Why Top Talent Leaves

"Poor people management" isn't specific enough, and it doesn't explain why top contributors are more likely to leave than mediocre contributors. It's a very specific form of poor management: treating technical people as interchangeable, and therefore assuming that all technical people are mediocre, and therefore assuming that maturity and judgment only exist in management. When people really, <i>really</i> swallow the Kool-Aid of management as the ultimate masters of the universe, as they must in certain large corporations, they start to think of management as the final step in human development: infant, child, adolescent, worker, manager. Some people linger on one step of maturation or another (literally "retarded") and that's fine, as long as they accept the natural order of things, right?<p>Apparently that approach works for some corporations. Getting rid of top contributors at least makes management's belief structure valid and gives their world a kind of simplicity and intellectual coherence that's hard to achieve on a large scale. (If you can't help believing something that isn't true, you had better make sure it <i>is</i> true in the part of the world you care about.)<p>Good managers know the people they manage and know their diverse capabilities. That's hard work, though, so it isn't for everyone.

Keep in mind that there will always be a delay between when you've unalterably lost someone good and when that person actually leaves the company. Financial, social, mental, and professional inertia is a real thing. And a job is in many ways a relationship like a romantic relationship, like a marriage.<p>When is a marriage irretrievably broken? If you take the moment that the divorce actually happened and you rewind say, 1 day, it seems unlikely that you could get the couple to reconcile then if they were irreconcilable just the day after. And in all likelihood you'd have to go back years to get to a point where reconciliation would be possible, where one or the other of them had not made the decision in their heart, perhaps without even consciously being aware of it, that the relationship was over and on a denouement to eventual permanent separation.<p>The same dynamics apply to employment. If you rewind the clock one day or one year from the point of separation you probably cannot fundamentally change the glide slope that results in an exit from the company. And like marriage and divorce the "reasons" are probably not so simple, not down to one solitary action or cause. More likely it's due to an incompatibility of life goals, lack of mutual respect, failure to communicate openly with one another, and problems with basic chemistry.<p>I have seen employees (good, high-caliber talent) who are immensely passionate about their job and they keep throwing themselves into the maw of rejection that their local corporate culture exudes. They keep banging away trying to make things better. Nine times out of ten they get rejected outright, and the 10th time they get dragged over broken glass getting one little change made. That sort of thing wears on a person just as surely as fighting with a spouse drags on a person. And one day things just start to click a little differently and they see a future where they are no longer working at that company, and they don't hate the idea.

I've come to a pragmatic conclusion about this problem:<p>When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for the sake of organizational effeciency become necessary. These compromises happen for the sake of allowing teams interact with hundreds or thousands of other developers to produce a large product (often at the oversight of a nontechnical executive). This is a serious turnoff to star workers who are self confident and prefer to do things their own way. Said star workers know their own worth and would prefer to work on their own terms again sans constant individual compromise, so they leave.<p>Mediocre programmers, lacking the confidence to leave, have a much larger threshold for such individual compromises for the sake of the organization. So they stay.

Eight of the most important words I learned in management, leadership, and choosing jobs, from a professor of mine:<p>"People join good projects and leave bad management"

Woefully incomplete. The article doesn't seem to recognize that talented folks can leave because their own goals have changed. Perhaps an engineer is ready to try new challenges that simply aren't applicable at the organization, or perhaps a manager has had a lifestyle change that drives her to resign.<p>Anytime somebody tells me "there's only one reason this happens," I get suspicious. Life is far more complicated than that.

"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring."<p>Am I the only one who thought that this was extremely unspecific? Many factors go into managing an organization- I'm curious as to which factors I should focus on to help motivate &#38; reinforce top talent. The only details provided by the author are accountability and reward systems.

I prefer Marc Andreessen's reason: Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem.<p>Source: <a href="http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-companies-part-2-reta" rel="nofollow">http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-...</a> (original seems to be deleted from blog.pmarca.com)

You can gauge someone's ranking in an organization explicitly and implicitly.<p>Sometimes implicit beats explicit.<p>The explicit is performance reviews, which can be cherry-picked. The implicit is the list of projects someone was entrusted to work with. People will more freely give the gamut of projects they've worked on than the gamut of performance reviews they've gotten, and most clever people realize this, so after a few dud projects they look elsewhere.

"what do you aspire to bring to the world?"<p>Yes. Yes. Yes. One thousand times, yes. If you're asking me to dedicate my waking hours to something, be clear about what that something is. Hint: It's not your corporation.<p>I've interviewed at several companies, and the only ones I rejected out of hand are the ones that are just "doing business" and have ceased to chase some vision.<p>Some companies do really cool stuff, but have no vision (e.g. most of Lockheed Martin) whereas there are companies who do something seemingly less exciting (e.g. Yelp) that have a vision for how they're going to change the world.<p>In Yelp's case, they're helping great businesses thrive and be found and holding bad companies accountable. As an Aero guy, I'd be predisposed to Lockheed, but frankly, when I talked to Yelp, that kind of thinking made all the difference.

"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring." Can't get closer to the truth.

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Manage those correctly for your employees and you'll have a happy organization.

top talent is like an $800 coffee machine. If you ain't gonna use it or appreciate the fine coffee it makes, there are others who will. and the coffee machine insists of being appreciated every moment .

In a word: Asshattery. More often but not always, brought on by shrinking resources -- whether real, or perceived/projected/created by management as part of a agenda regardless of financial state.

Because top talent isn't enough. You also need up-to-date skills, connections, past recognition and opportunity. Most talented people I know live in fear of never getting these things and becoming failures. So people tend to take a fail-fast approach to career changes and move as soon as they aren't getting these things.