Tech, talent and the great r̶esi̶g̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ moving-on
Resignation (late 14th century) seems to be a very negative and inaccurate word as tracing it’s etymology one finds that it stems from resign - to give up/abandon/surrender, which is not what people do, they actually move on to grab what they reckon is better.
Anyways, over a million resignations are expected in the Indian tech industry this year despite over 100% salary hikes in pockets, and attrition is hovering at 20-40% in companies of all sorts regardless of the fact that startups and established technology companies are doling out unprecedented salary hikes for retention and/or new hiring.
Now then, history does not repeat but rhymes, and how?! C, Y2K, Unix, Solaris, SQL, VB, Java, C++, Linux, PHP, mobile-apps, Python, Big data, Hadoop and so on..(keep adding C, Java, and maybe Python at regular intervals there !)
There’s enough memories from my experience of being in tech for more than two decades at least, that the demand-supply imbalance ebbs and flows. Sometimes painfully longer. In fact, don’ t take my word for it and have a look at this old news splinter from 1998.
As for this time, it’s certainly most severe and amplified or so it seems and we shall try and get to the bottom of it, if there is one. But mostly, the problem is chronic and the symptoms are acute. In my opinion anyways and I would divide the problem into 3 parts - Employers, Employees and Environment.
Employers
1. Catching up (almost always)
Most often than not, if a company is a follower and not leader in a tech/tech-applied context then the chances are that they are late to the party. Which means that hiring for experience in a specific skill or set of skills they want to catch-up on, assumes the top-most priority and also, extremely hard. For instance, Big Data, Data lake, Data Science eventually became a mandate for hiring folks who know NLP, CV, AI, ML and so on, depending on the business case, industry, etc.So now, if I did not start capturing user behaviour or such data of relevance, I need to start from all the way back.
Another way to land up in this spot slowly and then suddenly is by ignoring a company emerging from left field which becomes the single largest competitor - easiest example is Tesla for most of the car makers of consequence out there.
This means that unless you have a great culture and inspiring leadership (if that was the case you would be leading the space already), or another company is messing it up on both accounts (eg FB some time back) you would have to cough up a lot of capital to break talent away and on-board.
2. Safety in (inflated) numbers
The migratory season also forces most of the hiring to overcompensate for potential attrition, offer rejections and no-shows based on the most recent trending numbers.Which means, hire 3 for every 1 person leaving, 5 for 2 and so on and in case of fresh out-of-the-college graduates, go 2x or 2.5x of last year’s numbers.
Which means more people who would have been out of the contention post stack ranking, bag an employment offer, which gets interpreted as a higher than actual number of vacancies out there and thus an artificial inflation in demand and also more options to choose from for employees-to-be.
3. Pay more to attract (more)
This is nor merely a ripple effect of point 1 above but also the starting premise - that if you pay higher than the market offers for a role, it offsets the probability of not attracting anyone if you are just a startup, a late comer to the party or a legacy stack company aiming your crossbow at modernisation. And the Beatles kept singing - Can’t buy me love!
Environment
1. It’s all happening here
It’s an year of many firsts - first time so many unicorns, first time so many startup IPOs lined up, first time the Indian startup ecosystem has witnessed the infusion of such insane amounts of venture capital ! And then there are the valuations - the amount that used to be an exit for someone a few years back, is Series A/B today. (Check this)
All of this put together is stupendously fueling the spirit of entrepreneurship - it is almost like a mainstream career choice now, and all the abundant capital with companies there’s immense competition for hiring therefore and precipitating an arms-race like fight for talent(Often called talent before on-boarding and resource in a quarter or two).
2. Remote and very digital
The post-pandemic, remote-work savvy world is ravenously hungry for more digital - another first. The transformations and adoption of technologies has never been faster and more valuable.TCO (total cost of ownership), which was the qualifying criteria for any digital project or innovation idea, got replaced with a simple question - could it help us do more, faster and better? Which means users, customers, businesses and everybody in-between needs to hustle harder than ever.
3. The millennials :-)
Ah, the most spiritual of all human generations in the Anthropocene. They question status-quo, don’t believe anything they are just told, don’t want to sit at one place but experience life like never before and frown at career and life choices of every earlier generation.
They are evaluating their relationship with work ever so more post-pandemic lockdown(s) and by the way, it’s okay for them to just quit or not join an employer or even stop responding to phone calls from the recruiter who had sent an inflated offer letter.
Their needs are probably not captured by the Maslow’s pyramid but maybe a weighted graph of a set of principles or values or both, viz., involvement with freedom, earning with learning, working with purpose, access without ownership and such, where the weights are dynamic! They’re a large chunk of the tech workforce and pretty much shaping the thought process that lead to the onset of this large moving-on.
Some of the other pre-existing challenges are :
4. Quality of engineering education
Dated education curriculum and the resulting employability percentile of passing out engineers is lamentable. From parents, teachers, schools to colleges - the entire system and it’s stakeholders are involved in chicanery to become crème de la crème. Grades, marks, entrance tests, GPA/CGPA, etc - all intended for one sole purpose, qualify (filter) some to be plucked for progress and leave the rest. Now then, at one end we have thousands of students passing the muster of these strong filters and on the other, the vast majority of remnant students that must scamper and join mushrooming private universities to fulfill their dream of becoming an engineer, only to do something outside of the disciple for a living in most cases.(Read this)
5. Incongruous hiring mechanics
Having built and scaled large engineering teams, I can tell you one thing for certain that there is a lot left desirable in the whole chain of events starting from the headcount approval to the on-boarding of a new employee and then the onward journey of this employee until his/her migration elsewhere. Which is why venture investments in HR tech are looking to ride this perfect storm.
It’s a broken telephone from the beginning! Right from the headcount assessment to writing of a job description to filtering of resumes /applications - now done auto-magically by systems called ATS. And then there’s the assessments, interviews and the stream that flows into the on-boarding river.Everyone is playing checks and crosses - the idea in most places is to determine the deficiencies in a candidate and not the potential.But, that’s a Gordian knot for every company/team/hiring manager to untie for themselves.
And it’s a hustle too because there’s a hiring target and timeline for recruiters/agencies to hit that number. Just like sales quota, the unpolished cousin, if you will.
Employees
#Surf’s up!
It is as simple as that for most of the lot, however, they are dragooned into testing what they are worth by some latent triggers like :
soon my skill will be baseline or eaten up by this upcoming framework or tech
I’m done with my boss/work/company a while back, this is the right time to leave
I need to move to a different or better skill/company/location to experience and grow more
From performance appraisals to continuous evaluation, from experience to portfolio, from delivery to outcomes, from specialists to generalists.People want to move on !
There is no silver bullet to abate this great moving-on unfortunately and if anything at all, it would be too little, too late but there’s work to be done to minimise the impact from a repeat in the future.
There have been some serious tectonic shifts in the landscape this time round that warrant addressing the most fundamental aspects for all organisations, big and small, and it is the culture. That’s what disenchants an employee the most.Define a culture and find people who would only come in to solidify the culture and the spirit. Pick a leaf from the story of late Tony Hsieh & Zappos maybe.
And then, there’s the recognition of the fact that tech folks are not harder to hire but looking for a specific skill or experience or both at a point in time when everybody else is doing the same thing, is where the challenge lies.Understand the curves (or trends if you will) of technology - fading, emerging and lasting (like white crew necks, blue denims and canvas shoes!). So, let’s be willing to ditch the fading, early to adapt the emerging and fascinated to cling-on to the lasting.
A good developer must posses at least 2 out of these 3 - skill, domain context and technical acumen.So, would it make sense to hire for acumen, coach and train for skills(ahead in time) and immerse in domain context all along?
PS : But I’m not saying don’t hire for skill or domain context at all !