Cursed Chair

[seekingferret]

Work has been a lot to deal with for the past couple of months. We've hired three design engineers who each lasted about two weeks before quitting. (I've been joking about a cursed chair) We also lost an engineer who'd been with us for a year and a half. And our production manager left after working here for nearly a decade.

The longer term employees leaving, I know is not my fault. Both have been enduring extremely long commutes for their whole time they worked here, and they found work closer to home, so they took it. And good for them, I miss them personally and I miss the quality of the work they were doing, but I'm happy for them.

But the new hires... I'm trying to be introspective about that, and to figure out if it's something about the way I've been training them, and if there's something I should be approaching differently. Three people leaving so quickly says something is wrong, and I'm not sure what it is.

(It might just be the pay, I dunno. I don't get involved in that part of it. If there are better paying jobs elsewhere, and people are jumping as soon as they find one, maybe we just need to pay more. That's out of my hands.)

The thing is that there are very few engineers who have experience in my little tiny niche industry, and any engineer coming from elsewhere is going to need weeks to months of just learning basics before they can be really useful to us as a designer. So we figure the best thing to do is to hire people fresh out of college, to entry level positions, and then train the hell out of them. We throw a huge amount of information at them very quickly, and we repeat it again and again until it starts to stick in, and then we start throwing the next level of information at them.

It worked for me. And it's worked for four or five engineers I've successfully trained into quality engineers over the past decade. So I have a certain amount of faith that the process works and my own teaching skills are not horribly inept. But over the past couple months it's been a trainwreck.

Possibly it's this May/June silly season where kids graduate and frantically grab the first job offer they get without thinking about whether it's actually what they want to be doing, and we've just been unlucky with how that's shaken out. Possibly it's a problem in how we're screening people- we knew that several of them were extremely blank slates that we hoped to fill with useful engineering knowledge, and it's hard to assess a blank slate to see how trainable they are.

And possibly I've been bad at teaching. I've been overwhelmed with trying to get my design work done while also training the new people. I've basically been doing three and a half jobs for the last month. My main teaching strategy has been to grab them whenever I'm doing a task I think they'll need to learn and walk them through it as I do it, to multitask by combining my teaching with doing my design work. Lessons driven by a thought out curriculum have been rarer, and maybe I need to be more systematic in the information I'm imparting to make the new people feel more invested in learning. Perhaps the reason they're leaving so quickly is that I'm not showing them the trajectory of where we see them ending up once they work through our process.


Anyway, I'm drowning in work and just trying to claw my way to the surface, and it sucks. Although I am getting a raise for my troubles, so there is that.

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I'm wondering if they are thinking if training doesn't stick, they can't ask for the info again?

[seekingferret]

I hope that is just about the least likely explanation. Probably the thing we tell our trainees more than anything else is that we don't expect them to pick things up the first time, and it's better to ask again than to do something wrong without asking.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

That's good then. Some places will say they are open to people needing to ask and then get weird about it yet don't write things down.

[calledtovienna]

It is probably good to do a post-mortem and for someone from your company to get their perspective on why they quit after two weeks, at least officially.

That said... I don't think that "bad training" is the sort of thing that's obvious two weeks in? That seems too short for someone to decide that they are not getting the material fast enough, or the work that they are going to end up doing once they learn is insufficiently interesting. I can imagine quitting that fast if there is a better offer that suddenly materialized (which seems rare -- though it did happen to a friend) or if it is a weird quality of life condition, where I just can't imagine coming in there, day after day. So, if that's the case, that's a weird interview mismatch since presumably the hires knew what they were agreeing to.

Do you know where they ended up after? Stalk them on LinkedIn?

Anyway it is not your mystery to figure out, I assume, but if they are all leaving so quickly, I am really curious.

[calledtovienna]

In my friend's case, he applied to jobs for a year+, got ~ghosted by a prestigious MIT lab, took an offer in a far away suburb for less money doing non-engineering work, and then had that lab get their shit together and give him an offer with more money, a job doing actual engineering, two minutes away from his apartment, etc. He was very angsty about it, but even his now-former boss was supportive. It is kind of a whacky story, but seems like a pretty rare occurrence.

[seekingferret]

Two of the three told us that was what happened, that some other better job (more prestigious, closer to home, whatever) suddenly got back to them with an offer. So I dunno, maybe it's not that rare an occurrence, or maybe they were pretty sure they were going to get the other job and we were just a fallback option. In which case the problem is in our ability to screen whether our hirees are actually serious about staying.

I'm involved in the hiring process, but I don't make final hiring decisions. But I lead the training process. So if it's my fault, it's a fault in my training methods. And if it's not my fault, the company still needs to figure out what we're doing wrong, but I don't need to angst about my failings on dreamwidth. :P

[brainwane]

Have you had any more opportunity to reflect in the last month and learn anything more about how your training methods are working?

Have you ever read any of the research or textbooks or taken a class in instructional design, educational psychology, etc.? Multiple people I know recommend How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro. Jossey-Bass, 2010.

[seekingferret]

The new engineer is now on his fourth week, he is learning and getting more productive and shows no sign of wanting to leave, although I still wish I had more time to devote to him. I owe him a more detailed critique of a project proposal he created last week. I think at this point I'm going to conclude either a)Overfitting from Small Sample Size or b)May is the Silly Season for entry level jobs. or Both.

Thanks for the book rec!