
Solving the IT Turnover Crisis - jasim
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx
======
edw519
Lots of good points, but surprisingly little about the elephant in the room:
your best people leave because you're not paying them enough.

And you're not paying them enough because you've chosen to adopt a pay
structure that, by definition, cannot handle outliers (which are exactly what
your best people are).

An excellent programmer can routinely do the work of ten mediocre programmers.
Have you ever heard of a pay scale that pays Programmer III ten times as much
as Programmer I?

An excellent programmer can save you millions of dollars by increasing
revenues, reducing costs, changing the way you do business, or any combination
of these. How much of those millions does the programmer get?

An excellent programmer can provide a company significantly more value than
his boss and his boss's boss. How much more does he get paid?

An excellent programmer can earn real equity and merit bonuses in enlightened
firms. How many companies don't even have this on their HR radar?

An excellent programmer can go out and pound the pavement or join a start-up
and earn what he/she is really worth. And until most companies provide that
same opportunities, they probably will.

~~~
kls
I and a lot of other skilled talent left a company that was paying enough. The
main reason that everyone left was the place was a complete head f __k. Just
as the article stated the incompetent had become entrenched and created
bureaucratic process to stifle work. Since they could not do their jobs they
created paperwork process, and made that their job while not getting any real
work done. I spent two years trying to unwind the place and trying to inspire
people to do their job. I got so frustrated that I offered to do other peoples
work with my team if they would just stop the bureaucracy and stay out of my
way. That just created political opponents who actively tried to set my team
up for failure. After two years I realized that no amount of doing a good job
was going to fix the issue and left (I was getting squeezed out by politics as
well). The worst part is the few great developers who remained because of
loyalty to me where summarily dismissed after my departure. They actually
fired the best and the brightest for trying to make things better saying that
they where playing politics. That experience taught me that if the environment
is junk when you walk in, then walk out no amount of money is worth that
headache.

~~~
discreteevent
I think Bruce Eckel started a blog about these issues because he had seen them
so many times. From what I have seen it seems true more or less everywhere.
People are territorial and they see everything relatively. So in general its
more important to a manager that a talented employee is held back from
contributing value than that the employee deliver the value and possibly end
up getting paid more than the manager. Then again there are exceptions. You
will often hear very successful business people say "Success is about enabling
people". I remember reading an article about one entrepreneur years ago saying
that if you can get good people then don't be afraid to pay them more than you
pay yourself. But of course the manager is just an employee where the
entrepreneur is an owner. Maybe we should just go to a system with only owners
and contractors (another kind of owner) and let the enlightened owners and the
talented contractors win.

~~~
GFischer
I read this very recently here on Hacker News, about paying a succesful
salesperson/marketer more than the CEO (presumably yourself) in a startup.

------
madair
It's a good article but something I've been surprised to find out is true
since I've spent some time at a very large corporation for the first time is
that a place like this has a large contingent of developers that they seem to
prefer to not be very good at what they do, there just isn't an interest in
'standards of excellence' or what have you.

It's an economic decision, they just aren't interested in what very talented
developers have to offer, except for a very small portion of their business
needs. It's essentially factory work. A car manufacturer could pay more for
artisans to work the auto assembly line, and it may have some sort of positive
effect on the overall elegance of the workmanship, but there's a quality trade
off to be made and the vast majority of cars sold aren't a Lotus Esprit nor
will they ever be.

I don't justify this way of thinking, to me its the scorched earth of
capitalism with very limited consideration of the social, cultural, and
environmental implications of placing profit motive on a pedestal of not just
utility but also of righteousness, but that's me and that's not 99.999 percent
of the employing population. This is not an IT turnover crisis, as much as we
can come up with stats and anecdotes, this is a _global turnover crisis_ , and
it's because the value sought is not related to, as I said, social, cultural,
and environmental balance and success, it's about money. Sorry to be the freak
here, but this is the elephant in the room and why is it so hard to
acknowledge?

~~~
peregrine
I second this and especially the statement

 _..has a large contingent of developers that they seem to prefer to not be
very good at what they do.._

I've seen this as an intern and it drives me mad. Whole groups of people just
wanting to do the bare minimum and end up being rewarded for it. I have a hard
time being around people like this.

~~~
madair
I agree with what you're saying, however I was unclear and my intention was
the point out that it's the corporation that is satisfied and even prefers
factory-style workers for large numbers of positions. I'm talking about
corporations for whom the business is _not_ software.

~~~
silverlake
I taught software development at 100s of companies like this. The problems
are: (1) there are a finite number of excellent devs and none will work for
these companies. (2) Their IT tasks are not attractive to top devs because
it's mostly integration work. (3) Their top managers are not devs (lawyers,
accountants, insurance, etc) so IT work is not understood and devalued. (4)
Most of these companies have nightmarish bureaucracies that will deaden the
soul of the even the most enthusiastic new hire. (5) Because of all this, they
need to replace people often so they don't want to depend on superstars.

I've thought about this and I don't know what they can improve (except 4).
What can a large accounting company do to hire an ex-GOOG or MSFT? Nothing,
really.

~~~
madair
Well, my point was also not clear in that people may presume that I'm
criticizing the developers themselves. I work with a lot of developers, some
of them very good at software, but most not, but they are very good coworkers,
hard working, and they get a lot done which fulfills the needs of the
business, and they actually do themselves want to improve and are intrigued by
techniques they didn't know about or that they reserved in their minds for
"geniuses" which they assume that they are not.

I think that the implication that people may presume in my critique above is
that I think the problem is the developers not being better, but that's
perception is a big part of the profit motive that I'm critiquing. If success
is a zero sum game then sure, you want only the best, but what I'm critiquing
is that it is that very same zero sum game which makes it harder for these
corporate developers to get ahead. I'm not charging some evil master plan,
just that it's not realistic to presume that all developers must be top of
their game at any one point in their career, or even that it must be their
primary motivation in life.

I don't think the problems these developers face are only related to
contemporary society seeing the corporate profit motive prerogative as
paramount. It's also the attitudes of other developers who look down on them
and put them down and actively detract from the reputation of those "corporate
drones" who aren't as good as them. How about maybe didn't have the same
opportunities? How about didn't get the same influences in school? How about
just not having any mentors to show them the ropes? I find myself mentoring _a
lot_ and yet I also find it important to not be patronizing, but that's not
very hard when I appreciate and am thankful to be working with these
developers because they have so many good qualities, even if they haven't yet
learned some abstract coding concepts and maybe aren't even interested in
learning them.

But bleeding heart for the poor drones is not even the point, that's
patronizing in itself. I think the self-described non-drone developers that
look at things this way who are as negatively affected by the perception
problems. On a delusionary scale of one to ten who's the more delusional one?
The true believer in the way things work right now and is hoping for their big
Startup break so that they too will be winners and _free_? Or the corporate
drone developer who's a survivor, who's often an immigrant or foreign worker,
who's sending remittances home every year, or who's already lost all hope and
for whom thinking about career is about the time they reach for the depression
meds.

It's also worth considering that the negative weight that is assigned to these
developers is just plain factually wrong. First of all the corporations that
hire them are making buttloads of money upon the work of these "unskilled"
developers. And anyway, what exactly should we do with this supposedly dead
weight? Throw them out of the village? Banishment? Their lives aren't worth as
much? There isn't a place for them at the success in life table like there is
for the better developers? Is it that they don't work as hard? Really?
Hmmm...and what is this work of which you speak, bank software? Health
insurance statement producing doofangles that too 65 hours a week for the past
two months because the integration with the COBOL backend was acting up again
and the nightly batch jobs from partner corps sent to the FTP dropbox were
frequently corrupted? Hmmm.

And then some smartass comes along and tells them they're stupid for using FTP
or some other random criticism, some developer _always_ has a better way to do
it of course, but fails to realize that the developer they are talking about
simply has no say, no time to research, and nobody pointing to sources of
information that will make it easier. Not everyone reads HN.

I think the problem may not be those less skilled developers, the problem is
social conditioning and the narrative of what success is being all wrong.

We might talk a good game about looking for happiness in all the right places
but that seems to break down pretty damn quick the moment we start critiquing
those drones for not being good enough workers for the greater good. So what
is is? Socialist or Capitalist? Or is the Left and Right narrative that guides
our intellectual, political, and populist debate simply completely broken to
begin with. But I think that broken narrative are what guides the conversation
and attitudes as they relate to the concept of better or worse developers and
how they contribute to us, presumably the great ones that is.

So my actual criticism is really about the attitudes, both those "greater
good" attitudes, and those profit motive constraints which remove so much of
the joy in a job well done. "More bricks, less hay" seems to be all we hear in
corporate-land. Or at least, that's all I hear, maybe your bigcorp is a
healthier society.

~~~
Tamerlin
"but fails to realize that the developer they are talking about simply has no
say"

I agree with you, and in particular this. My experience in craporate IT is
exactly that. I've had a number of projects where we had a very specific set
of operational requirements (platform, OS, database, web server), and couldn't
get even a hint about anything vaguely resembling a functional requirement.
I've even had "emergency" projects where it was suddenly critical that we
deliver right away! But the same people complaining that we were late couldn't
tell us what the software was supposed to do.

One company I worked for didn't tell the development team about some software
we were supposed to develop (as it turned out, this software was supposed to
be part of the company's flagship product, but no one knew what it was or what
it was supposed to do) six months AFTER it was supposed to have been shipped.

There's really no way any developer could ever actually add value to a place
like that, no matter how skilled and how motivated.

~~~
madair
Totally. But the kicker is _scorched earth makes a lot of money_.

Those projects they canceled, and the craptacular ones that somehow managed to
make it into production, maybe _for 30 years_ , those are the decisions that
are making a lot of money. The idealized view of the peace and love and
beautiful code making money are just not how it's done in the real world. I'm
not a Microsoft hater, but hey, there's a good example for all you haters out
there.

~~~
Tamerlin
Sad, but true. And I fear only getting worse since the latest trend is to get
more for less, and quality keeps getting pushed lower on the priority list.

------
umjames
If by IT, the author means an actual IT department, then I think the real
problem is that no matter what your position in IT is, you are just an (often
unknown) extension of the Help Desk.

If by developer, you mean people who write whole (or significant parts of)
software applications, you find that you usually never get to do this in IT
departments.

This is why skilled software developers often leave IT departments. They don't
want 20-30 years of integrating pre-written software. They actually want to
write the software themselves.

------
powrtoch
While the article makes lots of interesting points, I'm uncomfortable about
how the case for the very existence of a "Value Apex" is accomplished through
some brief hand-waiving and vague truisms. The idea that the talented people
get less and less useful, while a very real possibility, I think warrants some
harder research before we declare it inevitable fact.

~~~
arethuza
"However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all
that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past
experiences, the growth stops."

I never worked anywhere where anyone could "learns all that there is to know
about the business".

Challenges change over time, what you need to know (and therefore learn)
various hugely with each new challenge.

"Value Apex" sounds like a pseudo scientific term justified with a few
invented graphs.

------
motters
I liked the term "beachheads of bad code". Will probably use that next time I
come across badly written code in a commercial context.

------
nradov
What a load of crap. I have worked for the same company for 12 years and have
provided more value every year. Several of my co-workers are in similar
situations. Alex Papadimoulis obviously doesn't understand how to do proper
staff development. Software development organizations have little or nothing
in common with law firms.

And the use of the word ‘crisis’ in the title is stupid. Everything is a
crisis now; we have a healthcare crisis, unemployment crisis, foreclosure
crisis, energy crisis and apparently now we can add IT turnover to the list.
If _everything_ is a crisis then really nothing is a crisis.

~~~
Tamerlin
"What a load of crap. I have worked for the same company for 12 years and have
provided more value every year."

It's not crap, you're the one who's fortunate.

I can say with complete certainty that I've added next to no value to most of
the companies that I've worked for that some random bozo hired off the street
couldn't -- because most of them resist anything like good engineering. They
just don't understand it, and they complain about (and penalize) programmers
who aren't writing code when those programmers are asking "What's this thing
INTENDED to do?"

No programmer, no matter how skilled, can add any value to such an
organization. They're ass-in-seat jobs even though the hiring staff pretends
that they're programming jobs.

------
poundy
The overall article makes sense BUT, I know people who have worked in the same
place for over 10 years, love the job, are productive and get results. They
don't work their butts off, they have achieved some kind of state where they
know what the company really needs are delivers exactly that.

