Solving the IT Turnover Crisis: Employment 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

Solving the IT Turnover Crisis: Employment 2.0

thedailywtf.com

53 pointsdnaquin18 comments

he failed to mention, that unfortunately, in our profession you have to quit and get another job in order to get a good pay raise.

A lot of employers, once they hire somobedy, raise the salaries just enough, and a bit, but they fail to recognize that the employee is much better developer and valuable than he was a couple of years ago. This is especially true to people in their 20s.

One way to retain employees: Give them really good raises and money to stay. Let them switch projects, or groups, when they are bored with what they are doing.

I read this on progit once and it has stuck with me: "If you can go across the street and get a 25% raise, then you're worth a 25% raise to your current employer."

Of course, this is not always true. The other company might have a use for one of your skills that your current position doesn't make use of.

True, but on the other hand you've accumulated a ton of company specific knowledge, familiarity with the codebase and so on.

And usually the exact skills are less important than the innate prowess of the programmer.

I'd interpret this differently: The fact that the industry has converged on the "don't give significant raises unless you change jobs or job titles" model is a subtle attempt -- perhaps even an unconscious attempt -- to implement the "up-or-out" model that the original submission recommends.

By not giving substantial raises, you're encouraging the best people to work at your company for a while and then quit. You're even giving them a good face-saving excuse to quit. It's far more amicable for an employee to say "I'm leaving because I can get another $25 an hour across the street" than "I'm leaving because I've been here for three years, I've done all I can for you, and now our relationship has become dysfunctional, and you never listen to me, and I'm bored to death". Similarly, it's easier to tell an employee "I'm afraid we have no budget for a big raise this year -- curse our penny-pinching accountants!" than "You've been around for four years, your value to the company is static or declining, and we all just kind of wish you would leave".

Which of these scenarios is more likely to produce happy "alumni" -- former employees who might be willing to network with you, refer other talented people to you, or even come back and work for your company again (presumably at a somewhat higher rate)?

If you expect your best employees to either move up or move out, pay raises are irrational. If you offer large raises to everyone that stays in the same position for five years, you're basically pouring more money into the metaphorical "dead sea". (This assumes, of course, that the "dead sea" model actually applies to your company and your industry. The model should be taken with a grain of salt...)

This is a really interesting take on the article, but not one that I can agree with.

It could just be the culture at the company that I work for, but when my manager tells me that I'm doing great work, I'm a top contributer, etc. but that the penny-pinching accountants won't let me have a raise then I do take that personally. I'm trying to move up but the company doesn't seem to want to let me. This isn't the way to turn me into an "alumni". Instead I'm going to be bitter at the company that gives lip service to career growth but isn't willing to put its money where its mouth is.

If a company wants employees to say for ten or more years, like they claim, then they need to be willing to pay up. Otherwise I would prefer the "you will be here for three years, then move on" talk on my starting day.

Mind you, I'm not saying that this half-assed, semi-conscious method of "up-or-out" is actually any good. At least half of the advantage of such a policy comes from admitting it up front, so that your employees can adjust their working styles, their culture, and their attitude. When a company's words are all about retention but its actions are all about up-or-out, it's more than a little insane. But that's corporate culture for you.

I'm trying to move up but the company doesn't seem to want to let me.

Well, here we have a situation that doesn't fit the up-or-out model perfectly: Companies where, for a certain class of top performers, there is no "up", only "out". These companies are not interested in grooming their IT staff for management, or bigger roles, or anything else. Their behavior suggests that they're really just hiring a stream of IT consultants on two-to-three-year terms... but they use full-time employees instead, possibly because they're cheaper, possibly because of employment law, and possibly because there are limits to how much power you can exert over a consultant.

It sounds like you might need to listen to your company's actions, rather than just their words. Words are very inexpensive. :)

My understanding is that McKinsey & Co. operate on this model and Google (among others) hire like mad from among the ranks of McKinsey almuni. Interestingly Google seems to be leaning towards the "up or out" model, as well, among their business folks (but are the opposite with their engineers, and do everything they can to retain people).

I'd be curious to know about any development shops that go this route. It makes sense to me, but I'm an outlier (I've never held a full-time job--I worked part-time while I was in college, then started my own business, and did some long-term contract work, now I'm on to another business). I don't see much sense in working on the same project for life. Then again, I've been involved in Webmin for 8 years, and there are plenty of areas I still find interesting...so maybe it's just the ability to flit around between various areas of the project that matters to staying "self actuating" as the article puts it.

what does google hire McKinsey consultants to do? I only know two people who worked at McKinsey, and they were kind of like Ivy-League advanced versions of the "two Bobs" from Office Space. I.e. their jobs were mainly to help justify corporate restructuring (firing vast swaths of people.)

"what does google hire McKinsey consultants to do?"

I meant they hire them as they're on their way "out" of McKinsey. And they hire them as managers.

That's interesting. Enron also hired a lot of their top managers and traders from McKinsey.

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

> most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long

If this is true then it's a recent development caused by changes in companies behaviour rather than anything intrinsic to engineers.

If you look at Bell Labs, HP, even Microsoft back in the day, engineers stayed there forever. The perennial example would be Steve Wozniak not wanting to leave HP.

What has changed since then is perhaps that companies now only do one thing and then specialize their people even beyond that. You need to allow some variation in work or anyone would get tired of it and leave. Even Google falls foul of this, you can change and work on any project as long as it uses the same infrastructure and is a web application, this doesn't compare well to Bell labs.

Most programmers are not ambitious by normal standards and tend to be risk adverse. As long as you don't make their job deeply boring or annoying they will literally never leave.

What has changed? In Woz's day, there were very few great programming jobs. HP & Bell Labs were two well known companies that had them. Giving one up was a big risk, if you loved programming. Today there are thousands of companies to chose from or you can easily roll your own.

Most programmers who are not ambitious tend to become dead wood soon enough. I've known lots of them. Top programmers, who still enjoy programming have a tendency to move on. At least that has been my personal observation.

There are always exceptions to the rule, we are talking in huge sweeping generalities here. YMMV.

I disagree with his graphs. His premise seems to be that experience is the most valuable contribution you can make to a team. I don't see that as sustainable, though... I think the most valuable contribution is intuition. If you want to be a programmer, you need to know more than "given problem a, here's how i've solved it in the past". You need to come up with new and better ways of doing things. You need to do research and learn by thinking (mixed in with a bit of learning by doing, of course).

JMHO. But I mostly see work as a way to get money for ideas, not experience.

Excellent article! I worked in a large consulting company for some time, and the up-or-out model was the norm there. And, you know what, the consulting arm definitely had a very good percentage of very good people!

Daniel

I have heard the opposite. In large companies, the chaff is sent to do "consulting". Better breaking somebody's else systems than yours. So I guess the top of the chaff was staying, and the really bottom was eventually let go.

I think the difference is, in a company where 'consulting' is the only source of income, you need to be good at whatever it is that you do, or your clients will go elsewhere. For large companies where consulting is a side business, than what you describe is probably the case.

Yes, this was a pure consulting company. The chaff actually stayed in-house and built the crappy time-keeping systems we all had to use to report our hours :-)

Very good article. It very clearly put into words (and graphs) the frustrations I've had at previous jobs. I can mentally map that graph to each job I've had with surprising accuracy.

It also occurs to me that beginning to see this pattern in my career, and despairing at being stuck in this cycle forever, was a major factor in deciding to start a start-up. What better way to "stretch the value apex" for myself?

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