How much does employee turnover really cost?

- Salary is VERY important for most engineers - most of us are making incomes where making a little more money might be important. That said, consider the incentives that drive the decision makers (managers) who decide on salaries. The managers who say "Yes we can keep these people but no we don't have to pay them more" are much more likely to succeed than the ones who say "I need more money for the same headcount". Unless you've put serious institutional capital in the bank in the form of previous success, you won't win this argument with higher management. (By the way, I agree with the general premise that turnover is really expensive and most companies, including their upper management, don't take it seriously).

- I think that this is another example of the "Hard to measure, easy to measure" divide in otherwise scientific management that defines most companies today. It is easy to measure salary. In fact, you are usually required to report it in most accounting schemes. Measuring cost of employee acquisition is easy for some parts only. On-boarding and training costs can be relatively well quantified. But what about lost productivity? What about lost innovation? Trying to measure "what isn't there" has never been easy. Managers will make decisions based on the hard data at hand. There is almost never enough hard data to justify greatly increasing their salary, and most managers won't go out on a limb (lacking hard data) to try and justify this. I can't say I'd do differently in their situation...

The interesting thing though is that you wouldn't really want to entice me that way, because I'd guess you'd get a worse product out of me. So there are different types of motivation that are important. The motivation to make a choice, versus the motivation to work hard on a choice.

That might have been more accurately stated as:

"Want to hire people to cure polio, go to Mars, put LED lighting in every home in Africa, fund research into fusion reactors, build flying cars, or push VR into the mainstream? You'd better have some cash."

It's rarely the people with the big money that are doing these things, they're just hiring people and having influence on direction. Sure, they might get credit for being a "visionary" or "innovator", but the people doing the real work rarely make the big bucks (or get much credit, unless they're very lucky).

But, in fact, the very people with lots of money who are influencing these developments are themselves influenced: often by people with not nearly as much money -- such as relatively poor authors, or other "real" visionaries.

So you could also say something like: "Want to have some really significant influence on the world? Write a book." It doesn't take a lot of money, and it's not certain that you will be influential, but if you have some really great ideas you might stand more of a chance of changing the world by writing than by trying to compete with the likes of Gates or Musk for the really big bucks.

Of course, lots of other cultural artifacts have also been hugely influential. How much of our modern world has been influenced by Star Wars or Star Trek, or by mathematics -- which really makes all those Mars journeys possible in the first place. How many people have been influenced and inspired by music? All of the arts really feed in to and greatly influence each other.

So there are plenty of ways to influence and change the world apart from being rich -- and many of them are even more effective, as these other means could influence many generations of people -- poor, rich, and otherwise.