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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   26675 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Acquisitions usually have a higher turnover rate than usual, but a 100% 50% annual turnover rate is insane very high and I'm very doubtful that half your workforce immediately bounced from a job they were happy with just because they got some experience. Some people will absolutely do this the first chance they get, but having half a company made up of these guys would have to be the worst luck I've ever heard of.

In the end it's just the internet so I can't fact-check what you say, but training your employees only brings so much goodwill and I suspect that either the acquisition made their job a lot shittier or the job already had high turnover and you got suckered on the purchase.

The timelines are also very short here which to me also points to something more than just people getting poached with a better offer. People who already have a job usually take some time to find a good option when looking for a new one. That 50% who left within half a year either started looking immediately or wanted out badly enough they took the first thing that gave them an offer. For some of them, probably both.

To get back to the point about H1B workers, your post shows the problem with H1Bs very well. Your company is unable or unwilling to provide sufficient benefits to retain US workers, so you turn to cheap foreign labor instead. This is bad for local workers' pay and erodes the local talent pool as less locals can find jobs where they can gain experience.

Edit: Lewis2 below pointed out that the turnover was 50% over a year (I read the post as 50% over 6 months). Edited to strike a section and make a couple changes, but I still think the rate is high enough to be indicative of other problems pushing employees away rather than them just gaining new options.

you turn to cheap foreign labor

Yes. And more insidiously, captive labor. If this foreign worker is fired then they are quickly deported, unless they can very quickly get a new job with the same title as their previous one. They can change jobs, but it again has to be approved as a comparable job with a comparable title and responsibilities. This specially skilled person with talents we cannot find in US workers is largely forbidden from growing and branching out in their career.

That friction in changing jobs and their precarious position in America is what I believe employers truly want. Americans and green card holders are free in their employment prospects. If this trained American in the anecdote is qualified for a new higher responsibility role and title at Google, then he'll go for it. His comparable H1B coworker will not and will be much more locked in. What employers wish they had were enforceable non-competes and captive workforces.

To get back to the point about H1B workers, your post shows the problem with H1Bs very well. Your company is unable or unwilling to provide sufficient benefits to retain US workers, so you turn to cheap foreign labor instead.

This. While I might be typically-minding here, I think there are significant costs to switching jobs. Interviews. Paperwork. A longer commute or possibly even a movement of residence. The risk that your new job will suck even more, or that you will get fired and find yourself unemployed. Loss of social relations at your current job.

I would expect that few will switch jobs for a few percentage points in gained utility, so if your workforce attrition is that high, you are clearly not a competitive employer. The libertarian/capitalist solution would be to either offer more utility to your workers or close up shop, not keep your company afloat using people whose participation in the labor market is constrained.

Also, I am a bit skeptical of this whole "from clueless windows admin to in-demand cloud specialist in a few months" story. I mean, you can train a button pusher to push new buttons, but at the end of the day you will still have a button pusher. Likewise, you can turn a bad/good programmer in one language into a bad/decent programmer in another language. This can all improve the immediate use of your worker, but there are no magic shortcuts. Going from "badly managing a few windows machines" to "working at Google" would imply that the employee had some further hidden skills, IMO.

Furthermore, I was under the impression that times are lean in the IT sector right now, with AI cutting into the lower end jobs.

Also, I am a bit skeptical of this whole "from clueless windows admin to in-demand cloud specialist in a few months" story. I mean, you can train a button pusher to push new buttons, but at the end of the day you will still have a button pusher.

Running a standard cloud installation is button-pushing. Building and running a nonstandard/bespoke datacenter, even if unwise, requires a lot more ability. So it's not a surprise the people doing the latter were able to learn to do the former. Now they're still high-ability, but know how to push an additional set of buttons, so they're worth more than either your run-of-the-mill button-pusher or what they were before.

running a nonstandard/bespoke datacenter, even if unwise, requires a lot more ability.

Total tangent, but a good story.

Early in my career, I was in a low level position that randomly physically placed me in the same room as four high-end infra guys. These dudes had been building complex system for decades and really knew their shit. They had a lot of opinions.

Two of them came up with a very nonstandard and bespoke way to manage the huge cluster we were running. The other two came up with a different very nonstandard and bespoke way to manage the huge cluster we were running.

The first group worked for at least the two years I was there to get permission from the higher-higher-higher ups to implement their solution. IIRC, they built like a mini deployment using old servers to demonstrate the feasibility. They wrote innumerable contingency and rollback plans. I left before it went live, but I heard they, eventually, got permission for a scaled down version of what they wanted. I think they got a kind of pat-on-the-head employee-of-the-month reward, as well as a paid trip to some cloud infra conference.

The second group left, raised some money for their idea, and then got their shit deployed across all of the operations of a massive specialty data center company. They're both giga-rich now with multiple layers of fuck you money.

To me, this is the triumph of markets of an individual firm. If your firm doesn't like your idea, but you have high enough conviction, it could be worth risking it to try to get your idea out there. Now, the odds of success are against you, but I find it far more disheartening to have the eventual mitigated success of the first two guys, rather than a potential start-up flame out.

The second group left, raised some money for their idea, and then got their shit deployed across all of the operations of a massive specialty data center company.

I design things. Anything I design on company time is company IP and supposedly they'd sue me if I left to make my business selling their IP.

Now, the odds of success are against you, but I find it far more disheartening to have the eventual mitigated success of the first two guys, rather than a potential start-up flame out.

Risk vs. Reward and all that, right? If I'm at a point in my life where I'm not responsible for others and have a bit of a safety net, the gamble is a great idea. If I'm the sole provider for others, well... maybe sticking with the safer route is better for me and those that rely on my income.

A hedge fund buying up small (and likely struggling) engineering firms and divesting them of their IT infrastructure to cut costs is likely not really a good place for existing employees to be. Them leaving once the transition is complete is probably what the management of the corporate raider wants anyway -- then they can hire cheap juniors who know nothing but the cloud in their place.

IT is well known to be a field where you almost always have to switch companies to get appropriate compensation. You graduate, get an entry level job, grind for a year, then ask for half of the 50% pay raise you would get for leaving and get it denied.

I think you misread whodatmiami’s comment. He said 50% left within a year, not that 50% left within six months and 100% within a year.

These are still very short timelines that point to something else going on... maybe a return to office mandate for a department that had been remote?

Good catch. I got mixed up between his mention of half leaving and timeframe of "gone in six months" to get an annualized 100% turnover. I'll edit my post to note that.

50% annual is better and a year makes the timelines a lot more reasonable for someone leaving post-training, but those numbers are still concerningly high.

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