How Hard Should Your Employer Work to Retain You? | Hacker News Reader

How Hard Should Your Employer Work to Retain You?

charity.wtf

59 pointsLiriel32 comments

Not sure if my experience is relevant, but from what I've seen there are two interested parties with different capabilities and interests:

- The employee's direct manager: values the employee the most, doesn't want to lose him, but cannot really directly offer pay. So instead, the manager offers praise, and more flexibility (personal leave on an ad-hoc basis, placement on best projects, etc.) If the employee wants to leave, the manager can attempt to justify a better salary to higher ups / HR, but has no actual control over this outside of making the case on behalf of the employee.

- HR / higher ups: I'm far less clear on how this works, however they seem to have hard limits for what they can offer, and no amount of convincing will budge those limits.

In total, it feels a bit like arguing with a low-level support tech: your case can be reasonable, the support tech is actually wise enough to the best solution, but his hands are tied by policy and he has no ability to change it.

This is an image the business works to maintain: Your manager is there to help you and make you feel like you belong so you don't leave, but the things that actually matter (pay) are untouchable algorithms defined by the faceless machine above. It's one of the ways modern businesses (at least in the US) have inched the shared rewards of capitalism away from the employee (and inched the shared pain of negative economic trends toward the employee) over decades.

It's also almost always a lie.

Most managers have a budget. They just don't want to spend it on you.

It even gets inched away from the customer. Problem with a service? The only people you have access to are support staff who can't really do anything beyond minor changes. So many business to customer interactions happens only between people who have no ability to change the situation either way.

Big businesses have nearly entirely isolated the capital owners (and upper management) from the goings of the business itself.

I don’t think it’s a good thing to tell the manager about starting/ongoing job search. Never heard anything positive happening after this in my career. Next day after that you are immediately put into departure queue. Basically no work in relevant projects and no way for promotions. “Document your work and shut up.” From this day on you’re dead weight in the payroll’s table.

Edit: and in your manager’s project planing table you just made a hole. That means somebody must be hired and trained delaying current project and making the manager look bad in the eyes of his/her superiors. No reason to be thankful for sure.

Manager: wants to retain employee

Salary increase budget: 3% of salary mass

Employee retention: does not happen

Alternatively, in some companies the only way to give a decent salary raise is promotions which leads to all kind of problems : title inflation, super performers put into a job they won't perform as well in, etc...

Retention is not easy

Also, when I've been unhappy in my job and ultimately quit as a result, a pay raise has always been offered in an attempt to get me to stay.

However, at the point I'm actually quitting, I've already told them the reasons why and pay is never on that list (if it were a pay issue, I'd have asked for a raise instead.) Offering me a pay increase and ignoring my actual problems tells me that the only thing my employer can offer me is more money, and any further discussion of the issue is pointless.

From my experience employers are not trying to retain talents except of stars.

Usually you ask for a rise, got rejected or sent to go through promotional committee which take month. Then you go for interview, got a job offer with even better total compensation than you asked at your current position and leave.

Yes by design. They want people to be replacible cogs. Not a value judgement just the way it has been since people learned to farm the land.

That just isn't an option for some industries though. The more complex (ie. domain-specific) the employees skills are, the less replaceable they are.

> From my experience employers are not trying to retain talents except of stars.

A lot of companies are firing people and keeping some kind of skeleton crew, and a lot of institutional (tacit) knowledge is being lost, and at the time those companies/teams need to do some of the fix or evolution in their product, everything takes at least 3x more time and effort.

I can see in some interviews for MLE/DE where companies aren't hiring for new products and/or sustain and support (OK, fair enough for this market), but the ones hiring are actually doing that for deep issues in terms of technical debt or losses in terms of institutional knowledge that went away with the layoff.

One company was offering some lateral movement in terms of role plus 10% salary increase to essentially migrate their whole orchestration system, move away all data pipelines from Scala to Python, and do the knowledge transfer because most of their staff just quit or was fired and none of their DS/MLE (star staff) knew about those technologies. Unless I'm unemployed, there is no way I would leave my job to a death march project like this and get fired after 6 months.

> Tenure functions somewhat differently at very large companies; it may take years for someone just to come up to speed and learn how to operate within the system, so they do their best to retain people for decades.

Even if you're "just" a 500 people company, expect the investment into getting a new hire up to speed to be at least a year's worth of salary - initial recruiting cost, dealing with governmental bureaucracy if the employee doesn't have citizenship, actual learning / training / handover time and reduced productivity in adjacent people.

Unfortunately, for most companies only the recruiting cost shows up in their HR budget calculations, so there is no "incentive" per se for HR to look for "leaders" who manage to burn through entire teams worth of people in years. They may achieve stellar business results, but the cost to the company doesn't show up on anyone's radar until enough people dump annoyance in Glassdoor.

> Even if you're "just" a 500 people company, expect the investment into getting a new hire up to speed to be at least a year's worth of salary

That was my case when I was hired to a DAX50: My manager told me to get the first year to learn about the company. At the first moment, I thought that was stupid and in 3 months I could be up to speed. For the technical and product part it was quite everything OK in 6 months; the part that took more time was the organizational and getting the organizational capital.

Ideally, as long as you're not a manager (or hell, even then...) your manager should have taken care of the "organizational capital" bullshit.

When I refer to organizational capital, I mean a form of "social capital" that is essential for effectively implementing changes within a team.

For example, in a large company, no one will allow you to make changes during your first day or month of work. Unlike start-ups and scale-ups, where there may be an automatic assumption of competency, in larger organizations, you need to demonstrate your skills and convince those around you of your capabilities.

It can feel like a ritualistic corporate dance, and for someone like me, who comes from smaller organizations, it was challenging to navigate. However, over time, people began to recognize my work, and now I can handle most tasks independently.

At this level it feels like "no one else can have 'em" is often as much of a reason as "we've got 'em". Hard to know for sure though.

I get that feeling sometimes. I have wondered what could have came of the internet if the titans of software weren't gobbling up talent and having them work on destroying privacy for the last 20 years or so. The whole surveillance economy kind of seems less like an inevitability and more like a decided-on goal to me.

> Recently we learned that Google spent $2.7 billion to re-hire a single AI researcher who had left to start his own company.

False. They acquired a company.

Yeah, they acquired the company to get Noam Shazeer back. The whole rest of the company was a bonus.

They already had all the same people and resources as that company. They don't need it's computers, or it's staff, or it's customers, or it's name. They aquired nothing but a load of integration and hr problems.

They aquired a single person, who will head a team exactly the same as he could have previously. The only difference is now he proved his point.

The article characterization is not only valid, it's not even hyperbole. It's actually plain dry recitation of events.

>Recently we learned that Google spent $2.7 billion to re-hire a single AI researcher who had left to start his own company.

This is a prime example of all the various news outlets (even "respected" newspapers) making us collectively dumber for reading them: https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+%242.7+billion+to+re-...

Also, the author's blogpost hotlinks to the supporting url (futurism.com/the-byte/) that has these sentences: >Google reportedly spent $2.7 billion to rehire AI expert Noam Shazeer — an astonishing amount of money for what boils down to the expertise of a single computer scientist. [...] As companies continue to pour billions into the environmentally damaging and still largely unproven tech, though, investors are starting to ask some tough questions. Should they really be paying several billion dollars to get the expertise of a single hire

It makes it seem like Google wired all $2.7 billion into Noam Shazeer's bank account.

Instead, the more accurate picture is a 30-member team "pseudo-acquihire" of Character.AI without officially buying the startup via a "licensing deal" . Excerpt from https://aimresearch.co/market-industry/old-employees-new-dol...:

>But now, in an unexpected and somewhat controversial twist, Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas are heading back to Google—along with 30 top researchers from his startup. The tech giant has orchestrated a rare “reverse acquihire,” bringing the AI pioneer back into the fold without buying out Character.AI. Instead, Google opted for a non-exclusive license to use Character.AI’s advanced large language model (LLM) technology, allowing the startup to exist independently but without its cutting-edge talent.

Maybe all that was Google's legal jujitsu of avoiding potential FTC/DOJ anti-monopoly actions. Either way, the mainstream headlines are terrible. The misinformation is spread further by the blog author copy&pasting them.

I think it was slightly tongue in cheek - everyone knows they didn't literally pay the guy a 2.7 billion hiring bonus

In my direct personal experience the whole IT management and HR world worked hard making procedures and practices (overly specific role specification details, recruitment standardisation including interviews, rigid technical expectations in a very fast changing and hugely diverse profession, onboarding or lack of it relying on very deterministic role specifications, continuous knowledge sharing) ensuring that SE are very easy to replace or get rid of.

Others do it regardless for short term financial benefits for the investors - ignoring the fate of the organization.

I feel the question being very late and mute for the software industry (with very few exceptions).

I think performance scalable stock awards vesting over 4-6 years are a pretty good way to align incentives here. High performers would naturally have a bigger / longer gilded chain. Anecdata - definitely worked on me)

Very hard as if not, I am not staying. Same for consultancy clients by the way; there are way too many of them, so why would we please them; they should please us.

You should make this a tag-line for your business so that the prospective clients are aware of your delusions.

Honestly, in an industry that talks about how important collaboration is and then places the most authoritarian minded individuals as our lauded CEOs (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Jobs, etc, etc) I just find Charity such a fucking breath of fresh air in terms of communication style and the way she talks about and clearly lives her principles. Honeycomb may not be FAANG-sized, but I'd genuinely give more to work under her than any other current CEO I can think of.

They are the masters, you and I workers. Collaboration, thinking collectively, is the servile mentality that is preferred in the workers.

To add, nothing is wrong with servile mentality! Not everyone wants to be the big-time leader.

Imo, one doesn't want either a servile or master mentality. Skip forward.

I mean, most "servile" people don't think of themselves that way; usually, they only do—if some third party actor managed to impose their judgement on them, fuelled by the actor's own resentment, or personal gain. For instance, this is the basis of communism. "You may make some money, do well for yourself, but you would always remain a prol. Associate. Dissociate. Associate..." This reasoning had determined the structure of Soviet agitprop, and coincidentally, underpins all of modern propaganda, too. (Although "Economics" is not necessarily the subject, as people really don't care about money too much, and how it's distributed, which is what you would expect.)

Most people don't feel compelled to "Skip forward"—they don't bother, and much happier for it.

Until they do, of course, but that's politics for you.

If you frame yourself according to a collective, if you are not an individual, you are bound to have a servile (or master) outlook - either is fine. People who don't define themselves according to the group/political/nation/religion/sportball team are the problem.. and left out of the discussion. They are the definition of 'idiots'.

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