
Where Have All The Good Managers Gone? - kitty
http://thomaslarock.com/2010/09/where-have-all-the-good-managers-gone/
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lmkg
Everyone wants talented, experienced employees, but no one wants to invest the
resources it takes to gain experience and develop talent. And why would they?
After investing so much into their developer, a competitor would just come
along and poach them with a cushier chair and a higher salary. Everyone would
rather be the poacher than the poachee, and so those "rookies with potential"
have no where to develop that potential into talent.

Of course, this is all a drastic oversimplification. Rookies can get jobs, and
get some experience by exposure. But developing talent effectively &
efficiently takes more time & resource investment beyond just having them do
work, and that's investment with an uncertain and non-immediate return. It's a
tough nut to crack, but the place where I would start is figuring out how to
retain your good employees, especially when the growth of their market value
is faster than your company's standard career advancement path.

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praptak
A legit concern but why on earth cannot the original company keep the now
trained employee with the cushier chair and a higher salary?

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suresk
There is a lot of natural pressure to keep wages down in most companies.

This is far, far worse in companies where software isn't their primary
business. Programmer wages are going up much faster than other wages (even
more if it is a developer who is in their first 5 or so years in the
industry), and it can be hard to hand out the frequent and relatively higher
raises necessary to keep good/improving developers from going elsewhere, while
other people in the company see far less in terms of raises.

It all ends up being for naught when the company has to find a replacement
(which costs money) and train them (which costs even more money), and usually
ends up paying them close to what it would have cost to keep the old person
around in the first place. But that's usually politically easier than handing
out raises all the time.

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praptak
I remember post-bubble-burst times when people were willing to learn huge
yucky legacy workflow systems all by themselves just to get a crap job in a
dreary cubicle-land. Perhaps this got some managers spoiled.

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dccoolgai
I kind of see what he's saying, but I think technical managers are a fixture
of the past, anyway. DBAs and developers should be taking responsibility or
their own skill progression - not leaving it in the hands of someone else.

