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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

#201

Post by ithkuil »

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…

Person A didn't do the unwise thing because they knew the system inside out.

Person B did an unwise thing and spent the weekend working to fix the consequence.

If the problem was subtle and management didn't immediate corelate the action of Person B with the problem, they are likely to profusely praise Person B's working their asses off to save the company during the weekend.

On the flipside, if the company only contains A kind of people or if A people are too influential, it's likely that you'll stick in a local optimum where people are not incentivized to try out new things that may fail but may also succeed.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#202

Post by raducu »

gsibble wrote: post #19
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…

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.

> Almost all of the companies I worked at hired senior positions from outside the company instead of promoting from within.

It's one of those things that goes by "Yeah, yeah, we know the studies, doesn't work that way in real life, it's cheaper to just fuck over your employees, pay new employees more, most of the old dumb fucks are to stupid/lazy to ask for a raise/go to an interview", just like work from home used to be. Until reality kicks in, some tectonic shifts happen and they start screaming they can't find good employees.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#204

Post by raducu »

aperson_hello wrote: post #111
afarrell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm in the process of changing jobs, not an employee, but I don't think it's HR's fault, but that of managers -- they should know the best what value people bring and what are the consequences of losing certain people be.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#205

Post by lloydatkinson »

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…

I am seeing this recently. Imagine a place that hired dozens of really good developers in 2020. Now imagine that instead of focussing on retention and paying well, they focussed on ignoring the waves of developers leaving and instead on exclusively hiring graduate developers. Now imagine all that domain knowledge that left months ago... compounded by the fact there is only five developers left from 2020...

Totally not a real story at all...

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#206

Post by hot_gril »

hayst4ck wrote: post #23

The hazard of retention is creating dependency. Dependency means, not just high bus factor, but opening yourself (the business) up to being vulnerable to another person's superior negotiation position. Then CEOs/boardmembers would have to spread their wealth rather than hoarding it all for themselves. Without a way to force CEO/boardmembers to spread their wealth (unions), I think we can expect companies to do what i…

As a rank and file employee, I'd not want to work with others at my same level who've made the company depend on them disproportionately to their level. Those exist, and they tend to obstruct progress.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#207

Post by kqr »

refurb wrote: post #194
kqr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

You are fortunate to have worked in mostly good places! I have seen a lot of sales compensated on commission at contract close. It gets as dysfunctional as one would expect.

I still don't agree it's easier, though. If a customer stays, is it because they've received great support or because the salesperson found a good fit?

What I'm trying to say is "if sales get compensated when a customer sticks around, then so should everyone else supporting that customer".

Basically the only good incentive programme is profit sharing (or ownership) applied across the organisation.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#208

Post by raducu »

returningfory2 wrote: post #26
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…

This is a common response to this issue, but I think there is a logical flaw in it. Employers don't know ahead of time which employees will leave and which will stay. In order to improve their employee retention, employers have to pay _all_ of their employees more, not just the ones that eventually will leave. This changes the math entirely. For example, suppose it costs 50% extra to replace someone who leaves. In re…

> For example, suppose it costs 50% extra to replace someone who leaves. In retrospect, sure, giving the sole employee who leaves a 10% raise each year to retain them makes sense. But if you have to give all of your employees a 10% raise per year, just to retain that one person, it doesn't make financial sense anymore.

Yeah, so basically this argument is realpolitik, machiavellianism, game theory -- things that work 9/10 years, bring in profits but have enormous hidden costs that ravage companies/economies/countries in that 1/10, 1/50, 1/100 years.

The argument is "be a dick as much as you can get away with, because people are sheep and being a dick is a virtue actually". Until a lot of people start being dicks, then we cry about the long lost art of not being dicks to eachother.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#209

Post by wink »

refurb wrote: post #194
kqr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Then again turnover for salespeople is often so fast that just doing 2 'good' years is enough, they move on and the company then needs to find a new salesperson AND new customers.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#210

Post by danwee »

I don't think it's realistic (but I wish it were). An example from a Western European country of what retention should look like from my point of view:

Senior software engineer (10 years of exp.) joins company X. Year salary: 80K EUR. This salary is not exclusive of "tier-1 top companies"(but let's not start a discussion about how low or high this number is, please)

- After 1 year. Good performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 92K EUR

- After 2 years. Great performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 105800 EUR... now this salary is starting to look unrealistic

- After 3 years. Great performance, he's the de-facto tech lead of the team. Raise of 15%. New salary = 121670 EUR. Now this is salary is rare for for non-tier 1 companies

At this point the senior engineer considers leaving because in year 4, it's impossible he'll get a 15% raise again (that would make around 140K EUR, and company X is not Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft). So, he switches companies. Company hires a new senior software engineer for 90K EUR. The cycle starts again.

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