[moksly]

You have to look at it from a bigger perspective. From your and my perspective changing jobs is a big deal, it only happens a few time in our lives and it has a massive impact. The management perspective is quite different, you’ll get to not only hire but also interview hundreds of not thousands in your career.

If you’re a good manager you’ll want to keep your employees for 5-7 years. This is because you want to help your employees develop their talents and grow their career, and when you do that, they’ll eventually outgrow the role you hired them to do and how far it was possibly to extend it to accommodate their growth. By that point, you kind of want your employees to move on. Maybe to a new position within your own organisation or to a different place. It’s not because you don’t like them or don’t want them to stay, but it’s because good employees tend to outgrow you. A select few people can stay in the same functions their entire lives and never lose enjoyment or motivation, but most of us aren’t like that and you have to keep that in mind when it comes to “pay me more, or I’m leaving” negotiating.

More than that though, you have to see how relying too much on individual employees is actually what is the management mistake in these type of situations. The issue isn’t “why couldn’t you keep x”, it’s “why did you let x become irreplaceable” because any good manager should know better.

Maybe the public sector in Denmark is different than other places, maybe not. I don’t think that it is. What typically happens when you have IT systems that rely too much on an employee is that they leave you and then you end up paying them a lot more money to consult for 6 months until someone else has redesigned the systems to no longer be too dependent on a single person and your former employee finally gets to really move on.