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Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

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Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#131

Post by deathanatos »

helf wrote: post #120

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…

I really don't get these decisions. I presume they'd need to pay time and a half there; you might as well just hire more people and bump base pay 12.5%. Everyone is happier due to not being stressed out, and it's the same cost.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#132

Post by Firmwarrior »

wisnoskij wrote: post #113
badlucklottery wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The idea is to keep everyone making the market rate without them having to job hop every few years

Generally software engineers get crappy 2% raises year-over-year and may or may not get significant RSUs/bonuses, while the market rate is flying up 5+% per year. I think most people on this site who've been working for 10+ years can attest that they snagged a 50% or more pay increase by changing jobs at some point.

I'd still be working at my first crappy post-college job if they'd been nicer to me and I were within 75% of what I can make at a nearby FAANG. But I snagged a 100% pay bump (DOUBLED pay) by changing jobs. And then I doubled my pay again a few years later! And now I've been in my current job 3 years, and I'm pretty sure I could get a 20% increase by changing jobs again even with the recession.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#133

Post by chris_wot »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #30

Margaret Thatcher (in)famously said that there was no such thing as society. By that she meant that, actually the only thing out there is individuals looking after their own self-interests. Well, it is the same with companies. In both case this leads to suboptimal results at 'system level' (a well-known problem in system optimisation).

A Thatcherite view of the world and humanity is unsustainable over the long term. It causes a hideous, selfish and cruel society.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#134

Post by lamontcg »

They should also stop building open office plans, as numerous studies have shown.

I'd like to see a study which analyzed corporate management as a cult and looked at the irrational non-profit-motive based behaviors that you have to 'signal' in order to work up the ladder. Where decisions were more about peer approval than actually making the company better.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#135

Post by gmane »

phpisthebest wrote: post #118
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"

I think you're generally right (I just took a demotion in title with a promotion in pay), but with the edge cases to avoid:

1. Cul-du-sac promotions where once you're there you don't have a progression beyond 2. Promotions where you end up hating the work

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#136

Post by kortilla »

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…

> It probably doesn't have much value if you're say, a doctor, working with different systems each time that look similar.

You either don’t know what a doctor does or I don’t understand the point you were trying to drive. Doctors spend decades refining their ability to recognize all kinds of issues that have vastly different conditional probabilities of occurring. Internalizing that is the entire value of a doctor over webmd.

Being a doctor isn’t as simple as absorbing a mechanic’s guide to the human body and just doing the same procedures over and over.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#137

Post by FredPret »

Beldin wrote: post #126
FredPret wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> millions of tiny startups. Sounds a bit like what Google does internally for promotions. Except their execution is failing so badly it is starting to affect the company. And also that I have no faith in this concept any more.

I meant actual companies so that engineers can get the long term benefits of their performance

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#139

Post by dilyevsky »

localhost wrote: post #82

When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with, they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network. A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen without ICs who know a lot of people t…

That’s WAI - lots of managers would rather call all the shots.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#140

Post by clnq »

neilv wrote: post #123
clnq wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stress can also cause serious permanent damage, not only transient symptoms that might be mistaken for something else. If I see a colleague who's too stressed, I'll impress upon everyone the importance of correcting that.

Yes, that's true as well.

Unfortunately, there are certain industries like AAA games, TV and movies where ambitious people are generally exploited through under-resourcing. Crunch is relatively normal, and it does make good economic sense for the shareholders in terms of ROI.

Recently, many people have been leaving these industries because the health/ambition trade-off doesn't make sense for them anymore. It doesn't for me as well, and I'm leaving too.

A lot of good institutional knowledge is lost this way. It probably accounts for the recent decrease in quality and delays of big AAA games.

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