3 ms·
Eh, you could make the argument that the company makes more money in the long run by keeping the most productive employees with the most institutional knowledge
by ufmace 10y ago
Eh, you could make the argument that the company makes more money in the long run by keeping the most productive employees with the most institutional knowledge around long-term, which requires really paying attention to what they want before they start looking elsewhere, keeping up with what market rates are and giving raises and bonuses appropriately, etc. As a rational business owner, would you rather pay out an extra $25k or whatever a year to keep your team intact, or let people leave and suffer months of lost productivity potentially worth many times more, paying recruiter fees of up to $20-30k for the replacement, a few more months of degraded productivity while the new guy ramps up, and still be paying that extra $25k on their salary anyways, because you wouldn't be able to hire anyone otherwise?
It's essentially a cultural thing. Many employers and employees only want to get/keep as much money as possible in the short term, and don't care about anything else. Others care about long-term relationships, stability, and realistic plans, and are willing to sacrifice a little short-term money for it. I'm not here to say either one is better, but do know which one you want, watch out for signs that anyone you do business with doesn't have the same values, and treat them accordingly.
- corecoder 10y agoWhen it comes to business owners, rationality is overrated. I've seen a lot of companies that are perfectly happy hiring a less competent dev that accepts 20% less, and takes more than twice the time to do the work.
- ufmace 10y agoThere certainly are plenty of companies out there like that. I tend to think that generalizing like that is dicey, though. The good, well-managed companies out there tend to keep the same developers for a long time, and any that leave tend to not have many complaints. The poorly managed companies tend to churn through lots and lots of developers, many of whom will go on to write blog and forum posts on how irrational and cutthroat business is. Thus the noise about poor management is louder than the reality.
- corecoder 10y agoEverything you say is correct; I wonder if there's a way to tell how many well managed companies are there and how many poorly managed ones.
- gvb 10y agoTo the accounting department it is perfectly rational. In the accounting department everybody is an identical square in the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, if square "A23" takes n hours to accomplish a task, the spreadsheet tells them they saved n x 0.2. This means that the longer it takes square "A23" to accomplish a task, the more the company appears to "save" in the spreadsheet.