1) they're dissatisfied with their pay and you're not listening
2) they're dissatisfied with their working conditions (bullpens or open offices anyone?)
so they'll never keep their best people and they'll never learn.
I got moved from a desk in in a dead end office with to a desk in a bullpen so that I could be "closer to the people who I work with." My performance fell off a cliff. People would stop by all the time to check up on things, there was always a conversation going on. It was incredibly stressful and I slowly burned out trying to maintain my level of productivity.
My boss (the director of the org.) started asking me why I was making mistakes and forgetting deadlines. I told him that it was entirely because of my new desk, and he said he would do what he could to help.
A couple of months go by, and we have another meeting. I say the same thing.
A few more months go by, we have another meeting. I say the same thing. He said he asked people to keep their conversations quieter.
A few more months go by, and we have a meeting, and I tell my boss I'm leaving because I'm burned out, and my desk is the #1 culprit. He and HR were like "you should have let us know before it got to this point."
I don't think there was a chance for them to understand the issue, regardless of how I articulated my concerns. To them, my new desk was an upgrade from the old desk. It was bigger, had lots of drawers, was closer to the "desirable" part of the building.
To me, it meant that everyone had to walk by my desk, and would use the time to chat, and ask questions that would be better handled via email. It was nice being closer to the team, but I had a way different workflow from everyone else. My boss probably thought it was great that everyone could turn around and ask me a question the second they thought of it, but it meant I was getting interrupted 3-4 times an hour, when I used to be able to work for 3 hours straight without seeing anyone.
I've honestly been thinking of calling up my old boss and asking him if he wants to grab a drink to see if he ever wrapped his head around why I left. To this day I'm baffled by the entire situation.
TL;DR: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Most CEOs and VPs are idiots, handing money around to each other in a circle jerk of old white guys club, backslapping each other for hiring each other and keeping the hegemony going.
These idiots do not know what they are doing, they have just been conditioned to ooze confidence and ignore critics.
The story is simple: we have a prefab building with 3 stories, a beautiful interior, 52 desks on each floor. All open, but for 2 closed meeting rooms per floor. And the toilet. The desks are arranged close to the window. The centre of the floor holds a couple meeting spaces, and the coffee machine. It was, unsurprisingly, very noisy.
I talked about the issue during a sprint's retrospective, and was told to lay out my proposals to HR. I had plenty, most of which didn't involve actually chopping up the "lovely" open space into actual desks. It was mostly about putting dividing half walls and generally muffling the whole thing, while mostly preserving that "open" look that is so dear to whoever doesn't actually work there (funny how most people who condoned the open plan end up spending most of their time in meetings).
I had indirect feedback later (through my team's product owner). Turned out the head HR was surprised to see me raise the subject—I was the first to do so. So she asked around. The feedback she got was mostly "well, yeah, it's an open plan, but it's okay", which she translated by "there is no problem, it's just a single contractor being difficult". I guess she was oblivious to the biases introduced by her being in a position of power. That nobody will say to her face that the noise is not okay, lest she thinks they can't fit in. (I no longer have that fear, for better or worse.)
I have later learned that a "Life in the Open Plan" group formed because of the noise issue.
They are never going to hire you. The contract is, in a way, a more airtight way of paying you under the table. Depending on the size of the business, labeling everyone as 1099 can reduce taxes for the business quite a bit. Thing is, though, is that it's illegal. But it's usually up to the worker to report it, so it is extremely under-enforced.
Bottom line is that you're being abused. I encourage you to file Form SS-8 as soon as possible with the IRS and check into your state's labor office to see what they can do.
https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-ss8
Source: I left a contractor role in October after realizing that I was a victim of misclassification.
Fourth, my contractor status is actually secondary to me. More important is being allowed to work part time (4 days a week), which I'm currently negotiating.
It also looks good from the outside.
Having their desk in the open plan, they're more be inclined to think they are as affected as everyone else. Except they're not, because they spend way more time in meetings, and live on the manager's schedule.
As far as I can tell, the higher ups actually do mean well. I'm not sure what drew them to the open plan, but I think cold blooded cynicism explains only a fraction of their error.
Why is this so common? What kind of brain dead morons are becoming managers?
Why do they even become managers if they don't want to manage. At my firm, it was the same. Some people were automatic fits and managed to do fine. The others were left to fend for themselves. No mentorship, no management, nothing.
I guess it's complimentary in a way, but I can articulate exactly what I did in a way that my mom, who is an artist and barely uses a computer, can understand.
I think a lot of the problem is that some managers are really inflexible. They only know one way of management, and if that doesn't work they don't know what to do. They are a lot like teachers in that regard. We've all had teachers who could only explain things one way, and they constantly confused students who didn't grasp that explanation.
I even got my boss and HR to admit that I was really self-aware, and was able to articulate what I needed to succeed. It was like that meme where you break a logical explanation down into atomic parts and get them to agree with every step along the way, but they just said "no" to the conclusion.
I guess it's maybe an example of the Peter Principle in action.
Re point #1, I simply don't understand how, long term, it is more cost efficient to hire and train someone entirely new than it is to build a culture of valuing current staff. Maybe I'm naive? Maybe it is difficult in ways I don't perceive?
Some managers also seem to only respond to crises. Being down an employee is a crisis. Making sure that your employee gets an appropriate raise isn't, especially since most people aren't going to leave their boss know that they are looking for another job
Is there a counterfactual? A company with a strong culture of promoting from within that outperforms as a likely result of this attribute?
Then a couple years later they were giving me basically no raise. When I told them I thought I was worth more, they asked me if I could "wait a year".
I got a new job and a huge raise compared to the last one. (Again, 30-40%.)
So while it's possible, it's not always even reliable at the same company that has done it in the past.
It's great you love my work but it's not enough of a reason that I shouldn't walk across the street to your competitor and get paid 20% more.
For whatever reason, letting them walk and paying that same 1.5x salary to a new mid-level hire is easier for everyone to swallow.
And from the employee's perspective, saying "yes" to a recruiter who expects to pay market rate sounds like a lot less hassle and stress than preparing a presentation on why your current company should change or make an exception to its HR polices for you.
Maybe by creating a workplace where developers want to stay you could keep them around at slightly under market rate? Not everyone is looking to job hop every 6 months. But the amount below market rate that you seem to end up by staying in one job feels like it's unreasonably large.
There isn't much of a "raw mercenary economics" argument for training (which the MBA types prefer), you've got to talk about intangibles like loyalty, goodwill, social connections, etc.
Let's say you train someone whose salary is [x]. After training, their market salary would be 30% higher; [1.3x].
Are you suggesting that if they end up with a hypothetical 10% raise, to [1.1x] because [.2x] was spent on training?
That's absurd. You can't just walk out on the street and hire a person who is already trained for [1.3x]. You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered.
I honestly think the difference in the second example is that the expenses in the second example are paying the kinds of people who make stupid personnel decisions like this.
I'm obviously cynical about the whole thing, but it seems that MBA-style thinking is almost deliberately evil. I have friends who have gotten MBAs from top schools, and friends who work in management consulting for the Big 4, and I've talked at length with them about their feelings about business practices that they implement and support. I literally have never gotten an answer that justifies philosophical objections to their work, beyond perhaps "well, it's just the way it's done."
I think it's a myth that organizations have to behave in a deliberately sociopathic manner in order to be successful. I mean, to a certain extent being a sociopath is an advantage, but I really don't think that's really a necessity.
On the flip side, I acknowledge that I am not very good at divorcing who I am from what I do. It's why I've made a career helping non-profits and social enterprises. I'd probably be a healthier person if I were able to get less invested in what I do.
Either that, or the company makes cuts somewhere else which -- all else being equal -- puts it at a competitive disadvantage. Budgets are generally zero-sum at a particular moment in time.
> You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered.
If you can prove that to the bean-counters, by all means spread the good word.
However even if true you must consider a third potential outcome: You train up the junior employee, and then they don't stay with your market-rate offer for whatever reason, and you have to incur the hiring-process costs anyway for the empty senior position.
That scenario is always be more expensive than the other two, and it can only strike junior-trainer companies. Senior-poacher companies don't have to even worry about the odds of it occurring.
Consider the costs associated with recruiting for a single role. You have to either advertise a role/filter out candidates or engage a recruiter (which costs time or money). You have to interview a number of people, taking time (money).
You then have to onboard that person, and choose a salary based on your limited knowledge about them. And even then you could still hire a lemon (although admittedly it could go the other way and you hire someone better than expeceted). You then have to wait for them to become productive in the new organisation.
You also have much better information about someone who has worked at your organisation for a longer period of time and can therefore tailor their salary better to their skills than for someone who you know nothing about.
Spending money on training is a predictable cost vs. an unknown future cost of hiring. And yes, people will also appreciate it as an intangible, which if you are 'mercenary' you can enumerate as a supplement to a certain amount of salary.