Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs
programmers.stackexchange.com
programmers.stackexchange.com
"this might cause debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion." is a bad set of reasons to close a question. Surely that's the desired result? If people start behaving like children, close the question, but until then, let the discussion grow...
I think the question is relevant for programmers though. I'd be leery of joining a company with such high turnover.
The users clearly want to have discussions, and not just factual Q&A.
And yet when you use these affordances to engage with like minded people, you get shut down. It's become a game with myself when I go to an SO page to guess whether it's been shut down, and the result is often a derisive mental "yup."
And for the record, I prefer a rich discussion to an inferior imitation of wikipedia.
When I found out about it, I thought it could be interesting, so I made a habit of visiting a few times a week to see what it was all about.
I stopped visiting after a few weeks because nobody knows what the point is. 90% of the interesting questions are closed as off-topic, closed because they "belong on Stack Overflow", or are closed because the answers are debatable.
It's kind of silly, really.
I looked, and guess what: Not only did the mods close it out of some insane sense of tidiness, and not only did they hide it from normal viewing; they apparently deleted it entirely. All our writing, all the good comments, all the voting: gone forever, without warning or apparent recourse.
So fuck them and their petty, arrogant bureaucracy. I will never write an answer for them again.
The problem is that any gameified system, like a karma or reputation system, attracts people good at interpreting rules strictly and finding efficient ways to exploit them. So you're actually selecting for literalist rules lawyers.
This specific question was turning into crap fast, with answers like "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." (since deleted). Closing it only prevents further answers, as it was obvious they were deteriorating. Still, the closure and any closure, is reversible, people always have the choice to vote to re-open if they feel the closure wasn't justified.
That's why I consider this the most brilliant bit of Wikipedia's policies: "If a rule prevents you from improving Wikipedia, ignore it." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
There's a great discussion of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_ru...
Last time this blew up on HN, some of the principals of SO turned up here, as did a bunch of mods. They were mostly unable to discuss the issues in terms of serving the audience; they just kept falling back on The Rules. An attitude, I'm sure, which quickly drove off anybody with common sense. So now they have achieved glorious groupthink: everybody they normally talk to agrees with them about The Rules.
For example: If you're worried a page will disappear, go to foo.com and paste the address. If it does disappear, you can go back to foo.com and retrieve the content, link to foo.com instead etc..
In the early days of stackoverflow I seem to recall they had a policy of keeping similar or even duplicate questions. The reasoning was that the extra interpretations of the same question made it easier to find them in a google search. What they have now seems entirely the opposite, content being removed to the point where it doesn't exist in any form. I don't really care if someone thinks a piece of content is on topic or relevant, if it isn't relevant to me I just won't look at it.
And why delete anything? Surely they are not running out of space. I'll volunteer $100 so they can buy another Terabyte to store those deleted discussions.
It works like this: The oldsters perceive that they enjoy a certain elite status by virtue of how long they've been there, and begin to think of themselves as the "keepers" of the community. They also develop a measure of contempt for newbies, perhaps because they (being new) want to talk about things that the oldsters have had a chance to discuss many times before. And perhaps because they (being new) represent a slightly different culture, which triggers stereotypical "kids these days" instincts.
So they begin taking measures to protect the site from junior members. A positive spin is put on it by calling it "upholding community standards", but it would be just as fair to negatively characterize it as "telling those damn kids to get off my lawn." I suppose which one you think it is depends on whether you're the one yelling or being yelled at.
Either way, the terminal point is that everyone has gone to have fun somewhere else, essentially because that's precisely what they had been told to do, and all that's left is a hoary old collection of ossified cucumbers fondly remembering how much fun they used to have and wondering where the magic went.
At an old-fashioned web forum I used to run we toyed with the idea of closing down and archiving old threads after they reached a certain age. The idea was to try and codify our opinion that old conversations might be worth preserving for posterity, but they aren't a substitute for new conversations and shouldn't be used as an excuse to stifle them. Never actually got around to implementing it, though.
It's not 'anything goes', however.
This is a close call, but I agree with the closing in that the post conflicted with the rules. It's possible it could have been worded better to avoid being closed, but even general employee retention strategies don't belong on that site.
The problem isn't that they don't allow discussion, it's that the range of topics allowed is so narrow. There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites, and each one has a very narrow, well-defined (but, importantly, poorly-communicated) breadth of allowable topics. And, if you get the wrong bucket it's closed and that's that.
To me there's only one, and the answer pages sometimes look different when I get sent in from DDG or Google.
My bad, I guess.
It is a mystery to me why a question that yields some answers that are directly about engineers and some that could apply more widely could be considered off topic. One answer explicitly cites the Joel Test. Another specifically discussed the economics of software development, and why the management behavior is pathological specifically for engineering organizations. How much more on topic does one need to be?
Equally, Quora users clearly crave questions and discussion, but Quora moderation/admins police grammar, content and direction so close people can't type free.
It feels hard to think. It feels hard to question.
Remember kids fight to feel free and talk free, in grown-up good-rooms of adults saying we need talk more appropriate and legal?
Little mind is given to little minds, and big minds in hiding.
What do you do, if someone else networked high tells you to change your mind, online?
Feels really hard typing free thoughts, stacked with questionable questions questioning questions.
But how do you find out if turnover is high? Just ask, I suppose, but a manager is going to try to downplay it, since he's selling the company to you. Hit or miss whether workers will be truthful about it, between wanting to be team players and not telling tales out of school.
I'm leaving a place with high turnover now. I had no idea. Although I could have entertained some suspicion when my agency told me how much they love this place; churn is lucrative for some people.
It would be interesting if you could measure this with LinkedIn - as in looking at the profiles of all developers who worked for company X and determine how long they stayed on average. Of course it would rely on people actively updating their profiles. But if you could it would be interesting to see how much high turnover at a company correlated with bad reviews for said company on sites like Glassdoor.
And it will be fairly evident when he does. A place with low turnover would be one where the manager can confidently look you in the eye and declare he has low turnover.
It is rare for hiring managers to be effective bald-faced liars (HR on the other hand suffers from no such weakness), so they will try to dodge the question instead. Dodgy hiring managers is pretty much the signal for "run for the hills".
Guess what happened to that topic. Likely quora was more open-minded in that regard (although not necessarily heaps more helpful, but I digress).
Its also incredibly fragmented - its impossible to pick the right instance for a question without getting in trouble.
its a proper power struggle.
We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion
Seems to be according to the SO "rules".. no?
Edit: davidlumley points out that this is not SO, and he might have a point.. Anyway, I don't think ppl should be mad at SO for not being what they expect or want it to be.
Apart from posting answers, there really isn't much else restricted by the question's being closed. I really think it is not a big deal.
- - Jerry E Pournelle
Any large enough organization tends towards bureaucracy, and the tendency is even stronger on the Web, where direct person-to-person interaction is more limited. And the evolution to "iron law" conditions tends to be faster there also, once the bureaucratic (rule-following and rule-enforcing) mindset is formed. Wikipedia, Google, and Amazon are other examples, they have all been getting worse to use over the last few years. Web-based organizations probably need to remain smaller than similar real-world organizations, if they want to avoid the effect.
SO works great for some formats, but as a discussion board, it sucks. The question that was posed had no clear answer, we could all wax poetic on the pathology and prognosis and cure of the OP's problem, but there's only 1 big green checkmark to go around -- and when it's been doled out, there's no going back. Essentially, every answer to the OP's question in that thread is an opinion and, by definition, is impossible to accurately score.
But as a place to ask advice from other experts and get a feel for how they're inclined to think about the issue, it's absolutely fantastic. And the reason why it's such a great platform for that kind of thing is that the interface goes to such great lengths to discourage drawn-out discussion. By making it hard for argumentative people to dominate the topic, it makes it possible to get a feel for what everyone's really thinking in a way that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented.
It's true that there is one little detail, the green checkbox, that isn't a good match for this use case. At least not if you think of it as a way to pick the one Objectively True[tm] answer. But to think of it that way is absurd. Even with concrete programming issues there's often more than one way to do it, and everyone knows that in those cases and many others the green checkbox really just indicates which option the question asker liked best.
And beyond that, it's just plain wrongheaded to suggest that there shouldn't be room for opinion at a place like SE. It's tantamount to saying that there's no room for discussing the difficult, nebulous problems that real professionals have to deal with on a daily basis, and that the site's really only intended for helping people with the one case in which we can always expect a single objective answer: Homework help.
I'm not saying we can't or shouldn't discuss bigger-picture ideas, but I just think that sites that were built to function more like discussion boards are better suited for such topics vs. sites that were created with the sole intention of discovering a single, "correct" answer to every question.
SO's interface worked pretty well for opinion. Who cares if it's impossible to accurately score? The most useful stuff generally ended up near the top, so readers could quickly find a lot of good material.
As to the green checkmark, a querent isn't obligated to select a best answer. And if they selected one, so what? It pushed one answer up, but readers were perfectly capable of reading down.
SO's behavior with opinion is a classic case of founders saying "B-b-b-b-ut they're doing it wrong". Which is backwards. The purpose of a discussion system is to serve its users, not its programmers. This is exactly the same sort of idiocy that killed Friendster: https://plus.google.com/116014836340643816850/posts/WFH5eDug...
> We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.
And to me (and this is of course just my interpretation), but that means that questions that can only yield subjective answers aren't really meant to be asked there.
Additionally, the FAQ[1] goes into even more detail that I think supports both my and SE's stance; the question ITT is, to me, clearly more under the "and it is not about..." section of the FAQ than it is under the top section.
They even plug another of their sites, The Workplace[2], as being a better fit for "general workplace issues, office politics, résumé help".
Point being, the question the OP asked here has absolutely nothing to do with programming, and thus doesn't have any place on a site that deals exclusively with programming.
But that doesn't really matter. You cite the rules as the authority for what should be there. I agree that the users and the rule-writers have different ideas about what the site should be. I'm saying the rule-writers are wrong, just like the Friendster rule-writers were wrong.
There's an untold number of other industries which face this same problem.
Do some research. It's surprisingly easy to find out what the rate of attrition is with your competitors. If the competition have a noticeably lower rate of attrition then it's time for some introspection.
Exit interviews are drastically underrated. Done right they can reveal a huge amount about why your attrition is higher than most.
Except most people will say "skip them" or "don't say anything bad". I've had this advice from a few people, and there was an HN thread some time back suggesting the same things. "Don't burn any bridges by badmouthing anyone in an exit interview", etc. Certainly there's a difference between "being honest" and "badmouthing", but when that info reaches certain ears, the distinction may be lost. For people that care about having good references, a whitewashed exit interview seems the easiest thing to do (I don't think it's the correct thing to do, but it seems that's a common enough thought process).
Orgs with a low truck number really shouldn't be offering significantly below-market compensation to critical staff in high-demand professions.
Most engineers that I've worked with would trade a good work environment & office culture for more pay / "room to advance" any day.
What's a good alternative for asking meaningful questions and having a quality discussion with people who have words of wisdom to spare? Quora? Reddit? HN?
I just can't come to like Quora, which is odd because it seems exactly the sort of thing I'd like. The interface is either confusing to me, or I think of it in a way that conflicts with its reality.
If you look at the amount of raise, it's usually ridiculously small, maybe 5-10%. When I switch jobs, my salary has grown 30-40% pretty much every time.
And that I never understood. When I leave, you have to spend money hiring a good developer, you have to spend money training him, all while possibly losing money because the work is not being done.
Accepting a counter offer is almost never a good decision.
The old employer is probably only buying time before replacing you. Even if this is not the case: You stay at a company that only pays you fair money when you threaten to leave. You look disloyal to the old company (see point 1, even if not now you might get fired later) and unreliable to the new one. It also perpetuates the "no raises, we'll just make a counteroffer if necessary" mindset which probably made you seek other job in the first place.
A bajillion times this. I've even had HR people admit it off the record that this effect exists and is extremely deliberate - i.e., they get direct instructions from management to "manage out" an employee.
Pay growth as a percentage tends to be higher for talented youngsters, but then again a lot of the value in an older engineer comes from experience, which often means experience in different work environments.
I'm clearly doing something wrong, or the job market here in the UK is a lot more different than in the US than I assumed.
$50K -> 200K growth in 10 years is possible, there's nothing extraordinary about it, but currently the only way to do it is to switch jobs.