This article implicitly assumes that the employee wanted to be in the company for life, at least initially. Which is strange, given the average life-span of a contemporary company, software or otherwise. Still, maybe if the company asks new prospects during their job interviews whether they want to stay in it forever, and rejects those who say no, this may be applicable. Otherwise, it seems a bit like an inflated sense of self importance.
You see, your company is probably not SpaceX, nor NASA. It's not pushing the frontiers of what's possible, or helping make the world a better place. That iPhone-app-cranking shop is just a marketing gig, nothing important on the face of this planet. And many people, many employees, have dreams. Or seek fulfillment, which they may not find in shipping out yet another webapp. They are in your company because it's fun to work on the problems it has - and it pays well - but that's not the extent of their dreams. Especially in this industry, where a lot of people were originally hobbyist programmers, which means tech is for them a part of life, a part of themselves, and not an otherwise uninteresting money-making skill set.
Happy people may very well leave their jobs, even if they love them, because it's unlikely that their life goals are perfectly aligned with company goals.
And Rands mentions this in the article. There's a weighted list of criteria you keep in the back of your head (am I fairly compensated? Is the company stable?) and you constantly reevaluate them.
Rands lists the major ones, but there can be dozens of others. I personally call them "red flags" and once I see enough, it's resume time. I've tuned my own threshold pretty well and walked away from some perfectly good jobs and companies, only to see them implode in my rear-view mirror a year or two later.
My current employer, who has treated me well to date, just went back on a promise not to move the factory to Mexico. At the announcement they promised not to relocate Engineering. I updated my resume over the holiday break.
I don't think the article assumes people enter a job intending to stay there for life. Rather, it assumes thst people will stay at a job so long as it meets their criteria for happy employment. The article makes a subtle point, which is that an employee will treat those criteria as absolute or fixed quantities until something -- an action, a slight, a struggle, or some other demoralizing event -- causes him to consciously reevaluate his criteria. At that point, the criteria become relative -- that is to say, relative measures of the current job vis-a-vis any perceived alternatives.
The only implicit assumption in the author's thesis is that people value stability and are generally content with the status quo until it is challenged. I'm not sure this applies to all people, though I'm willing to consider the possibility that it applies to most. And if not most, then certainly many.
All of that said, your point about changing life goals is a great one. People definitely leave jobs for reasons beyond those articulated in this article. Rands' thesis is not completely encapsulating. But it doesn't need to be complete in order to be compelling. So long as what he's saying provides a decent, rough framework for managers and leaders to keep in mind -- which I'm interpreting as his intent here -- then it's still valuable.
If I'm insanely fortunate I will have 100 reasonably healthy years on this planet. Spending 3-4% of my life at any one company is a lot if you ask me, no matter how much I like it there. The bottom line for a lot of people on HN is that they don't have to if they don't want to. And like you say, most companies are not SpaceX. While you can certainly still grow and crush it after 2-3 years, chances are that you can grow and crush it that much more if you uproot and start over somewhere else.
I think with a large, diverse (in terms of jobs possible to do) company that's possible. Someplace like Google, you could move teams every few years and learn new skills, do interesting work. (Assuming you enjoyed working for Google).
Conversely, if I had a job that paid well enough I knew I could retire healthy and happy, and in the meantime I didn't actively dislike it, I could tolerate a little monotony.
Unfortunately, most jobs couple monotony with long hours and think money will make up for it. This becomes a viscous cycle - the few hours you have to yourself are not a state where you are prepared to go out and learn new concepts, so you get locked into moving up the career ladder to get higher pay, rather than switching careers.
To me this is an attempt to look past the BS of generic reasons given while quitting. What happened a year prior to lead to that moment? Regardless if it's 1 or 20 years into the employment.
If what you said was the absolute case nobody would quit unless they were going to a job that is more meaningful to them in relation to their life goals, which happens to a degree but I believe is sill in a minority. Reality is much less idealistic and the 10 smaller reasons listed in the post can absolutely lead to shields down.
Even if you're at SpaceX you may treat it as "paying the dues" or apprenticeship period of your life until you can go off and have more impact somewhere else.
Wouldn't that almost by definition make then unhappy? If your job isn't helping your fulfill your life goals then at some point it seems like that conflict would make you unhappy.
That said, there are 3 companies I've worked at I would have stayed at 2-3x as long if I'd been happier at them where in this particular instance happiness = having more fun at work and building stronger/closer relationships with my co-workers.
nobody (should?) looks for satisfaction at work. that's the marketing human resources and PR feed you so you spend more time at work.
work is a means to sustenance. you help someone make a lot of money (either exploring space or showing ads in a plagiarized fart app) for a paycheck and then you use that money to sponsor your life style.
Happy people leave jobs they love all the time. Not everyone is an in-demand tech genius with no life outside their career. Not everyone has a buddy at another company who can promise a job. People leave jobs they love every day not because they want to, but because they have to.
Real people have real families. Kids grow. Parents age. Sisters have car accidents. Dogs rip their ACLs. At any moment any realworld person may have to walk away from the job they love to accommodate the needs of a family member. Maybe they need to go to a higher-paying job (if they are lucky) but more realistically they need a job at a different location or time so they can spend more time dealing with things totally outside the job.
Real people have real bodies. They get sick. They have heart attacks. They get devastating news from doctors. They need to spend less time at the keyboard and more time at the gym. The job you love, that you are willing to spend 24/7 working to improve, is often the job that is killing you.
Want to keep employees onboard? They want two things more than anything else: Either more money, fewer hours for the same money, or some balance between the two. That's what keeps people from leaving. It allows flexibility when that day comes that they would otherwise have to walk. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
I agree 100% on your point about flexibility. I personally value three things : fair compensation (both because I know I'm good and because I don't like to let people make a number on me), the company's mission and it's flexibility.
The first two are obvious. The way I see the third one is that I prefer when a company respects my life, value entrepreneurial mindsets, and will let me accommodate the evolution of my personal projects over time. Too many companies want to own your life and influence your lifestyle. They have a one-sided approach to employment.
I once met a different kind of employer. I told him I was passionate about something and left my job a few months before to start a startup that was at the time already on the market. He asked me if I wanted to work part-time of full-time, if I wanted to be on the payroll or if I'd preferred to invoice the company, and if I wanted to work from home or to commute.
This is the sort of company one wouldn't leave for sure, and it really triggers a deep sense of loyalty. Respect and flexibility are the key things.
I'm calling this the "It's not all about you" principle - the "you" being a person's employer. The OP article reads as if jobs are all about the employer, when there's also the employee's life that overrides any and all things that the employer has to offer.
I'd say more money or fewer hours will keep people onboard but only despite other problems. The other problems will still persist and they will adapt to the new lifestyle of more time/money they will take it for granted, but the niggling desires will still be there pushing them to another job.
"Either more money, fewer hours for the same money, or some balance between the two."
You're probably right that this probably how most people are motivated. I think the OP is talking about high-performing people at technology companies, who aren't mostly motivated by short-term pay rate or leisure time. They tend to be the best people precisely because they have more drive to succeed in the long-term than collect the best near-term paycheck or maximize leisure time. The best people in these companies could make more money for less work right now-- if they wanted to.
I'm not actually saying that's always (or even usually) a good thing-- the most common deathbed regret is working too much.
"When that mail arrived gently asking you about coffee, you didn’t answer the way you answered the prior five similar mails with a brief, “Really happy here. Let’s get a drink some time!” You think you thought Hmmm… what the hell. It can’t hurt. What you actually thought or realized was:...(miserable past experiences)"
No, that's not me. When someone asks me for a coffee in these circumstances I go out of curiosity - it gives me an opportunity to probe the career market in an indepth way and lets me upkeep contacts.
I'm happy where I work but I do need to know my market worth and what the job market is like just in case the management three layers up decides to do something which affects my position negatively.
I'm a neurotic about things that just need to work and my familys financial situation - for which I'm greatly responsible - is one of those things.
Networking and flirting with other employers is not treachery, it's common sense.
Also, I claim there is a hell of a statistic bias going here - I bet he does not collect this information from the people who are staying and which parts of this heuristic dataset actually explain why the people who left, left. One would need to compare these factoids with the population who stayed first. I understand the need for rules of thumb of course - just as long one remembers they mighy be completely wrong.
One thing is networking, and another is to do onsite visits that are clear recruiting pitches. I have a friend that, since she's become relatively well known and travels a lot, gets a lot of those recruiting pitches. Has that made her happier? Nope: It's not hard to see the grass greener on the other side when everyone around you is doing their best to make things seem amazing. She's never sat in the same place for more than a year in the last 6, so she's not really had time to leave her mark anywhere. Not one major work accomplishment in years. And now, the minute anything starts to look difficult, she gives up, and jumps ship again. It's like dumping partners after 4 dates: Never having enough time to building anything remotely meaningful. When the honeymoon phase ends, she's gone. In her case, her public face is what keeps people coming back. But really small stays are a red flag.
In a company, it's not as if you need people to stay for 10 years to be successful, but it's hard to go anywhere when 10 months is already considered a big tenure.
At the same time though, I also worry about having a core of people that never leave. A few jobs ago, I attended a 15 year celebration. 15! Straight out of school, to architect, without having ever worked anywhere else. Management never figured out that those 15+ year tenures were the reason many new senior hires were coming in and leaving quickly: Why would you work at a place that has such a long standing, very tenured network of people that trust each other more than anyone new, and that they'll never leave? You better love those people, because they are the technical ceiling of what you'll get.
This article (and most of the comments thus far) seems to completely ignore the fact that work might not be the only thing in your life.
As an example, seven years ago I asked my wife to leave a part-time job she loved. I was the family's main breadwinner, and spending 30 hours a week being a solo childcare provider was crushing my productivity.
She left that job. But it wasn't the job's fault in any but the most vague theoretical way, like "If they'd paid her a million dollars a year to work part time, we could have afforded a nanny."
(That change triggered additional positive changes in our lives, and today we are in a much nicer place for us to live, and she has a full time job she likes, though perhaps not quite as much as she loved that old job. But the environment that made that old job great ended years ago anyway, as her boss moved on to greener pastures.)
The last job I left was an extremely fulfilling job that I'd gladly stay in for a lot longer. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, work is not the only thing in life. Together with my fiancée, we've decided to move back to our country of origin, due to many personal reasons. This change had nothing to do with work at all.
Unless the employee leaves for a role (more senior, more pay, and/or more responsibilities) which at his/her current company simply isn't available or feasible.
I have experienced this from both ends, as the employee who outgrew my current role, and as a manager who my direct report outgrew their role. In this case, apart from trying to create a similar role (which often than not is impossible), the best you can do is to wish them the best, and be proud of the fact that you've worked with such an awesome colleague that they have now surpassed what the role could do for them. :)
This, exactly. I left a great company because I was at the top of the (small) technology department and didn't see any chance for further technical career development, either in management or in technology. It didn't make sense for the company to radically change their technical direction nor to hire a larger team.
At least that was my assessment. Nine months after I left they spun off a small start-up that, if I had known was coming, would have made me more likely to stay.
The biggest problem with this blog post is its assumption that there are "shields" to begin with.
Whatever I'm doing there's always a possibility of something better out there. Rather than throw up "shields" and shut off all possibility of serendipity, I just evaluate opportunities vs what I'm doing now (and factor in some switching cost). Obviously if I'm heavily invested in a long-term track, it would have to be something amazing to make me leave. But why would someone set up mental defenses against even the possibility of something amazing?
Supposedly I get a call from the POTUS asking me to be a part of the USA digital service with a mandate to dismantle (or to come up with a plan to dismantle) the NSA surveillance system, I would say yes in a heartbeat, no matter how good my current job is, or how attached I am to my coworkers or working environment.
There's no such thing as "shields" I agree with you totally.
One of the great things about my boss is that he talks frankly about the fact that many of us will move on and actually gives advice on what to try in your career "someday". This isn't because we express, or have much reason to express, dissatisfaction. It's simply pragmatic. Highly skilled workers have options and often ambition and curiosity too. Searching for " software job tenure" seems to indicate that most go through many companies in a career. Sometimes a company really does fail it's employees, but sometimes it really is just a chance to try something new. The point being, the author is speaking in too general terms. It's probably ok, even necessary, to not be everything to every employee.
This whole talk of shields up and shields down is of a suggestive psychological kind and it bothers me. Taking shields down implies that shields have been up before, yet the article fails to explain why we're dealing with shields in the first place.
To me the best employee is one that doesn't have to use any kind of shields at all. If using shields is the only way an employee can pretend (to others or himself) he's happy in his job, he probably isn't.
I've left a great job to start a company. And I've had good engineers leave at my startup. Nowhere in there I noticed any shields going up or down. It just wasn't a good fit. End of story.
Are you in the Bay Area? The sheer intensity of everybody constantly asking if you'd consider working for them means that you naturally must put up some defenses in order to stay focused.
"The reason this reads cranky is because I, the leader of the humans, screwed up. "
Not necessarily. Your organization might just not pay the same as some other equally pleasant place. Salaried employees now live in a world where it feels it's best to hoard as much money as possible throughout ones career just in case. It's not greed. It's a fear of destitution and miserable old age.
When I founded hello, a design agency, we had one rule around people leaving. It was always our fault. Whether they left because they found a better job, didn't like their manager, got better compensated and so on.
What I found was that the real reason people left was when they couldn't feel their own contribution in the company or when they couldn't grow insight the company anymore.
People will stand up to a lot of things as long as they feel like their contribution is part of the reason the projects succeed. It also turned out to be a great way to figure out how many people should be on a project. We would never have someone there just because we didn't know what else they should do.
As a founder leaving a company the reason at least for me was a little diffent. I left hello to join 80/20 because I felt we had the wrong conversations. I.e. I was spending too much time convincing the other partners of how the world looked like and they probably felt like they spent a lot of time trying to convince me how the world looked like. This is akin to having a relationship where you argue a lot about the symptoms and never about the root cause for the symptoms.
If you're perfectly happy, you're probably not going to leave to get a 10% raise.
If someone comes along and offers you 50% more than you're currently making, doesn't that implicitly mean you're not being properly compensated at your current job?
I guess that's the "shields down" moment, when you realize that you'll become chronically underpaid if you stick around.
I got the metaphor differently: People have natural shields to ward off thoughts about other possible (employment) futures. Actually considering someplace else means that some holes have been punched in this shield.
I hate to break it to HN, but we are not the norm. We're here because we long for more, and have the skills to make that yearning reality. So while every anecdote in the comments is true I'm sure for that person, for the vast majority of people, this article is pretty accurate.
There's certain questions that you can ask, but you will almost never get an honest answer, because the downside of potentially upsetting someone far outweigh the upside of being completely frank.
It's the same reason HR never gives an honest answer when someone is declined for a position. There is no upside whatsoever for them to be honest about the reason, and lots of potential negative negatives.
Not always true. I'll soon leave my job in one of the biggest US software company. I'm very happy there and love working with so many clever minds.
But the reason I'm leaving is to pursue something else in my life.
I want to own my destiny, reach for what I consider freedom and make something I'm passionate about and that'll make me proud even if I don't succeed. I'm creating my own company.
I didn't see that mentioned in the article and I don't think a company can do much about it to retain its talents.
Things may be different this time around as I am now a business owner but I usually grow bored with any job at about 2 years. I've had many situations where I did not respect the person in charge which makes it hard for me to stay around. The times I did really like my boss his boss would usually change something that made work lose its appeal to me. I'm kind of at the mercy of the consulting work I'm doing but at least I don't have to report to anyone so maybe I will stay with it
The article's title is bad but the core of it seems to be that IFF there's a perceived desires/offers mismatch on the part of the employee, then that employee will investigate the labour market.
If your company isn't aligned with the employee's process or life goals, that's a desires/offers mismatch. It may not be possible for the company to solve that, but it doesn't change the underlying pattern.
And then the person is not unhappy, but they look for a better match. To use the terminology of the article their 'shields[1]' would be down.
I don't think it's perfectly accurate, the core of the piece, mind. Because I go out with friends who work for other companies - so inevitably hear about them - as part of having a life. I've not had as many job changes as I've had coffees with friends. But it may be a reasonable heuristic.
---
1. As a language point, I detest the idea of calling it shields. It makes it sound like it's something that protects the employee, but of course it doesn't. It protects the employer for you not to be looking for something that better satisfies your desires.
I see a lot of people in this thread misunderstanding the "shields down" phrase. If you get a cold call from a headhunter you've never heard of before, are you less willing to consider their opportunity than when a good friend makes the same request? That's because your shield was active - it's a psychological way of coping with unwanted input.
I know folks who had a perfectly happy marriage and everything they wanted, but when someone new said, "Hey, you're hot - let's get together," things went off the rails. Sometimes it's not about whether you're happy - sometimes it's just the temptation that grass is greener on the other side. (And hey, sometimes it actually is.)
The difference being that with your spouse you often have an explicit promise of fidelity. You don't owe your employer yourself, they pay you for your time. I think the assumption that "accepting the coffee" equates to an assessment that the current job is unsatisfactory is not as consistently correct as the author implies.
Sometimes accepting the coffee is just taking the opportunity to learn more about the ecosystem you're in. A job can satisfy you in terms of the work, the environment, and the pay, but it can't teach you what it feels like to stand somewhere with a different view. "Accepting the coffee" is an opportunity to stand there.
You don't start learning a functional language because you've made an assessment that you've reached the limits of imperative languages – you learn a new language because in part because it gives you new perspective that, critically, often cannot be gained without going there yourself.
In fact, after a time I started wondering if the whole thing wasn't a remix of a relationship article as so many points it discusses can be easily related to them, too.
To give Rands the benefit of the doubt, I'm assuming the shields analogy is from the employer perspective. I don't believe he's suggesting that protective psychological barriers are consciously (or even subconsciously) raised to protect an employee from the temptation to join another employer.
Employers are unbelievably vulnerable. The single biggest commodity in the tech industry globally, is talent. When you employ people who do a good job you immediately become vulnerable. You attempt to cultivate and craft the perfect company culture. You try to ensure the work is pushing the boundaries and challenging the great people that are bringing you closer and closer to profitability. You convince yourself that its worth paying your staff ridiculous salaries because if you don't, someone else will.
The single biggest challenge in the tech industry globally, is retaining talent. You spend every waking hour questioning whether or not you are doing enough to keep your people happy. You assume they have shields when in reality, they just want to be happy.
Happy people leave jobs they love all the time. Not because you failed to keep them happy or because they believe another employer can make them happier, but because they are people. No-one will ever craft the perfect company where employee turnover is 0%, it's literally impossible but personally, I love the fact that so many companies are trying because ultimately, it means they are trying to make people happier.
'The perfect company culture' is all well and good so long as it is for the immediate benefit of employees and only secondarily the long-term benefit of the company. Too many senior managers maintain a top-down approach to culture and forget that employees care first for their own needs.
Friendly work environment free of inappropriate humor = Good thing. Happy employees = longer retention.
Forbidding any discussion of pay/raises during work hours to foster better cooperation across pay grades = evil. Keeping employees in the dark may increase retention, but does real harm to individuals. (Also probably illegal despite being a widespread practice.)
Utter tosh! I actively encourage my employees to think about a future outside their present company.
Sometimes people take the job they need - not the job they want. If you're stuck programming databases for a bakery, and NASA asks you to help land a rover on Mars - what can the baker do to keep you employed?
That's not a failure - a person's needs doesn't always align with business desires.
Part of that collective is the employee. We all have influence over our situation and the employee is never blameless. This "victim complex" can be just as detrimental as the failure of any of the three people you listed. It's far easier to get your feelings hurt and leave than it is to find out the truth. Just like it's far easier to not spread the truth in fear of the consequences than it is to deal with issues if you are a manager.
It may be a collective failure but the collection is bigger than you think it is.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
You see, your company is probably not SpaceX, nor NASA. It's not pushing the frontiers of what's possible, or helping make the world a better place. That iPhone-app-cranking shop is just a marketing gig, nothing important on the face of this planet. And many people, many employees, have dreams. Or seek fulfillment, which they may not find in shipping out yet another webapp. They are in your company because it's fun to work on the problems it has - and it pays well - but that's not the extent of their dreams. Especially in this industry, where a lot of people were originally hobbyist programmers, which means tech is for them a part of life, a part of themselves, and not an otherwise uninteresting money-making skill set.
Happy people may very well leave their jobs, even if they love them, because it's unlikely that their life goals are perfectly aligned with company goals.
[+] [-] joezydeco|10 years ago|reply
Rands lists the major ones, but there can be dozens of others. I personally call them "red flags" and once I see enough, it's resume time. I've tuned my own threshold pretty well and walked away from some perfectly good jobs and companies, only to see them implode in my rear-view mirror a year or two later.
My current employer, who has treated me well to date, just went back on a promise not to move the factory to Mexico. At the announcement they promised not to relocate Engineering. I updated my resume over the holiday break.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|10 years ago|reply
The only implicit assumption in the author's thesis is that people value stability and are generally content with the status quo until it is challenged. I'm not sure this applies to all people, though I'm willing to consider the possibility that it applies to most. And if not most, then certainly many.
All of that said, your point about changing life goals is a great one. People definitely leave jobs for reasons beyond those articulated in this article. Rands' thesis is not completely encapsulating. But it doesn't need to be complete in order to be compelling. So long as what he's saying provides a decent, rough framework for managers and leaders to keep in mind -- which I'm interpreting as his intent here -- then it's still valuable.
[+] [-] sbank|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggarious|10 years ago|reply
Conversely, if I had a job that paid well enough I knew I could retire healthy and happy, and in the meantime I didn't actively dislike it, I could tolerate a little monotony.
Unfortunately, most jobs couple monotony with long hours and think money will make up for it. This becomes a viscous cycle - the few hours you have to yourself are not a state where you are prepared to go out and learn new concepts, so you get locked into moving up the career ladder to get higher pay, rather than switching careers.
[+] [-] SonicSoul|10 years ago|reply
To me this is an attempt to look past the BS of generic reasons given while quitting. What happened a year prior to lead to that moment? Regardless if it's 1 or 20 years into the employment.
If what you said was the absolute case nobody would quit unless they were going to a job that is more meaningful to them in relation to their life goals, which happens to a degree but I believe is sill in a minority. Reality is much less idealistic and the 10 smaller reasons listed in the post can absolutely lead to shields down.
Even if you're at SpaceX you may treat it as "paying the dues" or apprenticeship period of your life until you can go off and have more impact somewhere else.
[+] [-] greggman|10 years ago|reply
That said, there are 3 companies I've worked at I would have stayed at 2-3x as long if I'd been happier at them where in this particular instance happiness = having more fun at work and building stronger/closer relationships with my co-workers.
[+] [-] gcb0|10 years ago|reply
work is a means to sustenance. you help someone make a lot of money (either exploring space or showing ads in a plagiarized fart app) for a paycheck and then you use that money to sponsor your life style.
work is not supposed to be a hobby.
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
Real people have real families. Kids grow. Parents age. Sisters have car accidents. Dogs rip their ACLs. At any moment any realworld person may have to walk away from the job they love to accommodate the needs of a family member. Maybe they need to go to a higher-paying job (if they are lucky) but more realistically they need a job at a different location or time so they can spend more time dealing with things totally outside the job.
Real people have real bodies. They get sick. They have heart attacks. They get devastating news from doctors. They need to spend less time at the keyboard and more time at the gym. The job you love, that you are willing to spend 24/7 working to improve, is often the job that is killing you.
Want to keep employees onboard? They want two things more than anything else: Either more money, fewer hours for the same money, or some balance between the two. That's what keeps people from leaving. It allows flexibility when that day comes that they would otherwise have to walk. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
[+] [-] r2dnb|10 years ago|reply
The first two are obvious. The way I see the third one is that I prefer when a company respects my life, value entrepreneurial mindsets, and will let me accommodate the evolution of my personal projects over time. Too many companies want to own your life and influence your lifestyle. They have a one-sided approach to employment.
I once met a different kind of employer. I told him I was passionate about something and left my job a few months before to start a startup that was at the time already on the market. He asked me if I wanted to work part-time of full-time, if I wanted to be on the payroll or if I'd preferred to invoice the company, and if I wanted to work from home or to commute.
This is the sort of company one wouldn't leave for sure, and it really triggers a deep sense of loyalty. Respect and flexibility are the key things.
[+] [-] barkingcat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbcbasic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webwright|10 years ago|reply
You're probably right that this probably how most people are motivated. I think the OP is talking about high-performing people at technology companies, who aren't mostly motivated by short-term pay rate or leisure time. They tend to be the best people precisely because they have more drive to succeed in the long-term than collect the best near-term paycheck or maximize leisure time. The best people in these companies could make more money for less work right now-- if they wanted to.
I'm not actually saying that's always (or even usually) a good thing-- the most common deathbed regret is working too much.
[+] [-] fsloth|10 years ago|reply
No, that's not me. When someone asks me for a coffee in these circumstances I go out of curiosity - it gives me an opportunity to probe the career market in an indepth way and lets me upkeep contacts.
I'm happy where I work but I do need to know my market worth and what the job market is like just in case the management three layers up decides to do something which affects my position negatively.
I'm a neurotic about things that just need to work and my familys financial situation - for which I'm greatly responsible - is one of those things.
Networking and flirting with other employers is not treachery, it's common sense.
Also, I claim there is a hell of a statistic bias going here - I bet he does not collect this information from the people who are staying and which parts of this heuristic dataset actually explain why the people who left, left. One would need to compare these factoids with the population who stayed first. I understand the need for rules of thumb of course - just as long one remembers they mighy be completely wrong.
[+] [-] hibikir|10 years ago|reply
In a company, it's not as if you need people to stay for 10 years to be successful, but it's hard to go anywhere when 10 months is already considered a big tenure.
At the same time though, I also worry about having a core of people that never leave. A few jobs ago, I attended a 15 year celebration. 15! Straight out of school, to architect, without having ever worked anywhere else. Management never figured out that those 15+ year tenures were the reason many new senior hires were coming in and leaving quickly: Why would you work at a place that has such a long standing, very tenured network of people that trust each other more than anyone new, and that they'll never leave? You better love those people, because they are the technical ceiling of what you'll get.
[+] [-] colomon|10 years ago|reply
As an example, seven years ago I asked my wife to leave a part-time job she loved. I was the family's main breadwinner, and spending 30 hours a week being a solo childcare provider was crushing my productivity.
She left that job. But it wasn't the job's fault in any but the most vague theoretical way, like "If they'd paid her a million dollars a year to work part time, we could have afforded a nanny."
(That change triggered additional positive changes in our lives, and today we are in a much nicer place for us to live, and she has a full time job she likes, though perhaps not quite as much as she loved that old job. But the environment that made that old job great ended years ago anyway, as her boss moved on to greener pastures.)
[+] [-] ricardolopes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredwu|10 years ago|reply
I have experienced this from both ends, as the employee who outgrew my current role, and as a manager who my direct report outgrew their role. In this case, apart from trying to create a similar role (which often than not is impossible), the best you can do is to wish them the best, and be proud of the fact that you've worked with such an awesome colleague that they have now surpassed what the role could do for them. :)
[+] [-] mooreds|10 years ago|reply
At least that was my assessment. Nine months after I left they spun off a small start-up that, if I had known was coming, would have made me more likely to stay.
[+] [-] xiaoma|10 years ago|reply
Whatever I'm doing there's always a possibility of something better out there. Rather than throw up "shields" and shut off all possibility of serendipity, I just evaluate opportunities vs what I'm doing now (and factor in some switching cost). Obviously if I'm heavily invested in a long-term track, it would have to be something amazing to make me leave. But why would someone set up mental defenses against even the possibility of something amazing?
[+] [-] azernik|10 years ago|reply
It might be comforting for the ex-manager to say "their loss, not mine," but that's not a very useful framework for analysis.
[+] [-] barkingcat|10 years ago|reply
There's no such thing as "shields" I agree with you totally.
[+] [-] rfeather|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsp1984|10 years ago|reply
To me the best employee is one that doesn't have to use any kind of shields at all. If using shields is the only way an employee can pretend (to others or himself) he's happy in his job, he probably isn't.
I've left a great job to start a company. And I've had good engineers leave at my startup. Nowhere in there I noticed any shields going up or down. It just wasn't a good fit. End of story.
[+] [-] gkop|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsloth|10 years ago|reply
Not necessarily. Your organization might just not pay the same as some other equally pleasant place. Salaried employees now live in a world where it feels it's best to hoard as much money as possible throughout ones career just in case. It's not greed. It's a fear of destitution and miserable old age.
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
What I found was that the real reason people left was when they couldn't feel their own contribution in the company or when they couldn't grow insight the company anymore.
People will stand up to a lot of things as long as they feel like their contribution is part of the reason the projects succeed. It also turned out to be a great way to figure out how many people should be on a project. We would never have someone there just because we didn't know what else they should do.
As a founder leaving a company the reason at least for me was a little diffent. I left hello to join 80/20 because I felt we had the wrong conversations. I.e. I was spending too much time convincing the other partners of how the world looked like and they probably felt like they spent a lot of time trying to convince me how the world looked like. This is akin to having a relationship where you argue a lot about the symptoms and never about the root cause for the symptoms.
It always somehow about meaning.
[+] [-] Mahn|10 years ago|reply
Also I'd argue that you can be perfectly happy and still resign. Sometimes someone simply comes along and offers more money.
[+] [-] pavlov|10 years ago|reply
If someone comes along and offers you 50% more than you're currently making, doesn't that implicitly mean you're not being properly compensated at your current job?
I guess that's the "shields down" moment, when you realize that you'll become chronically underpaid if you stick around.
[+] [-] joepvd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pheroden|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fede_V|10 years ago|reply
It's the same reason HR never gives an honest answer when someone is declined for a position. There is no upside whatsoever for them to be honest about the reason, and lots of potential negative negatives.
[+] [-] rloc|10 years ago|reply
But the reason I'm leaving is to pursue something else in my life. I want to own my destiny, reach for what I consider freedom and make something I'm passionate about and that'll make me proud even if I don't succeed. I'm creating my own company.
I didn't see that mentioned in the article and I don't think a company can do much about it to retain its talents.
[+] [-] collyw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lambent_Cactus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|10 years ago|reply
If your company isn't aligned with the employee's process or life goals, that's a desires/offers mismatch. It may not be possible for the company to solve that, but it doesn't change the underlying pattern.
And then the person is not unhappy, but they look for a better match. To use the terminology of the article their 'shields[1]' would be down.
I don't think it's perfectly accurate, the core of the piece, mind. Because I go out with friends who work for other companies - so inevitably hear about them - as part of having a life. I've not had as many job changes as I've had coffees with friends. But it may be a reasonable heuristic.
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1. As a language point, I detest the idea of calling it shields. It makes it sound like it's something that protects the employee, but of course it doesn't. It protects the employer for you not to be looking for something that better satisfies your desires.
[+] [-] mark-r|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrentOzar|10 years ago|reply
I know folks who had a perfectly happy marriage and everything they wanted, but when someone new said, "Hey, you're hot - let's get together," things went off the rails. Sometimes it's not about whether you're happy - sometimes it's just the temptation that grass is greener on the other side. (And hey, sometimes it actually is.)
[+] [-] chafir|10 years ago|reply
Sometimes accepting the coffee is just taking the opportunity to learn more about the ecosystem you're in. A job can satisfy you in terms of the work, the environment, and the pay, but it can't teach you what it feels like to stand somewhere with a different view. "Accepting the coffee" is an opportunity to stand there.
You don't start learning a functional language because you've made an assessment that you've reached the limits of imperative languages – you learn a new language because in part because it gives you new perspective that, critically, often cannot be gained without going there yourself.
[+] [-] cubano|10 years ago|reply
In fact, after a time I started wondering if the whole thing wasn't a remix of a relationship article as so many points it discusses can be easily related to them, too.
[+] [-] Peroni|10 years ago|reply
Employers are unbelievably vulnerable. The single biggest commodity in the tech industry globally, is talent. When you employ people who do a good job you immediately become vulnerable. You attempt to cultivate and craft the perfect company culture. You try to ensure the work is pushing the boundaries and challenging the great people that are bringing you closer and closer to profitability. You convince yourself that its worth paying your staff ridiculous salaries because if you don't, someone else will.
The single biggest challenge in the tech industry globally, is retaining talent. You spend every waking hour questioning whether or not you are doing enough to keep your people happy. You assume they have shields when in reality, they just want to be happy.
Happy people leave jobs they love all the time. Not because you failed to keep them happy or because they believe another employer can make them happier, but because they are people. No-one will ever craft the perfect company where employee turnover is 0%, it's literally impossible but personally, I love the fact that so many companies are trying because ultimately, it means they are trying to make people happier.
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
Friendly work environment free of inappropriate humor = Good thing. Happy employees = longer retention.
Forbidding any discussion of pay/raises during work hours to foster better cooperation across pay grades = evil. Keeping employees in the dark may increase retention, but does real harm to individuals. (Also probably illegal despite being a widespread practice.)
[+] [-] nitin_flanker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edent|10 years ago|reply
Sometimes people take the job they need - not the job they want. If you're stuck programming databases for a bakery, and NASA asks you to help land a rover on Mars - what can the baker do to keep you employed?
That's not a failure - a person's needs doesn't always align with business desires.
[+] [-] scotch_drinker|10 years ago|reply
It may be a collective failure but the collection is bigger than you think it is.
[+] [-] fistfuck|10 years ago|reply
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