Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

hrdive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–247 of 247 posts

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#241

Post by ryan_lane »

gsibble wrote: post #238
93po wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think you're making yourself indispensable by making the company dependent on you, but you're doing the opposite. You're a bottleneck, and when companies are trying to become more efficient, you'll be top of the list to make disposable.

Growth is understanding that you become indispensable by removing yourself as a dependency, because you uplift everyone around you. At higher levels of seniority, this is what orgs actually care about.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#242

Post by mbrochh »

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…

This can only work if you also reduce people's pay if they start stumbling and doing a shitty job.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#243

Post by cloverich »

luckylion wrote: post #77
endisneigh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easier said then done. Firstly it requires for you to know what you’re doing is both a key project and something in which paying more would be more likely to result in its completion.

Is it though? I've never worked as an actual employee, but I'm working in long-time contracts as a freelancer with companies. I've always found it pretty easy to tell who was carrying a project and who was dead weight. Might be different and harder to calculate for new projects, but for existing ones that are maintained, observing who gets asked when weird things happen and who solves the strange issues usually ident…

What you are describing is actually a rare skill / talent. Most people (including managers) do not possess it, IME.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#244

Post by AstralStorm »

akomtu wrote: post #73
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…

Someone is ought to make a game like factorio out of this: you manage workers with semi-predictable output, and have to pay them out of your semi-predictable profit. You can never lower anyone's salary, only fire someone, and that costs a fee (severance). There is outside pressure that forces workers to need more money - inflation - it's also semi-predictable, but it never goes down. My suspicion is that in a well mo…

Why there is an external inflation force?

These things do not happen out of nowhere. Someone is greedy and has market forcing powers.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#245

Post by AstralStorm »

danwee wrote: post #210

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…

Except at some point you run out of skilled software devs, and suddenly some poor soul is running a 3 man project single handed.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#246

Post by google234123 »

lvturner wrote: post #199
google234123 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess I'm talking about start ups that went from 10s of employees to 100s or 1000s. In those cases I see lots of young engineers leading teams.

E.g. when I interviewed at Robinhood in 2020 one interviewer was already an eng manager after she graduated from school and joined Robinhood just 1.5 or 2 years before. I don't think that happens now at Google or Facebook or Apple.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#247

Post by robocat »

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…

I think you imply it, but the important part is whether someone can learn a new position.

People quoting the "Peter Principle" usually ignore that it is normal to promote beyond current skill level, since it is common to learn a position when in that position.

The Peter Principle is that eventually an employee hits a roadblock where they are failing to learn the new position. That failure is usually attributed to the person, but I would guess the root cause is usually a lack of training ability within the organisation (not commonly recognised as the problem).

I am not a manager, but I see these stereotypical misconceptions all the time... I'm not accusing you of ignorance at all: I'm just pointing out you could be clearer to help us all!

Post reply on HN