5 ms·

Well said! Companies destroyed employee loyalty - by letting people go while paying bonuses to executives, by giving 3% raises while offering way higher salari

Well said! Companies destroyed employee loyalty - by letting people go while paying bonuses to executives, by giving 3% raises while offering way higher salaries to new hires, by saying "we are a family here" only when they need employees to make sacrifices. From the perspective of an engineering manager, attrition sucks. Whenever a season engineer leaves my team, I dread the next couple of weeks, because there's a chance others will follow. The hiring and onboarding is draining and often slows down the whole team for months. But whenever someone tells me they're leaving, I tell them I understand it. They need to think about their own career. Employers destroyed the loyalty and they need to fix it.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> Employers destroyed the loyalty and they need to fix it. I agree. I don't think that there's any incentive to do that, though.
- alex_anglin 5y ago
  Reducing attrition is a good incentive, especially these days. Whether it's enough is another question.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Do companies care? Their solution seems to be to hire more recruiters.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      My wife is a tech recruiter, my bread gets buttered on both sides. It's a really funny market.
- cogman10 5y ago
  There's a lot of incentive. The problem is HR and employers have decided to turn a blind eye to it in favor of looking at the next quarter. Why give someone a 10% raise because the market has spoken when you might be able to retain them with a 5% raise? Even if you hire new employees at a premium, some contingent of older employees will stick around just because switching jobs is a hassle. This sort of thing drives down quarterly costs which ultimately makes you look good to shareholders who can't see the internal destruction.
Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
Don’t forget or discount the destruction of the social contract between employer and employee. Massive layoffs, insolvent pensions, etc were just the start. Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre. When all that goes away and I have to work harder for less than my parents got then what is the point of being loyal to psychopathic companies with excruciatingly well documented histories of treating employees like interchangeable chattel? Loyalty ain’t gonna give these monsters any pause when they put the squeeze on me and the other numbers on their screen while they fantasize about how to blow their ill gotten gains.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre. Pensions are not relevant anymore. I see no reason to pay a defined benefit pension fund’s employees and expenses when I can simply buy VOO or a target date fund at one of many brokerages for basically free. And I get to avoid the risk of a corrupt employee of the employer messing with it, or to risk the employer not being around 50 years later. The other parts of the post have so many factors that contribute that it is not related to employer employee social contracts. Birth rates, relative developed-ness of other countries, supply and demand of labor, automation, political winds, societal changes, etc.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The problem is that many people aren't replacing their defined benefit pension with savings. They're replacing it with nothing. That said, defined benefit pensions were always designed around the idea that you'd be staying in the same place for maybe decades. Federal government pensions are perhaps the most obvious example but it applied to many companies as well. And that just doesn't represent typical behavior--especially among professional workers--these days.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

> Employers destroyed the loyalty and they need to fix it. I agree. I don't think that there's any incentive to do that, though.

alex_anglin 5y ago
Reducing attrition is a good incentive, especially these days. Whether it's enough is another question.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Do companies care? Their solution seems to be to hire more recruiters.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    My wife is a tech recruiter, my bread gets buttered on both sides. It's a really funny market.
cogman10 5y ago
There's a lot of incentive. The problem is HR and employers have decided to turn a blind eye to it in favor of looking at the next quarter. Why give someone a 10% raise because the market has spoken when you might be able to retain them with a 5% raise? Even if you hire new employees at a premium, some contingent of older employees will stick around just because switching jobs is a hassle. This sort of thing drives down quarterly costs which ultimately makes you look good to shareholders who can't see the internal destruction.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago

Don’t forget or discount the destruction of the social contract between employer and employee. Massive layoffs, insolvent pensions, etc were just the start. Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre. When all that goes away and I have to work harder for less than my parents got then what is the point of being loyal to psychopathic companies with excruciatingly well documented histories of treating employees like interchangeable chattel? Loyalty ain’t gonna give these monsters any pause when they put the squeeze on me and the other numbers on their screen while they fantasize about how to blow their ill gotten gains.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> Employees used to get pensions, have reasonable work hours, a reliable schedule and could afford to have a parent stay home in their 3-4 bedroom house on an acre. Pensions are not relevant anymore. I see no reason to pay a defined benefit pension fund’s employees and expenses when I can simply buy VOO or a target date fund at one of many brokerages for basically free. And I get to avoid the risk of a corrupt employee of the employer messing with it, or to risk the employer not being around 50 years later. The other parts of the post have so many factors that contribute that it is not related to employer employee social contracts. Birth rates, relative developed-ness of other countries, supply and demand of labor, automation, political winds, societal changes, etc.
- ghaff 5y ago
  The problem is that many people aren't replacing their defined benefit pension with savings. They're replacing it with nothing. That said, defined benefit pensions were always designed around the idea that you'd be staying in the same place for maybe decades. Federal government pensions are perhaps the most obvious example but it applied to many companies as well. And that just doesn't represent typical behavior--especially among professional workers--these days.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago