[OT]: companies

[Joakim]

On Thursday, 14 June 2018 at 20:59:06 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, June 14, 2018 16:04:32 Nick Sabalausky  via 
> Digitalmars-d- announce wrote:
>> On 06/14/2018 05:01 AM, AnotherTorUser wrote:
>> > If all such people stopped working for such companies, what 
>> > do you think the economic impact would be?
>>
>> What do you think is the social impact if they don't? And 
>> don't even try to pretend the companies can't trivially solve 
>> the "economic" issues for themselves in an instant by knocking 
>> off the behaviour that causes loss of talent.
>
> But that would imply that they have a frontal lobe. :)
>
> In all seriousness, it is surprising how frequently companies 
> seem to be incapable of making decisions that would fix a lot 
> of their problems, and they seem to be incredibly prone to 
> thinking about things in a shortsighted manner.
>
> I'm reminded of an article by Joel Spoelskey where he talks 
> about how one of the key things that a source control software 
> solution can do to make it more likely for folks to be willing 
> to try it is to make it easy to get your source code and 
> history back out again and into another source control system. 
> However, companies typically freak out at the idea of making it 
> easy to switch from their product to another product. They're 
> quite willing to make it easy to switch _to_ their product so 
> that they can start making money off of you, but the idea that 
> making it low cost to leave could actually improve the odds of 
> someone trying their product - and thus increase their profits 
> - seems to be beyond them.
>
> Another case which is closer to the exact topic at hand is that 
> many companies seem to forget how much it costs to hire someone 
> when they consider what they should do to make it so that their 
> employees are willing - or even eager - to stay. Spending more 
> money on current employees (be that on salary or something else 
> to make the workplace desirable) or avoiding practices that 
> tick employees off so that they leave can often save money in 
> the long run, but companies frequently ignore that fact. 
> They're usually more interested in saving on the bottom line 
> right now than making decisions that save money over time.
>
> So, while I completely agree that companies can technically 
> make decisions that solve some of their problems with things 
> like retaining talent, it seems like it's frequently the case 
> that they're simply incapable of doing it in practice - though 
> YMMV; some companies are better about it than others.

This was an interesting read on that topic, which I've linked on 
this forum before, where an engineer points out that companies 
would be better off not chasing "rockstars" with hot keywords on 
their resumes but improving their training, processes, and 
culture so that even average programmers can be productive, 
including mentioning using source control and the Joel test that 
you just referenced:

https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

Of course, the reason companies mostly don't do it is they're 
prone to the same cognitive failings as anybody else: it's easier 
to chase a quick fix than doing the hard work of putting in a 
system like this.