How Hard Should Your Employer Work to Retain You?

Not sure if my experience is relevant, but from what I&#x27;ve seen there are two interested parties with different capabilities and interests:<p>- The employee&#x27;s direct manager: values the employee the most, doesn&#x27;t want to lose him, but cannot really directly offer pay. So instead, the manager offers praise, and more flexibility (personal leave on an ad-hoc basis, placement on best projects, etc.) If the employee wants to leave, the manager can attempt to justify a better salary to higher ups &#x2F; HR, but has no actual control over this outside of making the case on behalf of the employee.<p>- HR &#x2F; higher ups: I&#x27;m far less clear on how this works, however they seem to have hard limits for what they can offer, and no amount of convincing will budge those limits.<p>In total, it feels a bit like arguing with a low-level support tech: your case can be reasonable, the support tech is actually wise enough to the best solution, but his hands are tied by policy and he has no ability to change it.

I don’t think it’s a good thing to tell the manager about starting&#x2F;ongoing job search. Never heard anything positive happening after this in my career. Next day after that you are immediately put into departure queue. Basically no work in relevant projects and no way for promotions. “Document your work and shut up.” From this day on you’re dead weight in the payroll’s table.<p>Edit: and in your manager’s project planing table you just made a hole. That means somebody must be hired and trained delaying current project and making the manager look bad in the eyes of his&#x2F;her superiors. No reason to be thankful for sure.

Manager: wants to retain employee<p>Salary increase budget: 3% of salary mass<p>Employee retention: does not happen<p>Alternatively, in some companies the only way to give a decent salary raise is promotions which leads to all kind of problems : title inflation, super performers put into a job they won&#x27;t perform as well in, etc...<p>Retention is not easy

From my experience employers are not trying to retain talents except of stars.<p>Usually you ask for a rise, got rejected or sent to go through promotional committee which take month. Then you go for interview, got a job offer with even better total compensation than you asked at your current position and leave.

&gt; Tenure functions somewhat differently at very large companies; it may take years for someone just to come up to speed and learn how to operate within the system, so they do their best to retain people for decades.<p>Even if you&#x27;re &quot;just&quot; a 500 people company, expect the investment into getting a new hire up to speed to be at least a year&#x27;s worth of salary - initial recruiting cost, dealing with governmental bureaucracy if the employee doesn&#x27;t have citizenship, actual learning &#x2F; training &#x2F; handover time and reduced productivity in adjacent people.<p>Unfortunately, for most companies <i>only</i> the recruiting cost shows up in their HR budget calculations, so there is no &quot;incentive&quot; per se for HR to look for &quot;leaders&quot; who manage to burn through entire teams worth of people in years. They may achieve stellar business results, but the cost to the company doesn&#x27;t show up on anyone&#x27;s radar until enough people dump annoyance in Glassdoor.

At this level it feels like &quot;no one else can have &#x27;em&quot; is often as much of a reason as &quot;we&#x27;ve got &#x27;em&quot;. Hard to know for sure though.

&gt; Recently we learned that Google spent $2.7 billion to re-hire a single AI researcher who had left to start his own company.<p>False. They acquired a company.

<i>&gt;Recently we learned that Google spent $2.7 billion to re-hire a single AI researcher who had left to start his own company.</i><p>This is a prime example of all the various news outlets (even &quot;respected&quot; newspapers) making us <i>collectively dumber</i> for reading them: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=Google+%242.7+billion+to+re-hire+a+single+AI+researcher" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=Google+%242.7+billion+to+re-...</a><p>Also, the author&#x27;s blogpost hotlinks to the supporting url (futurism.com&#x2F;the-byte&#x2F;) that has these sentences: <i>&gt;Google reportedly spent $2.7 billion to rehire AI expert Noam Shazeer — an astonishing amount of money for what boils down to the expertise of a single computer scientist. [...] As companies continue to pour billions into the environmentally damaging and still largely unproven tech, though, investors are starting to ask some tough questions. Should they really be paying several billion dollars to get the expertise of a single hire</i><p>It makes it seem like Google wired all $2.7 billion into Noam Shazeer&#x27;s bank account.<p>Instead, the more accurate picture is a 30-member team &quot;pseudo-acquihire&quot; of Character.AI without officially buying the startup via a &quot;licensing deal&quot; . Excerpt from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aimresearch.co&#x2F;market-industry&#x2F;old-employees-new-dollars-googles-2-7-billion-investment-in-character-ais-reverse-acquihire-for-ai-innovation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aimresearch.co&#x2F;market-industry&#x2F;old-employees-new-dol...</a>:<p><i>&gt;But now, in an unexpected and somewhat controversial twist, Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas are heading back to Google—along with 30 top researchers from his startup. The tech giant has orchestrated a rare “reverse acquihire,” bringing the AI pioneer back into the fold without buying out Character.AI. Instead, Google opted for a non-exclusive license to use Character.AI’s advanced large language model (LLM) technology, allowing the startup to exist independently but without its cutting-edge talent.</i><p>Maybe all that was Google&#x27;s legal jujitsu of avoiding potential FTC&#x2F;DOJ anti-monopoly actions. Either way, the mainstream headlines are terrible. The misinformation is spread further by the blog author copy&amp;pasting them.

In my direct personal experience the whole IT management and HR world worked hard making procedures and practices (overly specific role specification details, recruitment standardisation including interviews, rigid technical expectations in a very fast changing and hugely diverse profession, onboarding or lack of it relying on very deterministic role specifications, continuous knowledge sharing) ensuring that SE are very easy to replace or get rid of.<p>Others do it regardless for short term financial benefits for the investors - ignoring the fate of the organization.<p>I feel the question being very late and mute for the software industry (with very few exceptions).

I think performance scalable stock awards vesting over 4-6 years are a pretty good way to align incentives here. High performers would naturally have a bigger &#x2F; longer gilded chain. Anecdata - definitely worked on me)

Very hard as if not, I am not staying. Same for consultancy clients by the way; there are way too many of them, so why would we please them; they should please us.

Honestly, in an industry that talks about how important collaboration is and then places the most authoritarian minded individuals as our lauded CEOs (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Jobs, etc, etc) I just find Charity such a fucking breath of fresh air in terms of communication style and the way she talks about and clearly lives her principles. Honeycomb may not be FAANG-sized, but I&#x27;d genuinely give more to work under her than any other current CEO I can think of.