[HN Gopher] Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, s...
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Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests
Author : tchalla
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-10-25 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hrdive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hrdive.com)
| duxup wrote:
| Customer service/ even technical support seems to be a very
| little respected area in most companies.
|
| Trying to retain people they don't respect already seems
| unlikely.
| mindvirus wrote:
| When I was at a FAANG, it felt like they had this down to a
| science. Promotions every 2-3 years. Raises once a year, a few
| spot bonuses throughout the year, ad hoc equity grants. People
| still quit of course, but looking back it felt very retention
| focused and scientific.
| unicornmama wrote:
| Having worked both sides I agree.
|
| The Google Moloch seemed to have a fairest system, of course
| circumstances could be unfair but the process was fair. Most
| people who wanted promos and fed their soul to the machine
| would eventually get promos.
|
| Meanwhile in the startup zoo, it's all about earning favor and
| avoiding disfavor with a small group of lords.
| roflyear wrote:
| Bonuses at all, nevermind a few a year, sound great. Time to
| send out resumes.
|
| What's the workload at the typical FAANG?
| jamra wrote:
| So far there is a pretty serious tempo at my FAANG but the
| complexity is not very high so it's really simple work in
| terms of stretching the brain.
|
| Lots of working with other teams (XFN) so collaboration is
| almost as important as execution. Pay is good.
| gsibble wrote:
| From what I've heard, depends upon the FAANG. Google
| apparently has good work/life balance. All of them are all
| about making it through the interview process, which is a
| nightmare.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| lot of preparation, and a bit of luck.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Mine is heavy. Working hard and barely meet the expectations.
| Lot of competition and colleagues are good. Passing the
| interview is one thing, but staying there is also challenging
| as they get rid of low performers. (at least my experience).
| gsibble wrote:
| They do seem to have it down. Startups on the other hand
| absolutely do not.
| google234123 wrote:
| You sure? Seems like starts are the place where you find
| engineers with just a few years of experience getting
| management roles
| paxys wrote:
| Yeah, big tech has had it all figured out for a while now. At
| my company departments would get a target retention number.
| Going too much under _or over_ that was a problem. If a certain
| % of employees outside of the top performance buckets weren 't
| unsatisfied with their salaries and leaving, that meant you
| were paying everyone too much.
|
| It's crazy how much science you can apply to HR once you are
| working at a scale of tens of thousands of employees. At that
| point people aren't people anymore, just nameless resources to
| be plugged into an equation. Kinda like the "a single death is
| a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" analogy. Stack
| ranking follows the same principle.
| neilv wrote:
| I prefer to think of it like flowers from an SO, just because.
|
| "Hey, my valued employee, just thinking about you, and I wanted
| to send you these additional United States Dollars."
| endisneigh wrote:
| I agree with the title and point of article but it's not really
| possible. No company can consistently identify those who are
| good, pay them well, fend against competitors despite their
| rising expenses (remember paying people more?) and do all of
| these things while people leave anyway for reasons outside of
| their control (moving, bored etc), which results in you having to
| hire more anyway, stresses the before mentioned process
| (inevitably you will notice people who are paid less can perform
| as good or better than more paid employees).
|
| If I were in a position to implement things I'd simply get rid of
| raises all together and simple give people only stock and/or
| profit share. If they're doing well the raise will come to them
| automatically. Of course this has perverse incentives in itself
| too.
| dbish wrote:
| They can't do it perfectly but they can try. My pov having been
| at a few big techs is they aren't even trying.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Margaret Thatcher (in)famously said that there was no such thing
| as society. By that she meant that, actually the only thing out
| there is individuals looking after their own self-interests.
|
| Well, it is the same with companies.
|
| In both case this leads to suboptimal results at 'system level'
| (a well-known problem in system optimisation).
| kazen44 wrote:
| Thatcherism has little basis in actual sociology in my opinion.
|
| Societies do exist, and humans are not purely selfish rational
| beings either.
| tomrod wrote:
| Pay people well.
| gsibble wrote:
| Most companies will pay people the absolute bare minimum to get
| them to work there while barely being angry enough not to quit.
| tomrod wrote:
| Correct. If your optimization horizon is two weeks to a
| quarter, this short termism makes sense. But if your horizon
| is further, pay people well.
| gsibble wrote:
| This is definitely the opposite of what most of my employers have
| done. Gotten denied raises countless times which has forced me to
| find new employment to advance my career while they are 100%
| focused on hiring new talent. Lots of turnover which cost the
| companies a tremendous amount of time constantly bringing new
| hires up to speed.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Agreed - new hires always get the current market rate, which
| always higher than what existing employees are paid.
|
| Also on the flip side, if you've been in a role longer than say,
| 4 years, you should interview at other companies. You're probably
| getting underpaid. (Even if you've gotten a promotion). You don't
| have to jump ship, just see what's available.
| waboremo wrote:
| Yes there are also additional studies on "boomerang workers"
| that fit this new(er) class of people. Ones who despite even
| liking their job and eventually coming back, seek employment
| elsewhere because they aren't getting what they should be or
| aren't fulfilling the role they see themselves fulfilling
| properly.
|
| That's how intensely underrated retention is for a lot of
| companies, and how costly it can be when retention isn't
| seriously looked into.
| [deleted]
| woeirua wrote:
| When people say they want career progression, and opportunities,
| what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately,
| most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a
| title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good
| they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that
| happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order
| to keep making more money. That creates a perverse incentive, and
| the result is political bullshit that is typically misaligned
| with the company's interests which further drives away your high
| performers.
|
| End the perverse incentives. Pay your people well if they're
| doing a good job, regardless of how long they've been doing the
| same job or what their title is. Reward seniority and loyalty.
| Suddenly, you'll find that employee retention goes through the
| roof, and you don't have to worry about hiring new people all the
| time.
| flashgordon wrote:
| Mostly true but these days we have the case where regardless of
| capability it is sadly necessary to put a Ln person to do an
| Ln's job not Ln+k's job (for political reasons). This has the
| perverse effect of someone at Ln being punished for doing a job
| above their level if they are not _also_ doing their own job.
| What this means is you can only get promoted if you are doing
| the equivalent of two levels of work at a given time but if you
| were hired from elsewhere you only need to do the target level
| job.
| kodah wrote:
| From my perspective this is the way things used to work, then
| we had the pay equality movement which was largely
| misinterpreted by corporations to mean "Same title == same
| pay". The problem is that being a Junior on Team A may have the
| same cognitive load as being a Senior on Team B. I once led a
| team that was exactly like that.
|
| Saying "end perverse incentives" makes this seem like some
| moral oversight driven call-to-action but I think it's more
| complicated than that.
| errantmind wrote:
| While I broadly agree with your point, rewarding seniority is
| at odds with rewarding people based on how good they are at
| their jobs, from the perspective of incentives. The two are not
| always correlated and this is often why some companies hire
| externally instead of promoting from within.
|
| That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they
| misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to
| their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others
| instead of themselves.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Paying for equal performance on the measurable aspects of the
| job is easier to do than putting a value on institutional
| knowledge. As an old bird that has had time to internalize
| the tech stack, I can make one comment along the line of
| "Don't do that, and here is why..." -- getting that kind of
| contribution noticed and valued is harder.
|
| Parent comment is really saying to find a way to put a value
| on institutional knowledge.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I mean isn't that why vesting cliffs exist? I'd extend them
| to be for far more money but over far longer if I was the
| employer, but the job market won't bare it.
| vasco wrote:
| Leadership are mostly also employees by the way.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has
| a title of X they can only make up to Y,"
|
| Eh, most of the people in the established pay range tend to be
| at the low or mid range, so the company likely has the ability
| to pay more. Once they're at the top of rhe range, that
| shouldn't be much of a problem either... _but_ that assumes the
| range was created using good industry data. If so, then there
| shouldn 't be a better deal somewhere else (or at least very
| hard to find).
| paxys wrote:
| The worst part is that after a point in your career there's no
| path to promotion just for doing your job really well. You are
| expected to always take on new roles and responsibilities, some
| of which may not be suited for your personality or interests,
| and the net result often is that you get promoted and make more
| money but your overall useful output decreases. I know so many
| amazing engineers who had to essentially give up writing code,
| prototyping and tinkering - stuff they were really passionate
| about - to advance to staff+ levels. Now their time is spent in
| an endless stream of meetings, and the entire organization is
| worse off because of it.
| warbler73 wrote:
| Being promoted until you are no longer competent (or happy)
| is a long recognized corporate antipattern dynamic:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
| pixl97 wrote:
| You have the choice of managers knowing what the job is or
| managers that have never done the job. In general managers
| that know what the job is are better managers.
| akomtu wrote:
| Someone is ought to make a game like factorio out of this: you
| manage workers with semi-predictable output, and have to pay
| them out of your semi-predictable profit. You can never lower
| anyone's salary, only fire someone, and that costs a fee
| (severance). There is outside pressure that forces workers to
| need more money - inflation - it's also semi-predictable, but
| it never goes down. My suspicion is that in a well modeled game
| like this, there's no steady-growth mode when everyone is
| happy, and the organisation always collapses, even under
| perfect management.
| wisnoskij wrote:
| "Reward seniority and loyalty regardless of job title"
|
| Well janitor retention would surely go through the roof, but I
| think you might lose a lot of upper management and software
| engineers.
| woeirua wrote:
| Why? Because they would prefer to keep running on the
| neverending promotion treadmill? I think a LOT of engineers
| would rather stay engineers if they could keep getting
| reasonable raises. The problem is that almost all companies
| make it impossible to keep getting raises past a certain
| point _without_ getting promoted.
| dhiggdyjkb wrote:
| Good
| afarrell wrote:
| Or at least raise the salary cap alongside seniority for roles
| beyond a certain level.
| gsibble wrote:
| Almost all of the companies I worked at hired senior positions
| from outside the company instead of promoting from within.
|
| The other issue I ran into was being so good at the position I
| was in that I was "unpromotable". Got told that a lot as an IC.
| Was then told even though I was fully qualified for the
| promotion, I would not get it nor the accompanying salary.
| peteradio wrote:
| While you were laboring under your delusions would you say
| you worked more or less hard than if there wasn't false bait
| luring you onward? Inquiring MBA scientists need to know!
| slt2021 wrote:
| I could see that it was MBA asking, from your condescending
| tone
| pixl97 wrote:
| That's when you know it's time to leave.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Pay your people well if they're doing a good job
|
| Comparing peoples performance objectively in a large
| organisation is essentially impossible. Only the people working
| closely with someone really have any idea, and even then they
| only see part of the picture.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Only the people working closely with someone really have
| any idea
|
| And are accused of bias when trying to get raises for their
| team.
| replyifuagree wrote:
| This goes x1000 for knowledge work. Great knowledge workers build
| this amazing model of what is going in in the product they work
| on in their head that walks out the door with them. We can't
| prevent people from progressing their career by going elsewhere,
| but we sure as hell can focus on not giving them a reason to
| leave.
| bbatchelder wrote:
| Too many times in my career have I seen an employer lose an
| employee, who has a ton of institutional knowledge and performs
| adequately or even excellently, only to replace them them with
| someone that ends up costing much more money, and then takes a
| lot of time to get up to speed (which also slows the folks who
| help get them up to speed).
|
| It is like they haven't taken the time to even make a rudimentary
| calculation on the costs involved in keeping the employee versus
| replacing them.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| This is a common response to this issue, but I think there is a
| logical flaw in it.
|
| Employers don't know ahead of time which employees will leave
| and which will stay. In order to improve their employee
| retention, employers have to pay _all_ of their employees more,
| not just the ones that eventually will leave. This changes the
| math entirely.
|
| For example, suppose it costs 50% extra to replace someone who
| leaves. In retrospect, sure, giving the sole employee who
| leaves a 10% raise each year to retain them makes sense. But if
| you have to give all of your employees a 10% raise per year,
| just to retain that one person, it doesn't make financial sense
| anymore.
|
| To be clear I'm not endorsing this system at all! But from a
| pure financial perspective it makes sense to me and is why, I
| suspect, it persists.
| peteradio wrote:
| Presumably not everyone is as valuable or risky.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| This is exactly how we look at it. Those who are more
| valuable get larger annual raises.
|
| Also, during a high turnover period around a year ago, we
| even bumped a few people up mid year when we normally do
| salary increases at the beginning of the year. These folks
| were very happy and I think it earned a lot of trust that
| we looked at the market rates, determined they were
| underpaid, and made sure they were at least getting what
| they'd get paid elsewhere.
| eftychis wrote:
| I disagree related to the SF Bay Area and the Tech world
| specifically. It is usually written in the wall who is going
| to leave if things do not change. Now you could say the upper
| management can't read the wall, and the middle management
| might not want to share what has been stated -- or they kid
| themselves.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I would agree, but employers actually usually do know who is
| a flight risk.
| duped wrote:
| Good managers and HR leaders will recognize when people are
| teetering on leaving. Not always, but I've known a few who
| have given raises to keep people around and knew that others
| were planning on leaving before they announced it. In a
| healthy organization you can have frank conversations. Or
| even ambiguous ones. It's just rare.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It's almost like you need to identify which employees are key
| contributors and pay them appropriately. Imagine that.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Easier said then done. Firstly it requires for you to know
| what you're doing is both a key project and something in
| which paying more would be more likely to result in its
| completion.
| luckylion wrote:
| Is it though? I've never worked as an actual employee,
| but I'm working in long-time contracts as a freelancer
| with companies. I've always found it pretty easy to tell
| who was carrying a project and who was dead weight. Might
| be different and harder to calculate for new projects,
| but for existing ones that are maintained, observing who
| gets asked when weird things happen and who solves the
| strange issues usually identified the people who were
| instrumental. If someone is off a week and nothing moves,
| that's someone you probably want to keep (and probably
| also a situation you want to resolve, because that's not
| a good thing).
| r930 wrote:
| Not to mention the social load on integrating a new person to a
| team. Depending on the depth, breadth and number of
| interactions with other individuals, this causes others to have
| to also get up to speed on the new person's strengths,
| weakness, quirks, etc.
| panny wrote:
| But accounting and HR _will_ time your bathroom breaks. I guess
| the watchers don 't like being watched, which is why retention
| isn't a bother for them.
| toast0 wrote:
| > But accounting and HR will time your bathroom breaks. I
| guess the watchers don't like being watched, which is why
| retention isn't a bother for them.
|
| Maybe they should tune the company food to reduce bathroom
| occupancy. :P
| gsibble wrote:
| Ha. I had the CFO once call me angrily asking where I
| was......I was in the bathroom. She told me to get back to my
| desk. I took my time.
| feet wrote:
| I would have taken that time looking at job postings
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| These are the people who hate work from home culture. They
| can't tell who is at their desk in the particular second
| that they decide it's important.
| gsibble wrote:
| Oh, I've quit 3 companies where I was the CTO/lead engineer
| where they had to replace me with 5-10 people (backend and
| frontend devs, QA, devops, plus a manager or two, etc.) costing
| them enormous amounts of money.
|
| Many times they've hired me as a consultant where I make 5-10x
| my hourly rate for several months after bringing the new hires
| up to speed.
|
| Companies place very little emphasis on retention and retaining
| institutional knowledge. They don't seem to understand that
| employees who have worked at a company for years developing
| systems and architecture know where all of the secrets are.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Losing institutional knowledge is a b*tch. It costs more to get
| new people up to speed in terms of time and productivity lost,
| than to just retain people who already have the institutional
| knowledge.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Yes. We used to work in silos. Dave was responsible for x,
| Cathy for y. When Cathy left, we were screwed because nobody
| knew much about y.
|
| So now that I'm the project manager, after Steve builds the new
| feature then I alternate assigning the bug fixes between two
| other people who did not build it. That way, at least two other
| people become familiar with that part of the application while
| Steve is still around to answer questions and provide guidance.
| AntiRemoteWork wrote:
| clnq wrote:
| I work for a tech company that promotes internally quite well in
| recent years. But they also only want to hire senior, principal
| and lead level engineers to develop a mature workforce.
| Unfortunately, they fail to attract enough talent to replace
| attrition, which is high due to increasingly paltry employee
| numbers. And all in all, while the promotion-to-hiring ratio is
| good, there is too little hiring to keep employees from working
| 70-100 hour weeks. I am leaving, too, even if I was promised a
| promotion within months. I suppose the moral of the story is that
| balance is good, but hiring also must happen to replace
| attrition.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > increasingly poultry employee numbers
|
| I think you mean paltry. Although I have seen employees who
| flap about, squawk a lot and shit all over everything, so
| perhaps poultry is apt.
| clnq wrote:
| Oops! Thanks for the correction and a good laugh.
| mberning wrote:
| This is a microcosm of poor performance management. You need an
| effective way to get rid of bad hires, clear out dead wood, and
| retain your top contributors.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| The weird thing is, if you, as an employee start to show feint
| signs of wanting to leave, e.g. by complaining a lot to
| colleagues, or having an upset look on one's face, usually it is
| not acted upon, or even not picked up by any manager. If on the
| other hand you make it very clear that you are unhappy or that
| you might want to leave, it is understood as you are going to
| leave anyway, so they don't bother fixing any of the things that
| you have a problem with. At least that is what I experienced a
| few times. Instead they start to act as if you don't belong to
| the team anymore or give you boring or strictly defined tasks. So
| no wonder, you leave and they find some other employee, in which
| co-workers need to invest time and effort during a period of
| about half a year to get them up to speed. Rinse and repeat.
| rjsw wrote:
| I watched one PHB manage out one of the best junior engineers
| just because they expected young people to switch jobs often.
| gsibble wrote:
| You didn't break up with me, I broke up with you!
| vecter wrote:
| At my last startup, one of our employees approached this well.
| This is a very summarized version, but he came to me and said:
| "I'd like to be paid $X. I think I deserve it and I believe I
| can get that salary on the open market. I don't want to
| negotiate on this."
|
| We agreed and after a short discussion, we gave him the raise
| he asked. That he was a top performer made it an easy decision.
| dbish wrote:
| Doesn't tend to work at big tech as they have rigid very slow
| moving (and ill informed) HR processes that only react after
| they see a bunch of people leaving.
| jdaw0 wrote:
| Here is the MIT Technology Review report the article is
| referencing but doesn't bother to actually link to:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059470/customer...
| gausswho wrote:
| Even that is a summary, and if you request the full report
| you're bounced to a third party Genesys that demands your
| contact information, while popping up an unsolicited chat bot
| window. I killed that chat, made some fake info and was sent to
| a page that was functionally broken... except for the chat bot
| which had another go at me.
|
| MIT Technology Review should be ashamed of themselves.
| brnt wrote:
| It seems to me employers don't see employees as a (good!) target
| for investment anymore, the idea that you can build your
| workforce, but rather are obsessed with transactional labour: I
| have X currency, I want Y FTE of credential Z for it.
|
| Transactional attitudes begets itself.
| helf wrote:
| "No Shit".
| localhost wrote:
| When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their
| network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with,
| they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network.
| A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets
| discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks
| talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen
| without ICs who know a lot of people throughout the company.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| The hazard of retention is creating dependency. Dependency means,
| not just high bus factor, but opening yourself (the business) up
| to being vulnerable to another person's superior negotiation
| position. Then CEOs/boardmembers would have to spread their
| wealth rather than hoarding it all for themselves. Without a way
| to force CEO/boardmembers to spread their wealth (unions), I
| think we can expect companies to do what is in their best
| interest, maintaining a monopoly on power by ensuring no
| dependencies.
| dbish wrote:
| The confusing thing happening over the last 1-2 years (and in
| previous cycles) is that many current employees are also down
| significantly on their stock grants in public big tech. Employers
| seem to see this as ok, and that's the risk they take when taking
| stock, yet they are willing to go and pay a new hire with an
| updated price that means they make far more than you. It
| incentivizes leaving and wouldn't cost the employer anything to
| just re-up your pay to the original goal since they'll have to
| pay it anyway to a new person and lose the ramp up time
| duped wrote:
| In terms of number of shares or dollar amounts? Because tech
| has taken a massive slam in the last year in the markets.
|
| Employees should see that like a lot of investors do, which is
| a discount on blue chips. It changes the calculus a bit if you
| don't plan on executing on vest or holding after you do for tax
| reasons, which makes a lot of sense. But if you're considering
| a role at a big tech right now and plan to last a few years
| it's not necessarily a hit.
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