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Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

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Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#281

Post by ghaff »

dntrkv wrote: post #273
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.

Yeah. It's possible that some people are retiring or semi-retiring a bit early. But, based on my Twitter feed, it's mostly people switching jobs within the tech industry. (And, yes, anecdotally it does seem to be happening more than the base rate.)

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#282

Post by irthomasthomas »

dntrkv wrote: post #273
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.

But then why are people saying that hiring is so difficult now? E.g. "I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#283

Post by toss1 »

Toxic culture indeed!

Saw a very interesting bit of a talk yesterday, using how Seal Team 6 selects the team - two axes, Performance and Trustworthiness, and a grid, High/Medium/Low for each axis.

Obviously no one wants the lower left corner of low performance and low trust and everyone wants the High of both values.

But it really turns out that you will NOT want even the best performer with low trustworthiness — a very average performer with high trust is a better choice.

The problem in large organizations is that they have many methods and metrics to measure performance, and almost none to measure trustworthiness.

I've for decades observed that large organizations seem to actively filter-in and select for sociopathic tendencies at the top; there are only a few, ad seemingly by happenstance, who I'd rate high on the trustworthiness and ethical scale.

This talk made the mechanism immediately apparent -- all the selection is for performance, and there is little to no selection for trustworthiness. Fro trust, there's only a few rails that seem to resemble 'don't get caught breaking the law'.

Of course, when high-performance/low-trustworthy individuals get to the top, they are not going to institute or support systems to select for high-trust.

So, organizations will tend to ratchet in the sociopathic direction. And, sociopaths at the top can barely do anything but create a toxic culture.

Now we see the results: MIT studies show results "consistent with a large body of evidence that pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover...In general, corporate culture is a much more reliable predictor of industry-adjusted attrition than how employees assess their compensation."

This correlates with many other studies I've seen that people to not really leave bad pay, but bad management, and often in particular, bad managers.

And now, the measurement of only performance and not trust has made toxic cultures endemic, and — surprise — nobody wants to work there.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#284

Post by toss1 »

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…

It is a problem, but not the problem described in the article, and not the leading problem.

From the article: >> "This result is consistent with a large body of evidence that pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover. ... In general, corporate culture is a much more reliable predictor of industry-adjusted attrition than how employees assess their compensation."

In short, as with many other stories, what most commonly leads people to quit is bad management, and often specific bad managers. Obviously when pay is tool low and uncompetitive, that'll also create problems. That's also why the major law firms have associate pay in lockstep with big growth that more than doubles their pay in 5-7 years, by which time they're either on Partner track or out. So, yes it would be smart for firms needing engineers to follow suit.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#285

Post by hiq »

Nemi wrote: post #204
massysett wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do agree that it is negotiation, but it IS a risky play. While you are negotiating, you have leverage. But it is time dependent leverage. If you stay, you lose, not all, but a large part of that leverage. If you do stay AND they decide that you are a risk for THEM, they may make moves to make them less dependent on you and at some point may RIF you or move you out in some other way and at that point you may not hav…

> what I do is try to negotiate without a job offer in hand

You can have an offer in hand and just not talk about it. Without an offer, it can also be harder to come up with numbers. What if you ask for X at your current job, get it, but then get an offer for X+D from another company one month after?

Some posts read like they threatened their employers, but the politically correct way to negotiate is something like: "I think my market value, based on comparisons with friends with similar experience, is +x% of what I'm getting currently. I'd like to fix this so I stay here longer-term, because I like my current job thanks to y and z. Can we fix this?".

It really depends on the company culture, I've heard places where employees are encouraged to apply elsewhere to know what their market value is (isn't Netflix such an example?), in this case you won't look bad if you do get another offer and bring it up more directly.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#286

Post by Retric »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #274
Retric wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. htt…

First you read that chart wrong. 94,130 people make between 1M and 1.5M from the data you linked, an additional 34,060 make 1,500,000.00 — 1,999,999.99 etc. The actual number is (167,593,971 + 358 - 167,409,340) = 184,989 Americans make over 1M per year based on SSA data. Next that number is a massive underestimate based on how SSA calculates wages due to how Federal income taxes are calculated and the normal tax avoidance strategies used to minimize that W-2 number.

Beyond that the relevant question is not what percentage of people currently make that much money out of all people or even all workers. The relevant question is what percentage of people that aim for it eventually make that money. If hypothetically people make 1+M for on average 7 years of their life then your looking at something like ~10 x 184,989 people or roughly 1 out of every 180 people in the population. But again not everyone is in the running, a Teacher is hardly aiming to climb the corporate ladder to millions. Depending who you cut out the actual odds might be as high as 1-5%.

And of course ignoring actors etc who might make that much money but aren’t getting it on a W-2.

PS: To see just how biased official income statistics are try and calculate Bill Gates official lifetime taxable income some time vs how much his current net worth + total donations + 2.4B divorce added up to even ignoring all actual spending.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#287

Post by ghaff »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #282
dntrkv wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But then why are people saying that hiring is so difficult now? E.g. "I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437

A few (non mutually exclusive) theories:

- People are quitting with the intent of getting new jobs but they may not do so right away.

- Hiring needs are up so even if you have a constant pool, hiring is harder.

- With more remote work at many of the biggest (and best-paying) tech employers, it's harder for other tech companies to hire because geographical moats are being bridged in many cases.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#288

Post by rdtwo »

mcv wrote: post #234
rdtwo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can’t tell the difference but he gets executive pay and title

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#289

Post by hiq »

throwaway013389 wrote: post #98
skrebbel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

While working for a FAANG in Europe me and a lot of colleagues have been offered to relocate to the US. With a big salary increase as you can imagine. Believe me or not, very few people accepted. Surprisingly for me.

> Believe me or not, very few people accepted. Surprisingly for me.

In a way, there's a selection bias: most of these employees already knew that they could get more in the same company by just relocating to a US office, and that it's not that hard to do. If they were still in Europe at this point, it meant that they had real reasons to stay.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#290

Post by hnfong »

Aperocky wrote: post #257
zero41a wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

Another perspective to consider is that the best talent in those countries (specifically China and India) are not going to these consulting firms. China in particular have large tech companies (e.g. tiktok) that offer pays that almost matches the US, which skimmed the best engineers away from these contracting jobs.

The best ones also usually end up in California with a H1B visa. Also, why would one prefer to do random consulting work for a company exploiting salary arbitrage when they can choose to work for various companies doing more interesting work (either remotely or locally)?
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