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I officially mentored someone at my previous company and helped him move from a support tech role into a software dev position. It was incredibly rewarding. Bu

I officially mentored someone at my previous company and helped him move from a support tech role into a software dev position. It was incredibly rewarding. But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. One might argue that if everyone put more fish in the pond, then we'd all be better off (true), but we have a standard collective action problem where the free riders benefit at the expense of the fish growers. I see two (partial) ways out of this trap. 1. Pay more than everyone around you. (Obviously, not generally viable.) 2. Make the culture of your company so awesome that people will want to stay, even if you can't pay the most. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I'd be curious to hear other possibilities.

Fordec 8y ago
"CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?"
- techcode 8y ago
  Perhaps msluyter was thinking of big companies that smaller ones can't match on spending power. Either way - if you trained/grown someone to become much more valuable for other companies and still can't create enough value working for you... Then you have a different problem.
  - Roritharr 8y ago
    This the technically true, but also a very tough starting position. If my six person startup has issues squeezing as much value out of my Dev than FANG companies with all their support structure and research into this, this is only to be expected, imo. So yeah, it's a problem, one on the list of many problems most companies have though, so it's oversimplified to simply say:"Let's just pay for expensive training and hope they stay." Yes, you can foster a culture, build a sense of loyalty etc. but at some point in time even the most loyal employee feels underpaid if he's paid below market because the company can't afford someone at the stage they've reached by working there. I've seen this play out too often to ignore the counter argument. The incentives of the company and the worker often simply don't align when it comes to career growth.
    - novok 8y ago
      That is why the small startup has to do what FANG is not willing to do, like full remote work anywhere for everyone.
      - wolfgke 8y ago
        > That is why the small startup has to do what FANG is not willing to do, like full remote work anywhere for everyone. This is in my opinion (because of the infrastructure) easier to do for FANG than for the startup.
        detaro 8y ago
        What infrastructure do you have in mind? I guess if you employ people from everywhere, there's a bunch of overhead for handling international work contracts, payment etc.
        wolfgke 8y ago
        > What infrastructure do you have in mind? All kinds. From your mentioned international work contracts and payments over structuring the work/code so that in can easier be distributed worldwide,using standardized hardware and software configurations so that adminstration/updating can be done automatically etc.
        novok 8y ago
        There are organizational issues that make it hard @ FANG to be a full remote company.
    - FakeComments 8y ago
      I’m not sure I understand your point. Let’s imagine that I work a job for three years, and a company spends $30,000 training me over that time period, when I then leave because that training helped me reach a better career position. If they hadn’t paid for that benefit, I would have left after only two years — because the need to transfer for career advancement would happen sooner. This would save them $20,000-30,000 depending on how you count. So what’s the net difference? In scenario 1, they received a ROI of 1 year of improved labor, and 1 year of doubly improved labor. Additionally, the fixed costs of hiring are amortized over three years instead of two, and so decrease by 33%. So for $30,000 they decreased my hiring costs by 33% and received two years of increased quality labor — say 5-10% productivity. Hiring an engineer is 25-50% of their yearly salary, so they’re saving 8-15% of my salary over three years. The productivity of an engineer is going to be like twice their salary, just to pay overhead and profit. So we’re looking at a boost of 10-20% my salary in their revenues. So they’re looking at ~15-25% of my salary as the return for spending $10k/year. Naively, it seems like that pays off in many cases: it just requires you operate in a trust based manner.
- SamuelAdams 8y ago
  > CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?" It's quite simple, you lay them off. I've seen it happen more than once.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    Maybe in US you do. In UK "laying off" a programmer for anything other than major breach of contract(like being caught red handed stealing) and without making the position demonstrably redundant, takes about ~6 months and it's not a pretty process. Laying off should be the option of last resort, purely because of how incredibly costly it is(not just financially - going through the right steps takes time from both HR and other engineers).
    - hinkley 8y ago
      In the US it’s quite common in a lay-off for 2/3rds of the victims to be unpopular people anyway. No boss is gonna fight for someone who is getting the stink eye already. The lay-off lets then fire with cause without actually doing it. Kinda cowardly, but I’ve worked at places that cut proactively and things got even more toxic. Conversations speculating about who will get laid off next shouldn’t be a weekly thing. It’s paralyzing.
    - ukoki 8y ago
      > ...takes about ~6 months and it's not a pretty process. This fact is clearly expressed in the UK contractor market which seems to consistently pay a 2x premium over salaried employees. Whilst some of this premium may be based on skills I'd wager a lot of it is buying the right to end employment at short notice (either due to poor performance, or simply in response to changing business requirements making the role obsolete). https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/
- std_throwawayay 8y ago
  An employee wants more than money. If I have the feeling that I grow, I stay longer. If I get the feeling that they want to keep me down, I leave sooner. Simple as that. If you increase the skillset of your employees you get back something along the way, so it's not just money wasted but also collecting a lot of interest. Also you become attractive for employees who want to grow. It's easy for the beancounters to count all the wasted money but it's not so easy to evaluate the real productivity that such employees give back. Maybe if companies were allowed to trade employees like cattle that mindset would change.
reureu 8y ago
I've worked for enough crappy managers that I know how much that affects my job satisfaction and work-life balance. I'm at a point where I'd probably (and, currently do) sacrifice 10-15% of my salary just to work for someone who is respectful and interested in my development and wellbeing. I'd bet others are like me, and if you truly mentor and develop someone, you won't need to pay Netflix-level salaries to retain them.
- abc_lisper 8y ago
  This. I stay at my current work because of this.
- hashhar 8y ago
  You've articulated it much better than what I tried to in another comment ITT.
- bpyne 8y ago
  All that and it's important, for me, that the organization's mission aligns with my values.
gorpomon 8y ago
IMO that devil's advocate argument is incorrect. There is no trap in working to increase an employee's skills. If you train someone at work and level them up-- they're not in class 8 hours a day not contributing. They are working on a project. All software mentorship is based around the idea of growing skills while meaningfully contributing to a project. Actually it's much harder to train someone without a project. I have never once in my career seen a scenario where a person isn't contributing and just learning skills. After said project is done a trained person might leave. But an untrained employee might leave as well-- for a place that offers meaningful mentorship.
- dfrage 8y ago
  > There is no trap in working to increase an employee's skills. There's absolutely a trap if the now bigger fish stays in your pond for a while and the even bigger management shark decides you can be replaced by him for much less money. As I detail in another subthread in this discussion. Given the near absolute absence, at least in the US, of rewarding employees who have become much more valuable because of the experience they've gained in doing very real work, you're absolutely right that it needs to be tied to a real project, what you should generally do is complicated even before you factor in the vastly increased probability of it getting you fired. Is the greater productivity your company enjoys for a short period of time worth the shorter tenure of the mentee in it? > But an untrained employee might leave as well-- for a place that offers meaningful mentorship. How many of these places exist in the real world?
  - gorpomon 8y ago
    It sounds like we've just had really different workplace experiences in software. I've never seen a scenario where a trained employee replaces a more senior one. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's just not something I've seen in my career (e-commerce, a food delivery startup gone global and now a consultancy). Also, I've seen people take jobs that promise mentorship multiple times. I've seen multiple people take entry level apprenticeships that offer rigorous software development training. I've also seen multiple mid and senior level devs leave for jobs that offer meaningful mentorship in management and offer clear career growth options. So I guess it really just comes down to this: mentoring others can be a trap if the industry or company makes it a trap. It's up to a company to embrace mentorship and training and ensure it works for both mentor and mentee.
wccrawford 8y ago
>To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. Even more curious is that IT culture is basically that if you want to get paid what you're worth, you have to quit and go to another company. So these companies put all this effort into raising a better developer, and then refuse to pay them what they're now worth and basically force them to go elsewhere. It's not "what if they go elsewhere" under that situation, it's "when". I'd argue that you don't even have to "pay more than everyone around you". Simply coming close to parity is enough to stop most people from going through the pain of a job search. But these companies don't even get that close. The last time I switched jobs, I got a 40% pay increase. That's ridiculous. I even told the company I was underpaid and they asked if I could wait a year for a raise. I didn't even answer the question. I just walked away and started looking for a job. They weren't surprised when I found one and quit. And a couple weeks before I left, they put in a job ad for 7 developers, offering what I was making at my new job for each of them. I've been at this new job as a senior developer for 8 years now. Could I make more? Almost certainly. But they gave me decent raises and have a good culture (almost zero overtime in 8 years) and benefits, and I don't feel like leaving.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  It's not "what if they go elsewhere" under that situation, it's "when". This is gold. It's just a specific application of, "You shouldn't fight market forces, if you can help it." Simply coming close to parody parity Though, this started me thinking on what "parody bits" would be.
  - wccrawford 8y ago
    Ugh. I swear it was "parity" in my head. I have no idea how I managed to mis-type that. Wow.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      I keep looking back on past comments and finding stuff like that. I wonder if someone has come up with a homophone/typo mistake filter? Being able to turn that on for opponents one would like to discredit would be really insidious and evil. What if some evil genius at Google has come up with a hidden way to do this in Chrome? Would we ever know? Maybe not, if the frequency was kept low enough.
deleted 8y ago
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hashhar 8y ago
What I have personally experienced is that since I had an awesome mentor, I've been willing to follow them along anywhere they go and which in turn helps the mentor to get into a leadership role since over time they are effectively leading a group of mentees.
LolNoGenerics 8y ago
I don't think everyone leaves with the next best salary upgrade if you pay fair. Leveling up a junior should be rewarded in time. Part of the mentoring is to teach them how to fight for your upgrade, right? Good culture is good, but no culture fits all personalities. In the end you probably have to accept that some portion of mentees will leave and try to minimize the rate. What I would be afraid of that grown up juniors may get stuck in their learning environment and remain junior for way too long.
squallleonhart 8y ago
#2 doesn't work if the company can't get anywhere close to #1. With no work experience, I was hired as a junior dev with a $40k salary, which I gladly accepted. A senior dev mentored me throughout the year and it was fantastic. Coming up on my 1-year anniversary with the company, I was thoroughly enjoying my job, the people, and the culture. I was hoping to get a raise up to at least $60k, though, since I was significantly more valuable to the company than I was when I first joined. They offered me $50k. I started applying for other jobs and got an offer for $90k and I accepted it. I still talk with my mentor from my previous job. He's pissed that his company won't pay enough to keep the developers he mentors.
- x2f10 8y ago
  Do you have a mentor at your new job? If not, what would you consider his continued mentorship worth?
  - squallleonhart 8y ago
    Great question. I unfortunately don't have a mentor at my new job and it definitely hurt at first. However, I don't regret leaving as I've still learned a great deal independently, perhaps akin to a kid leaving home for the first time to go to university. I do find mentorship to be invaluable and hope to have a mentor again in the future, though. I am forever grateful to my mentor from my previous job for the foundation he provided. He instilled good habits and philosophies in me that pleasantly surprised some of my new co-workers and we've even implemented some improvements based on what I learned from him.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    I would think that extra $40k would allow him to hire a mentor personally.
patagonia 8y ago
I’m surprised there is not a compensation scheme something like what follows: Setup: Bring on promising “apprentice” and have 3 year roadmap to reaching “solid individual contributor” status - year 1: pay at market rate for standard recent college grad but payout 60% in year 1, 10% in year 2, 10% in year 3, 10% in year 4, 10% in year 5 - year 2: beginning of year give merit raise to full salary amount based on market rates but payout 75% in year 2, 5% in year 3, 10% in year 4, 10% in year 5 - year 3: beginning of year give merit raise to full salary but payout 90% in year 3, 5% in year 4, 5% in year 5 - beginning in year 4 get merit raise and receive 100% of salary cash that year as well as the 10% from year 1 and 5% from year 2 - year 5: includes 10% from year 1, 10% from year 2, 5% from year 3 If you can’t keep your employee after that, it’s on you, but they’ve def stuck around long enough to pay you back in productivity (edit: I realize my math is a bit off but I’m on a cellphone on the move, you’re gonna have to mentally fix the math, but you get the idea)
ergothus 8y ago
> if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted Not only is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you don't invest in your employees, the level of waste is larger. I recently posted an article on LinkedIn about this very topic: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-common-web-dev-hiring-mistake-brett-ritter/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-common-web-dev-hiring-mi... Note: I shamelessly plug one of my new-developer friends at the end.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  >>Not only is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you don't invest in your employees, the level of waste is larger. In the long-run, yes. The issue is that most companies optimize for short-term. Managers and executives can receive significant bonuses for keeping their costs down, and by the time the disadvantages of that approach (i.e. people leaving) become obvious, they too have bailed for the next gig.
president 8y ago
3. Treat all workers as cogs in a machine that can be replaced at any moment if they are disobedient or fail to do their job right. After all, there are plenty of qualified people lined up to take their place anyway. Bonus points for incorporating foreign workers that can be locked into indentured servitude for many years. If you do it right, your fish can never leave the pond!
dooy 8y ago
> Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I have been following hackernews for 15 years. 20 years since I saw an stallman interview in local pc magazine, blown away by the intensity of the man. I am an artist. I love to read plt stuff and haskell lisp code, I cried over sussman lectures.. It expands my mind, finding ways to express my thoughts so that common people in my world can understand me better, for their sake. I dont write programs, a lot of the code feels unmusical, not ergonomic, my musical background made me aware of how unmusical a keyboard feels like. Learning functional programming has made me aware how most people use imperative chain rule sequences to generate their thought patterns. I would love to work with inspired people just building new ways to express thoughts. But I quietly read and try to translate visions and feelings into code. Writting linear sentences is becoming a drag. It feels as if the time is ripe to raise our conversations to a more constructive functional level. It is happening. It is a slow progress. I can't see myself working in IT because of business deadline material oriented approach. So I continue to quietly read plt stuff. I do not want to understand anything because the other is usually limited to a smaller temporal frame. I read code and apply different real life variables to it and see how the interactions develop within my interaction space. How would you mentor me? /rant
scarface74 8y ago
To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. The question is why would someone leave your company once you train them? If someone is more valuable on the open market than you are paying them, pay them market rates. HR compensation policies need to be in line with the market, not the old “we have a policy of not giving more than 5% raises”. I’ve been working in development for a $long_time but I restarted my career about 10 year ago and my rise is about the same as you would see from someone just graduating from college 12 years ago. Out of the four job changes I had, two were partially because the next company was willing to offer me $25K more (not talking crazy west coast salaries here). One other went out of business and the other because they decided “they didn’t want to be a software company” and they just wanted report writers a year and a half after I was hired as the dev lead. 1. Pay more than everyone around you. (Obviously, not generally viable.) You don’t have to pay the most, but don’t pay so much under the market that everytime the employee sees a random job posting or a recruiter call they know they can make signifactly more just by picking up the phone/responding to an email. 2. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I'd be curious to hear other possibilities. That helps. But why would I spend a year a two “growing” at your company, when I could both “grow” and make a lot more money some place else? I’m at a happy place where I work now, and I am decently compensated compared to the market, but even now if someone was willing to pay me $25K more, all other things being equal (work life balance, no travel, short commute), I would jump ship. But the only realistic way I could make significantly more is by going into management (not interested) or being a consultant (not interested right now).
chadash 8y ago
> Make the culture of your company so awesome that people will want to stay, even if you can't pay the most. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I think this only goes so far. There are better companies and worse companies, sure, but even the best companies have their issues and after enough time, most people want to move on. People also change, and what seems awesome to a fresh graduate may not be great for someone older, so it's always hard to keep everyone happy. Pay, however, seems to be a motivator that keeps a lot of people in place (certainly not everyone, but a lot). I know plenty of talented people who feel trapped at their jobs because their jobs pay very well. It's common enough that there's a term for it, "golden handcuffs".
pyrale 8y ago
I believe there is a story along the lines of "Would you rather train people to see them leave, or not train them and have them stay?"
hinkley 8y ago
I tend to mentor people I see as promising. Those with leadership potential. Folks I see as future peers with similar values (ethics, quality, teamwork). If they get far I have a good reference or referral in my future. In the meantime I can offload some of my troubles onto them and worry about other things. To put it another way, if you think good software requires vigilance, and you worry that there’s a shortage of it, these people aren’t competition. They’re allies.
pm90 8y ago
> Make the culture of your company so awesome that people will want to stay, even if you can't pay the most. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. This is why company culture is so important. You may not be able to compete on financial compensation right away, but if you have a culture thats great, enables people to learn and grow and work with other great folks, its very attractive as compared to simply throwing more money. Not to mention: many folks _want_ that kind of mentorship and culture. They desperately want to learn from smart, experienced developers.
johngalt 8y ago
A business that pursues a poaching strategy will not develop the practices to identify in-house talent. Ergo, you have a hard time understanding anything about employee performance other than you pay a lot. When you are the one adding the fish to the pond. You know exactly what type of fish it is as it grows. Whereas the fish that you catch may be a catfish rather than a sockeye. The free rider problem is a real thing, but so is the market for lemons.
wisty 8y ago
> But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. Most good employees don't quit for at better job unless there's a dysfunctional workplace. Partly they don't know if there's better jobs, and partly it's just a lot of effort, but mostly because other companies don't know they're good employees. The labor market is a market for lemons. If you own a $2000 car that drives OK you don't sell it because other people won't believe it's any good.
- aiisjustanif 8y ago
  That doesn't seem to describe the IT market currently, at all.
vharuck 8y ago
"What if I train them, and they leave?" "What if you don't, and they stay?"
megablast 8y ago
That is why you don’t mentor someone. You provide the tools for everyone to improve.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
I wonder if that's what Peter Drucker meant when he said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast"
tomaskafka 8y ago
2. If great people don't have growth path at your company, they'll grow by going elsewhere.
snowwrestler 8y ago
People choose where to work, and money is only a small part of that decision. Invest in an employee, give them meaningful and interesting work, and the resources to grow, and you will generate a lot of value that doesn't show up on the books: loyalty. From the financial perspective, it is almost always cheaper to get more out of a current employee than to go into the market and find someone new. IMO there are two types of companies: those that know how to develop talent, and those that only know how to import it. The former are often the ones that have a long bright future and create a big impact on the world. > by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. This only holds true in a zero-sum game, which the economy is not. Improving the skills of employees actually makes the entire pond bigger.
bhl 8y ago
Is this a free rider problem? While a developer is being mentored and improving, they’re still contributing to the company for the same salary even though their market value is rising. Eventually, without a raise in salary, they’ll move to a company that pays market value. So developers aren’t free riders because the aforementioned; the new companies are free riders because they pay market rates. Edit: it may be a free rider issue if the mentorship / training is orthogonal to their tasks. For example, if Starbucks started to offer their baristas CS classes, it’d be a free ride for employees. But what are perks classified as?

Fordec 8y ago

"CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?"

techcode 8y ago
Perhaps msluyter was thinking of big companies that smaller ones can't match on spending power. Either way - if you trained/grown someone to become much more valuable for other companies and still can't create enough value working for you... Then you have a different problem.
- Roritharr 8y ago
  This the technically true, but also a very tough starting position. If my six person startup has issues squeezing as much value out of my Dev than FANG companies with all their support structure and research into this, this is only to be expected, imo. So yeah, it's a problem, one on the list of many problems most companies have though, so it's oversimplified to simply say:"Let's just pay for expensive training and hope they stay." Yes, you can foster a culture, build a sense of loyalty etc. but at some point in time even the most loyal employee feels underpaid if he's paid below market because the company can't afford someone at the stage they've reached by working there. I've seen this play out too often to ignore the counter argument. The incentives of the company and the worker often simply don't align when it comes to career growth.
  - novok 8y ago
    That is why the small startup has to do what FANG is not willing to do, like full remote work anywhere for everyone.
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      > That is why the small startup has to do what FANG is not willing to do, like full remote work anywhere for everyone. This is in my opinion (because of the infrastructure) easier to do for FANG than for the startup.
      - detaro 8y ago
        What infrastructure do you have in mind? I guess if you employ people from everywhere, there's a bunch of overhead for handling international work contracts, payment etc.
        wolfgke 8y ago
        > What infrastructure do you have in mind? All kinds. From your mentioned international work contracts and payments over structuring the work/code so that in can easier be distributed worldwide,using standardized hardware and software configurations so that adminstration/updating can be done automatically etc.
        novok 8y ago
        There are organizational issues that make it hard @ FANG to be a full remote company.
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    I’m not sure I understand your point. Let’s imagine that I work a job for three years, and a company spends $30,000 training me over that time period, when I then leave because that training helped me reach a better career position. If they hadn’t paid for that benefit, I would have left after only two years — because the need to transfer for career advancement would happen sooner. This would save them $20,000-30,000 depending on how you count. So what’s the net difference? In scenario 1, they received a ROI of 1 year of improved labor, and 1 year of doubly improved labor. Additionally, the fixed costs of hiring are amortized over three years instead of two, and so decrease by 33%. So for $30,000 they decreased my hiring costs by 33% and received two years of increased quality labor — say 5-10% productivity. Hiring an engineer is 25-50% of their yearly salary, so they’re saving 8-15% of my salary over three years. The productivity of an engineer is going to be like twice their salary, just to pay overhead and profit. So we’re looking at a boost of 10-20% my salary in their revenues. So they’re looking at ~15-25% of my salary as the return for spending $10k/year. Naively, it seems like that pays off in many cases: it just requires you operate in a trust based manner.
SamuelAdams 8y ago
> CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?" It's quite simple, you lay them off. I've seen it happen more than once.
- gambiting 8y ago
  Maybe in US you do. In UK "laying off" a programmer for anything other than major breach of contract(like being caught red handed stealing) and without making the position demonstrably redundant, takes about ~6 months and it's not a pretty process. Laying off should be the option of last resort, purely because of how incredibly costly it is(not just financially - going through the right steps takes time from both HR and other engineers).
  - hinkley 8y ago
    In the US it’s quite common in a lay-off for 2/3rds of the victims to be unpopular people anyway. No boss is gonna fight for someone who is getting the stink eye already. The lay-off lets then fire with cause without actually doing it. Kinda cowardly, but I’ve worked at places that cut proactively and things got even more toxic. Conversations speculating about who will get laid off next shouldn’t be a weekly thing. It’s paralyzing.
  - ukoki 8y ago
    > ...takes about ~6 months and it's not a pretty process. This fact is clearly expressed in the UK contractor market which seems to consistently pay a 2x premium over salaried employees. Whilst some of this premium may be based on skills I'd wager a lot of it is buying the right to end employment at short notice (either due to poor performance, or simply in response to changing business requirements making the role obsolete). https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/
std_throwawayay 8y ago
An employee wants more than money. If I have the feeling that I grow, I stay longer. If I get the feeling that they want to keep me down, I leave sooner. Simple as that. If you increase the skillset of your employees you get back something along the way, so it's not just money wasted but also collecting a lot of interest. Also you become attractive for employees who want to grow. It's easy for the beancounters to count all the wasted money but it's not so easy to evaluate the real productivity that such employees give back. Maybe if companies were allowed to trade employees like cattle that mindset would change.

reureu 8y ago

I've worked for enough crappy managers that I know how much that affects my job satisfaction and work-life balance. I'm at a point where I'd probably (and, currently do) sacrifice 10-15% of my salary just to work for someone who is respectful and interested in my development and wellbeing. I'd bet others are like me, and if you truly mentor and develop someone, you won't need to pay Netflix-level salaries to retain them.

abc_lisper 8y ago
This. I stay at my current work because of this.
hashhar 8y ago
You've articulated it much better than what I tried to in another comment ITT.
bpyne 8y ago
All that and it's important, for me, that the organization's mission aligns with my values.

gorpomon 8y ago

IMO that devil's advocate argument is incorrect. There is no trap in working to increase an employee's skills. If you train someone at work and level them up-- they're not in class 8 hours a day not contributing. They are working on a project. All software mentorship is based around the idea of growing skills while meaningfully contributing to a project. Actually it's much harder to train someone without a project. I have never once in my career seen a scenario where a person isn't contributing and just learning skills. After said project is done a trained person might leave. But an untrained employee might leave as well-- for a place that offers meaningful mentorship.

dfrage 8y ago
> There is no trap in working to increase an employee's skills. There's absolutely a trap if the now bigger fish stays in your pond for a while and the even bigger management shark decides you can be replaced by him for much less money. As I detail in another subthread in this discussion. Given the near absolute absence, at least in the US, of rewarding employees who have become much more valuable because of the experience they've gained in doing very real work, you're absolutely right that it needs to be tied to a real project, what you should generally do is complicated even before you factor in the vastly increased probability of it getting you fired. Is the greater productivity your company enjoys for a short period of time worth the shorter tenure of the mentee in it? > But an untrained employee might leave as well-- for a place that offers meaningful mentorship. How many of these places exist in the real world?
- gorpomon 8y ago
  It sounds like we've just had really different workplace experiences in software. I've never seen a scenario where a trained employee replaces a more senior one. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's just not something I've seen in my career (e-commerce, a food delivery startup gone global and now a consultancy). Also, I've seen people take jobs that promise mentorship multiple times. I've seen multiple people take entry level apprenticeships that offer rigorous software development training. I've also seen multiple mid and senior level devs leave for jobs that offer meaningful mentorship in management and offer clear career growth options. So I guess it really just comes down to this: mentoring others can be a trap if the industry or company makes it a trap. It's up to a company to embrace mentorship and training and ensure it works for both mentor and mentee.

wccrawford 8y ago

>To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. Even more curious is that IT culture is basically that if you want to get paid what you're worth, you have to quit and go to another company. So these companies put all this effort into raising a better developer, and then refuse to pay them what they're now worth and basically force them to go elsewhere. It's not "what if they go elsewhere" under that situation, it's "when". I'd argue that you don't even have to "pay more than everyone around you". Simply coming close to parity is enough to stop most people from going through the pain of a job search. But these companies don't even get that close. The last time I switched jobs, I got a 40% pay increase. That's ridiculous. I even told the company I was underpaid and they asked if I could wait a year for a raise. I didn't even answer the question. I just walked away and started looking for a job. They weren't surprised when I found one and quit. And a couple weeks before I left, they put in a job ad for 7 developers, offering what I was making at my new job for each of them. I've been at this new job as a senior developer for 8 years now. Could I make more? Almost certainly. But they gave me decent raises and have a good culture (almost zero overtime in 8 years) and benefits, and I don't feel like leaving.

stcredzero 8y ago
It's not "what if they go elsewhere" under that situation, it's "when". This is gold. It's just a specific application of, "You shouldn't fight market forces, if you can help it." Simply coming close to parody parity Though, this started me thinking on what "parody bits" would be.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  Ugh. I swear it was "parity" in my head. I have no idea how I managed to mis-type that. Wow.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    I keep looking back on past comments and finding stuff like that. I wonder if someone has come up with a homophone/typo mistake filter? Being able to turn that on for opponents one would like to discredit would be really insidious and evil. What if some evil genius at Google has come up with a hidden way to do this in Chrome? Would we ever know? Maybe not, if the frequency was kept low enough.

deleted 8y ago

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hashhar 8y ago

What I have personally experienced is that since I had an awesome mentor, I've been willing to follow them along anywhere they go and which in turn helps the mentor to get into a leadership role since over time they are effectively leading a group of mentees.

LolNoGenerics 8y ago

I don't think everyone leaves with the next best salary upgrade if you pay fair. Leveling up a junior should be rewarded in time. Part of the mentoring is to teach them how to fight for your upgrade, right? Good culture is good, but no culture fits all personalities. In the end you probably have to accept that some portion of mentees will leave and try to minimize the rate. What I would be afraid of that grown up juniors may get stuck in their learning environment and remain junior for way too long.

squallleonhart 8y ago

#2 doesn't work if the company can't get anywhere close to #1. With no work experience, I was hired as a junior dev with a $40k salary, which I gladly accepted. A senior dev mentored me throughout the year and it was fantastic. Coming up on my 1-year anniversary with the company, I was thoroughly enjoying my job, the people, and the culture. I was hoping to get a raise up to at least $60k, though, since I was significantly more valuable to the company than I was when I first joined. They offered me $50k. I started applying for other jobs and got an offer for $90k and I accepted it. I still talk with my mentor from my previous job. He's pissed that his company won't pay enough to keep the developers he mentors.

x2f10 8y ago
Do you have a mentor at your new job? If not, what would you consider his continued mentorship worth?
- squallleonhart 8y ago
  Great question. I unfortunately don't have a mentor at my new job and it definitely hurt at first. However, I don't regret leaving as I've still learned a great deal independently, perhaps akin to a kid leaving home for the first time to go to university. I do find mentorship to be invaluable and hope to have a mentor again in the future, though. I am forever grateful to my mentor from my previous job for the foundation he provided. He instilled good habits and philosophies in me that pleasantly surprised some of my new co-workers and we've even implemented some improvements based on what I learned from him.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  I would think that extra $40k would allow him to hire a mentor personally.

patagonia 8y ago

I’m surprised there is not a compensation scheme something like what follows: Setup: Bring on promising “apprentice” and have 3 year roadmap to reaching “solid individual contributor” status - year 1: pay at market rate for standard recent college grad but payout 60% in year 1, 10% in year 2, 10% in year 3, 10% in year 4, 10% in year 5 - year 2: beginning of year give merit raise to full salary amount based on market rates but payout 75% in year 2, 5% in year 3, 10% in year 4, 10% in year 5 - year 3: beginning of year give merit raise to full salary but payout 90% in year 3, 5% in year 4, 5% in year 5 - beginning in year 4 get merit raise and receive 100% of salary cash that year as well as the 10% from year 1 and 5% from year 2 - year 5: includes 10% from year 1, 10% from year 2, 5% from year 3 If you can’t keep your employee after that, it’s on you, but they’ve def stuck around long enough to pay you back in productivity (edit: I realize my math is a bit off but I’m on a cellphone on the move, you’re gonna have to mentally fix the math, but you get the idea)

ergothus 8y ago

> if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted Not only is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you don't invest in your employees, the level of waste is larger. I recently posted an article on LinkedIn about this very topic: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-common-web-dev-hiring-mistake-brett-ritter/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-common-web-dev-hiring-mi... Note: I shamelessly plug one of my new-developer friends at the end.

enraged_camel 8y ago
>>Not only is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you don't invest in your employees, the level of waste is larger. In the long-run, yes. The issue is that most companies optimize for short-term. Managers and executives can receive significant bonuses for keeping their costs down, and by the time the disadvantages of that approach (i.e. people leaving) become obvious, they too have bailed for the next gig.

president 8y ago

3. Treat all workers as cogs in a machine that can be replaced at any moment if they are disobedient or fail to do their job right. After all, there are plenty of qualified people lined up to take their place anyway. Bonus points for incorporating foreign workers that can be locked into indentured servitude for many years. If you do it right, your fish can never leave the pond!

dooy 8y ago

> Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I have been following hackernews for 15 years. 20 years since I saw an stallman interview in local pc magazine, blown away by the intensity of the man. I am an artist. I love to read plt stuff and haskell lisp code, I cried over sussman lectures.. It expands my mind, finding ways to express my thoughts so that common people in my world can understand me better, for their sake. I dont write programs, a lot of the code feels unmusical, not ergonomic, my musical background made me aware of how unmusical a keyboard feels like. Learning functional programming has made me aware how most people use imperative chain rule sequences to generate their thought patterns. I would love to work with inspired people just building new ways to express thoughts. But I quietly read and try to translate visions and feelings into code. Writting linear sentences is becoming a drag. It feels as if the time is ripe to raise our conversations to a more constructive functional level. It is happening. It is a slow progress. I can't see myself working in IT because of business deadline material oriented approach. So I continue to quietly read plt stuff. I do not want to understand anything because the other is usually limited to a smaller temporal frame. I read code and apply different real life variables to it and see how the interactions develop within my interaction space. How would you mentor me? /rant

scarface74 8y ago

To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. The question is why would someone leave your company once you train them? If someone is more valuable on the open market than you are paying them, pay them market rates. HR compensation policies need to be in line with the market, not the old “we have a policy of not giving more than 5% raises”. I’ve been working in development for a $long_time but I restarted my career about 10 year ago and my rise is about the same as you would see from someone just graduating from college 12 years ago. Out of the four job changes I had, two were partially because the next company was willing to offer me $25K more (not talking crazy west coast salaries here). One other went out of business and the other because they decided “they didn’t want to be a software company” and they just wanted report writers a year and a half after I was hired as the dev lead. 1. Pay more than everyone around you. (Obviously, not generally viable.) You don’t have to pay the most, but don’t pay so much under the market that everytime the employee sees a random job posting or a recruiter call they know they can make signifactly more just by picking up the phone/responding to an email. 2. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I'd be curious to hear other possibilities. That helps. But why would I spend a year a two “growing” at your company, when I could both “grow” and make a lot more money some place else? I’m at a happy place where I work now, and I am decently compensated compared to the market, but even now if someone was willing to pay me $25K more, all other things being equal (work life balance, no travel, short commute), I would jump ship. But the only realistic way I could make significantly more is by going into management (not interested) or being a consultant (not interested right now).

chadash 8y ago

> Make the culture of your company so awesome that people will want to stay, even if you can't pay the most. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I think this only goes so far. There are better companies and worse companies, sure, but even the best companies have their issues and after enough time, most people want to move on. People also change, and what seems awesome to a fresh graduate may not be great for someone older, so it's always hard to keep everyone happy. Pay, however, seems to be a motivator that keeps a lot of people in place (certainly not everyone, but a lot). I know plenty of talented people who feel trapped at their jobs because their jobs pay very well. It's common enough that there's a term for it, "golden handcuffs".

pyrale 8y ago

I believe there is a story along the lines of "Would you rather train people to see them leave, or not train them and have them stay?"

hinkley 8y ago

I tend to mentor people I see as promising. Those with leadership potential. Folks I see as future peers with similar values (ethics, quality, teamwork). If they get far I have a good reference or referral in my future. In the meantime I can offload some of my troubles onto them and worry about other things. To put it another way, if you think good software requires vigilance, and you worry that there’s a shortage of it, these people aren’t competition. They’re allies.

pm90 8y ago

> Make the culture of your company so awesome that people will want to stay, even if you can't pay the most. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. This is why company culture is so important. You may not be able to compete on financial compensation right away, but if you have a culture thats great, enables people to learn and grow and work with other great folks, its very attractive as compared to simply throwing more money. Not to mention: many folks _want_ that kind of mentorship and culture. They desperately want to learn from smart, experienced developers.

johngalt 8y ago

A business that pursues a poaching strategy will not develop the practices to identify in-house talent. Ergo, you have a hard time understanding anything about employee performance other than you pay a lot. When you are the one adding the fish to the pond. You know exactly what type of fish it is as it grows. Whereas the fish that you catch may be a catfish rather than a sockeye. The free rider problem is a real thing, but so is the market for lemons.

wisty 8y ago

> But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. Most good employees don't quit for at better job unless there's a dysfunctional workplace. Partly they don't know if there's better jobs, and partly it's just a lot of effort, but mostly because other companies don't know they're good employees. The labor market is a market for lemons. If you own a $2000 car that drives OK you don't sell it because other people won't believe it's any good.

aiisjustanif 8y ago
That doesn't seem to describe the IT market currently, at all.

vharuck 8y ago

"What if I train them, and they leave?" "What if you don't, and they stay?"

megablast 8y ago

That is why you don’t mentor someone. You provide the tools for everyone to improve.

james_s_tayler 8y ago

I wonder if that's what Peter Drucker meant when he said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast"

tomaskafka 8y ago

2. If great people don't have growth path at your company, they'll grow by going elsewhere.

snowwrestler 8y ago

People choose where to work, and money is only a small part of that decision. Invest in an employee, give them meaningful and interesting work, and the resources to grow, and you will generate a lot of value that doesn't show up on the books: loyalty. From the financial perspective, it is almost always cheaper to get more out of a current employee than to go into the market and find someone new. IMO there are two types of companies: those that know how to develop talent, and those that only know how to import it. The former are often the ones that have a long bright future and create a big impact on the world. > by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. This only holds true in a zero-sum game, which the economy is not. Improving the skills of employees actually makes the entire pond bigger.

bhl 8y ago

Is this a free rider problem? While a developer is being mentored and improving, they’re still contributing to the company for the same salary even though their market value is rising. Eventually, without a raise in salary, they’ll move to a company that pays market value. So developers aren’t free riders because the aforementioned; the new companies are free riders because they pay market rates. Edit: it may be a free rider issue if the mentorship / training is orthogonal to their tasks. For example, if Starbucks started to offer their baristas CS classes, it’d be a free ride for employees. But what are perks classified as?