Corporate Bribery
Personal growth is important, knowledge and experience only come from a couple of ways: -
1. You spend a lot of your own time learning and broadening your horizons.
2. You are placed into an environment (or environments) whereby you can learn from others and the experiences around you.
If a company really wants to keep someone they can just throw cash at them until the person wanting to leave is left with a Hobson's Choice.
I realized some time ago (check out my 2006 review post coming in the next few days) that the only real way for me to grow at a rate I was happy with, was to leave my current employer and attack work on my own, to pick and choose the projects which excited me and made me enthusiastic again.
It's a real shame when I see talent being wasted because of the selfishness of others. Good people should be allowed to explore all the avenues that are open to them, and a company should not hold people back from doing that, personal growth is massively important to morale and personal wellbeing of the individual and of a team more generally.
Every company has "churn" (the turnover of development staff) and this is a good thing, bringing in new ideas and a new perspective pushes developments forward (with the right management (that's a whole different post!)), there's also great benefit from getting rid of the old, the dead wood in some circumstances. There are those people who have been in the company for years and their answer to many questions is "Well, we've always done it that way.".
That same churn is good for the individual within companies, people come in with new fangled ideas like ohh I don't know, testing applications before shipping them for example, that's a good for everyone. We learn from each other, I love spending time with other MVP's and ASP Insiders, I learn so much, I feel challenged and it pushes me to new unexplored areas of my own technology theatre. The same should apply to the workplace.
When children in school are identified as being gifted in any area it's important that their potential is pursued, this same argument should be the place in the work place, and if a company cannot fulfill the potential of an employee they should not block the progression of someone by holding them back through any means of bribery (be it offering more money to stay, imaginary promotions or false promises). The companies who do that are wrong, very wrong in my opinion.
I hope this post helps two types of people: -
Bosses who are about to bribe someone to stay.
Employees who are about to be bribed to stay.
Cheers,
Phil.