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Cost of Attrition

benjiweber.co.uk

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Re: Cost of Attrition

#161

Post by ozim »

soheil wrote: post #154
grayfaced wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attrition usually loses the top-performers because they can get much better offers. The poor-performers don't have any good options to leave. Proactive management would reward the top performers and reprimand/fire the poor performers. That's the opposite of attrition.

Wait so according to your model of the world top-performers become idiots in their next job? Where are all these top-performers who do get compensated enough and what companies do they work for that have no attrition?

World is much bigger than you can imagine. If you hop jobs every 2 years in 30 years it is only 15 companies.

I have something like 10 years of experience and was working or collaborating already with something between 10 and 13 companies.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#162

Post by ozim »

Jensson wrote: post #25
enord wrote: post #12

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…

I don't think that hiring people to get outside knowledge is that useful in IT.

From what I understand there is no such other occupation that is sharing so much information between people. You have blogs, loads of free and paid materials, you have loads of conferences where you can send your staff to see "how others are doing it".

Other thing that I often see ... a lot of developers really invest in "outside knowledge" and common problem in dev teams is building stuff with new shiny tech or in a new way they saw on the conference.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#163

Post by streblo »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #141
streblo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"governments need to step in" was a pretty big leap to begin with

Not really. In the US, we have many government agencies, like OSHA, and the NLRB, and others, like the SEC, etc., not to mention the AGs and other law-enforcement people. Business owners love to hate on them, but they are a big reason that we don't have poorhouses any more. I have found that there is absolutely no bottom to the depths that people will sink, if they can make money. This seems to be true of folks that…

> I have found that there is absolutely no bottom to the depths that people will sink, if they can make money.

I'm confused why you don't think this same reasoning doesn't apply to politicians and bureaucrats who would be doing the regulating.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#164

Post by ozim »

I have to ask one important question, even though talent is more valuable than money, companies still don't have infinite amounts of money to simply rise pay for everyone.

Some companies operate in not that profitable markets or have bunch of other issues.

Cost of attrition is still dispersed over the time and while you loose the knowledge at hand it still might be cheaper to build it back over a year than drop cash on people right here right now.

There is such thing as time-value of money and company might prioritize other investments that in long term will outweigh knowledge lost as knowledge can be rebuilt and gains from other investment might not.

Of course one can say - there will be some knowledge that will be gone. From practical point of view, if that knowledge that is lost would be so valuable it would most likely resurface or would be rediscovered quickly by new hires. Maybe not ideally but still in a way that company can continue.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#165

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

streblo wrote: post #163
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. In the US, we have many government agencies, like OSHA, and the NLRB, and others, like the SEC, etc., not to mention the AGs and other law-enforcement people. Business owners love to hate on them, but they are a big reason that we don't have poorhouses any more. I have found that there is absolutely no bottom to the depths that people will sink, if they can make money. This seems to be true of folks that…

> I have found that there is absolutely no bottom to the depths that people will sink, if they can make money. I'm confused why you don't think this same reasoning doesn't apply to politicians and bureaucrats who would be doing the regulating.

Why do you think I said it the way I did?

Really, this is going nowhere. You seem to think I said something I didn't, and I can't change your mind.

Have a nice day.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#166

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #159
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example. Maybe it only applies in the US, but Japan has something even more stringent. If you live/work in a building with several floors, and a stairwell, go down the stairwell, until you get to the ground floor. If the building has a basement, there will be a door to the basement, and it will be facing the stairwell, and will open inward (towards the stairwell). The ground floor (at least), will have a "p…

I meant in regards to how long an employee works for an employer. That seems like it needs no government intervention.

No, I meant helping employers and employees to be able (not forced) to keep employees/stay in a job, if that is what they want.

This is usually done by "carrot" measures, like tax breaks, and "stick" measures, like minimum wages. It can also be safe workplaces.

But like I said, that's not going anywhere (in the US, at least).

Re: Cost of Attrition

#167

Post by sortalongo »

disambiguation wrote: post #136

Arguments of attrition aside, I don't agree with this model. Maybe I'm not understanding what an edge is supposed to be, but the author implies that "something" is lost when the edge disappears. That doesn't make sense. Knowledge live in the node, not the edge. You don't just forget a project you worked on just because someone left. If you lose access to knowledge when someone leaves, that's because you did a bad job…

I thought the edges represented the strength of relationships between teammates. As people get to know each other, people settle into roles and communication patterns, worrying less about social status, complementing each other, making decisions faster, and anticipating each other. Time together makes good a team more effective.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#168

Post by enord »

Kye wrote: post #60
enord wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

We are not in disagreement here. I was making a comparison in kind as a cheap rhetoric trick. Documentation is good, no documentation bad, good documentation can be better.

Slide along the scale towards more and better documentation and our perceptions might diverge. I don't think all the valuable know-how that goes in to fulfilling a specific role in a larger organization (and in particular the marginal knowledge, relations and skill that increases performance) can be captured in words. Even if it were, there is so much of it and it is full of subtle nuance and context sensitivity. On top of that each individual person takes to different parts of it in different ways. The things you can only learn by jumping in at the deep end. We all know, deep inside, that this is the stuff that matters and I see no reason to play charades and pretend we can know or see how even half of what we do really works. If we did, the world would be a very different place. Until then: tacit, implicit, context bound and relation contingent knowledge and skill will be the light that shines on our practice; and what we can put in to words, a mere shadow.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#169

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

myownpetard wrote: post #158
hwbehrens wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent's loyalty isn't to the company, it's to their direct reports (I assume). After you've been shielding people from the shitstorm for long enough, it can feel very difficult to fold up your umbrella and leave. Even if it's strictly better for you , it might violate your utilitarian instincts or personal ethics. Of course, companies know this and use it as one of the many tools to suppress wages.

But it sounds like they didn't do great by their reports: "I was a manager for over 25 years. I feel that I was a good one. My employees seemed to agree. I kept many of them on board for decades, and these were folks that could walk out the door, and get huge pay raises (my company paid "competitive" salaries)." It sounds like they did great by the company shareholders who captured the value from below market salarie…

Sadly, this is the type response I always get, around these parts, when I talk about things like kindness, integrity, honesty, and empathy.

In our industry, we get paid a lot, for our ages (I never made as much as even entry-level folks, these days, but I had plenty of money, and still do).

It's not my fault that so many people decide to live beyond their means. Many folks would be crazy grateful for the money we waste on frivolities.

I'm not a threat to anyone here. I live my life, the way I live it. I write the software I write, and I chronicle it here. There are alternative points of view, and alternative ways of living.

I'm almost deliriously happy, in my life now. I never understood how incredibly valuable it is, to be in a position, where my work is not getting turned into raw sewage, by clueless corporations.

There are other measures of success, in life, besides money.

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