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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

#141

Post by dilyevsky »

MisterSandman wrote: post #92
yodsanklai wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine is heavy. Working hard and barely meet the expectations. Lot of competition and colleagues are good. Passing the interview is one thing, but staying there is also challenging as they get rid of low performers. (at least my experience).

Tell me you're working at Amazon without telling me you're working at Amazon.

When i started at google a little over decade ago I had to work most nights first year or so just to get that occasional “exceeds”. Interviewing was a breeze compared to that

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#142

Post by stainforth »

wisnoskij wrote: post #88
woeirua wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because they would prefer to keep running on the neverending promotion treadmill? I think a LOT of engineers would rather stay engineers if they could keep getting reasonable raises. The problem is that almost all companies make it impossible to keep getting raises past a certain point _without_ getting promoted.

Quoted post unavailable.

This is such a bad faith interpretation of the point that I question your actual motive and belief system that would cause you to make such an attack.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#143

Post by agentwiggles »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #44
peteradio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably not everyone is as valuable or risky.

This is exactly how we look at it. Those who are more valuable get larger annual raises. Also, during a high turnover period around a year ago, we even bumped a few people up mid year when we normally do salary increases at the beginning of the year. These folks were very happy and I think it earned a lot of trust that we looked at the market rates, determined they were underpaid, and made sure they were at least get…

There is nothing like an unexpected raise to make a person feel some serious company loyalty. I started a position at a new company a few years back, run by a friend and senior colleague of mine. He had been with me at the previous company and had observed while I fought and fought to get a raise to market rates in that position.

He called me a few months into the gig and told me that he felt I should be making more than my starting salary and that I was getting a fairly substantial raise effective immediately.

I can't describe how good that felt, after having had to struggle to demonstrate my value at the previous gig only to be met with bureaucracy at every turn. I'm still with that company and genuinely love working with them. I make a pretty nice salary, and though I'm sure I could easily get a 20% raise to jump ship, I'm finally in a place where I can say "nah, I'm happy where I am" and not feel like I'm giving something up.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#144

Post by hamburglar »

paxys wrote: post #68
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…

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…

Some companies have a concept of “terminal levels”, which means if you get to this level and keep doing a good job and have no desire to keep chasing promos, that’s totally fine and they’ll keep increasing your comp according to your value, which does increase as you stay and accumulate institutional knowledge, experience, and reputation (and owed favors, political connections, friends in senior places, accomplishments under your belt, etc etc).

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#145

Post by nske »

pixl97 wrote: post #83
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…

You have the choice of managers knowing what the job is or managers that have never done the job. In general managers that know what the job is are better managers.

True, but there should always be a rewarding progression for someone that doesn't want to be a manager or change role. Because if the only rewarding path they see is to switch employers -or get counter-offers to try and get their wage bumped, then that's a problem. It's also a common theme for companies to be forced to give higher wages to new-hires, leaving their own veterans (that are actually more valuable) behind.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#146

Post by danielheath »

kortilla wrote: post #136
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…

> It probably doesn't have much value if you're say, a doctor, working with different systems each time that look similar. You either don’t know what a doctor does or I don’t understand the point you were trying to drive. Doctors spend decades refining their ability to recognize all kinds of issues that have vastly different conditional probabilities of occurring. Internalizing that is the entire value of a doctor ov…

I think it would have been clearer if they had said "Tenure" instead of "Seniority"

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#147

Post by mamidon »

kortilla wrote: post #136
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…

> It probably doesn't have much value if you're say, a doctor, working with different systems each time that look similar. You either don’t know what a doctor does or I don’t understand the point you were trying to drive. Doctors spend decades refining their ability to recognize all kinds of issues that have vastly different conditional probabilities of occurring. Internalizing that is the entire value of a doctor ov…

I think he means that a doctor with 15 years experience after school can change hospitals they work at with minimal impact.

A hiring a senior engineer with 15 years experience, but not at your company, might not compare as favorably to an intermediate engineer with 8 years total experience, but 3 years at your company.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#148

Post by localhost »

dilyevsky wrote: post #139
localhost wrote: post #82

When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with, they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network. A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen without ICs who know a lot of people t…

That’s WAI - lots of managers would rather call all the shots.

I don't know what WAI means, but note that I said discovered above. There's a separate conversation to get that work funded and that's where the managers come into the picture. Managers don't discover the work - they decide whether to fund the work.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#149

Post by majormajor »

muzani wrote: post #116
errantmind wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 hired someone with those skills to teach them. You also run into bus-factor issues and robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul limitations around "this person's domain knowledge would be useful for this new project, but we've never ramped someone up to take over what they're doing now."

Then there are the people who manage to get tenure without actually absorbing too much of that domain knowledge... so you need to be able to evaluate that, plus skills/aptitude/potential, not just years-in-seat, when deciding who to promote, when to hire, etc.

Re: Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

#150

Post by fluidcruft »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #74
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…

I mean isn’t that why vesting cliffs exist? I’d extend them to be for far more money but over far longer if I was the employer, but the job market won’t bare it.

There's also the military approach where there's a clock and you either get promoted or you are out. And then it repeats. Languishing isn't really allowed as an option.

If a job/task only requires entry level skills, why are senior employees doing them?

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