Why Top Talent Leaves
forbes.com
forbes.com
Apparently that approach works for some corporations. Getting rid of top contributors at least makes management's belief structure valid and gives their world a kind of simplicity and intellectual coherence that's hard to achieve on a large scale. (If you can't help believing something that isn't true, you had better make sure it is true in the part of the world you care about.)
Good managers know the people they manage and know their diverse capabilities. That's hard work, though, so it isn't for everyone.
I guess HN should cater to both technical and non-technical founders - maybe a sub-area of HN? (I know that's probably not in pg's intentions, and sounds a lot like the Reddit approach).
Why, this one is easy to explain: because they can and because being a top contributor correlates strongly with caring about more than the paycheck. If you care about the quality and meaning of your work then working in a crappy organization hurts you more than the guy who just does not care.
Why shouldn't the top contributor worry about his pay check or money?
Top contributor != A person who does great work for free.
Unfortunately this is how it is perceived in the industry. I've seen managers consider top contributors who look for money as evil wealth grabbers. Whereas a guy who does nothing sitting in the next cubicle is still acceptable.
Back here in India, this mentality is so common and prevalent that it assumed if you don't become a manager within 5 years of you joining the industry you are fit for nothing. Also managerial posts are supposed to be mean't for the best as you mention masters of the universe.
Many people even express shock, when someone above 27-28 codes or is involved in some tech work. Its considered as a sign of incompetence and under performance, like as though the person isn't really ready for the 'actual' stuff yet.
This has already let to huge problems in getting work done in large Indian IT firms. There just aren't good people anymore.
Such odd thinking. So... you do coding for a few years - doing stupid/wrong/mistake-filled code - to work your way up to "manager", then oversee people who are also doing stuff wrong. And if you actually learn during those first few years, and, say, get to 30 and are good at developing and actually can develop well, you're an outcast/outsider?
What other industries does India have this same mindset in?
Sometimes these developers are good managers as well, but arguably more often they aren't.
> it doesn't explain why top contributors are more likely to leave than mediocre contributors I think one can presume that top talent have more options so its easier for them to leave, also the probably became top-talent because they cared more than the average developer and thus more likely to be bothered by mismanagement. I think this could be presumed to be common knowledge and thus not need to be explicitly stated in the article.
When is a marriage irretrievably broken? If you take the moment that the divorce actually happened and you rewind say, 1 day, it seems unlikely that you could get the couple to reconcile then if they were irreconcilable just the day after. And in all likelihood you'd have to go back years to get to a point where reconciliation would be possible, where one or the other of them had not made the decision in their heart, perhaps without even consciously being aware of it, that the relationship was over and on a denouement to eventual permanent separation.
The same dynamics apply to employment. If you rewind the clock one day or one year from the point of separation you probably cannot fundamentally change the glide slope that results in an exit from the company. And like marriage and divorce the "reasons" are probably not so simple, not down to one solitary action or cause. More likely it's due to an incompatibility of life goals, lack of mutual respect, failure to communicate openly with one another, and problems with basic chemistry.
I have seen employees (good, high-caliber talent) who are immensely passionate about their job and they keep throwing themselves into the maw of rejection that their local corporate culture exudes. They keep banging away trying to make things better. Nine times out of ten they get rejected outright, and the 10th time they get dragged over broken glass getting one little change made. That sort of thing wears on a person just as surely as fighting with a spouse drags on a person. And one day things just start to click a little differently and they see a future where they are no longer working at that company, and they don't hate the idea.
Life in most large corporates starts with heightened expectation in the first few weeks/days and from there on its a constant decline and a complete mismatch in what the person expected and what the actual reality is.
My experiences have been horrible, I've seen a never ending timeline of nepotism, biased behaviors and partiality in large companies. Endless bureaucracy, politics and socialist style of 'one works, everyone else leeches on him' style of working very common.
Its this bitter fact is what causes the maximum attrition of good people from the company and not the inevitable boredom that happens with historical baggage.
Good people management as discribed in the article and the linked articles can mitigate this. Really good companies may add a cpuple of years, perfect ones may retain you forever if they exist at all. But sooner or later you will get something different, not necessarily better. Sad thing is that alo tof companies, and I don't mean your direct boss here but companies in general, do near to nothing about it. The end result being that the whole system is nearing the absolute average, the talents either being bosses (if they adapt, pgs essay on popularity comes to my mind), burned out and disillusioned (pretty likely) or start-up founders (where possible and hopefully successfull).
If employees were emotional and flighty it might be better. Something happens, and suddenly an employee quits. That gives the employer the time for a "baby, baby what's wrong? how can I make it right?" moment. In reality, there is no single one breaking point, it's a subtle and gradual process and the ultimate feedback sometimes comes as a surprise to the employer.
Just like in any relationship open communication and sensitivity is necessary. If you are a manager you have to always be on your toes. You have to wonder if the experiences that your team are going through right now are the sort that could harden their hearts to a degree that would drive them away from the company a few months or years down the road. If you don't realize such things, and you don't try to open a line of communication to get these subjects out in the open so they can be worked on or worked around then you're like the oblivious husband who doesn't notice his wife growing colder and more distant until you see her bags backed by the door.
Professional relationships are different from friendships and different from romantic relationships but a lot of the fundamentals are the same.
Many large companies exhibit stereotypically abusive behavior. They take and take and take and they don't typically back off until they hit a brick wall. But as mentioned above by then it's already too late. If you've ever wondered why the top talent seems to always evaporate out of big, soulless companies and over to smaller startups, well, this is precisely why. Even if the big, soulless companies had it in their hearts to do whatever it took to retain top talent the only thing that's really at their disposal is money, everything else they wield with too much insensitivity to actually matter to an employee's decision to stay or go.
Edit: also, big companies tend to do silly things like shuffle people around between managers as if the relationships between people and their managers were interchangeable and inconsequential.
When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for the sake of organizational effeciency become necessary. These compromises happen for the sake of allowing teams interact with hundreds or thousands of other developers to produce a large product (often at the oversight of a nontechnical executive). This is a serious turnoff to star workers who are self confident and prefer to do things their own way. Said star workers know their own worth and would prefer to work on their own terms again sans constant individual compromise, so they leave.
Mediocre programmers, lacking the confidence to leave, have a much larger threshold for such individual compromises for the sake of the organization. So they stay.
Striking a balance between enough process to keep everything on track and allow PMS to make predictions about the project timeline while not stifling your best programmers with a system they end up working against is not an easy task.
I'm not sure the analogy works, but this was my struggle moving from startups to enterprise environments. Personal contribution matters, but there can be no heroes, because the totality of the business is immense. This thinking requires a bit of abstraction on the business side and coming to terms with the fact that you're a member of a team (and there are many other teams all with different relative importance). A cog in the machine? Perhaps, but a startup is just a tiny machine, and when you scale, as is the nature of a successful startup, you do so by adding cogs and thus increasing the size of your machine.
I firmly believe that process doesn't really keep things "on track" as much as it forces the business the choose between competing priorities, and it forces communication. It doesn't matter if it's Agile, XP, whatever -- you need three things for process to work: 1) defined owners with the authority to set priorities, 2) defined intervals when those priorities can't be changed, and 3) agreement between the involved parties that they'll stick to the process.
Precisely because of worker analogy, people leave.
Departments that are not profitable can survive. If they were separate companies they would go bacckrupt. The free market "Only the fittest survive" motto doesn't apply to them. This is also the main reason why most state-run oranizations are ineffecient.
"People join good projects and leave bad management"
I posted a few words on it a while ago -- http://joshuaspodek.com/people-join-good-projects-leave -- that says the professor I heard it from, Michael Feiner, plus links to more about him.
Anytime somebody tells me "there's only one reason this happens," I get suspicious. Life is far more complicated than that.
Am I the only one who thought that this was extremely unspecific? Many factors go into managing an organization- I'm curious as to which factors I should focus on to help motivate & reinforce top talent. The only details provided by the author are accountability and reward systems.
While big and growing and profitable it is noticeably disturbed that the best people keep leaving. It is trying to fix that and failing miserably.
Here is what is making me leave.
1. Severe lack of control over how I work. A new, crappy source control tool is being shoved down our throats over our objections.
2. Because it is not a tech company, but a company which happens to have software development department, IT has washed their hands of us, and is in fact in open warfare with us. Fun!
3. Software is always seen as the problem. Just don't take it personally. This was told to me by a very senior manager who has been here for many, many years.
4. Official corporate policy STRONGLY discourages contact between software and the rest of the company. Contact I might use to try and fix that "software is always the problem" perception. But nope, not allowed to try.
5. The director of engineering tends to undercut us at random instances. For example, while I was the tech lead on a project he decided certain documents must not leave the company because they ware too sensitive. I was not consulted. It made my job 10x more difficult. Other documents which contained the exact same information + more, were sent out like free hot cakes.
6. A couple of hyper confrontational, screaming, perfectionist control freaks which are cronies of the director of engineering and I happen to report to one of them. Not actually the worst boss possible. Within that loud control freak perfectionist there is a mostly rational engineer. Who is also very technically competent. He just sucks big time as a manager and dealing with him is incredibly emotionally exhausting.
At one point he become so frustrated with another member of our team he literally gave up on him and dumped managing him in my lap. My management of him consisted of talking to him calmly. This resulted in him over-delivering on all his assigned tasks.
7. Corporate red tape bullshit bureaucracy.
8. My team has a few open positions (go figure!) one of them happens to be damn near identical to mine, the position is advertised for 20K more than I am getting paid. This is after I have asked for a raise. After I took a huge project that was supposed to be a train wreck, saved it, shipped it on time, and made a ton of money for the company.
I have an interview with another smaller company at the end of this week.
> the position is advertised for 20K more than I am getting paid
In fairness, it's pretty much accepted that you have to switch companies to get a sizable (say, 10%+) raise in IT. Not that it should be this way... but I think it's that way pretty much everywhere.
More people need to understand this. Slaving away hoping to "stand out" doesn't work in IT because of caps on compensation increases.
While big and growing and profitable it is
noticeably disturbed that the best people
keep leaving. It is trying to fix that and
failing miserably.
He was specifically trying to boil down the One True Reason. Here are the original 10 reasons that were the raw material: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/12/14/top-ten-r...
Source: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-... (original seems to be deleted from blog.pmarca.com)
Anyway I wonder if something like that is applicable here. Free agent mindset is a bitch for management because, like business ethics professors, they are mostly interested in how well you comply with their demands. As a result the emphasis is rarely about how you ensure that top talent has the freedom that makes their jobs worthwhile.
As a manager currently, I can tell you how I deal with free agents ready to do the next thing: I let them go, and plan ahead for their departure.
1) Have a free agent mindset (I can go if I don't like it here)
2) Are more loyal to the company than to their managers, and
3) Have no respect for the chain of command?
I have 16 direct reports at Twilio and ~50% of them are this type. I am grateful for every day they wake up and say, "Yes I am happy going to work today". I work to earn that time by supporting their goals and projects, empowering them to set their own course, and sketching a rough outline of the goals we have to achieve. I try to find ways that our mission as a company is aligned with their own passions and interests, and try to keep us in sync around if they're satisfied.
And someday, when they leave and build their own things, I will support them and I hope we will have our own Twilio "startup mafia".
Sometimes implicit beats explicit.
The explicit is performance reviews, which can be cherry-picked. The implicit is the list of projects someone was entrusted to work with. People will more freely give the gamut of projects they've worked on than the gamut of performance reviews they've gotten, and most clever people realize this, so after a few dud projects they look elsewhere.
Yes. Yes. Yes. One thousand times, yes. If you're asking me to dedicate my waking hours to something, be clear about what that something is. Hint: It's not your corporation.
I've interviewed at several companies, and the only ones I rejected out of hand are the ones that are just "doing business" and have ceased to chase some vision.
Some companies do really cool stuff, but have no vision (e.g. most of Lockheed Martin) whereas there are companies who do something seemingly less exciting (e.g. Yelp) that have a vision for how they're going to change the world.
In Yelp's case, they're helping great businesses thrive and be found and holding bad companies accountable. As an Aero guy, I'd be predisposed to Lockheed, but frankly, when I talked to Yelp, that kind of thinking made all the difference.
The most talented people are like airplanes. Fly them slow and they tend to crash.