9 ms·

Solving the IT Turnover Crisis

53 points by jasim 16y ago

edw519 16y ago
Lots of good points, but surprisingly little about the elephant in the room: your best people leave because you're not paying them enough. And you're not paying them enough because you've chosen to adopt a pay structure that, by definition, cannot handle outliers (which are exactly what your best people are). An excellent programmer can routinely do the work of ten mediocre programmers. Have you ever heard of a pay scale that pays Programmer III ten times as much as Programmer I? An excellent programmer can save you millions of dollars by increasing revenues, reducing costs, changing the way you do business, or any combination of these. How much of those millions does the programmer get? An excellent programmer can provide a company significantly more value than his boss and his boss's boss. How much more does he get paid? An excellent programmer can earn real equity and merit bonuses in enlightened firms. How many companies don't even have this on their HR radar? An excellent programmer can go out and pound the pavement or join a start-up and earn what he/she is really worth. And until most companies provide that same opportunities, they probably will.
- kls 16y ago
  I and a lot of other skilled talent left a company that was paying enough. The main reason that everyone left was the place was a complete head fk. Just as the article stated the incompetent had become entrenched and created bureaucratic process to stifle work. Since they could not do their jobs they created paperwork process, and made that their job while not getting any real work done. I spent two years trying to unwind the place and trying to inspire people to do their job. I got so frustrated that I offered to do other peoples work with my team if they would just stop the bureaucracy and stay out of my way. That just created political opponents who actively tried to set my team up for failure. After two years I realized that no amount of doing a good job was going to fix the issue and left (I was getting squeezed out by politics as well). The worst part is the few great developers who remained because of loyalty to me where summarily dismissed after my departure. They actually fired the best and the brightest for trying to make things better saying that they where playing politics. That experience taught me that if the environment is junk when you walk in, then walk out no amount of money is worth that headache.
  - discreteevent 16y ago
    I think Bruce Eckel started a blog about these issues because he had seen them so many times. From what I have seen it seems true more or less everywhere. People are territorial and they see everything relatively. So in general its more important to a manager that a talented employee is held back from contributing value than that the employee deliver the value and possibly end up getting paid more than the manager. Then again there are exceptions. You will often hear very successful business people say "Success is about enabling people". I remember reading an article about one entrepreneur years ago saying that if you can get good people then don't be afraid to pay them more than you pay yourself. But of course the manager is just an employee where the entrepreneur is an owner. Maybe we should just go to a system with only owners and contractors (another kind of owner) and let the enlightened owners and the talented contractors win.
    - GFischer 16y ago
      I read this very recently here on Hacker News, about paying a succesful salesperson/marketer more than the CEO (presumably yourself) in a startup.
  - dgabriel 16y ago
    I once took a 20 thousand dollar pay cut by bailing on a company that was trying to kill me. I'm much happier now.
  - motters 16y ago
    Indeed it's not just about the money, and the quality of the working environment is at least as important. The best companies I've worked at were were bureaucracy was deliberately kept to the absolute minimum level. It's hard to really innovate if you're simultaneously bogged down by process.
- cletus 16y ago
  Amen. It's also I think why a lot of programmers are attracted to startups: because it's far more attractive (not to mention the company's and the programmer's interests are more greatly aligned) to be somewhere where you share in the success and aren't simply treated as an irksome cost centre that's hard to apply metrics to. A programmer with 10 years of experience can be 10x (or more) more productive than a graduate yet they will probably less than twice as much. Do this exercise: look at how much you earnt 5-10 years ago and now adjust it by inflation into today's terms. In real terms don't be surprised if now you earn little more, the same or even less.
  - discreteevent 16y ago
    "A programmer with 10 years of experience can be 10x (or more) more productive than a graduate". I couldn't agree more and indeed sometimes it can be up to 100 times. Not necessarily because of their productivity but because of the absolute mess that they don't get you into.
    - presidentender 16y ago
      As a member of the class of 2009, I heartily agree. I like to think I'm pretty good, but I've been waiting for this ASP page I just wrote to finish with its DB interactions and load for five minutes. Anyone else would have avoided the need for the optimizations I'm about to go figure out.
      - bbwharris 16y ago
        Optimize your query. It's unlikely to experience that bad of performance from your display logic. (unless you are trying to display millions of rows at once)
        presidentender 16y ago
        Yeah, it's certainly somewhere in the data access portion of the code.
    - 16y ago
- jister 16y ago
  While you have a point there, the article is about employees quiting or leaving the company that you have no control over and that you can only stretch the time retaining them.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Have you ever heard of a pay scale that pays Programmer III ten times as much as Programmer I? Yes, ibanks and hedge funds routinely do this. Both programmers probably go by the title "VP", however.
  - ivenkys 16y ago
    While agreeing with what you say - i would like to add one caveat - only if you are working in a Business Critical (read Front Office) role.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      Very true, you certainly won't get the big bucks no matter what you do for HR or Facilities. But you will get paid well for fixing headaches in the back office (referential data, clearing, etc). Perhaps only 5x as much as a mediocre programmer rather than the 10x you'd get in the front office, but it's still a big multiplier. Line work costs banks a lot of money; if you can put 100 humans out of work, they (or someone else) will pay you.
- mynameishere 16y ago
  An excellent programmer can routinely do the work of ten mediocre programmers Quit repeating this crap. Quit it. Look at your hands, count the fingers. How many? Ten fingers. Ten fingers is the reason that the number "ten" appears in that sentence and that is it. In fact, an "excellent" programmer can be from anywhere to less valuable to infinitely more valuable than a mediocre programmer. But if the market needs 5 such people and there are 6 available, then the prices will reflect that rather than some cliche that gets endlessly repeated. can go out and pound the pavement or join a start-up Thus resolving all of your and the original author's objections. Yep, that's how the market works, that's how it's always worked and always will. There's simply no use expecting every company to magically know the "right" price. There's no such thing, ever.
  - lallysingh 16y ago
    Actually the number from my old software engineering class is on the order of 36:1 in productivity from the most to least productive members of a team.
    - javanix 16y ago
      Because if there is any training that stays relevant forever it is old college software engineering courses ...
      - ColinDabritz 16y ago
        I agree that recalled college classes aren't the sturdiest reference. Here is a better cited source: "Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering" by Robert L. Glass at the IEEE Computer Society website: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035 "P2. Good programmers are up to 30 times better than mediocre programmers, according to "individual differences" research. Given that their pay is never commensurate, they are the biggest bargains in the software field." He also has a wonderful published book, "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" I believe the number there is "28 times" as mentioned on Jeff Atwoods blog: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/revisiting-the-facts-and-fallacies-of-software-engineering.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/revisiting-the-fact... "2. The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers." I believe the source studies are cited in the book. I would add that the book is a great and thought provoking discussion of exactly this sort of 'old wives tale' about software engineering. Edit: I found the page with citations on google books. http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz-UJzZN0C&lpg=PA14&dq=facts%20and%20fallacies%20of%20software%20engineering%20robert%20glass%2028%20times&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz-UJzZN0C&lpg=PA14&#...
- _delirium 16y ago
  Unless your company will hire only the 10x programmers, though, it kills morale if you're paying some people 10% as much as other people to do similar-looking jobs. An exception is if someone is an acknowledged superstar: nobody will really be upset if Donald Knuth is hired at 10x their salary. But if you're paying two non-famous programmers a 10x difference, and expect them to work together well as a team, problems will likely result.
  - silverlake 16y ago
    Many industries pay different salaries to similar-looking jobs without mutinies: sales, traders & investment bankers, management consultants, managers (bonuses), sports & movie & TV stars, etc. Every IT goon on Wall St. gets paid differently for the same job depending on perceived success that year, much more than a 10% difference.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
madair 16y ago
It's a good article but something I've been surprised to find out is true since I've spent some time at a very large corporation for the first time is that a place like this has a large contingent of developers that they seem to prefer to not be very good at what they do, there just isn't an interest in 'standards of excellence' or what have you. It's an economic decision, they just aren't interested in what very talented developers have to offer, except for a very small portion of their business needs. It's essentially factory work. A car manufacturer could pay more for artisans to work the auto assembly line, and it may have some sort of positive effect on the overall elegance of the workmanship, but there's a quality trade off to be made and the vast majority of cars sold aren't a Lotus Esprit nor will they ever be. I don't justify this way of thinking, to me its the scorched earth of capitalism with very limited consideration of the social, cultural, and environmental implications of placing profit motive on a pedestal of not just utility but also of righteousness, but that's me and that's not 99.999 percent of the employing population. This is not an IT turnover crisis, as much as we can come up with stats and anecdotes, this is a global turnover crisis, and it's because the value sought is not related to, as I said, social, cultural, and environmental balance and success, it's about money. Sorry to be the freak here, but this is the elephant in the room and why is it so hard to acknowledge?
- peregrine 16y ago
  I second this and especially the statement ..has a large contingent of developers that they seem to prefer to not be very good at what they do.. I've seen this as an intern and it drives me mad. Whole groups of people just wanting to do the bare minimum and end up being rewarded for it. I have a hard time being around people like this.
  - umjames 16y ago
    It gets even more frustrating when they find out you are more skilled than they are. They won't improve their skills to try and match your ability, they'll just ask you to do it for them every time from now on until you leave. What's even sadder is that your boss will likely condone and encourage this behavior.
powrtoch 16y ago
While the article makes lots of interesting points, I'm uncomfortable about how the case for the very existence of a "Value Apex" is accomplished through some brief hand-waiving and vague truisms. The idea that the talented people get less and less useful, while a very real possibility, I think warrants some harder research before we declare it inevitable fact.
- arethuza 16y ago
  "However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past experiences, the growth stops." I never worked anywhere where anyone could "learns all that there is to know about the business". Challenges change over time, what you need to know (and therefore learn) various hugely with each new challenge. "Value Apex" sounds like a pseudo scientific term justified with a few invented graphs.
umjames 16y ago
If by IT, the author means an actual IT department, then I think the real problem is that no matter what your position in IT is, you are just an (often unknown) extension of the Help Desk. If by developer, you mean people who write whole (or significant parts of) software applications, you find that you usually never get to do this in IT departments. This is why skilled software developers often leave IT departments. They don't want 20-30 years of integrating pre-written software. They actually want to write the software themselves.
poundy 16y ago
The overall article makes sense BUT, I know people who have worked in the same place for over 10 years, love the job, are productive and get results. They don't work their butts off, they have achieved some kind of state where they know what the company really needs are delivers exactly that.
nradov 16y ago
What a load of crap. I have worked for the same company for 12 years and have provided more value every year. Several of my co-workers are in similar situations. Alex Papadimoulis obviously doesn't understand how to do proper staff development. Software development organizations have little or nothing in common with law firms. And the use of the word ‘crisis’ in the title is stupid. Everything is a crisis now; we have a healthcare crisis, unemployment crisis, foreclosure crisis, energy crisis and apparently now we can add IT turnover to the list. If everything is a crisis then really nothing is a crisis.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  "What a load of crap. I have worked for the same company for 12 years and have provided more value every year." It's not crap, you're the one who's fortunate. I can say with complete certainty that I've added next to no value to most of the companies that I've worked for that some random bozo hired off the street couldn't -- because most of them resist anything like good engineering. They just don't understand it, and they complain about (and penalize) programmers who aren't writing code when those programmers are asking "What's this thing INTENDED to do?" No programmer, no matter how skilled, can add any value to such an organization. They're ass-in-seat jobs even though the hiring staff pretends that they're programming jobs.
motters 16y ago
I liked the term "beachheads of bad code". Will probably use that next time I come across badly written code in a commercial context.

53 points by jasim 16y ago

Lots of good points, but surprisingly little about the elephant in the room: your best people leave because you're not paying them enough. And you're not paying them enough because you've chosen to adopt a pay structure that, by definition, cannot handle outliers (which are exactly what your best people are). An excellent programmer can routinely do the work of ten mediocre programmers. Have you ever heard of a pay scale that pays Programmer III ten times as much as Programmer I? An excellent programmer can save you millions of dollars by increasing revenues, reducing costs, changing the way you do business, or any combination of these. How much of those millions does the programmer get? An excellent programmer can provide a company significantly more value than his boss and his boss's boss. How much more does he get paid? An excellent programmer can earn real equity and merit bonuses in enlightened firms. How many companies don't even have this on their HR radar? An excellent programmer can go out and pound the pavement or join a start-up and earn what he/she is really worth. And until most companies provide that same opportunities, they probably will.

kls 16y ago
I and a lot of other skilled talent left a company that was paying enough. The main reason that everyone left was the place was a complete head fk. Just as the article stated the incompetent had become entrenched and created bureaucratic process to stifle work. Since they could not do their jobs they created paperwork process, and made that their job while not getting any real work done. I spent two years trying to unwind the place and trying to inspire people to do their job. I got so frustrated that I offered to do other peoples work with my team if they would just stop the bureaucracy and stay out of my way. That just created political opponents who actively tried to set my team up for failure. After two years I realized that no amount of doing a good job was going to fix the issue and left (I was getting squeezed out by politics as well). The worst part is the few great developers who remained because of loyalty to me where summarily dismissed after my departure. They actually fired the best and the brightest for trying to make things better saying that they where playing politics. That experience taught me that if the environment is junk when you walk in, then walk out no amount of money is worth that headache.
- discreteevent 16y ago
  I think Bruce Eckel started a blog about these issues because he had seen them so many times. From what I have seen it seems true more or less everywhere. People are territorial and they see everything relatively. So in general its more important to a manager that a talented employee is held back from contributing value than that the employee deliver the value and possibly end up getting paid more than the manager. Then again there are exceptions. You will often hear very successful business people say "Success is about enabling people". I remember reading an article about one entrepreneur years ago saying that if you can get good people then don't be afraid to pay them more than you pay yourself. But of course the manager is just an employee where the entrepreneur is an owner. Maybe we should just go to a system with only owners and contractors (another kind of owner) and let the enlightened owners and the talented contractors win.
  - GFischer 16y ago
    I read this very recently here on Hacker News, about paying a succesful salesperson/marketer more than the CEO (presumably yourself) in a startup.
- dgabriel 16y ago
  I once took a 20 thousand dollar pay cut by bailing on a company that was trying to kill me. I'm much happier now.
- motters 16y ago
  Indeed it's not just about the money, and the quality of the working environment is at least as important. The best companies I've worked at were were bureaucracy was deliberately kept to the absolute minimum level. It's hard to really innovate if you're simultaneously bogged down by process.
cletus 16y ago
Amen. It's also I think why a lot of programmers are attracted to startups: because it's far more attractive (not to mention the company's and the programmer's interests are more greatly aligned) to be somewhere where you share in the success and aren't simply treated as an irksome cost centre that's hard to apply metrics to. A programmer with 10 years of experience can be 10x (or more) more productive than a graduate yet they will probably less than twice as much. Do this exercise: look at how much you earnt 5-10 years ago and now adjust it by inflation into today's terms. In real terms don't be surprised if now you earn little more, the same or even less.
- discreteevent 16y ago
  "A programmer with 10 years of experience can be 10x (or more) more productive than a graduate". I couldn't agree more and indeed sometimes it can be up to 100 times. Not necessarily because of their productivity but because of the absolute mess that they don't get you into.
  - presidentender 16y ago
    As a member of the class of 2009, I heartily agree. I like to think I'm pretty good, but I've been waiting for this ASP page I just wrote to finish with its DB interactions and load for five minutes. Anyone else would have avoided the need for the optimizations I'm about to go figure out.
    - bbwharris 16y ago
      Optimize your query. It's unlikely to experience that bad of performance from your display logic. (unless you are trying to display millions of rows at once)
      - presidentender 16y ago
        Yeah, it's certainly somewhere in the data access portion of the code.
  - 16y ago
jister 16y ago
While you have a point there, the article is about employees quiting or leaving the company that you have no control over and that you can only stretch the time retaining them.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Have you ever heard of a pay scale that pays Programmer III ten times as much as Programmer I? Yes, ibanks and hedge funds routinely do this. Both programmers probably go by the title "VP", however.
- ivenkys 16y ago
  While agreeing with what you say - i would like to add one caveat - only if you are working in a Business Critical (read Front Office) role.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Very true, you certainly won't get the big bucks no matter what you do for HR or Facilities. But you will get paid well for fixing headaches in the back office (referential data, clearing, etc). Perhaps only 5x as much as a mediocre programmer rather than the 10x you'd get in the front office, but it's still a big multiplier. Line work costs banks a lot of money; if you can put 100 humans out of work, they (or someone else) will pay you.
mynameishere 16y ago
An excellent programmer can routinely do the work of ten mediocre programmers Quit repeating this crap. Quit it. Look at your hands, count the fingers. How many? Ten fingers. Ten fingers is the reason that the number "ten" appears in that sentence and that is it. In fact, an "excellent" programmer can be from anywhere to less valuable to infinitely more valuable than a mediocre programmer. But if the market needs 5 such people and there are 6 available, then the prices will reflect that rather than some cliche that gets endlessly repeated. can go out and pound the pavement or join a start-up Thus resolving all of your and the original author's objections. Yep, that's how the market works, that's how it's always worked and always will. There's simply no use expecting every company to magically know the "right" price. There's no such thing, ever.
- lallysingh 16y ago
  Actually the number from my old software engineering class is on the order of 36:1 in productivity from the most to least productive members of a team.
  - javanix 16y ago
    Because if there is any training that stays relevant forever it is old college software engineering courses ...
    - ColinDabritz 16y ago
      I agree that recalled college classes aren't the sturdiest reference. Here is a better cited source: "Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering" by Robert L. Glass at the IEEE Computer Society website: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035 "P2. Good programmers are up to 30 times better than mediocre programmers, according to "individual differences" research. Given that their pay is never commensurate, they are the biggest bargains in the software field." He also has a wonderful published book, "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" I believe the number there is "28 times" as mentioned on Jeff Atwoods blog: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/revisiting-the-facts-and-fallacies-of-software-engineering.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/revisiting-the-fact... "2. The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers." I believe the source studies are cited in the book. I would add that the book is a great and thought provoking discussion of exactly this sort of 'old wives tale' about software engineering. Edit: I found the page with citations on google books. http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz-UJzZN0C&lpg=PA14&dq=facts%20and%20fallacies%20of%20software%20engineering%20robert%20glass%2028%20times&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz-UJzZN0C&lpg=PA14&#...
_delirium 16y ago
Unless your company will hire only the 10x programmers, though, it kills morale if you're paying some people 10% as much as other people to do similar-looking jobs. An exception is if someone is an acknowledged superstar: nobody will really be upset if Donald Knuth is hired at 10x their salary. But if you're paying two non-famous programmers a 10x difference, and expect them to work together well as a team, problems will likely result.
- silverlake 16y ago
  Many industries pay different salaries to similar-looking jobs without mutinies: sales, traders & investment bankers, management consultants, managers (bonuses), sports & movie & TV stars, etc. Every IT goon on Wall St. gets paid differently for the same job depending on perceived success that year, much more than a 10% difference.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

madair 16y ago

It's a good article but something I've been surprised to find out is true since I've spent some time at a very large corporation for the first time is that a place like this has a large contingent of developers that they seem to prefer to not be very good at what they do, there just isn't an interest in 'standards of excellence' or what have you. It's an economic decision, they just aren't interested in what very talented developers have to offer, except for a very small portion of their business needs. It's essentially factory work. A car manufacturer could pay more for artisans to work the auto assembly line, and it may have some sort of positive effect on the overall elegance of the workmanship, but there's a quality trade off to be made and the vast majority of cars sold aren't a Lotus Esprit nor will they ever be. I don't justify this way of thinking, to me its the scorched earth of capitalism with very limited consideration of the social, cultural, and environmental implications of placing profit motive on a pedestal of not just utility but also of righteousness, but that's me and that's not 99.999 percent of the employing population. This is not an IT turnover crisis, as much as we can come up with stats and anecdotes, this is a global turnover crisis, and it's because the value sought is not related to, as I said, social, cultural, and environmental balance and success, it's about money. Sorry to be the freak here, but this is the elephant in the room and why is it so hard to acknowledge?

peregrine 16y ago
I second this and especially the statement ..has a large contingent of developers that they seem to prefer to not be very good at what they do.. I've seen this as an intern and it drives me mad. Whole groups of people just wanting to do the bare minimum and end up being rewarded for it. I have a hard time being around people like this.
- umjames 16y ago
  It gets even more frustrating when they find out you are more skilled than they are. They won't improve their skills to try and match your ability, they'll just ask you to do it for them every time from now on until you leave. What's even sadder is that your boss will likely condone and encourage this behavior.

powrtoch 16y ago

While the article makes lots of interesting points, I'm uncomfortable about how the case for the very existence of a "Value Apex" is accomplished through some brief hand-waiving and vague truisms. The idea that the talented people get less and less useful, while a very real possibility, I think warrants some harder research before we declare it inevitable fact.

arethuza 16y ago
"However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past experiences, the growth stops." I never worked anywhere where anyone could "learns all that there is to know about the business". Challenges change over time, what you need to know (and therefore learn) various hugely with each new challenge. "Value Apex" sounds like a pseudo scientific term justified with a few invented graphs.

umjames 16y ago

If by IT, the author means an actual IT department, then I think the real problem is that no matter what your position in IT is, you are just an (often unknown) extension of the Help Desk. If by developer, you mean people who write whole (or significant parts of) software applications, you find that you usually never get to do this in IT departments. This is why skilled software developers often leave IT departments. They don't want 20-30 years of integrating pre-written software. They actually want to write the software themselves.

poundy 16y ago

The overall article makes sense BUT, I know people who have worked in the same place for over 10 years, love the job, are productive and get results. They don't work their butts off, they have achieved some kind of state where they know what the company really needs are delivers exactly that.

nradov 16y ago

What a load of crap. I have worked for the same company for 12 years and have provided more value every year. Several of my co-workers are in similar situations. Alex Papadimoulis obviously doesn't understand how to do proper staff development. Software development organizations have little or nothing in common with law firms. And the use of the word ‘crisis’ in the title is stupid. Everything is a crisis now; we have a healthcare crisis, unemployment crisis, foreclosure crisis, energy crisis and apparently now we can add IT turnover to the list. If everything is a crisis then really nothing is a crisis.

Tamerlin 16y ago
"What a load of crap. I have worked for the same company for 12 years and have provided more value every year." It's not crap, you're the one who's fortunate. I can say with complete certainty that I've added next to no value to most of the companies that I've worked for that some random bozo hired off the street couldn't -- because most of them resist anything like good engineering. They just don't understand it, and they complain about (and penalize) programmers who aren't writing code when those programmers are asking "What's this thing INTENDED to do?" No programmer, no matter how skilled, can add any value to such an organization. They're ass-in-seat jobs even though the hiring staff pretends that they're programming jobs.

motters 16y ago

I liked the term "beachheads of bad code". Will probably use that next time I come across badly written code in a commercial context.