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A fascinating premise, and matches what I saw as an engineering director. The best just get bored and move on. I think many teams are unaware how much extra va

A fascinating premise, and matches what I saw as an engineering director. The best just get bored and move on. I think many teams are unaware how much extra value is possible by retaining existing employees vs hiring new ones. Each year I'd try to make sure I was "making them an offer they couldn't refuse" with new interesting challenges, new tech, plenty of personal research time, as much pay increase as I could possibly give, etc. A lot of engineering managers think that it's no big deal to just hire new staff, but even going from average turnover of two years to three years is an massive improvement.

jayd16 4y ago
>The best just get bored and move on. Is that the premise? Seems to be saying that constantly changing skills exhausts developers to the point that it becomes more lucrative to work in another profession. Although, I suppose learning new things just to tread water can be boring too.
- vitaflo 4y ago
  This is how I read it too. That a fast learners skill is degraded in a field that is constantly reset (software dev) vs one where you can stack knowledge. And thus the fast learners will eventually leave the software field and transition to one that doesn’t reset constantly so they can stand out more. Doesn’t have to do with boredom so much as maximizing potential.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> The best just get bored and move on. It may not be a matter of "the best". I have taken a personality test that had an item on it that covered product lifecycle. If 1 is initial conception, 2 is prototype, 3 is initial release, 4 is major enhancement, and 5 is maintenance, my personality is that I prefer 2 or 3. By 4 (major enhancement) I start to get bored, and by 5 (maintenance) I'm definitely bored. It's not that I'm one of "the best" (though I like to think that I am). I have a personality clash with the later stages of product lifecycle.
tboyd47 4y ago
It's not even that they get bored, it's that they're comfortable with their tools and don't feel like doing the mandatory re-tool every 5 years.
deathanatos 4y ago
Literally every engineering director I've ever seen says exactly what you're saying. E.g., "as much pay increase as I could possibly": for my experience and growth, an employer I worked with offered a -6.6% increase in real salary for my time there. (≈3 years tenure.) Negative. The work was also … not what I'd like to be doing. So between "stay with company" and "find different company", it shouldn't be too hard to predict which option was more appealing.
asiachick 4y ago
I think for some engineers (me) there's not much you can offer. I don't just want any new random tech challenge. It's unlikely your company or most companies have something I could truly be passionate about solving.
cabraca 4y ago
its not just the best ones. If you remove people from the grind for 1-2 days a week, give them a small budget and enough autonomy to do what they want, most people will fix shit that bugged them for a long time. The main problem is how micromanage-y the current development processes are. Everything has to be a ticket/user story and has to be planned and approved by some people that never even wrote a single line of code. Everything has to have some immediate business impact. I even see scrum teams measuring for team utilization now. target is 90% atm and they wonder why productivity is down.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  > If you remove people from the grind for 1-2 days a week The modern office seems hellbent on killing every last bit of slack in their workers, then wondering why they leave or get burned out. I realized the other day that a big part of my drive to move towards self-employment is really just a way to carve out time to take adequate care of myself. I have significant doubts that it is possible to continue to advance in tech to staff+ levels, be a good spouse, parent, and friend, and not run myself into the ground with physical/mental issues. And that is sad on multiple levels. So I respond by easing up on advancing my career, because it gives back to me the least.
  - shagie 4y ago
    > The modern office seems hellbent on killing every last bit of slack in their workers, then wondering why they leave or get burned out. There's a book to hunt up... Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency It's written by Tom DeMarco of Peopleware fame.
  - Frost1x 4y ago
    Pretty much. I often wonder where people find positions claimed on the internet where they're working 2-3 hours a day. I've increasingly throughout my career saw more and more slack evaporate to a point it's almost nonexistent. I always wondered why people complained about how much time certain aspects took up they could automate away and my question was always: well, once you automate away that nice simple task, what do you do with the extra time? You created more slack and someone's going to come looking to fill that void the second they're aware. And the new task is going to be more difficult until you get to sets of tasks so cognitively intense and complex you can't simply automate them away. Then your day is filled with incredibly challenging stressful work. I have no issue with doing complex work, I've spent my career doing it. What I have issue with is the amount of such work I can do in any given time span. At some point I need a break where I do something simple and mundane. Continous complex problem solving is the road to burnout. You'll be greeted by more and more failure and lack of visible progress combined with ever increasing stress levels. If you're an entrepreneur, small business owner, or manager looking to optimize your labor force then you may want the opposite. You want more time to focus on the complex and the more simple you can automate, the better or if you have a workforce, you want your highest comped individuals focusing on the most optimally complex tasks they're capable of handling. You don't want your Fellow level engineer refilling the coffee maker because it's empty or implementing some basic features on some UI, go back to inventing new algorithms, math, or building new technology... but people need those nice relaxing breaks and slack, they can't run at their best constantly.
quickthrower2 4y ago
You should fill in your profile with a link to your careers page :-)
cs137 4y ago
My experience, unfortunately, is that good managers like you seem to be don't last long. They get replaced by manage-up sleazeballs who'll never, ever protect the people beneath them because it's not game-theoretically optimal. The thing is, executives measure themselves by how quickly they get promoted into the next role, so no one cares that good management might reduce turnover in the next 2-3 years--in fact, the executive mindset is that it could just as easily increase turnover (what if we invest in their careers, and they leave?)
- dgb23 4y ago
  "what if we invest in their careers, and they leave?" - Does that also apply to decision makers?
- joshmarinacci 4y ago
  My philosophy as an engineering manager is to actually pursue this outcome. If I treat them badly they will leave. If I treat them well and train them into better engineers then they will leave. It's like being a college football coach. Having your star athlete be drafted to the NFL is entirely the point.
itsmemattchung 4y ago
> The best just get bored and move on. Or a reorg happens and you land a shitty manager. To be fair, almost all my managers were amazing, people who truly cared about their staff: at professional level as well as a personal level. I've only had one absolute psychopath as a manager ... but I should thank him because he was the last straw and gave me enough courage (and anger) to leave AWS and start my journey as a solo entrepreneur.
- y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  Oddly enough I joined AWS not too long ago and while the job itself sucks, my manager is exceptionally awesome. In fact I only interviewed with AWS as kind of a half-joke, but he was so likeable that it convinced me to take it seriously. He has a healthy "fuck em" attitude when it comes to pressure from outside the team, so he's constantly protecting us in a multitude of ways (e.g. during on-call rotations or deadlines being imposed on us). He has yet to do a single thing that I would consider micro-management.
  - alexalx666 4y ago
    We need more stories like that :D

jayd16 4y ago

>The best just get bored and move on. Is that the premise? Seems to be saying that constantly changing skills exhausts developers to the point that it becomes more lucrative to work in another profession. Although, I suppose learning new things just to tread water can be boring too.

vitaflo 4y ago
This is how I read it too. That a fast learners skill is degraded in a field that is constantly reset (software dev) vs one where you can stack knowledge. And thus the fast learners will eventually leave the software field and transition to one that doesn’t reset constantly so they can stand out more. Doesn’t have to do with boredom so much as maximizing potential.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> The best just get bored and move on. It may not be a matter of "the best". I have taken a personality test that had an item on it that covered product lifecycle. If 1 is initial conception, 2 is prototype, 3 is initial release, 4 is major enhancement, and 5 is maintenance, my personality is that I prefer 2 or 3. By 4 (major enhancement) I start to get bored, and by 5 (maintenance) I'm definitely bored. It's not that I'm one of "the best" (though I like to think that I am). I have a personality clash with the later stages of product lifecycle.

tboyd47 4y ago

It's not even that they get bored, it's that they're comfortable with their tools and don't feel like doing the mandatory re-tool every 5 years.

deathanatos 4y ago

Literally every engineering director I've ever seen says exactly what you're saying. E.g., "as much pay increase as I could possibly": for my experience and growth, an employer I worked with offered a -6.6% increase in real salary for my time there. (≈3 years tenure.) Negative. The work was also … not what I'd like to be doing. So between "stay with company" and "find different company", it shouldn't be too hard to predict which option was more appealing.

asiachick 4y ago

I think for some engineers (me) there's not much you can offer. I don't just want any new random tech challenge. It's unlikely your company or most companies have something I could truly be passionate about solving.

cabraca 4y ago

its not just the best ones. If you remove people from the grind for 1-2 days a week, give them a small budget and enough autonomy to do what they want, most people will fix shit that bugged them for a long time. The main problem is how micromanage-y the current development processes are. Everything has to be a ticket/user story and has to be planned and approved by some people that never even wrote a single line of code. Everything has to have some immediate business impact. I even see scrum teams measuring for team utilization now. target is 90% atm and they wonder why productivity is down.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
> If you remove people from the grind for 1-2 days a week The modern office seems hellbent on killing every last bit of slack in their workers, then wondering why they leave or get burned out. I realized the other day that a big part of my drive to move towards self-employment is really just a way to carve out time to take adequate care of myself. I have significant doubts that it is possible to continue to advance in tech to staff+ levels, be a good spouse, parent, and friend, and not run myself into the ground with physical/mental issues. And that is sad on multiple levels. So I respond by easing up on advancing my career, because it gives back to me the least.
- shagie 4y ago
  > The modern office seems hellbent on killing every last bit of slack in their workers, then wondering why they leave or get burned out. There's a book to hunt up... Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency It's written by Tom DeMarco of Peopleware fame.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  Pretty much. I often wonder where people find positions claimed on the internet where they're working 2-3 hours a day. I've increasingly throughout my career saw more and more slack evaporate to a point it's almost nonexistent. I always wondered why people complained about how much time certain aspects took up they could automate away and my question was always: well, once you automate away that nice simple task, what do you do with the extra time? You created more slack and someone's going to come looking to fill that void the second they're aware. And the new task is going to be more difficult until you get to sets of tasks so cognitively intense and complex you can't simply automate them away. Then your day is filled with incredibly challenging stressful work. I have no issue with doing complex work, I've spent my career doing it. What I have issue with is the amount of such work I can do in any given time span. At some point I need a break where I do something simple and mundane. Continous complex problem solving is the road to burnout. You'll be greeted by more and more failure and lack of visible progress combined with ever increasing stress levels. If you're an entrepreneur, small business owner, or manager looking to optimize your labor force then you may want the opposite. You want more time to focus on the complex and the more simple you can automate, the better or if you have a workforce, you want your highest comped individuals focusing on the most optimally complex tasks they're capable of handling. You don't want your Fellow level engineer refilling the coffee maker because it's empty or implementing some basic features on some UI, go back to inventing new algorithms, math, or building new technology... but people need those nice relaxing breaks and slack, they can't run at their best constantly.

quickthrower2 4y ago

You should fill in your profile with a link to your careers page :-)

cs137 4y ago

My experience, unfortunately, is that good managers like you seem to be don't last long. They get replaced by manage-up sleazeballs who'll never, ever protect the people beneath them because it's not game-theoretically optimal. The thing is, executives measure themselves by how quickly they get promoted into the next role, so no one cares that good management might reduce turnover in the next 2-3 years--in fact, the executive mindset is that it could just as easily increase turnover (what if we invest in their careers, and they leave?)

dgb23 4y ago
"what if we invest in their careers, and they leave?" - Does that also apply to decision makers?
joshmarinacci 4y ago
My philosophy as an engineering manager is to actually pursue this outcome. If I treat them badly they will leave. If I treat them well and train them into better engineers then they will leave. It's like being a college football coach. Having your star athlete be drafted to the NFL is entirely the point.

itsmemattchung 4y ago

> The best just get bored and move on. Or a reorg happens and you land a shitty manager. To be fair, almost all my managers were amazing, people who truly cared about their staff: at professional level as well as a personal level. I've only had one absolute psychopath as a manager ... but I should thank him because he was the last straw and gave me enough courage (and anger) to leave AWS and start my journey as a solo entrepreneur.

y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
Oddly enough I joined AWS not too long ago and while the job itself sucks, my manager is exceptionally awesome. In fact I only interviewed with AWS as kind of a half-joke, but he was so likeable that it convinced me to take it seriously. He has a healthy "fuck em" attitude when it comes to pressure from outside the team, so he's constantly protecting us in a multitude of ways (e.g. during on-call rotations or deadlines being imposed on us). He has yet to do a single thing that I would consider micro-management.
- alexalx666 4y ago
  We need more stories like that :D