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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

> very attractive to the owners

And yet I’ve worked at software companies that will go to great lengths to avoid attrition. For exactly the reasons mentioned in the post, they encourage people to move to other teams to build up the inter connectedness of teams while keeping employees motivated and engaged. In fact, even if you weren’t looking HR would reach out and ask if you were interested in looking at other teams within the company because you had been in your current team for 18 months.

Side note I don’t know if I’ve just been lucky but I can’t relate to this talk of “companies are evil and act maliciously against their employees at every opportunity”. That hasn’t been true in my experience.

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> Side note I don’t know if I’ve just been lucky but I can’t relate to this talk of “companies are evil and act maliciously against their employees at every opportunity”. That hasn’t been true in my experience.

I think this heavily depends on the type of industry you work in. In some industries the abuse is so normalised that everyone takes it for granted.

In retail you have the example of companies scheduling workers just under the number of hours at which they'd qualify for insurance or other benefits.

Hospitality work often expects you to be available any time they're short staffed, if you aren't you'll probably find your shifts cut.

On the white collar side last year we heard about junior analysts at Goldman Sachs being made to work 100+ hour weeks[1].

Game development is widely avoided due to a similarly toxic work culture, where you'll often be forced to "crunch" for long periods of time[2]. The worse places will also lay you off after the game has shipped.

At the software companies I've worked the biggest issues have been terrible raises for current employees, to the point that graduates were being paid the same or much more than people with 3+ years of experience.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/18/group-of-ju... [2] https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re...

I think there’s a combination of some people with really bad experiences and a larger group of people that exaggerate.

That said, it’s a fact of the contemporary employment market that most companies do compensation such that sticking around in one place means making significantly less money then moving around all the time. Companies bring new people in at higher comp but don’t push the comp of existing people doing those jobs to the same level even if those existing employees are performing well. I don’t think this is evil or malicious but it certainly feels hostile.

> For exactly the reasons mentioned in the post, they encourage people to move to other teams to build up the inter connectedness of teams while keeping employees motivated and engaged.

That isn't to avoid churn, that is to have more people around in general. If you leave your old team it means you no longer use your knowledge, the important part is to have engineers around, not to have the same engineers working on the same tasks.

For example, Google encourages churn by making it really easy to move to other teams in other areas. You don't talk to your old team again, so that is effectively the same thing as you leaving the company and them getting a new engineer, ie for the teams it is equivalent to churn.

Military veterans of some theater of war are desired exactly because they will perform well in the next theater of war.

I don't think i can fully appreciate how mind-bogglingly huge a company like Google is, so it might well be the case that tacit knowledge, skills and relations acquired in one team don't transfer meaningfully to another. I would have to see it to be convinced however, even more so to make me believe this kind of transfer was the norm.

> If you leave your old team it means you no longer use your knowledge,

If you move from Team A to Team B, you may not use your knowledge of the details of their codebase.

But you know precisely how to sort out the problems caused by the company's weird internal certificate authority, and their weird internal deployment tools, their weird internal inter-service auth system, and their weird internal multi-cloud system. That 'secure' way of managing secrets in production that makes 'unauthorized' errors almost impossible to debug? You know how to debug it. You know how to operate the purchasing system so your orders go through right the first time. You know precisely what the criteria are to get your subordinates promoted, and how to coach them to meet the criteria.

That can be worth a lot, when it comes to getting things done.

My past company tried to present these moves as a career option while failing to come up with a guide to promotion, and not really having the higher level of technical job. I changed jobs and got three promotions in five minutes by accident.

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