Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true (I wouldn't know, never did it). But for what one might reasonably categorize as "knowledge work", my experience is that knowledge reigns supreme. Some of that knowledge is shared by a whole community of practitioners, other parts of it is local and contextualized. This part probably makes up a sizable proportion of an organizations competitive advantage. To m…
In the military attrition is even worse because you can't fill gaps by hiring from any competitors!
Cost of Attrition
31–40 of 169 posts
Re: Cost of Attrition
#32Doesn't mention the benefits of attrition. A network can be robust since none of the pieces leaves, but what is even more robust is a network that constantly renews itself and gracefully handles the process of swapping out parts. Constant attrition means that your company never starts relying on individuals, instead the process survives and thrives on its own, hiring new people who then hire new people before they le…
I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true (I wouldn't know, never did it). But for what one might reasonably categorize as "knowledge work", my experience is that knowledge reigns supreme. Some of that knowledge is shared by a whole community of practitioners, other parts of it is local and contextualized. This part probably makes up a sizable proportion of an organizations competitive advantage. To m…
> To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire.
Fortunately, we developed systems of writing, so that the limit to this relearning is higher now than a few millennia ago. (Society does the ultimate “rehiring” continually.)
I think that far too many companies (including my own) rely much too heavily on “things that are in people’s heads” and don’t spend enough time and money on making the company knowledge effectively outlast any individual employee, making it easier to put the essential knowledge into new people’s heads.
Society doesn’t rediscover pi, e, I, and calculus from first principles every half-century, but rather we’ve instituted that knowledge into books and mechanisms of teaching.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#33Doesn't mention the benefits of attrition. A network can be robust since none of the pieces leaves, but what is even more robust is a network that constantly renews itself and gracefully handles the process of swapping out parts. Constant attrition means that your company never starts relying on individuals, instead the process survives and thrives on its own, hiring new people who then hire new people before they le…
> very attractive to the owners And yet I’ve worked at software companies that will go to great lengths to avoid attrition. For exactly the reasons mentioned in the post, they encourage people to move to other teams to build up the inter connectedness of teams while keeping employees motivated and engaged. In fact, even if you weren’t looking HR would reach out and ask if you were interested in looking at other teams…
Side note I don’t know if I’ve just been lucky but I can’t relate to this talk of “companies are evil and act maliciously against their employees at every opportunity”. That hasn’t been true in my experience.
I think there’s a combination of some people with really bad experiences and a larger group of people that exaggerate.
That said, it’s a fact of the contemporary employment market that most companies do compensation such that sticking around in one place means making significantly less money then moving around all the time. Companies bring new people in at higher comp but don’t push the comp of existing people doing those jobs to the same level even if those existing employees are performing well. I don’t think this is evil or malicious but it certainly feels hostile.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#34The 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…
> 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; ...
If the author's premise is correct, there should be a lot of money to be made in retaining talent. Some of that should filter down to more than 3% raises.
So if you believe in humans as rational economic actors, there is "$20 bills lying on the street" if you build a tech company that hires, increases comp, and retains, rather than the current model of hire, churn, poach.
I realize that double-digit raises at the same company is a big culture shift, but I've seen it done. If everyone benefits, why wouldn't it happen?
Re: Cost of Attrition
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true (I wouldn't know, never did it). But for what one might reasonably categorize as "knowledge work", my experience is that knowledge reigns supreme. Some of that knowledge is shared by a whole community of practitioners, other parts of it is local and contextualized. This part probably makes up a sizable proportion of an organizations competitive advantage. To m…
> 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 stron…
Excellent point IMO! For an organization to believe itself the sole proprietor of relevant and useful knowledge within it's domain of operation is pure hubris.
So too is believing it is anything more than a community of individuals, cooperating on the basis of shared- and tacit knowledge as well as skill to perform the different tasks that comprise business operations. Tacit knowledge and skill resides in the specific individuals, and shared knowledge in the specific relations between individuals. Losing an individual is losing part of aggregate tacit knowledge and skill, as well as all the specific relations shared by the individual. The organization as a thing-in-the-world loses part of itself not captured by it's charter and governing contracts (or share value, or business strategy, i could go on). These things are hard to quantify on the best of days, so to assume (or even mandate) that this cost is incurred with net benefit (by, as you say, hiring some industry heavy-hitter who is expected to bring the goods) is fraught with unknowns, and on balance likely hubris.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#36Doesn't mention the benefits of attrition. A network can be robust since none of the pieces leaves, but what is even more robust is a network that constantly renews itself and gracefully handles the process of swapping out parts. Constant attrition means that your company never starts relying on individuals, instead the process survives and thrives on its own, hiring new people who then hire new people before they le…
This is very true. Attrition helps with cross pollination as well as enforcing process and knowledge sharing.
However, I'd submit that it doesn't matter how good the docs and process are, you're going to lose a lot when an engineer who has been at a company for, say, 3+ years leaves:
* historical knowledge * personal relationships * intuition about the systems
Some things you can't get except by putting in the time.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#37The 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…
> 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; ... If the author's premise is correct, there should be a lot of money to be made in retaining talent. Some of that should filter down to more than 3% raises. So if you believe in humans as rational economic actors, there is "$20 bills lying on the street" if you build a tech compa…
[deleted]
Re: Cost of Attrition
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true (I wouldn't know, never did it). But for what one might reasonably categorize as "knowledge work", my experience is that knowledge reigns supreme. Some of that knowledge is shared by a whole community of practitioners, other parts of it is local and contextualized. This part probably makes up a sizable proportion of an organizations competitive advantage. To m…
> To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire. Fortunately, we developed systems of writing, so that the limit to this relearning is higher now than a few millennia ago. (Society does the ultimate “rehiring” continually.) I think that far too many companies (including my own) rely much too heavily on “things that are in people’s heads” and don’t spend e…
Well yes, if we could only train new employees for 20 years in the specific curricula of the organization, as that is how long we spend getting pi and calculus into the heads of kids.
On the scale of lifetimes, I don't think we can refer to it as "churn" as understood in the context of a modern company.
I'm being facile, of course. Developing a good library of knowledge as you propose is hard, takes a long time and many iterations and there is the unfortunate matter of time taking it's toll on the relevance of such recorded knowledge (esp. in our line of work). Not to mention costs. Even academic institutions, who are in the business of doing exactly this, guard their staff with tenure (some of the staff anyway, the big boys)
Re: Cost of Attrition
#39The 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…
Well said! Companies destroyed employee loyalty - by letting people go while paying bonuses to executives, by giving 3% raises while offering way higher salaries to new hires, by saying "we are a family here" only when they need employees to make sacrifices. From the perspective of an engineering manager, attrition sucks. Whenever a season engineer leaves my team, I dread the next couple of weeks, because there's a c…
> Employers destroyed the loyalty and they need to fix it.
I agree. I don't think that there's any incentive to do that, though.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#40Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost. Pay developers like it's monopoly money. You could call this "The benefit of retention", though that may be a bit reductive.
> Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost. That isn't true at all. FAANG pays a lot for you to join them and give good raises, but they don't pay extra to make you stay instead of leaving for another FAANG. So there is still a lot of churn at FAANG.
Well, you've reduced competition for employees from THE REST OF THE WORLD to a handful of companies, the executives of which you met for golf and sherry last Tuesday.