Nice. But remember: the cost of non attrition can be keeping idiot coworkers around. Who actively destroy work with their anti-work, and waste time with idiotic discussions.
Wait so according to your model of the world top-performers become idiots in their next job? Where are all these top-performers who do get compensated enough and what companies do they work for that have no attrition?
I recently had to give up trying to convince a coworker that the observer pattern was useful, because he refused to budge from the position that it made code harder to read as it was not "all in one place". Naturally as a stubbornly helpful person it took several hours over a couple weeks before I reached the point of surrender. Meanwhile there are a number of related decisions he's inflicting on the codebase that no one else would make, but find it easier to accept than resist, and which are ultimately unsustainable/ungeneralizable. If he left the team tomorrow the rest of the team would slowly revert these decisions. In the meantime, he's kind of just randomizing the code.
Not really a definition, but there's an example for you.
I once came in to work on a Monday to find a 200 email thread from a clique of idiot coworkers who had been feverishly working on a bug over the weekend, only to discover that our locks were fundamentally flawed, though that was at email 50. Around email 52, someone who actually knows how to use a RW lock (and has written research papers on lockless data structures) says, "no, they are fine, you're just doing it wrong, see [link]". The rest of the 150 emails were the idiots talking among themselves learning how locks work, and convincing themselves they now knew how to "work around" the bug (i.e. use the lock correctly).
This is not a thread about idiots, and actually these guys were trying their hardest to be conscientious employees... It was just a noisy and stupid way for several people who should have known better to learn how to do a simple and fundamental part of their job. (The one who falsely diagnosed the bad locking code was a 15 year veteran "senior" engineer. <scoffs>)
Incessant bike shedding about every project concern or business case. All with a tinge of negativity and scepticism leading into rather unimportant arguments because... "last time we tried this." They are often 100% correct but nobody wants to hear yhier shit because the team has marching orders, funding, and they want to complete the project without a bunch of stress and drama.
They have been at the company too long and aren't really happy about it. They don't get a new job because it's viewed as far too distruptive to their life. Again, they are probably 100% correct.
As others have said, the people you describe don't leave companies.
This is actually the opposite problem of what the article is covering: instead of companies not being able to keep good people, (some) companies are not able to get rid of bad people (whatever subjective definition of "bad" you choose to use).
I've worked at some companies where it's almost impossible to get rid of people that are only causing a net loss for the company, or at the very least, are consuming headcount that could be used to hire someone much better.
Attrition is about people leaving. "Idiotic coworkers" don't leave -- they have to be pushed out. And, again, that's a completely different problem when companies can't and/or choose not to push people like that out.
