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

Employee Retention

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 95 posts

Re: Employee Retention

#71

Post by Apocryphon »

roel_v wrote: post #57
Apocryphon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's chicken and egg, innit? If there was an economic incentive for people to live in San Jose (say, the tech scene was revitalized from actual startups as opposed to the Adobe/Cisco/eBay/Yahoo!/IBM dinosaurs, and Pinger), then there would be greater demand for SJ to densify, and have attractions, and thus invite more young people to live there. But because young people don't want to live there as it is, companies ar…

But that same argument goes for Bumblefuck, Arkansas, no?

What's an hour away from BMF with night life? The trip from SJ to SF may suck, especially with the Bay Area's appalling lack of a unified transportation system, but it'll still do in a pinch for SJ denizens to visit.

Re: Employee Retention

#72

Post by Apocryphon »

gdubs wrote: post #12
michaelochurch wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in. Transportation is your problem, along with NIMBY regulations (fought-for by limousine liberal hypocrites) that prevent proper growth. Silicon Valley is not Manhattan, with its daytime population density of 170k per square mile. It should not be expensive and congested. It's just badly planned, with a lot of regulatory…

The risk is turning Silicon Valley into Los Angeles.

As it is, South Bay is already a miniature LA in terms of sprawl and commuting, as well as concrete (lack of) architecture and strip malls.

Re: Employee Retention

#73

Post by gdubs »

slashCJ wrote: post #44
gdubs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk is turning Silicon Valley into Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is actually a much better place to live now for people in tech than the bay area. All the young people want to live in overpriced SF and the ones with families want to live in the south bay. In LA the thriving tech community is all in west Los Angeles, where Venice is the hip San Francisco (but waaay cheaper) and Santa Monica / West LA has great homes (also much cheaper than say Palo Alto [if you exclude…

I've lived in LA for ten years. Commuting anywhere can be a nightmare at any random hour of the day. Housing prices are amazing in comparison though -- a third as expensive as the Bay Area, I'd say (rental). They are building some new rail lines, but it's going to be a while... Great food too!

Re: Employee Retention

#74

Post by dyadic »

DrJokepu wrote: post #35

I wonder how you get people to believe in a mission if scepticism forms an inherent part of the culture. I‘m talking about the UK specifically. I feel like it would be very difficult to get the English guys and girls on my team to take our "mission" even remotely seriously.

Brit here.

Scepticism isn't the same as unwilling to believe. Usually just honesty, willingness to engage in dialogue, answer questions etc, will do it.

However, I have had experience working with Americans in the UK that sounds similar to what you might have experienced. In my experience, the "selling" of the mission has usually just been excessive enthusiasm on the American side with a hope that it will be contagious. To us, it all appears just a little fake.

Re: Employee Retention

#75

Post by patmcc »

danielweber wrote: post #39
tarpden wrote: post #11

I think these basics are most important: * don't constantly push to have your employees stay late * if you need your employees to travel, while they're away don't pressure them to work more than their usual work day. * don't disrespect and be a jerk to your employees * provide reasonable sick and vacation benefits

* Automatically raise their pay every year. It doesn't necessarily need to keep up with market, but they need to know that they aren't being suckers by staying at the job.

Bingo. Companies should have (at least) two mechanisms for raising pay: a 1 to 3% (tied to some measure of inflation) increase everyone gets, and a variable rate tied to their performance/company success/etc.

Re: Employee Retention

#76

Post by sokoloff »

fraction wrote: post #65

Great article, but I got a really good laugh out of this. "But very often, the hard technical problems are important to the world (e.g. Google, Palantir, Facebook)." Let me know when Facebook starts doing something important to the world.

Helping people stay in touch socially is important to humans. The engagement figures alone tell me that it's important (to them).

My parents and grandparents see more pics of my kids and feel more connected to their grandkids' random life experiences. That's important (to me and to them).

Jzw's point on narrowing your focus is worth mentioning here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html Facebook isn't helping me there, but it's helping others, and that's important to them.

Re: Employee Retention

#77

Post by nostrademons »

joezydeco wrote: post #10

The second good retention strategy is rocketship growth. Wow, the answer was right there under our noses all along! You guys out there losing employees, it's because you're not successful! Fix that!

You joke, but it's true. In general you shouldn't hire people until the company is already successful, i.e. people want what you're building faster than you can build it. If you do, you introduce a whole lot of other problems (having to pay them, having to convince them to pivot when you realize you're not succeeding, having to communicate the new company vision to them, having to keep them from getting disenchanted and bringing morale down) that you wouldn't have to deal with if you just didn't hire them in the first place.

I've found the biggest cause of failure of software projects (in general, not just startups) is staffing up too quickly. You really want to know what you're doing and have some idea how you'll get there before you bring other people on board.

Re: Employee Retention

#78

Post by aianus »

normloman wrote: post #15

The author recommends having a mission so employees feel like they're working for a greater good. So is this why every job on Hacker News goes something like "Help us change the world of [industry]," where [industry] can be something as banal as t-shirt printing or pizza delivery? If you don't believe me, here are some examples from the jobs board: Mobile Hacker? Come work with the team that's reinventing farming Sim…

Sometimes people want to fix broken/corrupt/inefficient systems. I love airbnb, lyft, uber, and bitcoin because of the way they empower individuals and spit in the faces of the fat cat incumbents and government regulators.

I'd rather get to a wear a self-righteous smirk to work than make an extra $20k a year to put in my 401k.

Re: Employee Retention

#79

Post by michaelochurch »

infinite8s wrote: post #13
michaelochurch wrote: post #7

This guy might be a VC that I can actually like. His point on terrible equity allocations is spot-on. If you're giving a dime and a half (0.15%) to your first employee engineer, at a valuation of $5 million, you're not going to get someone good. If you account for equity at-valuation, bad people become cheaper if you're a startup but good people become more expensive (i.e. you'd have to offer $75k per year of equity…

The difference between good and bad is only 40k?

That's not what I said (although the salary differences between good and bad engineers are small, in comparison to the differences of output).

A good, senior engineer (10-15 years experience) is typically going to get $150k at a large company and drop to $110k at a startup. But it would take at least $75k/year in equity, for a savvy person, for that drop to be worth it. A stock that is correlated to your employer should be worth less to you than one at zero correlation. Moreover, it's an illiquid stock. Furthermore, VCs are buying preferred stock while you have the common kind, and that can easily be a factor of 2 (or 4, or 8+) of difference in fair value.

Re: Employee Retention

#80

Post by nostrademons »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #54

Regarding the problem of losing in-house skills and experience, how about the notion of continuous hiring, in other words add another tech worker about every 3-4 months? Then you have a rolling system where there's enough overlap that when employee #6 leaves, employee #9 or #10 can take up the slack pretty quickly. I suppose it's not easy to "time" your hires because it's so hard to find the right fit, but if you can…

Good startup founders are continously hiring once their product has some market acceptance. When a really good candidate shows up, they snatch them up, regardless of whether they have an immediate need or plan. This is why many startups that are "not hiring" technically are, they're just waiting for the right candidate to show up.

Only problem is that like any Poisson process, your good hires will not be evenly distributed. Sometimes you'll get bursts and sometimes there will be long dry spells.

Post reply on HN