Ask HN: How long before a company gets their ROI from new hires / co-ops? - kevindeasis
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_ah
In my experience with early-mid career hires: 3 months to get ramped up, after
which you should be productive-but-slow. At 6 months you're productive, and
know enough to be dangerous. At 12 months you're really cranking and
delivering excellent value.

So, that averages ~6 months to break-even on an average employee, 9-12 months
if you include "duds" in the average.

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tlack
How long is a piece of string? I've had ROI from ten minutes after they
started working (knew how/wanted to fix something that was affecting immediate
revenue), or never, for years (worthless coders who just talk and move todo
items around).. how could there just be one single answer?

~~~
Rjevski
But I think he's asking for a baseline, a rough estimate, after which you
might want to start asking questions if the worker hasn't reached
productivity.

IMO your latter example is something very wrong - either on the employee's
side (they are lazy and not doing anything) or management who hired too many
employees and as a result those new people have nothing to do - either way,
heads should be rolling somewhere.

~~~
tlack
agreed, if the person is in a where-are-your-daily-commits kinda role, years
of non-progress is an obvious firing situation. Sometimes it's less black and
white.

let's say you hired two researchers to do some machine learning experiments to
develop a new product category. It could easily be years before you see any
ROI from that. Especially if their work has to be integrated with the rest of
the (functioning) system.

or say you hired someone for their proficiency in one part of the system --
say, they've run a top level domain before, know DNSSEC/IANA/ICANN in and out,
etc. If they never get to work on that, or their code never goes to production
because of other complications, it doesn't ding ROI. And yet, they are
technically doing what they were hired to do..

i guess my point is that ROI is the final output of many, many different
factors that determine an employees usefulness and relevance to an
organization.

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mattm
A manager of a large consulting firm in my city told me that they used to hire
8 month co-ops and would consider themselves lucky if they broke even.

