6 ms·

I can tell you how to not retain employees, and do the opposite of that. 1.) Make goals unclear or constantly changing. Bonus points if you tie their bonus to

by anw 6y ago

I can tell you how to not retain employees, and do the opposite of that. 1.) Make goals unclear or constantly changing. Bonus points if you tie their bonus to hitting some kind of OKR even though that goal may be put on the back burner halfway into the quarter. Even more so if this includes their holiday bonus, and you have a minimum threshold of “accomplish 80% of your quarterly OKR and get 80% of your bonus. Get 79% or less accomplished and take home 0%” 2.) Make sure all managers are spineless and won’t fight for their employees. This includes managers from other teams piling work onto people who don’t report to them, but add “important to the company” work that has to be done and your own manager always going along with it. 3.) Make sure there’s a lot of good old boys club going on, especially if the “principle” engineer and the CTO go out to clubs every other night trying to wing man for each other. Also make sure there’s no accountability for these favorite engineers (or employees in general) 4.) Have a career framework that lets your employees know what they can do in order to get promoted or grow into another role (manager? senior level?). After a couple years of not promoting (most) people, then get acquired or change the entire structure so all of your employees are unsure if their work is actually going to help them get a promotion, or if that’s even an option anymore. Finally, make sure feedback is treated like the plague. If somebody notices that the checkout page crashes every time someone uses PayPal, just ignore it. Somebody who isn’t the web dev has PR that fixes it? Let it live in limbo forever. Features require login but don’t tell customers until they get an auth error, and then have to refill out the form all over again? Not a problem. Why do you keep bringing up issues with the UX instead of rewriting our site in Angul...Reac....Vue.

artsyca 6y ago
Have you ever heard of "the culture code?" it's a pretty good outline of what truly matters, and that's extreme belonging. We give out all sorts of signals and most in the tech industry are ambiguous, toxic and uncivilized. Learn to read the signals and you'll break through to what matters most: culture.
- pc86 6y ago
  What are these signals? Which ones are not ambiguous, toxic, or uncivilized?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwanem 6y ago
    They appear to be tools used by their inventor, a marketing consultant, to sell copies of his book. Whether they have value beyond that I don't really care to pay to find out.
    - artsyca 6y ago
      You get what you pay for.
  - artsyca 6y ago
    We give off all kinds of signals in our behaviour, from how we dress to how we breathe to how we show up. A lot of the signals are cold, aloof, passive aggressive, disgruntled, dismissive, insincere, immodest, fake, insecure, uncultured, ignorant, insensitive, etc. That's just the human condition. Even if we don't mean them as such they can be interpreted as such by other insecure, insincere, imposter syndrome types. Put a bunch of people in a room and the signals get amplified, it's the basis of reality television. Combined, the signals whisper "you don't belong here." Your manager is giving you a signal by wearing running shoes to your 1:1. What does it mean? How can you interpret it? Your founder is giving a signal by walking in with a coffee. Again what does it mean? Your VC is giving a signal by his haircut. Your project manager is giving a signal by her exposed skin. Your developers are giving signals through their man boobs. All of these signals are wretched and don't entice quality people to stick around because they stink of belligerence. In an honest open and transparent environment the signals align with the values and people don't need to wallow in cognitive dissonance until their minds crack under the pressure to conform, because fundamentally people will do almost anything to be accepted by a group, and when your job depends on fitting in the company has a lot of leverage over you to essentially milk you for your efforts in exchange for keeping you around. Downvote if you are triggered by man boobs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mbielski 6y ago
A good old fashioned "corporate re-structuring" will also suffice for #4. While you are at it, cut pay by some percentage that just barely keeps the workers at their job and force budget cuts that systematically strip people of the tools that they need to do their work.
mrkeen 6y ago
> Make sure all managers are spineless and won’t fight for their employees. > If somebody notices that the checkout page crashes every time someone uses PayPal, just ignore it. Oh my god. So much these - especially the combination of the two. It's not hard to identify with the customer when building a service (especially if you use the product yourself.) It really angers me when I encounter a customer-facing problem, try to fix it, but instead I get shut down by my manager, who explains that it's not one of the company's OKRs this quarter.
sdiupIGPWEfh 6y ago
> tie their bonus to hitting some kind of OKR even though that goal may be put on the back burner halfway into the quarter Been burned by this a couple times. Especially infuriating after all the effort that goes into crafting "acceptable" OKRs every three months. Mandatory training sessions, the stress of identifying metrics that are both measurable & meaningful, multiple one-on-ones with management to review them, acknowledging and signing copies, and then toss it all in the trash because we're changing priorities. But it's the core of your performance review and tied to compensation. The hell. How common is this nonsense?
- scruple 6y ago
  > How common is this nonsense? *raises hand I don't know if it's common, but I've had the same experience and so have many friends.
chrisbennet 6y ago
Other things that lead to people leaving: Cut total compensation without cutting salary. A favorite cut is to reduce the quality of the insurance (and the cost to the company). The unilaterally changed your compensation without telling you let alone negotiating a new contract. Pay people the minimum instead of what they are worth. The guy who can walk to work from his house - you know he's not going to leave if you underpay him.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Even something as small as switching to a new (crappier) 401(k) custodian can be seen as a demotivating compensation cut. Yay, we saved $5 per employee, but lost two key contributors who were finally fed up. Probably not a good trade-off. EDIT: One of the classic texts on this is Steve Blank's "The Elves Leave Middle Earth" [1] which describes how small seemingly innocuous benefits reductions can serve as a "wake up call" for content employees who never really thought about looking around for a new job. 1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
analyst74 6y ago
My current place suffers from all of that!! But our retention is very high, and you can guess the reason.
- scruple 6y ago
  They pay _just_ well enough and with _just_ enough benefits to keep anyone from leaving? They're capable of weathering the pandemic for N years largely unscathed? Both?
apohn 6y ago
>“important to the company” work that has to be done and your own manager always going along with it. I've worked in some highly political large companies and one of the best managers I had would basically say "I know this is basically BS but there is lots of visibility on this so we have to show something." He'd then work with us to find the bare minimum we needed to do to to make it seem like we did a lot more. It's a lot easier to tolerate crap if people just admit it's crap and your job is to shovel it. It's awful when a bunch of managers hand-wave and act like you're smelling roses instead of crap. Then they make you work 10X harder then you need to just so they can show their boss you are growing roses, not shoveling crap.
- decafninja 6y ago
  I work at a company where tech is an unrespected cost center. There is also a ton of useless bureaucratic and middle management crap that impedes actual work getting done. My boss handles all of that and does his best to shield the team from all that stupidity so we can get our work done. He's one of the best managers I've worked for. I still don't like the company and work environment, but when I do leave this place, I'll genuinely miss my boss.

by anw 6y ago

artsyca 6y ago

Have you ever heard of "the culture code?" it's a pretty good outline of what truly matters, and that's extreme belonging. We give out all sorts of signals and most in the tech industry are ambiguous, toxic and uncivilized. Learn to read the signals and you'll break through to what matters most: culture.

pc86 6y ago
What are these signals? Which ones are not ambiguous, toxic, or uncivilized?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwanem 6y ago
  They appear to be tools used by their inventor, a marketing consultant, to sell copies of his book. Whether they have value beyond that I don't really care to pay to find out.
  - artsyca 6y ago
    You get what you pay for.
- artsyca 6y ago
  We give off all kinds of signals in our behaviour, from how we dress to how we breathe to how we show up. A lot of the signals are cold, aloof, passive aggressive, disgruntled, dismissive, insincere, immodest, fake, insecure, uncultured, ignorant, insensitive, etc. That's just the human condition. Even if we don't mean them as such they can be interpreted as such by other insecure, insincere, imposter syndrome types. Put a bunch of people in a room and the signals get amplified, it's the basis of reality television. Combined, the signals whisper "you don't belong here." Your manager is giving you a signal by wearing running shoes to your 1:1. What does it mean? How can you interpret it? Your founder is giving a signal by walking in with a coffee. Again what does it mean? Your VC is giving a signal by his haircut. Your project manager is giving a signal by her exposed skin. Your developers are giving signals through their man boobs. All of these signals are wretched and don't entice quality people to stick around because they stink of belligerence. In an honest open and transparent environment the signals align with the values and people don't need to wallow in cognitive dissonance until their minds crack under the pressure to conform, because fundamentally people will do almost anything to be accepted by a group, and when your job depends on fitting in the company has a lot of leverage over you to essentially milk you for your efforts in exchange for keeping you around. Downvote if you are triggered by man boobs.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mbielski 6y ago

A good old fashioned "corporate re-structuring" will also suffice for #4. While you are at it, cut pay by some percentage that just barely keeps the workers at their job and force budget cuts that systematically strip people of the tools that they need to do their work.

mrkeen 6y ago

> Make sure all managers are spineless and won’t fight for their employees. > If somebody notices that the checkout page crashes every time someone uses PayPal, just ignore it. Oh my god. So much these - especially the combination of the two. It's not hard to identify with the customer when building a service (especially if you use the product yourself.) It really angers me when I encounter a customer-facing problem, try to fix it, but instead I get shut down by my manager, who explains that it's not one of the company's OKRs this quarter.

sdiupIGPWEfh 6y ago

> tie their bonus to hitting some kind of OKR even though that goal may be put on the back burner halfway into the quarter Been burned by this a couple times. Especially infuriating after all the effort that goes into crafting "acceptable" OKRs every three months. Mandatory training sessions, the stress of identifying metrics that are both measurable & meaningful, multiple one-on-ones with management to review them, acknowledging and signing copies, and then toss it all in the trash because we're changing priorities. But it's the core of your performance review and tied to compensation. The hell. How common is this nonsense?

scruple 6y ago
> How common is this nonsense? *raises hand I don't know if it's common, but I've had the same experience and so have many friends.

chrisbennet 6y ago

Other things that lead to people leaving: Cut total compensation without cutting salary. A favorite cut is to reduce the quality of the insurance (and the cost to the company). The unilaterally changed your compensation without telling you let alone negotiating a new contract. Pay people the minimum instead of what they are worth. The guy who can walk to work from his house - you know he's not going to leave if you underpay him.

ryandrake 6y ago
Even something as small as switching to a new (crappier) 401(k) custodian can be seen as a demotivating compensation cut. Yay, we saved $5 per employee, but lost two key contributors who were finally fed up. Probably not a good trade-off. EDIT: One of the classic texts on this is Steve Blank's "The Elves Leave Middle Earth" [1] which describes how small seemingly innocuous benefits reductions can serve as a "wake up call" for content employees who never really thought about looking around for a new job. 1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

analyst74 6y ago

My current place suffers from all of that!! But our retention is very high, and you can guess the reason.

scruple 6y ago
They pay _just_ well enough and with _just_ enough benefits to keep anyone from leaving? They're capable of weathering the pandemic for N years largely unscathed? Both?

apohn 6y ago

>“important to the company” work that has to be done and your own manager always going along with it. I've worked in some highly political large companies and one of the best managers I had would basically say "I know this is basically BS but there is lots of visibility on this so we have to show something." He'd then work with us to find the bare minimum we needed to do to to make it seem like we did a lot more. It's a lot easier to tolerate crap if people just admit it's crap and your job is to shovel it. It's awful when a bunch of managers hand-wave and act like you're smelling roses instead of crap. Then they make you work 10X harder then you need to just so they can show their boss you are growing roses, not shoveling crap.

decafninja 6y ago
I work at a company where tech is an unrespected cost center. There is also a ton of useless bureaucratic and middle management crap that impedes actual work getting done. My boss handles all of that and does his best to shield the team from all that stupidity so we can get our work done. He's one of the best managers I've worked for. I still don't like the company and work environment, but when I do leave this place, I'll genuinely miss my boss.