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Isn't that more of a reflection of the company and not the worker? Why would a worker stay when they can make significantly more at another company? If compan

Isn't that more of a reflection of the company and not the worker? Why would a worker stay when they can make significantly more at another company? If companies wanted to retain their workers you'd think they'd do a better job but it's been shown over and over and over again that if you want to earn a market rate wage you need to find a different job -finding a new employee is expensive, much more expensive than retaining that same employee but being penny wise and pound foolish seems to be how compensation works.

ghaff 4y ago
Like many systems, it's something of a self-perpetuating cycle--combined with an environment where many large tech companies can and will pay almost arbitrarily large amounts to hire people away from another company. I'm pretty sure that, if you're a mechanical engineer or a developer at General Motors, you aren't going to double your salary by going to Ford.
shagie 4y ago
The amount that a Big Tech company could afford to pay a new employee is often more than the cost for a regular company to hire a trained employee again. And hiring a trained worker is overall less expensive than hiring an untrained worker who takes a year to get up to speed and then leaves for greener pa$ture$. What's more, if you have a brain drain of experienced people leaving for Big Tech, hiring an untrained worker who is able to make messes that won't be cleaned up is sometimes even more expensive than the wages paid to the employee. The result of this is that after a few rounds of people leaving management is faced with two options. Either contract projects out as the standard approach rather than having software developers on staff or move to "we're only hiring experienced people with all of these qualifications" so that on the job training isn't necessary. While some will also say "raise your wages to be competitive with Big Tech" - that isn't always practical or able to be justified for budgeting based on the revenue of the company. The overall industry appears to be bimodal with "Big Tech" and "everyone else". Any employee who can move from "everyone else" to "Big Tech" can out compete any wage offered by "everyone else" (and in boom times this was a much easier prospect). With that consideration, it was often very poor ROI for any company in the "everyone else" portion of the industry to offer training.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I don't know if it's actually bimodal to the degree that, say, law is. But I have seen the dynamic where, if someone at a smaller company gets an offer from, say, Facebook, the response of the company is to basically shrug and move on.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Probably not to the degree that law is bimodal, but there's certainly a different distribution of salaries in the big tech and venture capital companies than there is in "everywhere else". If someone got an offer from Facebook and puts it on the table, there is no way to compete with that as anything other than another big tech company. There's no way that say... Jack's Links ( https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/JackLinksProteinSnacks/743999893565993-ecommerce-marketing-intern?trid=84611281-e75b-46d6-94d7-5e3fd3c1de5e https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/JackLinksProteinSnacks/7439... ) can compete with working at a big tech company. This also goes for interviewing. I've seen new grads (back in the boomier times) say "I have an offer with {big tech co}" part way through the interview and say "ok" and stop the process since there's really no point in going on - the smaller shop better uses their time interviewing other candidates that may accept.

ghaff 4y ago

Like many systems, it's something of a self-perpetuating cycle--combined with an environment where many large tech companies can and will pay almost arbitrarily large amounts to hire people away from another company. I'm pretty sure that, if you're a mechanical engineer or a developer at General Motors, you aren't going to double your salary by going to Ford.

shagie 4y ago

The amount that a Big Tech company could afford to pay a new employee is often more than the cost for a regular company to hire a trained employee again. And hiring a trained worker is overall less expensive than hiring an untrained worker who takes a year to get up to speed and then leaves for greener pa$ture$. What's more, if you have a brain drain of experienced people leaving for Big Tech, hiring an untrained worker who is able to make messes that won't be cleaned up is sometimes even more expensive than the wages paid to the employee. The result of this is that after a few rounds of people leaving management is faced with two options. Either contract projects out as the standard approach rather than having software developers on staff or move to "we're only hiring experienced people with all of these qualifications" so that on the job training isn't necessary. While some will also say "raise your wages to be competitive with Big Tech" - that isn't always practical or able to be justified for budgeting based on the revenue of the company. The overall industry appears to be bimodal with "Big Tech" and "everyone else". Any employee who can move from "everyone else" to "Big Tech" can out compete any wage offered by "everyone else" (and in boom times this was a much easier prospect). With that consideration, it was often very poor ROI for any company in the "everyone else" portion of the industry to offer training.

ghaff 4y ago
I don't know if it's actually bimodal to the degree that, say, law is. But I have seen the dynamic where, if someone at a smaller company gets an offer from, say, Facebook, the response of the company is to basically shrug and move on.
- shagie 4y ago
  Probably not to the degree that law is bimodal, but there's certainly a different distribution of salaries in the big tech and venture capital companies than there is in "everywhere else". If someone got an offer from Facebook and puts it on the table, there is no way to compete with that as anything other than another big tech company. There's no way that say... Jack's Links ( https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/JackLinksProteinSnacks/743999893565993-ecommerce-marketing-intern?trid=84611281-e75b-46d6-94d7-5e3fd3c1de5e https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/JackLinksProteinSnacks/7439... ) can compete with working at a big tech company. This also goes for interviewing. I've seen new grads (back in the boomier times) say "I have an offer with {big tech co}" part way through the interview and say "ok" and stop the process since there's really no point in going on - the smaller shop better uses their time interviewing other candidates that may accept.