<story><title>Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix</title><url>https://www.neomindlabs.com/post/your-developer-wont-get-hit-by-a-bus-theyll-get-hired-by-netflix</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>game_the0ry</author><text>I agree with the author&amp;#x27;s point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That&amp;#x27;s how labor economic works - it&amp;#x27;s a market.&lt;p&gt;Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago. Example - when you new grad starts in i-banking, they&amp;#x27;re in training for 4-6 weeks. Not doing anything productive, just training to do the job. Not the case in engineering, you are assigned user stories day one and your training is doing the work. So new i-banks are highly paid (so they don&amp;#x27;t leave because talent is perceived to be scarce and valuable) and they&amp;#x27;re companies invest in them (through training early on).&lt;p&gt;Right now, corporate managers are vomiting in their mouth when the have to look at how much they need to pay to keep their engineers from leaving. It&amp;#x27;s because of the perception of engineers - they&amp;#x27;re seen as semi-skilled labor (cost center, not strategic to the business) and are easily replaceable (no, they&amp;#x27;re not). Culturally, they have been conditioned to think this way, so no wonder turn over is so high every where.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mumblemumble</author><text>Somewhat related to this point: A large conglomerate I worked for managed to kill one of their major products by making the mistake of assuming that programmers are easy to replace with any other skilled programmer. So they moved a product team to a new office, knowing that the highest-paid people on the team would not choose to relocate, and assuming it would be easy to backfill them with inexpensive new hires at the new location.&lt;p&gt;Except, in this case, the programmers in question had decades&amp;#x27; worth of hard-won domain expertise that was absolutely critical to their job function. And, this product targeting a niche industry, it was relatively uncommon domain expertise. So much so that the only people on the job market who had it were these folks whom they were ousting. All of whom had found positions at competitors within a day or two.&lt;p&gt;So then the company lost their ability to maintain the product in any meaningful way, and, within a year or two, customers started moving on as well.</text></comment>
<story><title>Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix</title><url>https://www.neomindlabs.com/post/your-developer-wont-get-hit-by-a-bus-theyll-get-hired-by-netflix</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>game_the0ry</author><text>I agree with the author&amp;#x27;s point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That&amp;#x27;s how labor economic works - it&amp;#x27;s a market.&lt;p&gt;Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago. Example - when you new grad starts in i-banking, they&amp;#x27;re in training for 4-6 weeks. Not doing anything productive, just training to do the job. Not the case in engineering, you are assigned user stories day one and your training is doing the work. So new i-banks are highly paid (so they don&amp;#x27;t leave because talent is perceived to be scarce and valuable) and they&amp;#x27;re companies invest in them (through training early on).&lt;p&gt;Right now, corporate managers are vomiting in their mouth when the have to look at how much they need to pay to keep their engineers from leaving. It&amp;#x27;s because of the perception of engineers - they&amp;#x27;re seen as semi-skilled labor (cost center, not strategic to the business) and are easily replaceable (no, they&amp;#x27;re not). Culturally, they have been conditioned to think this way, so no wonder turn over is so high every where.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tschwimmer</author><text>Investment Banks are a terrible example of low attrition workplaces, as attrition is quite high. It used to be the case (not sure if it still is) that expected attrition was ~100% after the first 2 years as an analyst as you were expected to go to B-school, the buyside or somewhere else.</text></comment>