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> It’s expensive to lose someone who knows the business, and expensive to hire someone. That's not true. Letting people go is a great business strategy because

> It’s expensive to lose someone who knows the business, and expensive to hire someone. That's not true. Letting people go is a great business strategy because it means companies don't need to give salary increases. They will right after that hire someone with less experience and making less money. But what about the business knowledge, you ask? Well, any company that knows what they're doing won't ever let important business knowledge in the hands of only one person. They will automatically distribute responsibility for important things into a group of people, so that if one of them leave the company it is not a big deal. Moreover, in the rare case that someone is really important for the company, by necessity she is just one out of several hundred. What I said continues to be true for everyone else.

jdblair 5y ago
This is definitely not universally true. My current employer sets compensation by asking "what is the business cost of losing this person?"
- coliveira 5y ago
  Your company probably don't know what they're doing, just read my explanation above.
  - alain94040 5y ago
    You seem to be very sure of your opinions about management's motivation. Are you yourself a manager or executive, or is this your opinion as a worker observing your employer's behavior?
    - jdblair 5y ago
      It's the stated compensation policy and confirmed by my experience as both an individual contributor and a manager of a team in the same organization.
simonh 5y ago
Even a moments reflection shown that’s not possible. Average wages in the US are rising at record rates at the moment, so clearly not all companies can be ditching experienced employees and hiring newbies. All those experienced workers seem to be getting jobs somewhere. Also there nothing automatic about managing key worker risks. Trust me on this. You seem to have some theoretical idealised image of a perfectly dystopian company and think that’s a universal truth. I’m not sure where you got this image from, I suspect it’s ideologically based, but reality is all over the map. Sure, companies look after their own best interests. Often those align very well with employees, but not always. You can have friends at work, and most people try to do the right thing, but the company is not your friend. It’s unreasonable to expect it to be.
- coliveira 5y ago
  Yes, companies are paying a lot but only because they need to attract new talent. The problem is with existing talent. To convince yourself, just look at the flip side. Why do you think workers are leaving companies at record rates? Because they're not valued where they are. If this was not the case, companies would pay to keep the talent they have.
  - almost_usual 5y ago
    Workers are leaving because they don’t want to work anymore. COVID gave everyone more time to reflect on their life.
    - coliveira 5y ago
      Isn't this the same thing? Companies want to extract the last drop of life from they employees, and they don't think it makes sense anymore. If companies wanted to keep them, they would just let these employees work less (which is basically the same as paying more per worker).
      - simonh 5y ago
        Companies are just made up of people, so that's a very bitter view of huge swathes of our species. Is human society really just the vicious race to the moral low ground you describe? As a species we have our failings, for sure, but I believe that most people, most of the time and with the freedom to choose try to do the right thing as they see it, and that's as true of people who work for companies as for people who don't.
hiq 5y ago
> Letting people go is a great business strategy because it means companies don't need to give salary increases. Company don't have to fire their employees, they can just freeze their salaries, there's no "need" to give salary raises, especially once they've explained that you're underperforming.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
taneq 5y ago
> Letting people go is a great business strategy because it means companies don't need to give salary increases. Only if you're not replacing them. People typically (in my experience anyway) get much larger raises when they move jobs than year on year at the same job. So either you're paying more for the new hire than you would have by retaining the old employee, or you're replacing them with someone probably less experienced/valuable in general, and certainly less experienced in the specific role you're trying to fill. Lose/lose.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
This isn't true. And I have an MBA, so I know that even if it were true, it's not what managers are being taught. It's expensive to replace people. Advertising, screening, interviewing, induction, training, all take up time. New employees are not productive from day 1, and take a long time to ramp up to "full" productivity. Losing people is also disruptive to the social life of the business - that person's friends may be less happy/productive after they leave. And all their friends may question their choice of employer - the loss of a popular staff member can trigger a wave of departures. And experienced employees are more productive. The economics of paying experienced employees more works fine.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
If you lose all knowledge of one of your systems, you need to rediscover what you already learned. This is extremely debilitating. But even if you don't lose all knowledge, as Brooks Law states > It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Brooks calls this the "ramp up" time. Software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated about the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker also needs to integrate with a team composed of several engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day. In addition to reducing the contribution of experienced workers (because of the need to train), new workers may even make negative contributions, for example, if they introduce bugs that move the project further from completion. The more churn that you have, the slower you can move. If you are Edison and have not yet created the light-bulb, but you have tried 1500 different attempts, and you were tasked with training a replacement, do you really think you would walk through all 1500 of those experiments? To be able to move forward, you not only need to know the happy path(what ends up in the code-base), but what doesn't, and why. That almost never makes it to the new hire. They will make that mistake again.
mbrodersen 5y ago
You clearly have zero experience running a successful business that require experienced/knowledgeable people to run. Firing a person in that kid of business is very expensive. It can take 6 months or longer to hire somebody else and get them up to speed. The actual cost is $50k or more to do this. And you might end up with a new hire that doesn’t work and then you have to do it all over again.

jdblair 5y ago

This is definitely not universally true. My current employer sets compensation by asking "what is the business cost of losing this person?"

coliveira 5y ago
Your company probably don't know what they're doing, just read my explanation above.
- alain94040 5y ago
  You seem to be very sure of your opinions about management's motivation. Are you yourself a manager or executive, or is this your opinion as a worker observing your employer's behavior?
  - jdblair 5y ago
    It's the stated compensation policy and confirmed by my experience as both an individual contributor and a manager of a team in the same organization.

simonh 5y ago

Even a moments reflection shown that’s not possible. Average wages in the US are rising at record rates at the moment, so clearly not all companies can be ditching experienced employees and hiring newbies. All those experienced workers seem to be getting jobs somewhere. Also there nothing automatic about managing key worker risks. Trust me on this. You seem to have some theoretical idealised image of a perfectly dystopian company and think that’s a universal truth. I’m not sure where you got this image from, I suspect it’s ideologically based, but reality is all over the map. Sure, companies look after their own best interests. Often those align very well with employees, but not always. You can have friends at work, and most people try to do the right thing, but the company is not your friend. It’s unreasonable to expect it to be.

coliveira 5y ago
Yes, companies are paying a lot but only because they need to attract new talent. The problem is with existing talent. To convince yourself, just look at the flip side. Why do you think workers are leaving companies at record rates? Because they're not valued where they are. If this was not the case, companies would pay to keep the talent they have.
- almost_usual 5y ago
  Workers are leaving because they don’t want to work anymore. COVID gave everyone more time to reflect on their life.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    Isn't this the same thing? Companies want to extract the last drop of life from they employees, and they don't think it makes sense anymore. If companies wanted to keep them, they would just let these employees work less (which is basically the same as paying more per worker).
    - simonh 5y ago
      Companies are just made up of people, so that's a very bitter view of huge swathes of our species. Is human society really just the vicious race to the moral low ground you describe? As a species we have our failings, for sure, but I believe that most people, most of the time and with the freedom to choose try to do the right thing as they see it, and that's as true of people who work for companies as for people who don't.

hiq 5y ago

> Letting people go is a great business strategy because it means companies don't need to give salary increases. Company don't have to fire their employees, they can just freeze their salaries, there's no "need" to give salary raises, especially once they've explained that you're underperforming.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

taneq 5y ago

> Letting people go is a great business strategy because it means companies don't need to give salary increases. Only if you're not replacing them. People typically (in my experience anyway) get much larger raises when they move jobs than year on year at the same job. So either you're paying more for the new hire than you would have by retaining the old employee, or you're replacing them with someone probably less experienced/valuable in general, and certainly less experienced in the specific role you're trying to fill. Lose/lose.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

This isn't true. And I have an MBA, so I know that even if it were true, it's not what managers are being taught. It's expensive to replace people. Advertising, screening, interviewing, induction, training, all take up time. New employees are not productive from day 1, and take a long time to ramp up to "full" productivity. Losing people is also disruptive to the social life of the business - that person's friends may be less happy/productive after they leave. And all their friends may question their choice of employer - the loss of a popular staff member can trigger a wave of departures. And experienced employees are more productive. The economics of paying experienced employees more works fine.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

If you lose all knowledge of one of your systems, you need to rediscover what you already learned. This is extremely debilitating. But even if you don't lose all knowledge, as Brooks Law states > It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Brooks calls this the "ramp up" time. Software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated about the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker also needs to integrate with a team composed of several engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day. In addition to reducing the contribution of experienced workers (because of the need to train), new workers may even make negative contributions, for example, if they introduce bugs that move the project further from completion. The more churn that you have, the slower you can move. If you are Edison and have not yet created the light-bulb, but you have tried 1500 different attempts, and you were tasked with training a replacement, do you really think you would walk through all 1500 of those experiments? To be able to move forward, you not only need to know the happy path(what ends up in the code-base), but what doesn't, and why. That almost never makes it to the new hire. They will make that mistake again.

mbrodersen 5y ago

You clearly have zero experience running a successful business that require experienced/knowledgeable people to run. Firing a person in that kid of business is very expensive. It can take 6 months or longer to hire somebody else and get them up to speed. The actual cost is $50k or more to do this. And you might end up with a new hire that doesn’t work and then you have to do it all over again.