Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

sloanreview.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 385 posts

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#81

Post by tomohawk »

This is based on comments people are willing to put in Glass Door, so there will be obvious biases there.

Publicly, people will make up a reason for leaving, and not state the real reason, or just not say anything.

I know a number of people who are just DONE with with covid culture, and just want to get away from it. The only way they can do that in many cases is to just leave their job. Since they are trying to get away from covid culture, the last thing they're going to do is talk about it on a site like Glass Door.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#82

Post by freedom2099 »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #75
freedom2099 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you on this one! I really don’t get it… I love in France (French riviera) and my salary despite being very good for the region is very far from the hundreds of thousands of FAANG companies in the US… and yet I more than once turned down offers from FAANGs because no amount of money can bet all the other benefits I get… 35h work week (no extra Hours), very relaxed corporate environment, 35 days of vacation a…

You're living the dream my friend!

I do my best XD

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#83

Post by gwd »

foolfoolz wrote: post #7

> Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior I don’t really believe these reasons or at least they don’t match what i’ve seen. I can only speak for FAANG: I think this is more compensation based than anything else. In an effort to level the playing field FAANGS establish l…

When you think of "toxic work culture", is "failure to promote diversity" the first thing that comes to mind? Are people really quitting SpaceX and Netflix in droves because they're not sufficiently supporting minority / LGBTQ rights?

If anything, doing some "window dressing" for "diversity" is probably a lot easier than actually changing toxic patterns of behavior of the existing set of employees. (And of course actually promoting racial and cultural diversity is a lot more difficult than both.)

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#84

Post by Aeolun »

emmo wrote: post #66
jahewson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of living is just so crazy high here though, $2.5m for a starter home in SV. More in some parts. You’d need a household income of 500k/yr to even qualify for that mortgage.

A quick browse of real estate websites seems to show lots of nice places in SV for well under that amount.

For a certain definition of nice. If you are looking at family homes you’re quickly looking at 2M+ (with a few buildings priced so low that I have to wonder what is wrong with them).

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#85

Post by thematrixturtle »

echelon wrote: post #40
Areading314 wrote: post #34

A huge problem with this industry is the inflexibility to pay current engineers LARGELY increasing comp each year. The thought is that there is a market rate for an engineer and that pay can increase with the market rate, but this is a fallacy. An engineer that has been at a largish company for 1 year is worth 20-30% more than the year they were hired because they have specific knowledge of the tech stack. Yet that e…

Speaking as the Devil's advocate, organizations want headcount to be fungible. If hiring and churn were huge issues for most companies, they would actively combat it. Instead, they've all mostly settled into the practice you see. Engineers typically do a 1-2 year tour of duty, vest, then bounce onto greener pastures. Steady state flux. In some senses, new talent also bring in new ideas and combat skeptical dispositio…

Speaking as someone hiring engineers in APAC, it's extremely difficult to find developers who are competent, experienced and have sufficient command of English to operate in an English-speaking team. The few that tick all three boxes and have in-demand tech skills (ML, k8s, AWS etc) can command Silicon Valley level salaries even in their home countries.

Of course the pool will expand over time and the situation will look different in 10 years, bit nevertheless the English requirement will remain a blocker for many, many engineers who could otherwise code circles around a random mid-level American programmer.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#86

Post by yunohn »

Fiahil wrote: post #79
yunohn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really important point that is always missing in these threads - execs at most companies (even at FAANG, but esp outside) make massive multiples of their average engineer.

5.000.000 for a single exec means 50.000 for each of the 100 "average engineers" working in their department. You can overcompensate execs because there fewer of them than engineers.

In this example, how much are these average engineers making? Usually, even at FAANG, less than 10% of them will command a 500k peak-SV salary. So for the rest, 50k each is a sizeable amount of money. In my experience, this is 2x the average yearly bonus.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#87

Post by rkangel »

This article does accidentally capture one of the major corporate problems pretty well. The conclude from their data that Toxic Workplace Culture is the biggest cause of resignation, and then they immediately suggest 4 short term things to try that don't relate to culture at all.

If you have a toxic workplace culture, the very first thing you should do is to start fixing your culture. This is very hard and not fast (as they acknowledge to be fair). One thing you can do though is to acknowledge it to your employees - "X, Y and Z is wrong and we're working to fix it". Nothing destroys morale more than employees being unhappy about a set of things and then management standing up and telling you there aren't any problems.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#88

Post by [deleted] »

Areading314 wrote: post #34

A huge problem with this industry is the inflexibility to pay current engineers LARGELY increasing comp each year. The thought is that there is a market rate for an engineer and that pay can increase with the market rate, but this is a fallacy. An engineer that has been at a largish company for 1 year is worth 20-30% more than the year they were hired because they have specific knowledge of the tech stack. Yet that e…

[deleted]

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#89

Post by redanddead »

freedom2099 wrote: post #59
stef25 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in a big city? Love that part of the world but it ain't cheap. Maybe even the most expensive part of the EU outside of London.

I live near Cannes, in a town of 70k people. Not super cheap but not even that expensive!

How is life there?

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#90

Post by shrimpx »

Areading314 wrote: post #34

A huge problem with this industry is the inflexibility to pay current engineers LARGELY increasing comp each year. The thought is that there is a market rate for an engineer and that pay can increase with the market rate, but this is a fallacy. An engineer that has been at a largish company for 1 year is worth 20-30% more than the year they were hired because they have specific knowledge of the tech stack. Yet that e…

Is the problem that people are hopping jobs (this was always the case), or that they're exiting the industry? I thought we're talking about the latter.

I see a lot of software people quitting to take sabbaticals, to work on a project that might turn into a company, or going small and retiring. To my eye, you can't pay those people a 40% raise to retain them.

Post reply on HN