
Why Top Talent Leaves - bedris
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/01/18/why-top-talent-leaves-top-10-reasons-boiled-down-to-1/
======
dkarl
"Poor people management" isn't specific enough, and it doesn't explain why top
contributors are more likely to leave than mediocre contributors. It's a very
specific form of poor management: treating technical people as
interchangeable, and therefore assuming that all technical people are
mediocre, and therefore assuming that maturity and judgment only exist in
management. When people really, _really_ swallow the Kool-Aid of management as
the ultimate masters of the universe, as they must in certain large
corporations, they start to think of management as the final step in human
development: infant, child, adolescent, worker, manager. Some people linger on
one step of maturation or another (literally "retarded") and that's fine, as
long as they accept the natural order of things, right?

Apparently that approach works for some corporations. Getting rid of top
contributors at least makes management's belief structure valid and gives
their world a kind of simplicity and intellectual coherence that's hard to
achieve on a large scale. (If you can't help believing something that isn't
true, you had better make sure it _is_ true in the part of the world you care
about.)

Good managers know the people they manage and know their diverse capabilities.
That's hard work, though, so it isn't for everyone.

~~~
kamaal
>> _treating technical people as interchangeable, and therefore assuming that
all technical people are mediocre, and therefore assuming that maturity and
judgment only exist in management....the ultimate masters of the universe, as
they must in certain large corporations, they start to think of management as
the final step in human development: infant, child, adolescent, worker,
manager._

Back here in India, this mentality is so common and prevalent that it assumed
if you don't become a manager within 5 years of you joining the industry you
are fit for nothing. Also managerial posts are supposed to be mean't for the
best as you mention _masters of the universe_.

Many people even express shock, when someone above 27-28 codes or is involved
in some tech work. Its considered as a sign of incompetence and under
performance, like as though the person isn't really ready for the 'actual'
stuff yet.

This has already let to huge problems in getting work done in large Indian IT
firms. There just aren't good people anymore.

~~~
mgkimsal
"Many people even express shock, when someone above 27-28 codes or is involved
in some tech work. Its considered as a sign of incompetence and under
performance, like as though the person isn't really ready for the 'actual'
stuff yet."

Such odd thinking. So... you do coding for a few years - doing
stupid/wrong/mistake-filled code - to work your way up to "manager", then
oversee people who are also doing stuff wrong. And if you actually learn
during those first few years, and, say, get to 30 and are _good_ at developing
and actually can _develop_ well, you're an outcast/outsider?

What other industries does India have this same mindset in?

~~~
goblin89
I don't think this is specific to India. Promoting good developers to more
managerial roles seems to be a common HR mistake.

Sometimes these developers are good managers as well, but arguably more often
they aren't.

------
InclinedPlane
Keep in mind that there will always be a delay between when you've unalterably
lost someone good and when that person actually leaves the company. Financial,
social, mental, and professional inertia is a real thing. And a job is in many
ways a relationship like a romantic relationship, like a marriage.

When is a marriage irretrievably broken? If you take the moment that the
divorce actually happened and you rewind say, 1 day, it seems unlikely that
you could get the couple to reconcile then if they were irreconcilable just
the day after. And in all likelihood you'd have to go back years to get to a
point where reconciliation would be possible, where one or the other of them
had not made the decision in their heart, perhaps without even consciously
being aware of it, that the relationship was over and on a denouement to
eventual permanent separation.

The same dynamics apply to employment. If you rewind the clock one day or one
year from the point of separation you probably cannot fundamentally change the
glide slope that results in an exit from the company. And like marriage and
divorce the "reasons" are probably not so simple, not down to one solitary
action or cause. More likely it's due to an incompatibility of life goals,
lack of mutual respect, failure to communicate openly with one another, and
problems with basic chemistry.

I have seen employees (good, high-caliber talent) who are immensely passionate
about their job and they keep throwing themselves into the maw of rejection
that their local corporate culture exudes. They keep banging away trying to
make things better. Nine times out of ten they get rejected outright, and the
10th time they get dragged over broken glass getting one little change made.
That sort of thing wears on a person just as surely as fighting with a spouse
drags on a person. And one day things just start to click a little differently
and they see a future where they are no longer working at that company, and
they don't hate the idea.

~~~
kamaal
I agree with you in principle. But an employment isn't the same as a
relationship with a Person.

Life in most large corporates starts with heightened expectation in the first
few weeks/days and from there on its a constant decline and a complete
mismatch in what the person expected and what the actual reality is.

My experiences have been horrible, I've seen a never ending timeline of
nepotism, biased behaviors and partiality in large companies. Endless
bureaucracy, politics and socialist style of 'one works, everyone else leeches
on him' style of working very common.

Its this bitter fact is what causes the maximum attrition of good people from
the company and not the inevitable boredom that happens with historical
baggage.

~~~
hef19898
That explains IMHO the average cycle of 5 years per employer. Year one: Your
happy that everything is new, you learn a lot and are releaved to have quit
your old job. Year two: You start to see the cracks, but you are still
motivated and full of energy, right? You try to fix it and still happy. Year
three:You can't fix everything and you start to hit walls. You realize things
aren't actually that different from before but still different. you hang on.
Year four: After a possible internal change you finally realize that it's just
more of the same in a different colour, you start to think about another
change. Year five:the same shit as before, without a perspective, at least non
you like, you find something else. The cycle starts again.

Good people management as discribed in the article and the linked articles can
mitigate this. Really good companies may add a cpuple of years, perfect ones
may retain you forever if they exist at all. But sooner or later you will get
something different, not necessarily better. Sad thing is that alo tof
companies, and I don't mean your direct boss here but companies in general, do
near to nothing about it. The end result being that the whole system is
nearing the absolute average, the talents either being bosses (if they adapt,
pgs essay on popularity comes to my mind), burned out and disillusioned
(pretty likely) or start-up founders (where possible and hopefully
successfull).

------
tsunamifury
I've come to a pragmatic conclusion about this problem:

When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for
the sake of organizational effeciency become necessary. These compromises
happen for the sake of allowing teams interact with hundreds or thousands of
other developers to produce a large product (often at the oversight of a
nontechnical executive). This is a serious turnoff to star workers who are
self confident and prefer to do things their own way. Said star workers know
their own worth and would prefer to work on their own terms again sans
constant individual compromise, so they leave.

Mediocre programmers, lacking the confidence to leave, have a much larger
threshold for such individual compromises for the sake of the organization. So
they stay.

~~~
DrStalker
There comes a point where having a few exceptional programmers is no longer
enough to deliver a project, so more and more process starts getting wrapped
around the software life-cycle to manage the larger team.

Striking a balance between enough process to keep everything on track and
allow PMS to make predictions about the project timeline while not stifling
your best programmers with a system they end up working against is not an easy
task.

~~~
Domenic_S
If I'm a homebuilder and in my crew I have 5 average-ability builders and one
exceptional tile guy, I can't be expected to let the tile guy run the show. I
might treat him differently -- give him plans and let him run with them, let
him be responsible for meeting his own deadlines and so forth, but in no
circumstance can I let that tile guy have total free reign over a home
project... and in all honesty, he probably doesn't want it.

I'm not sure the analogy works, but this was my struggle moving from startups
to enterprise environments. Personal contribution matters, but there can be no
heroes, because the totality of the business is immense. This thinking
requires a bit of abstraction on the business side and coming to terms with
the fact that you're a member of a team (and there are many other teams all
with different relative importance). A cog in the machine? Perhaps, but a
startup is just a tiny machine, and when you scale, as is the nature of a
successful startup, you do so by adding cogs and thus increasing the size of
your machine.

I firmly believe that process doesn't really keep things "on track" as much as
it forces the business the choose between competing priorities, and it forces
communication. It doesn't matter if it's Agile, XP, whatever -- you need three
things for process to work: 1) defined owners with the authority to set
priorities, 2) defined intervals when those priorities can't be changed, and
3) agreement between the involved parties that they'll stick to the process.

~~~
fijal
that's the point - the analogy does not work. A difference in performance
between an average worker and an exceptional one is not very large. The
difference between an average programmer and a good one can be between having
or not having stuff working.

Precisely because of worker analogy, people leave.

------
spodek
Eight of the most important words I learned in management, leadership, and
choosing jobs, from a professor of mine:

"People join good projects and leave bad management"

~~~
trustfundbaby
lovely quote. Is there a source for that?

~~~
spodek
Thanks.

I posted a few words on it a while ago -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/people-
join-good-projects-leave> \-- that says the professor I heard it from, Michael
Feiner, plus links to more about him.

------
kylemaxwell
Woefully incomplete. The article doesn't seem to recognize that talented folks
can leave because their own goals have changed. Perhaps an engineer is ready
to try new challenges that simply aren't applicable at the organization, or
perhaps a manager has had a lifestyle change that drives her to resign.

Anytime somebody tells me "there's only one reason this happens," I get
suspicious. Life is far more complicated than that.

~~~
aDemoUzer
Agree. I am leaving, not because of management but because I want to begin a
startup.

------
craze3
"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the
organization is confusing and uninspiring."

Am I the only one who thought that this was extremely unspecific? Many factors
go into managing an organization- I'm curious as to which factors I should
focus on to help motivate & reinforce top talent. The only details provided by
the author are accountability and reward systems.

~~~
asdkl234890
The company I work for now is a big, fast growing and very profitable
corporation. It also has a problem retaining top talent.

While big and growing and profitable it is noticeably disturbed that the best
people keep leaving. It is trying to fix that and failing miserably.

Here is what is making me leave.

1\. Severe lack of control over how I work. A new, crappy source control tool
is being shoved down our throats over our objections.

2\. Because it is not a tech company, but a company which happens to have
software development department, IT has washed their hands of us, and is in
fact in open warfare with us. Fun!

3\. _Software is always seen as the problem. Just don't take it personally._
This was told to me by a very senior manager who has been here for many, many
years.

4\. Official corporate policy STRONGLY discourages contact between software
and the rest of the company. Contact I might use to try and fix that "software
is always the problem" perception. But nope, not allowed to try.

5\. The director of engineering tends to undercut us at random instances. For
example, while I was the tech lead on a project he decided certain documents
must not leave the company because they ware too sensitive. I was not
consulted. It made my job 10x more difficult. Other documents which contained
the exact same information + more, were sent out like free hot cakes.

6\. A couple of hyper confrontational, screaming, perfectionist control freaks
which are cronies of the director of engineering and I happen to report to one
of them. Not actually the worst boss possible. Within that loud control freak
perfectionist there is a mostly rational engineer. Who is also very
technically competent. He just sucks big time as a manager and dealing with
him is incredibly emotionally exhausting.

At one point he become so frustrated with another member of our team he
literally gave up on him and dumped managing him in my lap. My management of
him consisted of talking to him calmly. This resulted in him over-delivering
on all his assigned tasks.

7\. Corporate red tape bullshit bureaucracy.

8\. My team has a few open positions (go figure!) one of them happens to be
damn near identical to mine, the position is advertised for 20K more than I am
getting paid. This is after I have asked for a raise. After I took a huge
project that was supposed to be a train wreck, saved it, shipped it on time,
and made a ton of money for the company.

I have an interview with another smaller company at the end of this week.

~~~
Domenic_S
Wow, do you work at the company where I worked last? It's disheartening to see
how common the situation is.

> the position is advertised for 20K more than I am getting paid

In fairness, it's pretty much accepted that you have to switch companies to
get a sizable (say, 10%+) raise in IT. Not that it should be this way... but I
think it's that way pretty much everywhere.

~~~
danssig
>In fairness, it's pretty much accepted that you have to switch companies to
get a sizable (say, 10%+) raise in IT

More people need to understand this. Slaving away hoping to "stand out"
doesn't work in IT because of caps on compensation increases.

------
mmaunder
I prefer Marc Andreessen's reason: Companies that have a retention problem
usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem.

Source: [http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-
big-...](http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-
companies-part-2-reta) (original seems to be deleted from blog.pmarca.com)

~~~
asdkl234890
The company I work for now is very profitable and growing fast. I can not wait
to leave. If I cared mostly about money, I would want to stay.

~~~
_delirium
I agree; I think the claim that "winning" is what retains people is vaguely on
the right track, but the focus on company growth and profits is off-base. A
sense that the company is doing _interesting things_ and is _where the action
is_ is fairly important, and may or may not be correlated with those things.
To take a classic (if admittedly overused) example, nobody at Bell Labs got
wealthy from working there; they all made a decent living, but it was
emphatically a middle-class living, with no stock-options or six-figure
salaries (even when inflation-adjusted). What kept people there was a feeling
that this was the best place in the world to work, and at the center of
interesting-stuff-happening.

~~~
Drbble
Yes, but Bell Labs is not a role model. (Many managers were a hassle there too
) There can't be more the than 5% of the industry doing what Bell Labs did or
MSR does. So the interesting question for the 95% is, what makes the best of
the rest, doing boring but profitable work, better than the rest of the rest?
Even at Google, a very desirable corporate job, many engineers aren't really
inventing the future.

------
lsb
You can gauge someone's ranking in an organization explicitly and implicitly.

Sometimes implicit beats explicit.

The explicit is performance reviews, which can be cherry-picked. The implicit
is the list of projects someone was entrusted to work with. People will more
freely give the gamut of projects they've worked on than the gamut of
performance reviews they've gotten, and most clever people realize this, so
after a few dud projects they look elsewhere.

------
johnhess
"what do you aspire to bring to the world?"

Yes. Yes. Yes. One thousand times, yes. If you're asking me to dedicate my
waking hours to something, be clear about what that something is. Hint: It's
not your corporation.

I've interviewed at several companies, and the only ones I rejected out of
hand are the ones that are just "doing business" and have ceased to chase some
vision.

Some companies do really cool stuff, but have no vision (e.g. most of Lockheed
Martin) whereas there are companies who do something seemingly less exciting
(e.g. Yelp) that have a vision for how they're going to change the world.

In Yelp's case, they're helping great businesses thrive and be found and
holding bad companies accountable. As an Aero guy, I'd be predisposed to
Lockheed, but frankly, when I talked to Yelp, that kind of thinking made all
the difference.

------
zobzu
"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the
organization is confusing and uninspiring." Can't get closer to the truth.

------
mbesto
Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Manage those correctly for your employees and
you'll have a happy organization.

------
lani
top talent is like an $800 coffee machine. If you ain't gonna use it or
appreciate the fine coffee it makes, there are others who will. and the coffee
machine insists of being appreciated every moment .

~~~
megablast
That analogy is awful. You can buy a $800 coffee machine, and put it on the
factory floor unused for 10 years, and it will not make a difference.

~~~
ArtB
Actually that seems like a good analogy. If you have a $800 coffee machine but
are serving it to people who won't appreciate it, it's going to waste. I've
heard HR people asking about how to attract top talent when all the company
does is build simple CRUD apps.

------
pasbesoin
In a word: Asshattery. More often but not always, brought on by shrinking
resources -- whether real, or perceived/projected/created by management as
part of a agenda regardless of financial state.

------
michaelochurch
Because top talent isn't enough. You also need up-to-date skills, connections,
past recognition and opportunity. Most talented people I know live in fear of
never getting these things and becoming failures. So people tend to take a
fail-fast approach to career changes and move as soon as they aren't getting
these things.

~~~
lhnz
The problem with this is that past recognition and connections take time.

