
The CIO's lament: 20-something techies who quit after 1 year - jwingy
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/122311-outlook-staffing-quit-254362.html
======
scarmig
Obvious link bait, but they call it bait because it works...

Seriously, fuck these people. Every month it seems that the WSJ or Fortune or
Forbes is running some article about how 20-somethings are not willing to give
110% for the company. Well, you know what? Management is the whiniest bunch of
entitled pricks to ever walk the Earth.

They feel entitled to developers' labor. They think that we should feel
honored for the opportunity to work on their legacy Java in-house apps that
have been ravaged by years of turnover, failed projects, arbitrary management
requirements, low quality devs, and outsourcing. But it's an insult to their
own egos for a lowly developer to ask to be paid as much as them or, quelle
horreur, more!

Fun story: first job out of college, I was working in exactly this
environment. It was terrible: ridiculous hours, low pay, boring projects, and
lack of respect from management. After six months, I got another job offer for
a company whose primary product is software, offering twice as much pay and
better benefits. I went to HR, asked them to match it if they wanted me to
stay, and they pretty much told me to fuck myself. Their counteroffer was a
raise of around $5k and tons of opportunities for advancement.

A year later, the senior developer, who had worked for the company for 15
years and was in his 50s with a wife and kids, was fired. Not because of any
performance reasons--he was pretty damn good at what he did--but because he
was the highest paid person in the department and management wanted to cut
costs for some kind of valuation or another. Yeah, he was quite the cost
center at $90k a year. They were doing him a favor: now he's freelancing,
working less, making more, and far, far happier.

Maybe in a different era it would make sense for a developer to be loyal to
the company she works for. But we don't live in that world anymore. Management
has done its damnedest to commodify labor and has more or less succeeded. So,
let's be commodities! But if management wants to burn us like oil, they should
expect to pay the market rate for it.

~~~
neutronicus
Obviously somewhat off-topic, but I'm irritated by this usage trend I see
taking the internet by storm.

"Entitled" means "having a legal right to something", not "having a (spurious)
sense of entitlement". Perhaps there's a one-word slur that means what you're
trying to say, but "entitled" isn't it.

~~~
scarmig
Hmm, good catch, didn't know that. Though, I think the usage is common enough
to be colloquial. The article itself talks about the sense of entitlement that
developers have, for instance.

Maybe a word like arrogated would work? It isn't totally right, though, and
it'd be sacrificing communication for the sake of formal correctness. I'm
guessing entitled has taken on its contemporary meaning through a need for a
word that didn't exist.

~~~
neutronicus
The other point I was passive-aggressively hoping to make by grammar
nitpicking is that maybe we can do without a one-word slur meaning that, since
its primary purpose is for one side in a negotiation to call the other side a
bunch of big fat pussies in an attempt to shame them into weakening their
demands.

I imagine we don't have one word that means "having a spurious sense of
entitlement" because up until recently (the last one or two hundred years) it
was generally crystal clear whether your station allowed you to demand
something of someone else or not, so that you'd simply throw someone's station
in their face instead of trying to make a sense of entitlement into a
character flaw.

~~~
scarmig
Oh, totally picked up on the other point. By pointedly ignoring it, I hinting
that my original comment was purposefully made to be more polemic than
rational argument, in case the "fuck these people" didn't give it away, and
focus on linguistic nerddom which is more interesting anyway =)

I don't see it so much as a negotiating tool, though. Analyzing it, I'd say
it's more an attempt to raise the relative status of the HN tribe by putting
down the status of middle managers than anything else.

------
tptacek
Or, reading between the lines, "how to speak the language of value to a line-
of-business-apps CIO during a negotiation". Instead of of sharpening your
hackles (or whatever) when you read stuff like this, try instead (a)
appreciating that _everyone on HN agrees with you about this guy's worldview_
, and (b) distilling out the guy's pain points and thinking of palatable ways
to target them to make way more money than the average dumbfuck kid who signs
away a _year_ of his life simply to "learn Java programming" at below-market
wages.

You guys are supposed to be entrepreneurs. Here is a guy with lots of money
who obviously does not understand why the world is changing, spelling out for
all of us what his business pain points are. If you're going to write snarky
comments about him, try first as an exercise taking out your checkbook,
putting it on the table in front of you, and conducting a two-minutes hate at
it. Take that, money! You don't know software development! Ha!

 _Stop berating people like this and get busy taking all their moneys._

~~~
daeken
At the end of the day, I treat entrepreneurship very differently than a day
job. When I'm running a business, my goal is to make the absolute most money I
can with the minimum of effort; generally that means producing something of
high value and getting it into the hands of as many people as possible. When
I'm wearing my day job hat, my goal is very different: how do I do cool things
while making a sizable chunk of cash? Note the ordering there -- I personally
am not (highly) motivated by money in something that I'm doing on a daily
basis.

This guy is great for entrepreneurs -- a virtual goldmine ready to be tapped
by the first person that figures out how to solve a couple of his issues in a
way that can bring in the money; he's terrible for employees who want to have
a fun and challenging work environment while making good money. No amount of
negotiation is going to fix that, in my opinion.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not at all challenging your assessment of this guy's worldview. I agree
with you. I'm just pointing out that a better title for this article might
have been something like "what to say in an interview for a line-of-biz dev
job interview to add 20% to your annual salary".

------
daeken
Let me save you a lot of money and time; I call this The 20-something techie's
lament: CIOs that don't understand why I'm leaving. (Note: this is largely a
work of fiction based on my own experiences and desires, as well as the
experiences of others.)

I work on your legacy applications, but you pay me new development wages,
generally below what I can get elsewhere. You don't challenge me enough, so I
end up watching cat videos to spend time between bursts of getting things
done, because there's just not enough actual work to be done. When I come to
you with problems, you talk about how you'll get some people together to look
into it; I've never heard back.

When Google contacts me, they treat me like a human that wants to grow, learn,
and expand beyond the walls of the company, not just inside it. I don't want
to play politics. I want to build cool stuff, make money, and learn something
new every day. You don't give me that, so I'm leaving.

~~~
dsolomon
Odd - when Google contacted me their recruiters were rude.

~~~
daeken
I just threw that out there since Google is one of the big fish. Feel free to
substitute for any trendy employer you wish.

------
drcube
"Even when CIOs promote 20- and 30-somethings, they often don't have loyalty
to the organization, Mok says.... They will stay with you as long as they see
certain things, including personal growth or personal value enhancement,
whether that's financial reward or career aspirations."

Employers fire or lay people off when it is no longer worth it to keep them
around. And employees absolutely should leave when it is no longer worthwhile
for them to stay. Loyalty doesn't come into it. If you aren't fulfilling their
"personal growth, value enhancement, financial reward or career aspirations"
THAT is why they are leaving. Fix that. Don't just complain about the
youngsters these days.

~~~
adrianparsons
I totally agree. Getting laid off once will shift your world view. The company
is generally going to act in its best interest, and so should you. I love my
current company and feel 'loyal' in a general sense, but that's because they
treat me exceptionally well and constantly throw cool projects at me.

Here's what I don't get. All of my contracts so far have been for 'at will'
employment -- meaning either party can terminate employment at any time. If
you want to keep someone around a while, why not have them sign a 3 year
contract? I would consider signing such a contract if the incentives were
right.

------
afthonos
I think it's interesting that he (implicitly) laments the lack of loyalty.
Current corporate culture is predicated on completely at-will employment: you
can get laid off whenever management thinks it's important to "downsize" and
"go lean"—how on earth do they expect their developers not to pick up and move
as soon as things look better elsewhere? Loyalty works both ways.

Sure, providing challenges and better pay might help, but fundamentally,
people (not just developers) will look at working for a company as only a job
unless one of three things happens:

1\. The company _as a company_ is doing something the employee genuinely
believes in. (Apple might be an example of that.) 2\. The company has a good
work atmosphere and a proven track record of loyalty. (Google comes to mind.)
3\. The employee has a financial interest in the company. (Startups.)

Short of that, lamenting lack of loyalty is lamenting the fact that your
removable cogs are willing and able to remove themselves.

------
samdk
HN's response so far to this is disappointing.

It's easy to read the first page (or just the headline) and come up with the
"you're not paying enough/your problems aren't interesting enough" response.
That's what pretty much everyone who's posted here so far has said. (And
that's what my initial reaction was, too.)

But that's not a terribly _useful_ reaction, and it's especially not a
terribly useful one to be posting here, where pretty much everyone agrees with
you already.

First, this guy understands (or at least claims to understand) a lot of the
points you're all making already, and describes some of the steps he's taking
to address them. (Mostly on pages 2 and 3.) Maybe it'll work for him, maybe it
won't; I know far too little about the details to have any idea. In either
case though, repeating the same "more money/interesting problems" thing over
and over doesn't really have any effect.

Second, some of the problems he's having are actually real problems. Any
company that's been around more than a few months is going to have existing
systems, and it often doesn't make sense to rewrite the entire thing every
time you need a new feature...even if the existing system is a bit ugly. As a
programmer, that's an important thing to understand, and it's something people
who don't have a lot of practical programming experience aren't necessarily
going to understand. Knowing that this is a potential issue is something that
can help you both as an employer and as an employee.

edit: I'm not saying that this guy actually knows what he's talking about, and
that the things he's doing will actually fix the problems he's having. I'm
saying that reactionary "this sucks" responses aren't very useful, especially
here.

~~~
qdog
I don't know what is disappointing, I read the full thing, it sounds like your
regular IT sweatshop if you read between the lines. Things like:

1) Giving the new guy an entire module to own (written by someone else). Ok,
so it's an entire module, no one explains htf it works? Every job I've been
to, this is how it works, and it sucks. When I write something and someone new
comes along to work on it, I try and give them some help. Otherwise, you get
the "We should rewrite this from scratch", because it's probably crappy
looking code. New guy might make more crappy looking code, but that's the
natural reaction most people have to 'a pile of code'.

2) Back in his 'day' IT guys worked around-the-clock. Seems like the shortage
today is in labor, not in jobs. We no longer work around the clock because WE
DON'T HAVE TO.

3) And I quote " They don't have the same notion that you go to one place and
you stay there for five, 10 or 15 years. But the incentives to do that aren't
there anymore because there are fewer pension plans and less profit sharing."
This. So much this. I often joke about becoming a school teacher so I get a
retirement package.

I'm a mercenary for hire to the highest bidder. Until I find a company that
can demonstrate some kind of loyalty towards me, that's how it is. I don't
particularly like it, but I have a wife/kids/mortgage and can't take a year
off to start my own company at this point.

~~~
wickedchicken
I know I'll get downvoted since HN frowns upon culture and fun, but 'qdog:
code mercenary' has a nice ring to it. Get someone to make a webcomic about
your exploits.

------
FigBug
I had job similar to this. I was doing a rights management console for
Universal Music to control usage rights on YouTube and Vimeo. My previous two
jobs I stayed over 4 years at both. I last 9 months and the CTO yelled at me
when I quit.

I did not enjoy the work. I did not feel I was creating anything of use. When
friends asked what I did at work I had to say "You know when you try and watch
a YouTube video and it's blocked in your country? I do that." It's hard to be
proud of that. I found it hard to work when I thought what I was doing was
stupid.

The music industry is bizarre. There are so many layers and different people
in charge it's impossible to make a descision. Even if they wanted to change
with the times I don't think they could.

25% more money and working from home wasn't enough to make me stay.

~~~
jeltz
I understand your feelings. One thing I always want to do in my work is to do
something useful. It does not have to be much or useful for many, but it has
to be useful.

Regional blocking for videos is almost the very opposite to useful in my view.
SO I would not stay long if I ever started working on a such company almost no
matter the pay.

------
BjoernKW
The main reason for this kind of turnover is that work in most companies -
especially the larger ones - is completely broken.

Employees are paid for the time they waste while being chained to a desk where
rather they should be paid for actual work accomplished. Many companies
actually value the enforcement of ridiculous 9 to 5 schedules and the
requirement of working on site (rather than at least partially remotely)
higher than the work you do. In many settings you can easily get away with
virtually doing nothing at all as long as you do it during fixed office hours.

What we describe as work today basically is cargo cult from the Industrial
Age. We're working with computers and the Internet, yet work is still
organized as if we were standing at an assembly line working piece rate.

It's quite telling the article doesn't even mention the possibility of remote
or otherwise more flexible working conditions. If they want to retain
developers CIOs have to realize they need to forego some control in exchange
for more flexible, happier and hence more efficient workers.

As for Harry Fox Agency, music licensing today is - thanks to the outrageous
behaviour by the music industry - a somewhat seedy business that probably
doesn't appeal too much to ethical, idealistic and loyal people.

------
rbanffy
The only thing that will keep a good developer is interesting problems. If
your problems are not interesting, they'll go away. The article also mentions
they leave for better pay, so, I suspect they should be paying more.

Remember - being trained to work in their internal product is not really
training they can use elsewhere. The company isn't doing them a favor by
training them.

Also, if their programmers think building the system again from scratch is a
good idea, perhaps they should consider it. "we have invested so-and-so
millions in this system and we won't scrap it regardless of how obsolete it
is" is sure to drive talent away.

------
heydenberk
It's totally unsurprising that it's hard to keep smart hackers engaged in
building custom Java software for music business rules and digital rights
managZZZZzzzz

------
yesimahuman
> Do you find that younger IT professionals suffer from the not-invented-here
> syndrome?

> They don't want to deal with something that's existing. Our systems
> are...not off-the-shelf; everything is custom. Younger workers get
> frustrated by these applications. They don't understand why the program does
> this. They want to just write something fresh. But when we've invested in a
> system as large as this, we're not just going to scrap it. The crux of the
> problem is that they want to create and own their own application. They
> don't want to inherit and have to be responsible for somebody else's work.

Could it be NIH that influenced the creation of system in the first place? In
my experience, managers request custom in-house applications to be created for
all of their custom "needs" all the time. It's a disease that young and old
are susceptible to.

------
ajross
FTA: " _No sooner does he hire a Java programmer and train him in the
company's music industry niche, than the programmer is recruited away for a
higher salary._ "

Pro tip: if the salary wasn't higher, the programmer couldn't have been
recruited away for a higher salary.

There's nothing wrong with the programmer. You're just not paying her enough.

And yes, this is endemic to the industry. No one (outside the Big Tech Giants
anyway) gives raises remotely close to what the employee could get by
quitting. They only want to pay market wage at hiring time. And the employees
aren't dumb.

Really the only notable thing here is that someone decided to write a news
article whining about it.

------
moocow01
Its been my personal experience that a huge number of companies (all types not
just 'startups') tank after a while (~5 years). When I look back if I had
stayed with any of my companies I would have been out of a job anyways.
Therefore, I'm quick to move on when things start to have indications of going
south. Loyalty way back when was probably a good means of 'survival' in that
it resulted in moving up the chain into a secure job but these days I find
loyalty to be the most sure fire way to being shafted.

------
alecco
Let's not fall for this obvious bait article. Networkworld thinks we are
stupid:

"No sooner does he hire a Java programmer and train him in the company's music
industry niche, than the programmer is recruited away for a higher salary.
Indeed, everyone on Trebino's six-person Java development team has less than
one year of experience with HFA, which is the nation's leading provider of
rights management, licensing and royalty services for the music industry."

Also small article requiring 3 page views.

------
herge
Every time I hear somebody complain about how disloyal/lazy/demanding
"Generation-Y" is, I wonder if would we would be more "loyal" if we had not
seen on a first hand basis how big companies treated our parents with layoffs,
cutting back benefits, etc.

------
mathattack
The CIO put it in his own words - if people are leaving for other firms, he
isn't paying a market wage. You have to earn the loyalty of 20somethings.
They've seen large companies lay off hordes of people for dumb reasons. You
can't pay someone with short ye time horizons a sub-market wage. Pay up foe
your people as they get experience, or pay up to find stable people or pay up
to retrain new hires every year.

------
brador
Welcome to the other side of the supply/demand curve. Tech talent is in
massive demand right now, finding good/great talent is particularly difficult
as there's just not enough to go around.

Hence, real talent commands an ever increasing pricetag.

And I love it.

~~~
dsolomon
The talent is out there, and finding it is easy.

Try finding a quality company where you don't end up working for a d-bag is
the difficult part.

------
kschrader
I've been managing the development team at my startup for 3 years now and have
had zero engineer turnover. I follow a fairly simple process:

1\. Make sure that people are learning.

2\. Let people use new technologies and give them interesting challenges.

3\. Make sure that people are paid above average salaries.

4\. Keep the hiring bar high so that smart people get to work with smart
people.

5\. Demand that code quality stays high so that you don't have to work on a
pile of shit.

Every time that I see an article like this I want to send the writer this list
of things so that they can put it on their wall and look at it every day. It's
really not that hard.

------
madanosliw
I think this is due to the speed at which techies' skills rot. You stay in the
same place doing the same thing for 5 years and you have a skill set that no
exciting employer (incuding your current one) is going to want. That's why we
all do side projects. That's why we do stay in jobs that let us constantly
improve ourselves. It's not that we're fickle, our tools and skills are
fickle.

------
jakejake
On page 1 this seems like a simple issue of money, then on the 2nd and 3rd
page seems like it may be about a little more. But ultimately I think it
really is just about the money.

I spent several years working as a developer in the insurance and healthcare
industries and I can say confidently that there's plenty of developers who
would love this job and would have no problems sticking around for a while.
There are plenty of people who either don't want the roller coaster of a
startup or else they've already done that for years and now want stability for
themselves and their family.

Of course you have to pay a higher wage for these people. This guys seems like
he plans to solve his staffing problem by creating interesting problems for
the younger guys. I don't think his luck will be any better in 2012.

------
gunmetal
TL;DR I'm losing all my programmers because I'm not paying them enough.

~~~
greenyoda
Exactly. If it's so easy for them to find a significantly better offer
elsewhere, then he's probably paying them below the market rate. And if it
costs him so much trouble to train new people to replace them, then he should
be doing more to try to retain the people he has (competitive salary, decent
working conditions, career path, etc.). But yeah, it's so much easier to bitch
about uncommitted employees than to be a competent manager.

------
Duff
Pay is just part of this issue. I've seen places that paid peanuts, but
treated people really well in other ways or had a mission that was
particularly compelling or noble. They managed to retain folks surprisingly
well.

The bigger issue is the place sounds like it is run like a feudal estate. Take
the 1:1 people:system ratio. So say I "own" system X, the system is troubled
for various reasons and I fix the thing.

What happens next?

My guess is that you are going to be stuck with "maintaining" this system
until the end of time, just like the overachievers over in the RPG group. Or,
you may get lucky and get laid off, because those 2% annual raises have made
you the highest paid Java programmer.

------
Wazza
Phew, lot's of testosterone out there. There's some fundamental principles at
play here. First in the economics of Supply and Demand, there's a shortage of
good developers programmers, generally in the marketplace. The CIO doesn't
sound like he's aware of this, obviously in such a climate, there's money to
be had, if you're good? Second, Being "older" and "looking in" from the
outside, there's an increasing "penchant" amongst the rising up generation,
and I'm going mildly stereotypical here, "I want to create, design and make",
which doesn't really gel with older traditional businesses that want to
maintain codebases, that, that are key to their enterprise. Yes, they could
shift with the times, and kill off decades of codebase and start again in Ruby
on Rails, or similar, but at what cost? The whole iT industry goes through
cycles like this every 10-20 years. Ironically, you either lose people to more
innovative technology OR, later, you end paying more because it's gone to
legacy and no-one around "does that anymore". Look at COBOL (before most of
you were born). I love the IT industry, it's constantly changing which always
creates opportunity, some struggle with this concept. Last, I think the CIO
needs to recognize these and changes and adjust his approach, if you were him,
with financial constraints, what would you suggest he do in recruiting?

------
mdkess
This guy has some interesting points, and does seem to be addressing the
problem. I was one of those 20-something techies who quit after a year (not at
his company, though).

Legacy code base, of course is not as much fun. Dual ownership of projects is
a really good idea. At my old job, I was thrown into the code base with no
support, and told to figure it out. I did, but it's not much fun scratching
your head for a month and then writing 100 lines of code. Especially after a
few rounds of this, with no feedback.

The 9-5 thing is interesting, but I don't think I could do a 9-5 shop. That
might be great if you are established, have a family, and are working on a
known problem, but for me, I find that I'm either 100% in, or 0% in, and
there's not much in between. I think I'd get bored in an environment like that
pretty quick (that's not to say that they're wrong, just that it's not for
me).

As for working from home, not sure that it's too important. I mean, hopefully
if you have a package or a doctor's appointment you can VPN in for the day,
but as a whole, don't really care.

Ultimately though, money is a big part. At my old job, I got a stellar
performance review, and a 2% raise for the year. They also bumped the baseline
for new collage hires to more than it was when I joined (so I was now making
less than the new college hires). I said that this was unacceptable, that my
rent had gone up more than that, and that I wanted 5%. They said no, but that
next year I'd be in for a promotion. I said goodbye, and they offered me
$20,000 to stay. That's just broken. I left.

------
Kynlyn
I'm one of those guys that has to fight like hell to retain talented
developers, so I understand where this guy is coming from. However....

He admits it's usually about money. Well duh. Then he has to pay them more. If
you want to hire great talent to work on your legacy Java app then guess what?
You're gonna be shelling out a lot of money.

In our business, we work on both new, cool functionality but also have legacy
code that has to be maintained. Naturally, nobody wants to work on that, but
it has to be done. The trick is to balance a developers workload so that they
aren't always stuck in doing legacy work. If one of our developers was forced
to work on maintaining legacy code for any great length of time, then I would
fully expect them to leave.

tl;dr; Pay your developers well and find ways to give them opportunities to
work on cool new stuff. Neglect either of those and they will leave you. It's
really not that hard...

------
fduran
Lack of purpose|mastery|autonomy: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc>
, also low salaries and being treated like a commodity in this case probably.

------
JabavuAdams
These guys make DRM. Who wants to work on that, except possibly as a i-need-
money-now-but-i'll-take-the-first-non-douchy-job-that-comes-up play?

It's like a land-mine CEO complaining that it's hard to find smart, well-
educated workers.

------
unfocused
The amount of loyalty ANY employee should give their employer should be the
same amount that their employer gives them - which is NONE.

My job is just a contractual agreement. No more, no less. Loyalty has nothing
to do with this. Think about it, if the economy is down and they want to lay
you off, where is this loyalty? If a re-org is done and you are moved
elsewhere, where is this loyalty?

It's not there because it never was there. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble or
sound negative. I'm not. I'm just trying to be honest. Understand this, and
you'll be much happier with your career and your life.

------
rpwilcox
In addition to the issues raised before, I'm curious about one thing:

 _How does he treat his developers?_

For example, the guy mentions that it's mostly 9-5. Does that mean that the
boss expects 20 hours days for 3-4 days for a weekend to ship the latest
version of their software (for the "big X.Y release")? Do 2 or 3 of these
weekends and developers see a pattern, and look for less crazy places.

Likewise, how is the development process managed? Is it chaos: "OMG GOTTA PUT
OUT THIS FIRE, DROP EVERYTHING?", or does it have some planning and order to
it? (I don't care if it's waterfall, Agile, Kanban or Scrum - is there some
order to the system so managers know the status of the system?)

How is their status reporting? I _really_ don't like being asked every 15
minutes how Ticket 29 is coming along. Daily standups are great (and usually
the best frequency. I've also done two daily standups per day, and it felt
nanny-ish).

Yes, turnover is a hard problem. Sometimes it involves being generous with the
benefits if you can't be generous with the salary. Sometimes it involves
changing your development process.

Sometimes it involves changing _your_ expectations: engineers don't expect to
be around for 5-10-15 years at a company because that's not how jobs work any
more. I almost laugh when I hear the "where do you expect to be in 5 years"
question, because, odds are, I'll be one or two jobs removed. (This is not
just a tech sector problem: the national average job length seems to be 3-5
years).

------
UK-Al05
I don't know why companies complain about loyalty. If it was the other way,
and had no use for you, they would not think twice about letting go excess
costs.

------
niels
I've worked in a place like this, and quit after little less than a year. They
don't tell you upfront about all their crazy legacy software. The database is
the Api for their applications, and the IT department gets to decide that you
have to use Windows for development. The salary is average. My advice is to
not take a job outside the software industry . I've never seen a place that
was not broken.

~~~
greenyoda
A lot of people would be willing to deal with crazy software and shitty
development environments if the salary and working conditions were really
good. (Many consultants specialize in maintaining toxic legacy software that
nobody else would want to touch.) But if the salary is just average (or
below), there would be many better places to go.

~~~
jeltz
Indeed, with the right team and right working environment deciphering legacy
application can even be fun. So the problem is not the legacy code alone.

------
cpr
As soon as I saw "RPG" I no longer needed to know why they had problems...

------
pasbesoin
At it's simplest: The first "people" to walk out on "job security" and careers
were the companies. So, fuck their incessant whining. (As yea sow, so shall
yea reap.)

------
akeck
Perhaps the CIO has gotten the product for which he was willing to pay. If he
paid market rates to mature 30 year olds with 10 years of industry experience,
he wouldn't have this problem.

------
maeon3
We can't pay our developers minimum wage.... Somebody call the wambulance. If
you are a dev and see a manager or cio type trying to guilt you into working
for less than 120k/year because that is just ridiculous. Smile and pee on his
desk on your way out. These guys make 150 to 500k/year and contribute LESS.

It is intimidation, you are a tool to these guys and they will not hesitate to
throw you under the bus if it saves them some cash for executive bonuses.

Its business. Supply and demand. Pay me what I am worth or im leaving. That is
it. They are Borg and you will be eaten when you lose your power.

~~~
dsolomon
I know developers with government clearances that would be happy to make half
that.

Where are there mythical high paying jobs? FantasyLand?

~~~
sounds
Maybe I'm stereotyping you as one of the LockMart/Boeing/Raytheon new hires. I
know a good dozen personally. They have problems.

* underpaid

* false promises of a career track to avoid giving you real compensation like stock options or bonuses

* deep cuts when the winds of politics aren't blowing your way

* poor workplace ergonomics

The mythical high paying jobs are in the "private sector."

~~~
dsolomon
I continue to work for the governments larger contracting companies. Top 50
[http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011....](http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011.aspx)

~~~
sounds
I omitted Northrop Grumman intentionally; they seem to still value engineering
prowess.

Please don't misunderstand me - there are awesome opportunities working for a
US government contractor. However, the "golden days" of the cold war are long
gone.

------
dsolomon
That CIO is selling smoke and mirrors.

| "We invest in training people and bringing them up to speed to where they
need to be, and boom they're gone"

Straight from the article - they invest NOTHING in retention. It's a separate
process altogether.

| "Even when CIOs promote 20- and 30-somethings, they often don't have loyalty
to the organization, Mok says."

So he's changed HR titles from "Software Engineer I" to "Software Engineer
II". No change in compensation package, responsibility, or goals. Nothing that
has any weight and no light at the end of the tunnel.

| "Where I think these guys would be very energized, they get almost
disincentivized. The way our projects work, we bring in a developer to work on
a module. These guys own a system from start to finish. To me, that's a great
opportunity."

Poster child for delusional. The developer doesn't own it, the company does.
He's just trying to guilt trip them

| "There have been a number of cases where we have had a system that runs into
issues, bugs, defects or a major change requirement. We thought it would be a
challenge for a developer to own it. But their first reaction is to want to
scrap it and start over. There's a whole different mindset."

You can't hang a pine tree from your 1972 Gremlin and pass the car off as new.

| "Secondly, we're working more closely with folks to determine their
strengths and desires and align them to the right systems."

If he's doing this with employees he's already too late. This should be done
during the interview and assessment process before they get hired. If you just
hired someone and you're first thought is "I wonder what to do with them",
then duh - they're going to start looking elsewhere.

| "Third, as new developers come in, we are teaming them with a business
partner to help them understand the impact of their system on the business. "

Guild trip model. After all, you've been working with CustomerX for a year
now... don't you like them? don't you want to help them? don't you want them
to be happy?

| "We're trying to get them more invested in the strategy. We're trying to
engage them in where the company is going. "

So he doesn't want their input. This is perhaps the biggest reason people are
leaving.

So he underpays, refuses to change, and doesn't want their input - and he
wonders why he can't retain people?

~~~
mdkess
I think that's a very cynical misreading of the article.

| Poster child for delusional. The developer doesn't own it, the company does.
He's just trying to guilt trip them

Owning a project means that you get to drive the direction of it, not that you
own the IP. This is very important, it makes people feel in control and that
their work is meaningful.

| You can't hang a pine tree from your 1972 Gremlin and pass the car off as
new.

Legacy code however is a reality of the software world, and a responsible
software developer has to know how to deal with it. I'm sure that Facebook and
Google have lots of old, forgotten and important code, but they didn't get to
where they are by rewriting things every time they could be a little bit
nicer. That said, the company has to make this as painless as possible for
people.

| If he's doing this with employees he's already too late. This should be done
during the interview and assessment process before they get hired. If you just
hired someone and you're first thought is "I wonder what to do with them",
then duh - they're going to start looking elsewhere.

Determining strengths and weaknesses is part of growing in a company. Most
people out of college are smart, but mostly directionless. Very few have
experience with distributed systems, UI/UX, concurrency, etc., and part of
growing is to give them the opportunity to see what's out there, and try new
things. If people feel like they're stagnating, they'll leave. Since I
graduated, I've been exposed to things that I didn't even have the slightest
clue existed.

~~~
dsolomon
The employees are not in control and their input isn't wanted. If the argument
centers around making them "feel" a certain way, then that's called delusion.

Throughout the article there's no mention of anything tangible done for
retention.

Combine that with the lack of interest in exploring a retention model and I
(and seemingly most other contributors here) have little sympathy for someone
crying "I can't keep anyone".

Quality people are easy to find, they're out there in droves. Finding a
quality company is the difficult part.

------
fleitz
"loyalty to the organization" why would anyone be loyal to an organization
that is underpaying them? We know from watching the actions of every fortune
500 that the lowest price for labour is what they are after, employees have no
loyalty because it is never reciprocal.

If the value walking out the door is so much why not pay more?

He should be congratulated on finding so many smart devs who know their value.
Maybe start by thinking of people as people instead of human resources.

------
rorrr
A clueless CIO doesn't understand why people leave and refuses to pay more,
make the environment more friendly, and projects more interesting. Money alone
can save that problem.

