Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/43409/dealing-with-engineers-that-frequently-leave-their-jobs

by lx • 14 years ago

53 70 14 years ago

programmers.stackexchange.com

Andaith• 14 years ago

I recently read on HN about how Stack Overflow is being taken over by the editors and that questions are being closed all too often. Is this an example of that?

"this might cause debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion." is a bad set of reasons to close a question. Surely that's the desired result? If people start behaving like children, close the question, but until then, let the discussion grow...

I think the question is relevant for programmers though. I'd be leery of joining a company with such high turnover.

antidoh4• 14 years ago

It's really the most bizarre thing. They built a site with affordances for discussion (although the mods might call them attractive nuisances). It looks every bit like a discussion site.

The users clearly want to have discussions, and not just factual Q&A.

And yet when you use these affordances to engage with like minded people, you get shut down. It's become a game with myself when I go to an SO page to guess whether it's been shut down, and the result is often a derisive mental "yup."

And for the record, I prefer a rich discussion to an inferior imitation of wikipedia.

davidlumley• 14 years ago

The most confusing thing for me, is that this _isn't_ Stack Overflow - it's Programmers. While SO is meant to have objectively correct answers, and that's why they are so quick to close threads, Programmers is meant to be more open and allow more general questions.

intellection• 14 years ago

/ users clearly want to have discussions, and not just factual Q&A.

Equally, Quora users clearly crave questions and discussion, but Quora moderation/admins police grammar, content and direction so close people can't type free.

It feels hard to think. It feels hard to question.

Remember kids fight to feel free and talk free, in grown-up good-rooms of adults saying we need talk more appropriate and legal?

Little mind is given to little minds, and big minds in hiding.

What do you do, if someone else networked high tells you to change your mind, online?

Feels really hard typing free thoughts, stacked with questionable questions questioning questions.

antidoh4• 14 years ago

> I'd be leery of joining a company with such high turnover.

But how do you find out if turnover is high? Just ask, I suppose, but a manager is going to try to downplay it, since he's selling the company to you. Hit or miss whether workers will be truthful about it, between wanting to be team players and not telling tales out of school.

I'm leaving a place with high turnover now. I had no idea. Although I could have entertained some suspicion when my agency told me how much they love this place; churn is lucrative for some people.

mtoddh• 14 years ago

But how do you find out if turnover is high?

It would be interesting if you could measure this with LinkedIn - as in looking at the profiles of all developers who worked for company X and determine how long they stayed on average. Of course it would rely on people actively updating their profiles. But if you could it would be interesting to see how much high turnover at a company correlated with bad reviews for said company on sites like Glassdoor.

potatolicious2• 14 years ago

> "Just ask, I suppose, but a manager is going to try to downplay it"

And it will be fairly evident when he does. A place with low turnover would be one where the manager can confidently look you in the eye and declare he has low turnover.

It is rare for hiring managers to be effective bald-faced liars (HR on the other hand suffers from no such weakness), so they will try to dodge the question instead. Dodgy hiring managers is pretty much the signal for "run for the hills".

eru2• 14 years ago

Don't ask directly about turnover. Ask about average time people stay there. (Depending on your formulation of the question, you give them an opportunity to brag about how much they are growing and thus having new-ish people.)

smartial_arts• 14 years ago

I remember asking once what should I do with my career, provided that I somehow feel that I reached the end of it.

Guess what happened to that topic. Likely quora was more open-minded in that regard (although not necessarily heaps more helpful, but I digress).

pungoyal• 14 years ago

i think the title of this question ought to be - Dealing with a workplace where engineers frequently leave for other opportunities.

therealarmen• 14 years ago

An interesting question on a relevant topic? Let's close it. Thanks, SO mods.

eckyptang• 14 years ago

Yes it's annoying. Perhaps there needs to be another alternative on the web which actually values users. People with useful information don't bother with it any more.

Its also incredibly fragmented - its impossible to pick the right instance for a question without getting in trouble.

its a proper power struggle.

jwarzech• 14 years ago

I think thats why Quora is doing as well as it is. At first I didn't get how they were differentiating but I find myself going there more and more for hight quality answers from people who know what they are talking about.

gizzlon3• 14 years ago

It's right there in the closing message:

We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion

Seems to be according to the SO "rules".. no?

Edit: davidlumley points out that this is not SO, and he might have a point.. Anyway, I don't think ppl should be mad at SO for not being what they expect or want it to be.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

There are already far too many answers to the question--more wouldn't really help anything. Any new answers--even really good ones--would just get lost in the noise.

Apart from posting answers, there really isn't much else restricted by the question's being closed. I really think it is not a big deal.

yrizos3• 14 years ago

And a few deleted ones. "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." is one of them (yeap, just that), the whole thread was turning to crap. Closing is only meant to prevent further answers, and this one was deteriorating fast.

billswift• 14 years ago

>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

- - Jerry E Pournelle

Any large enough organization tends towards bureaucracy, and the tendency is even stronger on the Web, where direct person-to-person interaction is more limited. And the evolution to "iron law" conditions tends to be faster there also, once the bureaucratic (rule-following and rule-enforcing) mindset is formed. Wikipedia, Google, and Amazon are other examples, they have all been getting worse to use over the last few years. Web-based organizations probably need to remain smaller than similar real-world organizations, if they want to avoid the effect.

pc86• 14 years ago

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

megablast• 14 years ago

Maybe http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ is a better place for this sort of question.

bunderbunder4• 14 years ago

It's a sad day for nerds everywhere when we have to start thinking of Reddit as a better place than Stack Exchange to ask this sort of question.

k3n4• 14 years ago

Well, it wasn't a _programming_ question.

There's an untold number of other industries which face this same problem.

Dystopian• 14 years ago

Back to the topic - (not SO) - I'd agree with some of the other commenters on SO that high-turnover isn't the engineers' fault; it's obviously a management issue.

Most engineers that I've worked with would trade a good work environment & office culture for more pay / "room to advance" any day.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

Yep, if it's happening many times, it can't be blamed on the individuals. There's definitely a tendency among managers to do this though instead of looking at oneself in the mirror and assessing any shortcomings.

jt2190• 14 years ago

Yes. In addition, I wonder who in that organization benefits from the high-turnover of engineers. For example, in the question, the manager's boss had a theory that three new engineers were worth one seasoned one. Perhaps all of the seasoned engineers leaving is supporting his point, in a bizarre way.

BadassFractal2• 14 years ago

I've had more than one question closed for being too close to a discussion on Programmers. It's very tiresome.

What's a good alternative for asking meaningful questions and having a quality discussion with people who have words of wisdom to spare? Quora? Reddit? HN?

antidoh4• 14 years ago

I like HN best, some of the subreddits second.

I just can't come to like Quora, which is odd because it seems exactly the sort of thing I'd like. The interface is either confusing to me, or I think of it in a way that conflicts with its reality.

BadassFractal2• 14 years ago

The problem with HN is that threads in the New section can get ignored too easily. In my exprience, 4/5 posts I make are never answered.

tyrmored• 14 years ago

http://leisuretown.com/library/qac/8.jpg

davvid• 14 years ago

The original comic is quite entertaining (if you don't mind silly/inappropriate humor). It's called "QA Confidential", and tells the story of how to get a job in QA and milk it for all it's worth. It was written during the heyday of the dot-com boom and nicely captured some of its irrational exuberance.

http://leisuretown.com/library/qac/

grueful• 14 years ago

This is tangent to the idea of a "truck number" - the number of people who can be hit by a truck before your org is endangered.

Orgs with a low truck number really shouldn't be offering significantly below-market compensation to critical staff in high-demand professions.

Peroni• 14 years ago

Actual response to the original question:

Do some research. It's surprisingly easy to find out what the rate of attrition is with your competitors. If the competition have a noticeably lower rate of attrition then it's time for some introspection.

Exit interviews are drastically underrated. Done right they can reveal a huge amount about why your attrition is higher than most.

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

"done right".

Except most people will say "skip them" or "don't say anything bad". I've had this advice from a few people, and there was an HN thread some time back suggesting the same things. "Don't burn any bridges by badmouthing anyone in an exit interview", etc. Certainly there's a difference between "being honest" and "badmouthing", but when that info reaches certain ears, the distinction may be lost. For people that care about having good references, a whitewashed exit interview seems the easiest thing to do (I don't think it's the correct thing to do, but it seems that's a common enough thought process).

chrisbennet• 14 years ago

The question title should have been: "Dealing with management that drives off our engineers"

rorrr2• 14 years ago

I was offered raises at only one company, ever. At every other company I had to ask for them after positive annual reviews, and I mostly got what I asked for.

If you look at the amount of raise, it's usually ridiculously small, maybe 5-10%. When I switch jobs, my salary has grown 30-40% pretty much every time.

And that I never understood. When I leave, you have to spend money hiring a good developer, you have to spend money training him, all while possibly losing money because the work is not being done.

vetler• 14 years ago

Someone once told me that the easiest way to get a higher salary will always be to get a new job, and I believe this to be true - either your salary at your new job will be higher, or your current employer will increase your salary to keep you since you have another job offer.

praptak• 14 years ago

> ... or your current employer will increase your salary to keep you since you have another job offer.

Accepting a counter offer is almost never a good decision.

The old employer is probably only buying time before replacing you. Even if this is not the case: You stay at a company that only pays you fair money when you threaten to leave. You look disloyal to the old company (see point 1, even if not now you might get fired later) and unreliable to the new one. It also perpetuates the "no raises, we'll just make a counteroffer if necessary" mindset which probably made you seek other job in the first place.

simonh3• 14 years ago

Ok, but with 'only' a 15% raise every year, your salary would quadruple every 10 years. That's not really a normal career trajectory.

Pay growth as a percentage tends to be higher for talented youngsters, but then again a lot of the value in an older engineer comes from experience, which often means experience in different work environments.

streptomycin• 14 years ago

If talented youngsters expected their company to be around in 40 years and still want them, after 15% raises every year (or even 10%), more would stay at one company. But there's no long-term loyalty on either end, for better or worse. So you have to get money while you can.

JoeAltmaier2• 14 years ago

Why not? Its not the same engineer expecting cost-of-living increases. Its an ever-more-experienced engineer growing from newbie to architect. Quadrupling every 10 years seems about right to me.

Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

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