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What's The Best Way To Retain Trained Employees?
Johnny Mnemonic asks: "I work for a small company that is considering spending a large chunk of resources on developing/training the team. This training will have the side effect of making us worth two to three times as much as we are paid now--and the honchos are afraid, reasonably, that after they spend the money on dev we will all jump ship. The fact that if we don't receive this training our company will be dead in two years escapes their notice. What do other places do to retain their help after a development/training cycle? Do they require the employees to learn it on their own hook, pay for it and then have the employees sign contracts for a period of time, or bite the bullet and pay for the training and either sweeten the share or expect some loss?"
"For those wanting more detail, we are currently a Mac Reseller and Support shop; admittedly fringe, but in our market there's plenty of work, and we continue to grow. However, we need to prepare for OS X--and although the consumer may never have to get to the CLI, we sure will. Receiving training on the CLI in OS X will make us de facto Unix sysadmins--and there's a lot more want ads for Unix sysadmins than Apple Product Professionals."
So all your guys are Mac GUI junkies and now, with a wee teeny bit o' training for OS X you're afraid they'll all be running out to be Unix Admins? I don't think you have anything to worry about. Almost made me spill my coffee : )
This may SOUND obvious, but whatever strategy they choose, make sure they plan on coming through with it. Failing to do that is poison to morale. For example, one of the perks I liked about my current job was the amount of vacation they offered -- only it was cut by a third less than 2 months after I started. It was an across the company policy change, but I couldn't help feeling like they were just dangling carrots in front of my nose. I moved pretty far for this job, and I'll probably stick around for a while, but I don't feel a whole lot of loyalty when they do things like that.
Now wait until all those MCSEs start getting "certified" for Linux..
If this training is gonna make you worth two or three times more, why didn't you do it for yourselves earlier? Take control of you professional life.
I had a company hand me a contract ( HR person ) before I went to training for Netware CNE stuff a few years ago. Anyway she handed it to me and asked me to sign it, it was basically if you leave within two years of training you pay us the cost of training. Well I said " Sure I will have my lawyer look it over and get back to you". I was fully intent on doing this and asking for guaranteed pay, and work contract since I was working with a lawyer on another issue as it was. Well she kinda went huh? with a funny look and said uh ok... I don't think she thought I was serious until I walked out and said it would probably take my lawyer at least a week or two to get back to her on this....and I walked out. Anyway by the end of the day my boss came and asked for the document back to forget about it and still sent me to training. I am not sure why people agree to sign these contracts, but I would never,never sign them unless there was a guarantee of something big other than training in the end.
Hookers.
Congress and the Clinton Administration recently passed legislation allowing employers to hire additional guest workers. Guest workers are "non-immigrants" sponsored by their employer and can only remain in the U.S. at their employer's behest. Let's face it, American workers have the problem of too much freedom. Your best bet is go the indentured servant route. It's a national infrastructure issue: if you're going go build up your company, you must hire foreign guest workers.
12 years ago when I started as a UNIX admin, people knew their stuff because there was no money to be made. You did it because you liked doing it and you wanted to know everything.
Most of the people I see now have come to this field because they heard there were jobs and that they paid well. Not one single NEW IS employee I've seen in the last 5 years made a good impression on me.
Especially UNIX admins. They learn how to create a user, how to create a filesystem and then they go jump ship for more money.
They don't know DNS, scripting, programming, etc.
They don't want to know more than the absolute minimum to get by with their jobs.
They think if they take a class at IBM, they will learn all they need.
I asked one the other day what the difference between paging and swapping was. She wasn't sure but she thought paging was the one in memory and swapping was the one on disk. She's been looking at vmstat for years but only knows to look at the idle column.
I asked her what a context switch was.
No idea.
Nor does she know how to script at all.
Not korn shell, not perl, nothing.
She takes other peoples scripts and trys to alter them and she hopes they work.
And this woman has 3 years UNIX admin experience and is now at a big publisher in Eagan Minnesota that publishes law books. She earns $60,000 per year.
And get this, she is helping programmers monitor performance on the UNIX machines!!
That would be some useful help.
It's all because of money.
People pass themselves off as experienced to get more money.
Wave enough at them and they come running.
All you high minded people sound so superior until your dollar amount is reached.
I thought the same till I got offered more than I ever dreamed of making.
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
What "state" are you speaking of? The United States? Like we already don't have problems with our educational system!
Better to spend the money on the basics, like decent middle and high schools. Perhaps we could even have a generation that knows how to read, write, and maybe even understand some calculus. There is an incredible gulf between affluent communities and poor communities when it comes to education -- giving this sort of benefit would only serve to widen this gap and once and for all create a permanent "labor" class. ugh. No thanks...
The state should provide every citizen with an education that will prepare them to learn ANYTHING. Specialized skills should come later, and be paid for by the individual or private entities.
--
First off, I very strongly disagree that you should reject a proprietary technology because O'Reilly doesn't have a book on it. First of all, having a book doesn't make it "open". Second of all, I agree you should put emphasis on more "published" technologies. BUT, there are many technologies that are *tremendous sources of competitive advantage* that have no major books out. Apple WebObjects, for example. Or object databases such as GemStone.
If your radar screen is limited to what everyone else sees, you're missing opportunities. That's okay for some, but not for me.
Now, as for training:
You're assuming that learning by yourself is faster than learning through training. I used to agree with you, but I don't so much anymore (partially because I train people now).
The underlying assumption here is that you're *NOT* learning anything from a trainer. Which is the exact opposite of what's supposed to be happening isn't it?
Think about it. You can't ask a book questions. A book doesn't guide you to the subtleties of what you're learning. A book also takes much longer to get you up and running with the basics, though it will give you a better foudational grounding than most training sessions.
The key to effective training is:
1) attendees have to pay as much attention to what is being taught as they would if they were reading a book / figuring it out for themselves
2) the trainer must be a good speaker and very knowledgable.
unfortunately 90% of the time, neither are true. People goof off, don't listen, AND they don't read books. Management sends them to training because they refuse to learn things on their own, and they learn nothing anyway, so training gets a bad rap.
On the other hand, for those that DO care and DO read, they usually are stuck with a trainer that knows nothing and isn't even a remotely engaging speaker. Training gets a deserved bad rap in this case...
so as always, the problem comes down to people. good people make all the difference... if you have good people, then the o'reilly book approach will work wonders. BUT couple that with a good trainer, and I think you'd be pleasantly surprised with the results.
I should add:
3) classrooms are only a small part of training. learning is about retention. You can only get that through one-on-one mentoring. use the classroom for the basics, and mentor key team members afterwards. Then they can act as mentors to their peers.
-Stu
A basic contract, or amendment to an existing contract, will work fine for binding the employee. Just state that if the employee leaves before (1yr, 2 yr, whatever) he/she must reimburse the company for the pro-rated value of the training. So if they quit immediately, they have to pay the full amount, if they leave halfway through the period they pay half, and if they leave after the time is up, wave at them as they head out the door. Such a contract is pretty firmly binding - you aren't saying they can't leave, you're just saying that if they do so before a certain period they owe you money.
A nice balance between value to the employer and value to the employee is struck. If an employee feels that their new skills are sufficiently valuable elsewhere to make up for the monies owed their current boss, more power to them.
Such an arrangement has been fairly common at places I've been when dealing with likely-to-move positions and pricey in-demand training. And I've never heard of anyone successfully challenging the contract after they've received the training.
just my $.02
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
2.3 kids
I've heard of 2.5 kids (one on the way) but what's 3/10 of a kid? Are you just being more precise on the EDD or? :-)
hahahahhaahha this is sooooo dumb. Why? Because most of the time the money you are going to get is huge. Most companies refuse to do large pay increases to employees they have already hired. Why should they pay me 25k more then the 40k they hired me for just because I moved up from routing dude to routing diety? Of course I can go somewhere else and get 80k easily. So I'd get charged 2k for training. I'm STILL laughing all the way to the bank. Not to mention I'd be in posisition to neogitate more vacation, flex time, training, and a signing bonus. Businesses like you are asking to get taking to the cleaners.
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
It's a bit like old Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (quick link from google). Which basically says you can't expect someone to work as a team member (level 3) when they're having their house re-possessed (level 2). Retention is a bit like that I guess.
This has nothing to do with staff retention. This is something often used in call centres, the modern sweat shops of the western world, to improve performance and boost morale. How successful it is a doing these things is questionable.
Money. Money, money, money.
If someone is worth more than what they're getting then pay them more. How they came to be that was is irrelevant. Do you expect them to be grateful for being trained? I'm sure they are, but gratitude is merely a lively expectation of things to come.
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
I hear that there are even "entertainment and refreshment" establishments that let certain employees work without a shirt, at least after the first song of their set. Wouldn't know about that personally, of course :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I expect she'll ultimately do very well there because she's a fast learner So even though you wouldn't have given her that chance, you think she'll succeed! Can't you see that you're not being consistent? It sounds like she wanted a challenging job, you weren't prepared to give her one (or didn't understand what whe wanted) and now you're making excuses. If someone leaves and makes a success of a better job how is it them at fault? Aren't people supposed to want to improve? Aren't you supposed to give them the opportunity? OK, if you thought she'd be a disaster then both of you are happy. But this way, *you've* lost (and don't seem to want to take the blame). In other words, it was your job to keep her. You failed. Don't blame her - she's gone on to make a success of a more interesting job. What did you expect?! I'm a software engineer. If the code doesn't work, I take the responsibility. It's not my manager's job to code. It *is* my manager's job to keep me happy. If they don't then I either leave (last company) or - if I think they'll listen (current employers) - complain and sort things out. But either way, if I'm not happy it's my manager's responsibility. That's what they are paid for (they don't actually make anything, do they...?).
http://www.acooke.org
Training has been given. When the first person left the hit was not that hard. We hurted for about three weeks.
Now we have one the Main guys left who had the training. He knew alot since I do not work full time (I am in school)
I did not get training. I have a good idea on what is going on but I can not commit myself to there nothing more than few
hours a weeks. The new guy they got to replace him will have to be trained. He did take classes but he still needs to be
trained in all other aspects of the job. Only time will tell if he will fit in. But the company did not plan ahead for such
events. When I finish college there is a good chance I will leave. The main issue problem was not only training but
compensation, always having a backup plan if someone goes. Train your guys pay them well and most will stay.
I've been a tech manager for many years. However, I'm also a Sr. Engineer in most of these instances, so I have a bit of both worlds--good things, and bad things happen due to this perspective.
As I trust, rely, and absolutly want to support the engineers who work for me, I am an avid proponent of giving A LOT of training to them. Once they've recieved training, it's important to reflect their added value to the company in the long run, but reflecting their salary, options, bonuses to their increased worth as an employee.
When dealing with upper management, I make sure to demonstrate the the two actions are intimately related to retaining good engineers. You don't send someone to training soley as a a perk--you're sending them to training to increase their value to the company, and therefore have an invested interest in keeping them on.
I've been in situations where companies have wanted employees to sign training contracts which oblige them to continue with the company for a certain amount of time, but I've never been for such measures--they tend to a) annoy me, because it's a tactic to ensure false loyalty, and b) reduces the amount of implied value that the employee feels about themself.
I try to engender loyalty by fulfilling the role of employee advocate. If one of my engineers truly need something, I'll get it for them. If they're working long hours resolving a situation, I make sure that I, or the company, foots the bill on dinner, be it a pizza and beer, or an evening dinner some night at a nice joint. Actually, I've been known to throw some mean BBQs in the courtyard of our building.
Why do I do all this to support the employees that report to me (and even the ones that don't?) It all goes back to the fact that I'm also one of them. I know what _I_ want, and it makes it easier to understand what is really important to them.
So, as far as training goes, the company is making an investment in increasing an employee's capability, and that investment doesn't end with training alone. Remember, that the company is getting added value in the proposition, not just the employee. Sit down with your employee, explain what the situation is, and trust them to do whats best, not only for themselves, but for the company as well. That is the only position you can take if you want to foster true loyalty.
The real problem is that everyone is treating employees like commodities these days and then are surprised when they act that way. If a company has a right to fire me because they aren't making enough money to pay both me and the shareholders, then I have a right to leave for the same reason. More so if you believe (as I do) that companies do not have the same rights as individuals. And no amount of whining about lack of loyalty will hold on to them.
The best way to hold on to employees is to make them owners. And I don't mean the token bullshit that comanies like Amazon.com do. Real employee ownership will keep them there. Then they get to decide how much to pay themselves, what the benefits are (including training) and they have a real voice in redressing their grievances. As a business owner (i.e. majority shareholder) you probably don't want to hear this, but it is true.
And don't tell me it can't be done. It has been done far too many times with far too much success for lame counter-arguments to still be around. We can argue about the trade-offs involved, but not the basic feasibility.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
do you work for Cisco?
If water were beans, I'd be 70% beans.
> Actually, although he presents it in excruciatingly painfull and exagerated detail, the guy has a point.
And in typical fashion for one so obsessed with tech who thinks "management" is a swear word, he got so hung up on the detail of the curriculum of training that he failed to notice the question, which had nothing to do with the worth of that particular training program (though "tripling one's value" is quite an overstatement unless he's mounting tapes or something).
No, it was just to show the world how god damn knowledgeable and 'leet he is. I'm making it a point to not hire OS zealots of any stripe unless they have such DAMN good skills in other areas that it compensates, OR they can learn to muzzle their knee-jerk reactions and work with what they need to.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Jesus, can we get a killfile feature for slashdot now please? I read at threshold 2 to screen out trolls like this moron, now they're getting in by default.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Written by a guy without much experience in the corporate world.
I'm currently working a contract for Microsoft and I'm pretty far from being "chained to my desk". I've got my own office, I come and go as I please, I wear whatever I want, I'm "in the loop" as much as I care to be, and I make scads of money -- enough to remove about 90% of the stress from the rest of my life.
And you'll still be in the same position 10 years from now. That may well be okay for you. OTOH, seeing yourself bypassed by people with more ambition and more work ethic may irk you -- as you will be "sure" that you are so much more "skilled" than they are.
When the hard times come, who will be retained -- the arrogant 30-hr-a-week man or the 50-hr-a-week man who was always there when the company needed him. No contest. You'll be on the dole along with a million other "indespensible" slackers just like yourself.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
I'm not whining or anything, this is just really odd looking. What happened?
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
PHB: Well, if we train them they will all leave. They will have skills that they can take with them. Then they will be worth more to another company. Me: What if you don't train them and they STAY?
The thing is, that if people are not given the training they need AND the work/projects to use it and continue to improve their skills and experience, the good ones will leave anyway, no matter what the PHBs do. If they are given the training but have no opportunity to use it, they will also eventually leave. The bottom line is to have good/decent projects to keep everyone happy. The training is secondary to that, but nonetheless important. Managers that are themselves directed by fear will eventually fail.
I agree. These misc. benefits are wonderful and I enjoy them myself, but the heart of the employer-employee relation is not self actualization, it is payment for services rendered.
(Would a manager want to go to a seminar in which they were told they need to pay more money to retain good people? Nah, that's too obvious.)
It make sense to choose employers are comparable money based on these things. It makes sense to earn a little less in exchange for a nicer environment.
But the bottom line is the bottom line. To get and keep top people, you will have to pay market rates.
On the contrary, some jobs higher up the scale get you *farther* from actual deliverables, in to a more consultative and advisory role.
No but it can make you management though.
Many people have pointed this out, so it's probably redundant, but make sure your employees are happy with things other than their pay. The place I work at pays good, but not the best possible wages, but nobody on the tech staff works in cubicles, we have a great dress code, opportunities to try new technology, excellent machines, and I genuinely like my co-workers. Stuff like this matters much more than just whether you make $1,000/year more than your previous job.
This PDF is from the Oracle Technet site, and is somewhat OCP-centric, but a lot of the points made would apply to other types of IT certification IMHO:
IT Professional Certification Myth and Fact Sheet
YS.
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
Just what kind of training are you planning to receive ? Do you think that a three-week course on CLI basics will make you suddenly worth a fortune?
Interesting how this works out. They are reluctant to train you, but in general when a company hits a bad spot they'll have no problem letting employees go. Perhaps it is the employees who should be saying, "Should I be putting this sort of effort into a company to make it more valuable if I will not be seeing any of that added value.".
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
A lady friend of mine and I were chatting about her new home.
It's expensive enough that she is now poor after paying rent.
"Better to be poor in a cassle than wealthy in a cave"
She agreed.. the whole reasoning behind the new place...
A diffrent way to think of it...
You "buy" a better job by taking a paycut...
On the other hand... being wealthy is pritty good when your living in a cave...
I don't actually exist.
> man, you are going to be so fucked when all your appreciated, in-the-loop, understood, secure employees leave for a 100% pay rise.
And daily whippings and being chain to desks (litterally) of course...
Not many people want to be Bill Gates... they'd rather be Linus...
Mr Gates isn't appreciated much [Look around Slashdot... one of the most populare web sites... not a whole lot of Bill love goin on here]
But he's wealthy...
Linus how ever... He isn't wealthy but he's much liked...
Would you rather have money or love? And you can't buy love....
I don't actually exist.
Being "in the loop" is not a perk to me.. Thats a stress generator right there.
The truth is the job pay is purely based on how easy it is to get someone to do that job.
If the job requires a lot of skill then it's hard to fill. Pays good money...
If the job is painful very few will tolerate it. Pays good money.
Microsoft pays the most money becouse they need the best tallent... Thats all there is to it...
(and yes I maintain that Windows stinks.. with the best tallent coding it... It's not the programmers it's the original design... Like a building falling down.. you can re-enforce it forever.. it's still falling down)
I don't actually exist.
Not only am I going to shatter your assertion I'm going down to to shatter the assertion you are attacking..
Larg companys DO care about employees. Not on names or faces. But on tallent. They don't care about say "Jim Bo Bob" they care about "programmer 2561a". But they do care.
The BEST example of this... everyone hold on now... MICROSOFT!! Haha...
I don't actually exist.
> Microsoft treats people like slaves because Microsoft treats people like slaves,
And so they pay them for it... thus we return to the point of qualty vs quanity...
If they'd treat employees better then they wouldn't have to pay them so much...
Ok now back down a tad.. Microsoft dosn't whip employees. That pay is justifyed by the tallent they need to get the job done (produce software that runs in spite of the insain design).
Microsoft treats employees just fine...
But if it ever is a choice between being a wealthy slave or a poor master... I'll be the master.. you be the slave...
I don't actually exist.
Any IT Geek(tm) worth their salt will stay if you let them actually use their training. For most people in this industry, money is just as important as interest in what they are doing. I mean, look at all the people out there creating cool stuff and GIVING it away - simply because they are really curious and interested in what they are doing.
If, however, you train them to be "de facto Unix sysadmins," you had better let them use that knowledge on an ongoing basis and encourage them to do so.
Also, remember that you will need to increase their pay - they are now more skilled workers and are contributing to a higher success of the company. If they do more work for the same pay, I guarantee that some will leave for that reason alone. You don't have to raise their pay right away, but as soon as they begin to use their new skills you had better be ready to give them some kind of incentive.
Anyway, whenever you train someone, there is more than just the cost of teaching them - there is the ongoing cost of having more skilled workers.
.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Thanks for assuming he lives in the U.S. where American tax laws apply. :-)
Thanks!
That actually explains it. I've never been on a UNIX course, but have spent ten years working with UNIX type operating systems.
Mod him up.
1. Split the people into teams.
2. Give the teams smart name for the people to
identify with like code-masters and hacker-knights.
3. Run measurements on the teams work, so you
make a competition between the teams.
4. This should do it!
Okay, what you do here is that you give
people a group identity and a common goal
to work against.
It is harder to replace a group identity than a job.
>The way my company gets around this is when I
>have training, the company pays for it. But if I
>leave within 6 months of having the training I
>pay a portion of the cost: all the price if I
>leave immediately, 5/6 if I leave 1 month after
>the training, 4/6 after 2 months, etc. This way
>they get value for their money, and I get to
>leave if I want, but I have to pay my dues!
If someone else really wants to hire you away, they'll gladly pay that bill for your training.
That sort of thing is more of a speedbump then a barrier to a new job.
Only problem is, and this has happened to me, if the possibility of training comes up at the same time as I'm fed up with the job, then it puts me off taking the training in case I end up quitting (on account of paying back 2-3K a month or so later). This is counter-productive both for me and my employer.
I suspect that this is the right approach, but a year is quite a long time in a twenty-something's career...
First of all, if the training will increase salary 3x, you're either grossly under paid, or overestimating the benefit of the training (or your ability to make use of the knowledge).
I think that one of the most important things to keep someone at a job is to make sure they have work that they like. My first job out of University wasn't bad
- Decent salary
- Excellent bonus program ~ 20%
- Amazing benefits
- Perks (company sponsored golf days, 5 day ski trip, extra holidays above the 3 weeks, coffee/drinks/snacks, flex time)
- Great equipment, friendly atmosphere
But, I was bored stupid. After 8 months, I was sick of the place. I loved the company, hated the job. I would up taking a pay cut (when you calculate all the perks) to go to a government job that I absolutely love. Since I started the new job, I've moved ahead in terms of salary and responsibility. Even though I'm underpaid there, management makes employees know that they're a vital part of the team, and keeps us busy doing stuff we enjoy. We've lost a few people to American companies that have doubled their salaries, but in the technical areas, nothing to local companies.
It easy to keep retrained employees, just wait until they are over 40 and you can retrain them all you want and they won't leave. They won't leave because they can't since no one else will hire them. Age discrimination works wonders for job retention.
> The truth, of course, is that along with higher
> pay also comes more job security and less
> stress.
I could agree on job security (thouhg not always), but less stress -- you're kidding yourself. Along with higher paid job come higher expectations, more deliverables to meet, more people to manage. It becomes harder to balance to parts of the equation: work and personal life.
--AP
Some job you have :) Some may say that a canary in a golden cage is still a canary in a cage... Some may say that it truly is happier than in an ordinary tin one. Some may not care at all. Some would let a bird free instead.
--AP
Or you live in Oregon, where you have no sales tax.
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
Well, five actually. And they're all payed. You actually get, on average, 8% of your annual salary extra every may (or when you leave).
I now have 25 days for vacationing. They won't let me go for five weeks on end, three weeks max. And maybe in my next round of negotiations I'll barter for 30 days.
Things are a bit different here in the Netherlands. We all have very good health care (people still whine, of course). We don't earn as much as you guys do, mostly due to taxation. A lot of people see this as bad, but we have quite a few benefits that other countries don't have.
My company pays half of my lunch, they would pay it all if the IRS would allow it. We have free cola/fanta/whatever. Stock options are a bit hard for a pre-IPO company.
So your answer might be come work in the Netherlands.
Blatant plug
Seriously, any one who wants to work for us should contact me at p.scheffers@bhold.net we're small and have a lot of fun with watching DVDs on big screens (boy those video-beamers are *great*)
Wow, you totally don't listen. Go back and read the point where I said that if you're paying 50 and they can make 150, then yeah, it is about the money. Of course it is. But not every job change is that cut and dried. If the place down the street is offering 55, but here at work you have 50 AND free soda AND foosball, then maybe the 50 is ok. That's all I'm saying.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
... short of increasing the pay? Pray, pray hard.
I've got 3 weeks, and as of the beginning of November, had used less than half of that. Why? Stupid project schedules. One project I'm on basically had me needing a vacation due to burnout, but unable to use it because of poor management ("we can't afford to have you out of the office if we're to make this deadline"). I took the full Thanksgiving week off, even though there's a project that needed me that week. But not having a day out of the office aside from weekends since the beginning of August was really wearing on me.
My point...You can offer all the "perks" you want, but unless the company is committed to letting the employees take full advantage of them, they're worthless. That cruise is a nice idea, but I don't really want to go on vacation with the same people I work with. You're not really "off." A satellite office seems nice in theory, but when you need daily interaction with non-IT people, it's more trouble.
My company has a free drink policy. Also free fruit, popcorn and pretzels. Every floor of every building throughout the world has soda, coffee, juice, tea and cocoa along with snacks. This way, no matter what office I have to travel to, I always have the same amenities. It shows how much the top brass values the employees. Yes, we are more productive.
Really? Got an story from personal experience?
I had that problem at a start-up. I left as soon as I could along with most of the other developers.
You are absolutely correct. Your list is pertinent to the US too, it's just most young workers don't realize it yet.
www.bmc.com
Contract law is pretty cut and dried, but it depends on the verbage in the contract. In theory, if you agree to a 2 year stint, but stick around for 1, you'd be on the hook for the next year's salary + court costs, etc. Of course, the company in question would have to file suit, and they may have determined it isn't worth while to do so...
Now, if you're tripling your income by jumping ship, then a year's salary isn't a big deal...
James
Exit interviews can only hurt you. If you give an honest criticism of the company, it will jeopardize any chances you have of getting a reference.
...
The only appropriate thing to say at an exit interview is:
"I am leaving for personal reasons and have no comments".
Of course, if you don't need references, rant away
With that extra 5K you can buy a lot of soda.
Employees that are happy and well compensated, stay.
If you consider training costs in lieu of raises/bonuses for the next year or so, you are going to irritate employees and then lose them.
My current employer:
1. REQUIRES me to get certified in two areas within the next year (I have 8 months left).
2. PAYS for all training, including expenses (books, classes, travel, hotel, meals, tests, etc.)
3. PAYS A BONUS when I actually receive certification.
4. PAYS ANOTHER BONUS if I can do it before 12/31/00. (My last test is scheduled for 12/29/00!)
I gave a verbal commitment to work for the company 2-years before considering anything else. (I didn't swear on a stack of Bibles; it wasn't written, recorded or otherwise made official.)
I was trained for 6 weeks (cram course) when I was first hired.
I'm paid a competitive amount -- my salary isn't going to double once I receive the certification if I go elsewhere. I'm still under the same annual performance review/quarterly stock & bonus review as everyone else. My chances for a bonus/stock grant actually go UP if I take more training!
chill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Provided that having a comfortable work environment is worth nothing to you.
I'm guessing "Jack of All Trades".
The smallest things can make a big difference. I for one, would be a lot more happy at work if I could get free drinks (other than what's available at the water fountain :-)). I'm sure it can't cost all that much, but, to the person getting the drink, it makes a big psychological difference. Yeah, it's a matter of convenience, but it also shows that the company is thinking about its employees. You could at least lower the price on the soda machines... Do I hear 15 a soda? Hello? Anybody?... :-)
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Smack! You hit the nail right on the head.
We've got the 'management seminar' thing going on right now. The result of this has been an 'intense investigation to find out what the employees really want'. So, instead of getting real raises this year, we all got an inflationary rate raise, 2-3%, BUT we now get to wear jeans on Friday! woohoooo!!!! (yes, i'm dripping with sarcasm)
I'm sorry, but wearing jeans on Friday does NOT facilitate me buying a house or investing more into my retirement.
So now I am looking to leave the company and the job, the first I actually liked, because management has been convinced that what I need more than money is jeans.
To qoute American Beauty:
"Never underestimate the power of denial."
Rosie_bhjp
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
How happy is a person that has to point out others are not very happy?
We could go on and on...
He was attacked on his own beliefs and defended them. Nothing wrong about that. If he didn't, whats the point of conversation?
rosie_bhjp
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
Is a statutory requirement here in New Zealand... :)
Jason
I hope that anyone reading that post seriously (as opposed to just moderating) realizes that the poster is exaggerating for Karma. To develop on Mac OS X beta, the only real work can be accomplished on its native FreeBSD variant, Darwin. As Win9x was built on DOS, OS X was built on FreeBSD/Mach.
The largest website in the world (Yahoo!) is built upon FreeBSD. The poster doesn't have enough information to know the future of OS X, nor does he know that it's not the next Mac OS version, but rather the next NeXT OS version.
What post did you read? ;)
We hired an inexperienced buffoon as a junior member. Didn't know Windows, Unix, programming, or anything. He read an O'Reilly book and got hired as a Java network programmer six months later.
I see three possibilities here:
1. He is a buffon with a job he can't possibly handle. He will probably be fired soon.
2. He was some kind of latent programming natural, and may become usefull some day
3. That was one of those misprinted O'reilly books with Voodoo Magic Ink(tm) and supernatural geek creating powers.
Laff. Its funny.
More Caffeine. NOW
Here are some retention strategies adopted by software companies to hold on to their talent.
Before that you have to understand why people and how they leave. It is rarely a well thought out plan. They mostly leave when they are down in the present job and the other guy is offering something better. Make sure it is difficul to get your guys. You may not stop all of them but you will be surprised how many you can stop.
1. Benefits which accrue at the end of the year or two years. I mean stuff like fully paid vacation (including travel and stay) to someplace every 1/2 years. They will loook forward to that and it will stop some of them from taking offers from prospective employers. I mean you have worked hard for 1.5 years and the company is going to pay for that vacation to that paradise island and you have made plans. Are you going to quit and take up something at this point. You will negotiate that with the new employer and it will push your costs very high.
2. Stock Options. One more golden handcuff which helps hold employees.
3. Bonuses for staying five years. Paying a 30-40,000 dollar bonus at the end of five years helps hold on to employees and makes sure that getting them is a lot harder for the competition. Especially after they have spent a couple of years. By that time if you are a small company you would have grown enough to afford it.
4. Of course I am assuming that you are not paying them below industry average. A sense of pride in working for the company can be instilled by involving the family in terms of letting them come to work. Parents, family and siblings should be encouraged to come to workplace and also be part of something. Also encourage partnerships and friendships developing in the company. You wouldnt leave an organisation where you have friends and when things go bad you have a valve to let off steam about what happened at the office.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
A key point is to make the office environment more attractive than the home office. I was recently interviewed by a start-up ISP to head up their web development department. The floor was concrete, what walls existed were unfinished drywall, and the desks looked like rejects from the local Salvation Army. Needless to say I didn't take the job.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I'm a family man. I work for a living, not living to work. If any opportunity arises that would be benificial for my family, I want to be able to take it.
My Weblog
It won't work very well. My current employer has a policy, that if you leave within 6 months that you repay the full cost of the training. This can represent several thousands of dollars for stuff like Java One. There are several difficulties with a policy like this. First actually getting the money back. With your loan solution this won't be such a problem. But another problem is people like me. When I learned of this policy, I told my employer that I wouldn't be attending any training under these conditions. I wasn't the only one who told them this. Don't get me wrong. I actually enjoy working where I am. But I don't want to close my options on being able to jump to another company.
My Weblog
Here in Norway, we all have four weeks of vacation. Thaht's why my company (and some more) are offering five weeks ;)
4 weeks is not unreasonable, don't give up!
"There is no substitute for thinking" - Bjarne Stroustrup
> One: If they leave within a year, make them pay for the training.
I've been on a contract with that clause. As an employee, it's not something that I would have asked to put into the contract, but I suppose it's only fair to the employer. In our case it worked on a pro-rata scale, e.g. if you left 6 months after a course, you had to pay back 1/2 the value of the course.
To keep people in the long term, fall back to the basics: Good money, stimulating and satifying work, and a good workplace keep good people.
If you really could be earning 3* salary after this course, then what's to stop you saving up for a few months (or taking out a parent or bank loan, etc), paying for the course yourself, then jumping ship without any help from the PHBs. It would surely be worth your while?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Well - what can I say - I (still) work for a Mobile Telco here and we're facing for quite a while an almost scary migration of cluefull personel.
Now, some of the cluefull managers would have said and done everything that was listed here in the threads, but noo! the higher manglement (no - it's not a typo) decided that it would be better to introduce a freaking new work contract for employees starting at 1st of Nov. What is so "innovative" about this? oh, nothing - just the fact that the soon-to-be-employee is to pay 10K USD if he/she leaves in the first 3 years. This sum will start to be prorated only after the first year and no sooner.
Somehow - I have some strong doubts that they'll manage to aquire new IT stuff with this kind of policy...
--
The funny thing is, no company could pay me enough to take MCSE courses. It would be a liability on my resume, and while I suppose I could just leave it off it's sure to come up at some point in the interview process. It would be an insult to even suggest such a thing. Now if we are talking about CCIE certification that's something else entirely.
What's wrong with your picture is that it certainly sounds like the employee is not given a choice. If they are forced into such a contract the contract would be unenforceable.
This isn't meant as flame bait, and I'm not sending this anonymous, but...
If I were your employee I'd consider leaving if this was proposed solely on the grounds that my boss would be an idiot. Perhaps I'm in the unique position of having all the knowledge of those that are "certified" in various fields, but not actually having the certification. The only conceivable reason that my employer would pay for training would be to get me certified in order to meet some requirement for a reseller agreement or somesuch. In fact, it would probably not be as much training as taking the Drake/Sylvan tests that would be required. It would be ludicrous to suggest that I sign some contract just because I'm willing to go through the hastle of getting some certification. After all, I'd be doing my company the favor, not the other way around. I already have the knowledge, or could easily gain it in a short amount of time as it becomes necessary. Certification means little to me personally, as I've met certified "professionals" in various fields that frankly didn't know what they were talking about. Novell certified people that didn't know how to check to see if you had the latest versions of drivers on your workstations, Cisco and Nortel certified people that didn't know a router from a switch from a bridge, or what an IDF and MDF were. The list goes on. So, I would take particular offense if your "standard approach" were used on me. You'd soon find that I'd be more willing to get another job without the training (at a greater salary, BTW) than sign some idiotic contract. It's not that I wouldn't want to stay at my current position that long anyway, as I currently plan on staying with my employer for the forseeable future. It's more that I'd have to seriously question my manager's experience and abilities if they didn't realize my view on the topic and taken that into consideration.
So, what's the message of this post? Be careful on enforcing your "standard approach" carte blanche on your whole staff. This approach may be appropriate for some of the staff, and quite probably the majority of the staff. However, there are, or hopefully are, those in your staff that do have the knowledge and just are not certified. I'd be careful with these employees and sensitive to their view of the situation.
I don't get it. What's with all these "raise offers?" I never received a raise offer, it was simply understood that I would be getting a raise every review period. The question is simply a matter of how much, and if it had to be sent to the executive committee for review or not. I don't understand what people are talking about "raise offers" for. Do they not constantly improve their productivity and help the company meet and exceed their goals? If they are not doing that then the company may not have any money to "offer" them. If they are busting out the numbers then the whole concept of "raise offers" are ludicrous to begin with. In any case, the employee should know what the numbers are and how they are contributing to them. If they don't I suppose they don't deserve to get an automatic raise.
You have to pay your employees what they are worth
If you train them and they are worth more, pay them more. Under paying them is demotivational.
If your company can't afford to pay the employees competatively, then you don't have a competative business.
I actually think this can apply both ways. I've currently just taken up a new position at slightly lower pay because I have no respect for my (ex-)current manager (or her manager, or the manager above that even). Lots of decisions being made without any proper thought or planning applied, and she's constantly at meetings which have little to no impact on the work we're actually doing. What's more after the latest restructure, she'll now be managing even more people....
Having a manager that you can actually talk to makes a big difference, especially if they're interested in developing their staffs' careers (This has been confirmed by a lot of the other posts in an indirect way...).
50% taxes will get you down after a while. My wife and I are seriously looking at leaving once she finishes school.
Young healthy people just have nothing to gain by staying in Canada. We just get screwed over to pay for everyone else's pet social programs.
Seriously, though, how much better is the tax situation down there? For someone making, say, $100,000 cdn (I'd say that's about $65 US, but it's not really, food and rent's pretty cheap here, though not real estate, so compare it to maybe $75,000 US), we'd pay close to $40,000 in combined federal and provincial income tax. Plus another $5,000 or so in unemployment insurance and government pension deductions. We pay 14% sales taxes on pretty much everything, except gas and booze which is closer to 60%. So figure well over 50% in total tax burden. What would be a comparable figure from down south? And how much does health insurance cost for 2 people, no kids, no health problems?
We also can't write off the interest payments on a residence, which I've heard Americans can, which would make a home much more affordable.
The State can't even teach most people to read and write. And you want them to teach tech skills? That's pretty funny.
Why would we want to do this?
Re-read your George Orwell.
Get to a better company soon. A company afraid to train its employees to maximum potential is on a one-way track to failure. They obviously are afraid they will lose well trained employees because of working conditions, salary, etc.
So, what are you waiting for? Get to the next fish up in the food chain.
"Receiving training on the CLI in OS X will make us de facto Unix sysadmins..."
In your dreams. It might make you de facto UNIX operations workers, capable of swapping tapes and adding users, but it will NOT make you a sysadmin.
That said, the best way to retain employees after training is to pay them much, much more. An employer can try to contract the employee to pay for the training if he leaves before a set date, but most other employers will be happy to pay off the debt as a signing bonus.
Since it's difficult to bind employees legally, here's my solution. First you get the employees to take out loans to do the training. Then you pay off their loan for them over, say, 2-3 years. But if they jump ship, they pay their own loan.
hahahah and he even quotes vonnegut!! THE PERFECT BOSS!!
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
I'd bet that people who make enough money to play with are the ones who want the perks. Of course if someone is getting a third of what they're worth they might be looking around, but that's a bit extreme. For me, right now I don't want perks, I want money.
Those who have the money want perks and special stuff. When your pay has basically plateaued, you start to notice the little things that make your job nicer.
I have also worked jobs where I can make $15/hour but the people are so bad (boses etc) that I might think about staying there for say...$100 and hour.
sopwath
It's a bit more than that. Most people buy things based as much on emotion as price. (I imagine a lot of techie types might be different, but geeks still have emotions. The point is that the employer shows respect. Having to say 'yes sir' all the time and be subservient isn't the best feeling, but some employers don't consider this viewpoint. If people are going to spend lots of money to find happiness and respect when they're not at work, then they should also consider an employer that provides a respectful, enjoyable workplace to be an asset. Also, think in terms of convenience. It's a bitch to change health plans etc. Any benefit which either offers convenience or creates inconvenience if withdrawn is going to be worth more than it's simple dollar value in terms of staying power. Besides, if the company gives the benefits, the employee dosen't pay taxes on them.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
In the US it may be, but in the UK it can be included in contracts. When I changed jobs I negotiated the amount I was due to pay back as I was leaving too soon after having done a series of training courses (it was under 2 years after the last one). I was expected to pay £4000 (about $6K) back - so this was not insignificant. Due to it being at the end of the period and me agreeing to stay on a bit longer to help train a replacement I managed to get the figure down. This has, however, stopped two of my ex-colleagues going as they can not afford to be burdened by a big pay abck to the company. This is not that unusual in teh UK and perfectly legal if a person signs for it (and training can be withheld if you do not sign).
They're not number one.
Sorry, you're wrong. That is what you like to believe. Numbers tell us that the Netherlands are the most productive country in the world. 40 hours a week is long nowadays as they've introduced the 36 and 34 hour workweek. The impact of this policy has made Holland the country with the smallest unemployment figure. This short workweek has no negative effects on the National Gross Total, using this number, we see that Holland is the most productive country in the world, because we work less, and we produce more - we're efficient. The US is head of the world in a Nominal way, not in ratio's. Seems like you guys still don't know how to keep precious employees yet, and those guys leaving is not good for the company. Heck, we can repay our debts soon, we will be US-independant!
Bizar technology?
A friend of mine works for a phone company which is going to spend about $20,000 to get him numerous certifications. He had to sign a contract saying that he would be there for four years, if he leaves early, he has to repay at least half of the training costs. This method appears to be the best solution
I don't mind helping people as an admin ... I see my job as essentially (to quote a good friend) "an enabler." (this guy was fabulous -- he ran a charity group and he'd print up name tags for everybody that said "Hi my name is SALLY, I am enabled by John" )My job is to make sure others are able to do their work ...
problem is that -- people become dependant on you when you help people too much ... its gotten so bad that people won't ATTEMPT to find out something they need ... they won't ask that little paperclip dude, they won't open the manuals, they won't look on the internet ... they will SIT there with their thumbs up their ass complaining that their computer is broken to the boss (which makes me look back) until I get in for the day ... these are problems like "How do I attach this file in outlook?" and "How do I open a zip file?" and "The color printer is out of toner" ... my boss is *SO* clueless he will forward me e-mails he's recieved with the subject "pls print all attachments" ... and it dosen't matter how many times you show someone somthing like that ... I honestly believe some people don't have the capacity to use computers (without a crutch atleast ...)
My rant aside ... anyone have similar problems with their orginizations? ... I'm planning on quiting for just these reasons
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
However, getting back to the original topic in hand (MacOS/X guys thinking they can admin *nix and its ilk); nothing can prepare you for maintaining a Checkpoint firewall, not even a CCSE (Checkpoint Certified Security Engineer).
It has frequent problems maintaining a persistent IKE tunnel to another Checkpoint firewall - those 650 firewalls all connect to a central head office and I have to reset at least eight of those tunnels a day; not much fun...
Furthermore, it has severe weaknesses running on Linux (i.e. it brings up the network interfaces before enabling its security policy which means for a brief period of time that your network is vulnerable) - it was nice of Checkpoint to port it to Linux, but with such a gaping security hole like this, is anybody going to take the Linux port seriously ?
I suppose what I am trying to say is that when you take the course provided by the manufacturer/developers of the product; you see all the rosy features that they want you to... but they never tell you about the features you really need to know about... after all, how many MCSEs know about the undocumented '/MBR' switch for FDISK ?
"Hmmm... they have the Internet on computers now ?" - Homer Simpson
"Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wuntime ewwors!" - Elmer Fudd
I can't list how many people I met at my last position who knew how to work around the shell, or even knew some of the keypresses in vi who /totally/ lacked the knowledge required of them as system administrators. (*Cough* What does 127.0.0.1 refer to?)
/lot/ of backup tapes.
Now, I'm not going to drop this one at the feet of the Linux boom, since a sister project, FreeBSD was the source of a lot of my training, but let us not mistake that a bit of facility with bash, and a full GNU environment, makes a sysadmin. There is a lot of knowledge beyond driving the box required, here.
In defense of the thought that these Mac guys will become Unix Admins, I have learned that an intelligent veteran of another computer discipline, self-motivated and willing to ask questions, is very likely to become an excellent admin, if given enough time to get up to speed. The only question for them, is whether they want to take that time, either concurrently with their work load, as I did, or making small change as a Junior Sysadmin somewhere, and changing a
Weapons of Mass Analysis
What metrics are you using?
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
I think it was WWII but could have been Nasa/Skunkworks - really vague memory.
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
I agree to this 100%. Perhaps the other departments should look at this example of leadership in action, and see how it can be applied to other departments. I have read somewhere that "People don't care about what you know, until they know how much you care."
*ahem* I have. My team is 2 women, 3 men. Everyone gets along great, which is also very important. I passed on hiring one very qualified applicant because the rest of the team wasn't getting "the vibe" from this person -- they didn't feel that person would fit in. Pete
I might be wrong, but I think that was it, and I think that would qualify him as "wealthy", even if Bill G is a whole lot "wealthier". =-)
-
-
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The management at this place are doing the right thing and they don't even know it!
Letting people grow and develop is the only way to keep them. Money is only an issue if you get to little of it and feel disgruntled. This guy hasn't mentioned anything like that.
Die dulci fruere. Have a nice day.
You're not getting an arguement from me here - My ankles hurt from squeezing them so much while i'm getting pounded in the ass at best buy. Its a company that eats up your soul, and i don't think i made that clearer in the first post.
But, i work there for the discount. Anyway, i also agree that A+ is essentially useless, i paid my own way on that one too. However, my point was simply this - people, whether educated or whatnot - see money as the bottom line. Again, why do i work there? cause i'm 19 and i make $11 an hour, as a SALESPERSON. and cause i get car stereo shit dirt cheap.
money talks, bullshit walks. anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves. I see all this stuff about making the employees feel valued at work. Come ON people! I know i'm valued at work - not because someone put me in charge, but because every day i'm there, they pay me $88 and every day i'm there, i sell probably $600 in JUST SERVICE PLANS which are 80% profit, not to mention any actual product. That's why i can dick around and not worry about getting fired, cause i make them money. again money is the bottom line. Other than the money, i'm a useless employee - i'm a walking human resources issue.
insert clever line here
sig?
For one thing, this is either really good training, this estimate is an exageration, or you already work for too little.
That said, the simple solution to employee retention is to make people want to stay. Here are some thoughts from someone already charged with this responsiblity:
Is this training going to add to the bottom line of the business? If new opportunities are created, it should. And that should provide some incentive to make the investment. Show them that the training will do more than simply keep the business relevant. If it will make each employee more marketable, it should make the business more marketable as well. If not, the training is a mistake.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
canaries in a cage were used to test gas levels in coal mining operations, when the canary died it was time to air the place out. A bad job description regardless of cubicle decoration
Read my plan to save the Bengals
You don't work next to the guy 1 cubicle over from me, my job is a gas meter :-)
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Class, repeat after me, Telnet is bad.
"Telnet is bad."
Good now lets say, It is a security risk.
"It is a security risk."
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Read my plan to save the Bengals
It takes the students will to learn, most people see a quick road to graduation from HS
Even valedictorian canidates duck the Advanced Placement courses because they know they can't hack it against the real brains of their schools. Note I didn't say they were dumb, offered a shot at a full ride at the state schools (In KY) is difficult to pass up. They take home economics, ag shop, drivers ed, and PE, while those of us with a genuine interest in learning slog through Advanced Biology, Chemistry, Animal Science, and Foreign Language to prep ourselves for college.
Moving up to post-secondary education doesn't help either, you take physics, calculus, chemistry, and engineering coursework while your peers enjoy phys-ed service courses, "BS in Social Work", and such gems as Geology 130, "dinosaurs and disasters " for a piece of sheepskin that is often makes them your supervisor somewhere down the road.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Spoken like a man who has never had a high paying job.
The truth, of course, is that along with higher pay also comes more job security and less stress. The reason for this is because you don't get the big bucks unless you're good, and if you're good, you quickly become very difficult to replace without seriously setting back the product schedule.
P.S. I'm currently working a contract for Microsoft and I'm pretty far from being "chained to my desk". I've got my own office, I come and go as I please, I wear whatever I want, I'm "in the loop" as much as I care to be, and I make scads of money -- enough to remove about 90% of the stress from the rest of my life. But by all means, keep working your shitty, low paying job and making ignorant comments about the rest of the industry if it makes you feel any better.
He's probably talking about scripting, asshole. You know -- JavaScript, VBScript, Active Server Pages, and so on. A friend who just went to a conference in San Francisco told me that experienced ASP writers are going for $80 an hour in that market now.
You're a real zealot, aren't you? Microsoft treats people like slaves because Microsoft treats people like slaves, and god damn the opinion of anyone who has actually worked there.
Did you miss the part of my message about having my own office, setting my own hours, wearing whatever I want, and getting lots of money? I bet you wish you were treated so well at your job, monkey boy.
I didn't even mention the free beverages, the beer and pizza every Friday, the margueritas on Thursdays, the occasional department-wide trip to the movies, and the unlimited and completely free training on pretty much any subject I desire.
It's also a rare week when I work 40 hours. I don't need to, since the pay is so good. I never work overtime except in the direst of emergencies, and even then that's only because I'm a decent fellow, not because I'm forced to.
Seems to me that my current reality pretty much exactly matches up with the wish lists posted on this thread. But it must all be a delusion, because I'm working for the evil Microsoft, right?
It's already pretty clear to me that you're some kid who has yet to enter the workforce, so I'll go easy on you. If I had any doubts of that, your witless comment about money and stress removed them. Money is what makes most problems go away, especially when it's not just yourself that you're responsible for.
I will leave you with this parting shot, though: perhaps if your sources of stress don't involve finances, then maybe it's you who has "major emotional deprivation". I have a wife, a child, friends, hobbies, and a career. My problems were solely due to a lack of money. Now, thanks to my own initiative in training myself, and the good folks in Redmond, I don't have those problems, either. Perhaps you're the type of person who would still be depressed while sitting on a pile of money, but that ain't me, buddy.
Nope.
I recently walked away from an assignment that was paying a pretty good rate in my current field, because I'd spent about two weeks doing the fairly difficult work I was hired for, that demanded a level of skill, and three weeks after that doing insultingly mindless work, trivial errands that could have been done by any high-school drop-out just trying to make money to buy pot. Like being called out of the office and driven downtown just so that I could run up to his accountant's office while he live-parked; an hour of my time taken just so that he didn't have to park his car.
Maybe there are some people for whom the money is everything. But by no means is it everybody; if it was, it'd be hard to explain the rich and famous celebrities who commit suicide. They've got it all, right? In all likelihood, no: they're committing suicide because they haven't found the reason to live they thought being rich and famous would give them.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
My employer sent me to this same training (the week-long one, and I got a Palm Vx from Verisign, too..) and I have a similar deal: I stay for a year afterwards.
..or corporations..)
They sent me for the same reason: They wanted to be a Checkpoint reseller, hell, we've installed it twice without being one: no fun.
What gets me, is that you're *supposed* to take the exam to be certified. Verisign sent the damned paper certificates to my employer, who decided that meant I was certified, but Checkpoint says nope. *sigh*
At least you got to take your exam. I can't get my employer to wake up on the issue.
-Steve
--
Don't trust your Government. (Update:
*kerchunk* *beep* "...Operator."
But they pay you too.
All my attempts to solve that or even convince them it was a problem were thwarted, and I was also laughed at when I suggested the best way to get our company on the Internet was to setup a Web server on our own Linux box not NT. They then hired an expensive consultant who told them to use Linux, and they marvelled at his wisdom. They then decided it sounded too complicated to do themselves and outside of the capabilities of their staff.
That was the beginning of my IT career, in '95 at a software development company. They were one of the better/smarter IT companies I've worked for.
--
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
I see we're just a /little/ judgemental today. Isn't it a good thing that everyone has the same systems of belief. Oh wait.. they don't. Fancy that, eh?
:) I like to think of myself as being in a rather happy spiritual state and I've definitely had a good education. It's just that when it comes to work, I'm a mercenary.
/long/ way to relieving stress :)
I don't care what my company thinks of me as long as they wanna give me lots of money. If I'm going to be a monkey, I'd better be a well-paid monkey
(And I've found that more money goes a
Now, I've got friends who go for a good workplace over salary and I can't argue with their point of view on that. I guess we're all different, hmm?
One of the most popular web sites? Define "popular", please :)
:) I don't have anything against Linus either, but when it comes to work, I am strictly the mercenary.
Personally, I've nothing against Bill. Hell, if I was that ninja of a businessman, I wouldn't be doing my work right now
I'd rather have both money and love. They're not mutually exclusive, you know.
Ow ow ow. My brain. It hurts! :)
Yeah, but working for IT and being a living gas meter are two completely different things.
yikes!! well, down here, (suburban south) $75,000/yr is a enough for 2 cars, a 4 bedroom house on an acre or so, etc. etc. (hmmmm, i have a 4 bedroom house on an acre and 2 cars...wonder how much i make?) i pay 8.5% sales tax (Texas, not all states are the same), NO state income tax, and as far as federal: i "technically" earned $70,000 and paid $6,921.00 in federal income taxes. if i had a mortgage instead of paid rent, i could have deducted that interest from my federal taxes (it would have reduced my income). as much as i despise federal taxes here, we seem to have it easy when compared to our international peers...
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Others have made most of the good points I'd make here. I'd just add that I've left jobs because training never materialized. This can be very important to employees. Staying up to date is on par with food, water and oxygen in the tech world. This doesn't always require training, but the right training on the right subjects sure does help. If a company wont make the investment in helping me stay up to date (and thereby do my job better), maybe they're not worth staying with....
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
Just keep Mountain Dew stocked in the office. Training or no training, --they'll stay. I would.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Summary: unless you're a company officer or other absolutely essential employee, you probably don't need to worry about it. -- Kris
Say if people start staying when not forced to, do you remove the rules?
;).
Because if you keep adding rules when bad (but rare) things happen, and never removing them you'll end up with too many rules.
Yes, I understand your pain. But I _won't_ sign bonds. It feels like working in a cage. I've also seen the way most people behave when they are "bonded" to the company, and I don't think it's good.
If you're the boss, then you decide the atmosphere of your company. If you want a trusting atmosphere, you're going to get stabbed in the back every now and then. But I feel the alternative is much worse.
If I'm going to battle, I want to be sure that those on my team are committed, they are there because they _want_ to be there, not because they've been chained down.
There was one guy here who was under a bond and he often "rowed backwards" or "paddled aimlessly". It was _really_ bad for morale. It's not worth keeping such people. Let them go, write them off as a loss.
Neither do I agree with paying people much more after training and certifying them just to keep them. Perhaps a small rise and a nice informal party as a "tribal ritual" will be fine. A significant pay increase should be the result of greater responsibility or increased productivity. Bonuses for accomplishing something (not just being certified!).
If someone thinks they _deserve_ more pay just because you _gave_ them training, I think they're the sort who are concerned only about money. These sort will _never_ feel like they've been given enough. Give them more, they still will jump at the next higher figure, even at the worst moment (middle of project).
How about sending your staff for training as early as possible - pick a good bang for the buck certification. That way you'll sift out the really disloyal ones ASAP.
A lot of companies don't seem to realize that a single decent loyal trustworthy employee is worth far more than three faithless super talented ones. If you know all your employees are loyal and trustworthy, it costs you a lot less - stuff doesn't vanish, expense claims aren't padded, you don't have to hire tons of people just to keep watch over everyone. And everybody knows that everyone else will be there for them.
Companies that think it's necessary to monitor their employees' keystrokes are such sad places. Maybe worse than prisons.
You still have to reward loyalty though. Loyalty with loyalty, respect with respect and trust with trust. And some money of course, if only to prove the sincerity of your words
Cheerio,
Link.
You should have quit working. While you have to pay up if you quit, there's no way you could be made to pay up if he fires you. Just go in and play quake all day. When you get canned, be honest to your next boss about why...
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Company OFFERS this. Most companies expectpeople to bring skillsets with them when they come to work. It is not MY company,but the one I work for,and I was simply letting people know what happens here.
Well you certainly read more into the post than existed. I do not own the company, I work for them. I was merely telling folks how things work in some companies. Cost of doing business? If I were an employer, I would certainly NOT behave like a momma to my employees. I would not potty train them, not teach them manners, not teach them language, not teach them reasoning skills... ad nauesum. Someone coming to work for me would have to bring his/her own current(as in up-to-date) skill set to get the job. I will not hand hold people who are not prepared for the work place. Cost of doing business my ass. You get some money of your own, then get the loans to start a business, then risk your own money, credit worthiness and your own reputation and start a business of your own. Then you pay for all the training your employees need or desire. Lots of luck. You are a current business owner? Consultant no doubt.
I'll bet you live at home.
Courts generally favor employees? Give me a break. When was the last time you signed a contract and defaulted on it? Oh, I guess you are a minor and still live at home too. Try the word lawyer, the other one is too hard for you to spell. I am not the employer, I merely gave one way SOME companies do business. The operative worh here is BUSINESS, not charity. It is true that one should consult a lawyer when signing any contract. That is merely prudent. The company I work for provides 80 percent reimbursement for school. College, that is. Certifications are something we look for the employees to BRING WITH THEM. The comapny I work for willpay for certifications, but on temployee terms. Real world reality check here youngster.
There are two things that came from this policy: First was resentment. Apparently there is no second thing. Excellent follow through. The new company's offer included an adjusted sign-on bonus that paid for his previous "debt". It would be an ACTUAL debt. Nor a quote DEBT unquote, and the additional money would not end up in the employees pocket. Your point, however fuzzy, is?
It's been my experience that the company provides the training and the employee guarantees to stay at the company for X months, if the contract is broken the employee is required to repay the company the cost of the training.
"When I die, I want to go quietly, like my grandfather, in his sleep... not screaming, like the passengers in his car."
Really? I could have sworn it was stock options. Last I heard, the whole cycle for microserfs was that they were hired right out of school with about $30k in stock options/year and just enough wages to keep them alive and healthy in a 2 bedroom apartment, burn them out in about 5 years, at which point they retire, turn in their stock options, and end up with about 3 mil in the bank (pre-taxes). Same goes for cisco, 'cept that the options don't increase as quickly and it's spread out over a longer time period. At a smaller buisness, though, I'd agree with you.
moox. for a new generation.
Your delusional.
-In the event that you disagree with the previous comment, be advised that you are most likely right anyway.
You are right about the vacation.
The question is...how does, say, Germany, manage
that? Six weeks is the norm, there, as I understand it. Yet they are one of the top 3 countries in GNP, no? WTF is wrong with the U.S. in this department?
More managers need to be reading Peopleware. It's too bad you can't fire your boss.
When people ask their workers what the office might need, it's often ignored anyway. I was working as a contractor at one site, and they asked everyone (including contractors) what the office needed to spruce things up. At least one perm person and myself asked for a genuine water cooler, since the water there was so bad, and everyone who wanted it had to buy bottled water and bring it in.
Guess what we got instead? We got those fucking "motivational" posters that the new edition of Peopleware blasts so badly. What friggin idiots the mgmt at this client was. The one I sat in front of had some quote like, "Teamwork, Many hands, one goal". The freakin' picture was of the CHINESE WALL!!!! Hello?! The Chinese Wall was built by SLAVES! Why not just show a field of cotton and American slaves picking it? How insulting! What f**king moron dreamt this picture up, and who decided to put it up after that? When I pointed this fact out about this particular (de)motivational poster, I know it was just put down as me being a "whiner", and promptly ignored. I couldn't WAIT for my contracting company to pull me. That was 11 months of pure hell...I can't imagine WTF the perm people were doing there.
Needless to say, every time I hear anything about that company, its about some new boneheaded thing
happening, or another person quitting.
A great way to keep people around (Other than treating them nicely, paying them well, and making sure they feel appreciated) is stock options. The trick of giving stock options is to make sure that if you give say 500 options to the employee that they are actually earned on a graduated plan, 50 the first year, 50 more the next, and on and on. Now, if they want all 500 of their stock options, they need to stay 10 years.
- Full Appreciation of Work Done
- Feeling of being 'In on Things'
- Understanding Attitude
- Job Security
- Good Wages
What Workers Really Want:In the UK at least, when polled people consistently say that they want improved public services rather than reduced taxes. But get them in the polling booth...
If you moderate me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
How did they arrive at this conclusion? If they surveyed the workers, I think the result is biased. Many people would like to believe they're less mercenaries than they are.
-Dave
The way my company gets around this is when I have training, the company pays for it. But if I leave within 6 months of having the training I pay a portion of the cost: all the price if I leave immediately, 5/6 if I leave 1 month after the training, 4/6 after 2 months, etc. This way they get value for their money, and I get to leave if I want, but I have to pay my dues!
I stole this sig.
That one thing?
Ask your employees exactly what they want.
Then give it to them.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
What he said. Ping pong and Wednesday breakfast are no substitute for a simple recognition of your value, especially in this market. If you train someone, he's worth more. A raise is cheap compared to the cost of hiring and training someone new (who, in the meantime, will be doing a less effective job). If you don't recognize it, another companywill.
I'm convinced that turnover is the number one productivity killer at our company (complacency is number two). It's hard enough communicating with other departments. When your emails bounce because someone quit ... well, that's frustrating.
We hired an inexperienced buffoon as a junior member. Didn't know Windows, Unix, programming, or anything. He read an O'Reilly book and got hired as a Java network programmer six months later. Makes me wonder what I'm still doing here.
It sounds like your management needs to go back to school.
...."manage people" gee, what a concept. Sounds like shitty managers to me; but, alas, IT is full of shitty managers.
It's kind of *their job* to keep people, hire people, fire people or
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
"dumb babies"?
Do you point at small children on the street and laugh at them because they hardly know anything?
Do you mock a 6 month old child because it doesnt know how to walk?
You need help.
- Toby
By the way, I'm taking a 50% pay cut in my new job, as it short-circuits 11 years of academic career (2 post-docs + 1 assistant professorship). Sometimes the other factors are very important.
Anyone who signs a contract in order to receive training is an idiot. If they want you to do a good job, they will afford you the training and tools necessary to do so. It should always be assumed that there will be some training necessary for any position. (occasionally not true, but rarely in my experience)
Any company that has employees leaving after training needs to take a very hard look at why. If the pay isn't competitive or the work environment sucks, then fix it. Your employees should not be able to get significantly better offers elsewhere.
The idea of a mandatory service period in exchange for training is ridiculous. Training is a part of the cost of hiring someone. If you don't want them to learn and get better, then your company is never going to improve and will slowly lose ground to competitors. A company's employees are the most important asset any company has. If they aren't being treated as such it should not be surprising that they are going elsewhere.
Everywhere that I have ever worked, the exit interview's sole purpose was to reinforce the climate of denial that the organization was wallowing in. Frankly, all they do is hold your last paycheck hostage so they can basically let some HR flunky waste your time and make a lot of veiled accusations of not being a 'team player'.
Of course, Human Resources departments are probably the biggest single factor in the decline of employee/employer relations.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
here's a timely article on "the options for companies that want to share some of the wealth with their workers" from The Observer, a UK broadsheet.
1 month in Brazil. But since it is from day N of the month to day N of the following one, some management tends to push for February. Mine doesn't, thankfully (moreso because February has Carnaval, which is a national holiday here). ;-P
Actually there was never any VC involved. =) The company has been turning a profit for quite a while now.
PHP actually. (Yes, someone actually pays people to use Free Software!)
Recently, I took a position - entry level, mind you - as a web programmer at a successful dot-com. When I was interviewed, they did the usual. There was a quick wave-through tour of the offices, I met some folks, they quizzed me, and all that.
What really interested me was the kitchen. They were pretty proud of it. Sandwich fixin's, soda pop, microwavable burritos, whatever. Buttloads of chips, cookies, and Little Debbie snacks. Basically it was stuffed to the gills with Geek Food.
On top of that were important things like a full medical/dental/optical plan, paid parking near the office, evaluations every 3 months, and a very flexible schedule (they really couldn't care less what time you show up or what time you leave, they just look at productivity vs. # of hours in the office).
So, even though they offered me the low-end of what I asked for in terms of salary, I accepted.
I was in love. I just got my first three month evaluation, and I still -am- in love.
I commute a little over an hour to work. My girlfriend graduates college next month and we're moving much closer, and so along with my pay increase, they're giving me some financial help with the move.
In terms of work load and working conditions - I have had a hand in training new employees, suggesting features for products already underway or completed by other departments, completing tasks on my own and in a team, and have had many suggestions (ranging from training and business development, up through company picnic fixins) taken seriously and followed through on.
You see, the IT industry is terribly unprofessional when it comes to internal dealings. IT workers are extremely resourceful and profitable. If you don't treat them like gold, eventually they'll find companies like the one I work for who will.
*sigh* So deluded. A dot-com??? and you're in love? Come on. Soon as the venture capital runs out. The kitchen dries up and work force is reduced, right before they 'lay' you off.
Start a goodamn union.
Simple Answer best buy and the other commercial-world businesses rape people beyone reason because no one is willing to stand up to them.
Many places that I've seen have required that employees who are to receive training first sign a contract agreeing to stay on board for anywhere between 6 and 18 months. This at least ensures that the company will be able to realize SOME of their investment, even if not all of it. In some states, such binding contracts are not entirely legal, and so there may be a clause that allows the employee to leave, but requires him to repay the training costs if he does so.
From my understanding of U.S laws, this is the best that companies can do, legally. Employees who leave a company can only be held liable for the cost of training; they cannot be held liable some duration of work.
I've read/studied about similar situations: legal/consulting firms paying for the MBA/JD education of their junior associates. Although the *language* of the contract sounds as though they are required to work for the firm three year after the completon of their degree, the actual essence of the contract only requires the employee to pay back the (usually pro-rated) cost of the degree to the firm, early termination of the contract by the employee. Remember, indentured servitude (even when ex ante voluntary) is illegal according to U.S. statutes. In employment contracts, only the employer can be held liable for holding up the duration of the contract (barring other justification for early termination - firing - such as detrimental behavior, slacking, etc.)
There are two issues that seem to but really do not contradict the statement above: sports contracts and H1 visas
The reason why sports contracts work is because the employers (sports team owners) have colluded together to agree that they will not offer work for employees who have broken a contract with one of the other employer in the group. The cases that brought about free agency in major sports (including European soccer) is based on the claim that this collusion violates anti-trust. Consequetially, the courts, players union, and team owners have arrived at a compromise where players get limited mobility ... but actually, many legal and economics scholars feel that this arrangement still violates anti-trust. Players unions use this during collective bargaining all the time to get more favorable terms. (Remember that Major League Baseball can get away with this because they received a sweet deal from Congress early on: anti-trust exemption)
So sports contract are a special example that does not really apply to more traditional jobs (yikes, can't believe I'm saying this about a bunch of hackers and geeks ;-) such as those in the hi-tech communiy.
As noted in /. several times, H1 visas tend to constrict the ability of the employees to move form one job to another. This of course might be seen as an informal way of contracting employees to a firm for a duration (usually until they qualify for a green card). Keep in mind that if I remember correctly, there is nothing in the H1 Visa statutes that prevent an employee from switching jobs ... just additional hassle of the new firm to arrange for a visa. This is mainly a problem with immigration, not work laws. Personally, I believe that not only should capital be allowed to cross international borders freely, but so should labor.
Not sure if this helps. But at least you might have a better undertstanding of what employers are up against when they make their employees much more valuable. I think the only way to survive is to foster a 'team' concept within the firm, make each person have a stake in the firm that is more than just her/his paycheck. Equity, of course, is one way to get at this ... but so are simple things like recognition. Don't just recognize the 'team leaders' or managers ... also recognize the 'grunts' who did a lot of the core work.
ps- anyone who says more money is what is removing 90% of their stress has got some serious serious issues and obviously major emotional deprivation
subvert the elitist slashdot patriarchy! (where all the stupid women at up in here?)
I've been with a few companies that basically put a price to the training (if it's free and just taking company time) and/or the actual training/books/tests.
The worst I had to deal with had a 2-year policy. Basically half the cost of any book they bought for you (even though it stays in the company library), all of any class they paid for you to take (paid for the actual training and/or paid you to be their on their time), all of any tests they paid for you, these totals were kept for two years and if you left before any one item was over two years old, you had to pay for it in full.
Since that time, the company I've been working for merged and we have a much better policy: Only actual out of pocket training or test costs are tallied, and they are only kept for a year and are prorated (so if you leave in 11 months, you only pay 11/12th the cost).
Along with that, we also got bonuses for getting certs, and generally get pay raises resulting from performance: A Cisco/Microsoft certed engineer bills $150/hr minimim, Microsoft engineer bills $135/hr minimum, vs. a tech with only his A+ cert bills $95/hr. Obviously if you've got more certs and can bill more per hour with customers, you should have better performance (although we've got some slacker engineers and have techs beat them in billing at times).
Does this work all of the time? Not always, we have some people leave, but we retain the better folks most of the time. However, we've stolen a ton of employees from others due to their lame employee personal growth policies (most places wouldn't do jack for their employees, and sure weren't going to pay them more just for getting certs).
That's the other step I took - I am my own corporation with no agency above me. Increases my billing rate by about $25 an hour. Thanks for links - I will check them out!
The Game Guy
Do you think that company is going to assume any responsibility towards you? NO ONE feels responsibility for anyone these days. It's NOTHING for a company to fire a high paid worker and bring in some kid right out of college to replacement them.
Is said contract going to promise you won't FIRE me for X amount of months? All that tells me is your 'competative' rates are probably coming from a dubious sources. If a company ever feels the need to attempt to tie hands, there's something fishy behind it.
Just pointing out some flaws in your logic...not an attack. 8)
The Game Guy
I've been a contracter coder for 90% of my career. Why? Because no one pays enough. The ONLY way I would consider taking a permanent job is to have a piece of the company. If you want your employees to stay with a company, you have to show them they are a valuable part of that company. You can't have it both ways: Train them so they are valuable and then not pay/compensate them. The company I contract with currently has a SERIOUS problem with that same factor. They are a large international company that hasn't figured out what coders/techies are worth yet. So, as soon as one of them gets up to full speed on a language/database/etc, they jump ship, usually for 50% more pay. The managers I work with have their hands tied on pay by policy. Thing is, they could afford to pay them more. Great for me - I've been with them for six & half years now. Strangely, the pay caps don't affect contract labor. Also good for me.
I'd also add that perks help a lot too, like casual clothes, off site working, flexible work hours, etc. Most companies still don't understand this either.
The Game Guy
How does this solve the problem of retaining good employees? I think you missed the question.
The Game Guy
if you want them to stay, then you must value them as people, not just employees you spent money on.
listen to what they have to say, then you'll have the answer
some get no respect in the workplace
some just have personal preferences for things: like dress codes, which hours they want to work, working from home, vacation time (paid or unpaid), ideas (who listens to them, are they acted apon)
but there are always people who need to move location for personal reasons: marriage, family needs, family crisis.
do you have a plan for those who need to move, but would still like to stay with the company?
try asking the employees, there's very few people out there who have no idea of what they want
One last thing to all you HR people. As an IC I would take 4-6 weeks off a year. I routinely make up for all those lost weeks and more in overtime. Every time I look for a job I mention desiring 4 weeks of vacation. I get looks like I am from mars. Its not a negotiable benefit, and no one seems to think its a reasonable request. If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
Oddly enough I work at a University, who, by din't of not being able to pay that well, offers a minimum of 4 weeks a year, with an option of 8. It is one of the reasons that I stay.
Extensive Vacation
Reasonable pay
Responsibility
Flexible hours
Ability to work from home
Trust
Minimal Dress Code (ie. Clothes)
In order of importance pay comes somewhere beneath flexible hours, responibility, trust, and dress code.
Veltyen
I have a good boss (much like yourself), a relaxed work environment, sharp co-workers, and a pleasant set of responsibilities. If they'd just let me hire an assistant I'd be thrilled.
I'd say that the rest of the IT folks feel pretty much the same way. We'd all like to make more money, of course, but for the moment we understand the realities of the situation and are willing to be patient.
The things that make us, in particular, very angry are the things that the company _can_ change, but doesn't want to. Interdepartmental space allocation, for example, so that we're not cramped into inadequate space while other areas have vacant offices. And a bizzare budgeting process that still views technology as a convenient luxury instead of an essential part of doing business. IT people are generally a logical and pragmatic bunch. Meaningless and archaic rules, byzantine procedures, and irrational policies will generally be contested or ignored.
Dude, a Foozeball machine and a pool table at work are all people really want! If those things are not satifying your employees, try chaining them to the wall and providing free twinkies.
!-- wit --!
The pay is really, really shitty compared to the private sector, though. I could easily make four times my current take-home if I was willing to move to the US and work.
--
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
pay them fairly
care about them
You don't need to give huge salaries to keep your employees. Give them the industry standard, or a just little more. But above all, make sure they like working for you.
____________________
Ni!
Not all companies suffer this though. Some companiew who value talent go to great lengths to keep the work force compensated and happy. The bennifits are great, but the occasional kudo pat on the back is even better. Some companies even provide free PC's and internet service to all employees, like Boeing and Intel. It's great to get stuff above the regular benefits package and go a long way to say you are important to us, what can we do to make you happy.
The truth shall set you free!
That sounds like when I was in the Navy. To get the advanced electronics, I had to up for 6 years instead of 4. The only problem is if the pay or kudos are way out of line, we walk as soon as the obligation is over. (The pay was not great and the choice of location, housing and kudos was very poor.) I was in the Navy only for the experiance and education. These were the two requirements real employers were looking for. That is not the case now. I am buying a home in the part of the country I call home and I don't have to worry about being moved within a couple years.
The truth shall set you free!
Other than not having Windows on your desktop, this sounds like a BIG software firm in Redomond!
The truth shall set you free!
Earth. My first employer did US NAVY. My current employer does. I plan on being here a while. I like it here.
The truth shall set you free!
Most [ambitious] employees see training as a perk. Yes, it raises their value on the job market, and yes they may leave because of it. But if your pay is competative, if your employees like the work environment, if there is the possibility of more training in the future, more training becomes another reason for them to stay.
--Chris
We work within the IT industry. We know that salaries go up 10% or so every year. We know that a whole list of perks are standard.
To most employers, they run a business where they have to keep costs down to make a profit. To them an employee needs 3% in raises each year. To them perks are a nice idea as far as employees are concerned but not really necessary for the business to offer.
My first job was in a small publishing company. Compared to the editors, some of whom were on salaries of below of my first job wage, I was already being paid a lot. Compared to editors who were grateful for any job and would put up with anything, my requests for basic IT style perks were excessive.
To me, after a year's experience, setting up projects on both sides of the Atlantic, I was getting paid less than they were forced to offer to find any new graduate.
When I asked for training, I was offered a 1 year or re-pay scheme. As I wasn't prepared to then be stuck on a salary two years behind the market, all that did was convince me that I had to move that much faster if I was to keep my skills up to date. It took me next to no time to find a job that doubled my salary and gave me all kinds of new toys to play with.
The point of all of this is: In a lot of small companies, the employers don't understand the IT industry, the salaries and perks involved and so on. They continue to offer what they think is reasonable compared to their other employees while lamenting the terrible IT staff they have and the way they abandon them. In these cases, the important first step is to get them to realise that their IT staff are part of an industry with different expectations to their other staff and that they either need to address that or accept a huge turn over.
Training companies spend a hell of a lot of money advertising their services as a way of learning new concepts. O'Reilly spend quite a bit on advertising, but only as references.
At the end of the day, the companies and the employees want whatever someone has spent a lot of money convincing them is the best option.
Also, once again, it come down to a lot of employers not understanding how IT works. Most companies employ a range of disciplines. Training works as a concept they can understand for every discipline. They don't want to have to find the O'Reilly equivalent for each discipline, assuming it even exists.
Well Goddamn. Sometimes /. DOES have some good discussions!
meh.
Ok, your in a tough situation. Your people are not trained for whats comming up so that puts you in a "Your damned if you do, your damned if you don't" position. On one hand if you train, your afraid that your employees with their newly found knowlege will jump ship. On the other, if they don't receive the training, your business will fall behind. I do believe that this is called being between a rock and a hard place.
My suggestion to you is to place your business/place of employment first. You'll have some individuals who will jump ship and others that will be loyal. The individuals who jump ship for greener pastures so to speak will find that the consequenses of jumping ship so early in the game may not be so good. It just doesn't look so good if you bite the hand that feeds you. When a potential new employer asks him/her how much experience they have in administering Mac's, what do you think they can say? And when they see that they are asked not to contact the former employer. Won't that raise a question? If they do contact you and find out that you just paid for their training. What will they think of their loyalty? Doesn't look so good to burn down a bridge does it?
BMaximus
I believe that is called communism.
The loss of scientific management and operations research and their replacement with "make people feel good about themselves" management classes has cost us all. It seems to have disappeared when industry got so successful that the costs of bad management got to be acceptable with the result that executives could hire any bozo and usually did.
That's not paranoid, it's a reasonable reading of reality. And to make it worse, those bozos hire their friends, ad nauseum. That's one of the reasons that new industries are very dynamic. It's also why new industries have higher percentages of women, gays, Jews and other groups not in the "old boy network". They don't have the entrenched bozos or the riches to support them.
It's called a State University System.
---
Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
Somehow I don't think it takes much to be a Unix sysadmin :)
---
Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
What I've seen work very well is making the employees sign a contract that forbids them to use their new skills at another location for X amount of months. On top of that, the company needs to increase the employee's pay to a level that is competative with the market.
Kris Felscher
Kris Felscher
We've got enough youth, how about a fountain of "smart"?
I tend to also see them as inversely proportional with a floating crossover point that varies according to the nodes(protocals(software(hardware))) you connect with. (the first node you connect to is yourself)
- Very casual work environment. I work in jeans and a t-shirt, show up and leave pretty much whenever I want within reason. There is no job-related stress in my life because of this.
- We are allowed to pursue technical interests on our own while at work. Even if it doesn't seem work related at the time, who knows how teaching yourself new skills could help the company in the future. If you do this and you apply the things to improving work processes/procedures, you are compensated accordingly. As long as you are getting your work queue done on time, you are able to do pretty much anything else you want while on company time. Having the freedom to pursue other interests really keeps me from getting burned out on the project at hand, and lets me stay up to date with current technology.
- We use open protocols and standards wherever possible in the entire office. This allows me to use linux and OS/2 on my desktop. I don't even have windows installed on my work machines. That alone has made me far more productive and stress-free.
Of course these two things both depend on having good management that doesn't try to micro-manage you to death. I have one of those as a VP, but the guy I report to is good at keeping that guy off our backs.That being said... when I consider the issue of training the developers that work for me, I take a long, hard look at this issue. If I decide that someone needs a certain skill, I try to determine not only what the cost of learning that skill will be, but also what the salary range for a person with that skill should be in my general geographic area.
This gives me both up front, and long term costs. The issue then becomes not how much underpaid someone will be that works for me, but rather, is there a business justification to pay them as much as they will then be worth?
What is not said, but is overtly implied, is that the company in question can't afford to pay 3x current salaries, although that's what the employees will be worth in the job market. Well, if a product, such as OS X, requires that much overhead in terms of labor to support, but won't generate enough revenue to pay for it, perhaps the real issue is that there is no business case to support the product.
In the manufacturing world, if you want to build a new product, but you have no hope of ever making enough off the product to pay for the equipment, raw materials, and labor required to manufacture the product, guess what - you don't make the product. Unless there is some overriding business reason to do so, the cost justification isn't there.
The same should be true in the high-tech world - if your companies sales and support fees of OS X are enough to pay the 3x salaries, then you should pay the 3x salaries. If not, you should not do the training, and not support the product. I would bet if you came up with what it would cost you to support this, and pay the employee what they deserve, and compare that number to the number of copies of OS X you will sell and support, you'd realize that, at the prices you'd have to charge your clients, few would deem OS X worth it.
First of all, the company needs to pay people to stay. Just have them take a look at what other companies in the area are paying for similar positions, and give your employees more than that (whether through base salary or other benefits). If you do this, than it is acceptable to ask them to sign a contract of a year or so in return for the training.
"My job is being right when other people are wrong." -- George Bernard Shaw
I don't know who said that there are 3 big levers to motivate your staff: money, power and acknoledgement of the good work done. Each employee will be motivated by a combination of these 3 main factors. Some would tend to be motivated if you give them some challenging things to do that stimulate their wits, the others say "Show me the money" and the other ones want to become a partner in 5 years. At a local scale, this is maintainable but in very big structures where you have less personalization, it is much harder to do. There are of course other levers, such as working conditions, convenience of access, flexible hours... I guess that in most cases if employees are given nice working conditions, a decent salary and are well considered by the hierarchy, they will feel as if they belong to the family and that's probably the strongest link you can think of.
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
Actually, the IT market is so insane due to the lack of resources at the moment that anybody who has worked on a Unix machine to do some ftp for the website of his ISP company can write on her CV Unix administrator because 1. she believes it in her own mind, 2. she knows she can double her salary with another company, 3. she'll learn it in the next company anyway. These are the new rules...
Just a little bit scary in terms of security but hell, everybody now wants to run when they are not even sure they can walk...
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
The thing is that some companies cannot real Unix gurus because there are not so many, or these already have a job and want to stay where they are or they are just too expensive for them. Still they need someone to do the job. Therefore, the only alternative is to get resources with less skills. People who installed Linux on their home PC and muck around with it are now given chances at a low salary to get into companies system to learn. This has a price: learning mistakes lead to the many security holes. Actually, the same applies to computer science in general and particularly to programming languages where quick-and-dirty *rules*. But the choice is simply a dirty system or nothing. Business pressure makes it so that dirty wins by far.
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
That's what comes when you hire people who don't have some vision of what they want to do in their lives. I don't believe it's the employer who should pay for your training.
You have to figure out what you want to do and then arrange training for it by yourself.
The bottom line-- what a pun...
What has induced me to stay in a given job has been a sense of reward for what I do. Wages are a part of this because they show appreciation from the management. However, good wages in an otherwise unappreciative workplace is not going to help.
Little things make a big difference-- incentives to learn, small gifts of candy during the high-stress times (and then occasionally for other reasons) or other expenditures that show the worker that his or her job is appreciated is at least as important as paying the worker more than the next guy.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Ditto!
Where I work now is political hell mainly because of EVERYTHING is someones a "little empire". Empires are the root of 99% of the problems in my workplace.
Every new project is shouded in secrecy, the kind of secrets that everybody knows but only a select few are "supposed" to know about.
Knowledge doesn't get passed around. In almost every project someone (who is not involved with it) points out a major flaw that later becomes a real pain in the butt.
Moral plummets because people feel they are getting left out of the new stuff and their experience, which is often substantial is not valued.
What keeps a lot of people is the "golden handcuffs", they get paid too much to leave. The flip side to this is that it keeps the bad people as well as the good (usually more so). The bad ones never leave because they have no hope of getting that kind of money (or in some cases even the same job) elsewhere.
So why do I stay;
- Great hours, 10 hour shifts / 40 hours a week makes for a 4 day working week, the roster is worked out so we have 6 days off in a row once a cycle.
- 5 Weeks holiday a year.
- They pay for my Comp Sci degree and let me study at work.
- 90% of the time my job involves sitting around watching tv. The other 10% is stressfull as hell dealing juicy technical problems (live TV). - Great money. - It's one of the few places I can do Master Control and not have to work overnight.
As soon as I finish my degree though I outta there!
When it absolutely positively has to be there.
Remembering, of course, to take out insurance against the possibility of the company going bust and leaving lots of redundant people with substantial liabilities.
--
A lot of employers believe as you do, that indentured servitude is only fair. :-) The biggest problem I see is that it sets the wrong tone between employer and employee. Loyalty isn't what it used to be. The mergers and layoffs of the '80's took care of that. But loyalty does still exist. I've seen it. I've even felt it on occasion. But tell me that you want me to sign something or I can't take a course, and loyalty goes out the window. The only thing that is left is a business arrangement. A job should be more than the exchange of services for money. If that's all that it is, I'll jump ship as soon as the time is up and get more money elsewhere.
Foosball (I presume that's american for table football), pool tables etc are all well and good but I'd much prefer:
Some of your points aren't particularly relevant in the UK:
-robinCompanies have to give at least 20 working days paid holiday a year (ie 4 weeks). That's from the Working Time Regs in response to EU Directives so I presume you can expect similar or better throughout Europe.
They must also suppy drinking water and there's good free healthcare on the NHS.
I was a full-time employee, but I had a contract with my boss. Essentially, were I to stay in his employ for 2 full consecutive years, I would get a $10K bonus at the end of it. Not bad. On top of that (not in the contrat, but it could have been) was regular, substantial raises as my value to him increased. For the first year I was getting $5K raises every 4 months or so. Admittedly, I started out at a fairly low rate of pay, but it quickly increased.
At the end of the 2 years, I got my bonus, and I had already paid for myself a few times over, including the bonus, the raises, and all the required training.
As your situation is slightly different, YMMV. However, you could restructure your department to work on a "contract" basis with raises and bonuses throughout the term of the contract. That way whoever stays gets more money, whoever doesn't stay gets the training but not the cash. Good luck!
"There's a party," she said,
"We'll sing and we'll dance,
It's come as you are."
The pay thing sucks, its not what you are being paid, its that there are others in the building that seem to be equally skilled, that are getting more. In any environment, this is going to cause problems.
Also, have you tried explaining to the powers that be that for every two hours that you privately tutor a secretary, it cost the university $20 (your time), and put you behind schedual? Heck, for every 30 or so secretaries, they put you a week behind schedual, and costs the university half a grand.
Oh, and if you are expected to help out the users in a university setting, I feel for you, especially if you are near one of the labs and the computer users know it. *Shudder* That job has some bad times. Plenty of "I've been using this floppy for 2 years and it has all my data on it, what do you mean its bad?" and "My computer just froze, and I'm almost done writing my term paper" (no save, of course). Unless you have an understanding boss (I never did), it can be a horrible job. You are considered a god when you fix some trivial problem, but you quickly become a witch when the problem can't be solved, and witches are burned at the stake.
Now you filled my head with bad memories, I'm gonna stand in the corner and bang my head against the wall.
Once these people are trained to the point they're worth three times what they are currently paid, how can we retain them without having to pay them three times what they are currently paid.
And the answer is, You can't.
I've seen this situation come up for 20 years, and I expect it'll be happening 20 years from now. If your employees are worth $50K/yr and you're paying them $40K, you're going to lose them - and that's only a 20% difference. Three to one? No way you hold onto those folks. Period, end of discussion.
That's not to say that you can get close. A good place to work is often worth 10% of salary. To me, with a nice nest egg and retirement 10 years away, it's even more than 10%. But you can't pay people $20K when they're worth $60K. It just doesn't fly.
So as to your managements quandry -- yeah, they're in a hole. If the market they're in demands workers who are worth $60K/yr and they're paying 20, they're out of business.
Attempting to put restrictions on what an employee can do after being trained is, at best, a delaying tactic. There's a limit on how restrictive those clauses can be (I am not a lawyer, yadda yadda), and requiring the training be paid back only helps until you find the next job and can afford to pay it back.
If you have correctly represented the situtation, this company has to change its business model either by increasing employee pay or searching for a service they can offer which doesn't require such skilled employees.
You're right about exit interviews being a crock. I was a longterm employee at a firm, but felt that the senior management were arrogant and incompetent, so I left. They had already heard from me and from others a long list of needed changes, but they were more interested in protecting their own positions than making changes. So the firm went down the crapper. In these circumstances, you can be sure that I wasn't going to give them any free consulting services on the way out the door. For my main reason for leaving, I cited "Color of office furniture clashed with my shirts." I also refused to sign any of the exit paperwork about non-competition, not headhunting employees after I left, etc.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
You need to look back to a book from the late 40's (approx) called "The Human Use of Human Beings" by Norbert Weiner. It actually attempted to apply scientific rigor to management. Weiner was one of the best of the early systems theorists, in at the foundations of information theory, systems analysis and operations research. He coined the term "cybernetics." A lot of post-WW2 management theorists borrowed keywords from Weiner, but I think the rigor was lost. Now the field is dominated by Tom Peters-style marketspeak and empty cheerleading. This has the advantage of being more easily absorbed into MBA programs. Keep in mind that it takes four or five years to learn engineering, but any pinhead can complete an MBA in at most two years. So ideas can't be allowed to get in the way of the much more important objectives of schmoozing and golf practice.
By the way, I think engineers are partially to blame for the sad state of management. Most of us look down their noses at it so much that we leave it to the tasseled-loafer slimeballs by default. And the few who do go into management seem to think that they don't need to learn anything new in order to do it.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Something to keep in mind about management training seminars is that they are sold to managers . So there's a tendency to tell them what they want to hear.
One thing they really want to hear is that they can motivate and keep employees without compensating them and without fundamentally changing the way the company is run. This is the origin of window-dressing such as free pizza for unpaid overtime, ping-pong tables in the work area, casual dress policies, etc. Some of these are nice to have, but none address the real, hard problems of compensation and incentives. Mostly, they're the equivalent of the third-grade classroom poster with gold stars by the pupils' names for good conduct.
At the margins, these little things matter. But there are employers out there who offer good pay, good opportunities, tolerable management, AND who still manage to get the little things right. I, for one, would trade $20k worth of better pay or benefits for a ping-pong table and the freedom to wear my T-shirt to work.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
That was a thought-provoking follow-up.
It reinforces a paranoid notion I've had for a long time that organizations optimize for efficiency only when they have no other choice, and then only to the least extent that they can get away with. The higher-priority optimization is to maximize (to steal your term) their bozo carrying capacity. This is entirely consistent with my experience: they need competent people. But they'd much rather hire someone's son-in-law, and if you can bring Junior on by making everyone else bust their butts a little more, that'll do. This is why results-based promotion policies are so often touted and so seldom implemented.
Reminds me of something I read long ago, sorry I can't cite the source: "Blessed are those who praise peace, for they shall bury the peacemakers."
The goal of such a phony policy isn't to make the organization work better: it's to induce you to work better so there will be more opportunities for free-riding.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
This training will have the side effect of making us worth two to three times as much as we are paid now
Well, gosh! Why don't you just invest your OWN freaking money and increase your value yourselves you dumb babies!?
Once your trained you're worth more on the market. If the company you work for doesn't honour that, work somewhere else. period.
If the company needs trained people then it should hire them at market price levels. If it can't afford the market prices then it isn't efficient and shouldn't be in the business. period.
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Hmm, but what he was saying was that a lot of tech people are happy to discuss these sorts of things over lunch and disclose their benifits.
I personally would rather not, except with people who were hired in the same "batch" as me, all of which should be on around the same cash anyway.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Duh!
Most companies are still living in the pre-AT&T deathmarch, corporate downsizing era.
Sorry, but workers rule now. Not only do companies need to pay a fair price, but they need to make their shop stand out from the rest. One does that through perks and the environment.
As a Tech Professional, you better expect me to leave on average of 3.5 years after I get there. You can treat me right, train me, and keep it interesting -- I might stay longer. Heck, I might even improve your business processes and make things efficient in ways you could never dream.
Treat me wrong by giving me boring things to do, tie me to "training contracts," frozen pay (Exxon is big for that -- can you imagine no raise for TWO YEARS??!) or some other serfdom and watch me leave, taking all of my knowledge and experience with me that you forgot to transition. Maybe that newly-graduated college kid you brought in (for cheap) might be able to pick up where I left off, but... that is a might big risk you're taking with your company.
Yeah, right.
the basic problem is that we are, inherently, loyal mammals, but we work for reptilian organizations who would (in many cases) eat their young to further the bottom line. we see this and it makes us pissy, and we quit to try and find some place to work with mammalian values. as a manager wonk, you can't change the whole corporate culture, but you can try and build a tribe in your corner. the little benefits matter a lot, and paying people equally matters more. face it, manager guys -- we find out how much our peers are making, and if you pay some new guy more for less than we are hauling in, we will be sore, feel worthless, and eventually quit. you want to keep people? treat them like they matter. make them feel needed, valuable to you. give them little toys that are a writeoff, anyway. and send them away for training, because that is fun and a really nice benefit. a week long class costs 1500 to 2000, plus travel and hotel. trained consultants on most of this stuff cost >180$/hr. a week of related work and your class is paid for. finally, the idea that a class or 2 in unix/variants makes an admin is as laughable as the idea that a class or 2 in oil painting result in a van gogh. now, in a few years...
In the USA, a 75K nominal salary (the emplyer will pay about 5k more in employer taxes) will be taxed like this in California, assuming a married couple with no kids and one income:
That adds up to US$24 000.
The state sales tax is 8%. There is no federal sales tax, GST, or VAT.
In other states, the state income tax may be as low as 0% (Texas, Florda, Washington, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota) or the state sales tax may be lower.
So that seems like much less than your Canadian total. Consdier that US$75 000 US is very unlikely to buy what CAN$100 000 buys in the most desirable parts of the USA. Health care is usually taken care of for free by your employer, unless you are a contractor and the USA has by far the best health care in the world.
B. Earl Watkins
PTO = Paid Time Off
This is the new buzzword/acronym to amalgamate all your Vacation, Sick time, Maternity leave, etc. Where you once had 20 days of vacation, the chances are that you have now got 19 days PTO. Grrrr.
I agree totally, but especially with the 'cubical' environment. There's no greater enemy to personal productivity and your sanity than having everyone looking over your shoulder as they walk on by. Added to that is the lack of real authentic daylight. I'm a contract employee and as such usually get dumped in the middle of the building at the furthest point from natural light. It seems to me that the permanent guys all migrate with years of service towards the windows and stay there until they leave. I hate neon lights, they give me headaches! Let's have some proper lighting or more windows, that'd make me a lot happier...
The obvious is blinding, that's why no-one sees it coming.
"I can't seen how requiring a 1-year contract for training is going to be a long-run winner for a company. Perhaps the company can tie down the newly skilled employee at their current pay, but the employee is sure going to resent this arrangement, and fly the coop as soon as the contract is up"
Yup, exactly. This was the attitude of my former employer, who wanted a TWO year contract even to buy me books and a self study course. And this company badly needed a Novell CNE because of it's obligation to their bid contract with the state. Basically they wanted to sign me up with no guarantee of job security, or a raise. I didn't want to be a $25K/year network engineer...
I'm not totally opposed to contracts, but they should be no longer than 6 months, maximum, and pro-rated, from the time the certification is achieved, and include specific criteria for regular raises. They also should include language that if you are fired/let go for ANY reason at all (except criminal activity) then your obligation to repay anything is void.
Any company that NEEDS to use a contract to keep employees isn't going to, irregardless of whether they have contracts or not. Draconian contracts will chase away good people and only keep you people like "paper" MCSE's.
People in IT get paid a lot more than average for several reasons, foremost among them is DEMAND. IT is also a demanding profession, we ALL have to constantly upgrade our skills, because technology is not static. It's only in the employer's best interest to provide training. If it's done unconditionally, or on a very reasonable contact of short length, this INCREASES loyalty.
There simply are not enough good IT people to go around, and there probably never will be. Not everyone, even smart people, have the work ethic and flat out interest in computer and networking technology to invest so much of themselves to stay in the game. If I were a manager, and one of my techs wanted to be a MCSE/RHCE/CNE, whatever, I'd be happy to assist in all reasonable ways.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"It seems that the old-school management still cling to the notion that employees do not discuss compensation packages with each other.
I know that, for the most part, all the geeks I work with will happily disclose their salary and compensation history with the company.
I have yet to see a potential employment contract that indicates I cannot do this."
I actually have seen this before. But still, the spread of such information will happen even so. Our tech department was a pretty close bunch, after all, we are all fellog geeks! We hung out together, went and drank beer every Friday together, etc. I was actually HAPPY for the guy who got the raise, he deserved it. But if they could give him $3/hr more, they could have given me $1.
Besides, how is a company going to keep such records as who gets paid what secret from the tech department that maintains the server and systems? Ain't gonna happen.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"Yeah right, a 7+ year A+ tech with Novell, NT and Linux experience isn't worth more than $10/hr?"
Hey! I make $5.25/hr!
Hmm...but I work at Subway so that kind of makes sense..."
Dude, get your A+ certification and come down to North Carolina... The opportunity is endless and so is the pay. Hell, McDonalds pays $7/hr down here!
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"Actually, the IT market is so insane due to the lack of resources at the moment that anybody who has worked on a Unix machine to do some ftp for the website of his ISP company can write on her CV Unix administrator because 1. she believes it in her own mind, 2. she knows she can double her salary with another company, 3. she'll learn it in the next company anyway. These are the new rules..."
So, can I claim to be a "Unix Admin" because I've used/installed Red Hat and Mandrake for the last year plus, and acutally set up a FTP and telenet server on it so that myself and my friends can access stuff at work from my home network?
Of course, this is my goal, to become a RHCE and work as a Linux network engineer somewhere.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"And don't let saleman Bob define how things must work. An overview, perhaps, but not cramming specs down tech's throats. Give them some freedom and power to play (which is what makes them good techs) and you will be amazed. But don't let them go nuts either. Know when to put the breaks on things. Finaly, make them feel part of the team, not the stepchildren you have hidden in the server room."
That is exactly how my previous company started treating the technical department. Like a red headed step child. The company VP would come downstairs (to where work was actually done) and order techs to empty garbage cans and shovel snow. These same people would then order us to work a weekend building 150 computers and not pay us any overtime.
Salespeople (like this aforementioned VP of sales and marketing) would sell stupid shit like a server with no backup or mirrored RAID array. Then we'd get blamed if the thing broke (a server like that not only will break but will lose all it's data when it does.
Towards the end, just before I left, the company had me start reviewing and designing specs that the salespeople were bidding. Which also took away from my time being able to work on actual technical tasks. Naturally half the time the managers would then revise my specifications to eliminate some kind of vital component (like an UPS).
This coincided with my annual review, which came out near maximum, and I got no raise offer at all, despite having more than 5 times more experience than the next most senior technician. That made me leave. Money may not buy happiness, but it will buy more tolerance for abuse among your employees.... afor awhile.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I used to work for Mount Union College and it was a great working environment with a great IS director. Everything was great except the compensation and medical benefits though, so eventually I did have to leave because I had to feed my family.
The point is, I wouldn't have left otherwise, it was the only thing that forced me out. Pay is way down on the list of my priorities as long as my family is comfortable with the pay I'll get. I think this is true for anyone who got into IT because it was something they liked doing. But you'll never stop those people who got into IT for the money that they thought was in it.
Now, if companies could replicate the college work environment there wouldn't be a discussion about this now...
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
Take this as a lesson in respect. It is better to show your appriciation of someone while they are there than it is to appriciate someone after they have left.
I have to admit that I have hopped from jobs in the past, and have even contemplated a move from my present employer from time to time do to bad management practices from the people above me. The point is that I am always appriciated after the fact, and never shown any appriciation in the present. Once I leave a place either many other people leave shortly after or the business goes downhill.
It's really upsetting when you leave and people call or write you afterwards saying, "gee, you were the best person we ever had." or "the jerk they replaced you with sucks." It makes me scratch my head when I try to figure out why these places would let good people go without some effort on their part to keep them.
Oh well, I guess it's just the Darwinian way to thin out the business gene pool.
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
Compensation time, like vacation time. If you work over normal hours for a project or whatever reason you should have the CHOICE to either receive overtime pay if one is eligeable to receive such, or compensation time for future use. (as a salaried technical manager I get no such option, but get a ratio of compensation time, 1 hour time off for every 2 hours over worked).
It all works out to flexability on the part of the employer to ensure that the employees have some control over their lives. If they need time off to spend with the family or extra money to pay a bill or whatever. Either way both sides win, the company gets the project completed and lowers the risk of turnover while the employee gets what they want in return for extra effort.
Sorry I wasn't more specific, I thought the term was well known.
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
This goes hand in hand with the old advice of ALWAYS keep your resume current and ready just in case. Even if I loved my job and felt entirely secure I would still keep my resume current and still look at the market every now and then to make sure I had the ability to move on just in case.
I don't do my employer much good when I stagnate, nor do I do any good for myself if I don't keep up. When I am not in some company sponsored training I train myself, I purchase and read books, I play around with different technologies, I do whatever I can to keep current and continually expand my knowledge. I do this not just because it improves my value, not just because it makes me a better employee, I do this in part because I like what I do and I always like to learn new things.
If you're happy just coasting along and willing to either wait for your employer to flip the bill or willing to sign away a year or so of your life for a class, go right ahead, I wouldn't.
Anyways, I agree with the parent post. A good portion of the spare time spent by a good IT professional is, and should be, spent learning. If the company does not front the dime for it, then do it to improve your marketability to move on.
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
My company trained an employee and watched him jump ship to our biggest competitor; in Louisiana, the judge laughed at the signed non-compete contract. But in Mississippi, he has recovered wages and training costs from one ex-employee and been paid handsomely by the company who hired two more to let them off the hook.
The principle in some states is that you cannot sign away your right to work in the field where you are equipped to earn your livelihood -- not for training, not for the finder's bonus you were paid, not for anything. Whereas in other places it is treated like any other contract.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Being an employee who recently received some valuable training, I can honestly say that, from most employee's perspectives, they will stay on at least for awhile out of respect for the training they received. It also helps if you give this training to new hires, or people who have only been with the company a short time, because they are less likely to leave. But in reality, if an employee is gonna jump ship right after they receive training, then they don't belong with you anyway. Because the bottom line is, they will jump ship eventually no matter what. Instead, I would work on making the workplace more inviting, by recognizing employees for their hard work, giving them financial incentives, etc. An employee who feels his/her work is valuable and respected--and feels he or she is getting properly promoted and rewarded--will probably be willing to ignore the better offers out there. I know in my case I have, and I'm happy.
Peter Seebach notes in his Hacker FAQ at http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html that: respect, admiration, compliments, understanding, discounts on expensive toys, and money are powerful motivators. Building from his ideas, I'd like to have a lab in which I could play. A few thousand dollars worth of computers and other equipment to work with would be nice. No, not for me to keep, or to take home, but just in a lab room somewhere at work. That, and the understanding that I would be free to work/play there as long as my other work was getting done would go a *long* way toward making me happier.
Actually, the high pay may eliminate some external stresses, but my experience has been that the higher pay, the more visibility, the larger the projects, and the higher the stress _at work_. Higher paying jobs also mean more work hours, less time to do personal stuff, which in turn can increase the external life stresses.
Basically, TANSTAAFL.
I've also found that the only job security (from working in the IT industry for almost 30 years now) is maintaining one's marketability.
...If it happens, it must be possible!
Regarding loans, retention contracts, etc... IMO, the difference is if it's employee selected training (like working on an advanced degree) vs. training that's necessary to maintain the explicit job function. In this case, a one week class hardly warrants the effort of all the hoo-hah and arm waiving, not to mention the probably mis-understanding of management intent by the employee. If it's a multiple-course curriculum, then such overhead may be appropriate.
...If it happens, it must be possible!
pay them money... money... money
I spent almost two years at an ISP in their sales team with this constant promise of being moved into tech where I belong. Everytime I threatened to leave, the promise came back but the job offer never really came. To really bust the bubble, they hired more sales staff and paid them more. As a sales agent, I took on work in four departments as well as handed in status reports on all of my projects technical and sales related weekly to my four various managers. The final straw was when I was put down for "not doing enough work". I finally left my company and am now an IT manager for a small insurance company that lets me go crazy and make their lives easier. My point to this little story is not about money or what I wanted to do..it was merely respect. My previous company, who I would've been very happy staying with, refused to show any respect towards what I did and rather than even attempt compensate me or pat me on the back, they just cracked the whip harder. The company I'm with now pays me nearly double what I want at my former company, though I would've worked there for a lot less. Why? The environment, the repsect, the fact that I have a voice. Listen to your employees and don't crack a whip on them too much, and they WILL be loyal.
This is a pet peeve, so I'm going to rant here.
Firstly, exit interviews are useless as data. To the employee who is leaving for a specific cause, chances are better than 50-50 they aren't going to tell you what that cause was. The wisdom on the street is to lie in your exit interview so that you don't burn any bridges.
Secondly, and more importantly, the exit interview is FAR TOO LATE to address the problem! By the time an exit interview happens, that employee has been disgruntled for between three months to a year (depending on their tolerance and the job market). If somebody leaves for reasons you could have fixed, that means you haven't been listening all along. To suddenly start listening on their last day is ironic and hypocritical.
--
This doesn't mean that individuals are allowed to disrupt work or disrupt teams. That's poison. But it does mean that if Jim doesn't want to fly on Sundays, it doesn't mean that Jim is your new Problem Child. Good employees will go the extra mile -- maybe they just won't go YOUR extra mile.
And so, if someone is good, your focus should first be on what you can do to enable them to do their good work on their terms. And if someone is not so good, your focus should be on what you can do to make them good. If they aren't good and can't be made good only THEN are they the Problem Child.
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I've seen an interesting variation on your (1) there. I and another person were getting good at particular jobs in a workplace. Another guy got hired to a sort of JOAT position- and immediately proceeded to grab most or all of the jobs we were doing, and then ended up not able to do all that right away. The other person is currently on a different assignment, and I took it as a sign that I needed to bail- and am contemplating doubling my price in case they continue to need to call me in after cutting the stability and predictability of the situation out from under me. I was good at what I did and it offended my sensibilities that this other person got allowed to romp in and replace me without anyone checking that he could do what he claimed, and so first I had to deal with being 'downsized' and then immediately had to deal with being called in anyhow. I can't work under those conditions and things are... negotiable at this point. If I stay it will be only because some aspect of the situation was improved for me- either the pay or the security and stability of the position or both. The pathetic thing is, there was really no reason to screw with that situation at all- it was working really well for everyone concerned, this one person just had boundary issues and couldn't refrain from grabbing big chunks of other people's jobs. I think that's a very good lesson to be learned- don't jerk people around for ego reasons or you might end up without the support you need- at the very least you risk losing any loyalty you've earned.
... and you'll have little turnover. Lots of those ways have been discussed here.
:-)
Pay a competitive wage.
Give workers flexibility.
Give your workers good tools and provide a comfortable work atmosphere. Each worker should have an office with a door that closes.
Make certain each worker has interesting, challenging projects to work on.
Recognize and promote talent.
This is a pretty tall order for an employer but if you do this, people will be beating down your door to get a job at your company. I know. I've worked for such a company for 3 years. I've been very lucky. But now, they want to go public and to do so they are taking steps to improve the appearance of profitability. Toward this end, many of the perks we've enjoyed are being eliminated. Guess what? Turnover has spiked. By eliminating perks, they are giving people an incentive to investigate whether they can get a better deal somewhere else.
Now, if you're running a company and you don't want to provide all this stuff but at the same time you recognize that turnover will kill you, there is another option. Hire older workers. They have considerably less job mobility.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
So, can I claim to be a "Unix Admin" because I've used/installed Red Hat and Mandrake for the last year plus, and acutally set up a FTP and telenet server on it so that myself and my friends can access stuff at work from my home network?
You can claim anything you want! Backing it up is another matter. All you have to do there is know enough that the PHB can't follow a technical discussion with you.
There are actually 'unix' shops out there where the serious 'professional' admins have done chmod -R 777 / to get rid of those pesky permission problems! Management doesn't know the difference because all of their admins are like that.
I find that the number of 'professionals' of that calibre in any given field makes a good index of labor shortage. Of course, as soon as supply meets demand, a bunch of these people will end up either in other lines of work, helpless desk (where they will continue to annoy competant coworkers), or as low level managers (based on the Peter Principle).
Fortunatly, it appears that you are taking the high road and will likely make the cut.
How they achieve this triplification of market value is another thing entirely. In my experience, people who know and use Unix are worth more than Window drones, mostly because you have to know what you're doing in order to use Unix to any larger degree.
Additionally, you are offending a lot of people by underestimating the unixishness of MacOS X.
--Bud
To me the employer / employee relationship is just like any other relationship that people are comming from two totally different perspectives. As the male/female relationships get John Gray and "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, maybe an "Employees are from Neptune, Employers are from Uranus" is warranted.
If the company NEEDS to have this training done, get it done and offer accomodations up front. Either way the company is going to have to pay for the talent either way. Maybe, like ask employees what makes them stay. Yes, prepackaged research can help but it might not catch the interests of your crew particular crew.
If it's money, offer it. Give them the little perks before training, pay for the training & give them the salary the way through, pay 2x the old salary (or 3x yearly minus training costs, whichever is higher) starting after the training finishes for a year then pay them market rate after that.
If the PHB's are still jittery, still offer that but ask them to sign a contract.
Did I say OS-X isn't Unix? Nope. I've used it a number of times, and I think its a rather amazing system and 100% unix where the command-line (non-gui) is concerned.
My point is you could be the world expert at administrating an OS-X system and it means NOTHING in the real world -- its not administrated, configured, secured or used the same way other Unix systems are. Any trained monkey can use a command line interface, that doesn't triple your workplace value. You get value as a system administrator by knowing how to properly manage, secure and administrate single servers and collections of servers.
There isn't another Unix in existance that is configured the way OS-X is. Saying otherwise demonstrates that you haven't spent a lot of time using it or even looking at it.
Ability to know what you're doing isn't that rare of a commodity in the workplace, contrary to what a lot of wannabe system administrators like to think. They have a belief that having fooled around with a few Unix variants as a hobby translates into real adminstration skills, which won't work in anything but the worst companies. Who wants to work for a compnay like that anyway?
The original poster has the same issue. He thinks that simply learning to use OS-X and do some very basic administrative talks via a CLI will make him a valuable system administrator. This just screams ignorance and a lack of understanding of the responsibilities of being a system administrator.
Pre-Linux that sort of attitude wasn't nearly as common. People who called themselves system administrators knew what they were doing in a lot of depth, not because they installed the system on their PC or took a week long training course.
Thats not a bad thing for the industry, since it drives the salaries of truely qualified individuals MUCH higher, but its bad for tech in general because that sort of lack of experience is what leads to system downtime, security breaches and other issues like that.
So maybe I offended some ignorant people with my post, but those people calling themselves unix administrators offends me.
...vaues time rather less than I do.
Why is 3 weeks of holiday per year considered generous? It's ridiculous. Half of that will disappear in random little things (take a day off to do errands, a couple of long weekends to go hiking, etc). One thing that companies here just don't seem to get is that time off is really nice. Give your employees 6 weeks off. DON'T pay them extra if they go a year without using it: force them to take it. Make sure that they can work from noon 'til midnight, or whatever hours they want. Making sure that your employees have plenty of time to enjoy the best part of their lives is virtually unheard of in the US, but once they're used to it, other companies will have a very hard time luring them away.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I like Orson Scott Card's take on this issue he's talking about programmers rather than sys-admin's but I think there are similarities.
Perhaps I mis-spoke somewhat here - it wouldn't be the first time I've done it.
The employee in question was a very smart person with a good amount of upside. She was being paid a reasonable amount of money for her current skill level and job requirements. She was doing well at the job, and, though she was not perfect (who is?), she was beginning to learn the more advanced skills she needed in order to progress at our company. She'd been in her fairly junior position for about a year, and had gotten two raises in that time.
Obviously, she thought she was ready, and the new employer did as well. One of the reasons that she was perceived as ready, though, was the new certification that we had paid to put her through. I expect she will adapt well and be worth every penny they give her as time goes by. But this particular person was not paid badly to begin with. We were paying a very good salary (given her age, relative skills, and background), paying for her college education, and her MCSE training. She then took the education we bought her that was intended to be for the benefit of both parties, and got another job. I'm not bitter about it - more power to her.
So there's the trade-off. An MCSE is seen as a career-enhancing certification. Personally, I value experience higher, but given the market (especially the NT sysadmin market), it's silly for everyone to hold as little value to the certification as I do (I remember far too many paper MCSE and CNE's over the years that couldn't figure out how to fix a loose connection if there was a big neon sign pointing to it, but I digress...), though - and there are things and skills to be gained for the employee by sitting in a class with other professionals that make it worthwhile.
But that training costs thousands of dollars. Is it unreasonable to expect that an employee stays long enough to let the employer gain some benefit from their investment? I like to think not. Requiring a year's commitment isn't ridiculous, and we're still sending employees for training - it's not holding anyone back. I wouldn't dream of letting us go in the opposite direction some companies do when trained people leave abruptly - cutting off all support for training whatsoever. That's ridiculous.
The carrot we offer the employee is free training and certification - potentially the equivalent of another $10K or so, and tax-free. And we'll pay for further certifications and updates on an ongoing basis. The stick is making them stick around for a year after getting the certification. If they don't let us gain benefit from the classes we pay for, what's the point of paying for it? Suggesting that the employee should simply get training, no strings attached, and have the employer pay is completely one-sided as well - for the employee's benefit. Ideally, we all need to meet in the middle.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I have a 4-person network staff at my company. We have had a company-wide policy since before my time that we would pay 100% of the cost of any college classes or professional certifications that are helpful to the job. We also give peoople a very nice work environment, good benefits, and competitive pay (not the top of the market, but pretty good compared to most). We also give my techies good toys to play with and a good deal of autonomy.
Anyhow, I sent two people through MCSE training - one in spring of 1999, and one in the fall of last year through winter. The first one who went was a fairly senior employee with loads of experience who already is commanding a pretty high salary. The other was a smart, but much less experienced person with a lower job level and salary accordingly (about right for her experience level, though, and she was getting regular raises). The experienced employee is still with us - the junior employee left a couple of months ago to go to a communications company at a substantial increase in pay.
Did I think she was ready for the job she took? No, not yet. Certification is nice as a checklist item, and the training process is useful, but you need real-world experience, too - and she didn't really have enough for the role yet. I expect she'll ultimately do very well there because she's a fast learner, but based on her current skills I couldn't have offered her equivalent pay to stay. However, she was being paid reasonably well, and did leave only a few months after completing MCSE training.
The bottom line for us out of this affair was that our company will still pay for education, but we have now added a 1-year requirement - they have to stay for at least a year after taking their final test for any sort of certification. We aren't counting the sort of periodic training that we send people to that isn't on a certification track, simply because those sort of classes aren't really resume checklist items.
Is it a little disappointing to add this policy? Yes - I liked the old way of just paying for everything, unconditionally. But one thing the prospective trainee doesn't realize sometimes is that companies that do train their employees are paying for it - in money spent and in time given up. We do this hoping that we can use the skills the employee gains to benefit the company. If they turn that training into another job immediately, then it's unfair to the company that just paid for the classes. The bargain we now require is "we'll pay you reasonably and pay for your advancement - but you have to promise us that you'll let us get some benefit from our investments".
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
And your organization matches. I've interviewed at places like that, and couldn't get out the door fast enough. Usually the phone interview is enough, but once or twice I've gone face to face.
Employees who put up with bosses like you and jobs like yours are not good creative quality employees. They are self-losers to tolerate that kind of bullshit.
Furthermore, such contracts aren't legal. Fat chance getting anything out of an employee who quits short of that one year mark. Again, any employee who believes that kind of threat isn't a good worker to start with.
Cracking the whip may work on slaves, but people who stay at a job voluntarily are much more productive and pro-active.
I bet most of your employees spend their time looking for ways to shift blame and responsibility, either up or sideways. Any problem comes up, they dodge and weave, duck and cover. Any one with initiative has long since left.
--
Infuriate left and right
Perhaps a 20 year Unix veteran admin would be worth triple, but going thru some admin course and memorizing the minimum man pages for a few commands is no substitute for those 20 years.
Maybe yon newbie could fake his way into such a job for triple pay, but it wouldn't last long.
Think about it in pure econmics terms -- if mere coursework tripled pay, world and dog would be lining up for it. How long would it stay secret? The mere fact that it hasn't happened should be proof enough it's not going to happen.
--
Infuriate left and right
> The role of the State is to make a level playing field for everybody
Maybe in your world. In mine it's to protect me from external enemies and those seeking power through coercion, and not a hell of a lot more. All men are created equal, doesn't mean they stay that way.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Not about the money?
I don't know about you, but if it weren't for the fact that my employer gives me money, I doubt I would take the trouble to go to work every day.
All the other stuff is nice and dandy, but money is the reason people work. Employees will NOT refuse a $90K job because they like the $30K job that comes with a ping pong table and a $10K performance based "bonus".
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The role of the State is to make a level playing field for everybody, so no one is disadvantaged for being "nice". Since every company (cough) pays taxes, everyone will pay for the training, and everyone will benefit.
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
It really depends on if you are in a "Right to Work" state. I'd still watch the contracts though. I do consulting as a side biz, and I've had a few try to get me to sign the standard employee rag simply because I was on retainer. While Indiana is a "Right to Work" State, some conservative judges or arbitrators won't think this way.
/.?) and repeatedly warns me that a contract is and was always supposed to be a negotiated instrument. Companies don't like to think like that and write contracts based on whats the best for them.
If there is something in your contract you don't like, strike it and return it back to the employeer for review. A good friend of mine is a Patent Lawyer in DC (is that a swear word on
Rewrite the argued statements and negotiate. If State Law says one thing, but you agree to another, ya deserve what ya get.
clif
I think these lists combined together include about every thing I care about except flexible schedules and vacation times. Also I feel I'm friends with everyone in the company to some extent so I'd not be likely to want to move somewhere I don't know anybody just for a little extra cash. I'm very pleased with my job currently even if the pay isn't that great yet. I'm willing to wait for the company to grow before I make a lot more $.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
To a very limited extent, this sort of thing works. Foosball, Playstations, etc. have an immediate effect on morale. However, it falls off quickly. In the kind of environment you're describing (typical startup) you've got tons of work to do, and are probably already short-handed. Adding these diversions will not help your ability to be productive if people are playing on them all the time.
I just recently left a company that had this philosophy. My pay was roughly half of what I'm worth in the real world, I had great healthcare that didn't cost me a dime, a very relaxed dress code (not naked was the code), free soda/coffee/spring water, etc. The perks were cool, but didn't make up for the fact that I was making about HALF of what I could make somewhere else. All of this stuff is nice, but each and every one of us is still at some level "coin operated".
I left that place. They're starting to tank now, so all of my stock (I was there long enough to exercise my options) makes a lovely wall hanging.
I seriously considered the idea of IC, to get the extra time off, but then I got an offer I couldn't refuse.. With my base plus commissions on what my sales guys sell, plus bonuses, I'm back at my market rate. It's a big company, has good benefits - in fact, just as good as the benefits I just left..
BTW - you say you're reluctant to go back to IC.. Why? That's what dice.com & headhunters are for. Work smarter...
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The unsig!
If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
You should work in academia -- it pays less, but has more perks (depending on where you are) than a typical company.
You generally start out with a lot more time off, and also get more holiday time at the university level. I'm currently making 75% of the salary I know I could get on the open market, but its nice to work in an environment that's as over-all casual (dress, attitude, schedules) as a university.
No 80-hour/week death marches, no bankruptcy (no stock options either), and I started with 4-5 weeks of vacation my first year (plus 2-3 weeks of sick leave, 1 week of "personal leave" and comp time). My friends might be making more money, but its nice to wake up and say "I'm gonna take off two weeks next month and go hiking" without worrying that its the only time you'll have all year, or that you'll come back to find your job is gone. I know I've still got another few weeks worth of time if I should want it...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
As an employer, you've got your head in the sand if you think that training an employee is a cheap way to get skills. $1000 worth of training will get you (1000/(Hourly Market Rate of Skill)) hours of free skill use for your company before the employee realises that he should get a pay rise or look elsewhere for another job. I've been on many training courses, and they've often been touted by trainers, during the course, as a great way to get a pay rise or a higher paid job.
Let's face it, there's not exactly a shortage of employers looking for Technology employees.
Certain aspects about your company may delay this. It is only a delay, however, until your employees find something tempting enough to leave.
AC Said:
I don't get it. What's the difference between administrating Darwin and other Unices?
I don't get it either... care to elaborate?
you are offending a lot of people by underestimating the unixishness of MacOS X.
Well, I'm not personally offended, but I think there's hell of a lot of "UNIX" people out there that don't realise:
The Mac OSX CLI is a shell, just like any UNIX shell. If you want to run bash then you can, if csh is your thing then run that.
If you want to run vi or emacs, you can.
If you look at the file system structure then it follows the UNIX structure (/etc,/usr,/tmp,/var etc...)
The Mac OS-X kernel is based on BSD, that's pretty UNIXy to me! (1977 - CSRG?, 4.4BSD-Lite --> BSD/OS,FreeBSD,NetBSD,OpenBSD --> Mac OS X... ring any bells?)
What got me was the fact that Apple didn't have the foresight to supply a contrib CD with GNU tools.
UNIX has many different flavours: Solaris, HPUX, Linux (Yes, I consider Linux a UNIX), BSD (Free,Net & Open) + all those others each with it's own little foibles... add to that Mac OS-X.
It seems that the old-school management still cling to the notion that employees do not discuss compensation packages with each other.
I know that, for the most part, all the geeks I work with will happily disclose their salary and compensation history with the company.
I have yet to see a potential employment contract that indicates I cannot do this.
ANd it's true.. one unhappy person can spread a vast amount of unrest!
I was in a similar situation a while ago. I was generally happy, but kind of suspected that a lot of other, less qualified people were gettin gpaid a lot more than me. It turned out to be true. What made matters worse, is that when I talked to all of these people, even those older than me, every single one of them was under the impression that I got paid a *lot* more than them, and they viewed me as a very senior and knowledgeable part of the staff. That's when I realized that, in no uncertain terms, I was getting the short end of the stick.
Actually, that's the kind of notion that you should learn to dispell.
Just because you maintain the equipment does *not* imply a de-facto right to see documents not meant for your eyes, whether or not it's easy from a technical perspective. As far as the company is concerned, things like personell files are for the eyes of the authorized HR employees (or whoever) only.
Believe me. You *never* want your management to think you abuse your position and snoop around.
Also.. in many cases, it is appropriate, and I've actively encouraged this, to set up completely separate subnetworks for HR, where I know no passwords, no nothing. I train one of their people on the tasks they need to deal with, and ensure that I am not left alone with the HR data ever. Why? It both gives me a legal leg to stand on, should I get accused, and it builds trust within the company.
Perhaps in your chosen sub-field of systems administration, MCSE is useless. I can relate.. I don' t and probably won't ever do it either.
MCSE is not a liability on a resume, no matter what you may think. It depends on the rest of the resume, and what's there. If it's listed at the bottom, behind your other skills.. that's great. It's something else you've done. Certainly those 'I'm an MCSE so that's all I need on my resume' resumes go in the bin.
I think that's the point right there though.. about choice. I posted elsewhere about it.. but you are right. THere is a big difference between being given the option of training, and being told you must do the training.
That's all part of getting the details sorted out *before* you get into the job, though.
I realize that OS X is BSD, yes. I'm just saying that it seems doubtful that a single course in 'OS X admin' will qualify you as a unix administrator. Also, how much of that admin course is specific to osx? (XML property lists, etc, as you say). Does the course focus on unix, or does it focus on apple's innovations with osx?
It goes both ways.
Given that training will make you more 'valuable', your employer shoudl consider two things.
1) If you *are* more valuable, you should be appropriately compensated.
2) Make the payback for training costs (even if the money is loaned by the company), paid back over a set period of time (negotiate this). THis doesn't mean you have to actually be out money; consider it that you owe them money, and this debt automatically decreases over time. YOu are alwyas free to take another job if you pay them out. This should cover the full cost of training.
An employer that suggests some sort of employment contract ammendment in exchange for training.. that's just FAIR! I have been through this, it's not in the LEAST bit 'mean' or 'keeping employees by contract'. It's called COVERING YOUR ASS. The logic is simple: You don't throw money away.
And I don't throw time away. Without such a contract, what prevents an employee from doing many thousands of dollars in training, and then walking? Even if the contract only guarantees six months (which may be what the employer determins it takes to cover his costs of training, ie, he would otherwise have to bring in outside help), it is enough time for the employee's new skill to be judged, and a new contract to be issued.
Also.. and I have to say this... part of the problem is overvaluation, or undervaluation, of what people think they do, or what employer sthink they do. If one little course makes you worth 'twice as much', you must not know much in the first place, or perhaps you don't value what you currently do enough.
Re-training on the UI for OSx will *NOT* make you a 'de-facto' unix admin. I'm sorry. No more than simply learning how to install linux will make you a 'de-facto' unix admin.
I'm not saying you can't do it, but what about the course? how much of it teaches real unix concepts? How mac-centric is it? How much of what this course will teach is like traditinoal unix, or is it just using a cli to do custom apple things?
Do you think that someone who has taken a mac osx course is somehow magically competent to go admin a solaris network?
The question is whether or not the company *requires* you to get the training. If they REQUIRE it, and also try to force you into an employment-term contract.. that's bullshit.
If they OFFER it, but you are under no pressure to accept it, then it's perfectly fair.
Keeping Employees by Keeping them Happy.
Sounds like you really get it.
Too bad more bosses don't.
The general gist of the story is that the cost of hiring replacement employees is far higher than any amount generally that would be spent keeping employees happy. BEers, lunches, goodies.... the total cost of these for the department woudl be dwarfed by teh cost of replacing even 1 or two employees.
I can't seen how requiring a 1-year contract for training is going to be a long-run winner for a company. Perhaps the company can tie down the newly skilled employee at their current pay, but the employee is sure going to resent this arrangement, and fly the coop as soon as the contract is up, or perhaps bite the bullet and leave even sooner. Then the company is going to be back in the same boat all over again. In addition there are going to be employees that just flat refuse to sign the contract - and these folks will not get the training the company needs to be competitive.
The only way that is going to work is if the company bites the bullet and pays a fair price for the new skills.
That's why I'm incorporated, and invoice my employer as a service provider.
I pay no sales tax on company expenses, expenses are deducted from revenues and help lower taxable income, and income is split three ways: company, salary, dividends. Throw in 5-10K per year in RSP's and other placements, and you're all set. I do not come _near_ paying 50% taxes! You just have to know how to play the system!
There are lots of ways. The problem described - how to keep people after they have learned a lot more and become more valuable - can be attacked by refering to the English management author, R. Meredith Belbin (see e.g. his company's home page). (Belbin's ideas are interesting for a number of reasons: he has a team role theory that in my opinion is more sutiable for describing teams than the MBTI, and he has a tounge-in-cheek form in his writing that I think should appeal to Dilbert fans. He refers, for instance, to something called BS 9000. But I digress.)
Consider two dimensions characterizing an employee: 1. Eligibility (i.e. formal background for doing a job). Those who take the course in question will hopefully become eligible for the job. 2. Suitablity (i.e. the attitudes, habits, and other personality characteristics required). Brought together, one may discover sense into a pattern:
Eligible & suitable Disappointing Ideal candidates move to greener pastures
Eligible but unsuitable The real problems The poor fits are reluctant to move and become difficult
Ineligble but Suitable Surprise fits perform surprisingly well In the job by accident, contended and staying put
Ineligible and unsuitable No problem Total misfits leave of own accord
This in fact coinsides with the much more scientifically valid writings of Mihaly Csikszetmihalyi (look him up in your favorite web-bookstore, his most well-known work is called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. His thesis is this:
In order for a task to be so interesting as to put the executor of the task into a state of flow (by some known as Deep Hack Mode), there must be an optimal mismatch between the skill that the task requires, and the skill that the executor possessess. This optimal mismatch is individual. Below this mismatch, the job is boring, above this mismatch, the job is frustrating.
So what might the employer do? Lots of things of course. Increasing wages and piling on gravy train benefits are obvious options (and should not automatically be ruled out by alternatives). But the employeer (any employer!) who wants to keep his or her staff should make sure that the job always requires a little bit more. After training, the employees match the task better. The employer better make sure the job doesn't match the employees too well!
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
"Yeah right, a 7+ year A+ tech with Novell, NT and Linux experience isn't worth more than $10/hr?"
:-)
Hey! I make $5.25/hr!
Hmm...but I work at Subway so that kind of makes sense...
Heh, carry on.
A DC is probably paid less than an IC who can negotiate well, but it is a great option for mediocre negotiators or people who don't want to incorporate, market, and handle paperwork themselves.
Yes, I am a DC.
--The basis of all love is respect
Training in technology only has a short term value: as an investment it depreciates just as fast as any other piece of computer technology. A company who poaches trained employees instead of doing its own training will leave those employees with outdated skills. Better to work for less in a company that makes a credible promise to keep your skills up to date. And the first step in making that promise is... provide training.
The second step is to put together a career development program which shows people how they will progress if they stay with you, and then make it real.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
[In a high-pitched, nasal voice]
I don't understand all this fuss over retraining tamed employees. Why are we taming them in the first place? Doesn't anyone else think this is a dubious use of psychoactive drugs?
And one more thing. There's the question of retraining at all. If you hire these people to do what they're good at, why not let them keep doing it? You're throwing away years of...
[Whisper from off-screen]
Oh, "retaining trained" employees.... Nevermind.
Of course, people started leaving like mad. It was getting pretty bad for a while. Morale was low, other people were actually talking to headhunters when they called.
The official response: All exit interviews had to be forwarded to the VP Engineering and new questions had to be asked. No effort was made to preemptively keep people from leaving, they just asked people (who of course wouldn't answer truthfully) WHY they were leaving. How ridiculous!
There are two things that came from this policy.
First, was resentment. Most workers there saw this as an attempt to endenture them. My friend avoided training whenever possible. And when another company came along with an offer he decided to take - the old company was unable to match it. And they tried - they made a very excellent counter offer. But in the end, he remembered what KIND of company he was working for and was more than happy to leave it behind.
So how did he ditch the required pay-back? The new company's offer included an adjusted sign-on bonus that paid for his previous "debt".
Too a good techie, training is a motivator. It is valuable to the employee, and can also improve the effectiveness of the company. Makeing it a tool to lock in employees only creates resentment. This makes your valued people easier for another company with deep pockets, and also starving for good people, to raid.
The perception created by this policy was the attempt to create a financial incentive to stay with the company for a specific time in exchange for training. Something along the lines of "I'd leave... but then I would owe them X dollars and I can't afford that." In this case (and in many others I've heard of), it didn't work that way. The new company had made its offer and then increased its offer to cover the buy-off of the employee's training. The employee got everything they were origionally offered and the raiding company got a valued employee. It was no barrier to the employee leaving.
So to recap... with today's shortage of good technical personnel, such a policy does not stop an employee from leaving. Its also very likely that such a policy generates resentment and provides a reason for an employee to leave.
Granted, the employer gets to retain their training funds - but that doesn't take into account for the lost time to find a new (scarce) qualified replacement and train them. Is it really a benifit to anyone involved?
He said it would triple their market value, i.e. Y=3X.
He didn't say what Y was. He didn't say what X was.
You clearly have an opinion as to what Y realistically could be. OK. Solve for X.
"Ouch."
Yeah, doing Mac support is not terribly lucrative right now.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Funny you should mention that. At my company, when someone leaves, we see the same letter over and over again, but with a different name. MS should make a "Resignation Wizard" for situaitons like that.
Inform people when there are leavers
.. I find that the best way, besides money, is to provide a plesent working environment. Don't restrict employees to cubicles -- sit down with the talent and say 'Alright, how do you want your workspace to look?' They will be much more happy working in an environment that they had at least a small part in designing.
Second, make sure that they KNOW you appreciate their work. I currently work as a freelance employee for GameSpy Industries. Because I don't live in California, I work from my home. And I can tell you right now, it is the best job that I've had. Not only is it working in an area that I have both a lot of knowledge in, and pure interest, but my contact with my boss(es). If I have an idea, I send one of them an ICQ msg, and we talk it over. If they have concerns, they let me know. I don't know if this is simply a bi-product of telecomutting, but the openness in communication really goes A LONG WAY.
------------
CitizenC
My name is not 'nospam,' but 'citizenc'.
If you take it out of the last paycheck. You aren't paying a lot for training. Many commercial training courses cost a lot more than one paycheck. And the cost of airfare, room and board etc. to get the person to the training site, often exceeds the cost of the course itself.
If the cost is in excess of what their last paycheck do you go after them? Do people strategically time their quitting so as to minimize the amount of money they lose. I'd bet you get a lot of people that don't bother with giving two weeks notice. If you have outstanding training costs then you would in essence be working for free.
I would only sign a contract like this if I have no other choice. To me it is like becoming an indentured servant.
My Weblog
for the exact same reasons. They want us dumb and in their employ. Also, if they train us, they'd have to pay us more...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Think about contractors and other service-providers you've worked with in the past. If you've had much experience with them, then you've probaby seen some gung-ho folks who really know what they're doing and are eager to make sure you're happy. You've probably also seen some who don't know what they're doing, are very unhelpful, and just want you out of their hair. If you low-ball your technichal staff, they're going to get out of there, and you're going to be left with bad employees.
It's very true that money is NOT the only consideration, but it is easily the most persuasive. You will not succeed if your employees are grossly underpaid, and neither will you succeed if your employees are grossly underqualified. If the management at your company can't grasp this, maybe it's you who should be looking for another job.
so basically, we should reward people who are too lazy to pay for their own self-improvement; people who are too shortsighted to invest money in their futures. and while we're at it, lets reward them with my money!
/. posts I haven't read yet. every ounce of technical knowledge I have today I developed either on the job or on my own time and money. I have no obligation to improve people who don't have the interest to improve themselves.
possibly the most asinine thing I'll read today, but then again there are a lot of
the role of the state is to define some rights for people and protect those rights for everyone. it should be pretty obvious if -- say, youre alive, conscious, and observing (which I imagine you must not be) -- that the state has no real interest in creating a level playing field, nor should it.
I've been a consultant since April 1, 1998. I was hating life for years before that, but my life as a consultant is rapidly closing in on the longest job I've held with one company - my own.
Speaking as one company to another - here's everything I know about finding clients - or everything I knew at the time I wrote it, it could use some updating:
Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants
And for everyone to read - you ever deal with those pesky headhunters?
Important Note to Recruiters and Contract Agencies
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Anyway, what I wanted to say was that high-tech is an expensive business and high-tech talent is hard to come by, the people who have the talent have to work long and hard to get the skills they possess and so they deserve to be richly rewarded.
If your business model does not allow you to pay your employees fairly and still remain profitable, you need to reevaluate your business model.
One suggestion might be to shut down your business and sell real estate or something.
Another suggestion would be to provide the training in command-line interfaces to your Mac OS X techs, and continue beyond that to cover Unix training of all sorts, so you can take on customers who are running "dot-com" web applications and are likely to be willing to pay more for service, and require it in higher quantities, than the typical home, education and small business consumer that is going to be using a Mac.
You should bring this question up in Apple's forums too - it's something Apple needs to address, because if end-users aren't going to be able to get their Macs serviced because all the techs have taken higher paying jobs doing something else, then Apple's not going to be able to sell Macs.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
While it is often in your employer's best interests to train you, and you should evaluate opportunities for training when selecting a new job, don't ever allow yourself to lapse into the belief that all of your training is your employer's responsibility.
At the very best, your employer will train you for what is required for you to perform your current job, or to allow your company to take on tasks that no one knows how to do yet. You won't be trained in things that will allow you to advance out of your current rank within the company, to find a better job at a new company - or importantly, to recover from losing your job.
Think you can't be fired? Well, maybe so. But your company could tank or lose enough money you have to be laid off. Always be prepared for this.
As a consultant, I keep canceled checks and receipts for technical books that I purchase for my own self-training. Most of my training comes from reading these books, websites on programming, participating in newsgroups on programming topics of interest to my work at hand or future work I'd like to do, and contributing to open source projects like the ZooLib cross-platform application framework.
As a self-employed businessperson, I can deduct my technical books as a business expense, so I know how much I spend each year on my books. In 1999, I spent about $750 on technical books alone, in 1998 I spent about $250.
You should spend a significant amount of your free time when you're away from work doing self training. Otherwise you may find that your skills are regarded as out of date and you're not able to get a job, or you cannot get a job with pay appropriate to your level of experience - fifteen years of experience in a language no one uses anymore won't get you anywhere, but fifteen years of experience as a programmer where you've picked up a new language and a few new API's each year and you'll be very salable.
Also see my advice Study Fundamentals not APIs, OSes or Tools.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The company I currently work for takes a slightly different approach to this situation. When it comes to training, there are two routes we can take in the company. Basically, for vendor service we have to meet different requirements (i.e. for Microsoft MCSP status we must have 2 MCSEs, for Apple Service Center 1 Apple Certified Tech per location, for Compaq Server Service 1 ASE company wide and two ACTs at each location, etc). If our company's status as a provider for a vendor comes under jeopardy for needing a certified technician, they target the most likely candidate for retention and send them to the classes / testing. What this results in are a few technicians that have been with the company a long time and have numerous certifications, backed by a large team of uncertified technicians who will be with the company, on average, one and a half years.
The second route is one that I have been using. Basically, the company will pay for any test that I want to take, and will even compensate me for books that I purchase as long as I leave them with the company when I am done with them. Since tests are only $100 on average and most of our employees take maybe 1 test a month, that works out well for them. If you want training, you are on your own. I am fortunate in this respect because my background experience and current client list provide me with more hands on experience than I could ever get in a classroom, and I am usually over qualified for the tests I take. I have been taking on average 2-3 tests a month and have become certified in an ungodly amount of things.
Point of all this being, I have become essential to several of the company's qualifications without signing any commitment agreements since the company has not payed for any training. If I were to leave, they would send off several techs to training in order to cover the gaps. The glory of the system is that it works out economically for the company.
So, if your company is not worried about turnover, and not concerned about individuals, then that is the easiest and most efficient way to go about it.
Although many markets in the North and in the West are in need of IT professionals and have amazing benefits, in the South East (Florida) it is a cutthroat market.
And, just for the record, I don't expect to break the 1.5-year tradition and have already begun a job search.
Don Pezet
MCSE+i, CCA, CCNA, Master ASE, Network+, A+, Blah, Blah, and Blah+
(Yes, I really have those)
As far as contracts that don't allow you to leave at all, methinks that would not stand up in court. There may be repercussions from leaving, but certainly they can't legally force you to stay?
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
Plus, the bosses won't let the secrataries go to **FREE** computer training seminars given by the university, because, "we have an admin you can just ask him." ... so I spend 2 hours a day showing people how to attach shit in outlook and meanwhile we haven't backed up in 6 mos :)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
1:) They paid for the course and subsequent exam.
2:) I agreed to stay with the company for at least 12 months afterwards.
The interesting bit was what would actually happen if and when I left the company; for example, if I left three months after the training, I would pay back 75% of the fees, if I left six months after the training, I would pay back 50% of the fees, etc, etc.
Of course, after the twelve months contract expires, I am free to do whatever I wish - in my employer's words, "We have had our moneys' worth after that anyway!".
"Hmmm... they have the Internet on computers now ?" - Homer Simpson
"Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wuntime ewwors!" - Elmer Fudd
I work at Best Buy, a multi billion dollar company, as a tech. I make shit for money, and don't really do any "real" tech work beyond installing ram, but this is Best Buy's solution:
They will pay for your A+ test as long as you stay on for a year. Fair deal I say. Another major player that does it is gateway country - You get a computer when you get a job, but if you leave before a year's out, you have to pay the pro-rated balance.
So: My proposed solution is pay for the training, but make the emplyees sign a form that says if they jump ship in less than a year, or 2, or whatever, they have to pay a pro-rated ammount of the training cost, i.e. if the contract is 2 years, the training costs $1,000, and they ditch at 1 year, they owe you $500.
insert clever line here
sig?
Don't get aggressive about that. It's a Federal felony.
18 USC 1584: Whoever knowingly and willfully holds to involuntary servitude or sells into any condition of involuntary servitude, any other person for any term, or brings within the United States any person so held, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
Employment contracts have run into this provision. Some states have tougher laws, too.
I'm on the other side of that issue, as an
owner and employer in a small internet company.
What staff cost in the big picture vs what they
bring in is always a big question. In a small
shop that leads very quickly to scale of operations,
business focus and my ability as manager to
keep it humming.
We've learned that you have to pay pretty much
the going rate in your area. **Then** you can
talk about quality of life and benefits,
flexibility and training, health club, AND
the challenges, etc....
Those extras will attract and keep the best people
but only if the pay is there. At least for top
level people, the challenge is critical too. Are
they going to learn management (OS-X or whatever
their personal goals)? The fit **must** be there
both for leaders and production staff.
That jibes pretty well with what the local
headhunters tell me too.
We're about to hire someone that will start at
twice what I make as owner. Personally I don't
have a problem with that; in theory at least I
own the shop. But it will create problems up
and down the line with everyone else - including
my wife.
Still, once I decided that mediocrity was not
going to cut it, only the best I could find would
do. So my challenge as manager will be to double
the scale, refine the business, and bring up the
level of the other staff (and clients). The
alternative is we won't get and keep good staff
and will ultimately go out of business.
If the owner of your business is really committed
to training and increasing your skills and value,
then he must also commit himself to doing **more**
with you. Doing that in a {stable|declining}
market, Mac services, is a tough nut.
We use a rather standard approach, we offer training at company expense, but require the employee to work for us for a year after the training, at the same performance level. The contract is lengthy, but in essence, if we train you in a field or subject that would benefit us and the employee (making him/her more likely to seek employment elsewhere),the employee will repay the cost of training out of their last paycheck if they fail to remain with us for a year. This year timeframe is a rolling window based upon the last training received. Job performance must not decline. That is to say, we provide you with MSCE training and pay for your expenses, then you deceide to "get out of the contract" by showing poor performance in hope of being terminated and eliminating your responsibility for repayment, well, we have excellent lawyers. This is to protect the investment we have made in our employees. Good employees are the main asset any company has, although some places do not realize this. We are not trying to be mean, it just makes sense to protect company investments. Few people can afford the high cost of training when working at subsistance levels. (These levels are not the result of being poorly paid, but arise from the American problem of not saving enough money.) I am able to save 25 percent of my take home pay, but my co-workers are always broke and going into greater debt on a daily basis. They need new cars, fine clothes, rent their places to live and generally are not fiscally responsible. These folks want instant gratification. But this is a different topic, and I digress...
If there is any significant amount of money involved, I would consider this inappropriate. If the company selects the training program, they pay for it; otherwise, there is too little incentive for them to make a good choice, and it opens up employees to all sorts of possibilities for abuse and fraud. If we are only talking a few thousand dollars, it should make no difference to the company anyway.
If the company trains you and adjust your salary and working conditions appropriately, you shouldn't be any more likely to leave after the training than before. If they don't, that should be their problem, not yours.
Forcing employees to take on is business expenses like that looks like just a transparent attempt to tie employees to your company at substandard wages or substandard working conditions. It smells of the kind of financial abuses migrant farmworkers or people who sign into iffy marketing schemes are subject to.
I hope you are honest about your policies with new hires before they sign up. In fact, you could save people more time by just letting us know what your company is so that they don't apply.
A better approach would be to incentivize employees to stay. Something like: after the training, your salary will be subject to the normal pay increases. But a year after completion of training, you will receive an additional 10% raise, together with a bonus or options valued at 15% of your current salary.
With that kind of approach, the cost and value of the training is properly accounted for by the company and there is no incentive for the company to cheat or force employees to accept unreasonably costly training. The risk of the employee is limited to the value of his new training to the company: if he leaves, he loses exactly as much money as his new training is worth to the company over a year.
with robots. Then program them to never want to work for another country.
My previous employer, a VAR type computer house that mostly served state government in West Virginia, changed training policies while I was there. We always had to train ourselves, but at least the company would pay for the tests (I think this is the LEAST an IT employer should do).
:)
When we had some engineers leave (Our CNE among them) the payroll of course went down. The company then started talking out of both sides of it's mouths "yes we NEED you to get more certifications, then "we don't want to pay for your tests then have you leave".
They started asking for a 1 year contract to pay for ANY test at all. Then for any kind of training assistance, ANY kind (even for CNE which the company needed badly) they wanted a 2 year contract. When I wrote one up that read that I was guaranteed to be employed for 2 years and see reasonable raises, and that I was free of the contract if the company laid me off for any reasons, they had a SHIT fit.
Not only that, but when my annual evaluation came up, I got near perfect marks, but no offer of a raise. That's why I'm now in North Carolina
In response to the specific situation: Your company NEEDS better trained people to grow. It's an investment that has to be made. Yes, they have to risk losing people, but if they are honest with them and give them what raises they can WHEN they can, I think they will retain most people.
But, the company has to be realistic. IF someone gets experience/certifications that are worth $50K in the industry, and you are only paying them $25K, they are going to leave. And there is nothing you can do to stop it, because only an idiot will work under contract for that much less than they are worth.
This is the mistake my old company made, they stopped being forthcoming with training and cert tests, stopped giving raises, and their best talent is leaving, and the only new people they can hire is raw talent with no experience (who then leave after getting experience)
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"DOH! You get what you pay for.
Wages are the bottom line for any employer-employee relationship. Anyone who says otherwise is deluding himself."
Wages are the bottom line if the employer is grossly underpaying people (like paying veteran A+ techs barely more than 1/2 the prevailing wage). Otherwise it's just one of several factors.
At my previous company, they simply started refusing to pay ANY technician, regerdless of experience more than $10/hr, and they didn't pay you any overtime at all (it was pro-rated). They also thought nothing of having us work an entire weekend on a mass build (150 machines).
This pissed off a lot of people, and cost us 2 engineers and 2 very veteran techs within 3 months. I ended up being the only guy with more than 3 years experience left, and my eval came up and they did the same thing to me: no raise. I left and am now in NC.
Not to say that money is the ONLY criteria. Personally, I want a good work enviornment where there aren't any unrealistic expectations, good people to work for and with, and management that don't walk around like a bunch of buzzword-spouting paper pushing drones.
I also judge a company by the people they put around me. Where I worked before I was the last experienced technician left. So basically I was having to provide the training for all the new "green" people which were all that they could hire for what they were paying. When they refused to give me any raise at all at my annual eval, that was my cue to skedattle.
I didn't even start THINKING about how little I made until this happened. It's my former employer's loss. When what you do is thrown back in your face with "you aren't worth a raise" when you worked as hard as I did, you look at your salary as the score of the game, and see you don't have enough points.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"he had hired five new employees, all of whom has less experience than I, and all of whom has fewer job resposibilities than I. Every single one of the new hires was paid between $1 and $7/hour more than he paid me, even after a "generous" (to him) raise."
This brings up a good point. Companies that do this are going to have an entire disgruntled staff. Managment often deludes themselves into thinking that you won't "know" that someone else junior to you without as much experience makes the same or more than you, but that is FANTASY. The rest of the staff ALWAYS knows.
Going back to my personal experience, when I got my annual review, with high marks and NO raise offer, I was 2nd in the entire company in time with the company (and 2nd only by 3 months). The VP pled poverty, then the Operations manager told me that I wasn't worth any more money.
Yeah right, a 7+ year A+ tech with Novell, NT and Linux experience isn't worth more than $10/hr?
I also found out that another tech, after his 90 day review, got a $3/hr raise to make what I made ($10/hr). Though I personally felt he deserved it (he came in raw and was getting very good), I also resented the fact that the company wouldn't even find $1 more for me, especially when I was being asked to TRAIN the new raw people (because they wouldn't pay enough to hire veterans).
Come to find out the main reason I didn't get a raise is because I'd have ended up making more than my 2 immediate supervisors.. Which speaks poorly of them. And of the company's chances. It either won't be there in 6 months, or will have nothing but entry-level people. And that won't sell in IT.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
If you are a manager or business owner and you are concerned about retaining employees after training them, then instead of looking at forcing them to sign contracts you might want to take another look at the way you interview and hire people instead.
As I've said, contracts are a scary thing, I know I wouldn't sign one. But, I really hate the idea of looking for another job also, so long as the company I work for treats me reasonably well.
When you need to hire someone, instead of looking purely at skills or experience, you may wish to look at their personality instead. Why did they get into IT. What do they want to do in the future. What type of people they like to work with. What type of company they want to work for.
If you find a person who is an ideal or close fit to your culture, (if you have one), And if that person likes what they do and you feel confident that they will like doing their work for your company then you will have little to worry about when you send that person to training.
Employment is a two way street, both sides should be happy with each other and both sides should gain in the arrangement. If employment turns out to be a parasitic relationship on one side or the other, it's a losing deal for both sides.
The point is, improve the selection process or the basic retention practices instead of going after the quick fix like contracts.
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
Get real, learning an OS-X CLI and how to administrate OSX won't give you any noticable increase in market value in the real world. You still won't know how to administrate a "real" Unix, won't have any "real" training, won't have any "real" experience. It takes a LOT more than a couple weeks training to be a qualified Unix system adminstrator, especially when that training is on a heavily modified variant of a Unix that isn't widely used in real enterprise environments anyway. There would be almost no skills transfer from OS-X to other Unixes.
Thats the way to get them to pay for the training -- educate them on the real lack of value that such training represents and point out to them that any of their employees that think that the addition of that skill set would significantly increase their value in the marketplace are so out of touch with reality that their loss probably won't be very significant anyway.
I don't want to be rude, but its not like they're paying for you to get Sun Certified or something.
I have been given the opportunity several times to go to training, but the company puts my neck in a noose with a contract. No thank you, I would rather buy the O'Reilly book.
This is what really bothers me... most of this training stuff can be figured out if the person just spends a little time reading and thinking through matters. Being sent to a training session has all the appearance of learning something (just like college courses), but it doesn't compare with spending some time learning it yourself. This route does have some limitations, especially if you are learning a proprietary technology. In my company we solve that problem by adopting no proprietary technologies. Basically, if O'Reilly doesn't write a book about it (or they conceivably couldn't do so) then we don't adopt the technology. It is really that simple.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I hope anyway. Otherwise I'm going to put the fact that I installed Linux on my box at home down as sysadmin experience too. Cause I don't log in as root, I created another user for myslf. And I shut off ftpd to avoid security holes. That makes me a sysadmin too, right? In a resume sort of way?
sorry, got a little out of hand...
Bleh!
Buying a hammer does not qualify you to build houses.
Buying a camo hat and shiny boots does not make you a soldier of fortune.
Buying a Mazda Miata does not make you an F1 champion.
Buying a golf ball does not make you Tiger Woods.
--
Infuriate left and right
This is one of the big things that keeps me in contracting. I have a lot more leverage with clients for time off. If there is a slow period between projects, what do they care, let me have two weeks off, they do not have to pay me. Also, between contracts I can take as much time off as I want.
What I would love to see is more jobs (W2 employee) offered as hourly positions. Then time off just becomes a project management issue. December is going to be very slow? The project manager lets you take it off, if you are willing to forego the income (maybe this income loss was offset by extra hours earlier in the year).
I have a few ideas on how to keep trained employees.
One: If they leave within a year, make them pay for the training.
It sounds mean, but it works. The company that I work for does the same thing. We consider it our invisible leash, but I think its fair. If they are going to spend thousands of dollars on me, they deserve something out of me. And I get to be trained on the latest and greatest things. Makes me happy, makes them happy. But don't make the leash last more than a year. Anything more than that might scare away candidates.
Two: Compensate them well.
In a technical company, us techs are the lifes blood of the company. Marketing, sales, legal, all very important people, but in this economy we have now, techs are very valued, and deserve to be paid for their skills. Its easy to get another salesman, they are a dime a dozen, but finding another perl guru might be a wee bit difficult. If you don't pay your tech's well, they will easily jump ship as soon as their invisible leash breaks, and take them and their skills YOU paid for to another company for more money. Plus more pay helps loyalty too. Stock options are nice too.
Three: Listen to your techs, and make them feel like real members of the company
I can't count how many times I've seen/heard techs give a honest and non flattering review of something only to be disregarded and ignored. Then when the project or the machine blows up, the techs get jumped on for not getting it to work correctly. And don't let saleman Bob define how things must work. An overview, perhaps, but not cramming specs down tech's throats. Give them some freedom and power to play (which is what makes them good techs) and you will be amazed. But don't let them go nuts either. Know when to put the breaks on things. Finaly, make them feel part of the team, not the stepchildren you have hidden in the server room.
That being said, people with H1-B visas are in a bit of a pickle. I've never dealt with it (I'm a citizen), but my understanding is that the consequences of leaving the job are being deported. This could be turned into indentured servitude, if I understand the law correctly.
Any H1-B employees have a perspective on this?
--The basis of all love is respect
Not to say money isn't a factor. While money can't buy you happiness, financial insecurity causes an aweful lot of greif and depression. If a company is unwilling or unable to pay for your skills, then it's their loss.
But their are other factors that affect whether or not people will stay once they are there.
That covers most of the bases. Money might bring people to a job, but people don't start looking for another job unless they are unhappy. Keeping with what I said before, too little money can cause unhappiness, so don't forget that too. (btw: I know, I know, I have been trolled, and I will try to have a nice day.)
More Caffeine. NOW
The answer, of course, is pay-for-performance rather than pay-for-time.
Under pay-for-performance, people have an incentive to optimize their performance so they'll have more spare time to do things that the company shouldn't have to pay for. Things like spend more time with the kids, work on some cool hack they've been dreaming up, just defocus a bit to take in a larger view of life or *gasp* becoming more educated so they can further optimize their performance!
Call me old fashioned...
Seastead this.
How about ripping the last 50 or so pages out of all the manuals and not giving them back until contracts have been signed? :-)
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
1.)Foosball tables, poool tables, video games, etc..
2.)Send everyone on a cruise! (My employer is oing this right now. Its a cheapo 4-day deal in Miami, but what a great morale booster.
3.)Buy lunch once a week.
4.)Offer 3 or 4 weeks of vacation. A little bit more than average.
5.)Open a satelite office in the 'burbs, or do work at home two days a weel.
6.)Free soda,coffee, bottled water.
7.)Stock options.
8.)Better than average healthcare.
9.)Ask your employees what they want most.
Okay, I'm out of ideas. Here's the scoop. I know right now that I could increase my income as a direct bill contractor by 50-60%. Why don't I?
Two reasons. First I have a family and two small children, and I want to spend time with them and not work myself nutty chasing down leads, so I guess thats less time. Two, I have great health care which helps with the kids. So I'm giving myself a break for a few years. (I have been an IC for the last 7 years.) It absolutely kills me to here management talk about high costs of free soda and vacation. The cost of replacing one employee is at least 25% of the annual salary of the position. Happy people don't leave. You can be cheaper onthe salary if you don't scrimp on the benefits.
One last thing to all you HR people. As an IC I would take 4-6 weeks off a year. I routinely make up for all those lost weeks and more in overtime. Every time I look for a job I mention desiring 4 weeks of vacation. I get looks like I am from mars. Its not a negotiable benefit, and no one seems to think its a reasonable request. If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
- "Just in Time" inventory systems, for example, where you save money by not having a large warehouse, but get screwed over if there is a temporary shortage. The upside on shortages if that if you plan it right, you can charge more for product in high demand.
- The removing of many layers of middle management. The upside is the removing of many layers of deadwood. The downside is the loss of a place to send workers who can't be fired, but who are harmful to the company in a decision making position.
- There is also a trend to lack of company loyalty because of diminished investment by workers and management in the future of the company. The result is that now that there are fewer senior being grown internally. This not only applies to middle managers, but also to Technology Experts. Factually, people have to be imported form overseas. This does not ensure competancy, and may produce other problems because of cultural clashes, sometimes on a subtle level.
- Lack of Scalability due to lack of sufficient people at hand to have sufficient organization to grow.
The overall effect is to encourage a cannibalization of resources because it is cheaper in the short term to strip mine what you have, or to pillage your competition for resources. This is horribly short sighted, often encouraged by investment houses and others who scream for higher stock prices so they can make their profits, and the human cost be damned.It is far more difficult to breath life into an enterprise and to grow it into a stable expanding concern.
Despite all of the management schools in existance, and all of the courses and degrees offered, it is obvious the most of the content beyond the basic machanic of accounting is full of junk ideas.
The management systems of companies are buggy beyond belief. There are resource leaks all over the place. There is no effective garbage collection. There are system conflicts all over the place. Anyone who put together a system like this would not even have the competancy of a script kiddie.
The fundamental expertise required to establish a modern running business has to be at least the level of any experienced system guru out there. And it isn't.
Management science needs to become an actual science based in the real world, with real principles. Right now, management is based far more on individual talent and genius than any real standardized body of knowledge.
Heck, when was the last time you saw the idea of applying the techniques of quality assurance to management? and how would you do it?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There is one good answer when an employer asks, "What if I train my employees and they leave?" and that is "What if you don't train them and they stay?"
Wages are the bottom line for any employer-employee relationship. Anyone who says otherwise is deluding himself.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
The reason that I have left my last few jobs was not money, but the work environment. Cubical Hell is a good way to loose employees. Give everone an office, even a small one, just so that every once in a while you can close your door and be alone to work on something is an increadble incentive to stay at a company. Free soda, coffee, hot chocolate and snacks are also major pluses. Another personal plus is the ablity to listen to music...esp the music I like. So either a good sound system (the altec-lansings are good! So are the harman-karden stuff), or good headphones...the Koss KSP/Portapro series give excellent frequency response from 50Hz to 20,000Hz, serious bass, and cost about $50. They are open air style, so that they don't block outside sounds.
Flex time, where possible is good, and/or the ablity to "bank" time, then take it off later is good. Extra vacation time is another plus...a week paid vacation is worth $5,000/year less to me.
A lack of dress code is also a major plus...if they really wanted a GQ model, they could have hired one, along with their wardrobe...if they hire me, I am a Unix/Linux SysAdmin/Security person, not a GQ model. Having to wear a tie all the time will cost a company an extra $10,000/year to hire me. A suit does not make a person work better.
Give people input into the company!!!! When people feel engaged in the company, rather than just some cog grinding out product, they tend to become more interested in the company, and thus less likely to be headhunted.
Prevent "little empires" within a company, this is bad for the company anyways, and it builds cliques, and when a person feels excluded, ie., not part of the clique, they are more open to leaving.
..just a few ideas...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
As a Canadian Hi-Techy, many people ask me why I don't pack up and head to the States to make twice as much as I do now.
Money is nice, but it's not all. Right now I work in an environment where my boss respects me, I have no boss over my shoulder all the time, no strict timesheet to complete, no idiot co-workers to bog me down, and the freedom to arrive a bit late and take an occasional afternoon off. Besides, I don't have to wear a shirt and tie!
I make a pretty decent salary, and it's plenty to afford house, cars, snowmobiles, cottage, 2.3 kids, dog and cat. What more could I want? Greed breeds misery, if you ask me.
It's not always greener on the other side!
Somehow I think it takes more than that to be a Unix sysadmin. :-)
I worked for a small ISP a while back. The owner proposed that I get an MCSE, and that he would pay for the tests on the condition that if I left within a year of taking a test, I reimburse him for the test. I think that offer would have been workable except for one thing: since I started working there, he had hired five new employees, all of whom has less experience than I, and all of whom has fewer job resposibilities than I. Every single one of the new hires was paid between $1 and $7/hour more than he paid me, even after a "generous" (to him) raise.
The fact that I was quite obviously being given the short end of the wage deal was enough to make me consider the one-year-or-reimburse deal to be not nearly sweet enough. When I left after a year and a quarter (the second longest tenure of any of his employees, according to the bookkeeper), I was still getting paid the same very low wage.
So, basically, I suppose what I'm saying is that it is impossible to retain employees if you give them the distinct impression that you will not be fair to them. If you give them a fair deal, something like an "if you leave within a year, we get back some|all of the money we spent on your training" will look a whole lot more attractive, and pay the person running your entire ISP division a bit more than the new techie grunt.
Well the original poster says he works for a reseller and support shop dealing with Macs. If the guys working there are going to be sysadmins after a one week class, well they are going to become sysadmins in a few more months on their own inititive anyways.
I've been to some unix training classes before, one of them Sun's sysadmin training (part 1). And I can tell you that it will take a lot more than a 1 week class to make someone a sysadmin. Even if that classes is geared towards making sysadmins.
Unless Apple has some really great training - "I know kung-fu! AND Unix!".
Unless the original poser is implying that a 1 week training class automagically makes someone worth double what they were making. Regardless of what they learned in that class.
Prospective employeers give preferance to employees skilled in a version of Unix they are using. If the interview was for a job in an OSX shop, well I'd expect the guy with OSX training and experiance to get a higher offer than someone with training and experiance with Solaris, all things being equal. How many places out there are looking to hire Solaris admins? HPUX? Lots. It remains to be seem what the demand for OSX specific admins will be.
What's the difference between admining OSX and some other Unix? Maybe 10 - 20K a year.
That being said, if I would interviewing for admins I would prefer someone who had been messing around with Linux for a couple of years and really nailed the general unix questions to someone who had been to 2 or 3 classes in exactly the OS they would be working in on the job, but couldn't answer any general technical questions.
Lots of people out there that look good on paper but sound REALLY bad when you get them in the room with a couple of admins with 10 years experiance doing the technical questioning...
People like to be challenged and appreciated. If it's really true that your people will be 3 times as valuable after the training, show it. Can you afford to pay them what you think they'd be worth in the market? That would be a good start. If you can't, look at retention bonuses. Everybody will say that it's not about the money, but honestly that depends on the scale. If you're paying $50k and somebody else offers $55k, then yeah, it's not about the money. But if you really mean that they could make $150k elsewhere, then you'll likely find that people take a serious look at those other offers.
But if the money is in the ballpark, then it's vital to keep the workplace interesting. The best consulting houses I know all run a common knowledge base that individuals feel they can feed off of, which is a nice feature. The best hackers know that they don't know everything, but they like the idea of having access to such a distributed knowledge base. Have regular events, too. Not just drinking at the local pub, either. Have offsites where you plan future projects. Give management responsibility to some of your more senior people. Make them feel that there's more to the job than just the Unix training they received.
I don't think that trying to lock people in will work. For starters, instead of sending the message that "The company wants you to improve as a person", you get "The company wants to use you to improve itself". And whether or not that's true in both cases, the thing is that people don't want to have it thrown in their face. Management is well aware that when Java people say they want to work on Enterprise Java Beans, it's to improve their own marketability -- it's not a far stretch to assume that people know that if a company sends you for training, they expect it to be profitable for them as a company. But trying to enforce that will just cause people to resent you, in which case you'll either lose them before the training, or else they'll take the training, grudgingly suffer the minimum contract period, and then definitely leave.
Remember, people do leave. There's nothing you can do about it, once someone has made up her mind. That's what exit interviews are for. If somebody leaves and tells you on the way out "Damnit I've been asking you for 9 months for a refrigerator for the developers", then you get an idea of how important those perks are.
In short, if you're talking about treating some people like the stars of the show, make sure that they feel like it. Let them walk around in their socks, even if there's a company dress code. Give them their own refrigerator if they don't already have one. In the long run these are tiny benefits that won't cost the company much at all. You have an advantage, your people are already there. Contrary to popular belief, the best people don't like to job hop. It's a pain in the neck to change insurance, move 401k money, etc... So you don't really have to compete with every job out there -- you just have to make sure that you work with what you've got and keep it nice for your talent.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Why have you ever left previous jobs?
Then ask this of the people at your company.
Here are the reasons I think that people change jobs:
(1) Lack of respect. The scenario I've seen over and over again over the years is the ego tripping manager whose internal narrative is "I get things done despite the miserable cretins who work for me." The people you want to retain do not put up with nonsense like that.
(2) Lack of progress. No matter how brilliant the work you do is, if it goes into a productivity black hole, or if the company doesn't know how to make use of it, you're morale suffers. When your boss expects the impossible of you he's failed to put together a winning plan and is setting you up for the fall.
(3) Lack of financial stability. Not knowing if you're going to be in business next week is much worse on morale than not having the highest salaries in the industry. Repeat after me: overhead is evil. Overhiring is evil and unproductive.
(4) Lack of opportunity to do interesting stuff. The best people will want an opportunity to stretch their capabilities, both by working on novel projects and by professional development.
All these things are the ingredients of a winning team -- respect, clear and achievable goals, fiscal responsibilty, and creativity. I don't have problems with various gimmicks to raise employee motivation, but the best motivation of all is being part of a winning team.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A lot of people have cited contracts, but has anyone ever heard of repurcussions from breaking them? Compucom hires bright college kids, send them to Dallas for MCSE, and a bunch of other certs from a pool (Compaq,HP, Intel). They are supposed to stay for two years, but I knew two that jumped ship about 1 to 1.5 yrs in, without repurcussions. How legally binding are they? This was in MA, so state right to work laws might play a role.
IANAL, and have never worked for CompuCom.
matt
I'm one of those deluded individuals that believes there's more to life than money. I also manage a team of 5 people and have been able to keep them as happy, well-adjusted employees.
First, having an open, honest relationship with your people is important. One of my guys came to me a couple of months ago, and told me that he was thinking of floating out a couple of resumees; I asked him if there was a problem with what he was doing, and he indicated that he wasn't learning as much as he wanted to. So, we discussed the matter openly and honestly and he has since decided to stay -- after I assigned him a good amount of his weekly time to do "technology discovery" -- basically, playtime where he is able to see if there are other appropriate technologies that we should be using (my department does web design and development). I offer my people flexible work times, even though that is not company policy. I keep them "in the loop" as far as company-wide and department-wide issues go. I make sure they are well-equipped, with fast machines and 21" monitors. I give them access to mentors outside of our department so that they can learn from more experienced people. I have convinced accounting to allow me to pay for technology-related and programming classes outside of the normal tuition-reimbursement channels, so that they can also take college classes. I buy them lunch once a month or so, and we have a couple of beers and bitch about stuff that we want to fix, and come up with plans on how to fix them.
Bottom line to me is, I have a group of people who are not the highest paid in the company (though I am working on that, too), yet I have one of the highest retention rates in a 900 person company. Remember, sometimes the less-tangible things can be as important as money.
Pete
I find it extremely hard to define a whole set of things that want to make people stay. Most people are different and want different things from work; younger folks want money; older folks want time. But when companies institute policies that aggrevate employees they almost guarantee those people will leave.
Not all people are happy at work, it does not mean they wish to leave, nor does happiness guarantee that someone will be a lifer. 20 year olds might like foosball machines, but a 50 year old might prefer a quiet room where they can smoke.
It takes allsorts to run a company, but we also run companies through the use of quite small teams. Keeping teams effective generally ends up retaining those team members.
I'm a network manager and I have some theories on the best way to keep IT people and the sad thing is that they are common sense issues that don't involve hiring IT slaves from India.
1. compensate people within the regional average for the skills they bring. (this rule MUST be followed first before others can work)
2. Make sure that the employee will do what that person was hired to do! (there is nothing worse than being hired as a network professional only to be stuck doing support work)
3. Spread interesting projects around, even if an employee doesn't have all the skills needed for a project, then team that person with someone who does. Make work a learning environment, that beats classroom training anyday!
4. Give honest praise when and where it is due. There is nothing worse than doing work that doesn't make a difference or doesn't receive recognition.
5. Listen to the people doing the work. They know about what they are doing and this gives them a chance to be a part of the business and learn more about business paired with IT.
6. Talk to your employees and be honest when ever you can. If there is something that you are not allowed to tell the employees, tell them that you can't say instead of lying.
7. Train when you have to, and compensate for new skills when they are being used.
8. Make room for employees to move within the organization. I would rather hire from within than hire outside the company, this benefits the company by retaining company knowledge and improves staff retention.
9. Make flex time available to people who want it. As long as the job gets done, what does it matter when the employees work? If they do a night shif for downtime projects, give them comp time instead of overtime if they want.
10. Small perks, take the staff out to lunch or drinks after work, expecially after rough projects or exceptional work done.
There are some other variations, of course, and many other twists that will work in substitution for the soft benefits. But the issue boils down to respect since these people are professionals.
IT people went to college, have to continuously study and relearn, they work long hours, and they work hard to be the best at what they do. Recognize their effort and make steps to appriciate this and show your respect when it is due.
But, that is just my opinionated opinion as a network manager with limited control over what I can do for my employees. (who have never left when I have managed or supervised wherever I have been).
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin