[Gareth321]

I finally have a use for my MBA. The theory on this one is not good. You're right: people will leave of their own volition. Problem is, it's usually the people with the highest marketability. In laymen's terms, the most skilled and productive employees. In any given organisation you'll find 20% doing 80% of the heavy lifting. Losing half of the most productive employees results in a real world 40% reduction in output. Of course, much of this output is intangible and easy to hide, so investors don't see the damage for years. Soon enough, lack of productivity bites cash flows, and another round of layoffs is announced. Wouldn't you know it, the most productive leave this time too.

[01100011]

A couple of coworkers with experience in the defense industry related a story about a company, Cubic I think, which started offering buyouts in order to reduce headcount and boost profits. The best engineers took the offer because they could just get another job somewhere else. The worst employees stayed behind and proceeded to do the same buyout approach next time the company needed to save money. It was a natural selection feedback loop that took the company's engineering talent into the gutter.

[mprovost]

Bruce Webster named this the "Dead Sea Effect". [0] Imagine your talent evaporating, leaving an increasingly salty residue.

[0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I think the practice is old, and /might/ have once made more sense.

If you offer a buyout to a bunch of people in a factory with no real alternative, you're selecting for the people who want to do nothing - which is probably the people who are doing (close to) nothing.

If you offer a buyout to a bunch of people with real alternatives, you're going to mostly buyout the people with the best alternatives (the most marketable employee / the most productive).

This is amplified by the fact that factory workers really have a minimum amount they must be productive. Whereas software engineers can LITERALLY do nothing. Further, factory workers have a pretty low limit on how productive they can be. The limit is much higher for software engineers.

It's an old practice that might have made sense, but definitely does not make sense in software.

[andrewjf]

As far as I can tell, this kind of thinking (the best people leave first and you're stuck with the lowest performers) _is_ accepted common knowledge.

So what's the thought process that goes into triggering the good people to leave? Is there just no other option?

[chii]

> So what's the thought process that goes into triggering the good people to leave?

my 2 cents is that those high-performers are not trusted enough with autonomy (by the increasingly large middle management). But the reason they are a high performer is because they're very good at working out what to do, as well as executing - which implies good autonomy, and self-reliant decision making. Perhaps at a large scale team, this sort of autonomy doesnt work.

As an anecdote, there are high performers in crafts such as blacksmithing - where the skills required are high and high autonomy is probably desired (i have never seen a blacksmith be micromanaged). So what makes software development so different that it cannot remain like a craft? My answer is that you have middle management who is made responsible for the output of the high performers, but they don't and can't truly control them - other than via micromanaging.

[peterangular]

> My answer is that you have middle management who is made responsible for the output of the high performers, but they don't and can't truly control them - other than via micromanaging.

Agree. This is all anecdotal:

IMO - the people who get promoted to management in technical roles often don't have the people skills to perform the job well. I have had leadership thrust upon me multiple times in my career and it's very difficult. You're constantly balancing autonomy vs. active management for each person, in each role, for each unique situation. You're sussing out people's strengths and weaknesses working to help highly competent/technical people progress in their career. You're actively working to keep people on the same page, and sometimes you're working against your own contentious team members.

I rail hard against non-technical management managing a technical role - it just doesn't work. So, typically, technical people get thrown into management roles and I think we often suck at it. We don't take the time to work on ourselves to have the people skills required to be a positive leader of people. Then we compensate like any other crappy manager: we micromanage (crack the whip), we keep people in the dark ("mushroom management"), we DARVO, we have angry emotional outbursts, we pick favorites, etc.

What we see in software (and other technical roles) is that most people picked for management never put the work in to be an effective leader of people. And, I think the very nature of our work precludes many of us from developing the social skills it takes.

[Gareth321]

>I rail hard against non-technical management managing a technical role - it just doesn't work. So, typically, technical people get thrown into management roles and I think we often suck at it.

I think this is just an outcome of the reality that it's extremely rare for someone to be highly competent in people management, business, and tech. Such a person can work anywhere, and ask for any amount of money. Back in the real world, candidates will usually have certain strengths. Good companies attempt to train up said weaknesses, but oftentimes people are just not good at certain things.

I used to be on your side re non-tech managing tech, but I am now much more pragmatic. People management skills are very difficult, and I don't believe a people manager needs to be as technically skilled as their employees. Quite the opposite: the employees are there because of the skills they can bring to the team. The critical component here is ensuring the people manager is actually good. That means providing autonomy where appropriate, and structure where necessary.

[chii]

> What we see in software (and other technical roles) is that most people picked for management

i think instead of being picked, it's more that the management track is the only real way to gain higher compensation. There's a glass ceiling for IC (individual contributors) in terms of compensation - sure there will be the occasional principal developer (or some such like "architect"), but even then, those roles tend to turn into a managing role; you're herding other people and writing proposals and to convince upper management that such and such ideas for the product or system is good.

If such a person was just given the authority to dictate - or is working alone - they'd just _do_ it. They'd be able to accomplish far more in the same amount of time (provided they do have the skill and execution chops). But that's exactly what a high-performing person _is_!

Unfortunately, even if such a role was created and the person given the space, the compensation is not matching unless said person had equity holdings (such as being a technical founder). So to reach a level of compensation commensurate with such skills and capability, you end up needing to become part of the management - paradoxically removing the use of the very skill that would make you worthy of such compensation!

[SuoDuanDao]

I suspect that past a certain scale, some good people leaving is so unavoidable it becomes necessary to make everyone replaceable. That tends to hobble the top performers the most, turnover justifies shifting the culture more in that direction, etc.

[dan-robertson]

I don’t really buy this argument. Another thing one sees is companies deciding that a certain level of ‘unregretted attrition’ is good and then effecting policies that end up raising attrition in general and of course it disproportionately rises for the more productive marketable employees. So maybe those companies don’t realise what they’re doing or they don’t know who is important to keep or they think the attrition is worth it. I don’t think one can merely consider it unavoidable when companies actively increase it.

[xbmcuser]

Self interest good people being good can take the money as they either expect to get a better or similar paying job as well as the payout for leaving so their income increases. If you are working for a company where it is so bad that it starts laying off people or buying out their contracts you are probably working in very stressful conditions.

[humanwhosits]

"If they can't afford those other people, I'm probably not getting paid enough to stay"

[caoilte]

The thinking is, Good people leave anyway. Everybody is replaceable.