Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests | Hacker News Reader

Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

hrdive.com

380 pointstchalla238 comments

When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates a perverse incentive, and the result is political bullshit that is typically misaligned with the company's interests which further drives away your high performers.

End the perverse incentives. Pay your people well if they're doing a good job, regardless of how long they've been doing the same job or what their title is. Reward seniority and loyalty. Suddenly, you'll find that employee retention goes through the roof, and you don't have to worry about hiring new people all the time.

Or at least raise the salary cap alongside seniority for roles beyond a certain level.

Or just have HR actually do their jobs and understand who is and isn't creating value instead of setting arbitrary salary caps...

I'm in the process of changing jobs, not an employee, but I don't think it's HR's fault, but that of managers -- they should know the best what value people bring and what are the consequences of losing certain people be.

The managers (in my experience at least, being on both sides of that table) don't have a shred of power in compensation discussions. That makes it a lot harder for the employee to negotiate (by design). Every compensation decision that wasn't pushed directly by HR got pushed to president-level management (these were in 100-500 person companies)

Almost all of the companies I worked at hired senior positions from outside the company instead of promoting from within.

The other issue I ran into was being so good at the position I was in that I was "unpromotable". Got told that a lot as an IC. Was then told even though I was fully qualified for the promotion, I would not get it nor the accompanying salary.

That's when you know it's time to leave.

And I did.

Also known as sociopaths ensuring there are losers to do the work

> Almost all of the companies I worked at hired senior positions from outside the company instead of promoting from within.

It's one of those things that goes by "Yeah, yeah, we know the studies, doesn't work that way in real life, it's cheaper to just fuck over your employees, pay new employees more, most of the old dumb fucks are to stupid/lazy to ask for a raise/go to an interview", just like work from home used to be. Until reality kicks in, some tectonic shifts happen and they start screaming they can't find good employees.

This is how my last job was, I was there for 7 years, finally left, tripled my compensation (I was very underpaid), and now most of the engineers I know from there have also left.

While I broadly agree with your point, rewarding seniority is at odds with rewarding people based on how good they are at their jobs, from the perspective of incentives. The two are not always correlated and this is often why some companies hire externally instead of promoting from within.

That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others instead of themselves.

Paying for equal performance on the measurable aspects of the job is easier to do than putting a value on institutional knowledge. As an old bird that has had time to internalize the tech stack, I can make one comment along the line of “Don’t do that, and here is why...” — getting that kind of contribution noticed and valued is harder.

Parent comment is really saying to find a way to put a value on institutional knowledge.

I mean isn’t that why vesting cliffs exist? I’d extend them to be for far more money but over far longer if I was the employer, but the job market won’t bare it.

That's actually a really good idea. Reuse an already common tool to reinforce what you want. If you stay here longer than your 4 year cliff we'll refresh you at 1.5x the last schedule. That's about what a company would end up dumping into a person's salary who is tenured anyway.

There's also the military approach where there's a clock and you either get promoted or you are out. And then it repeats. Languishing isn't really allowed as an option.

If a job/task only requires entry level skills, why are senior employees doing them?

Isn't that what Netflix does - or at least doesn't really permit for having an off-year?

Not at all. In fact, Netflix didn't even have levels until very recently. When I worked as a management consultant, about half of people left the company every two years at each promotion gate. Netflix's turnover was far, far lower.

This is often called up or out, too. Many/ most consulting companies do it.

Yes and the parent to yours is saying that leadership are the ones not capable or willfully opposite to > noticing and valuing

From my experience, I see institutional knowledge as a double edged sword - it can save you from some mistakes but, very often, it's also the thing standing in the way of progress.

I don't think I can count how many times I've seen a really poorly designed solution causing real pain, and everyone even knows it's bad, but it will never change until X leaves the org, which they have no intent of doing until they're rolling out on a stretcher. Usually X has been there a long time and knows everyone - often they've created enough messes that only they understand to avoid getting laid off. Heck, if the messes are big enough, they can even look like an above average performer to people who aren't overly familiar - generally never top of the stack though, as that might get them asked to take on more work.

Usually in such cases institutional knowledge has a better chance of answering the question what causes the pain and how to fix it and what are tradeoffs.

> From my experience, I see institutional knowledge as a double edged sword - it can save you from some mistakes but, very often, it's also the thing standing in the way of progress.

I can’t agree with you more. Having a combination of individuals with historical knowledge and new individuals with fresh perspectives can be so refreshing. We recently hired an external architect on the team. She’s great technically. However, I would argue her greatest contribution is fresh perspectives. She suggests ideas others (include me) hadn’t considered due to past negative experiences with team X or Y. By not being as aware of past histories or projects gone bad, she can encourage us to rethink things.

> it's also the thing standing in the way of progress.

The luddite attitude is orthogonal. Does it happen? Sure. But I also have the expectation that senior staff should be identifying the New, Better Way all the time. And are well-positioned to measure “better”. It is part of providing engineering leadership. An old bird that isn’t keeping up needs a job performance message.

Person A didn't do the unwise thing because they knew the system inside out.

Person B did an unwise thing and spent the weekend working to fix the consequence.

If the problem was subtle and management didn't immediate corelate the action of Person B with the problem, they are likely to profusely praise Person B's working their asses off to save the company during the weekend.

On the flipside, if the company only contains A kind of people or if A people are too influential, it's likely that you'll stick in a local optimum where people are not incentivized to try out new things that may fail but may also succeed.

Leadership are mostly also employees by the way.

"Leadership" usually means executives and those folks live in a different world of comp than Engineers and Project Managers, maybe even Product - but I know that bit isn't always truthy.

Seniority has a very real value in tech, though. It probably doesn't have much value if you're say, a doctor, working with different systems each time that look similar.

But in programming, you deal with systems, you know the undocumented gotchas of the system, and understand the flow of it better than someone who's completely new to it. You know when Chesterton's fence applies and when it doesn't. I often tell startups to promote the juniors instead of replacing them with seniors, because the junior who built the system would be able to modify it better.

Even in sales and product, there's some value to understanding what the customer wants and aligning that to the features or a specific pitch and such.

I agree with your general point, but medical doctors are the very last example I would have ever picked.

I think the point is that doctors are mostly interchangeable.

A reasonably experienced surgeon in one hospital in NYC is likely to be almost exactly as great on day one if he moves to the hospital across town.

> you know the undocumented gotchas of the system ... when Chesterton's fence applies and when it doesn't.

All too real. Unfortunately, i do think that relying on such expertise is fraught with danger - because both your bus-factor is 1, and it makes it hard to bring up new people.

In practise, this is hard to avoid, but i think a real senior developer should know to document the undocumented, and to communicate (using various mediums) to ensure that nobody needs tribal knowledge to work on a system.

> It probably doesn't have much value if you're say, a doctor, working with different systems each time that look similar.

You either don’t know what a doctor does or I don’t understand the point you were trying to drive. Doctors spend decades refining their ability to recognize all kinds of issues that have vastly different conditional probabilities of occurring. Internalizing that is the entire value of a doctor over webmd.

Being a doctor isn’t as simple as absorbing a mechanic’s guide to the human body and just doing the same procedures over and over.

I think it would have been clearer if they had said "Tenure" instead of "Seniority"

Yeah, they're synonymous in many cultures (the amount of time someone holds their current post, and not experience skill). But it seems they mean different things in this context.

I think he means that a doctor with 15 years experience after school can change hospitals they work at with minimal impact.

A hiring a senior engineer with 15 years experience, but not at your company, might not compare as favorably to an intermediate engineer with 8 years total experience, but 3 years at your company.

Tenure, domain knowledge, and skill are all pretty different underlying things.

Promoting someone with tenure just because of their domain knowledge is an extremely good way to hit the Peter Principle. You can get people who know the system very well but don't know how to take a step back and look around and evaluate the broader context vs just plugging along the same way as yesterday. Especially if you've never hired someone with those skills to teach them. You also run into bus-factor issues and robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul limitations around "this person's domain knowledge would be useful for this new project, but we've never ramped someone up to take over what they're doing now."

Then there are the people who manage to get tenure without actually absorbing too much of that domain knowledge... so you need to be able to evaluate that, plus skills/aptitude/potential, not just years-in-seat, when deciding who to promote, when to hire, etc.

Aren't these reasons why management is supposed to exist? If they can't figure out how to manage these situations, the issue is with the managers, and the new hiring should begin there.

I think you imply it, but the important part is whether someone can learn a new position.

People quoting the "Peter Principle" usually ignore that it is normal to promote beyond current skill level, since it is common to learn a position when in that position.

The Peter Principle is that eventually an employee hits a roadblock where they are failing to learn the new position. That failure is usually attributed to the person, but I would guess the root cause is usually a lack of training ability within the organisation (not commonly recognised as the problem).

I am not a manager, but I see these stereotypical misconceptions all the time... I'm not accusing you of ignorance at all: I'm just pointing out you could be clearer to help us all!

> The two are not always correlated

Not always, but still I would assume that people with complex tasks generally become more experienced and accumulate specific knowledge over time that makes them better at what they do. Therefore, it should be the default for employees to get a raise every now and then, unless there are clear signs that someone is not performing and the employer is not interested in keeping the person.

Rewarding seniority works if you have a fair system of performance management in place. Assuming your tenure at a single company is directly correlated with your ability to perform well, and grow and improve your value to the company over time, it would make sense.

That being said, when somebody finds that fair system sustainably in place at a company, let me know. Fair and accurate measurement of an employees performance, free from bias and favoritism ... I'm just not sure that's how people work.

False dichotomy. It doesn't need to be free of bias, just bias shouldn't be completely insane like "you must change job every month". In fact there should be bias for merit, but instead employees are uniformly undervalued.

>as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership

In my own very limited experience of mid-size companies, it seems like senior leadership is first on the chopping block when dissatisfaction becomes real. However, the expected value of those positions is much larger due to compensation (i.e. $2e6 x 1 year = $2e5 x 10 years, better assuming execs can find jobs within a few years)

“ That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others instead of themselves.”

After talking to a lot of managers it really seems that a lot of them are deeply skeptical of the people they themselves have hired.

> they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership

It seems to be the case that effective and competent leadership is the exception. Even in the military, where enormous amounts of money are spent on attracting, training and retaining leadership; they're simply aren't very many that are very effective. Mediocre leaders get promoted and that's just what everyone else gets to deal with. Other examples include professional sports, academia and politics. The tech industry is hardly an exception here.

"Reward seniority and loyalty regardless of job title"

Well janitor retention would surely go through the roof, but I think you might lose a lot of upper management and software engineers.

Good

Why? Because they would prefer to keep running on the neverending promotion treadmill? I think a LOT of engineers would rather stay engineers if they could keep getting reasonable raises. The problem is that almost all companies make it impossible to keep getting raises past a certain point _without_ getting promoted.

What counts as a "reasonable" raise?

> Pay your people well if they're doing a good job

Comparing peoples performance objectively in a large organisation is essentially impossible. Only the people working closely with someone really have any idea, and even then they only see part of the picture.

> Only the people working closely with someone really have any idea

And are accused of bias when trying to get raises for their team.

OTOH, I can’t tell you the number of mid (or even poorly) performing teams whose lead tells me that everyone on the team is well above average. (I guess logically that I can only conclude that it’s a team leadership problem causing the under-performance...)

Or a lack of resources? (Unless you're counting that as a "leadership problem")

I think that's not the case in these specific examples I had in mind from history, but is a fair point in the general case.

Mostly true but these days we have the case where regardless of capability it is sadly necessary to put a Ln person to do an Ln's job not Ln+k's job (for political reasons). This has the perverse effect of someone at Ln being punished for doing a job above their level if they are not also doing their own job. What this means is you can only get promoted if you are doing the equivalent of two levels of work at a given time but if you were hired from elsewhere you only need to do the target level job.

From my perspective this is the way things used to work, then we had the pay equality movement which was largely misinterpreted by corporations to mean "Same title == same pay". The problem is that being a Junior on Team A may have the same cognitive load as being a Senior on Team B. I once led a team that was exactly like that.

Saying "end perverse incentives" makes this seem like some moral oversight driven call-to-action but I think it's more complicated than that.

"most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y,"

Eh, most of the people in the established pay range tend to be at the low or mid range, so the company likely has the ability to pay more. Once they're at the top of rhe range, that shouldn't be much of a problem either... but that assumes the range was created using good industry data. If so, then there shouldn't be a better deal somewhere else (or at least very hard to find).

I think there's often better pay elsewhere because companies generally reactive towards employees rather than proactive. This is also reflected by the data showing lagging indicators.

When you factor in how much it costs to have a roll unfilled, hired a new person, then train them, then productively paying to retain your talent becomes a no-brainer

A lot of problems seem like they go away if you assume that you've solved them correctly.

Sounds universally applicable.

The worst part is that after a point in your career there's no path to promotion just for doing your job really well. You are expected to always take on new roles and responsibilities, some of which may not be suited for your personality or interests, and the net result often is that you get promoted and make more money but your overall useful output decreases. I know so many amazing engineers who had to essentially give up writing code, prototyping and tinkering – stuff they were really passionate about – to advance to staff+ levels. Now their time is spent in an endless stream of meetings, and the entire organization is worse off because of it.

Being promoted until you are no longer competent (or happy) is a long recognized corporate antipattern dynamic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

You have the choice of managers knowing what the job is or managers that have never done the job. In general managers that know what the job is are better managers.

True, but there should always be a rewarding progression for someone that doesn't want to be a manager or change role. Because if the only rewarding path they see is to switch employers -or get counter-offers to try and get their wage bumped, then that's a problem. It's also a common theme for companies to be forced to give higher wages to new-hires, leaving their own veterans (that are actually more valuable) behind.

Some companies have a concept of “terminal levels”, which means if you get to this level and keep doing a good job and have no desire to keep chasing promos, that’s totally fine and they’ll keep increasing your comp according to your value, which does increase as you stay and accumulate institutional knowledge, experience, and reputation (and owed favors, political connections, friends in senior places, accomplishments under your belt, etc etc).

Until the next reorg.

If this is your path I'd strongly recommend tenure in a core revenue generating project. Avoid projects in cost centers, especially those that serve small / non-critical business needs or have potential off-the-shelf replacements that could be purchased and integrated into the business. Don't assume that leadership will be rational about replacing an internal system with an off the shelf one, if someone comes along with a mandate for change all bets are off.

Don't assume you can rely on political capital when your area of work is being turned down, odds are there are a dozen other people that are trying the same thing. Leadership would likely want to retain lower cost junior employees with the rationale that they have potential in addition to being cheaper.

All good advice. I’ve made a career out of never assuming the good fortune will last. Sometimes your standing is rooted high enough to be above the reorg; sometimes it ain’t.

It's dysfunctional on the part of the org.

But it's also a Faustian bargain that many engineers knowingly enter into. They are trading their professional coding passion in for more money and status. For some, this isn't much of a loss. For others, it is. It really depends.

I just went from Midwest money to Bay money without moving out of the Midwest as an IC. I'm basically set for life and I know I don't want to be a people manager. Maybe someday I'll be staff/principal but I really don't mind sitting at a terminal level slinging code.

Someone is ought to make a game like factorio out of this: you manage workers with semi-predictable output, and have to pay them out of your semi-predictable profit. You can never lower anyone's salary, only fire someone, and that costs a fee (severance). There is outside pressure that forces workers to need more money - inflation - it's also semi-predictable, but it never goes down. My suspicion is that in a well modeled game like this, there's no steady-growth mode when everyone is happy, and the organisation always collapses, even under perfect management.

Why there is an external inflation force?

These things do not happen out of nowhere. Someone is greedy and has market forcing powers.

> When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money.

Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases).

What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you.

Most people want confirmation of their own beliefs about themselves -- they want the company/boss/coworkers to be showing respect and show that they value your work. People want to see that their work is accomplishing something and a lot of people can go to great lengths to lie to themselves that this is the case. And a lot of people also want progress, they want to see themselves doing new things, getting more responsibility, advancing their careers.

I hired and said goodbye to A LOT of software developers. And I do understand that it is difficult to get an honest, unbiased response when you ask them for the reasons for their decisions to leave.

But at the same time you get to experience trying to get people to stay and seeing what works and what does not. Giving raises works relatively rarely -- it only seems to delay. They are already discontent with their job and the higher salary only functions as a sort of gold handcuffs. After quarter century of doing this I literally am still to see a situation when a developer is offered a higher salary and suddenly becomes enthusiastic about their job to have a long fruitful career.

So what does work? Trying to find what causes them to be discontent in the first place and trying to address it. Do they feel they worked for too long in one project? Are they bored intellectually? Are they not getting along with their current boss? Changing the project without any raise is in my experience one of highest success rate things you can do in this situation. That success rate may not be very high (people tend to leave anyway) but at least I have a lot of good stories of people who changed teams and things clicked for them and they liked their new team. The only things that worked better in the past are changing the project WITH upgrade to the salary to reflect the market, and, for the ultimate highest employee-keeping potential - promotion to manager.

If people really did care mostly only about money, upping their salary should have greater success rate than moving them to another team and yet it is the opposite.

Now... this all assumes software developers and we know software developers are not exactly starving. If you are earning very little compared to your needs or when those needs grow suddenly people tend to really start paying way more attention to just monetary compensation.

We're talking about two different classes of workers here. The article specifically discusses call center workers.

I am not responding to the article but to one particular sentence you have included which I highlighted for your convenience.

This depends entirely on your raises. This year I left a unicorn startup to join a faang and got 100%+ increase in pay. I would’ve been happy to stay if the company could beat it, but they wouldn’t budge past 20%. In fact, I went down in level/titles so arguably, I don't care about the respect nearly as much as I do about the pay difference.

Nah, what you say is valid only for people doing menial tasks.

Sure, cheap developers implementing the same endpoint over and over for 20 years for a paycheck are like that, but a good chunk of them actually cares about solving a problem and get recognition in the form of life changing money.

How is a person receiving calls from customers and trying to solve their problems much different from say my job which is receiving calls from coworkers and trying to solve their problems.

Sure, I am paid many times better and the problems I am dealing with are way more complex and varied and I know a lot of people who are asking me for help, the calls are over Slack or Zoom and the timelines and involvement in the issue is much higher. Otherwise, this is the same job.

But to say that the people who are less capable are somehow composed differently psychologically, more resistant to doing repeatable work... it is the same as thinking that people in poor places on Earth are somehow very much different from us, less intelligent and outspoken. This is simply not true -- just go and visit places (and not just tourist attractions). Go to youtube and see people visiting places. Go to library and read a book about people visiting places.

Everybody says that the first thing they experienced is this feeling of everywhere in the world they thought being so much different, actually being very much the same as home. Buildings are different, views are different, weather is different, wealth is different. But the people and their daily problems are strikingly the same.

People who are paying low wage jobs have exactly the same kinds of problems, they just also have other problems like paying their rent that is keeping them doing the job they don't want to be doing because they just don't have any other option.

I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, I find that a lot of developers particularly younger millennials and generation Z put very little emotional investment in their jobs and treat it as a means to a financial end and nothing more, and honestly I think this is a healthy approach.

So that regard they would prefer more money and couldn't care less care about arbitrary internal recognition, it's a job nothing more, unless you're actually working in a genuinely meaningful field like advancing medical science for example.

Every time I've ever switched jobs (particularly anything revolving around e-commerce) or other meaningless drivel it's been about the money pure and simple.

100%. One counterexample (unfortunately the only one that comes to mind) is sales, where performance has an immediate positive cash & profit impact that is trivial to measure. Top salespeople can earn more than the CEO's of their companies.

In the backend of the org, this is harder to do, because the impact is hard to measure and comes to fruition later in the game.

One solution is to have small teams of engineers that own their companies - ie, millions of tiny startups. That way, brilliant contributions lead to large profits for the contributor.

But how engineers can be fairly compensated in large orgs, I'm not sure. This is a fundamentally hard problem. Removing the salary ranges might help.

> millions of tiny startups.

Sounds a bit like what Google does internally for promotions. Except their execution is failing so badly it is starting to affect the company. And also that I have no faith in this concept any more.

I meant actual companies so that engineers can get the long term benefits of their performance

That's a great idea and honestly I'd love that.

But at the same time you could have the same with bonuses based on how much money your team made. The more granular, the better (albeit there are limits).

> One counterexample (unfortunately the only one that comes to mind) is sales, where performance has an immediate positive cash & profit impact that is trivial to measure.

Nope!

Two salespeople closing the same total value over a year can have vastly different impacts on the business.

Say Alice cares about how well the customers she brought in are doing. She follows up on their experience every six months. She talks to the people in the organisation who fulfills the customer desires. She makes sure there's a good customer--product fit, and her customers are just at that edge where they challenge the organisation to do better without demanding of them the impossible.

On the other hand, Bob doesn't care about how customers do. He just wants to close deals. He finds bad customer--product fits but convinces them anyway by promising rainbows and daisies. The customer is unhappy from day 1, because they never get what they were lead to expect. The organisation is stressed out trying to fulfill unreasonable demands.

Alice is a net positive contributor, Bob is at best neutral -- both close the same value, remember!

That sales performance measures are easy and instantaneous is one of the most damaging myths governing my current workplace. It's really bad.

Most places I’ve seen have year on year bonuses for sales growth. It doesn’t have be a flat bonus for a given year.

So if Alice finds good customers and retains them, she does better than Bob because that customer is retained and she’s finding new accounts while Bob is trying to find customers to replace the sales he lost this year.

It’s not trivial to develop sales incentive programs, I agree, but it’s way easier than doing it for home office people whose job only has a loose connection to revenue and profit and any measure is inherently subjective.

You are fortunate to have worked in mostly good places! I have seen a lot of sales compensated on commission at contract close. It gets as dysfunctional as one would expect.

I still don't agree it's easier, though. If a customer stays, is it because they've received great support or because the salesperson found a good fit?

What I'm trying to say is "if sales get compensated when a customer sticks around, then so should everyone else supporting that customer".

Basically the only good incentive programme is profit sharing (or ownership) applied across the organisation.

Then again turnover for salespeople is often so fast that just doing 2 'good' years is enough, they move on and the company then needs to find a new salesperson AND new customers.

Over the years i've had debates with co-workers when someone changes roles with less responsibly, or goes from managing people to not but increases their salary on if that is a "promotion"

My Position has always been "More Money, with less responsibility, is the best promotion one could ever get"

I think you're generally right (I just took a demotion in title with a promotion in pay), but with the edge cases to avoid:

1. Cul-du-sac promotions where once you're there you don't have a progression beyond 2. Promotions where you end up hating the work

and you'll also have an easier time hiring new people when you need to!

Well said. But my counter argument is: why does Netflix do a revert course and introduce titles back to their job lines? At the beginning, Netflix used to just have senior SDE title. Now, they are starting to introduce more SDE titles into the company. If focusing on retention has been working great for Netflix, what made them change their mind?

Give the people what they want, and they'll give you what you want.

Perverse incentives are borne from cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all rules thought up in rush for a due-dated result requested by a manager who's in a rush for a due-dated result (continue as per stack of turtles).

> Reward seniority and loyalty

Aware this isn't a whitepaper that deeply explores what's better and worse for a company's workforce retention, but "Reward seniority and loyalty" is dangerously simplistic.

From my limited experience with payroll systems, and having groups of employees doing the same role, all on different rates based on how long they've worked for us, is a maintenance nightmare due to the inability to automate things. Salary bands and levels etc. alleviate this, but there are necessarily fairly tight limits where a 10-year veteran's expectations are just unrealistic. There's a point where "everyone doing this role" should be paid more, rather than this individual should get a higher percentage than their peers if their total remuneration would breach some ad-hoc level of acceptability.

I think a simple description of a wickedly-complex strategy is "know your people". This requires managers that have the time and space to get to know their reports, all the way up the chain.

Just two days ago I was discussing an ex-colleague, who had a bad reputation with our previous management (I was actually explicitly told by management not to bring him into my project). He eventually moved to a new company, and is an absolute star worker there. If he was managed better at the previous place he could have been a star there as well.

Immediate thought-analogy: If Managers treated their reports as Customers; if Managers acted as Sales Reps for the company in their dealings with reports, then retention would be less of a problem (also need to know which "Customers" are worth the effort).

But it all depends on what you're optimising for, and every workplace is different. Know which roles are "soldier out, soldier in", and which require 6 months of knowledge absorption to become remotely productive.

A single rule is as efficient as it gets, but it'll rub a majority of the people the wrong way. A rule for every individual will keep everyone somewhat more happy, but it'll be murder on administrative maintenance. Find your balance point on that scale and re-evaluate based on changing macro-economic situations.

> Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it.

I don't agree that this is a trap. sure, leveling systems aren't perfect. but they're based on a key insight: there is usually a limit to the impact an engineer can have for a given scope. if I own a single service/component in a larger ecosystem, there comes a point where it doesn't make sense to keep paying me more money to make it even better if my clients/dependencies aren't keeping up. the only way I can continue increasing my contribution to organizational goals is to broaden my scope and start influencing the design of other services/components I interact with. it's not by coincidence that is a major part of how leveling guidelines are written at most tech companies.

People can broaden the scope without leveling. The purpose of leveling is very frequently to give people hoops to jump through, especially at larger companies. Its purpose is another form of retention.

While its usually pay, sometimes other perks are part of it too. Higher rank = get away with more at most places. If the Staff needs to disappear for a couple of days due to personal reasons everybody wishes them the best. The Junior/Mid will get a lot of questions asked. Thats my professional experience from observation.

When you become low level manager this resets btw, Senior Managers and Directors will want to know where you are, nobody asks why the Director wasn't feeling it for 2 days though.

Other part of it is control. Higher rank means you get to decide which technology and how the problem gets solved and get to play empire building games. Which is fulfilling to some people. Some people want to feel like they are making the decisions, other people like to feel like they have influence on others for self worth. Other people enjoy high level strategic work over doing actual implementation of the work. You pretty much have to get promoted to do strategic style work in tech. My analogy is you enjoy playing a starcraft style RTS where you get joy out of sending the exact right amount of marines to beat that enemy in the most efficient manner, but hate having to do an FPS where you play that marine and have to fight that enemy yourself.

This can only work if you also reduce people's pay if they start stumbling and doing a shitty job.

Too many times in my career have I seen an employer lose an employee, who has a ton of institutional knowledge and performs adequately or even excellently, only to replace them them with someone that ends up costing much more money, and then takes a lot of time to get up to speed (which also slows the folks who help get them up to speed).

It is like they haven't taken the time to even make a rudimentary calculation on the costs involved in keeping the employee versus replacing them.

But accounting and HR will time your bathroom breaks. I guess the watchers don't like being watched, which is why retention isn't a bother for them.

Ha. I had the CFO once call me angrily asking where I was......I was in the bathroom. She told me to get back to my desk. I took my time.

I would have taken that time looking at job postings

These are the people who hate work from home culture. They can't tell who is at their desk in the particular second that they decide it's important.

I had the CIO - and a bunch of HR people - ask me why I was turning up to work at 10am!

I was on the late shift, 10-6.

Turns out the early and mid shift people hadn't turned up so CIO and HR people were manning the Service Desk until I got in.

You'd think they would then appreciate the work done. But no one appreciates a good service desk it seems.

> But accounting and HR will time your bathroom breaks. I guess the watchers don't like being watched, which is why retention isn't a bother for them.

Maybe they should tune the company food to reduce bathroom occupancy. :P

Oh, I've quit 3 companies where I was the CTO/lead engineer where they had to replace me with 5-10 people (backend and frontend devs, QA, devops, plus a manager or two, etc.) costing them enormous amounts of money.

Many times they've hired me as a consultant where I make 5-10x my hourly rate for several months after bringing the new hires up to speed.

Companies place very little emphasis on retention and retaining institutional knowledge. They don't seem to understand that employees who have worked at a company for years developing systems and architecture know where all of the secrets are.

Though it may cost more, spreading functional knowledge across a greater base of people would be more resilient. Even if a company needs to pay an individual 10x salary consulting for a year, it would be in their long term best interest to spread a fraction of that knowledge across a larger employee base and document what is tangible. There is a limit (different for different people) across which an individual cannot cognitively support an operation. With years more growth every person would eventually reach their personal limit or lose interest. It helps to have teams of people that are smart enough to work through new problems and document procedures, playbooks, current states and retrospective reports and rely on institutional processes to maintain a coherent operation. Sometimes money isn’t the singular factor at work.

They went out of business from the added cost, so, didn't work for them.

In most companies, it's good to let you leave, if they need 5-10 people to replace you. You take this as a point of pride, but I see folks like this as organizational bottlenecks.

When I leave an organization, my goal is for them to either directly replace me, or for them to not need to replace me at all. I do this by ensuring that I don't silo my work (by ensuring others are working with me, or under me), documenting everything I work on, and occasionally changing roles.

My specific goal is to help a company grow, not to make them depend on me.

Nice of you to prioritize wealthy company owners over your own income.

Yeah, my goal is to make a company as dependent upon me as possible in order to grow my income, not make it so I'm disposable.

You think you're making yourself indispensable by making the company dependent on you, but you're doing the opposite. You're a bottleneck, and when companies are trying to become more efficient, you'll be top of the list to make disposable.

Growth is understanding that you become indispensable by removing yourself as a dependency, because you uplift everyone around you. At higher levels of seniority, this is what orgs actually care about.

I'm prioritizing myself. My value isn't based on how dependent people are on me, it's based on how well I scale the company. They could fire me whenever they wanted and the business would continue running, but they don't want to fire me, because my value is high. My approach has landed me consistent promos, raises, and out of band stock grants.

If you think you're safe because the company is so dependent on you, you're misguided. You're the kind of folks that are actively targeted.

Ignoring money, I'm also prioritizing myself, because by removing myself as a dependency, I also make it possible to take vacations, and my stress levels are low.

This is a common response to this issue, but I think there is a logical flaw in it.

Employers don't know ahead of time which employees will leave and which will stay. In order to improve their employee retention, employers have to pay _all_ of their employees more, not just the ones that eventually will leave. This changes the math entirely.

For example, suppose it costs 50% extra to replace someone who leaves. In retrospect, sure, giving the sole employee who leaves a 10% raise each year to retain them makes sense. But if you have to give all of your employees a 10% raise per year, just to retain that one person, it doesn't make financial sense anymore.

To be clear I'm not endorsing this system at all! But from a pure financial perspective it makes sense to me and is why, I suspect, it persists.

Presumably not everyone is as valuable or risky.

This is exactly how we look at it. Those who are more valuable get larger annual raises.

Also, during a high turnover period around a year ago, we even bumped a few people up mid year when we normally do salary increases at the beginning of the year. These folks were very happy and I think it earned a lot of trust that we looked at the market rates, determined they were underpaid, and made sure they were at least getting what they'd get paid elsewhere.

There is nothing like an unexpected raise to make a person feel some serious company loyalty. I started a position at a new company a few years back, run by a friend and senior colleague of mine. He had been with me at the previous company and had observed while I fought and fought to get a raise to market rates in that position.

He called me a few months into the gig and told me that he felt I should be making more than my starting salary and that I was getting a fairly substantial raise effective immediately.

I can't describe how good that felt, after having had to struggle to demonstrate my value at the previous gig only to be met with bureaucracy at every turn. I'm still with that company and genuinely love working with them. I make a pretty nice salary, and though I'm sure I could easily get a 20% raise to jump ship, I'm finally in a place where I can say "nah, I'm happy where I am" and not feel like I'm giving something up.

It's almost like you need to identify which employees are key contributors and pay them appropriately. Imagine that.

Easier said then done. Firstly it requires for you to know what you’re doing is both a key project and something in which paying more would be more likely to result in its completion.

Is it though? I've never worked as an actual employee, but I'm working in long-time contracts as a freelancer with companies. I've always found it pretty easy to tell who was carrying a project and who was dead weight. Might be different and harder to calculate for new projects, but for existing ones that are maintained, observing who gets asked when weird things happen and who solves the strange issues usually identified the people who were instrumental. If someone is off a week and nothing moves, that's someone you probably want to keep (and probably also a situation you want to resolve, because that's not a good thing).

Managers responsible for promoting usually aren't in the trenches and getting honest feedback is actually hard.

When asking people about the performance of their peers, you usually get equally positive feedback unless folks are fucking up.

You have a good point though. Perhaps managers shouldn't be asking for feedback on specific individuals, but ask individuals who they go to for help and mentoring.

What you are describing is actually a rare skill / talent. Most people (including managers) do not possess it, IME.

Well obviously it isn’t necessary to pay them ‘appropriately’ (as I assume you’re suggesting that many don’t. It may also be the case that the cost of losing a key employee times the expected number lost is less than the cost of paying them all enough that they’re paid ‘appropriately’).

But I think the more important question is: who are these key contributors? It’s perhaps easy to identify some of them, particularly those who are louder, and perhaps it is also possible to identify those who appear important but are, in some sense, bluffing. But there are also likely those who are key but whom the system for evaluation overlooks. It’s probably better for those people if they leave as they may find an employer who can better recognise their talents (and leverage them and pay them for it). I don’t think I’d do a great job at recognising such key people even among those I work closely with but maybe I’m just bad at that sort of thing.

I think peers in a team always know who is the one who gets almost everything done. Maybe people in managament or in leadership positions don't know, but me in an individual contributor role always know who is the most productive and the one with the most business knowledge of my team.

Obviously identifying key people is hard, or everyone would get it right. Most important things are like that.

(I don't think it's quite as hard as you're making it out, though. Who are the people you go to first with questions about how stuff works?)

Maybe we have a mismatch on what "appropriate" pay means. If the expected cost of losing someone is less than what you're paying them, maybe you're paying them more than what's appropriate. But it does sound a bit like you're falling into the same trap as GP in assuming you have to pay everyone the same rate; I could be misreading you.

In my experience this is a challenge because everyone believes they are a key contributor.

Not just that, but few people have both the depth to recognize competency and the breadth to know which competent people are key.

In practice, most places I've been have a few people who are "obviously" key and then a lot of ambiguity.

I disagree related to the SF Bay Area and the Tech world specifically. It is usually written in the wall who is going to leave if things do not change. Now you could say the upper management can't read the wall, and the middle management might not want to share what has been stated -- or they kid themselves.

I would agree, but employers actually usually do know who is a flight risk.

Good managers and HR leaders will recognize when people are teetering on leaving. Not always, but I've known a few who have given raises to keep people around and knew that others were planning on leaving before they announced it. In a healthy organization you can have frank conversations. Or even ambiguous ones. It's just rare.

"Employers don't know ahead of time which employees will leave and which will stay."

That is their fault. I used to work in a well managed company. It was never a surprise when someone left as career progression was always an open topic between colleagues and supervisors.

You don't know when people are going to disappear if they are crouching and ducking around every corner to avoid management.

> For example, suppose it costs 50% extra to replace someone who leaves. In retrospect, sure, giving the sole employee who leaves a 10% raise each year to retain them makes sense. But if you have to give all of your employees a 10% raise per year, just to retain that one person, it doesn't make financial sense anymore.

Yeah, so basically this argument is realpolitik, machiavellianism, game theory -- things that work 9/10 years, bring in profits but have enormous hidden costs that ravage companies/economies/countries in that 1/10, 1/50, 1/100 years.

The argument is "be a dick as much as you can get away with, because people are sheep and being a dick is a virtue actually". Until a lot of people start being dicks, then we cry about the long lost art of not being dicks to eachother.

>Employers don't know ahead of time which employees will leave and which will stay

I may be a bad example, but I can assure you every employer I have ever left new I was unhappy in my role before I left.

I always have frank and open conversations with my managers about my expectations for growth, wages, etc. These are not Ultimatums, but more "In 5 years I would like to be" type conversations.

Now as a manager I have gotten similar feedback from people that work from me, sometimes you have to listen closely to understand what they are saying in reality as many are not as direct as I am, but the feedback is there

I think managers just simply ignore it in most cases

Yes but sometimes they do - at my last job at a large corporation I was paid 80% below the median rate for an engineer in my area/YoE/etc. - I threatened I would quit and showed them a counter offer that was 30% more than what I was currently making and they said "sorry nothing we can do" so I quit and found a better job.

Not to mention the social load on integrating a new person to a team. Depending on the depth, breadth and number of interactions with other individuals, this causes others to have to also get up to speed on the new person's strengths, weakness, quirks, etc.

I am seeing this recently. Imagine a place that hired dozens of really good developers in 2020. Now imagine that instead of focussing on retention and paying well, they focussed on ignoring the waves of developers leaving and instead on exclusively hiring graduate developers. Now imagine all that domain knowledge that left months ago... compounded by the fact there is only five developers left from 2020...

Totally not a real story at all...

The hazard of retention is creating dependency. Dependency means, not just high bus factor, but opening yourself (the business) up to being vulnerable to another person's superior negotiation position. Then CEOs/boardmembers would have to spread their wealth rather than hoarding it all for themselves. Without a way to force CEO/boardmembers to spread their wealth (unions), I think we can expect companies to do what is in their best interest, maintaining a monopoly on power by ensuring no dependencies.

This behavior is a self serving behavior that is in contradiction with maximizing shareholder value. Reliance upon a reliable person is can be very profitable for all involved.

Of course humans are apes in suits and will actually maximize their own personal interests regardless of what the laws or their job description says.

As a rank and file employee, I'd not want to work with others at my same level who've made the company depend on them disproportionately to their level. Those exist, and they tend to obstruct progress.

The weird thing is, if you, as an employee start to show feint signs of wanting to leave, e.g. by complaining a lot to colleagues, or having an upset look on one's face, usually it is not acted upon, or even not picked up by any manager. If on the other hand you make it very clear that you are unhappy or that you might want to leave, it is understood as you are going to leave anyway, so they don't bother fixing any of the things that you have a problem with. At least that is what I experienced a few times. Instead they start to act as if you don't belong to the team anymore or give you boring or strictly defined tasks. So no wonder, you leave and they find some other employee, in which co-workers need to invest time and effort during a period of about half a year to get them up to speed. Rinse and repeat.

You didn't break up with me, I broke up with you!

I watched one PHB manage out one of the best junior engineers just because they expected young people to switch jobs often.

At my last startup, one of our employees approached this well. This is a very summarized version, but he came to me and said: "I'd like to be paid $X. I think I deserve it and I believe I can get that salary on the open market. I don't want to negotiate on this."

It was a very significant raise but after a short discussion with my cofounders, we agreed and gave him what he asked for. That he was a top performer made it an easy decision.

Doesn’t tend to work at big tech as they have rigid very slow moving (and ill informed) HR processes that only react after they see a bunch of people leaving.

I've seen this in non-tech (with tech workers) also.

What would be your work dynamic if you thought otherwise, i.e. they are not worth it or you can’t afford?

In this particular case, I imagine that person would have left and found another job. They were certainly talented enough to do so. If so, there would've been no hard feelings on my end given that they're just going for what they deserve. If the reason was only because we wanted to but couldn't afford to, then I hope there wouldn't have been any hard feelings on their end either since we had a positive relationship and I would've made it clear to him that we wanted to retain him but simply didn't have the funds to.

When I was at a FAANG, it felt like they had this down to a science. Promotions every 2-3 years. Raises once a year, a few spot bonuses throughout the year, ad hoc equity grants. People still quit of course, but looking back it felt very retention focused and scientific.

Bonuses at all, nevermind a few a year, sound great. Time to send out resumes.

What's the workload at the typical FAANG?

So far there is a pretty serious tempo at my FAANG but the complexity is not very high so it’s really simple work in terms of stretching the brain.

Lots of working with other teams (XFN) so collaboration is almost as important as execution. Pay is good.

From what I've heard, depends upon the FAANG. Google apparently has good work/life balance. All of them are all about making it through the interview process, which is a nightmare.

lot of preparation, and a bit of luck.

Mine is heavy. Working hard and barely meet the expectations. Lot of competition and colleagues are good. Passing the interview is one thing, but staying there is also challenging as they get rid of low performers. (at least my experience).

Tell me you're working at Amazon without telling me you're working at Amazon.

When i started at google a little over decade ago I had to work most nights first year or so just to get that occasional “exceeds”. Interviewing was a breeze compared to that

They do seem to have it down. Startups on the other hand absolutely do not.

You sure? Seems like starts are the place where you find engineers with just a few years of experience getting management roles

A management role at a startup can be:

R&R of Manager Expected to perform as full time IC

and pay of an junior

I guess I'm talking about start ups that went from 10s of employees to 100s or 1000s. In those cases I see lots of young engineers leading teams.

E.g. when I interviewed at Robinhood in 2020 one interviewer was already an eng manager after she graduated from school and joined Robinhood just 1.5 or 2 years before. I don't think that happens now at Google or Facebook or Apple.

I prefer to think of it like flowers from an SO, just because.

"Hey, my valued employee, just thinking about you, and I wanted to send you these additional United States Dollars."

SO's (usually) like flowers. I advocate this approach, mostly because it works. Nothing says 'valued employee' more than periodic raises. And yeah, in the absence of money, additional stock grants have the same flavor.

Having worked both sides I agree.

The Google Moloch seemed to have a fairest system, of course circumstances could be unfair but the process was fair. Most people who wanted promos and fed their soul to the machine would eventually get promos.

Meanwhile in the startup zoo, it’s all about earning favor and avoiding disfavor with a small group of lords.

Yeah, big tech has had it all figured out for a while now. At my company departments would get a target retention number. Going too much under or over that was a problem. If a certain % of employees outside of the top performance buckets weren't unsatisfied with their salaries and leaving, that meant you were paying everyone too much.

It's crazy how much science you can apply to HR once you are working at a scale of tens of thousands of employees. At that point people aren't people anymore, just nameless resources to be plugged into an equation. Kinda like the "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" analogy. Stack ranking follows the same principle.

Not FAANG but at a large Fortune company you have heard of.

Had plenty of promotions, multiple spot bonuses and equity. Not Netflix or Google level comp, but not too far off either. It is a bit manager-dependent(good managers have to stick their hand in the cookie jar whenever it is close by), but I believe that most IT companies have this sort of structure setup.

It works too - if you don't know if you are going to get spot bonuses (or equity) at the new place, it becomes far more of a gamble.

And yet it can also be haphazard and misguided too. My experience has mostly been that the general comp level is high enough across the board, but discretionary/additional equity is almost exclusively thrown at high visibility/pet projects of the moment rather than the most important/impactful work that supports all of those fancy projects. Ie, working on infra has some of largest/widest impact in the company, but rarely merits AE/DE because everything is too incremental, difficult to explain the benefits to non-technical partners, or otherwise invisible to leadership at the levels necessary to grant equity. Losing a core, senior engineer from the database or network team can have a much larger technical impact than a random frontend engineer, and yet the bulk of AE/DE goes to flashy frontend product launches.

I wonder if that was sustainable and the past year of the economy says it wasn't.

Anecdotal, but I’m FAANG and in the process of switching, leveling up and getting paid a lot more elsewhere.

There was a counteroffer when I told my present company about the new offer but it was too little too late.

It’s well known among my peers that to level up or get paid more, you go elsewhere and maybe even boomerang back later.

Agreed - new hires always get the current market rate, which always higher than what existing employees are paid.

Also on the flip side, if you've been in a role longer than say, 4 years, you should interview at other companies. You're probably getting underpaid. (Even if you've gotten a promotion). You don't have to jump ship, just see what's available.

Yes there are also additional studies on "boomerang workers" that fit this new(er) class of people. Ones who despite even liking their job and eventually coming back, seek employment elsewhere because they aren't getting what they should be or aren't fulfilling the role they see themselves fulfilling properly.

That's how intensely underrated retention is for a lot of companies, and how costly it can be when retention isn't seriously looked into.

I'm one of those boomerang employees. It was the best thing I ever did. Left on good terms, learned a ton of new stuff at a few other companies, and ultimately came back a much improved employee, despite being a high performing worker to begin with.

Didn't realize there was a name/term for it, but it makes a lot of sense.

Where I'm currently working, a coworker left a couple weeks ago. He really wanted to stay, he LOVED the company, but his position wasn't a great fit for him and he found something else.

He told me that when he told HR "I hope I will come back some day", HR replied: "until I'm head of HR, no one that leaves will ever be considered again".

When I left my last job (BigTechCo) I was explicitly told by HR and my manager that I'd always be welcome back, just reach out. That company got a lot wrong but the HR department and my immediate management chain really did a great job.

That's the problem though, there are zero incentives in place for managers or recruiters to retain talent. No one gets a bonus when employees stick around, so no one optimizes for it.

I recently interviewed with Stripe for a leadership position and was asked about some of my most impactful contributions with my previous employer. I described several anti patterns that I identified with the development process that would lead to burnout and turnover, then I described the changes I put in place to prevent this outcome. Things like sprint retrospectives, tracking technical debt, prioritizing automation, clearly defining tasks before starting development, validating progress with the various stakeholders, upskilling and managing the career development of engineers, and a host of other QoL improvements to smooth out the development process for everyone involved.

It was immediately obvious that this was a dud in the eyes of my interviewers. Eyes glazed over almost instantly once I started talking about preventing burnout. And I can read a room, so I could have easily switched topics until I found something that received a positive response, but I was so shocked at the response that I doubled down. Needless to say that I did not make it to the next round. But in my view that's a true negative for both of us, because I can't work at a place that doesn't value their employees enough to design a healthy workplace for them to operate in.

I’m waiting for recruitment departments for big companies to learn about moneyball.

Currently the approach is “well we lost someone with 10 years of experience _at our company_ I guess we’ll replace them with some with 10 years of experience elsewhere. Problem solved!”

But really, to bring the moneyball analogy, the guy who left was hitting .380, while the guy you brought in will maybe be a .300 hitter a few years from now once he ramps up closer to the level of the .380 hitter.

So what recruitment should be doing is figuring out how many individual people they actually need to bring in to replace their .380 hitter. That calculation should also inform how much they’re will to incentivize the .380 hitter to stay.

Thank you for bearing with my drawn-out analogy!

Bill James’ stuff works in baseball because there is a very detailed kpi record for every player. Not so much for most devs who’s not super involved in open source

Prioritizing hiring over retention is the least bad thing a company does. Companies do terrible things, like:

- Dissolve good teams.

- Losing great employees for nothing

- Prohibition of documenting procedures (Yes, I've worked on one of these)

- Encouraging bullying behavior.

- 50% of time lost in meetings.

The explanation of all this is that... 99% of the companies where I worked the objective was not profit, they existed only for someone to demonstrate control over other people. Meetings is showing the power of "request a meeting". An employee asks for a raise? We don't give in to employees, etc.

If you understand this, all the weird stuff makes sense.

When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with, they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network. A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen without ICs who know a lot of people throughout the company.

That’s WAI - lots of managers would rather call all the shots.

I don't know what WAI means, but note that I said discovered above. There's a separate conversation to get that work funded and that's where the managers come into the picture. Managers don't discover the work - they decide whether to fund the work.

Works as Intended.

> Managers don't discover the work

I disagree. Have you never seen a manager hired from another place already come in with a bucket list they want to do bc “that’s how we done it at X”? That’s a classic. There are less nefarious examples of this ofc but ime managers absolutely do and even want to discover the work. Now whether they’re the right people to do it is entirely different question =)

I work for a tech company that promotes internally quite well in recent years. But they also only want to hire senior, principal and lead level engineers to develop a mature workforce. Unfortunately, they fail to attract enough talent to replace attrition, which is high due to increasingly paltry employee numbers. And all in all, while the promotion-to-hiring ratio is good, there is too little hiring to keep employees from working 70-100 hour weeks. I am leaving, too, even if I was promised a promotion within months. I suppose the moral of the story is that balance is good, but hiring also must happen to replace attrition.

> increasingly poultry employee numbers

I think you mean paltry. Although I have seen employees who flap about, squawk a lot and shit all over everything, so perhaps poultry is apt.

Oops! Thanks for the correction and a good laugh.

70 hrs/wk is for a rare work emergency.

100 hrs/wk will send someone to the Emergency Room.

Yes, it does generally lead to ER (particularly for stress symptoms being confused for something serious) now and then.

Stress can also cause serious permanent damage, not only transient symptoms that might be mistaken for something else.

If I see a colleague who's too stressed, I'll impress upon everyone the importance of correcting that.

Yes, that's true as well.

Unfortunately, there are certain industries like AAA games, TV and movies where ambitious people are generally exploited through under-resourcing. Crunch is relatively normal, and it does make good economic sense for the shareholders in terms of ROI.

Recently, many people have been leaving these industries because the health/ambition trade-off doesn't make sense for them anymore. It doesn't for me as well, and I'm leaving too.

A lot of good institutional knowledge is lost this way. It probably accounts for the recent decrease in quality and delays of big AAA games.

Ok, to actually add to this instead of just a one liner…

My current employer is a prime example of this stupid mentality causing issues.

They’ve gotten better about it but since I started little over two years ago they’ve had probably 60% turn over of full time team leader and higher staffers. Our poor VP spent the last 3 years arguing with our Japanese President and others about the need for retention policies as we have such a high staff turn over that it was/is costing us money in overtime etc. we were in a bit of a death spiral last year that we’ve luckily pulled out of but we lost so many people due to COVID and similar that we were working people mandatory 12 hour shifts with mandatory OT and kept having /more people/ quit. For obvious reasons. And then new hires wouldn’t last through their first paycheck.

They had to up base pays and bite the bullet and hire a ton of people all at once to try and get shift times lower.

It’s one of those things that makes me glad I’m IT. I’m a critical employee and they bend over backwards to accommodate me when I need it. I try to not abuse that though :)

We are a tier 1 parts supplier for Honda and we operate damn near 24/7/365

I really don't get these decisions. I presume they'd need to pay time and a half there; you might as well just hire more people and bump base pay 12.5%. Everyone is happier due to not being stressed out, and it's the same cost.

This is definitely the opposite of what most of my employers have done. Gotten denied raises countless times which has forced me to find new employment to advance my career while they are 100% focused on hiring new talent. Lots of turnover which cost the companies a tremendous amount of time constantly bringing new hires up to speed.

Losing institutional knowledge is a b*tch. It costs more to get new people up to speed in terms of time and productivity lost, than to just retain people who already have the institutional knowledge.

Yes. We used to work in silos. Dave was responsible for x, Cathy for y. When Cathy left, we were screwed because nobody knew much about y.

So now that I'm the project manager, after Steve builds the new feature then I alternate assigning the bug fixes between two other people who did not build it. That way, at least two other people become familiar with that part of the application while Steve is still around to answer questions and provide guidance.

Here is the MIT Technology Review report the article is referencing but doesn't bother to actually link to:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059470/customer...

Even that is a summary, and if you request the full report you're bounced to a third party Genesys that demands your contact information, while popping up an unsolicited chat bot window. I killed that chat, made some fake info and was sent to a page that was functionally broken... except for the chat bot which had another go at me.

MIT Technology Review should be ashamed of themselves.

This goes x1000 for knowledge work. Great knowledge workers build this amazing model of what is going in in the product they work on in their head that walks out the door with them. We can't prevent people from progressing their career by going elsewhere, but we sure as hell can focus on not giving them a reason to leave.

Yes they should. They should also prioritize ops over sales, and yet they don't.

After 11 years in Enterprise IT it's been my impression that we are very short sighted. We give everything to our sales and they sell everything between heaven and earth without a thought on how we can deliver it. And once the contract is signed, no effort is made to deliver or manage, just move on to the next big contract signing.

So just as they prioritize hiring and ignore retention, they also prioritize contract signing and ignore lifecycle management. It's the same short sighted thinking in another area.

The confusing thing happening over the last 1-2 years (and in previous cycles) is that many current employees are also down significantly on their stock grants in public big tech. Employers seem to see this as ok, and that’s the risk they take when taking stock, yet they are willing to go and pay a new hire with an updated price that means they make far more than you. It incentivizes leaving and wouldn’t cost the employer anything to just re-up your pay to the original goal since they’ll have to pay it anyway to a new person and lose the ramp up time

In terms of number of shares or dollar amounts? Because tech has taken a massive slam in the last year in the markets.

Employees should see that like a lot of investors do, which is a discount on blue chips. It changes the calculus a bit if you don't plan on executing on vest or holding after you do for tax reasons, which makes a lot of sense. But if you're considering a role at a big tech right now and plan to last a few years it's not necessarily a hit.

Dollar amount. It’s a hit comparatively because anyone joining today would make 100s of thousands more for some roles and someone who took the hit over the last year can just go reset their stock elsewhere. Holding for tax reasons makes no sense for public companies. Vested shares count as standard income.

I’ve been wondering about this myself. If you work in publicco tech, all their grants are priced in dollar equiv. So as you say, bouncing jobs right now should give you a ~50% equity boost, if you’re on a 4 year today at your current co. Surely though this is obvious & companies are doing top ups? Or, since they’re all entering hiring freezes / layoffs maybe they don’t can and want the attrition

Customer service/ even technical support seems to be a very little respected area in most companies.

Trying to retain people they don’t respect already seems unlikely.

It makes me quite sad to see how undervalued customer service and support is in a lot of the IT/tech world in general.

I don't think it's realistic (but I wish it were). An example from a Western European country of what retention should look like from my point of view:

Senior software engineer (10 years of exp.) joins company X. Year salary: 80K EUR. This salary is not exclusive of "tier-1 top companies"(but let's not start a discussion about how low or high this number is, please)

- After 1 year. Good performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 92K EUR

- After 2 years. Great performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 105800 EUR... now this salary is starting to look unrealistic

- After 3 years. Great performance, he's the de-facto tech lead of the team. Raise of 15%. New salary = 121670 EUR. Now this is salary is rare for for non-tier 1 companies

At this point the senior engineer considers leaving because in year 4, it's impossible he'll get a 15% raise again (that would make around 140K EUR, and company X is not Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft). So, he switches companies. Company hires a new senior software engineer for 90K EUR. The cycle starts again.

Except at some point you run out of skilled software devs, and suddenly some poor soul is running a 3 man project single handed.

Study? Just one? Come back when you have hundreds. Oh wait, you have hundreds? Well, come back when it costs less to retain than to turn over - Industry, probably

I agree with the title and point of article but it’s not really possible. No company can consistently identify those who are good, pay them well, fend against competitors despite their rising expenses (remember paying people more?) and do all of these things while people leave anyway for reasons outside of their control (moving, bored etc), which results in you having to hire more anyway, stresses the before mentioned process (inevitably you will notice people who are paid less can perform as good or better than more paid employees).

If I were in a position to implement things I’d simply get rid of raises all together and simple give people only stock and/or profit share. If they’re doing well the raise will come to them automatically. Of course this has perverse incentives in itself too.

They can’t do it perfectly but they can try. My pov having been at a few big techs is they aren’t even trying.

I think an article trending earlier yesterday is a big point to strengthen this.

Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320294]

Especially in startups losing knowledge is a huge problem -- I claim -- and a fundamental management issue as productivity models and other resource management models (theories) do not account for memory.

Who had someone left or themselves left only for X system to start dying in production? Or for a lot of info to have been lost because it existed on slack or on the conversation participants heads?

Startups can simply not afford to lose some/most people. Best case that knowledge is at the hands of competition.

It seems to me employers don't see employees as a (good!) target for investment anymore, the idea that you can build your workforce, but rather are obsessed with transactional labour: I have X currency, I want Y FTE of credential Z for it.

Transactional attitudes begets itself.

There is a saying that in any organization, there are people doing the job, and there are people keeping the organization (admin). In the long run, the organization is left with the admin. [0]

In terms of compensation and hiring, commonly the package is defined by HR while the performance is reviewed by your team manager. There are even places where the criteria of evaluation is defined by HR.

That's also why I'm very optimistic about start-ups. Company can never dominate a market forever. And the end of the day, all companies implode

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158

The article talks about employees in general. A lot of us are SWEs or adjacent. Software has a very short development cycle compared to other fields.

Whom you retain (or might want to retain) is a function of whom you hire. Having just finished a job search it's amazing how bad many outfits are at hiring, most it seems can't read CVs. And I'm the one who needs to have attention to details?

I have a phrase that sums up the process:

How you hire is whom you hire.

Put another way, if recruiting / hiring is off target, that's only going to magnify going forward.

Amazon hit this in a big way in their warehouse operations.[1] Their turnover is so high that they ran out of suckers willing to work at Amazon.

[1]https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...

Margaret Thatcher (in)famously said that there was no such thing as society. By that she meant that, actually the only thing out there is individuals looking after their own self-interests.

Well, it is the same with companies.

In both case this leads to suboptimal results at 'system level' (a well-known problem in system optimisation).

Thatcherism has little basis in actual sociology in my opinion.

Societies do exist, and humans are not purely selfish rational beings either.

Humans are not rational but you can bet that they will act in their perceived self-interest more often than not. They will always do in the workplace, which is the point here.

> Thatcherism has little basis in actual sociology in my opinion.

The entire basis of Thatcherism is dodging tax on riches made by selling the entire society.

A Thatcherite view of the world and humanity is unsustainable over the long term. It causes a hideous, selfish and cruel society.

Thatcher's advancement an individual self-interest oriented worldview is certainly advantageous/correct for her to say politically.

But the name for the 'system level' of a collection of interacting individual humans would be ... society.

Her statement is also deeply incorrect that individuals are solely interest-driven -- they're also value driven (though I suspect like many effective politicians she damn well knew that regardless of what she said). Of course, with companies, her statement is significantly more apt.

Why? Information spreading across companies with talent poaching sounds beneficial for the society

One weird trick for retention: pay your valued employees the market rate for their talent level... even if they have made the mistake of staying at your company for more than two years.

This article is incredibly barebones, there's almost zero actual content here, just some handwaving about studies and surveys that aren't even linked to.

This is a microcosm of poor performance management. You need an effective way to get rid of bad hires, clear out dead wood, and retain your top contributors.

Pay people well.

Most companies will pay people the absolute bare minimum to get them to work there while barely being angry enough not to quit.

Correct. If your optimization horizon is two weeks to a quarter, this short termism makes sense. But if your horizon is further, pay people well.

We needed a study to tell us this?? Anyone who's tried to hire should understand this implicitly.

This will make employees uncompetitive and shift more power to employers.

They needed a study over this?

Duh. Most people learn the job on the job.

"No Shit".

duh

They should also stop building open office plans, as numerous studies have shown.

I'd like to see a study which analyzed corporate management as a cult and looked at the irrational non-profit-motive based behaviors that you have to 'signal' in order to work up the ladder. Where decisions were more about peer approval than actually making the company better.

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