61–70 of 169 posts
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.
Define idiot coworker and idiotic discussions. I have only worked in small teams so I'm not sure I've met such a person.
While 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 pr…
It depends how supply and demand curves are moving. What might be true today may not have been true 10 years or 20 or 30 years ago. Labor costs have a big impact on profit, a measurement that all company owners and executives care very much about.
For the past few decades, it may have been true that the cost of attrition was less than the benefits of holding down pay for most others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
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…
Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre.
When all that goes away and I have to work harder for less than my parents got then what is the point of being loyal to psychopathic companies with excruciatingly well documented histories of treating employees like interchangeable chattel? Loyalty ain’t gonna give these monsters any pause when they put the squeeze on me and the other numbers on their screen while they fantasize about how to blow their ill gotten gains.
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…
> 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…
1) They're not.
2) Even if they were, it may be the case they are short-term biased, meaning they're willing to forgo $20 tomorrow for $10 today.
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.
Define idiot coworker and idiotic discussions. I have only worked in small teams so I'm not sure I've met such a person.
They have been at the company too long and aren't really happy about it. They don't get a new job because it's viewed as far too distruptive to their life. Again, they are probably 100% correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn'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…
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…
> 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…