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Comment by nullnilvoid | Hacker News Reader

Many managers have the mindset that they can find replacements easily. If you don't do the job, there are 5 people lining up for this position. They don't realize the cost of turnover, partially because it is hard to quantify the cost. In the good old days, IBM and other blue chips would spend lots of money and send employees back to school and train them well. Nowadays, everyone is considered to be replaceable.

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In my experience, this is not true in San Francisco. I've never worked anywhere in the bay area where engineers were thought of as easily replaceable. Everyone knows how hard it is to hire competent engineers around here. Even if people were lined up to replace a lost employee, just the interview process for hiring people is expensive as it takes multiple people out of their role to sit and interview someone for a day. When you lose someone, you end up with an empty position for at least a month, as even if you do hire someone right away they have to quit their current job and leave notice.

> I've never worked anywhere in the bay area where engineers were thought of as easily replaceable.

They may not have been thought of that way, but I've very much seen them treated that way.

People are humans and human nature nearly always leads to political behaviour (i.e. behaviour not optimal for the organization as a whole) in any organization of more than a few people.

Pressed on all sides, dealing with unreasonable demands from above, and with internal competitors and naysayers to fight off, even the most enlightened manager may sometimes behave in ways that treat people as easily replaceable.

Even if intellectually they know they aren't.

There could be a disconnect between hiring managers and HR and upper management. The hiring managers you know probably do understand the cost of replacing a lost employee and how hard it is to hire. The HR department that's actually in control of this, and of salaries, doesn't, or just doesn't care.

I have a theory that a lot of the terrible mismanagement we see with modern American corporations comes directly from HR. Didn't W. Edwards Deming say that companies would be better off just eliminating their HR departments altogether?

It would help considerably if every business school in the nation wasn't following the exact same idiotic playbook.

I agree. I switched to working remotely for a Silicon Valley division of a major company, and I definitely feel the difference in appreciation. I'm not by any means treated as a special snowflake, but rather I very much feel it's a two way street, I feel lucky to work there, they feel lucky to have me.

This is in stark contrast to when I was consulting in LA/OC, where I was constantly having to justify my not so high hourly rates/fixed bid projects.

Assuming the employee in question is an engineer of course... Not everyone has it that easy.

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