[DocTomoe]

In my experience, telling them that hiring the wrong person for the job must have been their incompetence and walking out makes them reconsider their strategies quickly.

Rehiring talent costs - on average - an annual salary. If more of us grew a spine, we wouldn't see the management/IT-ops staging a recreation of the stereotypical high-school jocks/nerds conflict.

[blowski]

> Rehiring talent costs - on average - an annual salary.

That's best-case scenario - an ordinary cog in a big team supporting well-documented/tested and fairly generic, simple software. A friend of mine did a research paper and said it's more like 3 years annual salary in most companies because:

* Loss of productivity during notice period

* Onboarding time of new staff

* Negative impact on morale of rest of team

* Rest of team needing to support work

* Recruiters fees

* Time spent recruiting

* Customer frustration

* Replacing them with someone worse

* Extra mistakes

[nerdponx]

Eh. Employers in the USA have very little incentive to worry about this, especially big employers.

Even if they manage to piss off an employee, it might take said employee a couple of months to find a new job (assuming they're in a field like programming where there are any jobs at all).

And the employee won't even start looking for a job after they've been unhappy for several months, because finding a new job is an exhausting, demoralizing timesink; it can be all but impossible to conduct an effective job search while handling other "real life" demands. Not to mention that it's "bad" to leave a job too soon.

And the employee can't just quit because their access to healthcare is dependent on having a full-time job with benefits. Individual market healthcare plans are all but unaffordable. Not to mention that it's "bad" to have a gap in your resume.

So even if the employee starts hating their job by month 2, if they aren't some kind of super-hot commodity in the job market, they won't leave until month 12 at the earliest. Heck, they might not ever leave at all.

Adjusted for the probability that the employee might leave in any given year and amortized over the lifteime of the employee at the company, the costs of making an employee unhappy are trivial compared to the value that can be extracted from them before they quit.

And that's all assuming that employees are somewhat non-fungible. For a job that doesn't require specific technical skills, employees are essentially fungible. This is kind of a good thing for society, because it means that there is a large number of educated, thoughtful, high-functioning people out there with good communication skills. But it's a bad thing if you are one of those people and you need to pay rent and go to the doctor.

People on HN (and in tech generally) seem to forget that they are tremendously fortunate to have any seller power at all in the labor market.

[znpy]

> If more of us grew a spine, we wouldn't see the management/IT-ops staging a recreation of the stereotypical high-school jocks/nerds conflict.

I cannot upvote this enough.

I haven't seen a company change mind so fast until 3/4 of a huge team (25-30 people) team left the company within 6-8 months.

[dunefox]

What made them leave? It's different if they leave randomly or because a well known set of reasons.

[jgeada]

Everybody lies on exit interviews. You mostly don't want to burn bridges and frequently will need some references. So HR departments have 0 useful information as to why people are leaving and even less about the costs of having developers go.

[zimpenfish]

> Everybody lies on exit interviews. You mostly don't want to burn bridges

Hold on - not everyone does (I offer myself as anecdata). And I am more than happy to burn bridges if I'm leaving a toxic workplace because, well, it's toxic.

[znpy]

It really depends. where the scene is not that big, it does happen to meet again a former coworker (or a former boss) at another company.

I've seen that happen.

[znpy]

you're pretty much right.

[tl]

Finding a job with higher pay or a better work environment makes the rest of that team (and possibly members of other teams) reconsider staying.

Personal anecdata: one person leaving a team of 10-20 caused 3-5 other people to either leave or re-negotiate in private. In extreme cases, this triggers a chain reaction.

[znpy]

This is also true.

[znpy]

a long streak of dumb decisions made by upper management (think C-level execs, not direct managers).