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The article ignores that "the market" works. Switching jobs, with new physical locations, new informal structures, new colleagues imposes a change cost on the
by knallfrosch 2y ago
The article ignores that "the market" works.
Switching jobs, with new physical locations, new informal structures, new colleagues imposes a change cost on the software engineer too. That's why a lot of people stay.
Additionally, paying every engineer the market rate wastes money on those that would have stayed anyway.
As a similar problem, countries that pay for babies find that 98% of their money is wasted on couples that have babies anyway. The Economist says:
"schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth"
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/why-paying-women-to-have-more-babies-wont-work https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/why-paying-wome...
Now that's a scale problem. Is one engineer staying really worth $10m? $1m? You'll pay way more than you think.
- ttyprintk 2y agoI had to think about your argument. So the underlying collapse in birth rates is actually among 19-year-old women who have chosen college and specifically because of low social mobility. Programs to help the marginal inconveniences of new parents don’t perform as well as directing that budget at social mobility. So let’s take a four-person company: marketing, HR, CEO, and engineer. Marketing, HR, and CEO share two beliefs: (1) if the engineer goes, the product will change. (2) no company has ever existed without marketing, HR and CEO. So, it’s not like they need a program parallel to these more-babies program; they just need to feel they could adapt to selling any variation of their product. Engineering has a different belief: imagine what we could do if we had another engineer slot in to tackle this backlog. That does look a little more like the more-babies program. PS> Article is https://archive.ph/nY2b1 https://archive.ph/nY2b1