What is wrong with frequent changing of jobs? It’s one of the easiest tools for increasing my compensation. The job market ideally should be so flexible you can switch to another company any time you want, no noncompetes.
That is the problem. That job-hopping is only way to get better compensation. The history, the domain knowledge and accountability is lost when one who made a programming decision is gone.
Why care about quality or maintainability if you are gone in year or two anyway...
You've hit the nail on the head -- the problem is systemic, not the implied sudden lack of virtue. People job hob in our industry b/c even the giants with hundreds of billions in the bank are caught up in absurd quarter-by-quarter performances for their shareholders, which sets the direction of the whole industry.
Exactly. On the level the parent is describing, having options is a good thing, but the side-effect of this systemic problem is that it fragments our ability to write good software because the process is not about developing good software, its about to profit. Which enshitifies the endeavor, devaluing the quality of the end result.. Slowly, over time, this enshifitication is going to, or already is causing problems in our technological infrastructure and maybe other areas of society.
I was just chatting with a friend of mine, this morning, about this kind of thing.
He works as a highly-skilled tech, at a major medical/scientific corporation. They have invested years of training in him, he brings them tremendous value, and they know it. He was just telling me how he used that value to negotiate a higher compensation package for himself. Not as good as if he swapped jobs, but he really has a sweet gig.
People who stay, take Responsibility for the code they write. They will need to face the music, if it doesn't work, even if they are not responsible for maintaining it.
They are also worth investing in specialized training, as that training will give great ROI, over time.
But keeping skilled people is something that modern management philosophy (in tech, at least) doesn't seem to care about.
Until corporations improve the quality of their managers; especially their "first-line" managers, and improve their culture, geared towards retaining top talent (which includes paying them more -but there's a lot more that needs doing), I can't, with good conscience, advise folks not to bounce.
> But keeping skilled people is something that modern management philosophy (in tech, at least) doesn't seem to care about.
I’m a founder for 10 people and this is the first thing we think about. Except for low performers; except that youngsters need a variety of experience to be proficient at life; except that the team is not performing well(1). 25% or 30% increases for half the workforce are frequent.
(1) The biggest remark from management coaches is that giving raises lowers employee performance, which I can fully witness in my company. It’s not even good for morale. I’m just happy that people exit the company fitter and with a girlfriend, even a kid and sometimes a permanent residency, but business-wise I’ve been as good as a bad leader.
I’m reaching the sad conclusion that employees bring it upon themselves.
Paying more is not the answer (but it is also not not the answer -we need to pay well). Improving the workplace environment, into a place people want to stay, is important.
My friend could double his salary, moving almost anywhere else, but he gets a lot of perks at his work, and is treated extremely well by his managers.
They just gave him a rave review, and that did more to boost his willingness to stay, than a 10% raise. He will still negotiate a better salary, but is more likely to be satisfied with less than he might have, if they tried to treat him badly.
Treating employees with Respect can actually improve the bottom line. They may well be willing to remain in difficult situations, if they feel they are personally valued.
I know this from personal experience. When they rolled up my team, after almost 27 years, the employee with the least tenure had a decade. These were top-shelf C++ image processing engineers, that could have gotten much higher salaries, elsewhere.
Yeah I agree with this. It really depends on the culture of the business. If the employee feels valued, giving raises increases feeling valued.
The problem is our current form of corporate culture. Employees don't feel like they matter, there efforts are a cog in a wheel. If you get a raise in this type culture, it only matters to the bottom line and there is no incentive produce because the employee is already unhappy in the first place.
Change your business culture and these problems will disappear, IMHO.
Is there any alternative to raises that don't lower employee performance, like some kind of bonus scheme? Or do you find some unfortunate relation between money vs motivation?
Truly unlimited PTO where you judge employees by their performance. I just spoke to my manager at the job I started late last year and he said it is customary for people to take 5-6 weeks kid a year.
Sounds like he's lucky though. Many companies are happy to let you specialize in their area of business, own the special software, get to know all the vendors & business contacts then really not pay you well. You dont get to find out until 5 years in when you have skills that aren't really transferable to a new job.
His skills are quite transferable. Many of the company’s customers would love to hire him away. The company doesn’t have a noncompete, and he’d probably quit, if they tried.
> But keeping skilled people is something that modern management philosophy (in tech, at least) doesn't seem to care about.
If they would care then job hopping would not exist. If staying at s company would be more. Beneficial to your salary, why would you ever want to change company, if you are otherwise happy?
> Not as good as if he swapped jobs, but he really has a sweet gig
If your main motivation for working is to exchange your labor for the maximum amount of money possible, I don’t see how that is the positive outcome you think it is.
I personally wouldn’t leave my current job if another one for $100K more fell into my lap. But the “unlimited PTO” where the custom is to take at least 5-6 weeks off during the year not including paid holidays and it being fully remote is hard to beat.
It's harder to learn the impact of your design decisions -- Seeing how software evolves to meet changing business goals and how the design choices made play out in the long run helped teach me a lot.
Coming up with a neat API that turns out to be difficult to modify in the future, or limiting in ways you didn't imagine would when writing it is a good learning experience.
Or seeing how long a system can survive growing usage -- Maybe a simple hack works better than anyone expected because you can just pay more for RAM/CPU each year rather than rebuild into a distributed fashion. Or the opposite, maybe there's some scaling factor or threshold you didn't know existed and system performance craters earlier than predicted.
The topic is “we’re destroying software”, not “we’re destroying techniques to increase your compensation”. Individual compensation and collective quality are not somehow inherently correlated.
I guess you could argue something along the lines of people never staying long enough to build complex things from start to finish. New people moving in and working on the project without the proper understanding, not caring since it will be someone else's problem in a few months...
> It’s one of the easiest tools for increasing my compensation.
This is the root problem. None of the problems the GP pointed up were created by software developer.
Now, if you want to know the consequences, it causes an entire generation of people that don't really know what they are doing because they never see the long-term consequences of their actions. But again, it's not the software developers that are causing this, nor are they the ones that should fix it.
I don't get the downvotes. This is a rational point of view for an individual. The problem is higher up, where the incentives align to make it rational. It'd be better if people could stay longer and still grow their compensation.
Why care about quality or maintainability if you are gone in year or two anyway...