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Cost of Attrition

benjiweber.co.uk

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Re: Cost of Attrition

#121

Post by jeffrallen »

bagacrap wrote: post #83
dgb23 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define idiot coworker and idiotic discussions. I have only worked in small teams so I'm not sure I've met such a person.

I recently had to give up trying to convince a coworker that the observer pattern was useful, because he refused to budge from the position that it made code harder to read as it was not "all in one place". Naturally as a stubbornly helpful person it took several hours over a couple weeks before I reached the point of surrender. Meanwhile there are a number of related decisions he's inflicting on the codebase that no…

I once came in to work on a Monday to find a 200 email thread from a clique of idiot coworkers who had been feverishly working on a bug over the weekend, only to discover that our locks were fundamentally flawed, though that was at email 50. Around email 52, someone who actually knows how to use a RW lock (and has written research papers on lockless data structures) says, "no, they are fine, you're just doing it wrong, see [link]". The rest of the 150 emails were the idiots talking among themselves learning how locks work, and convincing themselves they now knew how to "work around" the bug (i.e. use the lock correctly).

This is not a thread about idiots, and actually these guys were trying their hardest to be conscientious employees... It was just a noisy and stupid way for several people who should have known better to learn how to do a simple and fundamental part of their job. (The one who falsely diagnosed the bad locking code was a 15 year veteran "senior" engineer. )

Re: Cost of Attrition

#122

Post by [deleted] »

jurassic wrote: post #111

I’ve come to think a certain amount of attrition is needed to keep a product and the individuals working on it healthy. Back in my consulting days I worked with a few enterprise software companies that had a lot of highly tenured employees (think 10+ years). All the long-timers I met were skilled fiefdom builders with a strong bias toward opposing every change and maintaining the technical status quo because a lot of…

[deleted]

Re: Cost of Attrition

#123

Post by willcipriano »

MattGaiser wrote: post #91
alex_anglin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing attrition is a good incentive, especially these days. Whether it's enough is another question.

Do companies care? Their solution seems to be to hire more recruiters.

My wife is a tech recruiter, my bread gets buttered on both sides. It's a really funny market.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#124

Post by jader201 »

jeffrallen wrote: post #29

Nice. But remember: the cost of non attrition can be keeping idiot coworkers around. Who actively destroy work with their anti-work, and waste time with idiotic discussions.

As others have said, the people you describe don't leave companies.

This is actually the opposite problem of what the article is covering: instead of companies not being able to keep good people, (some) companies are not able to get rid of bad people (whatever subjective definition of "bad" you choose to use).

I've worked at some companies where it's almost impossible to get rid of people that are only causing a net loss for the company, or at the very least, are consuming headcount that could be used to hire someone much better.

Attrition is about people leaving. "Idiotic coworkers" don't leave -- they have to be pushed out. And, again, that's a completely different problem when companies can't and/or choose not to push people like that out.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#125

Post by hinkley »

jurassic wrote: post #111

I’ve come to think a certain amount of attrition is needed to keep a product and the individuals working on it healthy. Back in my consulting days I worked with a few enterprise software companies that had a lot of highly tenured employees (think 10+ years). All the long-timers I met were skilled fiefdom builders with a strong bias toward opposing every change and maintaining the technical status quo because a lot of…

I noticed early in my career that relentless refactoring ended up as de facto empire building because some people would just give up on tracking the changes I was making and abdicated that domain to me.

I think I have a very different way of organizing knowledge, where I worry more about how to answer questions than knowing the answers. This makes me very popular with young and new employees, and quite unpopular with those who think you make Important Decisions by locking everyone in a room until they are made. Oh and using a computer in a meeting is disrespectful so we will make all decisions from memory, then have another meeting when we discover our memory was faulty.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#126

Post by alexashka »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #106
alexashka wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, 'the good old days' talk. It has now shaped itself, but back in my good old days... This is my dad's favorite past-time, to talk about the good old days of the USSR when he had free education, free guaranteed housing, free health care and a guaranteed job. Combined with those other people who made USSR fall apart or are all about money or whatever . Nevermind all the other thousand broken things in that syste…

Interesting tangent, there. I’m not pining for “the good old days,” at all, and it’s … interesting … that this was what you read. I’m enthusiastic about tech, the future, learning new stuff, and making the world a better place. I feel that it is a shame that the concept of Personal Integrity (or corporate Integrity) is considered an anachronism.

> I’m not pining for “the good old days,” at all

> The entire industry has now shaped itself into a transient, mercenary, loyalty-free community.

You're not pining for a time prior to when the industry shaped itself into a transient, mercenary, loyalty-free community?

Or you mean to say it was a different kind of mess before, that has now shaped itself into another mess, but mess nonetheless?

If so, my apologies.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#127

Post by bartread »

I don't know. This is a nice piece of thinking, although I did get a bit bored after the first few points, but it perhaps ignores a couple of key realities:

1. Most obvious, people are going to leave, so you need to take that into account. You can't keep everyone and I'd argue you shouldn't try.

2. The impact of someone leaving is highly variable. Sometimes it's a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's pretty neutral. Different people add different amounts of value, and not all relationships are equal.

Of course high attrition can be a yellow or red flag - certainly a warning that you need to look at how management and leadership work - but some amount of attrition is a reality, and the outcome of that reality is not universally a "cost".

Re: Cost of Attrition

#128

Post by [deleted] »

bagacrap wrote: post #86
MattGaiser wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first full time boss quit over this. He was there 10 years and his life revolved around support as nobody else stayed more than a year, so nobody ever learned many of the systems.

some people like to be in this position, although I find those people have a way of stretching out every support or maintenance task that should take hours into weeks

[deleted]

Re: Cost of Attrition

#129

Post by hinkley »

travisjungroth wrote: post #120
dan-robertson wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your argument that encouraging attrition would cause these people to leave rather than the employees you might value more? That is, why wouldn’t doing things that lead to higher attrition lead to having a all the people you want leaving and the people you don’t want continuing to stay because e.g. it is harder for them to go elsewhere.

I think you have to fire them. If you just non-selectively "do things that lead to higher attrition", you're right, you're going to lose the best employees and just make things worse. It's painful and it's actively painful in a way that "let's just not pay so much everyone sticks around forever". You'd have to yank out someone that has convinced everyone they're essential to the company, but they're mostly essential…

I don’t know what goes on in manager meetings, but I think it’s a little too convenient that in many orgs very senior ICs get forced into management positions, which has the same effect. Trying to be both is politically and emotionally fraught, and some people hate it and quit.

You might say it’s constructive dismissal at its sneakiest.

Re: Cost of Attrition

#130

Post by twobitshifter »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #71
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget or discount the destruction of the social contract between employer and employee. Massive layoffs, insolvent pensions, etc were just the start. Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre. When all that goes away and I have to work harder for less than my parents got then what is the poin…

> Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre. Pensions are not relevant anymore. I see no reason to pay a defined benefit pension fund’s employees and expenses when I can simply buy VOO or a target date fund at one of many brokerages for basically free. And I get to avoid the risk of a corrupt employ…

Pensions are binding in their payments, the stock market is not. It’s clear why some people would prefer it.
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