If relationship with an employee and my company sours, all I really care about is that poor relationship not transferring to the relationship between my company and my clients.
Artificially locking ourselves into to a bad employer/employee relationship does nobody any good.
When you are an employee under these laws, you tend to put a lot more thought into choosing a company you would be willing to stay with as long as you are interested in that section of the industry.
I fight this problem several ways:
I turn our services into a products so that I can onboard people quickly and drive down costs - for example instead of telling each employees to setup a backup on a server, I had one employee make a script that we can deploy on all new servers. By turning processed into an easy to deploy product - It also keeps boredom low.
I give raises quickly and early to match new skills, so that when they do go job hunting they don't see a tremendous pay increase.
I compartmentalize employees so that they get really really good at a smaller range of skills - this lets me charge the customer more, and lets me pay my employees more, but it also has the side effect of diminishing job prospects.
What exactly do you mean? In my experience companies often try to hire people with specific skills instead of generalists (which btw is a mistake imo, smart people will be able to pick up the skill in question).
Based on the small size of the company, I must hire people who are intelligent and yet are passed over by the job market because they can't display that with a degree or job experience, and I've found your assertion to be true.
You're probably correct - perhaps given that we pay well and hold fast to 40 hours- it's more likely that there's not much incentive to leave.
This is completely, totally, and nonsensically evil that I'm not sure even where to begin. Supposing your company hired me and I knew this was the opinion of anyone who worked in management I would be polishing my résumé my first day on the job. This is the best way to make sure that the only people working for you are mindless drones and your HR office is a revolving door rather than a ladder for people with an ounce of ambition.
I'm certain that there are employees that like rote work, but for me, I can't stand it and project that onto others.
> it also has the side effect of diminishing job prospects
is a good or desirable thing.
As someone dealing with basically this situation, it sucks, but if I was also getting handed one-off "solve this puzzle and we're going to use the code you make every day" problems and raises early and often, it wouldn't suck nearly this much.
I supposes I could sugar coat things - but given that I'm hiring really smart people they'll figure it out and won't trust me one bit.
I would rather not having that kind of job prospects.
If an employee is seduced by an offer that doesn't work out - they can (and have) come back and can bring back what they learned.
One of the thing that I learned from such exits an re-entryies is that money is not always the best motivator - I used to run really lean to have a high payroll. Now I run lean to provide a good work environment - I can now fire bad companies that don't respect my employees.
It's great to hear someone articulating that point on HN. There is too often a constant stream of suggestions to the effect employees are a form of chattel.
All this analogy implies is that an employee can be seduced by a newer, trendier, higher salary startup.
Stop forcing your preconceived opinions and assumptions down my throat.