The CIO's lament: 20-something techies who quit after 1 year

Obvious link bait, but they call it bait because it works...<p>Seriously, fuck these people. Every month it seems that the WSJ or Fortune or Forbes is running some article about how 20-somethings are not willing to give 110% for the company. Well, you know what? Management is the whiniest bunch of entitled pricks to ever walk the Earth.<p>They feel entitled to developers' labor. They think that we should feel honored for the opportunity to work on their legacy Java in-house apps that have been ravaged by years of turnover, failed projects, arbitrary management requirements, low quality devs, and outsourcing. But it's an insult to their own egos for a lowly developer to ask to be paid as much as them or, quelle horreur, more!<p>Fun story: first job out of college, I was working in exactly this environment. It was terrible: ridiculous hours, low pay, boring projects, and lack of respect from management. After six months, I got another job offer for a company whose primary product is software, offering twice as much pay and better benefits. I went to HR, asked them to match it if they wanted me to stay, and they pretty much told me to fuck myself. Their counteroffer was a raise of around $5k and tons of opportunities for advancement.<p>A year later, the senior developer, who had worked for the company for 15 years and was in his 50s with a wife and kids, was fired. Not because of any performance reasons--he was pretty damn good at what he did--but because he was the highest paid person in the department and management wanted to cut costs for some kind of valuation or another. Yeah, he was quite the cost center at $90k a year. They were doing him a favor: now he's freelancing, working less, making more, and far, far happier.<p>Maybe in a different era it would make sense for a developer to be loyal to the company she works for. But we don't live in that world anymore. Management has done its damnedest to commodify labor and has more or less succeeded. So, let's be commodities! But if management wants to burn us like oil, they should expect to pay the market rate for it.

Or, reading between the lines, "how to speak the language of value to a line-of-business-apps CIO during a negotiation". Instead of of sharpening your hackles (or whatever) when you read stuff like this, try instead (a) appreciating that <i>everyone on HN agrees with you about this guy's worldview</i>, and (b) distilling out the guy's pain points and thinking of palatable ways to target them to make way more money than the average dumbfuck kid who signs away a <i>year</i> of his life simply to "learn Java programming" at below-market wages.<p>You guys are supposed to be entrepreneurs. Here is a guy with lots of money who obviously does not understand why the world is changing, spelling out for all of us what his business pain points are. If you're going to write snarky comments about him, try first as an exercise taking out your checkbook, putting it on the table in front of you, and conducting a two-minutes hate at it. Take that, money! You don't know software development! Ha!<p><i>Stop berating people like this and get busy taking all their moneys.</i>

Let me save you a lot of money and time; I call this The 20-something techie's lament: CIOs that don't understand why I'm leaving. (Note: this is largely a work of fiction based on my own experiences and desires, as well as the experiences of others.)<p>I work on your legacy applications, but you pay me new development wages, generally below what I can get elsewhere. You don't challenge me enough, so I end up watching cat videos to spend time between bursts of getting things done, because there's just not enough actual work to be done. When I come to you with problems, you talk about how you'll get some people together to look into it; I've never heard back.<p>When Google contacts me, they treat me like a human that wants to grow, learn, and expand beyond the walls of the company, not just inside it. I don't want to play politics. I want to build cool stuff, make money, and learn something new every day. You don't give me that, so I'm leaving.

"Even when CIOs promote 20- and 30-somethings, they often don't have loyalty to the organization, Mok says.... They will stay with you as long as they see certain things, including personal growth or personal value enhancement, whether that's financial reward or career aspirations."<p>Employers fire or lay people off when it is no longer worth it to keep them around. And employees absolutely should leave when it is no longer worthwhile for them to stay. Loyalty doesn't come into it. If you aren't fulfilling their "personal growth, value enhancement, financial reward or career aspirations" THAT is why they are leaving. Fix that. Don't just complain about the youngsters these days.

I think it's interesting that he (implicitly) laments the lack of loyalty. Current corporate culture is predicated on completely at-will employment: you can get laid off whenever management thinks it's important to "downsize" and "go lean"—how on earth do they expect their developers not to pick up and move as soon as things look better elsewhere? Loyalty works both ways.<p>Sure, providing challenges and better pay might help, but fundamentally, people (not just developers) will look at working for a company as only a job unless one of three things happens:<p>1. The company <i>as a company</i> is doing something the employee genuinely believes in. (Apple might be an example of that.) 2. The company has a good work atmosphere and a proven track record of loyalty. (Google comes to mind.) 3. The employee has a financial interest in the company. (Startups.)<p>Short of that, lamenting lack of loyalty is lamenting the fact that your removable cogs are willing and able to remove themselves.

HN's response so far to this is disappointing.<p>It's easy to read the first page (or just the headline) and come up with the "you're not paying enough/your problems aren't interesting enough" response. That's what pretty much everyone who's posted here so far has said. (And that's what my initial reaction was, too.)<p>But that's not a terribly <i>useful</i> reaction, and it's especially not a terribly useful one to be posting here, where pretty much everyone agrees with you already.<p>First, this guy understands (or at least claims to understand) a lot of the points you're all making already, and describes some of the steps he's taking to address them. (Mostly on pages 2 and 3.) Maybe it'll work for him, maybe it won't; I know far too little about the details to have any idea. In either case though, repeating the same "more money/interesting problems" thing over and over doesn't really have any effect.<p>Second, some of the problems he's having are actually real problems. Any company that's been around more than a few months is going to have existing systems, and it often doesn't make sense to rewrite the entire thing every time you need a new feature...even if the existing system is a bit ugly. As a programmer, that's an important thing to understand, and it's something people who don't have a lot of practical programming experience aren't necessarily going to understand. Knowing that this is a potential issue is something that can help you both as an employer and as an employee.<p>edit: I'm not saying that this guy actually knows what he's talking about, and that the things he's doing will actually fix the problems he's having. I'm saying that reactionary "this sucks" responses aren't very useful, especially here.

I had job similar to this. I was doing a rights management console for Universal Music to control usage rights on YouTube and Vimeo. My previous two jobs I stayed over 4 years at both. I last 9 months and the CTO yelled at me when I quit.<p>I did not enjoy the work. I did not feel I was creating anything of use. When friends asked what I did at work I had to say "You know when you try and watch a YouTube video and it's blocked in your country? I do that." It's hard to be proud of that. I found it hard to work when I thought what I was doing was stupid.<p>The music industry is bizarre. There are so many layers and different people in charge it's impossible to make a descision. Even if they wanted to change with the times I don't think they could.<p>25% more money and working from home wasn't enough to make me stay.

The main reason for this kind of turnover is that work in most companies - especially the larger ones - is completely broken.<p>Employees are paid for the time they waste while being chained to a desk where rather they should be paid for actual work accomplished. Many companies actually value the enforcement of ridiculous 9 to 5 schedules and the requirement of working on site (rather than at least partially remotely) higher than the work you do. In many settings you can easily get away with virtually doing nothing at all as long as you do it during fixed office hours.<p>What we describe as work today basically is cargo cult from the Industrial Age. We're working with computers and the Internet, yet work is still organized as if we were standing at an assembly line working piece rate.<p>It's quite telling the article doesn't even mention the possibility of remote or otherwise more flexible working conditions. If they want to retain developers CIOs have to realize they need to forego some control in exchange for more flexible, happier and hence more efficient workers.<p>As for Harry Fox Agency, music licensing today is - thanks to the outrageous behaviour by the music industry - a somewhat seedy business that probably doesn't appeal too much to ethical, idealistic and loyal people.

The only thing that will keep a good developer is interesting problems. If your problems are not interesting, they'll go away. The article also mentions they leave for better pay, so, I suspect they should be paying more.<p>Remember - being trained to work in their internal product is not really training they can use elsewhere. The company isn't doing them a favor by training them.<p>Also, if their programmers think building the system again from scratch is a good idea, perhaps they should consider it. "we have invested so-and-so millions in this system and we won't scrap it regardless of how obsolete it is" is sure to drive talent away.

It's totally unsurprising that it's hard to keep smart hackers engaged in building custom Java software for music business rules and digital rights managZZZZzzzz

&#62; Do you find that younger IT professionals suffer from the not-invented-here syndrome?<p>&#62; They don't want to deal with something that's existing. Our systems are...not off-the-shelf; everything is custom. Younger workers get frustrated by these applications. They don't understand why the program does this. They want to just write something fresh. But when we've invested in a system as large as this, we're not just going to scrap it. The crux of the problem is that they want to create and own their own application. They don't want to inherit and have to be responsible for somebody else's work.<p>Could it be NIH that influenced the creation of system in the first place? In my experience, managers request custom in-house applications to be created for all of their custom "needs" all the time. It's a disease that young and old are susceptible to.

FTA: "<i>No sooner does he hire a Java programmer and train him in the company's music industry niche, than the programmer is recruited away for a higher salary.</i>"<p>Pro tip: if the salary wasn't higher, the programmer couldn't have been recruited away for a higher salary.<p>There's nothing wrong with the programmer. You're just not paying her enough.<p>And yes, this is endemic to the industry. No one (outside the Big Tech Giants anyway) gives raises remotely close to what the employee could get by quitting. They only want to pay market wage at hiring time. And the employees aren't dumb.<p>Really the only notable thing here is that someone decided to write a news article whining about it.

Its been my personal experience that a huge number of companies (all types not just 'startups') tank after a while (~5 years). When I look back if I had stayed with any of my companies I would have been out of a job anyways. Therefore, I'm quick to move on when things start to have indications of going south. Loyalty way back when was probably a good means of 'survival' in that it resulted in moving up the chain into a secure job but these days I find loyalty to be the most sure fire way to being shafted.

Let's not fall for this obvious bait article. Networkworld thinks we are stupid:<p>"No sooner does he hire a Java programmer and train him in the company's music industry niche, than the programmer is recruited away for a higher salary. Indeed, everyone on Trebino's six-person Java development team has less than one year of experience with HFA, which is the nation's leading provider of rights management, licensing and royalty services for the music industry."<p>Also small article requiring 3 page views.

Every time I hear somebody complain about how disloyal/lazy/demanding "Generation-Y" is, I wonder if would we would be more "loyal" if we had not seen on a first hand basis how big companies treated our parents with layoffs, cutting back benefits, etc.

The CIO put it in his own words - if people are leaving for other firms, he isn't paying a market wage. You have to earn the loyalty of 20somethings. They've seen large companies lay off hordes of people for dumb reasons. You can't pay someone with short ye time horizons a sub-market wage. Pay up foe your people as they get experience, or pay up to find stable people or pay up to retrain new hires every year.

Welcome to the other side of the supply/demand curve. Tech talent is in massive demand right now, finding good/great talent is particularly difficult as there's just not enough to go around.<p>Hence, real talent commands an ever increasing pricetag.<p>And I love it.

I've been managing the development team at my startup for 3 years now and have had zero engineer turnover. I follow a fairly simple process:<p>1. Make sure that people are learning.<p>2. Let people use new technologies and give them interesting challenges.<p>3. Make sure that people are paid above average salaries.<p>4. Keep the hiring bar high so that smart people get to work with smart people.<p>5. Demand that code quality stays high so that you don't have to work on a pile of shit.<p>Every time that I see an article like this I want to send the writer this list of things so that they can put it on their wall and look at it every day. It's really not that hard.

I think this is due to the speed at which techies' skills rot. You stay in the same place doing the same thing for 5 years and you have a skill set that no exciting employer (incuding your current one) is going to want. That's why we all do side projects. That's why we do stay in jobs that let us constantly improve ourselves. It's not that we're fickle, our tools and skills are fickle.

On page 1 this seems like a simple issue of money, then on the 2nd and 3rd page seems like it may be about a little more. But ultimately I think it really is just about the money.<p>I spent several years working as a developer in the insurance and healthcare industries and I can say confidently that there's plenty of developers who would love this job and would have no problems sticking around for a while. There are plenty of people who either don't want the roller coaster of a startup or else they've already done that for years and now want stability for themselves and their family.<p>Of course you have to pay a higher wage for these people. This guys seems like he plans to solve his staffing problem by creating interesting problems for the younger guys. I don't think his luck will be any better in 2012.

TL;DR I'm losing all my programmers because I'm not paying them enough.

Pay is just part of this issue. I've seen places that paid peanuts, but treated people really well in other ways or had a mission that was particularly compelling or noble. They managed to retain folks surprisingly well.<p>The bigger issue is the place sounds like it is run like a feudal estate. Take the 1:1 people:system ratio. So say I "own" system X, the system is troubled for various reasons and I fix the thing.<p>What happens next?<p>My guess is that you are going to be stuck with "maintaining" this system until the end of time, just like the overachievers over in the RPG group. Or, you may get lucky and get laid off, because those 2% annual raises have made you the highest paid Java programmer.

Phew, lot's of testosterone out there. There's some fundamental principles at play here. First in the economics of Supply and Demand, there's a shortage of good developers programmers, generally in the marketplace. The CIO doesn't sound like he's aware of this, obviously in such a climate, there's money to be had, if you're good? Second, Being "older" and "looking in" from the outside, there's an increasing "penchant" amongst the rising up generation, and I'm going mildly stereotypical here, "I want to create, design and make", which doesn't really gel with older traditional businesses that want to maintain codebases, that, that are key to their enterprise. Yes, they could shift with the times, and kill off decades of codebase and start again in Ruby on Rails, or similar, but at what cost? The whole iT industry goes through cycles like this every 10-20 years. Ironically, you either lose people to more innovative technology OR, later, you end paying more because it's gone to legacy and no-one around "does that anymore". Look at COBOL (before most of you were born). I love the IT industry, it's constantly changing which always creates opportunity, some struggle with this concept. Last, I think the CIO needs to recognize these and changes and adjust his approach, if you were him, with financial constraints, what would you suggest he do in recruiting?

This guy has some interesting points, and does seem to be addressing the problem. I was one of those 20-something techies who quit after a year (not at his company, though).<p>Legacy code base, of course is not as much fun. Dual ownership of projects is a really good idea. At my old job, I was thrown into the code base with no support, and told to figure it out. I did, but it's not much fun scratching your head for a month and then writing 100 lines of code. Especially after a few rounds of this, with no feedback.<p>The 9-5 thing is interesting, but I don't think I could do a 9-5 shop. That might be great if you are established, have a family, and are working on a known problem, but for me, I find that I'm either 100% in, or 0% in, and there's not much in between. I think I'd get bored in an environment like that pretty quick (that's not to say that they're wrong, just that it's not for me).<p>As for working from home, not sure that it's too important. I mean, hopefully if you have a package or a doctor's appointment you can VPN in for the day, but as a whole, don't really care.<p>Ultimately though, money is a big part. At my old job, I got a stellar performance review, and a 2% raise for the year. They also bumped the baseline for new collage hires to more than it was when I joined (so I was now making less than the new college hires). I said that this was unacceptable, that my rent had gone up more than that, and that I wanted 5%. They said no, but that next year I'd be in for a promotion. I said goodbye, and they offered me $20,000 to stay. That's just broken. I left.

I'm one of those guys that has to fight like hell to retain talented developers, so I understand where this guy is coming from. However....<p>He admits it's usually about money. Well duh. Then he has to pay them more. If you want to hire great talent to work on your legacy Java app then guess what? You're gonna be shelling out a lot of money.<p>In our business, we work on both new, cool functionality but also have legacy code that has to be maintained. Naturally, nobody wants to work on that, but it has to be done. The trick is to balance a developers workload so that they aren't always stuck in doing legacy work. If one of our developers was forced to work on maintaining legacy code for any great length of time, then I would fully expect them to leave.<p>tl;dr; Pay your developers well and find ways to give them opportunities to work on cool new stuff. Neglect either of those and they will leave you. It's really not that hard...

Lack of purpose|mastery|autonomy: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc</a> , also low salaries and being treated like a commodity in this case probably.

These guys make DRM. Who wants to work on that, except possibly as a i-need-money-now-but-i'll-take-the-first-non-douchy-job-that-comes-up play?<p>It's like a land-mine CEO complaining that it's hard to find smart, well-educated workers.

The amount of loyalty ANY employee should give their employer should be the same amount that their employer gives them - which is NONE.<p>My job is just a contractual agreement. No more, no less. Loyalty has nothing to do with this. Think about it, if the economy is down and they want to lay you off, where is this loyalty? If a re-org is done and you are moved elsewhere, where is this loyalty?<p>It's not there because it never was there. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble or sound negative. I'm not. I'm just trying to be honest. Understand this, and you'll be much happier with your career and your life.

In addition to the issues raised before, I'm curious about one thing:<p><i>How does he treat his developers?</i><p>For example, the guy mentions that it's mostly 9-5. Does that mean that the boss expects 20 hours days for 3-4 days for a weekend to ship the latest version of their software (for the "big X.Y release")? Do 2 or 3 of these weekends and developers see a pattern, and look for less crazy places.<p>Likewise, how is the development process managed? Is it chaos: "OMG GOTTA PUT OUT THIS FIRE, DROP EVERYTHING?", or does it have some planning and order to it? (I don't care if it's waterfall, Agile, Kanban or Scrum - is there some order to the system so managers know the status of the system?)<p>How is their status reporting? I <i>really</i> don't like being asked every 15 minutes how Ticket 29 is coming along. Daily standups are great (and usually the best frequency. I've also done two daily standups per day, and it felt nanny-ish).<p>Yes, turnover is a hard problem. Sometimes it involves being generous with the benefits if you can't be generous with the salary. Sometimes it involves changing your development process.<p>Sometimes it involves changing <i>your</i> expectations: engineers don't expect to be around for 5-10-15 years at a company because that's not how jobs work any more. I almost laugh when I hear the "where do you expect to be in 5 years" question, because, odds are, I'll be one or two jobs removed. (This is not just a tech sector problem: the national average job length seems to be 3-5 years).

I don't know why companies complain about loyalty. If it was the other way, and had no use for you, they would not think twice about letting go excess costs.

I've worked in a place like this, and quit after little less than a year. They don't tell you upfront about all their crazy legacy software. The database is the Api for their applications, and the IT department gets to decide that you have to use Windows for development. The salary is average. My advice is to not take a job outside the software industry . I've never seen a place that was not broken.

As soon as I saw "RPG" I no longer needed to know why they had problems...

At it's simplest: The first "people" to walk out on "job security" and careers were the companies. So, fuck their incessant whining. (As yea sow, so shall yea reap.)

Perhaps the CIO has gotten the product for which he was willing to pay. If he paid market rates to mature 30 year olds with 10 years of industry experience, he wouldn't have this problem.

We can't pay our developers minimum wage.... Somebody call the wambulance. If you are a dev and see a manager or cio type trying to guilt you into working for less than 120k/year because that is just ridiculous. Smile and pee on his desk on your way out. These guys make 150 to 500k/year and contribute LESS.<p>It is intimidation, you are a tool to these guys and they will not hesitate to throw you under the bus if it saves them some cash for executive bonuses.<p>Its business. Supply and demand. Pay me what I am worth or im leaving. That is it. They are Borg and you will be eaten when you lose your power.

That CIO is selling smoke and mirrors.<p>| "We invest in training people and bringing them up to speed to where they need to be, and boom they're gone"<p>Straight from the article - they invest NOTHING in retention. It's a separate process altogether.<p>| "Even when CIOs promote 20- and 30-somethings, they often don't have loyalty to the organization, Mok says."<p>So he's changed HR titles from "Software Engineer I" to "Software Engineer II". No change in compensation package, responsibility, or goals. Nothing that has any weight and no light at the end of the tunnel.<p>| "Where I think these guys would be very energized, they get almost disincentivized. The way our projects work, we bring in a developer to work on a module. These guys own a system from start to finish. To me, that's a great opportunity."<p>Poster child for delusional. The developer doesn't own it, the company does. He's just trying to guilt trip them<p>| "There have been a number of cases where we have had a system that runs into issues, bugs, defects or a major change requirement. We thought it would be a challenge for a developer to own it. But their first reaction is to want to scrap it and start over. There's a whole different mindset."<p>You can't hang a pine tree from your 1972 Gremlin and pass the car off as new.<p>| "Secondly, we're working more closely with folks to determine their strengths and desires and align them to the right systems."<p>If he's doing this with employees he's already too late. This should be done during the interview and assessment process before they get hired. If you just hired someone and you're first thought is "I wonder what to do with them", then duh - they're going to start looking elsewhere.<p>| "Third, as new developers come in, we are teaming them with a business partner to help them understand the impact of their system on the business. "<p>Guild trip model. After all, you've been working with CustomerX for a year now... don't you like them? don't you want to help them? don't you want them to be happy?<p>| "We're trying to get them more invested in the strategy. We're trying to engage them in where the company is going. "<p>So he doesn't want their input. This is perhaps the biggest reason people are leaving.<p>So he underpays, refuses to change, and doesn't want their input - and he wonders why he can't retain people?

"loyalty to the organization" why would anyone be loyal to an organization that is underpaying them? We know from watching the actions of every fortune 500 that the lowest price for labour is what they are after, employees have no loyalty because it is never reciprocal.<p>If the value walking out the door is so much why not pay more?<p>He should be congratulated on finding so many smart devs who know their value. Maybe start by thinking of people as people instead of human resources.

A clueless CIO doesn't understand why people leave and refuses to pay more, make the environment more friendly, and projects more interesting. Money alone can save that problem.