16 ms·

Cost of Attrition

255 points by benjiweber 5y ago

soheil 5y ago
The cost of attrition is very real, probably higher than the cost of keeping low-performers on the team for large companies. For small startups the cost of attrition is probably negligible. Maybe the solution for big companies is to break them up into small independent startup like entities.
throwaway984393 5y ago
Thank you for posting the blog version
ozim 5y ago
I have to ask one important question, even though talent is more valuable than money, companies still don't have infinite amounts of money to simply rise pay for everyone. Some companies operate in not that profitable markets or have bunch of other issues. Cost of attrition is still dispersed over the time and while you loose the knowledge at hand it still might be cheaper to build it back over a year than drop cash on people right here right now. There is such thing as time-value of money and company might prioritize other investments that in long term will outweigh knowledge lost as knowledge can be rebuilt and gains from other investment might not. Of course one can say - there will be some knowledge that will be gone. From practical point of view, if that knowledge that is lost would be so valuable it would most likely resurface or would be rediscovered quickly by new hires. Maybe not ideally but still in a way that company can continue.
Jensson 5y ago
Doesn't mention the benefits of attrition. A network can be robust since none of the pieces leaves, but what is even more robust is a network that constantly renews itself and gracefully handles the process of swapping out parts. Constant attrition means that your company never starts relying on individuals, instead the process survives and thrives on its own, hiring new people who then hire new people before they leave etc. Such a process isn't very attractive to individuals, of course, but they are very attractive to the owners.
- tangjurine 5y ago
  Think about having a robust network like being able to fly. You don't develop the ability to fly by placing yourself in positions that require flying... Most companies that have lots of attrition have bad processes in place and are suffering due to attrition, although I think there are some companies that are developed enough to benefit from attrition like you described.
- jackblemming 5y ago
  Do you have any evidence to your claim? It’s possible to ad hoc rationalize pretty much anything. A real statistic against your claim is one of the highest predictors of defects in a code base is whether or not the original team is still working on it.
  - bncy 5y ago
    Not to mention vision that will change due to new ideas or influence that new staff brings to the team. It's not always beneficial for the project. It can go wrong in so many ways that it ends up being dead. Don't get me wrong, change is good but too much change is just too much to handle sometimes.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > highest predictors of defects in a code base is whether or not the original team is still working on it. Defects is a metric businesses doesn't care much about. If you have a good team that can create products customers wants, then it is better to have them keep making new products rather than maintain what they already have, then you can have less productive engineers perform maintenance, defects might go up but this way you will have way more products which businesses seems to care more about. You would have a point if maintenance was something companies cared deeply about, but they don't. They want new products, and company specific knowledge doesn't seem to be very valuable there.
    - bdavis__ 5y ago
      from a different angle: "non original team" might have higher defects, but i propose that "non original team" without process or time to understand the code base would be more accurate. changing people requires a time investment. and the learning curve is steep at the beginning
oerpli 5y ago
While the point seems worthwhile, the animations don't help at all. Stuff moves around for no reason (some graph layouting algorithm with easing I guess), the looping is bad and it's annoying to wait for the changes and as they happen instantly A simple picture for each transition would have been simpler to implement and actually showed something.
- nicky0 5y ago
  I found the animations helpful and they conveyed the ideas in the text to me well.
- franzb 5y ago
  And on mobile (iPhone), it seems to be impossible to scroll down on the animations themselves, only on the text. I had to stop reading the article at some point as I could no longer scroll down…
- shantnutiwari 5y ago
  yeah, the animations gave me a headache. Stopped reading the article
- ishmaeel 5y ago
  I appreciated the visualisation. My CPU fan, on the other hand, was not a big fan.
  - mikeholler 5y ago
    Most CPU fans are little.
enord 5y ago
Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost. Pay developers like it's monopoly money. You could call this "The benefit of retention", though that may be a bit reductive.
- throw8932894 5y ago
  More accessible option is to pay former developers for consulting.
- daemin 5y ago
  I would say that's because they would prefer the employees to create another project internally than leave and potentially create a competitor or even a more successful service that they'll need to spend billions on to purchase.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost. That isn't true at all. FAANG pays a lot for you to join them and give good raises, but they don't pay extra to make you stay instead of leaving for another FAANG. So there is still a lot of churn at FAANG.
  - enord 5y ago
    Well, you've reduced competition for employees from THE REST OF THE WORLD to a handful of companies, the executives of which you met for golf and sherry last Tuesday.
  - xenadu02 5y ago
    > FAANG pays a lot for you to join them and give good raises, but they don't pay extra to make you stay instead of leaving for another FAANG No, they just choose who to reward according to whatever their metrics are and how someone's management chain chooses to apply those metrics. These rewards are explicitly stock-based to help with retention. Some examples: - Have a "top talent" marker, managers get N% of their headcount to distribute each year. Anyone with the marker get more comp than their peers. - Create stock and bonus bands based on your rating and level, then heavily reward high senior bands compared to others. - Create a special retention program for specific areas of tech (eg ML) or for senior engineers who "cap out". Anyone in these programs gets a boost to comp. These things can be combined such that you can have 2x-5x differences in compensation for two engineers in the same department at the same nominal level, sometimes with small differences in performance ratings. When used correctly as intended programs like this reward people who work the hardest, are the best at what they do, or who will cause the most pain if they leave the company. If used incorrectly they become a tool for managers to reward their friends/sycophants. If a manager doesn't think about how to use them at all then it becomes a random walk, biased toward whatever you happened to do around review time. But no the FAANG companies are absolutely aware of the effects of retention and deploy resources to retain employees they think are important, at least at a high level. Sometimes those efforts don't reach the right people and sometimes your estimation of who is important is not aligned with the company's view.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
The author's points are absolutely correct. However, I don't think that it makes any difference. The entire industry has now shaped itself into a transient, mercenary, loyalty-free community. It will take a long time to change that. A lot of the trouble is the "You go first." mentality. Who will be the one to stay at a company for many years, getting only 3% raises; regardless of their performance, as their company's CEO keeps raking in millions of dollars, and lives a lavish, high-profile life? Who will be the company that starts to treat their employees in a manner that proves they are worth staying at? This may mean higher pay raises, the CEO taking some of their profit (and the shareholders and VCs), and sharing it with the employees. Letting employees unionize, etc. As people or companies are doing that, their competitors are running riot; acting as selfish, destructive and greedy as always. Many times, the competitors can crush the people trying to do the right thing. So that generally means that governments need to step in, and help the people and companies to do the right thing. As everyone knows, that's pretty much a non-starter, these days. The tech industry makes crazy money. When an industry makes money like that, everyone "looks the other way," at truly awful behavior. The finance industry has been like that, for decades. Whereas industries that don't make much money, like public education, social services, etc., are regulated up the wazoo, with an iron fist. I was a manager for over 25 years. I feel that I was a good one. My employees seemed to agree. I kept many of them on board for decades, and these were folks that could walk out the door, and get huge pay raises (my company paid "competitive" salaries). I certainly never made that much, compared to what people are doing, these days. many new hires out of college make more than I ever did, as a senior manager. I worked hard at being a good manager; and that often meant working around a company with a fairly rapacious HR policy (HR was run by lawyers). Most folks here, would (and have) sneer at me, for staying so long, and for doing the things that I needed to do, in order to be a good manager. In my case, it was personal Integrity thing. I have a really stringent Personal Code. I know that's unusual, and we can't expect it from most managers.
- rr808 5y ago
  True, I work in a corporate like this with not much stress, lots of vacation days, interesting work. It is paid similar to other professionals in the office. However people can earn 2x, 3x at a tech company so are just walking out. Its just tech firms are paying so much money yet making no profits its crazy.
sokoloff 5y ago
> Teams can be growing but have dropping tenure. It seems like any team that’s growing (by a non-trivial amount) would have dropping tenure.
jeffrallen 5y ago
Nice. But remember: the cost of non attrition can be keeping idiot coworkers around. Who actively destroy work with their anti-work, and waste time with idiotic discussions.
- nfRfqX5n 5y ago
  those type of people are lifers at a company
- dgb23 5y ago
  Define idiot coworker and idiotic discussions. I have only worked in small teams so I'm not sure I've met such a person.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Incessant bike shedding about every project concern or business case. All with a tinge of negativity and scepticism leading into rather unimportant arguments because... "last time we tried this." They are often 100% correct but nobody wants to hear yhier shit because the team has marching orders, funding, and they want to complete the project without a bunch of stress and drama. They have been at the company too long and aren't really happy about it. They don't get a new job because it's viewed as far too distruptive to their life. Again, they are probably 100% correct.
  - alexashka 5y ago
    "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.'
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    I recently had to give up trying to convince a coworker that the observer pattern was useful, because he refused to budge from the position that it made code harder to read as it was not "all in one place". Naturally as a stubbornly helpful person it took several hours over a couple weeks before I reached the point of surrender. Meanwhile there are a number of related decisions he's inflicting on the codebase that no one else would make, but find it easier to accept than resist, and which are ultimately unsustainable/ungeneralizable. If he left the team tomorrow the rest of the team would slowly revert these decisions. In the meantime, he's kind of just randomizing the code. Not really a definition, but there's an example for you.
rr808 5y ago
The other part of why people leave is they end up doing lots of support. Often when things go seriously wrong or even just regular problems the main people called on to fix it are the people that have been there a while and know the system best. They end up missing out on the interesting new projects. Its a good incentive to move.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  My first full time boss quit over this. He was there 10 years and his life revolved around support as nobody else stayed more than a year, so nobody ever learned many of the systems.
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    some people like to be in this position, although I find those people have a way of stretching out every support or maintenance task that should take hours into weeks
    - rr808 5y ago
      That is more like after the long haulers have left and the new people have to figure it out. The guy who wrote it can probably fix in 5 minutes, the next guy is paid more but takes 5 days.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- ballenf 5y ago
  There's an unintuitive incentive to refrain from gaining too much knowledge of all of an org's systems. Being the support person across teams potentially lowers your value to your immediate leads since you get pulled away so much. Good management will identify and correct for this, but it's not easy.
cwillu 5y ago
“This post is also available as a Twitter Thread” struck me as nonsensical as a restaurant saying “This meal is also available as a taxi ride”.
- rob74 5y ago
  More like "this meal is also available to go, but we put it in 15 packages, each containing three spoonfuls"...
1970-01-01 5y ago
>Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet. Beware looking at teams as a social network graph or org chart! Human teams are nuanced and require up-keep.. hence the existence of HR and management.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  If that's really what HR is supposed to be doing (upkeep of human teams, with nuance)... I have never worked at a place where they even act like they think it is, let alone succeed at doing it. Are there really HR's out there who are different? I have worked for managers who act like they think it is their role, and even succeed at doing it. As well as managers who don't.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fche 5y ago
If it's enshrined woke culture that's driving people away, mere $$$ won't fix it.
georgewsinger 5y ago
Counter-point: Tesla/SpaceX have extremely high attrition rates, but are so successful they'll likely be remembered in 100 years for their achievements. (To be fair the article just points out that attrition has a higher cost than we realize, not that attrition is never worth it).
jurassic 5y ago
I’ve come to think a certain amount of attrition is needed to keep a product and the individuals working on it healthy. Back in my consulting days I worked with a few enterprise software companies that had a lot of highly tenured employees (think 10+ years). All the long-timers I met were skilled fiefdom builders with a strong bias toward opposing every change and maintaining the technical status quo because a lot of their value was in their vast knowledge of the way things already are. Without attrition you end up accumulating people you don’t want. Overall it seems like a path to ossification/stagnation for your people and product. From the individual perspective, staying too long slows down your rate of learning because you aren’t coming into contact with new people and technology at the same rate. Anecdotal, but lately I’ve interviewed some 8+ year tenured candidates that I wouldn’t rate above SWE II because it was literally a “one year of experience 10 times” situation. I try to change things up every 4 years or so to avoid ending up this way myself.
- ericmcer 5y ago
  That’s maybe why most stock starts vesting after a year (when employees become very effective) and stops after 4 years.
- Atlas26 5y ago
  > From the individual perspective, staying too long slows down your rate of learning because you aren’t coming into contact with new people and technology at the same rate. Anecdotal, but lately I’ve interviewed some 8+ year tenured candidates that I wouldn’t rate above SWE II because it was literally a “one year of experience 10 times” situation. I try to change things up every 4 years or so to avoid ending up this way myself. Should be noted, this is applicable to the same position specifically, not any one company. Some of the best engineers in the world have only ever worked at places like Google, Microsoft, an academic institution, etc, but they make sure they're constantly learning, working with new teams, switching to new positions once they've mastered their previous one, etc. In many cases these folks actually have a big leg up vs new external hires due to product and institutional knowledge, while also constantly learning new technologies.
- mathattack 5y ago
  Can companies get around this by active transfers? This doesn’t work everywhere.
angarg12 5y ago
The article doesn't mention the double whammy of losing well connected engineers: morale and ripple effect. When a high performed with a good network leaves a company, it usually encourage others to leave as well.
bartread 5y ago
I don't know. This is a nice piece of thinking, although I did get a bit bored after the first few points, but it perhaps ignores a couple of key realities: 1. Most obvious, people are going to leave, so you need to take that into account. You can't keep everyone and I'd argue you shouldn't try. 2. The impact of someone leaving is highly variable. Sometimes it's a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's pretty neutral. Different people add different amounts of value, and not all relationships are equal. Of course high attrition can be a yellow or red flag - certainly a warning that you need to look at how management and leadership work - but some amount of attrition is a reality, and the outcome of that reality is not universally a "cost".
flakiness 5y ago
This feels like an organizational twin of an old idea of personal relationship, which is called "weak tie". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties
disambiguation 5y ago
Arguments of attrition aside, I don't agree with this model. Maybe I'm not understanding what an edge is supposed to be, but the author implies that "something" is lost when the edge disappears. That doesn't make sense. Knowledge live in the node, not the edge. You don't just forget a project you worked on just because someone left. If you lose access to knowledge when someone leaves, that's because you did a bad job of preventing silos. Further, someone who has deep domain knowledge is valuable even with 0 connections.
- mym1990 5y ago
  Unless every piece of knowledge is documented in a clean and understandable fashion, then the edge represents the ability for team members to collaborate with the node to either resolve issues or develop future improvements on the project. While you don't forget a project you worked on, it is unlikely that you worked on the specific pieces that others in your team were assigned to.
- sortalongo 5y ago
  I thought the edges represented the strength of relationships between teammates. As people get to know each other, people settle into roles and communication patterns, worrying less about social status, complementing each other, making decisions faster, and anticipating each other. Time together makes good a team more effective.

255 points by benjiweber 5y ago

The cost of attrition is very real, probably higher than the cost of keeping low-performers on the team for large companies. For small startups the cost of attrition is probably negligible. Maybe the solution for big companies is to break them up into small independent startup like entities.

throwaway984393 5y ago

Thank you for posting the blog version

ozim 5y ago

I have to ask one important question, even though talent is more valuable than money, companies still don't have infinite amounts of money to simply rise pay for everyone. Some companies operate in not that profitable markets or have bunch of other issues. Cost of attrition is still dispersed over the time and while you loose the knowledge at hand it still might be cheaper to build it back over a year than drop cash on people right here right now. There is such thing as time-value of money and company might prioritize other investments that in long term will outweigh knowledge lost as knowledge can be rebuilt and gains from other investment might not. Of course one can say - there will be some knowledge that will be gone. From practical point of view, if that knowledge that is lost would be so valuable it would most likely resurface or would be rediscovered quickly by new hires. Maybe not ideally but still in a way that company can continue.

Jensson 5y ago

Doesn't mention the benefits of attrition. A network can be robust since none of the pieces leaves, but what is even more robust is a network that constantly renews itself and gracefully handles the process of swapping out parts. Constant attrition means that your company never starts relying on individuals, instead the process survives and thrives on its own, hiring new people who then hire new people before they leave etc. Such a process isn't very attractive to individuals, of course, but they are very attractive to the owners.

tangjurine 5y ago
Think about having a robust network like being able to fly. You don't develop the ability to fly by placing yourself in positions that require flying... Most companies that have lots of attrition have bad processes in place and are suffering due to attrition, although I think there are some companies that are developed enough to benefit from attrition like you described.
jackblemming 5y ago
Do you have any evidence to your claim? It’s possible to ad hoc rationalize pretty much anything. A real statistic against your claim is one of the highest predictors of defects in a code base is whether or not the original team is still working on it.
- bncy 5y ago
  Not to mention vision that will change due to new ideas or influence that new staff brings to the team. It's not always beneficial for the project. It can go wrong in so many ways that it ends up being dead. Don't get me wrong, change is good but too much change is just too much to handle sometimes.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > highest predictors of defects in a code base is whether or not the original team is still working on it. Defects is a metric businesses doesn't care much about. If you have a good team that can create products customers wants, then it is better to have them keep making new products rather than maintain what they already have, then you can have less productive engineers perform maintenance, defects might go up but this way you will have way more products which businesses seems to care more about. You would have a point if maintenance was something companies cared deeply about, but they don't. They want new products, and company specific knowledge doesn't seem to be very valuable there.
  - bdavis__ 5y ago
    from a different angle: "non original team" might have higher defects, but i propose that "non original team" without process or time to understand the code base would be more accurate. changing people requires a time investment. and the learning curve is steep at the beginning

oerpli 5y ago

While the point seems worthwhile, the animations don't help at all. Stuff moves around for no reason (some graph layouting algorithm with easing I guess), the looping is bad and it's annoying to wait for the changes and as they happen instantly A simple picture for each transition would have been simpler to implement and actually showed something.

nicky0 5y ago
I found the animations helpful and they conveyed the ideas in the text to me well.
franzb 5y ago
And on mobile (iPhone), it seems to be impossible to scroll down on the animations themselves, only on the text. I had to stop reading the article at some point as I could no longer scroll down…
shantnutiwari 5y ago
yeah, the animations gave me a headache. Stopped reading the article
ishmaeel 5y ago
I appreciated the visualisation. My CPU fan, on the other hand, was not a big fan.
- mikeholler 5y ago
  Most CPU fans are little.

enord 5y ago

Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost. Pay developers like it's monopoly money. You could call this "The benefit of retention", though that may be a bit reductive.

throw8932894 5y ago
More accessible option is to pay former developers for consulting.
daemin 5y ago
I would say that's because they would prefer the employees to create another project internally than leave and potentially create a competitor or even a more successful service that they'll need to spend billions on to purchase.
Jensson 5y ago
> Just look at FAANG: Retain developers at (almost) any cost. That isn't true at all. FAANG pays a lot for you to join them and give good raises, but they don't pay extra to make you stay instead of leaving for another FAANG. So there is still a lot of churn at FAANG.
- enord 5y ago
  Well, you've reduced competition for employees from THE REST OF THE WORLD to a handful of companies, the executives of which you met for golf and sherry last Tuesday.
- xenadu02 5y ago
  > FAANG pays a lot for you to join them and give good raises, but they don't pay extra to make you stay instead of leaving for another FAANG No, they just choose who to reward according to whatever their metrics are and how someone's management chain chooses to apply those metrics. These rewards are explicitly stock-based to help with retention. Some examples: - Have a "top talent" marker, managers get N% of their headcount to distribute each year. Anyone with the marker get more comp than their peers. - Create stock and bonus bands based on your rating and level, then heavily reward high senior bands compared to others. - Create a special retention program for specific areas of tech (eg ML) or for senior engineers who "cap out". Anyone in these programs gets a boost to comp. These things can be combined such that you can have 2x-5x differences in compensation for two engineers in the same department at the same nominal level, sometimes with small differences in performance ratings. When used correctly as intended programs like this reward people who work the hardest, are the best at what they do, or who will cause the most pain if they leave the company. If used incorrectly they become a tool for managers to reward their friends/sycophants. If a manager doesn't think about how to use them at all then it becomes a random walk, biased toward whatever you happened to do around review time. But no the FAANG companies are absolutely aware of the effects of retention and deploy resources to retain employees they think are important, at least at a high level. Sometimes those efforts don't reach the right people and sometimes your estimation of who is important is not aligned with the company's view.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

The author's points are absolutely correct. However, I don't think that it makes any difference. The entire industry has now shaped itself into a transient, mercenary, loyalty-free community. It will take a long time to change that. A lot of the trouble is the "You go first." mentality. Who will be the one to stay at a company for many years, getting only 3% raises; regardless of their performance, as their company's CEO keeps raking in millions of dollars, and lives a lavish, high-profile life? Who will be the company that starts to treat their employees in a manner that proves they are worth staying at? This may mean higher pay raises, the CEO taking some of their profit (and the shareholders and VCs), and sharing it with the employees. Letting employees unionize, etc. As people or companies are doing that, their competitors are running riot; acting as selfish, destructive and greedy as always. Many times, the competitors can crush the people trying to do the right thing. So that generally means that governments need to step in, and help the people and companies to do the right thing. As everyone knows, that's pretty much a non-starter, these days. The tech industry makes crazy money. When an industry makes money like that, everyone "looks the other way," at truly awful behavior. The finance industry has been like that, for decades. Whereas industries that don't make much money, like public education, social services, etc., are regulated up the wazoo, with an iron fist. I was a manager for over 25 years. I feel that I was a good one. My employees seemed to agree. I kept many of them on board for decades, and these were folks that could walk out the door, and get huge pay raises (my company paid "competitive" salaries). I certainly never made that much, compared to what people are doing, these days. many new hires out of college make more than I ever did, as a senior manager. I worked hard at being a good manager; and that often meant working around a company with a fairly rapacious HR policy (HR was run by lawyers). Most folks here, would (and have) sneer at me, for staying so long, and for doing the things that I needed to do, in order to be a good manager. In my case, it was personal Integrity thing. I have a really stringent Personal Code. I know that's unusual, and we can't expect it from most managers.

rr808 5y ago
True, I work in a corporate like this with not much stress, lots of vacation days, interesting work. It is paid similar to other professionals in the office. However people can earn 2x, 3x at a tech company so are just walking out. Its just tech firms are paying so much money yet making no profits its crazy.

sokoloff 5y ago

> Teams can be growing but have dropping tenure. It seems like any team that’s growing (by a non-trivial amount) would have dropping tenure.

jeffrallen 5y ago

Nice. But remember: the cost of non attrition can be keeping idiot coworkers around. Who actively destroy work with their anti-work, and waste time with idiotic discussions.

nfRfqX5n 5y ago
those type of people are lifers at a company
dgb23 5y ago
Define idiot coworker and idiotic discussions. I have only worked in small teams so I'm not sure I've met such a person.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Incessant bike shedding about every project concern or business case. All with a tinge of negativity and scepticism leading into rather unimportant arguments because... "last time we tried this." They are often 100% correct but nobody wants to hear yhier shit because the team has marching orders, funding, and they want to complete the project without a bunch of stress and drama. They have been at the company too long and aren't really happy about it. They don't get a new job because it's viewed as far too distruptive to their life. Again, they are probably 100% correct.
- alexashka 5y ago
  "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.'
- bagacrap 5y ago
  I recently had to give up trying to convince a coworker that the observer pattern was useful, because he refused to budge from the position that it made code harder to read as it was not "all in one place". Naturally as a stubbornly helpful person it took several hours over a couple weeks before I reached the point of surrender. Meanwhile there are a number of related decisions he's inflicting on the codebase that no one else would make, but find it easier to accept than resist, and which are ultimately unsustainable/ungeneralizable. If he left the team tomorrow the rest of the team would slowly revert these decisions. In the meantime, he's kind of just randomizing the code. Not really a definition, but there's an example for you.

rr808 5y ago

The other part of why people leave is they end up doing lots of support. Often when things go seriously wrong or even just regular problems the main people called on to fix it are the people that have been there a while and know the system best. They end up missing out on the interesting new projects. Its a good incentive to move.

MattGaiser 5y ago
My first full time boss quit over this. He was there 10 years and his life revolved around support as nobody else stayed more than a year, so nobody ever learned many of the systems.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  some people like to be in this position, although I find those people have a way of stretching out every support or maintenance task that should take hours into weeks
  - rr808 5y ago
    That is more like after the long haulers have left and the new people have to figure it out. The guy who wrote it can probably fix in 5 minutes, the next guy is paid more but takes 5 days.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ballenf 5y ago
There's an unintuitive incentive to refrain from gaining too much knowledge of all of an org's systems. Being the support person across teams potentially lowers your value to your immediate leads since you get pulled away so much. Good management will identify and correct for this, but it's not easy.

cwillu 5y ago

“This post is also available as a Twitter Thread” struck me as nonsensical as a restaurant saying “This meal is also available as a taxi ride”.

rob74 5y ago
More like "this meal is also available to go, but we put it in 15 packages, each containing three spoonfuls"...

1970-01-01 5y ago

>Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet. Beware looking at teams as a social network graph or org chart! Human teams are nuanced and require up-keep.. hence the existence of HR and management.

jrochkind1 5y ago
If that's really what HR is supposed to be doing (upkeep of human teams, with nuance)... I have never worked at a place where they even act like they think it is, let alone succeed at doing it. Are there really HR's out there who are different? I have worked for managers who act like they think it is their role, and even succeed at doing it. As well as managers who don't.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fche 5y ago

If it's enshrined woke culture that's driving people away, mere $$$ won't fix it.

georgewsinger 5y ago

Counter-point: Tesla/SpaceX have extremely high attrition rates, but are so successful they'll likely be remembered in 100 years for their achievements. (To be fair the article just points out that attrition has a higher cost than we realize, not that attrition is never worth it).

jurassic 5y ago

I’ve come to think a certain amount of attrition is needed to keep a product and the individuals working on it healthy. Back in my consulting days I worked with a few enterprise software companies that had a lot of highly tenured employees (think 10+ years). All the long-timers I met were skilled fiefdom builders with a strong bias toward opposing every change and maintaining the technical status quo because a lot of their value was in their vast knowledge of the way things already are. Without attrition you end up accumulating people you don’t want. Overall it seems like a path to ossification/stagnation for your people and product. From the individual perspective, staying too long slows down your rate of learning because you aren’t coming into contact with new people and technology at the same rate. Anecdotal, but lately I’ve interviewed some 8+ year tenured candidates that I wouldn’t rate above SWE II because it was literally a “one year of experience 10 times” situation. I try to change things up every 4 years or so to avoid ending up this way myself.

ericmcer 5y ago
That’s maybe why most stock starts vesting after a year (when employees become very effective) and stops after 4 years.
Atlas26 5y ago
> From the individual perspective, staying too long slows down your rate of learning because you aren’t coming into contact with new people and technology at the same rate. Anecdotal, but lately I’ve interviewed some 8+ year tenured candidates that I wouldn’t rate above SWE II because it was literally a “one year of experience 10 times” situation. I try to change things up every 4 years or so to avoid ending up this way myself. Should be noted, this is applicable to the same position specifically, not any one company. Some of the best engineers in the world have only ever worked at places like Google, Microsoft, an academic institution, etc, but they make sure they're constantly learning, working with new teams, switching to new positions once they've mastered their previous one, etc. In many cases these folks actually have a big leg up vs new external hires due to product and institutional knowledge, while also constantly learning new technologies.
mathattack 5y ago
Can companies get around this by active transfers? This doesn’t work everywhere.

angarg12 5y ago

The article doesn't mention the double whammy of losing well connected engineers: morale and ripple effect. When a high performed with a good network leaves a company, it usually encourage others to leave as well.

bartread 5y ago

I don't know. This is a nice piece of thinking, although I did get a bit bored after the first few points, but it perhaps ignores a couple of key realities: 1. Most obvious, people are going to leave, so you need to take that into account. You can't keep everyone and I'd argue you shouldn't try. 2. The impact of someone leaving is highly variable. Sometimes it's a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's pretty neutral. Different people add different amounts of value, and not all relationships are equal. Of course high attrition can be a yellow or red flag - certainly a warning that you need to look at how management and leadership work - but some amount of attrition is a reality, and the outcome of that reality is not universally a "cost".

flakiness 5y ago

This feels like an organizational twin of an old idea of personal relationship, which is called "weak tie". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties

disambiguation 5y ago

Arguments of attrition aside, I don't agree with this model. Maybe I'm not understanding what an edge is supposed to be, but the author implies that "something" is lost when the edge disappears. That doesn't make sense. Knowledge live in the node, not the edge. You don't just forget a project you worked on just because someone left. If you lose access to knowledge when someone leaves, that's because you did a bad job of preventing silos. Further, someone who has deep domain knowledge is valuable even with 0 connections.

mym1990 5y ago
Unless every piece of knowledge is documented in a clean and understandable fashion, then the edge represents the ability for team members to collaborate with the node to either resolve issues or develop future improvements on the project. While you don't forget a project you worked on, it is unlikely that you worked on the specific pieces that others in your team were assigned to.
sortalongo 5y ago
I thought the edges represented the strength of relationships between teammates. As people get to know each other, people settle into roles and communication patterns, worrying less about social status, complementing each other, making decisions faster, and anticipating each other. Time together makes good a team more effective.