Last week Susan blogged about the joys and challenges we've had with online social-networking sites. Many thanks to those of you who offered us great tips on that subject. Keep them coming!
This weekend, we've had a chance to do social networking the old-fashioned way--live and in person. We traveled to California for a surprise 50th birthday party for a friend. Since many of the other party attendees are also good friends, it was great to be able to catch up with those that we don't see regularly and when we do see them, it's often in a harried conference environment so that we don't have as much time as we'd like to sit and talk, meet their spouses, etc. It was especially nice to be able to catch up with a few of these folks that we originally met at COMMON conferences, but who aren't going there regularly any more.
We rented a house in Huntington Beach big enough to share with some of the other birthday partiers and hosted a "day after the party gathering," which originally started out as brunch but didn't actually break up until around 8 p.m. (If anyone's interested in a great house to rent in that area, contact us; we walked to the beach every day, very comfortable and as reasonably priced as accommodations in the area can be.) In addition, we were able to make some new friends--friends and/or family of our old friends who we were able to get to know thanks to the birthday party gathering.
It's really very much like the concept of the online-networking model. But it was nice to be able to really meet face to face, the old-fashioned way. Some things never go out of style and hopefully gatherings like this one will remain an important adjunct to the online variety of networking.
One of our weekend housemates is responsible for a team of RPG developers so naturally some of our time was spent discussing the state of the RPG community, especially when it comes to hiring and retaining good RPG folks for the team. It seems that she must be doing something very right because her team returned a 96+ percent job-satisfaction rating on a recent company-wide survey. The goal the company had set was less than 75 percent so the high rating among the developers was evidence of the great job the management team was doing to keep them happy and productive.
What's her secret? She attributes it to two major factors. First, they pay attention to salary levels in the industry and make sure they are paying a bit above the average. Secondly, and we personally believe at least as importantly, they make sure all their developers are consistently and regularly trained in the latest features and technologies related to their RPG development. She feels this investment in training not only has the obvious positive benefit of making their applications as good as they can be and the
developers as productive as they can be, but it also helps tremendously in staff retention.
It is much like the sentiment we've heard (and often repeated) from Zig Ziglar (paraphrasing): What's worse than training your employees and losing them? Not training them and keeping them! It would seem our friend's experience bears out the fact that training your RPGers helps to keep them around in addition to helping them do a better job.
It always helps to have developers who WANT to learn new technologies.
One of the big problems in the i community is lack of interest.
Of course those who participate in the community tend to fall in that category, but many don't.
I have a friend, who is a IT manager for a medium sized shop, who REQUIRES his staff (developers, operators, etc) to attend local user group meetings and tech conferences. He tells me it was tough to convince the brass to let him send them ... but it's paid off. Sadly, he's in the minority.
Many other shops I know of refuse to send their staff to conferences and LUG meetings ... because they think that, as they accumulate skills, they will want to find new jobs.
Posted by: david | February 24, 2009 at 01:36 PM