How much does employee turnover really cost?

Post by flukus » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 11:01 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #79

Inthenameofmine wrote: post #59

It's funny. The smart companies I know are all moving away from hiring full-time devs. They want a very small core team of highly skilled devs, all with relatively high equity, combined with tons of freelancers/consultants on a call-list. By far the biggest cost to software companies is employee turnover because the second greatest cost is employee education and training. We've measured developer productivity in mult…

Do freelancers/consultants magically need no onboarding and become fully productive on day 1?

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 11:04 PM UTC

flukus wrote: post #195

softawre wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with their presentations at conferences. They hire really good people, pay them a ton (300k+), and fire them when they stop performing. It's a good way to get great people, if you can afford it.

That gets into a murky definition of "performing" though. Performance is often limited by other people, many of which may be long gone. It can also create a culture of people unwilling to admit mistakes. It doesn't take long for these behaviours to produce massive amounts of technical debt. The policy doesn't seem to be working for their UI team either.

Post by smileysteve » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 11:11 PM UTC

euphoria83 wrote: post #29

This article missed the fact that the cost to the company in trying to keep the employees who will leave every year might be greater than the cost of losing them. For e.g., in the example given in the article, the company loses 1.57 million due to employee turnover. However, who knows how much the company might have to spend to keep those employees from leaving. The cost would be high because the effort spent on empl…

Post by megablast » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 11:14 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #82

jedrek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been to management seminars where they downplay the importance of money, saying that employees are mostly motivated by other factors. Then I talk to my co-workers, the ones that are quitting, and about half of them leave because they've been working for 2+ years without a raise. I worked at a company where a company decided to introduce a new management program (LEAN) into one department. That 16 person departme…

My last job gave me a ~2% raise the first year and a ~1% the next. I left shortly thereafter. Should have left after the first lousy raise. The previous job gave me back-to-back 1% raises. Left that job after two years as well. Should have left at the one year mark. I've been in my current job a few months. I'll stick around till the first annual raise cycle to see how they treat me. I don't think I'll give this empl…

Post by maverick_iceman » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 11:15 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #85

_yosefk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing few would book a management consultant simply telling to pay people more money - consultants who want a job instead have to explain how to motivate for free. But the people who share a lot of the blame for this idiocy and who have no good excuse are "heterodox economists" and TED talk presenters telling us how money doesn't motivate people past a certain point, or how it actually makes people less creati…

Money doesn't motivate people past, oh, a half million or so a year, maybe.