41–50 of 61 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would an employee feel honest telling their boss their 5-year goals? What if it isn't "leading a larger team at this company" ?
What does a typical 5-year goal sound like? I always struggle to come up with anything when this sort of question comes up (not necessarily in an employer-employee conversation, just in general).
The way you treat exiting employees is just as important as how you treat them when they are still there from a recruiting perspective. If you treat someone well when they decide to leave, they are more likely to recommend your company to others looking for a job. There have been places I left for various reasons that were great employers that I still recommend to this day for others looking for a job.....and might e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they've already chosen to quit, paying more may only keep them begrudgingly.
No, sometimes pay is the original issue. But if they choose to leave, do not offer them money to stay. Any employee who stays is not being very smart, the only interest the company has in paying you more is keeping you long enough to train your replacement. If you were not worth X the day before you quit, how are you suddenly worth X the day you decide to quit? I've seen people accept a counter-offer from a company,…
This can easily happen when you are actually worth X, but the company thinks you are worth X-Y because they have a history of underpaying and perhaps were able to get away with it when the economy was down. If the market is willing to pay X for someone like you, you are worth X regardless of what your current employer thinks you are worth (as long as you act on it).
Imagine getting punched in the stomach. And then, instead of recovering in a few minutes, imagine the shock and pain slowly turning into disappointment, anger and dread. Don’t you realize how important you are to the team? How could you do this to me? It was what I felt right then and there. Betrayal. Sadness. Despair about the future. Umm, companies pull the plug on employees all the time. In most cases with vastly…
I agree on the "hurt" part, but it is a well known fact that employees do change jobs in this industry. If a manager is not aware of that, and has not already made contingency plans for when that difficult time comes, then he is not very good at his job.
I would go as far as to say that he could do worse than to look at what other parts of his job he might been ignoring (hopefully) without noticing. Maybe that would explain why the employees leave in the first place.
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"And sadly, the optimal capitalist strategy is to just lay them off and enjoy the surplus they unwittingly made for you." Maybe for a dumb capitalist. The optimum strategy is to pick a level of compensation that works for them and you while realizing there is a transition cost to new people and talent is worth something.
No, the optimum strategy is to determine if compensating them to a mutually agreeable level is more or less expensive than losing their expertise and rolling someone new in. Just because parent said optimal strategy is to lay them off doesn't mean you have to act like that's _never_ going to be the case. For the given hypothetical, the 'ol "get them to unknowningly train their replacement by pretending like you're re…
I thought it went without saying that you cannot force someone into an agreement. Agreements sometimes don't happen and then you pay the additional costs out of necessity.
> For the given hypothetical, the 'ol "get them to unknowningly train their replacement by pretending like you're rewarding them with more compensation and a direct report" could be the "optimal" strategy.
That might be someone's interesting play, but I think it is a poor strategy because it shows your employees and anyone else you are going to make agreements with that you are of the duplicitous sort and cannot be trusted. This will affect your long term prospects in a negative way. Never mind its a pretty poor way to go through life.
Strategy should be thought of as long term.
The way you treat exiting employees is just as important as how you treat them when they are still there from a recruiting perspective. If you treat someone well when they decide to leave, they are more likely to recommend your company to others looking for a job. There have been places I left for various reasons that were great employers that I still recommend to this day for others looking for a job.....and might e…
As good as slack is for communicating I don't think it should be used as a "knowledge" store. At a previous employer I found that commit messages were a great way to store information. Maybe commit messages aren't as great for question and answers, but searching slack doesn't seem very intuitive. Idea: A slack bot that searches for questions and answers and creates a wiki out of the scraped information.
It's not that it shouldn't be, but that it probably won't be when it should. My company uses HipChat and not Slack, but ever since we first adopted it about 4 years ago I have been preaching that our in-house technical support staff use its search function before asking the developers for help. Maybe 10% of them do, if I'm being generous. The rest think their issue is unique and requires immediate one-on-one developer attention.
We also have an in-house wiki that doesn't get consulted as often as it should. I spend at least half a day documenting, from a end-user perspective, every project I complete on our wiki and still find myself repeating what I've written in a one-on-one chat on a daily basis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Founder equity is typically on a completely different scale than that of employees (even first hires). So we shouldn't be surprised that their loyalty is on a completely different scale, as well.
Exactly. My main problem is that the CEO's stance is entirely hypocritical, because he would demand real equity or quit (probably even faster) if he was in the employee's position. Once you have access to millions in funding its tough to see people who have to work for a living as human just like you. You expect them to lovingly accept terms that you would be insulted at. Now if your talent is so great that you dwarf…
Seems like "pay them more" should be at least mentioned as a possibility here.
Tech people (in general) do not make job decisions based solely on money. They want recognition, good work, good teams, good leadership, a meaningful product, etc. If your solution to morale problems is to increase salaries, you have already missed the mark in some of these other areas.
If a leaving employee is so important, you should ask yourself "Am I really 100x-1000x (whatever ratio your equity is to their equity) more important than this employee?"