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Resume-driven development; average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years and it disincentivizes quality. Plus its not like lives depend on it; if insta UI breaks for

Resume-driven development; average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years and it disincentivizes quality. Plus its not like lives depend on it; if insta UI breaks for a 30 seconds, who gives a f?

okdood64 3y ago
> average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years Can you direct me to the underlying data for this?
- __lbracket__ 3y ago
  Don't know how reliable this is: https://customers.ai/articles/employee-tenure-in-tech-companies https://customers.ai/articles/employee-tenure-in-tech-compan... But google around, this number is well known within the inustry.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    In exponentially growing companies average tenure will always be low even if the average person stays a long time, so those numbers only works for companies that doesn't grow or shrink. In the years I was at Google I only saw a few people leave in my and adjacent teams, if average was to leave after 1.5 years I should have churned through several generations but the people I worked with early were mostly there when I left but there were several times more people overall.
roncesvalles 3y ago
I think aspects of big tech employee evaluations are to blame: - competitive or zero-sum performance evaluations (aka stack ranking) - short evaluation windows (3 months or 6 months) - two consecutive bad evaluations get you terminated - KPI-driven evaluation: if you can't show numbers, you didn't do it This basically means: 1. Someone investing time in creating long-term value will always lose out to someone focused on short-term value and may actually get fired by this system. 2. Certain types of projects will never be worth doing in this incentive model. Quality improvements that can't be quantified are not worth doing. If it costs 10x more effort to quantify the impact of some work than actually doing it, that work will never get done. Any project that spans longer than the evaluation window (either to execute or to show results) is not worth doing. Small arbitrary quality improvements in different parts of the system are not worth doing.
- __lbracket__ 3y ago
  >Someone investing time in creating long-term value will always lose out to someone focused on short-term value and may actually get fired by this system. I want there to be a domain/vertical where this does not hold.
sangnoir 3y ago
On the flip-side: companies won't give substantial raises to current engineers, but are willing to pay new joiners more. There are also frequent re-orgs: if an engineer that enjoys their current work and team gets re-org'd, why shouldn't they change employers? Most aspects of their job are changing, so why not get a pay-bump for the inconvenience?

Resume-driven development; average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years and it disincentivizes quality. Plus its not like lives depend on it; if insta UI breaks for a 30 seconds, who gives a f?

okdood64 3y ago

> average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years Can you direct me to the underlying data for this?

__lbracket__ 3y ago
Don't know how reliable this is: https://customers.ai/articles/employee-tenure-in-tech-companies https://customers.ai/articles/employee-tenure-in-tech-compan... But google around, this number is well known within the inustry.
- Jensson 3y ago
  In exponentially growing companies average tenure will always be low even if the average person stays a long time, so those numbers only works for companies that doesn't grow or shrink. In the years I was at Google I only saw a few people leave in my and adjacent teams, if average was to leave after 1.5 years I should have churned through several generations but the people I worked with early were mostly there when I left but there were several times more people overall.

roncesvalles 3y ago

I think aspects of big tech employee evaluations are to blame: - competitive or zero-sum performance evaluations (aka stack ranking) - short evaluation windows (3 months or 6 months) - two consecutive bad evaluations get you terminated - KPI-driven evaluation: if you can't show numbers, you didn't do it This basically means: 1. Someone investing time in creating long-term value will always lose out to someone focused on short-term value and may actually get fired by this system. 2. Certain types of projects will never be worth doing in this incentive model. Quality improvements that can't be quantified are not worth doing. If it costs 10x more effort to quantify the impact of some work than actually doing it, that work will never get done. Any project that spans longer than the evaluation window (either to execute or to show results) is not worth doing. Small arbitrary quality improvements in different parts of the system are not worth doing.

__lbracket__ 3y ago
>Someone investing time in creating long-term value will always lose out to someone focused on short-term value and may actually get fired by this system. I want there to be a domain/vertical where this does not hold.

sangnoir 3y ago

On the flip-side: companies won't give substantial raises to current engineers, but are willing to pay new joiners more. There are also frequent re-orgs: if an engineer that enjoys their current work and team gets re-org'd, why shouldn't they change employers? Most aspects of their job are changing, so why not get a pay-bump for the inconvenience?