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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

One trend I have noticed is a grass is always greener hiring mentality at a lot of companies. That is, looking external for new hires versus promoting from within. This forces folks to jump around for career progression. And those that are not as willing to jump around feeling discouraged that no matter how hard they work they will likely be overlooked for someone from the outside. To this end hard work is discouraged over networking and willingness to disrupt your life.

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Often times it's not even a matter of "grass is greener" mentality but the fact that there is no position to get promoted into because a career tract was never put into place by the organization. The only thing you can do is stay put or do a horizontal jump.

Promoting from within means you have to forgo quick wins for long them gains. That’s just not how US managers age leaders think.

<< "That's just not how US managers age leaders [are incentivized to] think."

Just wanted to highlight that it's not a problem we're destined to deal with. Fix the incentives ala fix the problems.

To add to this, the switching cost for engineers is extremely low, so you'd expect that companies would work hard to retain talent to compensate. I recently switched companies partly due to this conundrum.

I feel it's become a self fulfilling prophecy.

90% of the people I've worked with who stayed in one place > 7 years were paid under market but also not great at their jobs.

I guess it depends on where you work, or perhaps the field. I have seen some truly awful external hires. I have also seen some great ones, but I suppose it is more of a gamble to go external, whereas promoting internally has a lower downside and also lower upside.

One major negative of hiring externally is it harms employee moral. There have been a number of studies that hiring internally is better for long-term organizational health.

I see the same at my workplace. Hell, I think I'm slowly becoming one of those underpaid and underperforming people myself. The reason for this is that if there is no chance of a meaningful improvement in your salary or other benefits, why would you even try? Good old "they pretend to pay me and I pretend to work".

If there is no proper incentive system in place to encourage good performance, those who value money or career development just leave after a while and those who just want an easy life stay and underperform.

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