New Job

Last Friday was my last day at Opera Software. Alex Papadimoulis is spot on when he writes that quitting is like an “awkward, uncomfortable break-up”. Handing in that letter of resignation isn’t easy…

After that, you’ll have to tell your co-workers about it, which isn’t easy either. “You’re leaving? Why?!” Well, this time it was just a matter of wanting to do something else.

Once that’s done, working the last three months is a breeze. “Wait a minute there, sir” you say in shock. “Three months?!” Yes, that’s the standard resignation period here in Norway, and if I’m not mistaken it’s not uncommon in other countries either.

I’m going back to Enonic, who produces a content management system, written in Java. That, of course, labeled me as a “Java man” straight away. Some people don’t seem to get the concept of being a generalist. It’s a fairly small company (~20 people), and I know several of the people working there, so I look forward to it.

Skilled vs. Unskilled

Something else that Papadimoulis mentions in his post, is that skilled employees are prone to quit more often than unskilled. This may or may not imply that skilled people do not stay long in a single company, but in my experience that is not the case. I’ve seen plenty of highly skilled people stay within a company for a long time.

The company I’m leaving, Opera Software, has many highly skilled employees, that have been there for a long time. Perhaps that’s because of the nature of the company, though … There’s not a lot of browser factories out there (and certainly not in Norway).

The company I’m going back to, Enonic, still has several skilled people that have been there while I had my sabbatical at Opera.

Quitting - You can’t avoid it

One of the first things I learned as a manager, was that people will quit, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Thanks Jesper, you were my first. (Dis)Honorable mention to Ole Kasper, who quit the day before my xmas vacation, a not so nice xmas present. It’s always sad when employees quit, but the first times were especially tough.

There are certain steps you can take, to try to keep an employee, but usually people have already made up their minds about leaving. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, of course.

Throwing money at them can help, but there are problems with this solution. 1) There’s a limit as to how high you can go, 2) if the employee has applied for another job they can probably outbid you, and 3) the core motivation of employees is usually not money.

Again, as Papadimoulis writes, let’s not ignore the elephant in the room: the easiest way to earn more money is to apply for another job. It’s the nature of the game, really … Companies who are looking for new employees have to outbid their competitors. Not many people want to take a cut in pay at their new job, although it can happen - it’s just not common (I’ve seen highly skilled employees do this to get more interesting and challenging work).

Money is only one part of this equation, though. It has to be high enough, for some definition of high, and then the other factors come into play - is the work interesting, what are the other benefits, and so on.

Conclusion

The conclusion is … ah … well. I’ve run out of steam, unfortunately. But let’s just say that employee retention is a complicated affair, and that it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that skilled employees, that you have been dependent on, quit. Treat them well, and it might not happen, but don’t bet on it.

Knowing how to lay things out on a webpage can be difficult. With table-based layouts it was easier, but for a while now it’s been considered more correct to use CSS for layout, unless you have tabular data, of course. Personally I’ve never quite gotten the hang of how to do it in a good and consistent manner.

Enter Blueprint, which I’m using for this blog.

You might notice that I’ve gotten rid of Wordpress. What I’m using now instead is something Jesper Noehr started, and I’ve modified a little bit. I hope the transition will be as painless as possible.

The first time it happend, I was surprised. I told myself it must have been a fluke and that Google would fix it. Then it happened again: a few minutes ago I got an SMS on my phone…

Reminder: FROM YOUR SISTER /GET BACK TO ME FAST!!

Indeed, there was an appointment in my calendar. Not surprisingly, my sister’s name isn’t Mrs. Joyce. If spammers really have a way into Google Calendar, this is pretty bad… Do we need spam filtering on our calendar appointments now?

For some reason I can’t find a setting for limiting SMS reminders to only work where I explicitly add it, I don’t really want spammers to spam my calendar and my phone.

I’ve gotten used to spam in mail, but this is unsettling.