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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

#241

Post by chrismcb »

skrebbel wrote: post #10
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…

I'll never understand the American thirst for money for the sake of it. If HN comments are to be believed, top performer at your average FAANG easily earn $500k per year. At that point, aren't you well past the point where more money brings more happiness, even in high cost-of-living places? What's the point? Why not find a job that's fun and fulfilling?

I think a lot of people who earn $500k switch jobs exactly for the reason you mentioned. But a lot of times that also comes with a pay raise.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#242

Post by heresie-dabord »

insickness wrote: post #106
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…

Companies should pay more attention to which leaders are roundly hated since they can be the biggest contributor to toxic culture. At my company, we had a CIO who was hated by every member of the IT team. Attrition rates as well as glass door reviews reflected it. Yet they kept him there for years.

People, even as infants, understand right and wrong.

Giving rank and privilege to people who don't deserve it will be noticed by workers.

The skilled workers will see the incompetence of impostors. And if the impostors are also unpleasant or dictatorial, workers will escape.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#243

Post by jtsiskin »

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…

https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#244

Post by acdha »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #239
ramphastidae wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you’re both right: outsourcing jobs rarely saves money due to the communications & cultural gaps if you’re trying to closely manage someone’s work and they don’t have a very clear understanding of where their work fits in the larger scheme of things.

What works better is outsourcing entire business functions so all of that routine coordination can happen in the same team/time zone, and you have an easier time measuring performance.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#245

Post by reedjosh »

iamtheworstdev wrote: post #181
ui4jd73bdj wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reasonable enough for a fresh grad. For example 50k->300k. I doubt every engineer could prove to be so valuable in the end spectrum but might work for some companies. Of course if the company fired people the model would lose it's appeal, since you are leaving money on the table on the early spectrum but have no security to reach the end. Would you leave a company where you got a guaranteed 30% raise every year…

it's amazing to see the silicon valley effect on people's' thoughts of programmers salaries... $300,000 at age 30?

Yes, $300k at age 30.

I'm remote too.

Go read Blind posts. You do have to be pretty good, but it's about where I'm at, and there are plenty others like me.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#246

Post by pedrosorio »

emmo wrote: post #68
TomVDB wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding a job that’s fun and fulling and finding one that is very well paid doesn’t have to be a contradiction. But there are multiple reasons why money is a bigger focus: - less long term job security. And that lower paid fulfilling job might very well be less secure too. I want to secure my financials as quickly as possible. - insane cost of housing. A family sized 1800 sqft house with a garden now routinely sells…

Move to a different neighbourhood.

They want a single-family home in a major world city in a walkable neighborhood, moving is not an option.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#247

Post by UncleMeat »

Retric wrote: post #156
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.

Some people do actually end up at that kind of a multiple of their initial salary. It’s not that such growth is impossible it’s just really really uncommon and generally takes regularly changing roles.

It doesn't just require changing roles. People making 140,000,000 annually are basically only the founders of the very largest tech companies. CEOs of the very largest tech companies will get stock grants in the nine figures on occasion, but not annually. No staff engineer who changed jobs every three years for three decades is making nine figures.

So yes, if you start as a junior engineer and end your career as a CEO of one of the most successful companies on the planet then you can see this growth. But those aren't regular raises for doing good work. Those are completely different pay strata for completely different jobs.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#248

Post by cjbgkagh »

thesausageking wrote: post #235
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.

The story wasn’t from Amazon... but yeah they do have a burn and churn culture.

I think it depends a lot on the group you’re in and where you land in the office politics. Microsoft used to be a nightmare in certain orgs and Intel used to be worse. I hear complaints about Google and Facebook at times, but those companies do seem to be more relaxed about things.

The roles I like tend to be well coveted and so are often the target of undermining. There is a process where one org wants to subsume the responsibility and budget of another org and so they will undermine the other org to ensure its failure. I was once forced to buy thousands of computers that were way over spec in order to blow out the budget and make it harder to justify the investment in the project. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#249

Post by serverholic »

trabant00 wrote: post #53

> failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion I have a very hard time believing this is the major driving factir in the "great resignation". Or maybe my Europe environment is completely different. But to me this sounds like another attempt to push certain political views and not at all to really discover what is going on.

Companies now hire people to tell them they don't have enough black people on the team.

The answer isn't more of this bullshit.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#250

Post by reedjosh »

kamaal wrote: post #154
ui4jd73bdj wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reasonable enough for a fresh grad. For example 50k->300k. I doubt every engineer could prove to be so valuable in the end spectrum but might work for some companies. Of course if the company fired people the model would lose it's appeal, since you are leaving money on the table on the early spectrum but have no security to reach the end. Would you leave a company where you got a guaranteed 30% raise every year…

Getting a 30% raise yoy, is something even the most optimistic entrepreneur starting up out there would salivate at. Even going from 50 -> 300k, is no easy joke. Its not even worth starting a company if you can make these kind of 6x increase in fortunes in years. Imagine going to the stock market and claiming to have 30% return yoy. I'd like to believe even at FAANGs these mad salaries aren't common. And I would be v…

> Even going from 50 -> 300k, is no easy joke.

Yeah, it does take a lot of effort. I put in a lot of 50hr weeks to get this kind of gain, but it's totally doable.

> That resume is basically signalling the candidate does no work apart from hopping jobs.

I get a _lot_ of work done in even just 6 months.

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