Item — HN Reader

Are you saying you, as a manager, are running a group so poorly that you have enough churn to where retention makes up a large percentage what you work on day to day?

Or are you saying your company treats/pays employees so poorly that there is significant turnover throughout the organization? And instead of generally treating/paying employees better they rather have middle management spend a significant amount of their time discussing retention?

And you are choosing to highlight this as something IC's should appreciate that management has to deal with?

1 comments

You’re getting downvoted, it seems, but you raise a very real point: you need to have a high turnover, or rough span of control ratios, in order for this to be a common interrupt.

Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers… it’s a bit telling.

Anecdotally: I spent 6-7 years managing at various levels (manger/sr mgr/director) before going back to an IC role, and I had a single regrettable attrition (+2 non-regrettable) in that time.

> Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers…

I know this is an old saw because it’s usually true, but I’ve left companies where I had a good relationship with my manager because I lost confidence in leadership at some level above them.

Sometimes you can see the train wreck coming and it’s time to go.

I would point out that you still left because of a bad manager, just a higher level one.