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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

#221

Post by phpisthebest »

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…

>Employers don't know ahead of time which employees will leave and which will stay

I may be a bad example, but I can assure you every employer I have ever left new I was unhappy in my role before I left.

I always have frank and open conversations with my managers about my expectations for growth, wages, etc. These are not Ultimatums, but more "In 5 years I would like to be" type conversations.

Now as a manager I have gotten similar feedback from people that work from me, sometimes you have to listen closely to understand what they are saying in reality as many are not as direct as I am, but the feedback is there

I think managers just simply ignore it in most cases

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#222

Post by jokethrowaway »

twawaaay wrote: post #93
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…

> When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases). What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you. Most people want confirmation of t…

Nah, what you say is valid only for people doing menial tasks.

Sure, cheap developers implementing the same endpoint over and over for 20 years for a paycheck are like that, but a good chunk of them actually cares about solving a problem and get recognition in the form of life changing money.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#223

Post by justsocrateasin »

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…

Yes but sometimes they do - at my last job at a large corporation I was paid 80% below the median rate for an engineer in my area/YoE/etc. - I threatened I would quit and showed them a counter offer that was 30% more than what I was currently making and they said "sorry nothing we can do" so I quit and found a better job.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#224

Post by twawaaay »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #222
twawaaay wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases). What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you. Most people want confirmation of t…

Nah, what you say is valid only for people doing menial tasks. Sure, cheap developers implementing the same endpoint over and over for 20 years for a paycheck are like that, but a good chunk of them actually cares about solving a problem and get recognition in the form of life changing money.

How is a person receiving calls from customers and trying to solve their problems much different from say my job which is receiving calls from coworkers and trying to solve their problems.

Sure, I am paid many times better and the problems I am dealing with are way more complex and varied and I know a lot of people who are asking me for help, the calls are over Slack or Zoom and the timelines and involvement in the issue is much higher. Otherwise, this is the same job.

But to say that the people who are less capable are somehow composed differently psychologically, more resistant to doing repeatable work... it is the same as thinking that people in poor places on Earth are somehow very much different from us, less intelligent and outspoken. This is simply not true -- just go and visit places (and not just tourist attractions). Go to youtube and see people visiting places. Go to library and read a book about people visiting places.

Everybody says that the first thing they experienced is this feeling of everywhere in the world they thought being so much different, actually being very much the same as home. Buildings are different, views are different, weather is different, wealth is different. But the people and their daily problems are strikingly the same.

People who are paying low wage jobs have exactly the same kinds of problems, they just also have other problems like paying their rent that is keeping them doing the job they don't want to be doing because they just don't have any other option.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#225

Post by SauciestGNU »

raducu wrote: post #202
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.

> 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 t…

This is how my last job was, I was there for 7 years, finally left, tripled my compensation (I was very underpaid), and now most of the engineers I know from there have also left.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#226

Post by aperson_hello »

raducu wrote: post #204
aperson_hello wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The managers (in my experience at least, being on both sides of that table) don't have a shred of power in compensation discussions. That makes it a lot harder for the employee to negotiate (by design). Every compensation decision that wasn't pushed directly by HR got pushed to president-level management (these were in 100-500 person companies)

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#227

Post by SauciestGNU »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #160
paxys wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is that after a point in your career there's no path to promotion just for doing your job really well. You are expected to always take on new roles and responsibilities, some of which may not be suited for your personality or interests, and the net result often is that you get promoted and make more money but your overall useful output decreases. I know so many amazing engineers who had to essentially…

It's dysfunctional on the part of the org. But it's also a Faustian bargain that many engineers knowingly enter into. They are trading their professional coding passion in for more money and status. For some, this isn't much of a loss. For others, it is. It really depends.

I just went from Midwest money to Bay money without moving out of the Midwest as an IC. I'm basically set for life and I know I don't want to be a people manager. Maybe someday I'll be staff/principal but I really don't mind sitting at a terminal level slinging code.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#228

Post by dbcurtis »

JustLurking2022 wrote: post #185
dbcurtis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From my experience, I see institutional knowledge as a double edged sword - it can save you from some mistakes but, very often, it's also the thing standing in the way of progress. I don't think I can count how many times I've seen a really poorly designed solution causing real pain, and everyone even knows it's bad, but it will never change until X leaves the org, which they have no intent of doing until they're rol…

> it's also the thing standing in the way of progress.

The luddite attitude is orthogonal. Does it happen? Sure. But I also have the expectation that senior staff should be identifying the New, Better Way all the time. And are well-positioned to measure “better”. It is part of providing engineering leadership. An old bird that isn’t keeping up needs a job performance message.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#229

Post by Volrath89 »

dan-robertson wrote: post #85
andrewflnr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like you need to identify which employees are key contributors and pay them appropriately. Imagine that.

Well obviously it isn’t necessary to pay them ‘appropriately’ (as I assume you’re suggesting that many don’t. It may also be the case that the cost of losing a key employee times the expected number lost is less than the cost of paying them all enough that they’re paid ‘appropriately’). But I think the more important question is: who are these key contributors? It’s perhaps easy to identify some of them, particularly…

I think peers in a team always know who is the one who gets almost everything done. Maybe people in managament or in leadership positions don't know, but me in an individual contributor role always know who is the most productive and the one with the most business knowledge of my team.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#230

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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