
Ways to Minimize Employee Retention - rustyrazorblade
http://rustyrazorblade.com/2014/09/21-ways-to-minimize-employee-retention/
======
amputect
> 14\. Humiliate people in public.

If you have to choose only one item from the list, this one is really,
shockingly effective and easy to implement. My wife was in tears the other day
because she made two trivial, easily-fixable errors on some paperwork she was
doing as a stand-in for someone who was out sick. She fixed the errors and
resubmitted it when they were brought to her attention, but her boss still
sent the original one around to the entire office as an example of how not to
do the paperwork, offering a prize to anyone who could spot all of the errors
on it, and all-but-outright-stated that anyone who would submit paperwork in
such shape was a moron.

I'm willing to believe that her boss is just a complete fucking idiot and
meant it to be funny, but it was extremely cruel and totally uncalled for.
Publicly humiliating your newest employee for the incredible crime of
"volunteering to help take care of something when the person responsible is
out sick" is really, really dumb and a great way to ensure that nobody ever
helps anybody else with anything. It's working, because while we were on
vacation she came back to a huge pile of work that nobody had even made an
effort to handle, even though anyone in the office could have pitched in. And
since she's a fast learner, she's also stopped helping other people when
they're out sick, because it can only possibly lead to either 1) Her doing
more work for no recognition, or 2) Her doing more work for no recognition and
getting publicly mocked for doing something wrong.

For some mysterious reason, the office she works for has a hard time retaining
employees and a hard time hiring new ones. People also take a LOT of (unpaid)
sick days there, which are informally known as "sick of all the bullshit"
days, because they're happier staying home without pay than coming to work and
dealing with their manager.

~~~
com2kid
I am of two minds about this.

On one hand, a "you broke the build dunce cap" isn't the worst of ideas.
(Although by far I prefer a check-in system that doesn't allow the build to be
broken for everyone...)

I've been shamed, and semi-publically (within the team) shamed others, for not
having written any unit tests before check-in.

I'm also a big fan of publically celebrating successes. When a tester writes
up a good bug, I'll have it sent around to everyone as an example of what a
good bug report looks like!

~~~
steve_g
Teasing, shaming and other forms of negative humor are very hard to do with a
positive result. People are astonishingly different in what they can tolerate
and how they respond. I suppose, with the right people, and the right team
dynamics it can be OK.

But as a manager, I would strongly advise you to steer clear of that tactic.
Even if you've got awesome emotional intelligence (and I don't) it's easy to
screw up. It's not worth it.

Really, don't do it. Because when you screw up, it hurts real people.

There are better ways to encourage people - for example, the positve feedback
to the tester you described.

~~~
hamburglar
> Teasing, shaming and other forms of negative humor are very hard to do with
> a positive result. People are astonishingly different in what they can
> tolerate and how they respond. I suppose, with the right people, and the
> right team dynamics it can be OK.

So true. I've had great managers that had great rapport with the team and
everyone was tight knit enough that the manager could stand in the hall and
say "hey, come over here and look at the ridiculous code Bill wrote" and it
would all be in good fun, even for the person who was being mocked (being able
to laugh at your own mistakes is important, IMO). And on the other hand, I've
had terrible managers who aren't able to do it in a good-natured manner and it
ends up being mean-spirited, condescending, and morale-killing. There's a
surprisingly fine line between "lol, Bill, what were you thinking?" and "Bill
wrote bad code and I'm going to call him on it, making everyone on the team
uncomfortable, and thus cultivating an environment where everyone lives in
fear of making a mistake."

~~~
chris_mahan
No. It's never, ever appropriate. Ever.

~~~
hamburglar
Appropriate versus inappropriate is irrelevant, in my opinion. Can it work?
Yes. Is it more likely to backfire and make your team miserable? Yes. Is it
something that creates a hostile work environment? Debatable, and definitely
situational.

I would actually argue that when done right, this sort of smack-talk can be
healthy and reassuring to the recipient. It's a bit perverse, but I like a
situation where my coworkers respect me enough to make fun of my mistakes
without me or them worrying that it _actually_ calls my competence into
question. I've worked with people who you can't poke fun at, and it's usually
because they actually _are_ somewhat incompetent and making fun of their
errors would be cruel.

~~~
chris_mahan
poking fun at people? It's not funny unless it's funny for everyone. Poking
fun in a hurtful way is bullying.

Hopefully we never work together.

~~~
hamburglar
Oh, good lord. I thought I made it clear that I wasn't talking about poking
fun in a hurtful way.

> Hopefully we never work together.

Indeed.

------
beloch
22\. Hire antisocial self-declared "rock star" employees who can't stand other
human beings.

23\. Encourage sociable, pleasant employees to read Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.

24\. Peer reviews and stack ranking!

25\. Stress that everything must be done in-house. If your employees want a
wheel, they must reinvent it themselves.

26\. Play video games in your office during crunch-time or, heck, just take
the day off. You deserve it!

27\. Survey your employees to find out what extracurricular activities
everyone enjoys. Then, ignore that data and hold a mandatory weekend game of
your own favorite sport pitting your employees against those of a personal
rival. If your team loses, throw your hat on the ground, jump up and down on
it, and swear never to do this again. Repeat once or more annually.

28\. If, after doing all this, you still have payroll to burn, hire somebody
at twice the salary of anyone else, anonymously leak salary information for
your department, and be sure to give this new employee _absolutely_ _nothing_
to do except twiddle their thumbs.

~~~
civilian
Therefore a wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and
in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then
they will always be faithful to him.

Niccolo Machiavelli "The Prince"

~~~
luch
Most people associate Machiavelli with a devious, twisted mind when he was
actually simply a pragmatic. He is labeled as an amoral guy since he admits
that violent or cunning methods are sometimes useful.

Also, as an software contractor, his thesis on private forces/ paid forces is
quite enlightening.

~~~
civilian
Link for reference:
[http://www.bartleby.com/36/1/13.html](http://www.bartleby.com/36/1/13.html)

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schrodingersCat
There may be a story behind this post as it feels quite personal, but this is
a pretty good composite of bad management behaviors. I see this more of a
collage than a specific rant. I could be wrong, but I've seen one or more of
these traits expressed by almost any supervisor I've encountered (not all the
time or all at once).

~~~
stockninja
I was thinking the exact same. I have a very clear image of this domineering,
unhinged alpha who ran op's previous company into the ground.

------
drawkbox
Another - Reward hard work and delivery with another project quickly and as
scattered. When one delivers a touch project in an impossible timeline, rather
than changing anything management side, deem them the "saver" and give them
bad project after bad project with shorter and shorter timelines.

This could be reposted as Business/Management 101 in the office for most
managers, or apparently the guide many have been using.

I have experienced almost all of them and could feel the pain in each line
item that would come from developers that care or product developers that know
what it takes to ship a successful product, well written and thorough.

------
chasing
Ooh, this is fun:

22\. Developers don't like to concentrate on their work for more than about
30-45 minutes at a stretch. So make sure to liven up their days with lots of
meetings spread over the course of the day!

------
dasil003
If you have to write this post to vent because you are stuck in a job you
can't afford to leave and you are scared you'll be fired if you raise these
issues to management, then so be it, write the bloody post and I hope you feel
better.

However in terms of practical changes, this post can neither benefit you nor
anyone else. We all know about broken management cultures that this post
describes, but none of those managers in question would do anything but become
extremely defensive if confronted by a post like this (which they wouldn't be
because they don't know what Hacker News or a technical blog is).

To the clueful neutral observer we have to weigh out whether management is
_really_ this clueless, or is the author a poor communicator full of sour
grapes? Honestly it's 50/50, but I would probably be too nervous to ever hire
someone who posted this vitriolic of prose publicly, it just comes off as
unprofessional.

~~~
zenogais
Knowing the author personally and having worked at the same company with him
(he left there a long time ago). I can say it is neither. It was among the
most broken places I've worked. The author himself is a great communicator and
technical lead.

Perhaps we should accept the shocking reality that there are really startups
this awful to work for :)

~~~
zenogais
Or we can just do the "downvote of denial"

------
hawkice
Or, my favorites:

* Have CEO live in another state, but not let his absenteeism stop him from insisting the entire company change

* Throw chairs at people who want to release the code after it's feature complete [Ah, TJ, I wanted to give you a big ol' bear hug for finally pressing the point after hitting feature complete more than 10 times and us never releasing]

* Be constantly high on amphetamines

* Steal the identity of a math textbook author in suburban California

* Announce in a quarterly all hands meeting that it was a positive quarter because, even though the business lost money, and lost money faster than last year, the negative year over year growth got smaller (read: closer to zero), so you'll be losing the same amount of money YoY in no time!

If you guys think it's a harsh reality that companies do the stuff in this
article... I guess I am curious if you guys have worked at venture funded
startups?

~~~
mason55
_> If you guys think it's a harsh reality that companies do the stuff in this
article... I guess I am curious if you guys have worked at venture funded
startups?_

I've worked at three including one medium sized exit and never experienced
what's in the article or your post.

~~~
hawkice
Congratulations! :) Startups are more fun without these things (I think that's
the implication of the article as well).

------
bowlofpetunias
Only two ways are needed:

1\. Create a constant state of uncertainty. Make promises you don't keep, and
never explain why. Announce stuff that never materializes.

2\. Don't give people any chance to successfully complete anything they start.
(Simplest way: keep moving the goalposts.)

In my experience, people can take any kind of abusive crap, but uncertainty
plus the inability to do anything worthwhile will either get people to quit or
put them on the shortest route to a burn-out.

And the worst part is, these two ways are often not applied by malicious
douche bags, but simply incompetent management. In the start-up world these
are often entrepreneurs with no idea of and a total lack of empathy with what
it's like to be an employee.

------
cmdrfred
A lot of this applies even to non-tech jobs, I think employers got a little to
comfortable with high unemployment. Watch the hilarity ensue when those
demographics change.

~~~
seivan
It won't. The supply will always outweigh the demand in professions that needs
a better working environment the most (minimum wage, or lack of)

------
darren2000
"12\. Establish dominance by staring at people, never blinking."

"14\. Humiliate people in public."

Sounds like a personality disorder, possibly anti-social personality disorder.
See: [http://www.wikihow.com/Spot-a-Sociopath](http://www.wikihow.com/Spot-a-
Sociopath), in particular:

"9\. See if the person makes uninterrupted eye contact. Sociopaths are known
for giving intense uninterrupted eye contact. The person stares because he or
she is completely comfortable staring at people to make them uncomfortable.
Staring at others intently is a way to further his or her own means."

"1\. Look for a lack of shame. Most sociopaths can commit vile actions and not
feel the least bit of remorse. Such actions may include physical abuse or
public humiliation of others."

------
winslow
Appending my own personal pain point

22\. Allow IT, regulatory, & quality to inhibit your productivity to the point
that you work on side projects just to know what it's like to ship something.

Yeah, I'm currently interviewing else where.

------
thoughtpalette
#19 and #20 seems the most common issues I've had to deal with in development.

19\. Give estimates without consulting the people that are actually doing the
work. When they disagree with the deadline, shrug your shoulders and explain
that it can’t be changed and people are expecting it to be completed on
schedule. Repeat every time.

20\. Break the above cycle when everyone is about to quit. Get estimates down
to the hour for every single feature. Assume no slippage. Add features but do
not adjust schedule.

------
hamburglar
One I'd add is "upon reading any of these previous points, tell yourself why
it doesn't apply to you so you can continue doing it."

------
rdl
I assume there's some kind of story behind this post?

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binarytrees
> 14\. Humiliate people in public.

This happens a lot. It happens at my company when you screw up a build.

------
Terr_
I'm feeling #17 right now, although that implies there _is_ a plan.

------
grandalf
If this is your reality, we're hiring !

------
GrinningFool
Dude. Just find a new job.

~~~
cranklin
He already did.

