Ask HN: Best ways to retain qualified employees?
What are the best effective measures to retain qualified employees (in general and developers in particular)?
I'd like to read you experiences and maybe some studies or articles about the topic.
I'd like to read you experiences and maybe some studies or articles about the topic.
158 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadif someone comes to you with a competing offer, you should be open to negotiation (provided they have done well in their recent perf reviews)
This bare minimum will keep you from coming across as super-cheap and out of touch / unconcerned with their compensation. Remember most employees can get a bigger raise by switching jobs; your salary increases shouldn't make a point of making that obvious.
2. Foster their career growth.
3. Pay them above market if you can or give them a part of the company in equity or options.
4. Generally be a place that people want to work at.
Especially when they suggest organization wide changes to improve workflow or work environment. Don't be the guy always dismissing suggestions or you can slowly but surely turn a proactive A player to someone that just do the bare minimum while seeking other opportunities.
Also, this kind of people tends to be loyal to your product success more than you.
This will seem like they are fighting against you, but train your eyes to see the difference.
Also pair this kind of people with similar one. The goal is for them to counter and correct each other. It'll give them opportunity to grow.
I've also really enjoyed Jason Fried's talks and writings about managing employees.
2. Pay above market rates and promote when it's deserved.
3. Allow them to retain IP of their side projects. People who want to build startups will eventually leave, but you can delay it with this. Considering most people will never reach product market fit, it's a win win.
About (3), that just makes things worse in my opinion, people end up working for their CVs, their side projects, and their future company. You would certainly retain them, but not sure if that's the kind of people that will make your company successful.
After a given minimum figure for my salary, I personally would value more WFH, having good tools, being able to make progress and not feeling stuck because of bulls??t and a nice manager and team that focuses on getting things done and shipping. No amount of free avocado would compensate it for me.
So, to OP, (as someone commented elsewhere) just LISTEN to them and ACT to help them fix what they see wrong. That's it. I'd be surprised if the only things they want to stay is more money.
The moment someone else pays them more for a more pleasant environment you are 100% guaranteed to lose someone.
And people have an inherent bias for the status quo because of job switching costs (or if they don't, they're not long for your company anyway). If they're happy and feel fairly paid, they're not going anywhere. If they get a competing offer such that it no longer seems fair, if you've created an environment of trust, they may even tell you.
You couldn't pay me enough to work in a toxic culture. I've been there, and no amount of money is worth it to me.
I'm fed up of people thinking they can compensate for not paying adequately by buying a ping pong table and a vague promise of "great growth oportunities"
Getting your just compensation isn't about "chasing money," it's about making sure you're paid what you're worth. The market largely dictates that and it's easier than ever to get a rough idea (+/- 20% is pretty easy) of where you stand based on experience, industry, location, and leverage.
> I'd be surprised if the only things they want to stay is more money.
Nobody said that.
This is on top of all the other sensible advice here such as pay them well, give them flexibility etc.
In short:
1. give them the ability to apply their own solutions to your problems - don't force-feed solutions as part of your problems. let dev teams use their own expertise to collaborate with the business to come up with the right answer
2. allow devs to pursue mastery of their field, give them opportunity to learn and experiment and become great at what they do
3. make sure that the thing you're building matters to your customers, so that your devs have a feeling of purpose. nobody wants to ship code that does nothing, for nobody. start measuring whether you're building the right thing (see Lean Startup)
People will say 'pay', but I think that only matters up to a certain point. I don't think anyone leaves a company offering all 3 of the above just because they aren't paid above market rate.
Best of luck!
If I, as a dev, really enjoy my job and know that I might not get a better situation by switching, I will at least ask my employer for a raise before walking.
All in all, money is the easiest thing to fix of those in my opinion and it's easy to talk about it.
"Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. Both Type X's and Type I care about money. If an employee's compensation doesn't hit the baseline that I described in Chapter 2 — if her organization doesn't pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn't equitable compared to others doing similar work - that person's motivation will crater, regardless of whether she leans toward X or toward I. However, once compensation meets that level, money plays a different role for Type I's than for Type X's. Type I's don't turn down raises or refuse to cash paychecks. But one reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes the issue of money off the table so they can focus on the work itself. By contrast, for many Type X's, money is the table. It's why they do what they do. Recognition is similar."
2. Reward good performance
3. Give opportunities for internal growth.
4. Support their other goals (startups, health, lifestyle).
5. Appreciate them and don't be afraid to show it.
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#3 on this list is under-rated, in my opinion.
Point 4 for example ("Support their other goals (startups, health, lifestyle)"), is basically the same as what the current top comment states as "1. Give them flexibility eg- work timings, wfh."
Point 1 is again another one of the top comment's point.
Either way I strongly feel that giving people a way to move on to the next big important mission as they progress is the real secret. Humans get bored and all the bonuses and free lunches in the world won't keep highly motivated talent from seeking out something they consider 'worthy' of their time.
I think this is a big one, at least from my 40yo pov.
Getting a boss to tell the client "we will add that feature to our list" vs telling me "we really like this client, how fast can you crank out this feature for this stupid deadline"
I value my personal time/health more than salary.
Autonomy and Impact- people need to feel like they own their work and that it matters to someone. Meaningful (subjectively defined) work is an important motivator in my experience. Creeping nihilism erodes morale and motivation.
I’ve found that nihilism is often caused by broken processes that fail to fix obvious deficiencies, especially in large corporations. This ranges from pointless hoop-jumping to get simple software packages to the lack of accountability/oversight for low-performers and everything in between.
Some want money. Some want flexibility. Some want to work on groundbreaking projects. Some want a mixture.
You can keep the un-/underqualified by improving their skillset, I've not seen the lazy improved, but maybe that's possible as well.
1.) Make goals unclear or constantly changing. Bonus points if you tie their bonus to hitting some kind of OKR even though that goal may be put on the back burner halfway into the quarter. Even more so if this includes their holiday bonus, and you have a minimum threshold of “accomplish 80% of your quarterly OKR and get 80% of your bonus. Get 79% or less accomplished and take home 0%”
2.) Make sure all managers are spineless and won’t fight for their employees. This includes managers from other teams piling work onto people who don’t report to them, but add “important to the company” work that has to be done and your own manager always going along with it.
3.) Make sure there’s a lot of good old boys club going on, especially if the “principle” engineer and the CTO go out to clubs every other night trying to wing man for each other. Also make sure there’s no accountability for these favorite engineers (or employees in general)
4.) Have a career framework that lets your employees know what they can do in order to get promoted or grow into another role (manager? senior level?). After a couple years of not promoting (most) people, then get acquired or change the entire structure so all of your employees are unsure if their work is actually going to help them get a promotion, or if that’s even an option anymore.
Finally, make sure feedback is treated like the plague. If somebody notices that the checkout page crashes every time someone uses PayPal, just ignore it. Somebody who isn’t the web dev has PR that fixes it? Let it live in limbo forever. Features require login but don’t tell customers until they get an auth error, and then have to refill out the form all over again? Not a problem. Why do you keep bringing up issues with the UX instead of rewriting our site in Angul...Reac....Vue.
We give out all sorts of signals and most in the tech industry are ambiguous, toxic and uncivilized.
Learn to read the signals and you'll break through to what matters most: culture.
A lot of the signals are cold, aloof, passive aggressive, disgruntled, dismissive, insincere, immodest, fake, insecure, uncultured, ignorant, insensitive, etc. That's just the human condition. Even if we don't mean them as such they can be interpreted as such by other insecure, insincere, imposter syndrome types.
Put a bunch of people in a room and the signals get amplified, it's the basis of reality television.
Combined, the signals whisper "you don't belong here."
Your manager is giving you a signal by wearing running shoes to your 1:1. What does it mean? How can you interpret it?
Your founder is giving a signal by walking in with a coffee. Again what does it mean?
Your VC is giving a signal by his haircut. Your project manager is giving a signal by her exposed skin. Your developers are giving signals through their man boobs.
All of these signals are wretched and don't entice quality people to stick around because they stink of belligerence.
In an honest open and transparent environment the signals align with the values and people don't need to wallow in cognitive dissonance until their minds crack under the pressure to conform, because fundamentally people will do almost anything to be accepted by a group, and when your job depends on fitting in the company has a lot of leverage over you to essentially milk you for your efforts in exchange for keeping you around.
Downvote if you are triggered by man boobs.
I'm trying to comment more substantively but you're not giving me anything to work with.
Obviously I threw you off the scent by triggering your sensibilities.
But I'll have you know I've worked with PM's who had very distinct physical traits that attempted to buck the conventions. One woman worked exclusively in athleisure and halter tops, even in winter. Another guy had piercings all over his face and ears. This other nitwit wore the same exact orange hoodie abomination every single day for four months. My favorite is the guy who wore tiny golf shirts so I could see his underwear on top of his jeans. This is a grown man, with a beard! He should have gone into military service to learn something about personal grooming and had no place in the organization no matter how brilliant. His very presence was a sector stating "abandon hope all ye who enter here" as in you have zero chance of seeing a real client now get back to your coerced agile workflow.
These signals are impossible to ignore and reek of bougie decadence and cause people like me who want to invest their whole lives to something more than an unfair exchange of time for money to die a little inside and seek the comfort of strangers to air our grievances only to get downvoted, therefore reinforcing the trauma.
Plus I like to disguise my modesty in an utter lack of respect because this industry is a cockroach infested nest of groupthink if you ask me with everyone copying everyone's signals until only clones remain. Then we argue about diversity and scratch our heads as to why none of the girls want to play with us.
The reference to man boobs is in relation to grown men signalling like middleschoolers wearing printed T's from guardians of the galaxy and star trek while they get progressively more corpulent on a diet of chicken wings and lunch specials and pints of shock top. Oh and pizza. Always the dry pizza left over from those two pizza meetings.
There's this myth that brilliant people are supposed to be anti social, but only to a point? Look how antisocial I am, at least on the surface.
I'm actually using this forum as a testing ground for my fevered ideations. Any substantive meaning you may extract is all in your own mind.
> If somebody notices that the checkout page crashes every time someone uses PayPal, just ignore it.
Oh my god. So much these - especially the combination of the two. It's not hard to identify with the customer when building a service (especially if you use the product yourself.) It really angers me when I encounter a customer-facing problem, try to fix it, but instead I get shut down by my manager, who explains that it's not one of the company's OKRs this quarter.
Been burned by this a couple times. Especially infuriating after all the effort that goes into crafting "acceptable" OKRs every three months. Mandatory training sessions, the stress of identifying metrics that are both measurable & meaningful, multiple one-on-ones with management to review them, acknowledging and signing copies, and then toss it all in the trash because we're changing priorities. But it's the core of your performance review and tied to compensation. The hell.
How common is this nonsense?
*raises hand
I don't know if it's common, but I've had the same experience and so have many friends.
Cut total compensation without cutting salary. A favorite cut is to reduce the quality of the insurance (and the cost to the company). The unilaterally changed your compensation without telling you let alone negotiating a new contract.
Pay people the minimum instead of what they are worth. The guy who can walk to work from his house - you know he's not going to leave if you underpay him.
EDIT: One of the classic texts on this is Steve Blank's "The Elves Leave Middle Earth" [1] which describes how small seemingly innocuous benefits reductions can serve as a "wake up call" for content employees who never really thought about looking around for a new job.
1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
I've worked in some highly political large companies and one of the best managers I had would basically say "I know this is basically BS but there is lots of visibility on this so we have to show something." He'd then work with us to find the bare minimum we needed to do to to make it seem like we did a lot more.
It's a lot easier to tolerate crap if people just admit it's crap and your job is to shovel it. It's awful when a bunch of managers hand-wave and act like you're smelling roses instead of crap. Then they make you work 10X harder then you need to just so they can show their boss you are growing roses, not shoveling crap.
I still don't like the company and work environment, but when I do leave this place, I'll genuinely miss my boss.
2. Be honest regarding company state and finances. The worst thing is that you tell everything is OK, the company is doing well, and suddenly you have to lay off half of your staff.
3. Flexible hours and projects. Development (and solving problems) is an art, not cranking something like in a factory.
People don't quit jobs, they quit a boss.
Since I have had the opportunity to raise my kids, I have grown tremendously as a manager: I have learned to forgive and to stand fast. To allow for slack and to demand relentlessness. To treat people as individuals (you might have guessed I work in IT where rather exquisite characters seem to flourish) and learn them to enjoy the results of our efforts as a team.
Loads of seemingly contradictional qualities that are required from parents and very easily translate to people management.
Basically I see my role as a temporary one: you are here with me since we need each other to reach some goal, and then we will both move on. This might be short-term or long, but we will separate and I will do my utmost best to become a better person / employee / employer over time, as I will do my utmost best to let you grow and fore fill yourself.
Oh and I will try to be having a good time while doing that, since I have ran out of time to suffer for no reason but suffering.
1. I expect to be trusted. If there is no possibility to work from a remote location and excessive time tracking (e.g. punch cards) because of a lack of trust, I realized that my work was not valuated at all.
2. I expect to be able to use my own workflow. If I get micromanaged and am forced to use buggy toolchains and processes with lots of dependencies, my productivity will suffer and so will my passion. Define the inputs and outputs of my work, but not anything in between.
3. Growth is more important than high pay. I am not talking about a 2% raise every year. There really needs to be a difference based on performance. I throw myself into something and get the same pay rise as if I had been slacking the whole year. This will not lower my performance, it will make me leave.
1) superstar centered
2) technology centered
3) community centered
Of these most companies adhere to 1) or 2) and a lot of the suggestions in this thread reflect that
Nobody has really tried 3) that I know of but it's the best way to get people to want to stay, duh
This is straight out of "the culture code" by Daniel Coyle
1) to work with people just as qualified, including managers who are just as qualified at managing (a rare unicorn in the IT sector)
2) not having roadblocks for doing good work. This includes being kept in the dark, micro-management, simplistic "all employees have exactly same computer" policies, workplaces that makes concentration difficult due to e.g. noise or splatter of meetings, weird requirements which can't be discussed at all and doesn't make sense.
If those who are open to staying see people rewarded, in futile efforts to retain them, for being almost gone, they will eventually start leaving as well.
So yes, be clear about what the exact responsibilities everyone has and build up a solid team where everyone fits in.
A few weeks ago I interviewed for a job with a 50% salary increase compared to the current company I work for. All went well until I had an interview with the manager. He was the kind of guy I would not want to work with. He gave me the micro-manager vibe and mentioned a few things that made me turn down the job.
I'd rather work with a good and nice manager than have a 50% salary increase.
And if you worth +50% on the market you should really re-evaluate how nice is your manager not paying you that much. It is all 3-5%/year {raises|insults} until you show them a competitive offer, then the parent question gets asked.
Not necesseraly. If I had the chance to move up in my current role and keep the same salary I would stay.
I did apply for a job that actually paid less, but had more responsibility. I guess it's part of planning your career rather than tactically deciding based on money.
So, I'm not done looking, but money is not the only deciding factor.
But as soon as you find a good job with a decent manager that pays 50% more, you are going to leave.
Actually the moment that you've received that offer with 50% salary increase you already lost some of your motivations even though you may not notice it immediately. And you are going to continue lose more of your motivations because you know that you can earn more.
I think Money is equally important to many other things mentioned here. But the thing about money is that it isn't the only thing that matters. If you don't fix other problems, money can only keep your employees as long as they can't find a replacement with similar pay scale. And even until then they are going to under-perform.
So Money is important. You can't keep good, motivated, high performing employees only with a good pay check. But you can't keep them without a good pay check either.
Well yes, I would. But that doesn't mean it's only about money.
> And you are going to continue lose more of your motivations because you know that you can earn more.
Partly agree. I know I can do more and be in a role with more responsibility. If I find a new job as a manager/team lead which pays same or 10% less, I would actually go for it. Because in the long run I may move up to director/VP level. So maybe money is important as I mentioned, but it's not the only thing.
> So Money is important. You can't keep good, motivated, high performing employees only with a good pay check. But you can't keep them without a good pay check either.
Totally agree.
Often times development teams are applying all kind of processes and reporting are taken accountable for the bug they make, and are overall held to a high standard of quality. All the company is able to consult the backlog, ask questions, whatever, it seems good, and they're ok with it in general.
But then, the dev team may very well fell like all the other team are basically doing the exact opposite. Maybe the sales team will never admit a single failure to close on its team side, the product one will never admit its specs were flawed, the marketing will never admit its creatives where delivered too late, etc...
And that perceived unfairness may be a deal breaker for engineers in my experience. They don't care for example (or even know) if the sales guys have to go to nightclubs until 1am to land a deal while they clock out a 6.30pm, they value visible equality of treatment.
So to retain certains developers, company wide "fairness" may go a long way. (I use quotes because I'm not 100% sure this is the correct english term).
I know everyone says no, I want this or that, but at the end of the day, you are trading time for money. Only when people have enough money to not worry do they care about other things, and unless they are were getting 300k+ in a FAANG company for the last few years and now can live ok for a few years, pay is the important factor.
If you can't save a penny, even if work conditions are great, people will change to start building their 401k or to get their kid to a better school.
Then there is also the cultural factor that if a manager asks 'what kinds of things motivate you' if you just say money, you are branded an heretic, so people say independence or agency or whatever.
I would say (assuming they have another option of course) more than 95% of the people here and everywhere would change jobs if they got a 20% payout or something, so that probably says a lot about it.
"I know everyone says no, I want this or that, but at the end of the day, you are trading time for money."
Not all time is equal. Let's say you're paid $2000 and you're at a job that has no stress, feels cognitively easy and career advancement is possible. Now suppose you're being paid $4000, but you're lightly stressed all the time at baseline. In fact, the whole company is. Now you're being paid $6000 with chronic moderate stress. Or imagine being paid $8000 with heavy chronic stress and you barely have it under control.
In these scenario's I'd choose for the $2000 in most cases, unless the other cases are short-term assignments. I could do the $4000 job for perhaps 1 to 2 years, but you start playing with your health in all other cases if you do it for that long.
Now this only looked at the relationship of salary, time and stress, but I believe there are a few other variables as well, but it's a lot of typing ;-)
E.g. being able to do remote work wherever and work hours whenever, as long as you average 160 hours per month on a 3 month basis. That's completely different as well, I can imagine that you have people that take 1.5 months off and then sink in all their time in the other 1.5 months while being in Argentina, traveling with their SO.
You might as well replace the numbers with letters because discussing a time-for-money exchange while ignoring the time component is pretty worthless.
At least until then, marginal utility is essentially linear with marginal gross.
Not sold? Boom, imagine that your loved ones are suddenly ill.
In your example you go from x to 4x but taking a developer in London with say a new-senior salary of 70k for a standard low-medium stress role, (with a few exceptions such as working in finance) you might get up to 100k by making a change, which is ~1.4x. But that extra 30k is taxed at 40% so isn't significantly more and is irrelevant against the actual cost of housing in London.
HN is always a SV bubble but by and large jobs that allow you to triple your income are vanishingly rare for the average developer, so given you're not going to change your situation entirely with an extra 16k why trade a known quantity for more stress, longer hours and a worse quality of life.
For example, for me, I work to support my family. Pretty much any software job in my area will be able to do that for me, so the bigger consideration in choosing is which jobs will actually allow me to spend quality time with my family (since that's the entire reason why I go to work). No amount of additional pay could persuade me to work 60 hours a week or work in an environment that leaves me drained by the end of the day.
I think people in general say not work 60 hours a week, or freedom, etc. Which is fine, but for me that is the starting point. Same as I don't need to say 'not be physically or sexually assaulted at work' as I expect that is the norm.
I don't think developers are more concentrated in urban centers than any other jobs are.
I've done the math but just to maintain the same standard of living I'd need to make around $400k a year cash comp in San Francisco. Doable for a very small minority, maybe, but not with my resume and experience. And that's not even counting California taxes, where the marginal tax rate is 4x my current rate (I know the math is more complicated than that which is why I called out marginal), and the increased Federal taxes if I was actually making $400k. So it's probably in the neighborhood of 10-15% higher. And there's little things like a Roth IRA, which I would become ineligible for. That's $6k a year in tax-advantaged retirement contributions, gone. Obviously a good deal for a big pay raise, but a net loss if I'm just maintaining the same savings.
I work remotely for the last 10 or so years so I understand that. But you gave a good example, if a company wants to hire good talent in SF, as you said, it will be 400k. No amount of free sushi or bean bags will change your mind. So, pay is the reason you aren't there. No amount of 'like minded individuals' or whatnot will make you move.
Absolutely true. People don't jump ship to get a 10% increase in salary once most of their usual financial needs are met.
However, when people feel they are underpaid compared to other companies, it might seems unfair and unjust. Engineers can feel unappreciated and leave because of that.
Furthermore, many companies seem to be able to think only in terms of money: very often the employee that is paid more is also listened to, given opportunities to grow, treated with respect.
This is brainwashing. You will spend almost all of your life working, get all that you can. Its a business transaction, dont live like a slave
Most of us look at billionaires and think "why would anybody want so much more money than they need?", identify this as the vice of "greed", and implicitly stear ourselves away from that vice. However, the quantitative disparity here makes these phenomena qualitatively different. As you said, employment is a business transaction and should be treated as such, and this attitude only becomes a vice when it dominates someone's life (as in the case of the billionaire).
It is possible to work without putting your real life on "pause" (we age every moment whether we are present with that truth or not).
The "brainwashing" is people who don't pursue or request raises because "I'm already comfortable".
>For example, for me, I work to support my family. Pretty much any software job in my area will be able to do that for me,
Yes, but are you thinking outside of right now? What happens if the software jobs dry up in your area, or you have something happen where you aren't as competitive at your job and need to change careers. What if the new career you land on doesn't typically offer health insurance? Do you have enough money for a change like that? Do you have 6 months to a year in expenses saved up? Money isn't money, money is freedom, and we're all trying to buy our freedom.
I don't exclusively value money, and there are trade offs that I won't make, but lets not pretend like making more money isn't very impactful for nearly everyone.
The economics are different for software developers for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that we don't have a cartel protecting our licensure, but you give me an extra $350k a year and it definitely will raise the bar on what I'm willing to put up with. But a decade in, I'd be willing to give up more than $350k for more of the intangible valuables.
The question was not "What is the way to keep software developers without paying them"
> For example, for me, I work to support my family. Pretty much any software job in my area will be able to do that for me, so the bigger consideration in choosing is which jobs will actually allow me to spend quality time with my family (since that's the entire reason why I go to work). No amount of additional pay could persuade me to work 60 hours a week or work in an environment that leaves me drained by the end of the day.
Have you asked your wife if she would take a $1,000,000 a year for 2-4 years in exchange for you working 60 hour weeks? Because actual financial security as described by having extra half a million a year in a bank sounds like a boon to any family that does not already have millions of dollars in cash and cash equivalents.
This is a strange way of thinking and an absurd baseline. Most software developers have also gone out of their way to study, keep up their skills, etc. Why would you think "making more than a live wage" is a good thing -- perhaps the comparison should be the value they are adding? If all those years studying for SATs, struggling thru tough CS courses, grad school, GREs, etc get compared to earning a living wage, why even bother?
Also, I grew up on a "living wage". Living wage means your kids dont get braces. They go to schools with gangs. It means wearing shoes with holes. It means you skip doctors appointments because your living wage does not cover the deductible or copay. It means you cant get a review book for your SAT and you need to chip in with friends to share a review book and allocate time among yourselves.
SWEs: If you've busted your arse to get where you are and add value, dont fall for the "remember you're making more than living wage" argument.
So if I don't need your job, you need to build a working environment where I want the job you are offering. The details of what that means will be different for each person, so managers need to talk to their people, and need to ask. There won't be one single thing to do to retain everyone - retention is a permanent ongoing negotiation.
- match (or offer, if you don't) my 401k - increase health benefits - provide a learning benefit - no strings attached. It shouldn't matter if it "benefits the company" directly - flexible hours. (I prefer a 6-2 schedule. Why do I have to be in 9-5 just because that is what most do? - etc ..
Compensate an employee well, and they will see you care about them; not just their work.
Companies think they can retain people out of fear, this only works on people without options. The ones without options are the lowest value slice of employee to have.
If not being paid above market value it takes away one of the big reasons to stay. And if caught at a low point it might be enough to open the door and look around.