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Suppose you've got an average, B-grade engineer who has been doing this job for 3 years. They should have all the technical knowledge tuned to do this job, conn

Suppose you've got an average, B-grade engineer who has been doing this job for 3 years. They should have all the technical knowledge tuned to do this job, connections to all the right people they need to work with, and all kinds of institutional memory about why everything is the way it is. You let that person go, and bring in an objectively better, A-grade worker. It's going to take months to find that person, more months to train them, and still more time before they're fully operational the way the last employee was. And you still have risks, that they're really a C but they talked a good game in the interview. Or they're not going to be satisfied doing this job for long. Or they're not even going to take the offer when you make it. And yet, in my experience the average company won't try very hard to keep people. They'll give them mediocre raises for far less than they'd be willing to hire someone into that position for, and do very little otherwise to try to keep them happy until they have one foot out the door. I don't get it, it doesn't make sense from the coldest and most calculating perspective I can give it, but with some notable exceptions it seems that's just how it works.

johnnyanmac 4y ago
Yup. Pension is dead and no company on the high up business ends sees the value in labor, even if the people who "survive" the layoffs feel the most heat. They'd rather have a revolving door of new people they give inflation raises to than offer to keep valuable talent and in-knowledge. Because if one person gets a 30% promotion I guess that means EVERYONE will get one, and that's not good for a coporation.
Marsymars 4y ago
This really resonates with me. I had a solid team of what you’d call B-grade engineers for years, but for various reasons most of the team left over the past couple years and were replaced with C’s. Feature velocity has mostly ground to a halt under the mountain of technical debt that the B-team accumulated. I’ve made my displeasure known, but my company doesn’t seem to have any real interest in keeping me.
rossdavidh 4y ago
Yes, exactly, employees may not actually be like virtual servers that you can spin up and shut down at will, but some employers will think of them that way.
- Cheezewheel 4y ago
  >but some employers will think of them that way Employers quite clearly already think that way.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Some employers? That seems to be the norm from what I've seen. Team leaders usually know full well how hard it is to find good new people and get them trained, just like the previous comments here say, but somehow upper management never seems to understand this at all. I guess they think that's lower-level management's and HR's problem to solve.

johnnyanmac 4y ago

Yup. Pension is dead and no company on the high up business ends sees the value in labor, even if the people who "survive" the layoffs feel the most heat. They'd rather have a revolving door of new people they give inflation raises to than offer to keep valuable talent and in-knowledge. Because if one person gets a 30% promotion I guess that means EVERYONE will get one, and that's not good for a coporation.

Marsymars 4y ago

This really resonates with me. I had a solid team of what you’d call B-grade engineers for years, but for various reasons most of the team left over the past couple years and were replaced with C’s. Feature velocity has mostly ground to a halt under the mountain of technical debt that the B-team accumulated. I’ve made my displeasure known, but my company doesn’t seem to have any real interest in keeping me.

rossdavidh 4y ago

Yes, exactly, employees may not actually be like virtual servers that you can spin up and shut down at will, but some employers will think of them that way.

Cheezewheel 4y ago
>but some employers will think of them that way Employers quite clearly already think that way.
midoridensha 4y ago
Some employers? That seems to be the norm from what I've seen. Team leaders usually know full well how hard it is to find good new people and get them trained, just like the previous comments here say, but somehow upper management never seems to understand this at all. I guess they think that's lower-level management's and HR's problem to solve.