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Cost of Attrition

benjiweber.co.uk

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Re: Cost of Attrition

#71

Post by lotsofpulp »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #65
arnvald wrote: post #30

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…

Don’t forget or discount the destruction of the social contract between employer and employee. Massive layoffs, insolvent pensions, etc were just the start. 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 poin…

> 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.

Pensions are not relevant anymore. I see no reason to pay a defined benefit pension fund’s employees and expenses when I can simply buy VOO or a target date fund at one of many brokerages for basically free. And I get to avoid the risk of a corrupt employee of the employer messing with it, or to risk the employer not being around 50 years later.

The other parts of the post have so many factors that contribute that it is not related to employer employee social contracts. Birth rates, relative developed-ness of other countries, supply and demand of labor, automation, political winds, societal changes, etc.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#72

Post by beaconstudios »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #63
beaconstudios wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 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 al…

That's a post hoc argument - you're presenting a possibility to explain why not minimising attrition was actually rational all along. Its quite well established by now that human decision making is not very rational. Even people who aim for rationality are generally biased towards variables with high measurablility.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#73

Post by 1970-01-01 »

>Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet.

Beware looking at teams as a social network graph or org chart! Human teams are nuanced and require up-keep.. hence the existence of HR and management.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#74

Post by michaelt »

Jensson wrote: post #24
nindalf wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

> If you leave your old team it means you no longer use your knowledge,

If you move from Team A to Team B, you may not use your knowledge of the details of their codebase.

But you know precisely how to sort out the problems caused by the company's weird internal certificate authority, and their weird internal deployment tools, their weird internal inter-service auth system, and their weird internal multi-cloud system. That 'secure' way of managing secrets in production that makes 'unauthorized' errors almost impossible to debug? You know how to debug it. You know how to operate the purchasing system so your orders go through right the first time. You know precisely what the criteria are to get your subordinates promoted, and how to coach them to meet the criteria.

That can be worth a lot, when it comes to getting things done.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#75

Post by datavirtue »

Jensson wrote: post #2

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…

Hmmm...I and a few other top developers on a corporate team just left a project and company because we were being mindlessly driven by management.

Management really tried to be accommodating, transparent, and woke in their treatment of employees but the work load was just too much. One sprint into the next without any breath in between.

Tenure averaged about one year on the team. The project has been going without release for three or four years.

The only people left are juniors (college grads basically) who don't realize how bad it is wrecking their health.

The only thing keeping their main SME dev is the generous PTO. She is always out sick, randomly. A lot of it was obviously the stress. She would always let out this lengthy loud exhale on calls and in grooming sessions. When I started doing that I began the exit.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#76

Post by ghaff »

thewarrior wrote: post #45
mooreds wrote: post #34

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…

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.

Especially with remote work breaking down geographical moats at least within countries/regions, it's entirely possible that for most people salary-maximizing, they go with one of the big West Coast employers (or something like an HFT) if they can get in. And most other companies compete to hire everyone else.

Of course, hiring practices are sufficiently random in many cases that it's not really a matter of those firms skimming all the cream (and salary is only one factor that many go by anyway). But it is harder for other companies to salary match the likes of Google and Facebook.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#77

Post by wbl »

nindalf wrote: post #10
Jensson wrote: post #2

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…

> 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…

My past company tried to present these moves as a career option while failing to come up with a guide to promotion, and not really having the higher level of technical job. I changed jobs and got three promotions in five minutes by accident.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#78

Post by lotsofpulp »

beaconstudios wrote: post #72
lotsofpulp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 al…

That's a post hoc argument - you're presenting a possibility to explain why not minimising attrition was actually rational all along. Its quite well established by now that human decision making is not very rational. Even people who aim for rationality are generally biased towards variables with high measurablility.

The reasoning is that if preventing attrition was so valuable, then it would have shown up via better profits for various businesses over the many previous decades, especially publicly listed ones since their financials are public.

I am sure some businesses got it wrong, and some businesses got it right. And it probably even varies within businesses based on specific roles.

For example, it very well may be rational for a grocery store to let cashiers go if the cost of acquiring and training a new one is low enough that it lets the store compete with other grocery stores since they are operating on razor thin margins. On the other hand, people with specialized tasks in the store such as a butcher or baker or manager might have a better case for keeping them from leaving.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#79

Post by alexashka »

dgb23 wrote: post #59
jeffrallen wrote: post #29

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.

"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.'

Re: Cost of Attrition

#80

Post by jrochkind1 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #73

>Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet. Beware looking at teams as a social network graph or org chart! Human teams are nuanced and require up-keep.. hence the existence of HR and management.

If that's really what HR is supposed to be doing (upkeep of human teams, with nuance)... I have never worked at a place where they even act like they think it is, let alone succeed at doing it. Are there really HR's out there who are different?

I have worked for managers who act like they think it is their role, and even succeed at doing it. As well as managers who don't.

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