Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
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Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
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Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#2I assume there's some kind of story behind this post?
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#3I'm feeling #17 right now, although that implies there is a plan.
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#4A lot of this applies even to non-tech jobs, I think employers got a little to comfortable with high unemployment. Watch the hilarity ensue when those demographics change.
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#5If you have to write this post to vent because you are stuck in a job you can't afford to leave and you are scared you'll be fired if you raise these issues to management, then so be it, write the bloody post and I hope you feel better.
However in terms of practical changes, this post can neither benefit you nor anyone else. We all know about broken management cultures that this post describes, but none of those managers in question would do anything but become extremely defensive if confronted by a post like this (which they wouldn't be because they don't know what Hacker News or a technical blog is).
To the clueful neutral observer we have to weigh out whether management is really this clueless, or is the author a poor communicator full of sour grapes? Honestly it's 50/50, but I would probably be too nervous to ever hire someone who posted this vitriolic of prose publicly, it just comes off as unprofessional.
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#6There may be a story behind this post as it feels quite personal, but this is a pretty good composite of bad management behaviors. I see this more of a collage than a specific rant. I could be wrong, but I've seen one or more of these traits expressed by almost any supervisor I've encountered (not all the time or all at once).
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#7If you have to write this post to vent because you are stuck in a job you can't afford to leave and you are scared you'll be fired if you raise these issues to management, then so be it, write the bloody post and I hope you feel better. However in terms of practical changes, this post can neither benefit you nor anyone else. We all know about broken management cultures that this post describes, but none of those mana…
Some of these issues I see has being very, very difficult to communicate to a boss. Others I can relate to and have communicated to management before, especially about open office plans and estimates, with the response being that it is just the way things are.
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#822. Hire antisocial self-declared "rock star" employees who can't stand other human beings.
23. Encourage sociable, pleasant employees to read Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.
24. Peer reviews and stack ranking!
25. Stress that everything must be done in-house. If your employees want a wheel, they must reinvent it themselves.
26. Play video games in your office during crunch-time or, heck, just take the day off. You deserve it!
27. Survey your employees to find out what extracurricular activities everyone enjoys. Then, ignore that data and hold a mandatory weekend game of your own favorite sport pitting your employees against those of a personal rival. If your team loses, throw your hat on the ground, jump up and down on it, and swear never to do this again. Repeat once or more annually.
28. If, after doing all this, you still have payroll to burn, hire somebody at twice the salary of anyone else, anonymously leak salary information for your department, and be sure to give this new employee absolutely nothing to do except twiddle their thumbs.
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#9If you have to write this post to vent because you are stuck in a job you can't afford to leave and you are scared you'll be fired if you raise these issues to management, then so be it, write the bloody post and I hope you feel better. However in terms of practical changes, this post can neither benefit you nor anyone else. We all know about broken management cultures that this post describes, but none of those mana…
You're assuming there's no utility in commiseration, which is false.
Re: Ways to Minimize Employee Retention
#10> 14. Humiliate people in public.
If you have to choose only one item from the list, this one is really, shockingly effective and easy to implement. My wife was in tears the other day because she made two trivial, easily-fixable errors on some paperwork she was doing as a stand-in for someone who was out sick. She fixed the errors and resubmitted it when they were brought to her attention, but her boss still sent the original one around to the entire office as an example of how not to do the paperwork, offering a prize to anyone who could spot all of the errors on it, and all-but-outright-stated that anyone who would submit paperwork in such shape was a moron.
I'm willing to believe that her boss is just a complete fucking idiot and meant it to be funny, but it was extremely cruel and totally uncalled for. Publicly humiliating your newest employee for the incredible crime of "volunteering to help take care of something when the person responsible is out sick" is really, really dumb and a great way to ensure that nobody ever helps anybody else with anything. It's working, because while we were on vacation she came back to a huge pile of work that nobody had even made an effort to handle, even though anyone in the office could have pitched in. And since she's a fast learner, she's also stopped helping other people when they're out sick, because it can only possibly lead to either 1) Her doing more work for no recognition, or 2) Her doing more work for no recognition and getting publicly mocked for doing something wrong.
For some mysterious reason, the office she works for has a hard time retaining employees and a hard time hiring new ones. People also take a LOT of (unpaid) sick days there, which are informally known as "sick of all the bullshit" days, because they're happier staying home without pay than coming to work and dealing with their manager.