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Seattle Tech Engineers Are More Loyal Than Those in San Francisco, Data Shows (geekwire.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Software engineers in Seattle stay at companies an average of six months longer than do their counterparts in San Francisco, according to data from online job search giant Indeed. That may seem like a small difference, but it's actually quite significant when compared to the total time engineers tend to stay with a company. In Seattle, they average 29 months while San Francisco devs stick around for about 23 months. Doug Gray, Indeed's senior vice president of engineering, shared that finding along with other statistics during an event on attracting tech talent, hosted by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce on Thursday morning. "That is another thing that we should be promoting here in Seattle, is that greater loyalty, which leads to the ability for someone to have an impact in their company, for them to actually have greater career development within that company," said Gray.Also see: Scraping By On Six Figures? Tech Workers Feel Poor in Silicon Valley's Wealth Bubble
And if you live in a small village you'll probably stay int he same job for life. Doesn't mean you're more loyal, it just means you've got fewer choices.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I suspect this says more about San Francisco than about Seattle. Throw some other cities in there.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
"...stay at companies an average of six months longer...greater loyalty, which leads to the ability for someone to have an impact in their company, for them to actually have greater career development within that company..."
Greater impact my ass. 6 additional months isn't going to define career development or impact the company in some grandiose way.
People used to stay at companies for far longer than the 29 months being celebrated here. The turnover rate today is a joke. Then again, so is the fact that employees are no longer treated like people, but instead like commodity resources that can be exchanged as the wind blows.
Where I work the average IT person stays 5 to 8 years. Most of my co-workers are 15 year vets. I can't imagine how crappy these places must be if the average is only two years. Hell it can take a year just to get someone comfortable int he environment.
Aren't you curious how people at other companies do things?
I find most people who have grown long in the tooth and accepted 2% raises as normal aren't curious about anything.
Sometimes people are satisfied with their job and money isn't their main driver.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Aren't you curious how people at other companies do things?
Not enough to give up my 6 weeks of vacation, institutional memory and senior status as "He Who Knows".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What does that mean? I accept a 2% annual raise, but I already make a hefty six figure salary that I already feel is too high. And I have been at my company for 15 years, which I assume would make me long in the tooth. What does that have to do with my curiosity? My problem isn't curiosity, but time. I have a backlog of reading on technical topics that is a mile long, but I'm so busy I barely have time to post on Slashdot ;-)
Aren't you curious how people at other companies do things?
I find most people who have grown long in the tooth and accepted 2% raises as normal aren't curious about anything.
Curious. I find many people that hop jobs every couple years to be not curious enough to deeply learn about anything, and are mostly just greener-grass folks looking to trade some sweat for money.
Sometimes staying put for a while correlates with a desire to learn something a bit more than superficially. Although trade skills often be practiced anywhere, learning a business and industry enough (to understand how to create value in a business) often takes more than one project cycle and 23 (or 29) months perspective is a pretty short time to see what generates value for customers and what is unimportant... Generally, if you aren't spending VC money, it's better value to companies to have employees know what is important and what is unimportant over the long term. You can only be twice as good as another ditch digger, but good ideas can be 100x better than bad ideas...
Of course there are companies where little can be learned and there's little reason to stay there at all, and maybe you simply stay there 23 months to make it look like you aren't a job hopper. But that's probably 22 months too long IMHO, as there are generally other fish in the sea...
I think only a fool doesn't meter out raises that match inflation at a minimum... Unless you are looking to reduce your labor force through attrition.
Further, companies that don't dish out more than average salaries for their best employees, are NOT watching their bottom line in the long term but are making the often repeated mistake I call "Manage to quarter". This is where the share price at the end of THIS quarter is all that matters, nobody is thinking about next quarter or the one after. This is common among struggling companies with cash flow issues.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Or maybe the people that stay realize that they have a vesting period before getting additional IRA benefits.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
the tech companies to the employees? Do they kick you to the curb when the stock drops $2? When you hit your 35th or 40th birthday? Do they collude with other companies to limit your pay and benefits? Will they hire you if your skin is brown? If you are female?
We keep seeing reports on things like worker loyalty but why don't we see the same on company to employee loyalty?
I would say most of the time I achieve my goal well within 29 months at which point the project is ready to be handed to over to people who would have difficulty putting it together, but have enough skills to ride a mature project through the rest of its life time.
Maybe it works differently in development. I can say with a great deal of certainty that if you're talking about development then you're talking nonsense. It is orders of magnitude easier to develop something new than to maintain someone else's mess.
All (experienced) devs have seen the following movie:
Hotshot devs create something new as per management's instructions. They take every shortcut in the book to produce a product in record time - spaghetti code, no documents, no comments, 12k line functions, no local variables (all globals), multiple buffer overruns ... and almost fully untested. They sing their own praises to management emphasising how quickly they work, because "we're that good".
Of course it's a fucking mess that crashes anytime a user does something out of the ordinary, so it has to be maintained. A maintenance team is assigned (usually just a lone developer without the spine to refuse) and get told to "add this small feature". It takes them a few days just to figure out which globals in a 17-level deep nested if-then-else construct may impact on the behaviour, so it takes them more than a few days to implement the feature, no matter how small.
Of course, the original asshole devs use this metric to make themselves look good to management: "Look, we created the the thing and we only took so long - these other devs that maintain it are so poorly skilled that it takes a week just to ADD to it. We're obviously much more skilled." This false metric gets used by these asshole devs to justify why *they* should be creating the next new product requested from management.
And thus the cycle repeats.
Make no mistake - if you do the "create new product" bits and not the "maintain existing product" bits, you are doing the easy bits!.
The creator of bugs is less-skilled than the fixer of bugs. We understand that it makes you look good to management to say "see how quickly I can create", but it takes less skill than "I've got to read and understand this mess, and only then will I be able to fix it."
Trust me, you are the less-skilled, not the more-skilled. Don't talk down about people who are cleaning up your mess - they're essentially wiping your ass after you've taken a dump. If you were any good at all, you'd wipe your own ass.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.