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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

#191

Post by lambdasquirrel »

leetcrew wrote: post #188
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…

> 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. I don't agree that this is a trap. sure, leveling systems aren't perfect. but they're based on a key insight: there is usually a limit to the impact an engineer can have for a given scope. if I own a single service/component i…

People can broaden the scope without leveling. The purpose of leveling is very frequently to give people hoops to jump through, especially at larger companies. Its purpose is another form of retention.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#192

Post by dalyons »

dbish wrote: post #52

The confusing thing happening over the last 1-2 years (and in previous cycles) is that many current employees are also down significantly on their stock grants in public big tech. Employers seem to see this as ok, and that’s the risk they take when taking stock, yet they are willing to go and pay a new hire with an updated price that means they make far more than you. It incentivizes leaving and wouldn’t cost the emp…

I’ve been wondering about this myself. If you work in publicco tech, all their grants are priced in dollar equiv. So as you say, bouncing jobs right now should give you a ~50% equity boost, if you’re on a 4 year today at your current co. Surely though this is obvious & companies are doing top ups? Or, since they’re all entering hiring freezes / layoffs maybe they don’t can and want the attrition

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#193

Post by discordance »

mindvirus wrote: post #5

When I was at a FAANG, it felt like they had this down to a science. Promotions every 2-3 years. Raises once a year, a few spot bonuses throughout the year, ad hoc equity grants. People still quit of course, but looking back it felt very retention focused and scientific.

Anecdotal, but I’m FAANG and in the process of switching, leveling up and getting paid a lot more elsewhere.

There was a counteroffer when I told my present company about the new offer but it was too little too late.

It’s well known among my peers that to level up or get paid more, you go elsewhere and maybe even boomerang back later.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#194

Post by refurb »

kqr wrote: post #184
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…

> 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. Nope! Two salespeople closing the same total value over a year can have vastly different impacts on the business. Say Alice cares about how well the customers she brought in are doing. She follows up on their experience every six months. She talks…

Most places I’ve seen have year on year bonuses for sales growth. It doesn’t have be a flat bonus for a given year.

So if Alice finds good customers and retains them, she does better than Bob because that customer is retained and she’s finding new accounts while Bob is trying to find customers to replace the sales he lost this year.

It’s not trivial to develop sales incentive programs, I agree, but it’s way easier than doing it for home office people whose job only has a loose connection to revenue and profit and any measure is inherently subjective.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#196

Post by tedsanders »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #154
fluidcruft wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the military approach where there's a clock and you either get promoted or you are out. And then it repeats. Languishing isn't really allowed as an option. If a job/task only requires entry level skills, why are senior employees doing them?

Isn't that what Netflix does - or at least doesn't really permit for having an off-year?

Not at all. In fact, Netflix didn't even have levels until very recently. When I worked as a management consultant, about half of people left the company every two years at each promotion gate. Netflix's turnover was far, far lower.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#197

Post by Eisenstein »

majormajor wrote: post #149
muzani wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tenure, domain knowledge, and skill are all pretty different underlying things. Promoting someone with tenure just because of their domain knowledge is an extremely good way to hit the Peter Principle. You can get people who know the system very well but don't know how to take a step back and look around and evaluate the broader context vs just plugging along the same way as yesterday. Especially if you've never hire…

Aren't these reasons why management is supposed to exist? If they can't figure out how to manage these situations, the issue is with the managers, and the new hiring should begin there.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#198

Post by ryan_lane »

gsibble wrote: post #10
bbatchelder wrote: post #2

Too many times in my career have I seen an employer lose an employee, who has a ton of institutional knowledge and performs adequately or even excellently, only to replace them them with someone that ends up costing much more money, and then takes a lot of time to get up to speed (which also slows the folks who help get them up to speed). It is like they haven't taken the time to even make a rudimentary calculation o…

Oh, I've quit 3 companies where I was the CTO/lead engineer where they had to replace me with 5-10 people (backend and frontend devs, QA, devops, plus a manager or two, etc.) costing them enormous amounts of money. Many times they've hired me as a consultant where I make 5-10x my hourly rate for several months after bringing the new hires up to speed. Companies place very little emphasis on retention and retaining in…

In most companies, it's good to let you leave, if they need 5-10 people to replace you. You take this as a point of pride, but I see folks like this as organizational bottlenecks.

When I leave an organization, my goal is for them to either directly replace me, or for them to not need to replace me at all. I do this by ensuring that I don't silo my work (by ensuring others are working with me, or under me), documenting everything I work on, and occasionally changing roles.

My specific goal is to help a company grow, not to make them depend on me.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#199

Post by lvturner »

google234123 wrote: post #72
gsibble wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do seem to have it down. Startups on the other hand absolutely do not.

You sure? Seems like starts are the place where you find engineers with just a few years of experience getting management roles

A management role at a startup can be:

R&R of Manager Expected to perform as full time IC

and pay of an junior

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#200

Post by muzani »

danielheath wrote: post #146
kortilla wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ov…

I think it would have been clearer if they had said "Tenure" instead of "Seniority"

Yeah, they're synonymous in many cultures (the amount of time someone holds their current post, and not experience skill). But it seems they mean different things in this context.
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