17 ms·

Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

380 points by tchalla 4y ago

veeceearr 4y ago
cardy31 4y ago
I’m waiting for recruitment departments for big companies to learn about moneyball. Currently the approach is “well we lost someone with 10 years of experience _at our company_ I guess we’ll replace them with some with 10 years of experience elsewhere. Problem solved!” But really, to bring the moneyball analogy, the guy who left was hitting .380, while the guy you brought in will maybe be a .300 hitter a few years from now once he ramps up closer to the level of the .380 hitter. So what recruitment should be doing is figuring out how many individual people they actually need to bring in to replace their .380 hitter. That calculation should also inform how much they’re will to incentivize the .380 hitter to stay. Thank you for bearing with my drawn-out analogy!
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Bill James’ stuff works in baseball because there is a very detailed kpi record for every player. Not so much for most devs who’s not super involved in open source
pts_ 4y ago
This will make employees uncompetitive and shift more power to employers.
Animats 4y ago
Amazon hit this in a big way in their warehouse operations.[1] Their turnover is so high that they ran out of suckers willing to work at Amazon. [1]https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
hot_gril 4y ago
The article talks about employees in general. A lot of us are SWEs or adjacent. Software has a very short development cycle compared to other fields.
danwee 4y ago
I don't think it's realistic (but I wish it were). An example from a Western European country of what retention should look like from my point of view: Senior software engineer (10 years of exp.) joins company X. Year salary: 80K EUR. This salary is not exclusive of "tier-1 top companies"(but let's not start a discussion about how low or high this number is, please) - After 1 year. Good performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 92K EUR - After 2 years. Great performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 105800 EUR... now this salary is starting to look unrealistic - After 3 years. Great performance, he's the de-facto tech lead of the team. Raise of 15%. New salary = 121670 EUR. Now this is salary is rare for for non-tier 1 companies At this point the senior engineer considers leaving because in year 4, it's impossible he'll get a 15% raise again (that would make around 140K EUR, and company X is not Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft). So, he switches companies. Company hires a new senior software engineer for 90K EUR. The cycle starts again.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Except at some point you run out of skilled software devs, and suddenly some poor soul is running a 3 man project single handed.
INTPenis 4y ago
Yes they should. They should also prioritize ops over sales, and yet they don't. After 11 years in Enterprise IT it's been my impression that we are very short sighted. We give everything to our sales and they sell everything between heaven and earth without a thought on how we can deliver it. And once the contract is signed, no effort is made to deliver or manage, just move on to the next big contract signing. So just as they prioritize hiring and ignore retention, they also prioritize contract signing and ignore lifecycle management. It's the same short sighted thinking in another area.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Whom you retain (or might want to retain) is a function of whom you hire. Having just finished a job search it's amazing how bad many outfits are at hiring, most it seems can't read CVs. And I'm the one who needs to have attention to details? I have a phrase that sums up the process: How you hire is whom you hire. Put another way, if recruiting / hiring is off target, that's only going to magnify going forward.
a_c 4y ago
There is a saying that in any organization, there are people doing the job, and there are people keeping the organization (admin). In the long run, the organization is left with the admin. [0] In terms of compensation and hiring, commonly the package is defined by HR while the performance is reviewed by your team manager. There are even places where the criteria of evaluation is defined by HR. That's also why I'm very optimistic about start-ups. Company can never dominate a market forever. And the end of the day, all companies implode [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158
viridian 4y ago
This article is incredibly barebones, there's almost zero actual content here, just some handwaving about studies and surveys that aren't even linked to.
helf 4y ago
"No Shit".
bbatchelder 4y ago
Too many times in my career have I seen an employer lose an employee, who has a ton of institutional knowledge and performs adequately or even excellently, only to replace them them with someone that ends up costing much more money, and then takes a lot of time to get up to speed (which also slows the folks who help get them up to speed). It is like they haven't taken the time to even make a rudimentary calculation on the costs involved in keeping the employee versus replacing them.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  I am seeing this recently. Imagine a place that hired dozens of really good developers in 2020. Now imagine that instead of focussing on retention and paying well, they focussed on ignoring the waves of developers leaving and instead on exclusively hiring graduate developers. Now imagine all that domain knowledge that left months ago... compounded by the fact there is only five developers left from 2020... Totally not a real story at all...
- panny 4y ago
  But accounting and HR will time your bathroom breaks. I guess the watchers don't like being watched, which is why retention isn't a bother for them.
  - gsibble 4y ago
    Ha. I had the CFO once call me angrily asking where I was......I was in the bathroom. She told me to get back to my desk. I took my time.
    - feet 4y ago
      I would have taken that time looking at job postings
    - bonestamp2 4y ago
      These are the people who hate work from home culture. They can't tell who is at their desk in the particular second that they decide it's important.
AntiRemoteWork 4y ago
nuancebydefault 4y ago
The weird thing is, if you, as an employee start to show feint signs of wanting to leave, e.g. by complaining a lot to colleagues, or having an upset look on one's face, usually it is not acted upon, or even not picked up by any manager. If on the other hand you make it very clear that you are unhappy or that you might want to leave, it is understood as you are going to leave anyway, so they don't bother fixing any of the things that you have a problem with. At least that is what I experienced a few times. Instead they start to act as if you don't belong to the team anymore or give you boring or strictly defined tasks. So no wonder, you leave and they find some other employee, in which co-workers need to invest time and effort during a period of about half a year to get them up to speed. Rinse and repeat.
- gsibble 4y ago
  You didn't break up with me, I broke up with you!
- rjsw 4y ago
  I watched one PHB manage out one of the best junior engineers just because they expected young people to switch jobs often.
- vecter 4y ago
  At my last startup, one of our employees approached this well. This is a very summarized version, but he came to me and said: "I'd like to be paid $X. I think I deserve it and I believe I can get that salary on the open market. I don't want to negotiate on this." It was a very significant raise but after a short discussion with my cofounders, we agreed and gave him what he asked for. That he was a top performer made it an easy decision.
  - YeBanKo 4y ago
    What would be your work dynamic if you thought otherwise, i.e. they are not worth it or you can’t afford?
    - vecter 4y ago
mindvirus 4y ago
When I was at a FAANG, it felt like they had this down to a science. Promotions every 2-3 years. Raises once a year, a few spot bonuses throughout the year, ad hoc equity grants. People still quit of course, but looking back it felt very retention focused and scientific.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  I wonder if that was sustainable and the past year of the economy says it wasn't.
- discordance 4y ago
  Anecdotal, but I’m FAANG and in the process of switching, leveling up and getting paid a lot more elsewhere. There was a counteroffer when I told my present company about the new offer but it was too little too late. It’s well known among my peers that to level up or get paid more, you go elsewhere and maybe even boomerang back later.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Bonuses at all, nevermind a few a year, sound great. Time to send out resumes. What's the workload at the typical FAANG?
  - jamra 4y ago
    So far there is a pretty serious tempo at my FAANG but the complexity is not very high so it’s really simple work in terms of stretching the brain. Lots of working with other teams (XFN) so collaboration is almost as important as execution. Pay is good.
  - gsibble 4y ago
    From what I've heard, depends upon the FAANG. Google apparently has good work/life balance. All of them are all about making it through the interview process, which is a nightmare.
    - yodsanklai 4y ago
tomrod 4y ago
Pay people well.
- gsibble 4y ago
  Most companies will pay people the absolute bare minimum to get them to work there while barely being angry enough not to quit.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Correct. If your optimization horizon is two weeks to a quarter, this short termism makes sense. But if your horizon is further, pay people well.
gsibble 4y ago
This is definitely the opposite of what most of my employers have done. Gotten denied raises countless times which has forced me to find new employment to advance my career while they are 100% focused on hiring new talent. Lots of turnover which cost the companies a tremendous amount of time constantly bringing new hires up to speed.
woeirua 4y ago
When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates a perverse incentive, and the result is political bullshit that is typically misaligned with the company's interests which further drives away your high performers. End the perverse incentives. Pay your people well if they're doing a good job, regardless of how long they've been doing the same job or what their title is. Reward seniority and loyalty. Suddenly, you'll find that employee retention goes through the roof, and you don't have to worry about hiring new people all the time.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Give the people what they want, and they'll give you what you want.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  > When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases). What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you. Most people want confirmation of their own beliefs about themselves -- they want the company/boss/coworkers to be showing respect and show that they value your work. People want to see that their work is accomplishing something and a lot of people can go to great lengths to lie to themselves that this is the case. And a lot of people also want progress, they want to see themselves doing new things, getting more responsibility, advancing their careers. I hired and said goodbye to A LOT of software developers. And I do understand that it is difficult to get an honest, unbiased response when you ask them for the reasons for their decisions to leave. But at the same time you get to experience trying to get people to stay and seeing what works and what does not. Giving raises works relatively rarely -- it only seems to delay. They are already discontent with their job and the higher salary only functions as a sort of gold handcuffs. After quarter century of doing this I literally am still to see a situation when a developer is offered a higher salary and suddenly becomes enthusiastic about their job to have a long fruitful career. So what does work? Trying to find what causes them to be discontent in the first place and trying to address it. Do they feel they worked for too long in one project? Are they bored intellectually? Are they not getting along with their current boss? Changing the project without any raise is in my experience one of highest success rate things you can do in this situation. That success rate may not be very high (people tend to leave anyway) but at least I have a lot of good stories of people who changed teams and things clicked for them and they liked their new team. The only things that worked better in the past are changing the project WITH upgrade to the salary to reflect the market, and, for the ultimate highest employee-keeping potential - promotion to manager. If people really did care mostly only about money, upping their salary should have greater success rate than moving them to another team and yet it is the opposite. Now... this all assumes software developers and we know software developers are not exactly starving. If you are earning very little compared to your needs or when those needs grow suddenly people tend to really start paying way more attention to just monetary compensation.
jdaw0 4y ago
Here is the MIT Technology Review report the article is referencing but doesn't bother to actually link to: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059470/customer-experience-and-the-future-of-work/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059470/customer...
- gausswho 4y ago
  Even that is a summary, and if you request the full report you're bounced to a third party Genesys that demands your contact information, while popping up an unsolicited chat bot window. I killed that chat, made some fake info and was sent to a page that was functionally broken... except for the chat bot which had another go at me. MIT Technology Review should be ashamed of themselves.
hayst4ck 4y ago
The hazard of retention is creating dependency. Dependency means, not just high bus factor, but opening yourself (the business) up to being vulnerable to another person's superior negotiation position. Then CEOs/boardmembers would have to spread their wealth rather than hoarding it all for themselves. Without a way to force CEO/boardmembers to spread their wealth (unions), I think we can expect companies to do what is in their best interest, maintaining a monopoly on power by ensuring no dependencies.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  As a rank and file employee, I'd not want to work with others at my same level who've made the company depend on them disproportionately to their level. Those exist, and they tend to obstruct progress.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  This behavior is a self serving behavior that is in contradiction with maximizing shareholder value. Reliance upon a reliable person is can be very profitable for all involved. Of course humans are apes in suits and will actually maximize their own personal interests regardless of what the laws or their job description says.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
Margaret Thatcher (in)famously said that there was no such thing as society. By that she meant that, actually the only thing out there is individuals looking after their own self-interests. Well, it is the same with companies. In both case this leads to suboptimal results at 'system level' (a well-known problem in system optimisation).
- wwweston 4y ago
  Thatcher's advancement an individual self-interest oriented worldview is certainly advantageous/correct for her to say politically. But the name for the 'system level' of a collection of interacting individual humans would be ... society. Her statement is also deeply incorrect that individuals are solely interest-driven -- they're also value driven (though I suspect like many effective politicians she damn well knew that regardless of what she said). Of course, with companies, her statement is significantly more apt.
- kazen44 4y ago
  Thatcherism has little basis in actual sociology in my opinion. Societies do exist, and humans are not purely selfish rational beings either.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > Thatcherism has little basis in actual sociology in my opinion. The entire basis of Thatcherism is dodging tax on riches made by selling the entire society.
  - mytailorisrich 4y ago
    Humans are not rational but you can bet that they will act in their perceived self-interest more often than not. They will always do in the workplace, which is the point here.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  A Thatcherite view of the world and humanity is unsustainable over the long term. It causes a hideous, selfish and cruel society.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
turtlebits 4y ago
Agreed - new hires always get the current market rate, which always higher than what existing employees are paid. Also on the flip side, if you've been in a role longer than say, 4 years, you should interview at other companies. You're probably getting underpaid. (Even if you've gotten a promotion). You don't have to jump ship, just see what's available.
- waboremo 4y ago
  Yes there are also additional studies on "boomerang workers" that fit this new(er) class of people. Ones who despite even liking their job and eventually coming back, seek employment elsewhere because they aren't getting what they should be or aren't fulfilling the role they see themselves fulfilling properly. That's how intensely underrated retention is for a lot of companies, and how costly it can be when retention isn't seriously looked into.
  - victor9000 4y ago
    That's the problem though, there are zero incentives in place for managers or recruiters to retain talent. No one gets a bonus when employees stick around, so no one optimizes for it. I recently interviewed with Stripe for a leadership position and was asked about some of my most impactful contributions with my previous employer. I described several anti patterns that I identified with the development process that would lead to burnout and turnover, then I described the changes I put in place to prevent this outcome. Things like sprint retrospectives, tracking technical debt, prioritizing automation, clearly defining tasks before starting development, validating progress with the various stakeholders, upskilling and managing the career development of engineers, and a host of other QoL improvements to smooth out the development process for everyone involved. It was immediately obvious that this was a dud in the eyes of my interviewers. Eyes glazed over almost instantly once I started talking about preventing burnout. And I can read a room, so I could have easily switched topics until I found something that received a positive response, but I was so shocked at the response that I doubled down. Needless to say that I did not make it to the next round. But in my view that's a true negative for both of us, because I can't work at a place that doesn't value their employees enough to design a healthy workplace for them to operate in.
replyifuagree 4y ago
This goes x1000 for knowledge work. Great knowledge workers build this amazing model of what is going in in the product they work on in their head that walks out the door with them. We can't prevent people from progressing their career by going elsewhere, but we sure as hell can focus on not giving them a reason to leave.
unity1001 4y ago
Losing institutional knowledge is a b*tch. It costs more to get new people up to speed in terms of time and productivity lost, than to just retain people who already have the institutional knowledge.
- bonestamp2 4y ago
  Yes. We used to work in silos. Dave was responsible for x, Cathy for y. When Cathy left, we were screwed because nobody knew much about y. So now that I'm the project manager, after Steve builds the new feature then I alternate assigning the bug fixes between two other people who did not build it. That way, at least two other people become familiar with that part of the application while Steve is still around to answer questions and provide guidance.
clnq 4y ago
I work for a tech company that promotes internally quite well in recent years. But they also only want to hire senior, principal and lead level engineers to develop a mature workforce. Unfortunately, they fail to attract enough talent to replace attrition, which is high due to increasingly paltry employee numbers. And all in all, while the promotion-to-hiring ratio is good, there is too little hiring to keep employees from working 70-100 hour weeks. I am leaving, too, even if I was promised a promotion within months. I suppose the moral of the story is that balance is good, but hiring also must happen to replace attrition.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > increasingly poultry employee numbers I think you mean paltry. Although I have seen employees who flap about, squawk a lot and shit all over everything, so perhaps poultry is apt.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Oops! Thanks for the correction and a good laugh.
- neilv 4y ago
  70 hrs/wk is for a rare work emergency. 100 hrs/wk will send someone to the Emergency Room.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Yes, it does generally lead to ER (particularly for stress symptoms being confused for something serious) now and then.
    - neilv 4y ago
      Stress can also cause serious permanent damage, not only transient symptoms that might be mistaken for something else. If I see a colleague who's too stressed, I'll impress upon everyone the importance of correcting that.
brnt 4y ago
It seems to me employers don't see employees as a (good!) target for investment anymore, the idea that you can build your workforce, but rather are obsessed with transactional labour: I have X currency, I want Y FTE of credential Z for it. Transactional attitudes begets itself.
dbish 4y ago
The confusing thing happening over the last 1-2 years (and in previous cycles) is that many current employees are also down significantly on their stock grants in public big tech. Employers seem to see this as ok, and that’s the risk they take when taking stock, yet they are willing to go and pay a new hire with an updated price that means they make far more than you. It incentivizes leaving and wouldn’t cost the employer anything to just re-up your pay to the original goal since they’ll have to pay it anyway to a new person and lose the ramp up time
- dalyons 4y ago
  I’ve been wondering about this myself. If you work in publicco tech, all their grants are priced in dollar equiv. So as you say, bouncing jobs right now should give you a ~50% equity boost, if you’re on a 4 year today at your current co. Surely though this is obvious & companies are doing top ups? Or, since they’re all entering hiring freezes / layoffs maybe they don’t can and want the attrition
- duped 4y ago
  In terms of number of shares or dollar amounts? Because tech has taken a massive slam in the last year in the markets. Employees should see that like a lot of investors do, which is a discount on blue chips. It changes the calculus a bit if you don't plan on executing on vest or holding after you do for tax reasons, which makes a lot of sense. But if you're considering a role at a big tech right now and plan to last a few years it's not necessarily a hit.
  - dbish 4y ago
    Dollar amount. It’s a hit comparatively because anyone joining today would make 100s of thousands more for some roles and someone who took the hit over the last year can just go reset their stock elsewhere. Holding for tax reasons makes no sense for public companies. Vested shares count as standard income.
duxup 4y ago
Customer service/ even technical support seems to be a very little respected area in most companies. Trying to retain people they don’t respect already seems unlikely.
- leducw 4y ago
  It makes me quite sad to see how undervalued customer service and support is in a lot of the IT/tech world in general.
endisneigh 4y ago
I agree with the title and point of article but it’s not really possible. No company can consistently identify those who are good, pay them well, fend against competitors despite their rising expenses (remember paying people more?) and do all of these things while people leave anyway for reasons outside of their control (moving, bored etc), which results in you having to hire more anyway, stresses the before mentioned process (inevitably you will notice people who are paid less can perform as good or better than more paid employees). If I were in a position to implement things I’d simply get rid of raises all together and simple give people only stock and/or profit share. If they’re doing well the raise will come to them automatically. Of course this has perverse incentives in itself too.
- dbish 4y ago
  They can’t do it perfectly but they can try. My pov having been at a few big techs is they aren’t even trying.
mberning 4y ago
This is a microcosm of poor performance management. You need an effective way to get rid of bad hires, clear out dead wood, and retain your top contributors.
localhost 4y ago
When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with, they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network. A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen without ICs who know a lot of people throughout the company.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  That’s WAI - lots of managers would rather call all the shots.
  - localhost 4y ago
    I don't know what WAI means, but note that I said discovered above. There's a separate conversation to get that work funded and that's where the managers come into the picture. Managers don't discover the work - they decide whether to fund the work.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      Works as Intended. > Managers don't discover the work I disagree. Have you never seen a manager hired from another place already come in with a bucket list they want to do bc “that’s how we done it at X”? That’s a classic. There are less nefarious examples of this ofc but ime managers absolutely do and even want to discover the work. Now whether they’re the right people to do it is entirely different question =)
xiaodai 4y ago
duh
animitronix 4y ago
We needed a study to tell us this?? Anyone who's tried to hire should understand this implicitly.
whatever1 4y ago
Why? Information spreading across companies with talent poaching sounds beneficial for the society
helf 4y ago
Ok, to actually add to this instead of just a one liner… My current employer is a prime example of this stupid mentality causing issues. They’ve gotten better about it but since I started little over two years ago they’ve had probably 60% turn over of full time team leader and higher staffers. Our poor VP spent the last 3 years arguing with our Japanese President and others about the need for retention policies as we have such a high staff turn over that it was/is costing us money in overtime etc. we were in a bit of a death spiral last year that we’ve luckily pulled out of but we lost so many people due to COVID and similar that we were working people mandatory 12 hour shifts with mandatory OT and kept having /more people/ quit. For obvious reasons. And then new hires wouldn’t last through their first paycheck. They had to up base pays and bite the bullet and hire a ton of people all at once to try and get shift times lower. It’s one of those things that makes me glad I’m IT. I’m a critical employee and they bend over backwards to accommodate me when I need it. I try to not abuse that though :) We are a tier 1 parts supplier for Honda and we operate damn near 24/7/365
- deathanatos 4y ago
  I really don't get these decisions. I presume they'd need to pay time and a half there; you might as well just hire more people and bump base pay 12.5%. Everyone is happier due to not being stressed out, and it's the same cost.
zac23or 4y ago
Prioritizing hiring over retention is the least bad thing a company does. Companies do terrible things, like: - Dissolve good teams. - Losing great employees for nothing - Prohibition of documenting procedures (Yes, I've worked on one of these) - Encouraging bullying behavior. - 50% of time lost in meetings. The explanation of all this is that... 99% of the companies where I worked the objective was not profit, they existed only for someone to demonstrate control over other people. Meetings is showing the power of "request a meeting". An employee asks for a raise? We don't give in to employees, etc. If you understand this, all the weird stuff makes sense.
lamontcg 4y ago
They should also stop building open office plans, as numerous studies have shown. I'd like to see a study which analyzed corporate management as a cult and looked at the irrational non-profit-motive based behaviors that you have to 'signal' in order to work up the ladder. Where decisions were more about peer approval than actually making the company better.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Study? Just one? Come back when you have hundreds. Oh wait, you have hundreds? Well, come back when it costs less to retain than to turn over - Industry, probably
civilized 4y ago
One weird trick for retention: pay your valued employees the market rate for their talent level... even if they have made the mistake of staying at your company for more than two years.
eftychis 4y ago
I think an article trending earlier yesterday is a big point to strengthen this. Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320294] Especially in startups losing knowledge is a huge problem -- I claim -- and a fundamental management issue as productivity models and other resource management models (theories) do not account for memory. Who had someone left or themselves left only for X system to start dying in production? Or for a lot of info to have been lost because it existed on slack or on the conversation participants heads? Startups can simply not afford to lose some/most people. Best case that knowledge is at the hands of competition.
jrm4 4y ago
They needed a study over this? Duh. Most people learn the job on the job.

380 points by tchalla 4y ago

I’m waiting for recruitment departments for big companies to learn about moneyball. Currently the approach is “well we lost someone with 10 years of experience _at our company_ I guess we’ll replace them with some with 10 years of experience elsewhere. Problem solved!” But really, to bring the moneyball analogy, the guy who left was hitting .380, while the guy you brought in will maybe be a .300 hitter a few years from now once he ramps up closer to the level of the .380 hitter. So what recruitment should be doing is figuring out how many individual people they actually need to bring in to replace their .380 hitter. That calculation should also inform how much they’re will to incentivize the .380 hitter to stay. Thank you for bearing with my drawn-out analogy!

dilyevsky 4y ago
Bill James’ stuff works in baseball because there is a very detailed kpi record for every player. Not so much for most devs who’s not super involved in open source

pts_ 4y ago

This will make employees uncompetitive and shift more power to employers.

Animats 4y ago

Amazon hit this in a big way in their warehouse operations.[1] Their turnover is so high that they ran out of suckers willing to work at Amazon. [1]https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...

hot_gril 4y ago

The article talks about employees in general. A lot of us are SWEs or adjacent. Software has a very short development cycle compared to other fields.

danwee 4y ago

I don't think it's realistic (but I wish it were). An example from a Western European country of what retention should look like from my point of view: Senior software engineer (10 years of exp.) joins company X. Year salary: 80K EUR. This salary is not exclusive of "tier-1 top companies"(but let's not start a discussion about how low or high this number is, please) - After 1 year. Good performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 92K EUR - After 2 years. Great performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 105800 EUR... now this salary is starting to look unrealistic - After 3 years. Great performance, he's the de-facto tech lead of the team. Raise of 15%. New salary = 121670 EUR. Now this is salary is rare for for non-tier 1 companies At this point the senior engineer considers leaving because in year 4, it's impossible he'll get a 15% raise again (that would make around 140K EUR, and company X is not Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft). So, he switches companies. Company hires a new senior software engineer for 90K EUR. The cycle starts again.

AstralStorm 4y ago
Except at some point you run out of skilled software devs, and suddenly some poor soul is running a 3 man project single handed.

INTPenis 4y ago

Yes they should. They should also prioritize ops over sales, and yet they don't. After 11 years in Enterprise IT it's been my impression that we are very short sighted. We give everything to our sales and they sell everything between heaven and earth without a thought on how we can deliver it. And once the contract is signed, no effort is made to deliver or manage, just move on to the next big contract signing. So just as they prioritize hiring and ignore retention, they also prioritize contract signing and ignore lifecycle management. It's the same short sighted thinking in another area.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Whom you retain (or might want to retain) is a function of whom you hire. Having just finished a job search it's amazing how bad many outfits are at hiring, most it seems can't read CVs. And I'm the one who needs to have attention to details? I have a phrase that sums up the process: How you hire is whom you hire. Put another way, if recruiting / hiring is off target, that's only going to magnify going forward.

a_c 4y ago

There is a saying that in any organization, there are people doing the job, and there are people keeping the organization (admin). In the long run, the organization is left with the admin. [0] In terms of compensation and hiring, commonly the package is defined by HR while the performance is reviewed by your team manager. There are even places where the criteria of evaluation is defined by HR. That's also why I'm very optimistic about start-ups. Company can never dominate a market forever. And the end of the day, all companies implode [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158

viridian 4y ago

This article is incredibly barebones, there's almost zero actual content here, just some handwaving about studies and surveys that aren't even linked to.

helf 4y ago

"No Shit".

bbatchelder 4y ago

Too many times in my career have I seen an employer lose an employee, who has a ton of institutional knowledge and performs adequately or even excellently, only to replace them them with someone that ends up costing much more money, and then takes a lot of time to get up to speed (which also slows the folks who help get them up to speed). It is like they haven't taken the time to even make a rudimentary calculation on the costs involved in keeping the employee versus replacing them.

lloydatkinson 4y ago
I am seeing this recently. Imagine a place that hired dozens of really good developers in 2020. Now imagine that instead of focussing on retention and paying well, they focussed on ignoring the waves of developers leaving and instead on exclusively hiring graduate developers. Now imagine all that domain knowledge that left months ago... compounded by the fact there is only five developers left from 2020... Totally not a real story at all...
panny 4y ago
But accounting and HR will time your bathroom breaks. I guess the watchers don't like being watched, which is why retention isn't a bother for them.
- gsibble 4y ago
  Ha. I had the CFO once call me angrily asking where I was......I was in the bathroom. She told me to get back to my desk. I took my time.
  - feet 4y ago
    I would have taken that time looking at job postings
  - bonestamp2 4y ago
    These are the people who hate work from home culture. They can't tell who is at their desk in the particular second that they decide it's important.

AntiRemoteWork 4y ago

nuancebydefault 4y ago

The weird thing is, if you, as an employee start to show feint signs of wanting to leave, e.g. by complaining a lot to colleagues, or having an upset look on one's face, usually it is not acted upon, or even not picked up by any manager. If on the other hand you make it very clear that you are unhappy or that you might want to leave, it is understood as you are going to leave anyway, so they don't bother fixing any of the things that you have a problem with. At least that is what I experienced a few times. Instead they start to act as if you don't belong to the team anymore or give you boring or strictly defined tasks. So no wonder, you leave and they find some other employee, in which co-workers need to invest time and effort during a period of about half a year to get them up to speed. Rinse and repeat.

gsibble 4y ago
You didn't break up with me, I broke up with you!
rjsw 4y ago
I watched one PHB manage out one of the best junior engineers just because they expected young people to switch jobs often.
vecter 4y ago
At my last startup, one of our employees approached this well. This is a very summarized version, but he came to me and said: "I'd like to be paid $X. I think I deserve it and I believe I can get that salary on the open market. I don't want to negotiate on this." It was a very significant raise but after a short discussion with my cofounders, we agreed and gave him what he asked for. That he was a top performer made it an easy decision.
- YeBanKo 4y ago
  What would be your work dynamic if you thought otherwise, i.e. they are not worth it or you can’t afford?
  - vecter 4y ago

mindvirus 4y ago

When I was at a FAANG, it felt like they had this down to a science. Promotions every 2-3 years. Raises once a year, a few spot bonuses throughout the year, ad hoc equity grants. People still quit of course, but looking back it felt very retention focused and scientific.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
I wonder if that was sustainable and the past year of the economy says it wasn't.
discordance 4y ago
Anecdotal, but I’m FAANG and in the process of switching, leveling up and getting paid a lot more elsewhere. There was a counteroffer when I told my present company about the new offer but it was too little too late. It’s well known among my peers that to level up or get paid more, you go elsewhere and maybe even boomerang back later.
roflyear 4y ago
Bonuses at all, nevermind a few a year, sound great. Time to send out resumes. What's the workload at the typical FAANG?
- jamra 4y ago
  So far there is a pretty serious tempo at my FAANG but the complexity is not very high so it’s really simple work in terms of stretching the brain. Lots of working with other teams (XFN) so collaboration is almost as important as execution. Pay is good.
- gsibble 4y ago
  From what I've heard, depends upon the FAANG. Google apparently has good work/life balance. All of them are all about making it through the interview process, which is a nightmare.
  - yodsanklai 4y ago

tomrod 4y ago

Pay people well.

gsibble 4y ago
Most companies will pay people the absolute bare minimum to get them to work there while barely being angry enough not to quit.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Correct. If your optimization horizon is two weeks to a quarter, this short termism makes sense. But if your horizon is further, pay people well.

gsibble 4y ago

This is definitely the opposite of what most of my employers have done. Gotten denied raises countless times which has forced me to find new employment to advance my career while they are 100% focused on hiring new talent. Lots of turnover which cost the companies a tremendous amount of time constantly bringing new hires up to speed.

woeirua 4y ago

When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates a perverse incentive, and the result is political bullshit that is typically misaligned with the company's interests which further drives away your high performers. End the perverse incentives. Pay your people well if they're doing a good job, regardless of how long they've been doing the same job or what their title is. Reward seniority and loyalty. Suddenly, you'll find that employee retention goes through the roof, and you don't have to worry about hiring new people all the time.

iancmceachern 4y ago
Give the people what they want, and they'll give you what you want.
twawaaay 4y ago
> When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases). What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you. Most people want confirmation of their own beliefs about themselves -- they want the company/boss/coworkers to be showing respect and show that they value your work. People want to see that their work is accomplishing something and a lot of people can go to great lengths to lie to themselves that this is the case. And a lot of people also want progress, they want to see themselves doing new things, getting more responsibility, advancing their careers. I hired and said goodbye to A LOT of software developers. And I do understand that it is difficult to get an honest, unbiased response when you ask them for the reasons for their decisions to leave. But at the same time you get to experience trying to get people to stay and seeing what works and what does not. Giving raises works relatively rarely -- it only seems to delay. They are already discontent with their job and the higher salary only functions as a sort of gold handcuffs. After quarter century of doing this I literally am still to see a situation when a developer is offered a higher salary and suddenly becomes enthusiastic about their job to have a long fruitful career. So what does work? Trying to find what causes them to be discontent in the first place and trying to address it. Do they feel they worked for too long in one project? Are they bored intellectually? Are they not getting along with their current boss? Changing the project without any raise is in my experience one of highest success rate things you can do in this situation. That success rate may not be very high (people tend to leave anyway) but at least I have a lot of good stories of people who changed teams and things clicked for them and they liked their new team. The only things that worked better in the past are changing the project WITH upgrade to the salary to reflect the market, and, for the ultimate highest employee-keeping potential - promotion to manager. If people really did care mostly only about money, upping their salary should have greater success rate than moving them to another team and yet it is the opposite. Now... this all assumes software developers and we know software developers are not exactly starving. If you are earning very little compared to your needs or when those needs grow suddenly people tend to really start paying way more attention to just monetary compensation.

jdaw0 4y ago

Here is the MIT Technology Review report the article is referencing but doesn't bother to actually link to: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059470/customer-experience-and-the-future-of-work/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059470/customer...

gausswho 4y ago
Even that is a summary, and if you request the full report you're bounced to a third party Genesys that demands your contact information, while popping up an unsolicited chat bot window. I killed that chat, made some fake info and was sent to a page that was functionally broken... except for the chat bot which had another go at me. MIT Technology Review should be ashamed of themselves.

hayst4ck 4y ago

The hazard of retention is creating dependency. Dependency means, not just high bus factor, but opening yourself (the business) up to being vulnerable to another person's superior negotiation position. Then CEOs/boardmembers would have to spread their wealth rather than hoarding it all for themselves. Without a way to force CEO/boardmembers to spread their wealth (unions), I think we can expect companies to do what is in their best interest, maintaining a monopoly on power by ensuring no dependencies.

hot_gril 4y ago
As a rank and file employee, I'd not want to work with others at my same level who've made the company depend on them disproportionately to their level. Those exist, and they tend to obstruct progress.
maerF0x0 4y ago
This behavior is a self serving behavior that is in contradiction with maximizing shareholder value. Reliance upon a reliable person is can be very profitable for all involved. Of course humans are apes in suits and will actually maximize their own personal interests regardless of what the laws or their job description says.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

Margaret Thatcher (in)famously said that there was no such thing as society. By that she meant that, actually the only thing out there is individuals looking after their own self-interests. Well, it is the same with companies. In both case this leads to suboptimal results at 'system level' (a well-known problem in system optimisation).

wwweston 4y ago
Thatcher's advancement an individual self-interest oriented worldview is certainly advantageous/correct for her to say politically. But the name for the 'system level' of a collection of interacting individual humans would be ... society. Her statement is also deeply incorrect that individuals are solely interest-driven -- they're also value driven (though I suspect like many effective politicians she damn well knew that regardless of what she said). Of course, with companies, her statement is significantly more apt.
kazen44 4y ago
Thatcherism has little basis in actual sociology in my opinion. Societies do exist, and humans are not purely selfish rational beings either.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > Thatcherism has little basis in actual sociology in my opinion. The entire basis of Thatcherism is dodging tax on riches made by selling the entire society.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  Humans are not rational but you can bet that they will act in their perceived self-interest more often than not. They will always do in the workplace, which is the point here.
chris_wot 4y ago
A Thatcherite view of the world and humanity is unsustainable over the long term. It causes a hideous, selfish and cruel society.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

turtlebits 4y ago

Agreed - new hires always get the current market rate, which always higher than what existing employees are paid. Also on the flip side, if you've been in a role longer than say, 4 years, you should interview at other companies. You're probably getting underpaid. (Even if you've gotten a promotion). You don't have to jump ship, just see what's available.

waboremo 4y ago
Yes there are also additional studies on "boomerang workers" that fit this new(er) class of people. Ones who despite even liking their job and eventually coming back, seek employment elsewhere because they aren't getting what they should be or aren't fulfilling the role they see themselves fulfilling properly. That's how intensely underrated retention is for a lot of companies, and how costly it can be when retention isn't seriously looked into.
- victor9000 4y ago
  That's the problem though, there are zero incentives in place for managers or recruiters to retain talent. No one gets a bonus when employees stick around, so no one optimizes for it. I recently interviewed with Stripe for a leadership position and was asked about some of my most impactful contributions with my previous employer. I described several anti patterns that I identified with the development process that would lead to burnout and turnover, then I described the changes I put in place to prevent this outcome. Things like sprint retrospectives, tracking technical debt, prioritizing automation, clearly defining tasks before starting development, validating progress with the various stakeholders, upskilling and managing the career development of engineers, and a host of other QoL improvements to smooth out the development process for everyone involved. It was immediately obvious that this was a dud in the eyes of my interviewers. Eyes glazed over almost instantly once I started talking about preventing burnout. And I can read a room, so I could have easily switched topics until I found something that received a positive response, but I was so shocked at the response that I doubled down. Needless to say that I did not make it to the next round. But in my view that's a true negative for both of us, because I can't work at a place that doesn't value their employees enough to design a healthy workplace for them to operate in.

replyifuagree 4y ago

This goes x1000 for knowledge work. Great knowledge workers build this amazing model of what is going in in the product they work on in their head that walks out the door with them. We can't prevent people from progressing their career by going elsewhere, but we sure as hell can focus on not giving them a reason to leave.

unity1001 4y ago

Losing institutional knowledge is a b*tch. It costs more to get new people up to speed in terms of time and productivity lost, than to just retain people who already have the institutional knowledge.

bonestamp2 4y ago
Yes. We used to work in silos. Dave was responsible for x, Cathy for y. When Cathy left, we were screwed because nobody knew much about y. So now that I'm the project manager, after Steve builds the new feature then I alternate assigning the bug fixes between two other people who did not build it. That way, at least two other people become familiar with that part of the application while Steve is still around to answer questions and provide guidance.

clnq 4y ago

I work for a tech company that promotes internally quite well in recent years. But they also only want to hire senior, principal and lead level engineers to develop a mature workforce. Unfortunately, they fail to attract enough talent to replace attrition, which is high due to increasingly paltry employee numbers. And all in all, while the promotion-to-hiring ratio is good, there is too little hiring to keep employees from working 70-100 hour weeks. I am leaving, too, even if I was promised a promotion within months. I suppose the moral of the story is that balance is good, but hiring also must happen to replace attrition.

mr_toad 4y ago
> increasingly poultry employee numbers I think you mean paltry. Although I have seen employees who flap about, squawk a lot and shit all over everything, so perhaps poultry is apt.
- clnq 4y ago
  Oops! Thanks for the correction and a good laugh.
neilv 4y ago
70 hrs/wk is for a rare work emergency. 100 hrs/wk will send someone to the Emergency Room.
- clnq 4y ago
  Yes, it does generally lead to ER (particularly for stress symptoms being confused for something serious) now and then.
  - neilv 4y ago
    Stress can also cause serious permanent damage, not only transient symptoms that might be mistaken for something else. If I see a colleague who's too stressed, I'll impress upon everyone the importance of correcting that.

brnt 4y ago

It seems to me employers don't see employees as a (good!) target for investment anymore, the idea that you can build your workforce, but rather are obsessed with transactional labour: I have X currency, I want Y FTE of credential Z for it. Transactional attitudes begets itself.

dbish 4y ago

The confusing thing happening over the last 1-2 years (and in previous cycles) is that many current employees are also down significantly on their stock grants in public big tech. Employers seem to see this as ok, and that’s the risk they take when taking stock, yet they are willing to go and pay a new hire with an updated price that means they make far more than you. It incentivizes leaving and wouldn’t cost the employer anything to just re-up your pay to the original goal since they’ll have to pay it anyway to a new person and lose the ramp up time

dalyons 4y ago
I’ve been wondering about this myself. If you work in publicco tech, all their grants are priced in dollar equiv. So as you say, bouncing jobs right now should give you a ~50% equity boost, if you’re on a 4 year today at your current co. Surely though this is obvious & companies are doing top ups? Or, since they’re all entering hiring freezes / layoffs maybe they don’t can and want the attrition
duped 4y ago
In terms of number of shares or dollar amounts? Because tech has taken a massive slam in the last year in the markets. Employees should see that like a lot of investors do, which is a discount on blue chips. It changes the calculus a bit if you don't plan on executing on vest or holding after you do for tax reasons, which makes a lot of sense. But if you're considering a role at a big tech right now and plan to last a few years it's not necessarily a hit.
- dbish 4y ago
  Dollar amount. It’s a hit comparatively because anyone joining today would make 100s of thousands more for some roles and someone who took the hit over the last year can just go reset their stock elsewhere. Holding for tax reasons makes no sense for public companies. Vested shares count as standard income.

duxup 4y ago

Customer service/ even technical support seems to be a very little respected area in most companies. Trying to retain people they don’t respect already seems unlikely.

leducw 4y ago
It makes me quite sad to see how undervalued customer service and support is in a lot of the IT/tech world in general.

endisneigh 4y ago

I agree with the title and point of article but it’s not really possible. No company can consistently identify those who are good, pay them well, fend against competitors despite their rising expenses (remember paying people more?) and do all of these things while people leave anyway for reasons outside of their control (moving, bored etc), which results in you having to hire more anyway, stresses the before mentioned process (inevitably you will notice people who are paid less can perform as good or better than more paid employees). If I were in a position to implement things I’d simply get rid of raises all together and simple give people only stock and/or profit share. If they’re doing well the raise will come to them automatically. Of course this has perverse incentives in itself too.

dbish 4y ago
They can’t do it perfectly but they can try. My pov having been at a few big techs is they aren’t even trying.

mberning 4y ago

This is a microcosm of poor performance management. You need an effective way to get rid of bad hires, clear out dead wood, and retain your top contributors.

localhost 4y ago

When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with, they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network. A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen without ICs who know a lot of people throughout the company.

dilyevsky 4y ago
That’s WAI - lots of managers would rather call all the shots.
- localhost 4y ago
  I don't know what WAI means, but note that I said discovered above. There's a separate conversation to get that work funded and that's where the managers come into the picture. Managers don't discover the work - they decide whether to fund the work.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Works as Intended. > Managers don't discover the work I disagree. Have you never seen a manager hired from another place already come in with a bucket list they want to do bc “that’s how we done it at X”? That’s a classic. There are less nefarious examples of this ofc but ime managers absolutely do and even want to discover the work. Now whether they’re the right people to do it is entirely different question =)

xiaodai 4y ago

duh

animitronix 4y ago

We needed a study to tell us this?? Anyone who's tried to hire should understand this implicitly.

whatever1 4y ago

Why? Information spreading across companies with talent poaching sounds beneficial for the society

helf 4y ago

Ok, to actually add to this instead of just a one liner… My current employer is a prime example of this stupid mentality causing issues. They’ve gotten better about it but since I started little over two years ago they’ve had probably 60% turn over of full time team leader and higher staffers. Our poor VP spent the last 3 years arguing with our Japanese President and others about the need for retention policies as we have such a high staff turn over that it was/is costing us money in overtime etc. we were in a bit of a death spiral last year that we’ve luckily pulled out of but we lost so many people due to COVID and similar that we were working people mandatory 12 hour shifts with mandatory OT and kept having /more people/ quit. For obvious reasons. And then new hires wouldn’t last through their first paycheck. They had to up base pays and bite the bullet and hire a ton of people all at once to try and get shift times lower. It’s one of those things that makes me glad I’m IT. I’m a critical employee and they bend over backwards to accommodate me when I need it. I try to not abuse that though :) We are a tier 1 parts supplier for Honda and we operate damn near 24/7/365

deathanatos 4y ago
I really don't get these decisions. I presume they'd need to pay time and a half there; you might as well just hire more people and bump base pay 12.5%. Everyone is happier due to not being stressed out, and it's the same cost.

zac23or 4y ago

Prioritizing hiring over retention is the least bad thing a company does. Companies do terrible things, like: - Dissolve good teams. - Losing great employees for nothing - Prohibition of documenting procedures (Yes, I've worked on one of these) - Encouraging bullying behavior. - 50% of time lost in meetings. The explanation of all this is that... 99% of the companies where I worked the objective was not profit, they existed only for someone to demonstrate control over other people. Meetings is showing the power of "request a meeting". An employee asks for a raise? We don't give in to employees, etc. If you understand this, all the weird stuff makes sense.

lamontcg 4y ago

They should also stop building open office plans, as numerous studies have shown. I'd like to see a study which analyzed corporate management as a cult and looked at the irrational non-profit-motive based behaviors that you have to 'signal' in order to work up the ladder. Where decisions were more about peer approval than actually making the company better.

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Study? Just one? Come back when you have hundreds. Oh wait, you have hundreds? Well, come back when it costs less to retain than to turn over - Industry, probably

civilized 4y ago

One weird trick for retention: pay your valued employees the market rate for their talent level... even if they have made the mistake of staying at your company for more than two years.

eftychis 4y ago

I think an article trending earlier yesterday is a big point to strengthen this. Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320294] Especially in startups losing knowledge is a huge problem -- I claim -- and a fundamental management issue as productivity models and other resource management models (theories) do not account for memory. Who had someone left or themselves left only for X system to start dying in production? Or for a lot of info to have been lost because it existed on slack or on the conversation participants heads? Startups can simply not afford to lose some/most people. Best case that knowledge is at the hands of competition.

jrm4 4y ago

They needed a study over this? Duh. Most people learn the job on the job.