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.
those type of people are lifers at a company
Cost of Attrition
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: Cost of Attrition
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any evidence to your claim? It’s possible to ad hoc rationalize pretty much anything. A real statistic against your claim is one of the highest predictors of defects in a code base is whether or not the original team is still working on it.
> 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 t…
from a different angle:
"non original team" might have higher defects, but i propose that "non original team" without process or time to understand the code base would be more accurate.
changing people requires a time investment. and the learning curve is steep at the beginning
Re: Cost of Attrition
#43The 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…
In companies, perception is more important than reality - this is why easily measured variables are treated as more important than difficult-to-measure ones - you can justify decisions by pointing to hard data even if that data is barely related to the problem at hand. Imagine trying to justify giving a developer a large raise (a measurable impact) and justifying it with an argument that retention is probably more profitable than churning (hard to measure). You'll be laughed out the door.
People aren't rational actors in the sense of "they aim for the objectively best action given a goal" - we generally aim to minimise risk, prefer things that are simple, and prefer doing what everybody else is doing. Homo economicus isn't even used in modern economics let alone being anywhere near to reality.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#44The 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…
This is a game setup by company management which is heads we win tails you lose.
If people stay on in the company they under pay people and save money. If people are constantly job hopping there's no longer any long term obligations towards employees and you have a constant pool of replacements thereby saving even more money.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#45The 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…
Yes there's a lot of money in retaining talent at any cost. That's what FANG companies are basically. The only problem being these firms are so good at making money they've sucked out a lot of the oxygen.
Most companies aren't as good at using their retained talent to make money.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#46Doesn'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 this heavily depends on the type of industry you work in. In some industries the abuse is so normalised that everyone takes it for granted.
In retail you have the example of companies scheduling workers just under the number of hours at which they'd qualify for insurance or other benefits.
Hospitality work often expects you to be available any time they're short staffed, if you aren't you'll probably find your shifts cut.
On the white collar side last year we heard about junior analysts at Goldman Sachs being made to work 100+ hour weeks[1].
Game development is widely avoided due to a similarly toxic work culture, where you'll often be forced to "crunch" for long periods of time[2]. The worse places will also lay you off after the game has shipped.
At the software companies I've worked the biggest issues have been terrible raises for current employees, to the point that graduates were being paid the same or much more than people with 3+ years of experience.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/18/group-of-ju... [2] https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re...
Re: Cost of Attrition
#47The 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…
True, I work in a corporate like this with not much stress, lots of vacation days, interesting work. It is paid similar to other professionals in the office. However people can earn 2x, 3x at a tech company so are just walking out. Its just tech firms are paying so much money yet making no profits its crazy.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#48The other part of why people leave is they end up doing lots of support. Often when things go seriously wrong or even just regular problems the main people called on to fix it are the people that have been there a while and know the system best. They end up missing out on the interesting new projects. Its a good incentive to move.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#49The 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…
> So that generally means that governments need to step in, and help the people and companies to do the right thing.
Then its not democracy any more. Its slavery. If People want to leave let them leave.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#50Earlier 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…
True enough, but look at your last point.
> 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.
How long and how many resources does it take to train someone to understand pi, e, and calculus?
Or, to apply your nice analogy to the topic under discussion.
what are the expected costs (time + training support) to get a new hire trained on all of the written materials which describe the system?
For a non-trivial system, those costs can be very high.