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Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric?
Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.
This sentence really confused me, and I spent a couple of minutes trying to parse it. For anyone else reading, I think "not being applicable to team" is supposed to say "not being applicable to teams".
It's really hard for me to take this author seriously after his "Willingness to look stupid" post that went viral here about a month ago. The entire post was ridden with a superiority complex about how he's willing to look stupid, but never willing to explain his actions that make him look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946490
The dictum "think horses not zebras" has its value - ordinary possibilities are more likely - but it doesn't say that zebras don't exist.
To be honest, this comment is a perfect illustration of why Dan had to write that essay. Some people can't see beyond the obvious, and if the obvious is "this guy is stupid", well, you better not be afraid to look stupid.
Would like to see these thoughts applied to public health policy.
>Some people seem to view companies like a game of SimCity, where if you want more money, you can turn a knob, increase taxes, and get more money, uniformly impacting the city. But companies are not a game of SimCity. If you want more attrition and turn a knob that cranks that up, you don't get additional attrition that's sampled uniformly at random. People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the a…
I’ve never understood these critiques. If you want to study society, what’s the alternative? No matter what, you have to make a model of some kind. Yeah, some models are simplistic, but maybe they can capture the high order bits of the phenomenon they are modeling, and at least you are committing to an idea you can codify, find fault with, and improve. The alternative (never making models) seems to be a type of intellectual nihilism.
the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting at a bit under 10% was too low Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric? Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.
One thing that I always think is undervalued is how variable a single persons output is. A bad day, illness, life changes, etc all dramatically impact a person’s efficiency. Treating even the same persons output as abstract is fraught with issues. One month a rockstar the next a schlub.
the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting at a bit under 10% was too low Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric? Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.
In otherwords, if managers are doing their job "correctly" they should either (1) be pushing their staff so hard that 1 in 10 of them quit every year (2) weening out the the poorest performer.
the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting at a bit under 10% was too low Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric? Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.
a) it makes you inflexible (i.e. you cant readjust by constantly hiring people that fit whatever your new goals are better)
b) it means you are to easy on people and keep low performers around
c) b) means it also makes trajectory upwards harder for good employees, so the good employees are more likely to be the few who quit
"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.
Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle
Devs: no wait not like that
Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time.
Managers know this also.
But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So we bend over backwards to pretend everyone is equal and capable of the same things in all areas. Then we secretly make sure somehow by magic the truly critical projects are routed to the people and teams with more reliable outcomes.
> People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the actions company leadership takes impacts everyone in the same way. The people who are most effective will be disproportionately likely to leave if you turn a knob that leads to increased attrition.
Damn correct.
An observation of mine is that a company may recognize the most valuable employees in informal ways. For example, they may have some peer recognition awards that the same employees get because their peers know how valuable they are, but due to other constraints (ex, politics) they may not hold a title/level that represents this. When the company turns the nob, as Dan says, these most valuable people are the first to leave. Management is mostly oblivious, but the other engineers know.