“This post is also available as a Twitter Thread” struck me as nonsensical as a restaurant saying “This meal is also available as a taxi ride”.
Cost of Attrition
51–60 of 169 posts
Re: Cost of Attrition
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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. That isn't to avoid churn, that is to have more people around in general. If you leave your old team it means you no longer use your knowledge, the important part is to have engineers around, not to have the same engineers working on…
Military veterans of some theater of war are desired exactly because they will perform well in the next theater of war.
I don't think i can fully appreciate how mind-bogglingly huge a company like Google is, so it might well be the case that tacit knowledge, skills and relations acquired in one team don't transfer meaningfully to another. I would have to see it to be convinced however, even more so to make me believe this kind of transfer was the norm.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#53The 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.
That’s an interesting logical leap.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#54The 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.
Here’s a relevant MonkeyUser: https://www.monkeyuser.com/2020/new-hire/
Re: Cost of Attrition
#55“This post is also available as a Twitter Thread” struck me as nonsensical as a restaurant saying “This meal is also available as a taxi ride”.
More like "this meal is also available to go, but we put it in 15 packages, each containing three spoonfuls"...
Re: Cost of Attrition
#56Earlier 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…
>Defects is a metric businesses doesn't care much about.
This depends on both the defect and the business. Just because critical regressions and recurring denial of service has become normalized as somehow par for the course in our line of business does not mean it comes without cost. It's all situational and subject to calculated tradeoffs but every shop i've worked with/in has classes of defects on the "Never Again" list, and sometimes on the "NEVER EVER EVER AT ANY COST" list.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#57While the point seems worthwhile, the animations don't help at all. Stuff moves around for no reason (some graph layouting algorithm with easing I guess), the looping is bad and it's annoying to wait for the changes and as they happen instantly A simple picture for each transition would have been simpler to implement and actually showed something.
yeah, the animations gave me a headache. Stopped reading the article
Re: Cost of Attrition
#58The 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.
There's an unintuitive incentive to refrain from gaining too much knowledge of all of an org's systems. Being the support person across teams potentially lowers your value to your immediate leads since you get pulled away so much. Good management will identify and correct for this, but it's not easy.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#59Nice. 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.
Define idiot coworker and idiotic discussions. I have only worked in small teams so I'm not sure I've met such a person.
Re: Cost of Attrition
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It takes 20 years because kids come from all kinds of backgrounds and there isn't enough funding for individualized support. A company should be able to get someone up to speed faster since that person is presumably chosen for that role based on existing proficiency. It's easier to piece together an understanding of the system from the napkin scratch notes of the person who got hit by a bus than it is to hope they come out of the coma before the business fails. Imperfect documentation is better than none.