Toxic culture is driving the great resignation • Hacker News Board

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#271

Post by AlwaysRock » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

Terry_Roll wrote: post #110

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…

Most of the posts on here focus on wage/money and yours is one of the few that outright points out the toxic culture in companies. I think for too long the toxic workplace has been hidden behind laywer drafted agreements when employers leave and the rest of the workforce have been captive because they thought they might not get the same job with better conditions elsewhere. But a growing population means this is chan…

For me its always come down to managers expecting loyalty from me while giving little to none in return. Loyalty means different things to different people but I'm an employee. I'm not my bosses friend and they are not mine.

Hopefully we have a good working relationship but at the end of the day they pay me for a service. If I'm unable to provide that service they will get rid of me. If someone else will pay me more for that service or make my life easier while I provide that service then I will go do it for them.

I've always laughed at how managers/companies expect loyalty but then when you leave they treat you terribly or like you never existed. If you were actually loyal to me the individual you would want to be involved in my life or at least treat me well after I stopped providing a service for you. But they don't. If you treat work as anything more than receiving a paycheck you earn for a service than you are a sucker.

As P.T. Barnum would say, there is one born every minute.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#272

Post by ngc248 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

irthomasthomas wrote: post #270

What I dont understand about The Quittening is where are these people going? Did they die, or retire, or change career, or went self employed? People don't just walk away from a 6 figure career and vanish. Where are they now?

I was wondering that too, i don't think the stimulus payments was this big right? Are they moving back with their parents?

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#273

Post by dntrkv » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

irthomasthomas wrote: post #270

What I dont understand about The Quittening is where are these people going? Did they die, or retire, or change career, or went self employed? People don't just walk away from a 6 figure career and vanish. Where are they now?

They’re getting new jobs. Quitting is at ATH and so is hiring. The proper name should be The Reshuffling.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#274

Post by chipotle_coyote » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #227

pc86 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some people" are also born in poverty and become billionaires. Not nearly enough to make it worth talking about like it's anything but a statistical aberration.

Quite a few people do cap out in the 7 or low 8 figures though. The old “climbing the corporate ladder” adage is based on actual people even if most people never climb vary high it’s a real possibility if you actually want to make serious money. Personally, I and most developers don’t think it’s worth it which is one of the reasons why it’s not actually difficult to get started.

> Quite a few people do cap out in the 7 or low 8 figures though.

Gonna be the [citation needed] guy here again; "quite a few" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. According to the most recent wage statistics from 2020, there are less than 100,000 people reporting incomes of $1M or over; that alone doesn't just put you in the top 1%, it puts you in the top 0.1%. "Low 8 figures" is in the low thousands.

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2020

I'm not the first person to point out that Silicon Valley (and SV-style) software engineering incomes seem to have skewed HN's idea of what "average" salaries are and I won't be the last, but I think it's really true. If you make a six figure income, you're pretty much in the top 10% of that wage statistics chart; the median income is around $30K.

> Personally, I and most developers don’t think it’s worth it

The number of people who started as developers and increased their salaries to that $1M+ level have got to be very, very low, and I don't think you can really imply that most developers have the opportunity to do so and simply choose not to. That kind of "engineering founder" success requires skills beyond engineering (and, as much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, a certain amount of good fortune).

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#275

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

massysett wrote: post #135

sbarre wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In effect, you threatened them into giving you a raise. And I'll say congrats on getting it, but are you at all concerned about your ongoing relationship with management? Do they think "he's good for a few years at least now" in terms of comp adjustment, and/or do you expect a raise again next year? At my company, I understand (but have not seen first hand) that anyone who tries this (either comes to the table with a…

This is not at all a risky play, because GP was willing to walk. It’s a true negotiation only if you’re willing to walk out. So to negotiate, realistically assess the availability of other options, and whether you’d accept them. If you’re not willing to walk, it’s just a game of chicken. That can indeed be risky, as then you might lose what you have with no fallback and no alternative.

I was talking with a friend of mine a while back. He's getting onto retirement age and I gather he's pretty comfortable financially. And he was telling me, not so much from a direct financial perspective, but how with various organization and team/role changes that had been going on it was just so much less stressful to know that he could just shrug, say "nope, that doesn't work for me," and retire a few years early.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#276

Post by varelse » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #268

varelse wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you are classified as an at will employee you should give your employer at will loyalty. They don't owe you anything and you don't owe them anything either beyond the responsibilities of your job in exchange for whatever they're paying you. It's up to them to make sticking around your best option. But when I'm on interview panels and someone brings up that the person in question is a job hopper, rather tha…

No reason to downvote you. However, if someone has generally changed jobs every year or two and I wouldn't hire someone who I knew with certainty would only stay that long, I might think I'm special enough that I can keep them around. But I'd probably be wrong.

And that's the thing, it's okay with me if I'm wrong. Or as I responded to a doctor who asked a similar question: "Do all your patients live?" It's not a question of being special to me, it's a challenge to figure out what will make them stick around and make the company money and it's usually strongly correlated in my experience.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#277

Post by TomVDB » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

cjrp wrote: post #49

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.

What's considered a starter home? In England (well, the south-east of England), lots of people get started in a 1 or 2-bed flat (~60m²), maybe move up to a small terraced or semi-detached when they have kids.

I’ve done the roommating thing, and paid my dues living in small apartments. But at some point I wanted the comfort of a house with a garage, a hobby room, and a yard where the kids can run around.

So, yeah, different expectations.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#278

Post by cjbgkagh » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

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…

Addendum; you tend to know going into these things that the reason such opportunities still exist in these dysfunctional orgs is precisely because they are dysfunctional. I guess hope springs eternal that maybe you could succeed where others have failed.

A former colleague at the same company optimized a core process saving $10M p.a. in compute cost. They couldn’t find a second person who knew assembly well enough to do a code review so they were never able to deploy it.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#279

Post by chipotle_coyote » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

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…

> I'd like to believe even at FAANGs these mad salaries aren't common.

My impression -- as someone who is neither an engineer (anymore) or at a FAANG, but is making above the apparent market rate for technical writers in Silicon Valley at a company that needs to compete with FAANGs for talent and chooses to do so by offering high base pay and bonuses rather than stock options -- is that at this moment in time, these mad salaries are common in both FAANG and competing-with-FAANG companies, but only in specific fields and specific locales.

Personally, I'm not convinced this is sustainable any more than the SF Bay Area housing market is sustainable. If the shift to fully remote or "hybrid remote" workforces is truly underway, it's probably just a matter of time before that starts pushing down income levels. If you cut your cost of living in half by moving from Mountain View to Boise, employers will start factoring that into your compensation -- many already do.

In the long run, of course, that would lead to a slow creep toward equalization of cost of living across the country; there are already anecdotal (but loud!) reports of housing costs increasing substantially in surprising places as people leave the west coast and the northeast and move inland. Eventually that should make COL adjustments smaller or less common, but it will likely also make "I'm making $350K right out of college" less common. (Or whatever $350K is adjusted for inflation in a decade.)

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#280

Post by simplestats » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

varelse wrote: post #259

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…

As long as you are classified as an at will employee you should give your employer at will loyalty. They don't owe you anything and you don't owe them anything either beyond the responsibilities of your job in exchange for whatever they're paying you. It's up to them to make sticking around your best option. But when I'm on interview panels and someone brings up that the person in question is a job hopper, rather tha…

Is "at will" the right term here? What's the alternative, granting you tenure at their little company or something? If you are an at-will employee who is kept around, then might that demonstrate actual loyalty (and probably higher pay) versus being at a place that is prohibited by law from laying you off without good cause?

Perhaps you mean if they treat employees like a commodity. They can do that withoug laying people off; universities tend to treat their tenured faculty this way also. Optimizing for getting the most work out of the witth the lowest cost. If so, then yes employees should, in turn, act like the job is a commodity and try to optimize income-minus-costs on their end too.