Comment by andrewmutz

I'm unsure about how long your career has been.

At Taos, there was a monthly training session / tech talk on some subject.

At Network Appliance ('98-'09), there was a moderate push to go to trainings and they paid for the devs on the team I was on to go to the perl conference (when it was just down the road one year everyone - even the tech writers - went).

At a retail company that I worked at ('10-'14), they'd occasionally bring in trainers on some thing that... about half a dozen of the more senior developers (who would then be able to spread the knowledge out ... part of that was a formal "do a presentation on the material from the past two weeks for the rest of your team.")

However, as time went on and as juniors would leave sooner the appetite for a company to spend money on training sessions has dissipated. It could be "Here is $1000 training budget if you ask your manager" becoming $500 now. It could be that there aren't any more conferences that the company is willing to spend $20k to send a team to.

If half of the junior devs are going to jump to the next tier of company and the other half aren't going to become much better... why do that training opportunity at all?

Training absolutely used to be a thing that was much more common... but so too were tenures of half a decade or longer.

This! Each time I join a new job, about 1-3 months in the door, there is a sit-down with the new line manager to check-in and give some feedback. I always talk about future compensation expectations at the time. I tell them: The market pays approximately 4-5% increase in total comp per year. That means, up 20% every 4 years. That is my expectation. If they current company is not paying that rate, I will look elsewhere for work. In almost all cases, they nod their heads in agreement. Ironically, when I come to them 3-5 years later with a new job offer in hand with a nice pay raise, 100% of them do not support matching the compensation, and view me as an un-loyal "job hopper". You just can't win with middle managers.

This is why I never do internal job transfers. The total comp doesn't change. If I do an external job change, I will get a pay rise. I say it to my peers in private: "Loyalty is for suckers; you get paid less."

Yeah, companies broke the career structure decades ago. There's no seniority rewards nor pensions to look forward to, and meanwhile companies put more budget in hiring than in promoting. They look at the high turnover rates and executives shrug. Money is being made, no changes.

It's no surprise the market adapts to the new terms and conditions. But companies simply don't care enough to focus on retention.

This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions.

I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already have" is.. a hard sell. What are you buying with that $20k exactly? 20% more hours? 20% more output? No? Then why are we spending the money?

It's certainly possible to dance around it talking about reducing risk ("there's a risk this person leaves, which will cause...") but it's bogged down in hypotheticals and kinda a hard sell. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.

fwiw at big tech companies I haven't found this to be true, bonus and refresher multipliers for the higher performance review ratings are significant

And retraining that candidate probably costs you a month of productivity, too.

They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.

The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching.

What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.

When I worked at a very small company we were extremely concerned about this, and so we paid people well enough that they didn't want to leave. All I can figure is that the bean counters just don't understand that churn has a cost.

Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing.

Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity.

A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.

Same reason why companies don't pay everyone 10 million bucks a month. Where do you think the money comes from?

Sure but there needs to be a balance with momentum. You cant keep losing institutional knowledge like that. I think we are heavily disbalanced towards too much churn

Good to minimize bus factor, bad when you want to innovate and expand your business. So I guess it's ideal for this slowing economy focused on "maintenance".

40, that's around the time pensions were starting to be removed.