention is probably more profitable than
| churning (hard to measure). You'll be laughed out the door.
|
| It depends how supply and demand curves are moving. What
| might be true today may not have been true 10 years or 20
| or 30 years ago. Labor costs have a big impact on profit, a
| measurement that all company owners and executives care
| very much about.
|
| For the past few decades, it may have been true that the
| cost of attrition was less than the benefits of holding
| down pay for most others.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| That's a post hoc argument - you're presenting a
| possibility to explain why not minimising attrition was
| actually rational all along. Its quite well established
| by now that human decision making is not very rational.
| Even people who aim for rationality are generally biased
| towards variables with high measurablility.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The reasoning is that if preventing attrition was so
| valuable, then it would have shown up via better profits
| for various businesses over the many previous decades,
| especially publicly listed ones since their financials
| are public.
|
| I am sure some businesses got it wrong, and some
| businesses got it right. And it probably even varies
| within businesses based on specific roles.
|
| For example, it very well may be rational for a grocery
| store to let cashiers go if the cost of acquiring and
| training a new one is low enough that it lets the store
| compete with other grocery stores since they are
| operating on razor thin margins. On the other hand,
| people with specialized tasks in the store such as a
| butcher or baker or manager might have a better case for
| keeping them from leaving.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| That's the perfect market fallacy, which is also a post
| hoc justification.
| throway453sde wrote:
| > So that generally means that governments need to step in, and
| help the people and companies to do the right thing.
|
| Then its not democracy any more. Its slavery. If People want to
| leave let them leave.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's an interesting logical leap.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am confused what you mean by "the right thing" and why
| the government needs to be involved.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Here's an example. Maybe it only applies in the US, but
| Japan has something even more stringent.
|
| If you live/work in a building with several floors, and a
| stairwell, go down the stairwell, until you get to the
| ground floor.
|
| If the building has a basement, there will be a door to
| the basement, and it will be facing the stairwell, and
| will open inward (towards the stairwell). The ground
| floor (at least), will have a "panic bar," to unlatch it
| (this is a horizontal bar, at waist level, on average-
| sized people, that can be pushed, to unlatch the door,
| and push it open). The door will also open outward (away
| from the stairwell).
|
| This is because of government regulations. Developers
| would not choose to do this, if given a choice. It's not
| cheap. I believe that some older buildings may be
| "grandfathered in," where they might not have to do it.
|
| The same goes for lighted exit signs.
|
| If they didn't have this, a lot of people would die in
| fires and emergencies. Before these types of regulations,
| there were constant stories about dozens of people dying
| in workplace fires. It still happens, in some places.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I meant in regards to how long an employee works for an
| employer. That seems like it needs no government
| intervention.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| No, I meant helping employers and employees to be _able_
| (not _forced_ ) to keep employees/stay in a job, if that
| is what they want.
|
| This is usually done by "carrot" measures, like tax
| breaks, and "stick" measures, like minimum wages. It can
| also be safe workplaces.
|
| But like I said, that's not going anywhere (in the US, at
| least).
| streblo wrote:
| "governments need to step in" was a pretty big leap to
| begin with
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not really.
|
| In the US, we have many government agencies, like OSHA,
| and the NLRB, and others, like the SEC, etc., not to
| mention the AGs and other law-enforcement people.
|
| Business owners love to hate on them, but they are a big
| reason that we don't have poorhouses any more.
|
| I have found that there is absolutely no bottom to the
| depths that people will sink, if they can make money.
| This seems to be true of folks that graduated from Yale,
| or from Jail.
|
| The idea that any industry will "self-regulate," is a
| laughable and naive myth.
| focus2020 wrote:
| Enforcing staying at job via law enforcement is the
| definition of slavery. If people want to quit for higher
| wages let them. Market will move to equilibrium.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Seriously. I have no idea what you are talking about.
| streblo wrote:
| > I have found that there is absolutely no bottom to the
| depths that people will sink, if they can make money.
|
| I'm confused why you don't think this same reasoning
| doesn't apply to politicians and bureaucrats who would be
| doing the regulating.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Why do you think I said it the way I did?
|
| Really, this is going nowhere. You seem to think I said
| something I didn't, and I can't change your mind.
|
| Have a nice day.
| alexashka wrote:
| Ah yes, 'the good old days' talk. It has _now_ shaped itself,
| but back in _my_ good old days...
|
| This is my dad's favorite past-time, to talk about the good old
| days of the USSR when he had free education, free guaranteed
| housing, free health care and a guaranteed job. Combined with
| those _other_ people who made USSR fall apart or are all about
| money or _whatever_.
|
| Nevermind all the _other_ thousand broken things in that
| system, let 's narrow it down to a few elements that align with
| your pre-conceived idea and cherry-pick, to create _the good
| old days_ and conversely, kids nowadays.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Interesting tangent, there.
|
| I'm not pining for "the good old days," at all, and it's ...
| _interesting_ ... that this was what you read.
|
| I'm enthusiastic about tech, the future, learning new stuff,
| and making the world a better place.
|
| I feel that it is a shame that the concept of Personal
| Integrity (or corporate Integrity) is considered an
| anachronism.
| alexashka wrote:
| > I'm not pining for "the good old days," at all
|
| > The entire industry has now shaped itself into a
| transient, mercenary, loyalty-free community.
|
| You're not pining for a time prior to when the industry
| shaped itself into a transient, mercenary, loyalty-free
| community?
|
| Or you mean to say it was a different kind of mess before,
| that has now shaped itself into another mess, but mess
| nonetheless?
|
| If so, my apologies.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The second.
|
| Lots of people want to "go back," but that can never
| happen. It does not mean that "the old ways" are bad, or
| that they could not be applied to today or the future,
| but there is a _very_ good chance they would not be
| applicable to today 's world, without modification.
|
| I don't like "Old bad; New Shiny." Something is
| advantageous to the current situation, or it is not. Its
| provenance should have nothing to do with it.
|
| As an engineer, who has been developing (and shipping)
| software for my entire life, I can tell you that some
| (not all, just some) things that I learned "in the good
| old days" are quite applicable to today's world, and I
| always find it amusing, when someone goes "Wow! That is
| so cool!" when I have shown them some old pattern that
| was created before they were born.
|
| In the company that I worked at for a long time, a bunch
| of ultra-conservative folks had a war with future-facing
| folks, and won (that's one reason I was let go). I
| totally understand where they come from, but I also think
| that it was a disaster, and may kill a 100-year-old
| company.
|
| But no one asked me. They just handed me my pink slip.
|
| Best thing that ever happened to me.
|
| Funny "In Soviet Russia..." story. A friend of mine, who
| is married to a Russian, and lived in Perm for many
| years, said that the soviets always built two of
| everything, because one inevitably failed, and was used
| for parts, for the second. I have no idea how true it
| was. He is prone to flights of hyperbole.
| tombert wrote:
| My perspective is (and always has been) that I am working for a
| for-profit entity. There's nothing wrong with this, most people
| do it, and that's pretty much how society is built.
|
| But I feel that the for-profit aspect applies both ways: if the
| company is going to work to maximize profits, why shouldn't I
| do the same? If another company is offering me a substantially
| higher salary than I would get with a normal raise, then why
| shouldn't I at least consider it? The company wouldn't hesitate
| to fire me off if they felt I was underperforming.
|
| The only argument I can see for loyalty (and only kind of) is
| if you work for a non-profit, or something run on a finite
| research grant or something. At that point, you could argue
| that loyalty isn't naive as the work itself is more the goal
| than the profit motive.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| The parent's loyalty isn't to the company, it's to their
| direct reports (I assume). After you've been shielding people
| from the shitstorm for long enough, it can feel very
| difficult to fold up your umbrella and leave. Even if it's
| strictly better _for you_ , it might violate your utilitarian
| instincts or personal ethics.
|
| Of course, companies know this and use it as one of the many
| tools to suppress wages.
| tombert wrote:
| That's totally fair; if you think your replacement is going
| to make people under you's life worse, it might be hard to
| leave. I've never been a manager or had anyone reporting to
| me, so I can't speak to that point.
|
| But I agree, I think this is kind of weaponized by
| corporations to avoid employee churn.
| myownpetard wrote:
| But it sounds like they didn't do great by their reports:
|
| "I was a manager for over 25 years. I feel that I was a
| good one. My employees seemed to agree. I kept many of them
| on board for decades, and these were folks that could walk
| out the door, and get huge pay raises (my company paid
| "competitive" salaries)."
|
| It sounds like they did great by the company shareholders
| who captured the value from below market salaries.
|
| Kindness, respect and trust should be table stakes but it's
| not going to pay for my kid's college fund, keep up with 7%
| inflation, or help me build my rainy day fund for a
| pandemic driven recession.
| Moodles wrote:
| > So that generally means that governments need to step in, and
| help the people and companies to do the right thing.
|
| That sounds pretty ominous. What policy would you suggest? Why
| would you be confident the government would be at all
| competent?
| warcher wrote:
| Honestly it's already been done- release the wage numbers
| publicly. The only way screwing over long term team members
| works is if you can keep a lid on it. Wage secrecy enables
| all kinds of bad behavior.
| bwestergard wrote:
| "Who will be the company that starts to treat their employees
| in a manner that proves they are worth staying at? This may
| mean higher pay raises, the CEO taking some of their profit
| (and the shareholders and VCs), and sharing it with the
| employees."
|
| You're right!
|
| Competition between management teams for investment ensures
| that, absent some other force constraining competition, it
| isn't sustainable for most management teams to break out of
| this race to the bottom. The exceptions - firms that have a
| quasi-monopolistic market position - prove the rule.
|
| "Letting employees unionize, etc."
|
| Employees don't need permission from their employer to unionize
| in the United States or any other high income country. It is
| entirely the decision of the workers; if a majority want to
| form a union, the employer is obligated to bargain with them.
|
| Historically, this is how the race to the bottom has been
| halted.
| rr808 wrote:
| The other part of why people leave is they end up doing lots of
| support. Often when things go seriously wrong or even just
| regular problems the main people called on to fix it are the
| people that have been there a while and know the system best.
| They end up missing out on the interesting new projects. Its a
| good incentive to move.
| ballenf wrote:
| There's an unintuitive incentive to refrain from gaining too
| much knowledge of all of an org's systems. Being the support
| person across teams potentially lowers your value to your
| immediate leads since you get pulled away so much. Good
| management will identify and correct for this, but it's not
| easy.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| My first full time boss quit over this. He was there 10 years
| and his life revolved around support as nobody else stayed more
| than a year, so nobody ever learned many of the systems.
| bagacrap wrote:
| some people like to be in this position, although I find
| those people have a way of stretching out every support or
| maintenance task that should take hours into weeks
| rr808 wrote:
| That is more like after the long haulers have left and the
| new people have to figure it out. The guy who wrote it can
| probably fix in 5 minutes, the next guy is paid more but
| takes 5 days.
| [deleted]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet.
|
| Beware looking at teams as a social network graph or org chart!
| Human teams are nuanced and require up-keep.. hence the existence
| of HR and management.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| If that's really what HR is supposed to be doing (upkeep of
| human teams, with nuance)... I have never worked at a place
| where they even act like they think it is, let alone succeed at
| doing it. Are there really HR's out there who are different?
|
| I have worked for managers who act like they think it is their
| role, and even succeed at doing it. As well as managers who
| don't.
| oerpli wrote:
| While the point seems worthwhile, the animations don't help at
| all.
|
| Stuff moves around for no reason (some graph layouting algorithm
| with easing I guess), the looping is bad and it's annoying to
| wait for the changes and as they happen instantly
|
| A simple picture for each transition would have been simpler to
| implement and actually showed something.
| nicky0 wrote:
| I found the animations helpful and they conveyed the ideas in
| the text to me well.
| franzb wrote:
| And on mobile (iPhone), it seems to be impossible to scroll
| down on the animations themselves, only on the text. I had to
| stop reading the article at some point as I could no longer
| scroll down...
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| yeah, the animations gave me a headache. Stopped reading the
| article
| ishmaeel wrote:
| I appreciated the visualisation. My CPU fan, on the other hand,
| was not a big fan.
| mikeholler wrote:
| Most CPU fans are little.
| flakiness wrote:
| This feels like an organizational twin of an old idea of personal
| relationship, which is called "weak tie".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Counter-point: Tesla/SpaceX have extremely high attrition rates,
| but are so successful they'll likely be remembered in 100 years
| for their achievements.
|
| (To be fair the article just points out that attrition has a
| higher cost than we realize, not that attrition is never worth
| it).
| soheil wrote:
| The cost of attrition is very real, probably higher than the cost
| of keeping low-performers on the team for large companies. For
| small startups the cost of attrition is probably negligible.
| Maybe the solution for big companies is to break them up into
| small independent startup like entities.
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