On turkeys

Turkeys have a problem 🦃. They think that the farmer is their best friend. This idea is reinforced every day when the farmer brings them food. And then one day, the turkey loses everything. That's called a turkey problem. Companies too have a turkey problem.

Companies take on a number of measures to make employees stay with them. It looks like it's working because they keep showing up to those standup meetings, but then one day, the employee resigns.

One solution to the turkey problem is to stop thinking like a turkey. Instead of focusing on events, consider intentions and motives. Why would the farmer feed me? Why would this excellent engineer work for us as opposed to a company with better incentives? Is it because of Loyalty, friendship, and kindness? Maybe. I'm sure that's what the turkey thinks.

Companies implicitly exploit the delta between a person's true competence and their perceived market value. "Competitive salaries" means the lowest thing that they think the candidate will accept. The candidate is behooved to join, but then a few months later when they eventually find out their true market value, you can't talk about trust anymore.

In practice, here's a suggestion for better retention of us highly mobile tech workers. I think companies should offer jobs as follows: We have $80k worth of Python to be written by someone who's currently writing $70k worth of Python 🍉