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Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

sloanreview.mit.edu

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Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#231

Post by cjbgkagh »

MathYouF wrote: post #207
cjbgkagh wrote: post #153

Perhaps I’ve been unlucky but my experience at big tech has been marred by churn and burn culture - high pressure tactics to get the most work out of employees and discarding them when they inevitably burn out. Average tenure was 1-3 years. Amazon was particularly bad at this. The only modicum of power employees have is in quitting and now that they’re exercising it the employers are acting like their throats have be…

Slightly off topic, but could you go into a bit more detail on this artifact? I thought an artifact was something like a trained model, but you said it was "written" in Scala then Java, which makes me think I don't understand the meaning, and the word on Google has very broad definitions.

Data pipeline -> ML Model -> Dataset.

The dataset is what makes the money.

I should have written “the process that produces the artifact was written in Scala.”

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#232

Post by zero41a »

pembrook wrote: post #172
UncleMeat wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pretty hard" is an understatement. In ten years, somebody receiving a 30% raise each year sees their pay go up by a factor of nearly 14. Over a 30 year career it is a factor of 2600. Somebody starting at 50k would end their career making 130,000,000 annually.

Thank you for hilariously illustrating how bubble-y the current moment feels. If you think dramatically increasing compensation is going to continue in the next decade like it has in the last one, I think you might be disappointed. Now that companies are comfortable with remote, HR departments are eventually going to realize that services like Deel exist, and that its not actually that hard to hire employees overseas…

My company has been in the foreign contractor market for a while. I still make a massive US salary. Having been on the hiring team for many of these contractor shops I can tell you that the skill level of contractors in India/Africa/China/Ukraine has another 5-10 years before it even begins to approach the average skill of a seasoned American engineer. For a while my business as an independent contractor was quite literally fixing code written by foreigners because the company thought they could play this arbitrage game.

For example, we've hired several engineers through a very big name, silicon valley backed, foreign contractor firm. They perform at the level of a junior engineer at best.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#233

Post by Buttons840 »

chongli wrote: post #102
rkangel wrote: post #87

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…

A fish rots from the head down. The people in charge with the most power to solve workplace toxicity are in all likelihood the cause. If that is the case then the best advice is for people to resign and go elsewhere, just as people are doing according to the article.

A side effect of this is most jobs people find will be toxic, because those are the ones people are leaving and the ones with openings. I suppose that is already the case.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#234

Post by mcv »

rdtwo wrote: post #160
mcv wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also because the exec has more power. More power over budgets, over the company, a closer relationship with the people who decide their salary, etc. We just have power over the tech, which may be vital, but it's not power we leverage very hard.

While it may seem that way a lead engineer has more actual ability to swing outcomes than an executive. I can save or loose my company millions in a month but my exec can’t even get us 1-2 people without 3 months of paperwork. He can’t allocate more than 5k in capital without months of review. And he works 60-80hrs a week requesting status. It’s a total joke that he Gets paid 3-4x what engineers do

Was that an executive or a middle manager? It sounds like the latter. But you're absolutely right that it's weird that the people who's job it is to enable engineers, get paid more than the engineers who do the actual work.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#235

Post by thesausageking »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #153

Perhaps I’ve been unlucky but my experience at big tech has been marred by churn and burn culture - high pressure tactics to get the most work out of employees and discarding them when they inevitably burn out. Average tenure was 1-3 years. Amazon was particularly bad at this. The only modicum of power employees have is in quitting and now that they’re exercising it the employers are acting like their throats have be…

Amazon has always had a different culture than other bigtech cos. I have plenty of friends at Google, Microsoft, Snap, and Facebook who work 36 hours at week, don't stress at all about their jobs, and are paid really well.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#237

Post by pydry »

zackify wrote: post #116
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…

I was able to negotiate a 45k pay raise at my current company. After clearly proving my value for about 2 years. I made it obvious that I would accept a role at my friends company if they couldn’t come up. I explained to them nicely that I would rather stay, but I can’t without a large raise. It can be done, but it would have never happened without me pushing them. No company is going to willingly throw out raises th…

I've seen some friends some do this. The time it took to go through, the size of the raise and the headache involved in convincing everybody (like pulling teeth), still, IME, essentially made it a losing proposition for them compared to just hopping jobs.

Still others have thrown out raises without being pushed but they were critical organizational lynchpins getting 10% raises when the market would bump them 50% minimum. That's even worse.

Fundamentally, I think the surplus value from these tech workers who hate interviewing and get "stuck" with cost of inflation raises are often a lot more profitable than we'd give them credit for, and a lot of companies are happy to risk losing a high performer if it meant keeping 3 profitable grumbling malcontents on lower pay.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#238

Post by freedom2099 »

odonnellryan wrote: post #214
freedom2099 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true… only sea view apartments and houses do have incredibly high prices… otherwise you can find an apartment of 100m2 for prices ranging from 200k euros to 500k. Many homes with garden in the area range from 450k to a million (depending on the location). If as a couple the household income is 100k or more a year it is not difficult at all to get a mortgage. In France is very hard to get fired… there is a…

500k is getting close to 10x the salary.

If you are married or in a pax it is getting closer to 5x not 10x

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#239

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ramphastidae wrote: post #195
pembrook wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for hilariously illustrating how bubble-y the current moment feels. If you think dramatically increasing compensation is going to continue in the next decade like it has in the last one, I think you might be disappointed. Now that companies are comfortable with remote, HR departments are eventually going to realize that services like Deel exist, and that its not actually that hard to hire employees overseas…

Nope. Cheap, outsourced labor has been available for decades. If what you’re saying was true, the shift would have already happened. The reality is that the vast majority of outsourced labor is significantly lower quality than the onshore talent. Mix that with poor communication and a ten hour time zone difference … it’s usually net negative.

Instead of outsourcing, even relatively small businesses are now opening international branch offices with full time local employees, tapping the pool of talented engineers who would prefer not to emigrate. The grandparent poster is correct: if there's real savings to be had, eventually someone will find a way to get to it.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#240

Post by simplestats »

synergy20 wrote: post #161
quietbritishjim wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 engineer will likely be offered a 3-5% raise. Although I agree with your overall point, I disagree with this line of reasoning. I think the pay offered to an engineer already takes into account that they will understand the tech stack after six…

That sounds about right to me. The company also has risks in that its interviewing process indeed just found a good match and you will be as good in real as in paper(your resume), I think the salary part covers the first year, no raise for first year makes perfect sense unless you're absolutely undervalued when you're hired. The other side is that, if you're not as good as you're supposed to be, normally you won't ge…

Overall I'd say the whole point of the interview process at senior level and beyond is to make as sure as possible that you are productive immediately. They give you tasks you can do without thorough knowledge of their process. And these days, lots of one-to-one meetings to hold your hand some and keep your productive.

If you don't get a raise in the first year, it's often more about pedantry regarding the HR rules, which tend to be "optimized" by penny-pinching adjustments over the years to take advantage of employees every way they can (this is their job, squeezing money out of people any way they can). E.g. you weren't there for the last round of evaluations so you don't get a raise. Possibly no bonus too. You need to discuss all this stuff when negotiating, they'll be trying to help you work the system at that point, rather than using it against you.

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