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When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money. Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it. When that happens then the name of the game is getting a promotion in order to keep making more money. That creates a perverse incentive, and the result is political bullshit that is typically misaligned with the company's interests which further drives away your high performers.

End the perverse incentives. Pay your people well if they're doing a good job, regardless of how long they've been doing the same job or what their title is. Reward seniority and loyalty. Suddenly, you'll find that employee retention goes through the roof, and you don't have to worry about hiring new people all the time.

While I broadly agree with your point, rewarding seniority is at odds with rewarding people based on how good they are at their jobs, from the perspective of incentives. The two are not always correlated and this is often why some companies hire externally instead of promoting from within.

That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others instead of themselves.

Almost all of the companies I worked at hired senior positions from outside the company instead of promoting from within.

The other issue I ran into was being so good at the position I was in that I was "unpromotable". Got told that a lot as an IC. Was then told even though I was fully qualified for the promotion, I would not get it nor the accompanying salary.

The worst part is that after a point in your career there's no path to promotion just for doing your job really well. You are expected to always take on new roles and responsibilities, some of which may not be suited for your personality or interests, and the net result often is that you get promoted and make more money but your overall useful output decreases. I know so many amazing engineers who had to essentially give up writing code, prototyping and tinkering – stuff they were really passionate about – to advance to staff+ levels. Now their time is spent in an endless stream of meetings, and the entire organization is worse off because of it.
Someone is ought to make a game like factorio out of this: you manage workers with semi-predictable output, and have to pay them out of your semi-predictable profit. You can never lower anyone's salary, only fire someone, and that costs a fee (severance). There is outside pressure that forces workers to need more money - inflation - it's also semi-predictable, but it never goes down. My suspicion is that in a well modeled game like this, there's no steady-growth mode when everyone is happy, and the organisation always collapses, even under perfect management.
> Pay your people well if they're doing a good job

Comparing peoples performance objectively in a large organisation is essentially impossible. Only the people working closely with someone really have any idea, and even then they only see part of the picture.

100%. One counterexample (unfortunately the only one that comes to mind) is sales, where performance has an immediate positive cash & profit impact that is trivial to measure. Top salespeople can earn more than the CEO's of their companies.

In the backend of the org, this is harder to do, because the impact is hard to measure and comes to fruition later in the game.

One solution is to have small teams of engineers that own their companies - ie, millions of tiny startups. That way, brilliant contributions lead to large profits for the contributor.

But how engineers can be fairly compensated in large orgs, I'm not sure. This is a fundamentally hard problem. Removing the salary ranges might help.

Over the years i've had debates with co-workers when someone changes roles with less responsibly, or goes from managing people to not but increases their salary on if that is a "promotion"

My Position has always been "More Money, with less responsibility, is the best promotion one could ever get"

> When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money.

Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases).

What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you.

Most people want confirmation of their own beliefs about themselves -- they want the company/boss/coworkers to be showing respect and show that they value your work. People want to see that their work is accomplishing something and a lot of people can go to great lengths to lie to themselves that this is the case. And a lot of people also want progress, they want to see themselves doing new things, getting more responsibility, advancing their careers.

I hired and said goodbye to A LOT of software developers. And I do understand that it is difficult to get an honest, unbiased response when you ask them for the reasons for their decisions to leave.

But at the same time you get to experience trying to get people to stay and seeing what works and what does not. Giving raises works relatively rarely -- it only seems to delay. They are already discontent with their job and the higher salary only functions as a sort of gold handcuffs. After quarter century of doing this I literally am still to see a situation when a developer is offered a higher salary and suddenly becomes enthusiastic about their job to have a long fruitful career.

So what does work? Trying to find what causes them to be discontent in the first place and trying to address it. Do they feel they worked for too long in one project? Are they bored intellectually? Are they not getting along with their current boss? Changing the project without any raise is in my experience one of highest success rate things you can do in this situation. That success rate may not be very high (people tend to leave anyway) but at least I have a lot of good stories of people who changed teams and things clicked for them and they liked their new team. The only things that worked better in the past are changing the project WITH upgrade to the salary to reflect the market, and, for the ultimate highest employee-keeping potential - promotion to manager.

If people really did care mostly only about money, upping their salary should have greater success rate than moving them to another team and yet it is the opposite.

Now... this all assumes software developers and we know software developers are not exactly starving. If you are earning very little compared to your needs or when those needs grow suddenly people tend to really start paying way more attention to just monetary compensation.

Mostly true but these days we have the case where regardless of capability it is sadly necessary to put a Ln person to do an Ln's job not Ln+k's job (for political reasons). This has the perverse effect of someone at Ln being punished for doing a job above their level if they are not also doing their own job. What this means is you can only get promoted if you are doing the equivalent of two levels of work at a given time but if you were hired from elsewhere you only need to do the target level job.
Too many times in my career have I seen an employer lose an employee, who has a ton of institutional knowledge and performs adequately or even excellently, only to replace them them with someone that ends up costing much more money, and then takes a lot of time to get up to speed (which also slows the folks who help get them up to speed).

It is like they haven't taken the time to even make a rudimentary calculation on the costs involved in keeping the employee versus replacing them.

The hazard of retention is creating dependency. Dependency means, not just high bus factor, but opening yourself (the business) up to being vulnerable to another person's superior negotiation position. Then CEOs/boardmembers would have to spread their wealth rather than hoarding it all for themselves. Without a way to force CEO/boardmembers to spread their wealth (unions), I think we can expect companies to do what is in their best interest, maintaining a monopoly on power by ensuring no dependencies.
The weird thing is, if you, as an employee start to show feint signs of wanting to leave, e.g. by complaining a lot to colleagues, or having an upset look on one's face, usually it is not acted upon, or even not picked up by any manager. If on the other hand you make it very clear that you are unhappy or that you might want to leave, it is understood as you are going to leave anyway, so they don't bother fixing any of the things that you have a problem with. At least that is what I experienced a few times. Instead they start to act as if you don't belong to the team anymore or give you boring or strictly defined tasks. So no wonder, you leave and they find some other employee, in which co-workers need to invest time and effort during a period of about half a year to get them up to speed. Rinse and repeat.
When I was at a FAANG, it felt like they had this down to a science. Promotions every 2-3 years. Raises once a year, a few spot bonuses throughout the year, ad hoc equity grants. People still quit of course, but looking back it felt very retention focused and scientific.
Agreed - new hires always get the current market rate, which always higher than what existing employees are paid.

Also on the flip side, if you've been in a role longer than say, 4 years, you should interview at other companies. You're probably getting underpaid. (Even if you've gotten a promotion). You don't have to jump ship, just see what's available.

I’m waiting for recruitment departments for big companies to learn about moneyball.

Currently the approach is “well we lost someone with 10 years of experience _at our company_ I guess we’ll replace them with some with 10 years of experience elsewhere. Problem solved!”

But really, to bring the moneyball analogy, the guy who left was hitting .380, while the guy you brought in will maybe be a .300 hitter a few years from now once he ramps up closer to the level of the .380 hitter.

So what recruitment should be doing is figuring out how many individual people they actually need to bring in to replace their .380 hitter. That calculation should also inform how much they’re will to incentivize the .380 hitter to stay.

Thank you for bearing with my drawn-out analogy!

Prioritizing hiring over retention is the least bad thing a company does. Companies do terrible things, like:

- Dissolve good teams.

- Losing great employees for nothing

- Prohibition of documenting procedures (Yes, I've worked on one of these)

- Encouraging bullying behavior.

- 50% of time lost in meetings.

The explanation of all this is that... 99% of the companies where I worked the objective was not profit, they existed only for someone to demonstrate control over other people. Meetings is showing the power of "request a meeting". An employee asks for a raise? We don't give in to employees, etc.

If you understand this, all the weird stuff makes sense.

When a senior person walks out the door, they also take their network with them. Whoever the company replaces that person with, they are not going to have the same (or if external any) network. A lot of interesting and important work at large companies gets discovered by ICs (Individual Contributors) with solid networks talking to other ICs in other teams. That work won't happen without ICs who know a lot of people throughout the company.
I work for a tech company that promotes internally quite well in recent years. But they also only want to hire senior, principal and lead level engineers to develop a mature workforce. Unfortunately, they fail to attract enough talent to replace attrition, which is high due to increasingly paltry employee numbers. And all in all, while the promotion-to-hiring ratio is good, there is too little hiring to keep employees from working 70-100 hour weeks. I am leaving, too, even if I was promised a promotion within months. I suppose the moral of the story is that balance is good, but hiring also must happen to replace attrition.
Ok, to actually add to this instead of just a one liner…

My current employer is a prime example of this stupid mentality causing issues.

They’ve gotten better about it but since I started little over two years ago they’ve had probably 60% turn over of full time team leader and higher staffers. Our poor VP spent the last 3 years arguing with our Japanese President and others about the need for retention policies as we have such a high staff turn over that it was/is costing us money in overtime etc. we were in a bit of a death spiral last year that we’ve luckily pulled out of but we lost so many people due to COVID and similar that we were working people mandatory 12 hour shifts with mandatory OT and kept having /more people/ quit. For obvious reasons. And then new hires wouldn’t last through their first paycheck.

They had to up base pays and bite the bullet and hire a ton of people all at once to try and get shift times lower.

It’s one of those things that makes me glad I’m IT. I’m a critical employee and they bend over backwards to accommodate me when I need it. I try to not abuse that though :)

We are a tier 1 parts supplier for Honda and we operate damn near 24/7/365

This is definitely the opposite of what most of my employers have done. Gotten denied raises countless times which has forced me to find new employment to advance my career while they are 100% focused on hiring new talent. Lots of turnover which cost the companies a tremendous amount of time constantly bringing new hires up to speed.
Losing institutional knowledge is a b*tch. It costs more to get new people up to speed in terms of time and productivity lost, than to just retain people who already have the institutional knowledge.
Here is the MIT Technology Review report the article is referencing but doesn't bother to actually link to:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059470/customer...

This goes x1000 for knowledge work. Great knowledge workers build this amazing model of what is going in in the product they work on in their head that walks out the door with them. We can't prevent people from progressing their career by going elsewhere, but we sure as hell can focus on not giving them a reason to leave.
Yes they should. They should also prioritize ops over sales, and yet they don't.

After 11 years in Enterprise IT it's been my impression that we are very short sighted. We give everything to our sales and they sell everything between heaven and earth without a thought on how we can deliver it. And once the contract is signed, no effort is made to deliver or manage, just move on to the next big contract signing.

So just as they prioritize hiring and ignore retention, they also prioritize contract signing and ignore lifecycle management. It's the same short sighted thinking in another area.

The confusing thing happening over the last 1-2 years (and in previous cycles) is that many current employees are also down significantly on their stock grants in public big tech. Employers seem to see this as ok, and that’s the risk they take when taking stock, yet they are willing to go and pay a new hire with an updated price that means they make far more than you. It incentivizes leaving and wouldn’t cost the employer anything to just re-up your pay to the original goal since they’ll have to pay it anyway to a new person and lose the ramp up time
Customer service/ even technical support seems to be a very little respected area in most companies.

Trying to retain people they don’t respect already seems unlikely.

I don't think it's realistic (but I wish it were). An example from a Western European country of what retention should look like from my point of view:

Senior software engineer (10 years of exp.) joins company X. Year salary: 80K EUR. This salary is not exclusive of "tier-1 top companies"(but let's not start a discussion about how low or high this number is, please)

- After 1 year. Good performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 92K EUR

- After 2 years. Great performance, everyone is happy. Raise of 15%. New salary = 105800 EUR... now this salary is starting to look unrealistic

- After 3 years. Great performance, he's the de-facto tech lead of the team. Raise of 15%. New salary = 121670 EUR. Now this is salary is rare for for non-tier 1 companies

At this point the senior engineer considers leaving because in year 4, it's impossible he'll get a 15% raise again (that would make around 140K EUR, and company X is not Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft). So, he switches companies. Company hires a new senior software engineer for 90K EUR. The cycle starts again.

Study? Just one? Come back when you have hundreds. Oh wait, you have hundreds? Well, come back when it costs less to retain than to turn over - Industry, probably
I agree with the title and point of article but it’s not really possible. No company can consistently identify those who are good, pay them well, fend against competitors despite their rising expenses (remember paying people more?) and do all of these things while people leave anyway for reasons outside of their control (moving, bored etc), which results in you having to hire more anyway, stresses the before mentioned process (inevitably you will notice people who are paid less can perform as good or better than more paid employees).

If I were in a position to implement things I’d simply get rid of raises all together and simple give people only stock and/or profit share. If they’re doing well the raise will come to them automatically. Of course this has perverse incentives in itself too.

I think an article trending earlier yesterday is a big point to strengthen this.

Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320294]

Especially in startups losing knowledge is a huge problem -- I claim -- and a fundamental management issue as productivity models and other resource management models (theories) do not account for memory.

Who had someone left or themselves left only for X system to start dying in production? Or for a lot of info to have been lost because it existed on slack or on the conversation participants heads?

Startups can simply not afford to lose some/most people. Best case that knowledge is at the hands of competition.

It seems to me employers don't see employees as a (good!) target for investment anymore, the idea that you can build your workforce, but rather are obsessed with transactional labour: I have X currency, I want Y FTE of credential Z for it.

Transactional attitudes begets itself.

There is a saying that in any organization, there are people doing the job, and there are people keeping the organization (admin). In the long run, the organization is left with the admin. [0]

In terms of compensation and hiring, commonly the package is defined by HR while the performance is reviewed by your team manager. There are even places where the criteria of evaluation is defined by HR.

That's also why I'm very optimistic about start-ups. Company can never dominate a market forever. And the end of the day, all companies implode

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158

The article talks about employees in general. A lot of us are SWEs or adjacent. Software has a very short development cycle compared to other fields.
Whom you retain (or might want to retain) is a function of whom you hire. Having just finished a job search it's amazing how bad many outfits are at hiring, most it seems can't read CVs. And I'm the one who needs to have attention to details?

I have a phrase that sums up the process:

How you hire is whom you hire.

Put another way, if recruiting / hiring is off target, that's only going to magnify going forward.

Amazon hit this in a big way in their warehouse operations.[1] Their turnover is so high that they ran out of suckers willing to work at Amazon.

[1]https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...

Margaret Thatcher (in)famously said that there was no such thing as society. By that she meant that, actually the only thing out there is individuals looking after their own self-interests.

Well, it is the same with companies.

In both case this leads to suboptimal results at 'system level' (a well-known problem in system optimisation).

Why? Information spreading across companies with talent poaching sounds beneficial for the society
One weird trick for retention: pay your valued employees the market rate for their talent level... even if they have made the mistake of staying at your company for more than two years.
This article is incredibly barebones, there's almost zero actual content here, just some handwaving about studies and surveys that aren't even linked to.
This is a microcosm of poor performance management. You need an effective way to get rid of bad hires, clear out dead wood, and retain your top contributors.
Pay people well.
We needed a study to tell us this?? Anyone who's tried to hire should understand this implicitly.
This will make employees uncompetitive and shift more power to employers.
They needed a study over this?

Duh. Most people learn the job on the job.

"No Shit".