I agree; I think the claim that "winning" is what retains people is vaguely on the right track, but the focus on company growth and profits is off-base. A sense that the company is doing interesting things and is where the action is is fairly important, and may or may not be correlated with those things. To take a classic (if admittedly overused) example, nobody at Bell Labs got wealthy from working there; they all made a decent living, but it was emphatically a middle-class living, with no stock-options or six-figure salaries (even when inflation-adjusted). What kept people there was a feeling that this was the best place in the world to work, and at the center of interesting-stuff-happening.
Yes, but Bell Labs is not a role model. (Many managers were a hassle there too ) There can't be more the than 5% of the industry doing what Bell Labs did or MSR does. So the interesting question for the 95% is, what makes the best of the rest, doing boring but profitable work, better than the rest of the rest? Even at Google, a very desirable corporate job, many engineers aren't really inventing the future.
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The company I work for now is very profitable and growing fast. I can not wait to leave. If I cared mostly about money, I would want to stay.
I agree; I think the claim that "winning" is what retains people is vaguely on the right track, but the focus on company growth and profits is off-base. A sense that the company is doing interesting things and is where the action is is fairly important, and may or may not be correlated with those things. To take a classic (if admittedly overused) example, nobody at Bell Labs got wealthy from working there; they all made a decent living, but it was emphatically a middle-class living, with no stock-options or six-figure salaries (even when inflation-adjusted). What kept people there was a feeling that this was the best place in the world to work, and at the center of interesting-stuff-happening.
Yes, but Bell Labs is not a role model. (Many managers were a hassle there too ) There can't be more the than 5% of the industry doing what Bell Labs did or MSR does. So the interesting question for the 95% is, what makes the best of the rest, doing boring but profitable work, better than the rest of the rest? Even at Google, a very desirable corporate job, many engineers aren't really inventing the future.