I think it's first worth having policies that recognize the modern knowledge worker. Unlimited vacation, hardware budgets, a results-only work environment, optional meetings. No company bullshit. Etc. That way folks won't go "maybe a vacation will help" - because you've already done it.
Of course, that is just removing roadblocks. That's not an active measure. You should be having weekly one on ones with all direct reports (and so on up and down the chain). Rarely when a coworker quits is it completely unexpected. At some point a switch is flipped from "not going to even consider it" to "sure, I'll talk to recruiters." And then the clock starts ticking. In some ways, the organization has already lost if it got to that point.
Raises and titles are not the only thing that drives people; I'd probably argue that's the worst sort of extrinsic motivation. If a bigger title is all that keeps someone working there, you've already failed. As a manager it's your job to know what motivates your people and help get them there accordingly.
When someone says it's about the money, it's never about the money.
So in order to prevent the "I have a better offer" discussion, you have to innoculate your people ahead of time. Make them immune to better offers by making them unavailable to those who would make them.
Find out what really motivates each person and engineer the "perfect job description" for them:
- meaningful work
- quality working conditions
- proper work/life balance
- appropriate compensation / benefits
- a well-defined mutually agreed upon future career path
- proper recognition
- congruent culture (work mates)
Make it so that people love coming to work. It's not that hard if you really want to.
Do that and you will never lose them. If you can't (or won't), then they were never really yours in the first place.
In many ways I don't disagree with you, but in many ways I do.
I left my first four jobs purely due to money -- particularly the first three. There is nothing those businesses could have done to retain me short of a rapid and vast increase in pay.
The fourth one was about money, but it was also about several of your other listed factors. I was underpaid sure, but I also had excellent work conditions, good work/life balance, great benefits, great recognition and easily the best work mates I've ever had. I miss those few years daily and wish I could return there, but with better pay and differently aligned work responsibilities.
After these jobs I entered a very different phase in my career.
My next three paid me well enough that pay wasn't an issue, I could live comfortably, travel when I wanted,have plenty of toys, etc. All have had meaningful work, but most of the list was off with few exceptions.
These two major phases, early career development and later career development have been very different in terms of what has motivated me to stay.
Early career - rapid advancement -- which was really a proxy for more money.
Late career - now that I had sufficient money - I either have to find work where I can advance or find something I can stay in steady state till retirement. I prefer the former, but it's surprisingly easy to find yourself in a situation where neither are true and it's time to move on.
Operating under the assumption that I won't take a job that doesn't pay well and provide meaningful work and reasonable work conditions, here's what motivates me to leave these days:
- Lack of good leadership and a clear direction with strong decision making skills and high workforce engagement.
- Leadership that doesn't invite input from experienced employees.
- Non-congruent culture. Very hard to judge until you work there.
- Lack of stability in the work environment.
- Artificial glass ceilings.
- Misdirected recognition. I'm not bothered by an environment of no particular recognition, but I am bothered by one that directs it to the wrong people.
- People getting passed over for obvious promotions. It's usually tied to Cronyism and Nepotism, but not always. I've even happily taken positional promotions that weren't tied to pay increases.
I've found that most people I know who've stayed at a job long-term usually hate their jobs, but for a wide variety of personal reasons fear they can't find equivalent or better work elsewhere. Some of them are highly qualified and experienced, but stay only out of an irrational fear of staying with the devil they know because, as one friend put it, "it could be even worse someplace else!"
Here's how I view this: really excellent employees need continuous challenges, most business will eventually run out of new and interesting things for those employees to work on and try to make it up with positional advancements, but at some point even those slots will run dry. It's perfectly natural for excellent employees to move on elsewhere and there's nothing wrong with it. It's incumbent on the employer to make sure that the work that person was doing wasn't staffed one deep and has a plan B for the eventuality of that person leaving. Turnover can be good, it's natural, it should be embraced just like Google embraces failure in their scalable systems. Good employees should leave with your blessing.
You wrote:
> When someone says it's about the money, it's never about the money.
Sometimes, it's about the money.
I recognize this isn't a normal experience, but I spent a year and a half working on a team where I made 26k/yr while other team members made 80-120k/yr. There were some complicating factors (it was a state legislature, and I didn't have a college degree), but even localized, 26k for my skillset (web development focusing on open source mapping technology) was unreasonable.
When I left, it was definitely about the money. I was very clear that it was about the money. If somebody said, "Money aside, what's really bothering you?" I'm not sure my then 23-year-old-self could have managed to be civil.
My last company had some pretty interesting work, but a lot of people started looking to leave or left due to money. I think everyone who left got at least a 25% increase in pay leaving.
At the same time, a lot of people didn't leave because the work was interesting and their peers were all good to work with.
When a company doesn't give meaningful raises for 5 years, people will start leaving.
I am in the process of leaving an excellent job.
I am well paid.
The work is very enjoyable and meaningful.
The people I work with are excellent.
My team and I have huge freedom to innovate.
The company is stable.
I do not have to work huge hours.
The work my team and I do on a daily basis is highly regarded.
Why am I leaving? When I arrived, in 2009, I decided that I was not going to work anywhere more than 3-5 years, simply because I had worked in my previous company for 12 years, and it took me 'too long' to shake free of that.
That's the discipline that I am working through right now. Everyone around me has known from the beginning about that arbitrary time-limit. They know I'm actively looking. They know that I'll continue to be exceptionally transparent about the entire process.
Honestly, I've been very happy with this process. People know where I stand, and that reduces anxiety. I've been paying down technical debt with a pure passion for the past few months, which would probably not have been possible without as much communication.
I'm probably going to end up getting an additional pay raise when I leave, which is fine, and I'm happy to get it. But it's not why I'm leaving.
One thing that you didn't mention and that has been very important in the decision making process of my recent job search would be:
- hard work
The vast majority of the jobs out there are run-of-the-mill scale this CRUD thing jobs. Nothing wrong with that but if a company can offer me the opportunity and trust to work on something that is technically very hard, then that is a definitive bonus (although it's not possible for all types of companies to offer that kind of work to engineers)
In finance, that's certainly not true. I've seen several people make the leaps from the entry-level $100k job to the mid-level $200k job to the profit-sharing (or director-level) uncapped compensation jobs, doing it for the money. But to be fair, the difference in developer payscales as you move across finance-related roles is lifestyle-changing large, not the $20k bump you get switching from MSFT in Redmond to Google in Kirkland.
I would agree: when the employee gets to the point where, "It's about the money" I would guess that it's probably not.
In addition to not finding fulfillment (edw519's list of motivating factors), I'd say there's a list of demotivating factors too:
* Having your feedback or objections being ignored by management
* "... I'm gonna need you to come in on Sunday..." once too often
* Not being able to do your best work (because of schedule, or other, pressures)
* Too many meetings / status checks
* Greener pastures, technology stack wise, "Wow, here I am doing Java, but hot darn does Scala look cool, I wish we could use some Java version later than this Java version from 1999"
* too much drama
With enough of these conditions too often, it doesn't matter how good the money is.
Having said that, if your current salary is around the amount you need to survive, then these worries come into place. If you're worried about losing your house because your salary is too low, then you're at a different place on the Maslow's pyramid and then it might really be about the money. ("Wow, this job is actually going to pay me, vs working for equity. I should take it")
I wish people would realize that absolutes are almost never correct. Sometimes it is about the money. You think people are never horribly underpaid in a job that they otherwise like?
In my experience, companies that find themselves in the “What Would It Take to Keep You Here?” situation are rarely ever prepared to actually do what it would take to keep you there. The very next sentence out of their mouths is usually "but only management is eligible for that level of..."
"OK, but to be honest we just don't have that money available at the moment. Is there anything else we could do? We don't want to lose you, but we have to be realistic."
As a CEO, many of the scariest days I've faced have been those when a critical member of our team told us they were leaving the company. Your heart sinks...
I'm always happy to hear that a company values their employees, and takes a proactive approach to keep them happy. I'm also surprised how little some companies do on that same front, and only scramble to analyze pay, work conditions, etc. after an employee has announced they're leaving. By then it's too late.
One case that sticks out for me was a few years back when a brilliant lead dev I know left the company he was working for. I knew the company's work conditions weren't favorable, he didn't have a job title worthy of what he was doing day to day, and after hearing the salary he was being paid (about half a typical market-rate salary at the time), my only question was why he hadn't left earlier.
So I think a lot of companies encourage their employees to leave without even knowing it. Or even worse, they know they're shortchanging them on some level and gamble on fear or ignorance in hopes that said employees feel they're getting a fair deal. I believe this to be the case with the example I cited above, and am glad the lead dev has since found a company with much better work conditions across the board.
I was in a pretty similar situation recently. After more firewood was thrown on the fire, I decided to start looking, and at that point I had already decided not to accept any counter-offer. Not only was I being shortchanged on salary (significantly), but also in benefits, perks, and working conditions. I'm really happy I found an awesome startup in SF that still after a month feels like an ideal workplace for me.
When I was looking, I was disconcerted when I found companies with no personal growth prospects or that flat out said they wouldn't pay what I was asking (fair) because they didn't want to pay two engineers with the same title too differently. I asked if they would offer bonuses to compensate or if they'd consider paying the other guy the same salary, because he seemed smart enough. No to both, and I felt that alone indicated that management there didn't value engineering talent.
I really hope this treatment of talented workers isn't too pervasive in the industry. Pay people what they're worth. Strive to offer the best working conditions, benefits, and perks. Take the values of your employees into consideration. It really doesn't seem like it's too much to ask for. And personally, I'm all for complete transparency within my company, even to the point of salary information. I think it would resolve more issues than it would cause.
It seems that in this post a title change was given without a raise. I don't necessarily think that doing that is such a good idea. I know the post says that they were already being compensated fairly. Here's why I think promotions without pay are a bad idea: It gives the employee more incentive to leave, and very little to stay. Superiors tend to give titles pretty easily because it's "free", but I think it may actually cost the company more in the long run. It's a gambler's play.
I think there's much more evidence that there is a management mandate to squeeze as much as possible out of salaried employees than there is about counter-offered employees having their head on a block under management efforts to replace the perceived-disloyal. The proactivity being championed in the post and comments does not have industry support and any manager who suggests giving raises or benefits ahead of time likely has the Sword of Damocles hanging over them afterwards.
> The proactivity being championed in the post and comments does not have industry support and any manager who suggests giving raises or benefits ahead of time likely has the Sword of Damocles hanging over them afterwards.
This might be true, but it seems like bad policy. A number of industries give extra compensation to preempt attrition. The whole point of bonuses in finance and consulting isn't to encourage people to work harder (they're already working flat-out) but to keep them from leaving. Nobody has the "I'm going to leave unless you can up my salary" conversation. Instead, management pays big bonuses to top performers before they get dissatisfied and think of leaving.
I don't think this post, or most best-practice type articles, is trying to describe how things generally work, or even trying to push it as mainstream knowledge. Instead it's someone who has gained enlightenment trying to get through to people with open minds.
On this general topic, not only should you ensure that you don't lose your best people externally, more importantly you shouldn't lose your best people internally -- that they turn into not-your-best-people because they know they're underappreciated but don't have the willpower to leave, but instead try to passively setup a situation where they're asked to go.
That's one thing I've learned from Hacker News, that the ability to identify the right people to hire and promote is the lifeblood of an organisation. It seems like such a crime that big companies would delegate these to central departments who barely know how the teams are going or even what they do
> It seems like such a crime that big companies would delegate these to central departments who barely know how the teams are going or even what they do
It is, but its also an opportunity for smaller business to more effectively compete
what also needs to be done form a CEO CTO perspective is have a succession plan in place - this is where I feel Rand fell down here it should not be be "o noes what if x leaves" it should be if x leaves can y (x's deputy) do his job.
I don't think you should expect employers to make pre-emptive strikes. This is a geek rationalisation for passive behaviour. As a talented employee, you should speak to your employer and tell them that you believe you're worth more to them than they're currently valuing you (do not threaten them with leaving though). If they don't understand the significance of you stating this to them, then leave and it will become apparent to them. (But it is better to give them the information before doing so.)
For profitability, it's more important to keep the cost of employees down, than it is to helpfully negotiate value-creators into better positions. (If you were to do so, then how do you defend it to your investors? You can't prove they were about to leave...)
If you are worried about single points of failure leaving, then request that another employee be hired and mentored into understanding of the SPOF. Even better create intrinsic motivations so you can have more confidence this won't happen. Ask employees if they're doing work they love, create a fun company culture, etc.
I kind of see this whole article as feel-good for the non-ownership class.
I don't think you should expect employers to make pre-emptive strikes. This is a geek rationalisation for passive behaviour. As a talented employee, you should speak to your employer and tell them that you believe you're worth more to them than they're currently valuing you (do not threaten them with leaving though). If they don't understand the significance of you stating this to them, then leave and it will become apparent to them.
One thing that many engineers fail to recognize is that their managers are often more overworked than they are. They take being "ignored" personally, when reality is that their managers have a million plates spinning at once.
This is why it's considered distasteful to ask for a transfer or better project at 6 months. To the employee, that's a long time. To the manager, that person just came on board. If the manager has 12 reports, then the effective tenure (absolute tenure, divided by number of reports) is 0.5 months.
Which supports my long-standing contention that open allocation is superior. Expecting managers to control the division of labor in addition to the other work they have is just too much.
The email featured in the article bothers me. First line: "If either were to come to us with a competing offer, we'd work with all our might to keep them". Then, almost in the same breath "They're fairly compensated, IMO." Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
It was my belief that at the time, they were fairly compensated for the roles they held at the VP level. When we moved them up to officer titles and roles, we did increase compensation as well. Our standard policy is that we always pay above the 50th percentile and below the 90th percentile based on available salary data. We've got a really nice set from a wide survey of VC investors based on portfolio company size, stage, etc. and combine that with info from Salary.com and Payscale, too.
From my reading of it, that email is in fact written by the author (Rand Fishkin).
In any case, I have to admit that in most situations if I were given a new title without an accompanying raise or bonus, I'd consider it to be somewhat patronizing and it would have the opposite impact of what the author here is suggesting.
Of course, YMMV. I'm a programmer and I don't care much about specific titles.
As an early employee of a startup, what keeps me here are my stock options. REAL ownership of a company.
I didn't join the company to get a vacation or a title bump. I joined because I believe in the vision, the people and the hope that some day my stock will be worth something.
If you can create a meritocracy where employees understand that the company's success translates to their own personal success, then they're much less likely to leave.
I think you are in for some growing up. No to put down your beleifs or company you work for but getting paid unfairly (below reasonable market) is not most practical approach.
As always, it comes down to "if you want your employee to stay, give him a raise (salary, title, perks, ...) according to his skill BEFORE he tries to leave with a competing offer".
There was a post on hacker news a few days ago where everyone was saying that in their experience, non-minimal pay raises always came with changing job, not with normal raises within their current position. Same for me, pay raises always meant changing job, with my employer realizing "oh wait, we were paying you as X but you're actually worth Y, now that you noticed let us offer you an appropriate salary". No thanks.
That's why when google started giving huge pay raises to a lot of people a couple years ago to keep them I actually thought it was a good idea, and more people should do that; if your employees are good, giving them a raise is usually a lot cheaper and easier than finding someone of the same skill and experience.
It really seems like that is the only way to make significant progress (as far as salary) in your career. You either jump ship or get a competing offer so your current company can match. If I came in with a competing offer that paid me 15-20% more and the company can match, then why didn't they just give me a raise in the first place? It probably would have stopped me from even being interested in other positions.
Companies need to focus more on "What we should be doing to ensure our best employees are happy and not looking to move" rather than the "Oh you are leaving. What can we do for you ? btw, we cannot do this this and this. other than all this, sure we can do blah"
That mock monologue is actually really spot on. I just recently left our bootstrapped startup and had a pre-emotive conversation shortly before doing so. It played out just like that.
I shared this link on HN already but since its so relavent here it is again. I wrote about why I still left. But didn't write about the conversation I had. And you hit it on the head. http://mustefa.com/looking-back-at-my-ux-career-in-2012/
I think technically, I may not have needed board permission to make the move, but certainly any time you're promoting to officer level, you should be informing your board/investors.
Did you leave anyway? Are you still staying now out of loyalty even though it is likely you are worth more than what the company pays you (and probably haven't put out your feelers)?
I read some of the comments about employee passiveness. Sometimes it's tough for an employee to put themselves on the spot like that. What if the conversation doesn't go the 'right' way?
[+] [-] MattRogish|13 years ago|reply
Of course, that is just removing roadblocks. That's not an active measure. You should be having weekly one on ones with all direct reports (and so on up and down the chain). Rarely when a coworker quits is it completely unexpected. At some point a switch is flipped from "not going to even consider it" to "sure, I'll talk to recruiters." And then the clock starts ticking. In some ways, the organization has already lost if it got to that point.
Raises and titles are not the only thing that drives people; I'd probably argue that's the worst sort of extrinsic motivation. If a bigger title is all that keeps someone working there, you've already failed. As a manager it's your job to know what motivates your people and help get them there accordingly.
[+] [-] edw519|13 years ago|reply
So in order to prevent the "I have a better offer" discussion, you have to innoculate your people ahead of time. Make them immune to better offers by making them unavailable to those who would make them.
Find out what really motivates each person and engineer the "perfect job description" for them:
Make it so that people love coming to work. It's not that hard if you really want to.Do that and you will never lose them. If you can't (or won't), then they were never really yours in the first place.
[+] [-] bane|13 years ago|reply
I left my first four jobs purely due to money -- particularly the first three. There is nothing those businesses could have done to retain me short of a rapid and vast increase in pay.
The fourth one was about money, but it was also about several of your other listed factors. I was underpaid sure, but I also had excellent work conditions, good work/life balance, great benefits, great recognition and easily the best work mates I've ever had. I miss those few years daily and wish I could return there, but with better pay and differently aligned work responsibilities.
After these jobs I entered a very different phase in my career.
My next three paid me well enough that pay wasn't an issue, I could live comfortably, travel when I wanted,have plenty of toys, etc. All have had meaningful work, but most of the list was off with few exceptions.
These two major phases, early career development and later career development have been very different in terms of what has motivated me to stay.
Early career - rapid advancement -- which was really a proxy for more money.
Late career - now that I had sufficient money - I either have to find work where I can advance or find something I can stay in steady state till retirement. I prefer the former, but it's surprisingly easy to find yourself in a situation where neither are true and it's time to move on.
Operating under the assumption that I won't take a job that doesn't pay well and provide meaningful work and reasonable work conditions, here's what motivates me to leave these days:
- Lack of good leadership and a clear direction with strong decision making skills and high workforce engagement.
- Leadership that doesn't invite input from experienced employees.
- Cronyism. Nepotism. Brown-nosing. Machiavellianism.
- Non-congruent culture. Very hard to judge until you work there.
- Lack of stability in the work environment.
- Artificial glass ceilings.
- Misdirected recognition. I'm not bothered by an environment of no particular recognition, but I am bothered by one that directs it to the wrong people.
- People getting passed over for obvious promotions. It's usually tied to Cronyism and Nepotism, but not always. I've even happily taken positional promotions that weren't tied to pay increases.
I've found that most people I know who've stayed at a job long-term usually hate their jobs, but for a wide variety of personal reasons fear they can't find equivalent or better work elsewhere. Some of them are highly qualified and experienced, but stay only out of an irrational fear of staying with the devil they know because, as one friend put it, "it could be even worse someplace else!"
Here's how I view this: really excellent employees need continuous challenges, most business will eventually run out of new and interesting things for those employees to work on and try to make it up with positional advancements, but at some point even those slots will run dry. It's perfectly natural for excellent employees to move on elsewhere and there's nothing wrong with it. It's incumbent on the employer to make sure that the work that person was doing wasn't staffed one deep and has a plan B for the eventuality of that person leaving. Turnover can be good, it's natural, it should be embraced just like Google embraces failure in their scalable systems. Good employees should leave with your blessing.
[+] [-] roflc0ptic|13 years ago|reply
Sometimes, it's about the money.
I recognize this isn't a normal experience, but I spent a year and a half working on a team where I made 26k/yr while other team members made 80-120k/yr. There were some complicating factors (it was a state legislature, and I didn't have a college degree), but even localized, 26k for my skillset (web development focusing on open source mapping technology) was unreasonable.
When I left, it was definitely about the money. I was very clear that it was about the money. If somebody said, "Money aside, what's really bothering you?" I'm not sure my then 23-year-old-self could have managed to be civil.
[+] [-] kyrra|13 years ago|reply
At the same time, a lot of people didn't leave because the work was interesting and their peers were all good to work with.
When a company doesn't give meaningful raises for 5 years, people will start leaving.
[+] [-] Diederich|13 years ago|reply
Why am I leaving? When I arrived, in 2009, I decided that I was not going to work anywhere more than 3-5 years, simply because I had worked in my previous company for 12 years, and it took me 'too long' to shake free of that.
That's the discipline that I am working through right now. Everyone around me has known from the beginning about that arbitrary time-limit. They know I'm actively looking. They know that I'll continue to be exceptionally transparent about the entire process.
Honestly, I've been very happy with this process. People know where I stand, and that reduces anxiety. I've been paying down technical debt with a pure passion for the past few months, which would probably not have been possible without as much communication.
I'm probably going to end up getting an additional pay raise when I leave, which is fine, and I'm happy to get it. But it's not why I'm leaving.
I'm leaving because, for me, it's time. :)
[+] [-] kami8845|13 years ago|reply
One thing that you didn't mention and that has been very important in the decision making process of my recent job search would be:
The vast majority of the jobs out there are run-of-the-mill scale this CRUD thing jobs. Nothing wrong with that but if a company can offer me the opportunity and trust to work on something that is technically very hard, then that is a definitive bonus (although it's not possible for all types of companies to offer that kind of work to engineers)[+] [-] larsberg|13 years ago|reply
In finance, that's certainly not true. I've seen several people make the leaps from the entry-level $100k job to the mid-level $200k job to the profit-sharing (or director-level) uncapped compensation jobs, doing it for the money. But to be fair, the difference in developer payscales as you move across finance-related roles is lifestyle-changing large, not the $20k bump you get switching from MSFT in Redmond to Google in Kirkland.
[+] [-] rpwilcox|13 years ago|reply
In addition to not finding fulfillment (edw519's list of motivating factors), I'd say there's a list of demotivating factors too:
With enough of these conditions too often, it doesn't matter how good the money is.Having said that, if your current salary is around the amount you need to survive, then these worries come into place. If you're worried about losing your house because your salary is too low, then you're at a different place on the Maslow's pyramid and then it might really be about the money. ("Wow, this job is actually going to pay me, vs working for equity. I should take it")
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|13 years ago|reply
But most programmers don't live there.
[+] [-] nollidge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0nty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mzarate06|13 years ago|reply
I'm always happy to hear that a company values their employees, and takes a proactive approach to keep them happy. I'm also surprised how little some companies do on that same front, and only scramble to analyze pay, work conditions, etc. after an employee has announced they're leaving. By then it's too late.
One case that sticks out for me was a few years back when a brilliant lead dev I know left the company he was working for. I knew the company's work conditions weren't favorable, he didn't have a job title worthy of what he was doing day to day, and after hearing the salary he was being paid (about half a typical market-rate salary at the time), my only question was why he hadn't left earlier.
So I think a lot of companies encourage their employees to leave without even knowing it. Or even worse, they know they're shortchanging them on some level and gamble on fear or ignorance in hopes that said employees feel they're getting a fair deal. I believe this to be the case with the example I cited above, and am glad the lead dev has since found a company with much better work conditions across the board.
[+] [-] just2n|13 years ago|reply
When I was looking, I was disconcerted when I found companies with no personal growth prospects or that flat out said they wouldn't pay what I was asking (fair) because they didn't want to pay two engineers with the same title too differently. I asked if they would offer bonuses to compensate or if they'd consider paying the other guy the same salary, because he seemed smart enough. No to both, and I felt that alone indicated that management there didn't value engineering talent.
I really hope this treatment of talented workers isn't too pervasive in the industry. Pay people what they're worth. Strive to offer the best working conditions, benefits, and perks. Take the values of your employees into consideration. It really doesn't seem like it's too much to ask for. And personally, I'm all for complete transparency within my company, even to the point of salary information. I think it would resolve more issues than it would cause.
[+] [-] dangero|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randfish|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewmck|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
This might be true, but it seems like bad policy. A number of industries give extra compensation to preempt attrition. The whole point of bonuses in finance and consulting isn't to encourage people to work harder (they're already working flat-out) but to keep them from leaving. Nobody has the "I'm going to leave unless you can up my salary" conversation. Instead, management pays big bonuses to top performers before they get dissatisfied and think of leaving.
[+] [-] corresation|13 years ago|reply
On this general topic, not only should you ensure that you don't lose your best people externally, more importantly you shouldn't lose your best people internally -- that they turn into not-your-best-people because they know they're underappreciated but don't have the willpower to leave, but instead try to passively setup a situation where they're asked to go.
[+] [-] coopdog|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dillona|13 years ago|reply
It is, but its also an opportunity for smaller business to more effectively compete
[+] [-] walshemj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhnz|13 years ago|reply
For profitability, it's more important to keep the cost of employees down, than it is to helpfully negotiate value-creators into better positions. (If you were to do so, then how do you defend it to your investors? You can't prove they were about to leave...)
If you are worried about single points of failure leaving, then request that another employee be hired and mentored into understanding of the SPOF. Even better create intrinsic motivations so you can have more confidence this won't happen. Ask employees if they're doing work they love, create a fun company culture, etc.
I kind of see this whole article as feel-good for the non-ownership class.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
One thing that many engineers fail to recognize is that their managers are often more overworked than they are. They take being "ignored" personally, when reality is that their managers have a million plates spinning at once.
This is why it's considered distasteful to ask for a transfer or better project at 6 months. To the employee, that's a long time. To the manager, that person just came on board. If the manager has 12 reports, then the effective tenure (absolute tenure, divided by number of reports) is 0.5 months.
Which supports my long-standing contention that open allocation is superior. Expecting managers to control the division of labor in addition to the other work they have is just too much.
[+] [-] redguava|13 years ago|reply
I think I came across this idea in a Netflix culture slide deck first and it stuck with me.
[+] [-] dokem|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TinyBig|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randfish|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgemcbay|13 years ago|reply
In any case, I have to admit that in most situations if I were given a new title without an accompanying raise or bonus, I'd consider it to be somewhat patronizing and it would have the opposite impact of what the author here is suggesting.
Of course, YMMV. I'm a programmer and I don't care much about specific titles.
[+] [-] xmanifesto|13 years ago|reply
I didn't join the company to get a vacation or a title bump. I joined because I believe in the vision, the people and the hope that some day my stock will be worth something.
If you can create a meritocracy where employees understand that the company's success translates to their own personal success, then they're much less likely to leave.
[+] [-] stevewilhelm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cunac|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bconway|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nolok|13 years ago|reply
There was a post on hacker news a few days ago where everyone was saying that in their experience, non-minimal pay raises always came with changing job, not with normal raises within their current position. Same for me, pay raises always meant changing job, with my employer realizing "oh wait, we were paying you as X but you're actually worth Y, now that you noticed let us offer you an appropriate salary". No thanks.
That's why when google started giving huge pay raises to a lot of people a couple years ago to keep them I actually thought it was a good idea, and more people should do that; if your employees are good, giving them a raise is usually a lot cheaper and easier than finding someone of the same skill and experience.
[+] [-] johnward|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codegeek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mustefaj|13 years ago|reply
I shared this link on HN already but since its so relavent here it is again. I wrote about why I still left. But didn't write about the conversation I had. And you hit it on the head. http://mustefa.com/looking-back-at-my-ux-career-in-2012/
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
EDIT: nvm, on re-read, I see you were just asking for feedback. I wasn't sure if you needed permission from your board to promote to CMO, etc.
[+] [-] randfish|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnuc|13 years ago|reply
Got double the pay and free rent on my apartment.
[+] [-] 3825|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mustefaj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NenAcOpdaf3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squozzer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treskot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wellthat|13 years ago|reply
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