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When you start on a team, you produce negative value. On day one, you've already cost the company a significant amount just in recruiting, signing bonuses, and
by 13of40 3y ago
When you start on a team, you produce negative value. On day one, you've already cost the company a significant amount just in recruiting, signing bonuses, and randomizing the other engineers who had to interview people for your position. Where I work, I would guess the break-even point is about six months to a year, so there's a good chance someone who leaves after like 1.5 years is still a net loss.
Maybe it's a good way to game the system, but don't expect the system to cheer for it. Also, if you run across someone who worked at a place for a year and they claim they completely rewrote and revolutionized a legacy system, blah, blah, etc. you should take that with a grain of salt, because of course that's what they would say. They're not going to tell you how they hustled out the door a month before the performance discussions because they knew the hammer was coming down.
- devnullbrain 3y agoEmpirically, companies are very bad at evaluating this cost. If they weren't, upwardly-mobile job hoppers wouldn't exist because the previous company where they generate positive value would have increased their salary over the salary they could get elsewhere. In practice we see that the companies are reluctant to give raises, hiring costs are considered capex, and there are inefficiencies in salaries because frictions cause employees to stay in roles that are not financially optimal, meaning there's a premium to accepting the risk of moving jobs.
- sam0x17 3y agoYeah, if companies recognized this properly, they would incentivize employees to stay, and would avoid things like layoffs at all costs. Google used to do this in the early days when they believed their #1 resource was human capital. Then the suits came in...