Why do software developers leave

Many high performers are also ambitious by nature. If the team has established leaders and not enough opportunity for others to grow, then it can be a reason for some workers to look for better prospects outside.

This can be due to the insecurity of existing leaders or simply because there is not enough work to warrant multiple leaders. Every worker deserves to see their career path and how their work is going to pay off. This is one of the reasons cited in HR exit interviews but in reality, it is rarely the sole reason but rather another catalyst in making someone quit a stable job. If there are not enough opportunities to learn and grow, employees can start getting apprehensive about the long-term security of the job.

Some workers may remain content with the work in their comfort zone while others are motivated for growth, and to retain those workers, opportunities for learning and development are required. Company benefits are also key differentiators when planning a long-term career. There are others, not so common ones which are location-specific like in the US, immigration support plays an important role in hiring and retention while in India, an opportunity to travel abroad may be a lucrative benefit.

If the employees feel that their hard work or extra efforts are not being recognized or rewarded appropriately, they may lose motivation and even start looking for a change. Sometimes even acknowledgment of work at the right moment is a big motivation and at the same time, lack of it can be a trigger.

Management is the most important and impactful reason as it can address all the previous 12 reasons. Management is responsible for laying out the vision, policies, and processes for all of the company.

Employees need to have trust in the management and believe that management has the best interest of its people in mind. Some companies focus too much on margins and profits that they forget the very force that will make it happen. However, compensation is usually not the factor that triggers a job switch but it is definitely a key factor in the decision about the next job.

Change is always difficult for everyone and a decision to switch a job is made after a lot of sleepless nights, thinking, and deliberation. The truth is that there is never one reason but a combination of factors that contribute to the process. There is a lot that is being done to fix it but still, a lot is left to be desired.

So, beyond financial assistance, take a look at how you can ease their hours, to pick up the skills your company will need. Many companies have a clause in their employee contracts obligating employees to a minimum term of employment after providing for their training.

C Apprenticeship and Cross-Training Programs. Apprenticeships have long been part of the make-up of European enterprise. Let someone adept at a skill help train someone who is new at it. Some companies may not recognize apprenticeship programs, so this can help with retention, as well.

A large portion of the coursework associated with software development, data science and machine learning is available for free through the Open Education Consortium OEC or for a small fee through EdX. EdX provides some moderation and certification. There are plenty of other online options to choose from. For additional help in improving retention, make sure to check out Onboarding Developers: 9 Tips for a 90 Day Program.

Gitential helps you to improve the performance of your software development team based on their Git activities with actionable insights. Our advanced software development analytics provides developers with automated performance tracking of key metrics and easy to understand graphics. Retaining key talent is getting increasingly complex. Traditional behavior analysis has proven useful to many organizations in finding, hiring, and even retaining quality talent.

Skip to content. Start your free trial. Book a Demo. Sign in. Why Software Developers Leave. Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on linkedin. Share on reddit. November 9, No Comments. Turnover Rates: What to Expect. Costs to hire vary by method — via recruiter high , advertising medium , job fair usually low ; and skill availability lower for testers compared to AI specialists. Lost productivity factoring an average of 35 days to find and hire a new developer. Relative efficiency costs in the time for the new developer to become equally well-versed in assigned projects as their predecessor.

Developer turnover can have an impact on software quality, though you can mitigate some of those costs with our Five Code Churn Tips for Software Engineering Managers. Potential for the Snowball Effect — if one person leaves, others may go with them, and the disruption increases the chances of others also leaving. Reasons for Turnover. Turnover is a difficult issue as it can extend from so many root causes.

There are few to no metrics to tell you why software developers leave, only that they are at risk of doing so. Those metrics can provide you an early warning sign so you can begin finding out why. Therefore, if your company is using outdated technology or bad engineering practices they will be motivated to leave and join a more innovative company. If your company is mature, it can be challenging to revamp your technical environment, architecture or development methodology.

If it's impossible to satisfy those criteria, it may make sense to see if there are any other teams or products within your company where that engineer would be a better fit. There are many different goals available to software engineers and no two engineers are the same. Having a one size fits all approach will not be sufficient. Understanding these areas will help you set your goals with your engineering teams helping them remain motivated and valued.

Engineers are typically analytical and will often optimise for career growth. For this reason, having an ambiguous or inconsistent job level structure will result in engineers not wanting to progress within your company. Create clear specific levels and job titles with defined scope and responsibilities with a coherent path on how to progress, leading to more clarity and commitment.

Here is an example of a generic levelling structure:. The scope of responsibility can vary depending of whatever makes sense for your company. What is important though is that you have very specific criteria and this is applied fairly and consistently across the company.

No matter who you are, your technical environment or company culture, there is always another company within your market who want to poach your engineers. Their recruiters will call your engineers and if they are offering salary packages that are superior to yours, your engineer will feel undervalued and be extremely tempted to leave. Further to this, if the market has increased the average salary for an engineer and you're offering your new hires a higher salary package than your existing employees, they will find out and they will leave your company.

Review your salaries regularly and ensure you are meeting market value. Benefits have also become the tipping point for many companies, ensure you are offering desirable benefits to your employees, that might be pension or equity. Speak with your engineers and find out what benefits are most important to them. In the latter case, subsequent language updates can require today's developers to rewrite old code written by long-gone developers who wrote under different conditions and who might not have documented what they did and why they did it.

That's a big problem for companies that have millions of lines of code written in a language. Stepsize, a firm that focuses on technical debt by tracking development issues in major code editors such as VS Code, conducted a fairly small survey of software engineers to find out why they leave their jobs.

The results should be taken in context: the company's key selling point is trying to solve technical debt challenges that organizations face, but at the same time, technical debt could be one area worthy of attention considering how hard it is to hire and retain software engineers.

And the best way to do that is to carefully manage technical debt to maintain a healthy codebase," says Alex Omeyer, CEO of Stepsize. Technical debt, or 'code quality and codebase health', was the fourth most important issue cited by respondents.

The survey allowed respondents to choose several primary factors. Where to learn the most popular programming languages Here's a look at the most popular programming languages based on surveys and courses. SEE: Remote working jobs row shows how much tech has changed. Code needs to be understood by future employees. It also needs to be clean and consistent and testable, notes Stepsize, since this affects how well a codebase can be maintained in the future.