3 ms·
This excerpt says a lot: "Employers should be more cautious about pursuing strategies that discount the contributions of older workers. In recent years, some c
by paulm1 8y ago
This excerpt says a lot:
"Employers should be more cautious about pursuing strategies that discount the contributions of older workers. In recent years, some companies realized too late — after older employees had departed — that longtime employees possessed critical knowledge and experience. Moreover, whatever cost reductions companies achieve can be ephemeral if young hires move on to other opportunities."
- mylons 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ
- gcb0 8y agoproblem with the industry is short term vision. today even the CEO will make lots of money if they drag the company in the mud for short term perceived profit (doesn't even have to be actual profit). splitting cost centers and being the manager of the one that gets more income than outcome associated in some spreadsheet makes zero more money but pays lots of bonus and promotions. same for launching tons of features aligned with some strategic goal, even if it completely destroy obvieties like market reputation (eg YouTube kids) or is ridden with bugs that you discounted as "will implement on phase 2. because agile" (don't even get me started on documentation and maintenance runbooks, your waterfall dinosaur!) now get off my lawn!
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoIsn't that what publicly traded industry is supposed to do? Maximize the returns for the shareholder each quarter?
- cat199 8y agoindustry perhaps (though this is debatable); industry is not society however. confusing the two can be problematic.
- dwaltrip 8y agoA company is supposed to maximize returns over its lifespan, while also upholding an ethical standard and a set of values.
- lostmsu 8y agoIts an interesting problem, because that's generally not the goal of individual workers, including those in management roles. Their goal is usually on a much shorter term - get promoted quickly.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoThe last thing my father was involved in at his work with a international corporation was attempting to set up a better training methodology for passing knowledge on from the retiring boomers to the new staff. It was met with utter apathy - I don't know if it even continued after he retired.
- peterclary 8y agoInteresting. Was that apathy from the new staff, who weren't interested in spending time acquiring institutional knowledge vs skills/experience which would increase their value in the marketplace? Or apathy from the corporation itself, which didn't understand the value of the knowledge it was losing?
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoFrom the corporation itself - there seemed little reward to the investment by their reckoning.
- Jtsummers 8y agohttps://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/managing-organizational-forgetting/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/managing-organizational-... I posted that a day or two ago because of that exact issue. Organizations that don't try to retain knowledge (and we're in a knowledge-based industry!) will lose it over time, and they won't even know what they've lost. Until it's too late. We had a project where our partner had let go of a bunch of senior engineers. They later (as part of the new project) had to re-design a lot of hardware components and incurred a significant delay because no one knew how the system worked anymore, and the new people were too junior to do a proper job of it anyways.