Cost of Attrition

I think some developers don't realize that corporations have a target attrition rate and it is fairly easy for them to enforce.

I would say that Attrition actually benefits employees and companies. The Employees who stay take a pay cut each year either to inflation or to the fact they just don't get paid more. Employees get better pay once they change jobs and companies get to have new people at a lower rate and they in turn may have a different perspective. Avoiding change I think it isn't necessarily the people who will stay for long periods of time but it might be corporate culture instead.

This is only necessary for single-product companies. Otherwise, just do mandatory career broadening assignments like the military does. You have to learn about and work on many parts of many stacks and regularly change teams and product lines. There is no need to fire people to keep them working in one position forever and building fiefdoms.

Heck, militaries even have interbranch and even international exchange programs. There is no reason in principle companies can't do the same and temporarily trade out employees every now and again to learn how things work elsewhere. It would have to be subject to pretty strict NDAs and limitation of sensitive data access, but given the sensitivity of classified defense data, if the military can make it work, private companies should be able to make it work, too.

The second.

Lots of people want to "go back," but that can never happen. It does not mean that "the old ways" are bad, or that they could not be applied to today or the future, but there is a very good chance they would not be applicable to today's world, without modification.

I don't like "Old bad; New Shiny." Something is advantageous to the current situation, or it is not. Its provenance should have nothing to do with it.

As an engineer, who has been developing (and shipping) software for my entire life, I can tell you that some (not all, just some) things that I learned "in the good old days" are quite applicable to today's world, and I always find it amusing, when someone goes "Wow! That is so cool!" when I have shown them some old pattern that was created before they were born.

In the company that I worked at for a long time, a bunch of ultra-conservative folks had a war with future-facing folks, and won (that's one reason I was let go). I totally understand where they come from, but I also think that it was a disaster, and may kill a 100-year-old company.

But no one asked me. They just handed me my pink slip.

Best thing that ever happened to me.

Funny "In Soviet Russia..." story. A friend of mine, who is married to a Russian, and lived in Perm for many years, said that the soviets always built two of everything, because one inevitably failed, and was used for parts, for the second. I have no idea how true it was. He is prone to flights of hyperbole.

When I left my company, after 27 years, I chose to take my pension in a lump sum. I had plenty of money in other investments, so I wasn't too worried about it.

I used the money to fund one of my companies, and tossed the rest into an index fund.

I made back the money I used to fund the company in a couple of years; just from the portion in the index fund (it's been crazy).

Earlier this year, my ex-employees told me that the company is shutting down their pension plan. I don't think that they are siphoning off the money, Jimmy Hoffa-style, but I think that I'm glad I took the cashout.

> 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

No, they just choose who to reward according to whatever their metrics are and how someone's management chain chooses to apply those metrics. These rewards are explicitly stock-based to help with retention.

Some examples:

- Have a "top talent" marker, managers get N% of their headcount to distribute each year. Anyone with the marker get more comp than their peers. - Create stock and bonus bands based on your rating and level, then heavily reward high senior bands compared to others. - Create a special retention program for specific areas of tech (eg ML) or for senior engineers who "cap out". Anyone in these programs gets a boost to comp.

These things can be combined such that you can have 2x-5x differences in compensation for two engineers in the same department at the same nominal level, sometimes with small differences in performance ratings.

When used correctly as intended programs like this reward people who work the hardest, are the best at what they do, or who will cause the most pain if they leave the company. If used incorrectly they become a tool for managers to reward their friends/sycophants. If a manager doesn't think about how to use them at all then it becomes a random walk, biased toward whatever you happened to do around review time.

But no the FAANG companies are absolutely aware of the effects of retention and deploy resources to retain employees they think are important, at least at a high level. Sometimes those efforts don't reach the right people and sometimes your estimation of who is important is not aligned with the company's view.