Why people leave companies
qz.com
qz.com
People will "work all the time" only if they love their job and the company more than their significant others, their friends, their children, their health, etc.
If companies consider a "good fit" someone who is willing to give up their personal life for the company, it's not surprising that it's hard for them to find people to hire.
"2. People do better work when they have lives of their own..."
This seems to contradict item #1: if you work all the time, how can you have a life of your own?
One more thing: The author of this article is an HR person, so the only thing she knows about why employees leave is probably based on what the employees choose to divulge during their exit interviews. Employees are generally not going to tell HR that "I'm leaving because my boss is an asshole", since that would be burning bridges - word could get back to the boss, and the employee would never get a decent reference from them. A smart employee would realize that they have nothing to gain by telling HR their real reasons for leaving, so they'd say something generic and inoffensive like "I'm leaving to pursue other opportunities".
This is particularly not true inside the tech industry: good employees are constantly harassed by other companies. They will offer higher wages, shorter hours and tons of other benefits to make a wanted engineer turn. Sometimes those offers are hard to turn down, even if you are pretty happy with your job.
What I've seen happen to me and friends is a simple matter of chosing to be honest or not. Last time it happened to me I sat down with my boss and told him:
- Boss, these guys want me pretty bad, they have been harassing me for months now and I turned down every offer. Problem is, they gave me this X offer now and, taking into account that I'm getting married next year, the extra money would be handy, this is getting hard to say no.
He gave me a counteroffer and we lived happily ever after.
Bottomline: sometimes the employee does not really want to leave, but it's a tough market out there. If you want to keep your engineers (and other employees as well) you simply have to be a better workplace than the others. This includes money, benefits, hours, bureaucracy, stress levels and every other possible aspect that your employee might take into account.
It's not really that different than building a product which is better than your competitor. Problem is that H&R and Hiring guys want so bad to make a case for themselves that they try those magic and golden rules that simply won't work.
You are dealing with people, be nice to them and they will be nice to you in return. If they don't, you don't want them in your ranks anyway.
There is no fair way to pay people. It is a supply / demand and negotiated marketplace. There is no such thing as I am work $100k/year because I did XYZ and know ABC. I mean that may be true this second, but it is as only as true as the most up to date data. And is not true in any absolute sense.
It demands honesty from both parties and any employee must understand exactly what you said: companies can't give all the employees want. You have to know your own value and make yourself valuable to the company first, then ask for recognition.
The Pink Floyd song put's it well "When you ask for a pay rise it's no surprise they giving none away".
What does work for getting a pay rise is:
1. If you are genuinely paid less than market then prove it by getting an offer from another company.
2. The other option is to get promoted into a new role. As a developer that usually means becoming a manager - so even if you could add 10* more value as say an "architect" it may be more profitable personally to become a manager.
There may be other more 'ruthless' ways too. I am not ruthless enough to know about them!
But all in all value and pay are roughly correlated but increasing one doesn't necessarily increase the other.
If they are making specific offers to people who haven't interviewed with them, that smacks of desperation to me - maybe there's a good reason why they're having so much trouble hiring that they have to pull these stunts.
If you go to your current employer with a "We are willing to pay up to X for the right candidate" offer, then they have plenty of excuse for ignoring it if that's what they care to do, so it doesn't seem to have much value over just asking for a raise if you want one.
The real bottom line of that point was that interviewing with other companies is kind of a pain, and employees generally won't do it unless they've already decided they want to move on. Other companies usually don't give specific offers before a round of interviews, so by the time your employee has an offer in-hand from another company, it's too late to be making counter-offers. Better to both do your best to watch the market and give raises that match the market, rather than just cost of living, and to cultivate an environment where unhappy employees will be comfortable telling you why they're unhappy before they go looking for another position.
> He gave me a counteroffer and we lived happily ever after.
It's not a counteroffer the author talks about. She talks about "Boss, I'm leaving" situation.
I have worked at places where latter hires made more than former hires (same equity), this disgruntled the former hires and there was a loss of experienced people. Simply bumping people up to the company average could have retained their better employees.
You gotta laugh. Or cry. I forget which.
The very next sentence then immediately says this:
"People who love their job and the company will work all the time anyway. If you’ve hired good fits, you’ll see this happen."
Uhh.. so you want to replace mandatory week-end over time, with an informal criteria where good fits work all the time anyway - thus if you don't work on the week-ends (of your own """choice""") you confirm you aren't a good fit?
Now, there's nothing wrong with working on week-ends when there's a deadline or an important milestone, but substituting explicit expectations with implicit ones is flat out horrendous and it means that you have to constantly read between the lines to find out exactly what you have to do.
- People who are a good cultural fit don't mind working all the time
Therefore:
If someone minds working on week-ends - then they weren't a great cultural fit. It's almost Calvinist in its logic.
As you said, there's absolutely no problem working on week-ends when it's needed, or getting really caught up in an exciting new tech and spending evenings getting it up and running. However - when this become (implicitly) expected as a marker of good cultural fit, you've basically placed it as a burden for everyone.
I disagree with that, on the basis that deadlines and milestones are artificial constructs of the company. It should always be wrong to work on weekends.
I worked for 15 years for a Fortune 100 company and I experienced probably five or six 'crises' each year that required me to work unusual hours.
The worst case in each scenario was that the company might lose some money; the most common case, though, was nothing at all; it had been declared that we would be 'competitive' by an arbitrary date and it was all-hands-on-deck to meet that target.
Looking back I now understand and regret that neither of those cases are anything I should have worried about as an individual person. I gave my personal time to the company simply to avoid being sacked; that doesn't seem like a fair trade.
A good manager will keep an employee engaged, challenged, and happy. In fact managers can achieve this even if the company itself is not engaged, challenging, and a happy place. Good managers can also shield employees from an array of terrible dysfunction at the company level. All good managers I've ever had have this skill. A bad manager will not only expose company dysfunction, but magnify it, making the employee's job more difficult than if the employee has no manager at all. I've had the latter several times, and it's soul-draining.
The rest of the article reads like a novice's take on the SF startup scene, which I happen to loathe anyways. One funny example is the #7 HR comment, which exposes a pretty big misunderstanding about HR. HR serves no useful purpose to the employee; it exists to shield the company from problems, nothing more. Improving HR will have no meaningful impact on employee retention.
<Edited for tone.>
I left because I was told that due to it being academia, I was hard capped at essentially <2% yearly raises unless I swapped jobs out and back, and holding myself to a hilariously low academic salary this early in my career was going to really set me back financially in the long run.
I've also been privileged to work with HR people for whom the adage "never trust them" was completely false, because they were good people who happened to work in HR. So there's that, too. They were excellent sources of advice and problem-solving help when needed, and I consider at least one of them a friend even now that I no longer work for the company.
So it sounds to me like you're projecting, and kind of being rude about it?
> I've also been privileged to work with HR people for whom the adage "never trust them" was completely false.
I'm glad you had a good experience with HR. Being able to be friends with an HR employee does not invalidate the axiom that you should not trust an HR rep in matters of your career (happiness). There is too large a body of negative examples out there in order to safely ignore it. Everyone can of course can and will make their own choices, but I stand by my previous statements.
HR is not a union for employees. HR is there to protect the company: It just turns out that the company's theoretical (keyword there) interests and the employee's interests align frequently (e.g. keeping the workplace free of discrimination, keeping employee morale up).
HNers are soooo logical!
I have never worked at a company in 13 years that has done a pivot. There are companies out their doing the boring (but still profitable) stuff y'know!
Also I have never worked at a company that expects me to do routine unpaid overtime over the contracted hours. But I have worked in UK/Australia with different culture. UK is best 25 days annual leave + public holidays, and often no expectation to work more than the hours you agreed when you signed up (which is fair enough!).
Ahem yet people leave their cushy programming jobs in the UK!
Main reasons for me are substandard coding practices, low pay, not interesting enough work, major life changes (e.g. moving to another country), company going downhill.
Pro tip: Don't tell the potential employer or recruiter your current salary. Or if you do lie and add 20-30%.
Something that is actionable that can help retain employees is encouraging candor and honest communication about office politics on the part of direct supervisors. It kept me from jumping ship and I consider myself underpaid. Knowing that at least one person at the company had my best interests at heart kept me from making a decision that would have hurt everybody but me.
However, I usually found the minute you are inconvenient, you will be let go. Communication is important, but remember that businesses ALWAYS has their best interest in mind. Sometimes it is necessary to make tough decisions (bad for company, good for you - because you feel selfish) and quit a unwinnable situation.
But the advice in the article is aimed at companies trying to keep people, not at employees trying to make career decisions. Presumably, the person in the company reading the article has a serious need to keep personnel, and I've seen first-hand how difficult that can be in the face of market realities.
I'm trying to hire someone right now and I'm being forced to either get real creative about who we're willing to take on, or give up for the time being on my ambition of building and leading a team. Simply because our CFO doesn't want to pay market salary for a developer. I've been following Rands long enough to think I can do this.
The corp has my respect and gratitude for this.
I don't like the reference to "culture fit" since this is so nebulous and often abused, but the comment about skills-based hiring is really important for startups.
Lack of a willingness to develop employees is one of the big reasons startups complain about a "talent shortage." Far too many companies focus on people who can do X, Y and Z today because they've been doing those things for n years, and they completely filter out smart, motivated people who, if given an opportunity and a good environment, could be developed into fantastic employees.
This has an underestimated impact on employee retention. Unless your company is a rocket ship, the person you hire on a perfect skills fit may start to feel like he or she is stagnating relatively quickly.
Growth is crucial to employee satisfaction and companies should consider the saying "a man's reach should exceed his grasp" when filling positions. Hire intelligent, conscientious people who have to grow to fit a role and chances are they'll be far more engaged and loyal than the employees who don't have to grow to do the job.
And yes, don't expect people with lives to work crazy hours, but usually we just self select ourselves out of those jobs, because they're a bad fit. I suppose if you go from single to married and/or having kids, you might be stuck.
The only one I really agree with is loss of confidence, but even then, if I'm paid well, I'll probably be too lazy to go somewhere else, unless I start thinking working at the company is actually detrimental to my resume (which has happened to me once)
I could see hiring a low level HR person in more of a clerical role and then hiring a community builder or evangelist or whatever to focus on culture.
The author hints at "mandatory fun" with regards to company activities. I tend to be pretty strongly introverted and don't enjoy social outings very much. Yet every job I've been at when there's a company happy hour, a group going for drinks, a team lunch, or a holiday party and I don't want to go I find myself hounded for it. Made fun of for not wanting to "have fun" or ridiculed about not wanting to be "part of the team". To the point that I'll often just call out on the day of the event so I don't have to put up with it.
I guess I missed the part where me having fun by going home and sitting in front of my fireplace reading my new Henry Ford biography is against the rules. And lets not get started on how tired I am of being made fun of for not liking to drink alcohol. Team building activities and the such are fine, and I totally get why they exist and why most people enjoy them, but I genuinely don't have fun in most social settings. And I have even less when it's forced upon me or people go out of their way to try to force me into them.
If there are hush-hush meetings and rumors circulating, that's a huge red flag. Run your business transparently. You never know which of your employees might have a solution to whatever problem the business is facing.
I speculate that there is a type of HR role that could fill this need, but not be a full-time payroll person for the startup companies they serve. Perhaps a type of retained recruiter but who has a much closer relationship to the start up than the current 'hunter' type that Founders never meet in person. They'd have a good working relationship with the founder and employees, actually understand the culture and the tech, and then only bring people in who they felt were truly a fit.
Do such types exist? If not, would founders find them valuable? How would you align their interest with the startup so they genuinely brought in candidates they felt were a fit?
> I speculate that there is a type of HR role that could fill this need
We have this at my company (not going to name, just to remain semi-anonymous). There's a whole group dedicated just to finding people who seem like good fits for the company. They're employees the same as any engineer would be.
I don't think it's that uncommon at bigger (i.e. > 100 employees) companies.
She also assumes that a manager/boss is definitely doing a good job and therefore an employee leaving is a hiring problem. Not really... it's interesting if this is a common logic among HR
The project manager of mine was a terrible person. He made testers(female) cried in the toilet all the time. Think about it!!!