How much is turnover costing your company?


The software industry has a turnover problem. The general consensus is that it takes around 6-12 months to fully onboard a new hire. Essentially, you hire someone for 100k a year. Then it takes roughly 6-12 months before that person starts producing work at the 100k level. This would be fine if Software Engineers did not change jobs frequently, but we tend to switch jobs every 1-3 years for higher pay. 

Let us consider the case of a company with a complex project and slightly high turnover. They need a full 12 months to onboard a new engineer and they can expect that engineer to stay at the company for 2 years in total. If onboarding proceeds linearly that company ends up paying 2 years pay for 1.5 years worth of results. The company is spending 25% of salary on training for the lifetime of that employee. 

If the company managed to get the average lifetime per employee up to 3 years they would spend 3 years pay on 2.5 years of work or roughly 17% of salary on training. 

A company in this situation could afford to give an 8% raise if it kept an employee around for an additional year. 

Certified Kubernetes Administrator!

I had the opportunity to take the [CKA](https://www.cncf.io/announcement/2016/11/08/cloud-native-computing-foundation-launches-certification-training-managed-service-provider-program-kubernetes),
‘Certified Kubernetes Administrator’ exam because my employer is trying to get ‘Certified Kubernetes Service Provider’ status, which requires 3 certified administrators. Now, why would Certified Kubernetes Administrators or service providers be valuable for your company? The CKA is good because it certifies a base level of knowledge and ability in kubernetes administrators. Things you would expect from CKAs are the ability to debug clusters, perform upgrades, bootstrap clusters and application deployment tasks.

What and how does the exam test administrators? The exam tests your ability to perform operations against the kubernetes api. The entire exam period is spent in the command line with kubectl on a standard linux shell. The test validates your ability to ‘get things done’ in the kubernetes environment.

Overall, I have a very positive outlook on the exam. I spent about a week preparing. I read a lot of the kubernetes.io documentation, ran through ‘kubernetes the hard way’ three times and had worked with kubernetes on the application side previously. I passed on the first try, but I did need all of the exam time and had to skip a few of the hard problems.

I don’t think that the CKA is essential for devops or kubernetes admins, but it is a good exam and great for filling some of the gaps you might have in your knowledge.