Ask HN: How do you judge if an employee should be retained?

One thing missing here is your relationship with your manager. You could be a star employee, and have a crap relationship with your manager, noone is going to fight for you to stay. Conversely, you could be a mediocre employee and have a great relationship with your manager, and be paid oodles and oodles to stay because you do have someone singing your praises.

It's all about perception, not reality.

Good point. So maybe ADVERTISEMENT (have you advertised to your peers what you have achieved) and LIKEABILITY (are you liked) are two more variables to consider.

> MARKET VALUE What is the employee worth to another employer? This can be judged fairly easily with some quick googling and job posts.

I disagree, I don't believe you can get a clear estimate of the value generated by the role from job posts -- you see one component of labour costs that employers are willing to pay, which gives a lower bound on the value. value > salary_costs + other_costs. The cost is not the same thing as the value. The value might be 1.5x or 2x or 20x or 200x higher than the cost of the salary. That gap between value and cost might not matter unless you are in a very strong negotiating position where you have an effective monopoly on your skillset and the company has no alternative.

From the company's perspective:

(1) how much value does the role create for _this_ company. This sets a hard upper bound on how much the company could rationally pay for the role.

(2) how much would it cost the company to go out to the labour market and hire, train and retain a new employee to fill the role. or perhaps, how much would it cost to transfer another employee internally from a less critical role to fill the gap and hire externally to backfill that less critical role.

(3) what impact does the decision have on other employees at the company? if other employees come to know that one employee negotiated a large raise, will they also ask for large raises? or conversely, if employees see some of their colleagues quitting for big pay rises with other companies, will a bunch of people resign at the same time and leave some projects / products / teams unable to function.

If you want any substantial raises within an employer, you really need to be 'promoted' somehow - new project, more employees reporting to you, new responsibilities, etc.

MARKET VALUE - its often the case that an employee is worth more to a different employer (where they can bring their experience) than the current employer (where they have experience, but other people have the same experience and can train someone new).

SKILL SET - the employer may not need whatever skills the employee has, particularly any new skills that have been developed since being hired. If an employer judges that a role can be filled with someone with, say, 5 years of C++ experience, and they hire someone with 5 years of C++ experience, and that person stays for 8 years, that doesn't mean that the employer values and will pay for those three extra years of experience, they may prefer to loose them, and replace them with some new person with 5 years of experience. Employers like people who are minimally qualified for a position. This is why you need to use whatever new skills you have gained to be 'promoted' or find a new role (internally or externally), you can't expect an employer to start wanting new skills and experience in the same role that they didn't originally hire for.

HISTORY - this depends a lot on other people in the organization. Did you learn all the 'historical and legacy knowledge' from senior management / founders who are still there? In that case, they can teach that to someone else, just like they taught it to you. This is only valuable if those people leave and you are now the only person with the knowledge, otherwise you can never have more value than the original people that taught you, according to this metric.

Basically, if you want to earn more, you need to find ways to move into new, better jobs / employers, you can't try to turn your current position into a higher paying one.

There are some other metrics that are important too:

TEAMWORK - Does the employee work well in a team, share work, help others be productive?

LEADERSHIP - Is the employee showing leadership, and a potential replacement for any management employees that leave?

NETWORK - Does this employee have contacts across the organization, and bring people together? Have they referred people in their network to join the company, become clients or vendors?

I suggest you measure COST TO YOU if you lose them. That would be the loss of productivity + cost of hiring somebody new + cost of training + risk of that person not being as good.

Keep while the gain from keeping someone exceeds the cost of keeping them. This could be money, talent, impact on the work environment, ….

Humans aren't rational, and are particularly bad at assessing each other and performing cost benefit analysis.

True, but managers are paid to do so.

Simple. If it costs more to replace him/her. Thats all theres to it.