Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

hrdive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 247 posts

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#111

Post by aperson_hello »

afarrell wrote: post #18
woeirua wrote: post #17

When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates…

Or at least raise the salary cap alongside seniority for roles beyond a certain level.

Or just have HR actually do their jobs and understand who is and isn't creating value instead of setting arbitrary salary caps...

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#112

Post by FredPret »

woeirua wrote: post #17

When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates…

100%. One counterexample (unfortunately the only one that comes to mind) is sales, where performance has an immediate positive cash & profit impact that is trivial to measure. Top salespeople can earn more than the CEO's of their companies.

In the backend of the org, this is harder to do, because the impact is hard to measure and comes to fruition later in the game.

One solution is to have small teams of engineers that own their companies - ie, millions of tiny startups. That way, brilliant contributions lead to large profits for the contributor.

But how engineers can be fairly compensated in large orgs, I'm not sure. This is a fundamentally hard problem. Removing the salary ranges might help.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#113

Post by wisnoskij »

badlucklottery wrote: post #109
wisnoskij wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Come on now. That seems like an intellectually dishonest example. Do you really think anyone is proposing the pay growth of a janitor should be so high they're getting CEO rates?

If pay were calculated by seniority, and not title, how else would it work?

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#114

Post by clnq »

neilv wrote: post #87
clnq wrote: post #45

I work for a tech company that promotes internally quite well in recent years. But they also only want to hire senior, principal and lead level engineers to develop a mature workforce. Unfortunately, they fail to attract enough talent to replace attrition, which is high due to increasingly paltry employee numbers. And all in all, while the promotion-to-hiring ratio is good, there is too little hiring to keep employee…

70 hrs/wk is for a rare work emergency. 100 hrs/wk will send someone to the Emergency Room.

Yes, it does generally lead to ER (particularly for stress symptoms being confused for something serious) now and then.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#115

Post by FredPret »

peteradio wrote: post #31
gsibble wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of the companies I worked at hired senior positions from outside the company instead of promoting from within. The other issue I ran into was being so good at the position I was in that I was "unpromotable". Got told that a lot as an IC. Was then told even though I was fully qualified for the promotion, I would not get it nor the accompanying salary.

Quoted post unavailable.

You're getting some snarky replies but I can totally see this being included in a management methodology to get the most out of an IC. It's not a good thing but it would work on some

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#116

Post by muzani »

errantmind wrote: post #34
woeirua wrote: post #17

When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates…

While I broadly agree with your point, rewarding seniority is at odds with rewarding people based on how good they are at their jobs, from the perspective of incentives. The two are not always correlated and this is often why some companies hire externally instead of promoting from within. That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to thei…

Seniority has a very real value in tech, though. It probably doesn't have much value if you're say, a doctor, working with different systems each time that look similar.

But in programming, you deal with systems, you know the undocumented gotchas of the system, and understand the flow of it better than someone who's completely new to it. You know when Chesterton's fence applies and when it doesn't. I often tell startups to promote the juniors instead of replacing them with seniors, because the junior who built the system would be able to modify it better.

Even in sales and product, there's some value to understanding what the customer wants and aligning that to the features or a specific pitch and such.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#117

Post by stainforth »

dbcurtis wrote: post #64
errantmind wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I broadly agree with your point, rewarding seniority is at odds with rewarding people based on how good they are at their jobs, from the perspective of incentives. The two are not always correlated and this is often why some companies hire externally instead of promoting from within. That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to thei…

Paying for equal performance on the measurable aspects of the job is easier to do than putting a value on institutional knowledge. As an old bird that has had time to internalize the tech stack, I can make one comment along the line of “Don’t do that, and here is why...” — getting that kind of contribution noticed and valued is harder. Parent comment is really saying to find a way to put a value on institutional know…

Yes and the parent to yours is saying that leadership are the ones not capable or willfully opposite to > noticing and valuing

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#118

Post by phpisthebest »

woeirua wrote: post #17

When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates…

Over the years i've had debates with co-workers when someone changes roles with less responsibly, or goes from managing people to not but increases their salary on if that is a "promotion"

My Position has always been "More Money, with less responsibility, is the best promotion one could ever get"

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#119

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

muzani wrote: post #116
errantmind wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I broadly agree with your point, rewarding seniority is at odds with rewarding people based on how good they are at their jobs, from the perspective of incentives. The two are not always correlated and this is often why some companies hire externally instead of promoting from within. That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to thei…

Seniority has a very real value in tech, though. It probably doesn't have much value if you're say, a doctor, working with different systems each time that look similar. But in programming, you deal with systems, you know the undocumented gotchas of the system, and understand the flow of it better than someone who's completely new to it. You know when Chesterton's fence applies and when it doesn't. I often tell start…

I agree with your general point, but medical doctors are the very last example I would have ever picked.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#120

Post by helf »

Ok, to actually add to this instead of just a one liner…

My current employer is a prime example of this stupid mentality causing issues.

They’ve gotten better about it but since I started little over two years ago they’ve had probably 60% turn over of full time team leader and higher staffers. Our poor VP spent the last 3 years arguing with our Japanese President and others about the need for retention policies as we have such a high staff turn over that it was/is costing us money in overtime etc. we were in a bit of a death spiral last year that we’ve luckily pulled out of but we lost so many people due to COVID and similar that we were working people mandatory 12 hour shifts with mandatory OT and kept having /more people/ quit. For obvious reasons. And then new hires wouldn’t last through their first paycheck.

They had to up base pays and bite the bullet and hire a ton of people all at once to try and get shift times lower.

It’s one of those things that makes me glad I’m IT. I’m a critical employee and they bend over backwards to accommodate me when I need it. I try to not abuse that though :)

We are a tier 1 parts supplier for Honda and we operate damn near 24/7/365

Post reply on HN