LinkedIn sent me an automated email recently detailing that 7% of my 215 “connections” had changed jobs in 2012. (As an aside, consider those 215 LinkedIn connections compared to 65 or so Facebook Friends. As if more evidence was needed to illustrate that Your Faithful Servant has been challenged forever with that whole Work/Life Balance thing.)
The 7% figure was frankly a bit surprising when I chewed on it a bit – I would have thought that percentage to be quite a bit higher. 2012 was quite a year of personnel churn at work with a number of colleagues from both my current and previous projects moving on to different jobs. Some moved to other work within the company. Many moved to entirely new companies. Common external destinations in RTP for folks leaving the company seemed to be SAS and NetApp. A healthy job market for software engineering is A Good Thing (selfishly speaking of course), even if the folks departing left some big shoes to fill.
For a period last year in July and August, it seemed like several folks were leaving each week. They were dropping like flies. After that, it was a bit more sporadic but that summer burst of departures definitely caught the attention of management. At that time, we were all requested to fill out these “Fit For You” cards and then discuss them with our manager. On these cards you listed 3 or 4 “Satisfaction Factors” that most directly contribute to your overall satisfaction on the card. Then you rate how you feel about that Satisfaction Factor in your current job and identify any actions that the manager and/or you can take to improve that rating. The factors are things like Culture, Environment, Recognition and Reward, Motivation, and so on. Groan. I do give management credit for trying to find common themes behind the departures, but it is so awkward filling those types of self-assessments out.
While this was all going down last August, I remember taking a walk around the campus at lunchtime one day with a couple of other colleagues, including James, our co-op from the University of Michigan. Naturally the conversation got around to all the folks leaving IBM and these “Fit For You” cards and how uncomfortable that whole process was. James was wondering whether he had to fill one of these cards out. Internally, I chuckled a little bit when I thought about that. If I put myself in James’ shoes when I was 20 years old, I am thinking my Satisfaction Factors would have been something like:
- Enough beer money to get inebriated on Friday and Saturday evenings.
- Pickup hoops three or four times a week at Trees.
- A win over the Nitters and a New Year’s Day Bowl.
Obviously James is more serious than me. I told James that I didn’t think this self-assessment exercise was for co-ops – just the full-timers - and that he shouldn’t sweat the “Fit For You” card, but that he should check with The Boss on that. The Boss and I have known each other since 1991 – we worked together (as engineers) through the early 2000s and then back in 2011 he replaced my old manager.
Since most of my department, unlike me, had just recently been assigned to work under The Boss in April, a couple of the other folks during that lunchtime walk started grilling me about how it was to “work with The Boss”.
At that point, I confessed about my long-standing background with The Boss. When I blurted out “I’ve known The Boss since 1991”, I took a quick glance out of the corner of my eye toward James. He didn’t say a word, but, for a split-second he had this look of wonderment that had “Holy Shit, I wasn’t even born in 1991!” written all over it. Classic.
