Cost of Attrition

And on mobile (iPhone), it seems to be impossible to scroll down on the animations themselves, only on the text. I had to stop reading the article at some point as I could no longer scroll down…

The author's points are absolutely correct.

However, I don't think that it makes any difference.

The entire industry has now shaped itself into a transient, mercenary, loyalty-free community.

It will take a long time to change that.

A lot of the trouble is the "You go first." mentality. Who will be the one to stay at a company for many years, getting only 3% raises; regardless of their performance, as their company's CEO keeps raking in millions of dollars, and lives a lavish, high-profile life?

Who will be the company that starts to treat their employees in a manner that proves they are worth staying at? This may mean higher pay raises, the CEO taking some of their profit (and the shareholders and VCs), and sharing it with the employees. Letting employees unionize, etc.

As people or companies are doing that, their competitors are running riot; acting as selfish, destructive and greedy as always. Many times, the competitors can crush the people trying to do the right thing.

So that generally means that governments need to step in, and help the people and companies to do the right thing.

As everyone knows, that's pretty much a non-starter, these days.

The tech industry makes crazy money. When an industry makes money like that, everyone "looks the other way," at truly awful behavior. The finance industry has been like that, for decades. Whereas industries that don't make much money, like public education, social services, etc., are regulated up the wazoo, with an iron fist.

I was a manager for over 25 years. I feel that I was a good one. My employees seemed to agree. I kept many of them on board for decades, and these were folks that could walk out the door, and get huge pay raises (my company paid "competitive" salaries). I certainly never made that much, compared to what people are doing, these days. many new hires out of college make more than I ever did, as a senior manager.

I worked hard at being a good manager; and that often meant working around a company with a fairly rapacious HR policy (HR was run by lawyers). Most folks here, would (and have) sneer at me, for staying so long, and for doing the things that I needed to do, in order to be a good manager.

In my case, it was personal Integrity thing. I have a really stringent Personal Code. I know that's unusual, and we can't expect it from most managers.

> Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at your own peril.

I never said that experience isn't valuable. The question was whether experience at a particular company was more valuable than experience outside of it. Every time you hire a senior engineer from another company you learn a bit of their secret sauce, making your company stronger. Participating in that knowledge trade is extremely valuable, and without churn you will be left out as most of your engineers will have mostly experience from your company, that is a really bad thing.

> highest predictors of defects in a code base is whether or not the original team is still working on it.

Defects is a metric businesses doesn't care much about. If you have a good team that can create products customers wants, then it is better to have them keep making new products rather than maintain what they already have, then you can have less productive engineers perform maintenance, defects might go up but this way you will have way more products which businesses seems to care more about.

You would have a point if maintenance was something companies cared deeply about, but they don't. They want new products, and company specific knowledge doesn't seem to be very valuable there.

Nice. But remember: the cost of non attrition can be keeping idiot coworkers around. Who actively destroy work with their anti-work, and waste time with idiotic discussions.