Management Debt

bhorowitz.com

13 points·jayliew··3 comments

"An excellent engineer decides to leave the company because she gets a better offer. For various reasons, you were undercompensating her, but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company and the engineer in question is not your best engineer"

Why isn't the root cause addressed? If this engineer was a key player, what made her decide to look elsewhere for a job? The decision to jump ship is always made long LONG before the interviewing starts.

One could reason that she opened her eyes and realized that she's a key player, but unappreciated. Shouldn't that have been uncovered in a 1:1?

> "An excellent engineer decides to leave the company because she gets a better offer. For various reasons, you were undercompensating her, but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company and the engineer in question is not your best engineer"

Umm, that's not the biggest problem.

She's not the company's best engineer and she's leaving for more money than said company pays said any engineer, including the best.

That tells us that the best engineer is underpaid too. And now she probably knows it.

Many companies think that they can hire better than average folks for industry standard, aka average, salaries. How many good engineers can't compare two numbers that are in currency units?

You can't compare numbers if you don't have them. Aside from partially-reliable anonymous sources like Glassdoor and Vault, how do you know what an engineer of her experience and skill set is making in her area?

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