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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

#231

Post by wwweston »

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).

Thatcher's advancement an individual self-interest oriented worldview is certainly advantageous/correct for her to say politically.

But the name for the 'system level' of a collection of interacting individual humans would be ... society.

Her statement is also deeply incorrect that individuals are solely interest-driven -- they're also value driven (though I suspect like many effective politicians she damn well knew that regardless of what she said). Of course, with companies, her statement is significantly more apt.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#232

Post by andrewflnr »

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…

Obviously identifying key people is hard, or everyone would get it right. Most important things are like that.

(I don't think it's quite as hard as you're making it out, though. Who are the people you go to first with questions about how stuff works?)

Maybe we have a mismatch on what "appropriate" pay means. If the expected cost of losing someone is less than what you're paying them, maybe you're paying them more than what's appropriate. But it does sound a bit like you're falling into the same trap as GP in assuming you have to pay everyone the same rate; I could be misreading you.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#233

Post by namelessoracle »

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 its usually pay, sometimes other perks are part of it too. Higher rank = get away with more at most places. If the Staff needs to disappear for a couple of days due to personal reasons everybody wishes them the best. The Junior/Mid will get a lot of questions asked. Thats my professional experience from observation.

When you become low level manager this resets btw, Senior Managers and Directors will want to know where you are, nobody asks why the Director wasn't feeling it for 2 days though.

Other part of it is control. Higher rank means you get to decide which technology and how the problem gets solved and get to play empire building games. Which is fulfilling to some people. Some people want to feel like they are making the decisions, other people like to feel like they have influence on others for self worth. Other people enjoy high level strategic work over doing actual implementation of the work. You pretty much have to get promoted to do strategic style work in tech. My analogy is you enjoy playing a starcraft style RTS where you get joy out of sending the exact right amount of marines to beat that enemy in the most efficient manner, but hate having to do an FPS where you play that marine and have to fight that enemy yourself.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#234

Post by 93po »

ryan_lane wrote: post #198
gsibble wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), documentin…

Nice of you to prioritize wealthy company owners over your own income.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#235

Post by scruple »

ragazzina wrote: post #212
fuzzzerd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those boomerang employees. It was the best thing I ever did. Left on good terms, learned a ton of new stuff at a few other companies, and ultimately came back a much improved employee, despite being a high performing worker to begin with. Didn't realize there was a name/term for it, but it makes a lot of sense.

Where I'm currently working, a coworker left a couple weeks ago. He really wanted to stay, he LOVED the company, but his position wasn't a great fit for him and he found something else. He told me that when he told HR "I hope I will come back some day", HR replied: "until I'm head of HR, no one that leaves will ever be considered again".

When I left my last job (BigTechCo) I was explicitly told by HR and my manager that I'd always be welcome back, just reach out. That company got a lot wrong but the HR department and my immediate management chain really did a great job.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#236

Post by leducw »

duxup wrote: post #56

Customer service/ even technical support seems to be a very little respected area in most companies. Trying to retain people they don’t respect already seems unlikely.

It makes me quite sad to see how undervalued customer service and support is in a lot of the IT/tech world in general.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#237

Post by gsibble »

ok_computer wrote: post #174
gsibble wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Though it may cost more, spreading functional knowledge across a greater base of people would be more resilient. Even if a company needs to pay an individual 10x salary consulting for a year, it would be in their long term best interest to spread a fraction of that knowledge across a larger employee base and document what is tangible. There is a limit (different for different people) across which an individual cannot…

They went out of business from the added cost, so, didn't work for them.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#238

Post by gsibble »

93po wrote: post #234
ryan_lane wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), documentin…

Nice of you to prioritize wealthy company owners over your own income.

Yeah, my goal is to make a company as dependent upon me as possible in order to grow my income, not make it so I'm disposable.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#239

Post by throwaway675309 »

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…

I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, I find that a lot of developers particularly younger millennials and generation Z put very little emotional investment in their jobs and treat it as a means to a financial end and nothing more, and honestly I think this is a healthy approach.

So that regard they would prefer more money and couldn't care less care about arbitrary internal recognition, it's a job nothing more, unless you're actually working in a genuinely meaningful field like advancing medical science for example.

Every time I've ever switched jobs (particularly anything revolving around e-commerce) or other meaningless drivel it's been about the money pure and simple.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#240

Post by ryan_lane »

93po wrote: post #234
ryan_lane wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), documentin…

Nice of you to prioritize wealthy company owners over your own income.

I'm prioritizing myself. My value isn't based on how dependent people are on me, it's based on how well I scale the company. They could fire me whenever they wanted and the business would continue running, but they don't want to fire me, because my value is high. My approach has landed me consistent promos, raises, and out of band stock grants.

If you think you're safe because the company is so dependent on you, you're misguided. You're the kind of folks that are actively targeted.

Ignoring money, I'm also prioritizing myself, because by removing myself as a dependency, I also make it possible to take vacations, and my stress levels are low.

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