Healthy Software Developer this is the problem I always have with most of the companies I've worked with. They just don't value the programmer's desire to R&D and learn new skills or provide right place for them (technically, environmentally and financially). We are always thirsty for new challenges and improvements and if we think the environment is stopping us to improve with a routine, We simply leave. If only they could value these, it would be a lot better for the both sides. Right ? (Btw this is my experience from most of the companies in Iran)
It is more likely a natural selection process - these unhealthy companies are going to lose ultimately - even they know the direction to be healthy. There are always people who deny, or go through the motions.
The way to convince your bosses to treat you better is to unionize. It's weird how (assuming you can survive their retaliation) once you're unionized, your bosses are SUDDENLY willing to consider that treating you well might be okay for profits after all!
That’s definitely a big component agreed! You can’t pay people enough to deal with excessive micromanagement though, which is what I was trying to (politely 😉) say!!
Just wanted to say how refreshing it is to find a channel that talks about the realities of software dev, rather than the "ZOMG I'm amazing and my company is amazing and this particular product or development technique or language or tool I'm trying to sell you is amazing" nonsense that pervades most of dev talk on the internet. Kudos.
Thanks Andy. I've been on that side of thinking I had some "silver bullet" solution to this stuff too. It took me years to become a bit more balanced. And I'm still learning. Good to hear you're getting some value out of it!
I think the problem is even deeper than that. To me, there are three phases: ramp up, peak productivity, and technical debt swamp. What I have seen is that it takes about 6mo to 1yr to get up to speed. Then, you can really get into a groove and accomplish some big thing that is both exciting to work on and rewarding at the end (both in terms of cash or promotion and pride for a job well done). At this point, you are maybe 1.5 to 2 years in, you are now a "veteran" in the project. At this point, people have left and left over their systems for you to maintain, you are the most knowledgeable about the whole software stack, you've got your own "big thing" to maintain, and everyone wants your opinion in meetings and planning documents. At this point, you can't really get any meaningful work done anymore, your speed drops to zero, at least in terms of the measurable impact of your personal contributions because it's hard to "monetize" your contributions to maintenance, discussions, decision making, or on-boarding junior people / answering everyone's questions about everything. So: 1) Turn-over is a vicious cycle because as you burden the "veterans" with so many "juniors" to mentor, you lose more veterans, and the more juniors you will need to replace them. 2) The staggering speed at which software goes from "awesome new feature" to burdensome technical debt, especially if poorly written, is very much a driving force for turnover.
A friend of mine works in a small start up, that on the surface has a great environment. When you dive deeper into the company, it is anything but healthy. The boss once told a set of new hires that he was the best at the company and no one else at the company could compare. Not only did he mention this but he did it at lunch with the team present. That is a clear sign to move on IMO. It is a challenge to change the way management thinks or goes about their business. Mind you, relationships / environments are a two way street and this is all from one perspective. People will only attract and keep top talent if they: 1. respect their developers regardless of the developers skill level 2. understand the sacrifices being made by the team members 3. pay competitive wages as the employee grows
Great topic! I agree with the skill level gap. However I believe turnover is only one of the factors the causes this skill gap Given the following: 1). There are developers who stayed for more than 5 years that are ineffective, and more of a liability (Wage Thieves -- that's what they call them in Japan). Can't be fired due to labor laws (depending on the country). 2). There are short tenured developers who have contributed a lot. - Career plan / Salary per value efficiency. - The project / environment was not exciting enough as you gain mastery. - Didn't belong to the "valued employees" that receives special treatment due to lack of tenure. There's a pattern I see, on the ineffective ones. "They lack passion - regardless of tenure." Also burnout, the bigger the flame the faster you burn. (Insert Performance vs Tenure = Consistency)
Excellent points. I focused on what employers might consider so the environment is more enticing, so I didn’t explore all you have here. Thanks for sharing. As for people who aren’t in a position to grow, that definitely contributes to low overall skill across a team or company, but I think it’s more natural as part of a typical career.
this has been every job since i graduated university (experienced devs resigning, thus putting more pressure on the rest of the team including new hires, which leads to more people resigning including new hires) the earliest i resigned a job for another was 9 months (3 senior devs including my mentor resigned on the first month I started that job) my current job, the lead resigned 6 months in, another senior dev resigned just last month, its been an year for me at this place and im already looking for my next gig companies need to get out of the mindset employees are expendable, when someone resigns, they are taking all the knowledge with them
It is usually after 2 years that a software developer leaves the company as they can make much more money in a new position than they would ever get in raises. +2 years under your belt means you should have 10-30k+ per year. Staying at your current company just won't offer that.
Yep, and that's symptomatic of employers not wanting to offer a growth path to keep people there. If companies gave people more opportunities to grow, rewards, and responsibilities - they could get the value out of them to prevent them from leaving. It's a comforting lie that you can just replace someone with 2+ years experience at a company with a new person and they'll just "drop in" and do the same stuff in a couple weeks. LOL
@@yannisone7148 well there are several reasons to make a career decision and benefits is only one of them. There's also career growth opportunities, impact (on the business or customer), and work/life balance. I talk about this in the free career guide PDF on the front page of my website. As developers we focus (in my opinion) too much on benefits, and sometimes career growth (especially technical) at the expense of impact and work/life balance.
@@HealthyDev Not only this, but it's more cost effective to give a 30%+ raise to keep up with the market demand for 2+ year SD or any other position. It costs money and time to find and hire a new employee. I think it's estimated to start at around $10,000 to onboard a new employee to the point where they can start doing work, not productive work. Now if you work for IC (intelligence community) and you have a TS/SCI, that costs the company over $100,000. It would make sense the pay the employee more once they have received the TS/SCI, but most companies don't. You can take your TS/SCI to another company that will pay you an extra 30-50% just for having the TS/SCI on top of any other type of salary increase. Companies feel like employees SHOULD be loyal. When in fact, employees loyalty is directly related to the companies loyalty to the employee. I think there are three critical keys for retaining an employee: growth, experience and money.
that's a massive pay rise. I've never seen anything even close to that. Heck, I've not seen my income go up AT ALL in over a decade. After compensating for inflation I now make probably less than I did when I first started as a programmer over 25 years ago.
I've been on my project for just over 2 years. I'm the last person left from the original team, and in same cases there have been 3 or more people that have cycled through a specific role. Due to poor documentation and high churn, I am basically the teams wiki, which is not good for my productivity.
I've been there, but I've been on this project for around 6 years. I wasn't in the original team, but I am the one who's worked the longest on this project. From personal experience I can tell you that you can lessen the load on yourself by taking some time to actually document all those things that people usually ask you. That way, you can just point them to an actual 'wiki' instead of being the 'wiki' :)
@@SuperPranx Yes!!! Documenting patterns in wikis is IMHO one of the most underutilized skills by many developers. Awesome that you are reaping the benefits.
@@HealthyDev My company had the WORST documentation strategy. Documents purtaining to certain behaviors, etc were just randomly placed in different confluence spaces. (multiple confluence spaces for many projects that share the same devs) When they should have just had 1 confluence space, and folders & actual organization of the documents. Not to mention no one ever had time to actually write the documentation, cause the company refused to spend money on it. I asked so many times "Can we PLEASE go through our confluence and get rid of the old documents that are no longer relevant, organize all the diff spaces into 1 collective space for the overall product, etc" and they looked at me like I was insane. Like, yea, it'll take a bit of time, oh well, you can only blame the old managers on the project for letting it get this way.
There were documents in there about how the old PMs handled the project & weird docs with super old ticket numbers & old devs that were no longer with the project, some not even with the company anymore having a conversation in the comments that was completely useless to the current devs. It was so annoying, we ended up using the MS Teams wiki to link to and organize the confluence wiki. It was so stupid.
Not only that. When you loose someone, especially when everyone is under pressure, usually the rest of the team needs to pick up the slack, which is not good for morale, and they too will have to learn to maintain the code that belonged to the leaving member. Hiring more people during crunch time is bad, because now the rest of the team will have to use their time to get the new guys up to speed, or worse, you'll pay them for doing nothing, because no one have time to explain anything to the new people. I am amazed how many managers dont understand this. I'm lucky enough to have worked for the same company for 10 years now, with little staff turnover. Your colleagues become like family, they habe patience with your flaws and quirks. Last year, I was placed on a new system that was going to replace our existing system. Everything changed. Angular was a steep learning curve in its own right, web development comes with a ton of security concerns that makes development harder, slower and more frustrating. Add to that the lockdown that changed everything and made work feel like solitary confinement. Last year was such a negative experience that I literally cried in January at the thought of another year like that. Still, O decided to stick it out. Why? Because the fellowship of my colleagues, and a 10 year history of a company that really took good care of me. As much as I hate to admit it, I would be an idiot to switch jobs in these uncertain times. Not only will that not make this horribly convoluted new technology go away, I'll have to learn it anyway in a new work environment among new people who dont know me, with the pressure of having to proof myself all over again. I know its the wild west out there, and finding a good employer is as rare as chickenteeth. This year is better than last year, and maybe I'll feel even better next year. But had I not have that positive experience of my company, I'd probably wouldve left long ago, thinking I dont need this in my life. And I dis think that, but never seriously enough to act on it. My company bought my loyalty, and now its paying dividents.
@@HealthyDev I think Im almost done watching all of your amazing videos. Thanks for the great content, its pure gold! When will you publish new ones????
At the places I’ve been at it’s usually a conflict between those who control the resources and those who do the work. The good ones who do the work want to do the best job and be an example for the rest of the team. This means high quality. However, the ones who control the resources take it as a personal attack on them and equate high quality with high cost and make it their goal to get you to take as many shortcuts as possible and to lower your quality standards. Because they don’t understand the work, they can’t understand how higher quality leads to higher team productivity. You don’t see a conflict and want to do the right thing for the company by doing high quality and high productivity. This can involve spending time up front to learn a new technology, but the resource managers see this as another wasteful activity and try to make you start producing before you know what you are doing and you feel like you are conflicted between doing what is best for the company and doing what the people who control the resources want you to do. If you don’t do what they want you to do, they can starve you for resources. If you do do what they want you to do, your work is going to be much lower quality and much lower productivity. Ideally you’d like to do great work and lead the team by increasing productivity and quality. In reality, you realize going up against them will mean you’re being undermined at every turn. At some point you realize their is no way to win, so you take your skills and go elsewhere where you hope you can ramp up soon enough to maybe get more respect at the next job where you might be able to make it work. Rinse and repeat. It seems like it is a bad system, but from a high performing employee who wants to do the best for the system, it’s the only rational course, that by building up your skill set across various companies, you can make the biggest impact. Sometimes you can make things work by working clandestine for a while, but it’s madness and eventually the controllers of the resources will go so far as to let you go all the while saying you are the best employee they have except you lack flexibility or didn’t understand the business or some other reason.
I can confirm that this is pretty much how this works. The company I am working for has so high turnover that at this point some of the people need to work on multiple areas and positions at the same time as the more experienced people are leaving and the new ones are not able to replace them. If 10% of people on your project alone is leaving within 2 months period and you hear from the top that "well, it's expected that some people will leave" you know that it's time to pack your stuff and get out.
The business can't accept the idea that they shouldn't have their fingers in each person's day to day activities. My company justifies all their micromanaging as required by government regulation, which is BS. I spend a third of my job dealing with useless bureaucracy, and it's only growing. The typical dev I work with is about a year out of college, so I spend another third of my time training them and answering questions. The other third of my time is spent converting one data type to a slightly different data type to fit together two systems that were written by people who didn't have a sufficient understanding of the business to come up with a sensible abstraction. Needless to say, we hardly get anything done. Any new features we manage to squeeze in are hacked as fast as possible and cause way more problems down the line. I probably won't last another year.
I’m sorry. I’ve been in situations with similar frustrations but yes that sounds especially difficult. I hope you’re able to detach when you aren’t working so you can enjoy life some until you find something better. 👍
The software company which I am working at serving a very specify manufacturing industry that produce products that affect every single people in the world, and the customers of us are really billion dollar revenues company. The domain knowledges that required to understand the software products for being productive, I would say is a way more than 2 years. I have been here for 11 years. Just 3 years ago when I was considered as a relative new employee in the company (average about 12 years of working experience), a new management comes in which directly or indirectly contribute to 85% of employee leaving, I am just becoming one of the most experience developers in the company just in 2 years time OMG. When some of the older employee resigned, they told the HR to keep the old people as many as possible, and all they do is to keep hiring new people for replacement.
people like to learn, right about (2 years) when the rate of learning stalls and, consequently, productivity is highest, they leave, I don't think it's coincidental... the way to keep them, would be to increase the cost of leaving (pay more, improve environment quality, increase subjective value of employees, etc.), I guess...
Hey thanks for the feedback! I agree people can get bored around that time, that is part of it. In the series of videos in a playlist of this channel called “The LifeCycle of a Software Product”, I offer some strategies for how businesses can create more learning opportunities (and innovation). Not a silver bullet, but some things I don’t see enough companies consider. YMMV
Yup. People act in a way that they believe is in their own best interest. At my last company, I could set a clock on every new college grad my company hired. In two to three years, they would move on for a much bigger payday with one exception: one who spent any working hours working on a graduate degree. Not that I'm complaining: it meant that cheaper young programmers wasn't there long enough for management to believe they could replace me. The overseas programmers had even more frequent turnover, and I can't blame them in the least. At their pay rate, of course they would find something better (either more pay or a better opportunity) within a year or so. You would no more than get them trained to use a new technology (forget learning the business), and they would quickly leverage that new skill into a new job.
Great video. Programmer skills are definitely not on a normal distribution regardless of ramp up time. It is a heavily skewed distribution with the median further on the left side. Hence companies desire to find those few and far between rockstar programmers that really push tech forward. There is a whole lot companies can do to lesson ramp up time. But to this date, I still know companies, teams, that write horrendous spaghetti code, to quote "we don't need comments" and run into non-stop points of programming equilibrium between adding something and breaking something. Turnover is one of the worst things you can have on a tech team. And its cost, between recruiter fees, ramp up time, delays, changes to accommodate, time from other devs to get to know and learn to work with new person, time to train them, etc... far FAR exceeds a decent raise. Fortunately, I work somewhere, were HR works with me on this, and my teams has next to no turnover.
I've seen it. Very specialized roles that take _years_ to fully get up to speed and productive, with extreme turnovers (e.g. the average tenure in a team is less than 2 years). Management doesn't care. 😢
I worked as a senior web developer at a well known online store. My first month was horrible The supervisor for that section was a jerk. I left within the second month. We had two juniors came on the same time as me four months later they all left.
Sometimes the most well-oiled process in a company is the revolving door...it’s hard to help these companies. Yup, sometimes we just have to re-evaluate and move on!
This is spot on! We have been consulting for a Big Company TM and there has been a turnover of above 30% and they're really going off the rails !! Nobody knows anymore entire parts of the codebase because "the one that worked on it" left the company and took all of it is knowledge with them. Its really a pain.
One thing I would add though, is that in a complex environment. If you are the new hire, you can do a lot to reduce the time it takes to make you productive. But it will require taking advantage of all the opportunities, big and small that you can find. Ask so many questions, not just about the tech, but who all the people are and how you can work with them, introduce yourself, be friendly and cooperative, navigate people problems, constantly be trying to understand the landscape, the business, make a huge effort on those fronts. Not just the project of the moment you are working on
Great insights, yep understanding context is important. Unfortunately college and boot camps don't teach this - at least in my experience. If more people did what you suggest they would definitely be productive quicker - I'm not sure it would completely nullify the gap I mention in the video but it's certainly worth the effort regardless!
Another great video Jayme! My average tenure per employer is around the 1.5yr mark as well. For me, I set big goals for myself, and if I can achieve those goals within the environment I'm in, I stay, and if I can't, I relocate to where I can. I deplore formal performance management processes, because they require pigeon holed responses fitting into a specific employers environment, instead of encouraging broader and more far reaching goals. In my book, every employees goal, who wants it, should be to eliminate their employer as a roadblock
Awesome perspective. With me being the primary provider for a family, I look for something a little more stable, but I know that’s not everyone’s situation. Thank you!
If I can go to any other company that pays more, makes me work less, and uses technology that I like I would go there. If a company really wants to hold people who is talented they should pay more and give extras.
Another thing I noticed after almost 20 years in software development is: the more time you stay in an organization, the more likely you will be pushed to maintain legacy code, and the less chance you have to be part of new projects, which usually are full of young people that could benefit from all you learned. At least in my case this was decisive to leave a couple of jobs, specially because I knew that none of the authors of the new, badly wrote and projected system would stay to nurse their creation and it would eventually end up in my hands.
Some companies hire people for the sole purpose of blaming them for the failures in the project. This shady scapegoating practice let's management bid on projects and make promises they know they cannot keep. When production goes over budget and over time, management can say it was because of this one employee slowing things down. It's a way for them to avoid looking bad or changing how they operate.
An interesting video and thank you Jayme. Although some companies and some HR staff/managers will say they want their hires to stay longer, and the sentiment is genuine, it is also true that new employees, many at least, want to stay there. Its a two way street - companies put in the effort to search, but so do hires. However, once the hiring has occurred, the company they work for may not really be the company they saw from the outside. Likewise, the employee may not be exactly what was seen before an offer was made. So as you say, to paraphrase, there is an onboarding time, to learn aspects of the business etc. (Both parties are really learning about each other.) You stated 2 years for this. I generally agree, but I would offer that this can be at least 6 months or a year. I generally set myself professional milestones, at increments of 30 days, to *onboard myself*. Increasingly, however, the companies I run into expect 100% efficiency within 2 weeks, which is largely unrealistic given the large software landscape any professional software person works in. I think if the employee comes in with enthusiasm, a willingness to take notes, ask a few questions, listen, be reliable, and try to contribute - then its worth it to keep that employee for up to year. Even after 6 months, a 'new hire' will be lightyears more productive than within the first two weeks.
Thanks you’re absolutely right. The “two week onboarding” myth is ridiculous. It takes that long for someone to get familiar with working as a cook in a restaurant and hopefully without insulting anyone in the dining industry, the number of variables we face in IT joining a team is astronomical. It’s just not a realistic expectation!!
I think I have shied away from many jobs out there that have a long laundry list of requirements. I mean, what's the difference of 3 years of GIT experience vs 3 months of GIT? Really not much at all. But job requirements are rediculous.
This isn't always the case, but I find "culture fit" (wildcard they can use for any reason to reject you) can actually work in your favor during hiring. I've seen people get hired who don't have the requirements but they have a great attitude and just seem like a cool person to work with. The interviewing process in this industry is so broken. We treat interviewees like we're shopping features for a car, not an individual. It really needs to change...
At most companies, it's easier to leave to get a raise or promotion. Can come from poor management, lack of appreciation (viewing software as cost center), and/or politics. When companies operate under tight deadlines, the first things to go are tests, docs, training, etc. Add in the creep of tech debt and the company has created an artificial skill gap out of thin air, where it isn't the skills of the developers but product knowledge.
nastier: in many companies there's either time for training and "employee development" or there is money for it. When there's time it means there aren't enough projects to keep everyone working overtime (and thus not enough money coming in to pay for things like training), when there's money coming in everyone is working overtime and weekends to keep the delivery deadlines so there is no time that can be set aside for training. End result is that for the company it's easier to replace people than to train them and let them grow, even if you do not promote them. Rather than send someone on a 3 week training course to learn some new technology or whatever, create a job opening for someone who already has that skill and shunt someone on staff who's "getting outdated" from one deadend project to the next until they either quit, burn out, or make a mistake serious enough you have "reason to fire" them. And so the rat race continues.
Oh my. You are so right about this. Companies definitely need to learn to keep their people closer. I have been working for 2 years in the same company. When I joined I was a small junior and now, I am one of the veterans 😂 Just because so many people left and other new people joined. Except the team leads, almost everyone is new... So it is super hard to keep track of everyone and everything. As a "veteran" you also need to train the new joiners, but at the same time you are expected to deliver top notch stuff. Well, you kind of cannot because you have so many stuff on your plate... You cannot handle all of it. Without stressing about it and over-working your a** off.
My career lasted six years. I didn't burn out. But I was moved under a manager who may have been burned out. I asked him for another project to work on besides the tiny one I already had, which was in a maintenance mode. He said no ("Until you've established a track record with me, you don't get to pick and choose what you work on. I'm not keeping you in the dungeon of this project, you're not digging yourself out of the dungeon."). Then he got mad at me for not producing...whatever it was he wanted. He didn't know what he wanted. He wanted me to figure out what to do to this finished project. Actually he wanted me to invent one-day projects.
Thank you for the content! My Unit has a high hire/leave rate. I just gave up to train the new guys. My Cheff does to try to keep a core team. It is horrible
If I stop learning and growing on the job then I need to get paid much more in compensation if they want me to stay. If I can be hired another place where I can keep learning and growing on the job for the same pay then I am leaving. If it is a large company then they can also just move me to a different project if they do not want to pay more. I think this is why so many leave around the time they are most productive. They feel like their growth is stagnating.
Yes exactly. I talked about how companies can provide more growth opportunities in the playlist about the software product lifecycle on the channel. I have a feeling you may have experienced some of the same things I have.
I worked at a mid sized transportation company. The turnover rate was 3 months. Basically our CTO would blow a gasket every other minute, would routine single out employees for public shaming and had only cursory understanding of the technology we used. Temper and ethical flaws aside, I Usually wouldn't expect a CTO to have a deep understanding of tech but he insisted on playing infrastructure, enterprise and software architect. Compound that with no documentation or specifications, you just knew you had your very own slice of hell when you worked there. At one time they hired a department manager, he told me he decided to find other work on his first day after our CTO blew the mother of all gaskets.
Wow, some great insights here! It is absolutely shocking how many misconceptions run rampant throughout the software industry. I’ve absolutely seen that it can take a year or more for developers-including senior hires-to get ramped up at companies that deal heavily with *existing code*, which is what, 90% of positions? 95%? It seems like the programmer mythos still revolves around startups dealing with greenfield code where everything is starting from scratch, even though that is just totally not representative of what most programmers actually do. Even the rock starriest of rock stars is going to need to take time to get acclimated to existing code and domain, and then understand how to navigate the politics of the company.
Also really like the idea of pointing out how all software projects are different. A lot of people in the .Net enterprise world where I come from definitely have very rigid ideas about how to do things, and follow an extremely rules-based (and really, fear-based) approach to development that doesn’t always result in time and effort being spent on the right priorities. But it’s certainly much easier for an organization to impose rules than to deal with nuance.
Hits close to home. Looking at switching jobs right now after 1.6 years or so at my current one. Feels like my familiarity with the codebase and architectural practices is quite high at this point, but the features I'm being assigned to do are arguably senior software engineer level now (despite me being a software eng 1). Not sure why they'd expect me to stick around and put up with that.
On a similar note, I became a veteran/lead developer in the auto industry after 1 year not due to turnover, but incessant hiring. I was the 10th person added to the team that eventually grew to nearly 60. The perpetual onboarding pushed everyone that was productive to hide in their corners and horde their slice of the code. This created a false equivalency in so many ways. The manager could not focus on any one person's contributions and thus everyone became equal in his eyes. This destroyed most of the rapport from those who were productive and put in a lot of effort since they were no longer appreciated as much. Plus, most of the newbies ended up flailing around for over a year due to an unclear vision of the final product mixed with constant onboarding and process changes. I think this situation is tangentially related to what you're describing. I believe the ramifications of high turnover and perpetual hiring is akin to a snowball that's incredibly difficult to stop from growing. "People don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad management." (Poor salary/advancement should be inclusive with bad management)
I’m a front end dev at a property firm. My wife, kid and mother in law all got Covid. I somehow didn’t officially get it. Both my tests came back negative but I was still have a lot of symptoms. So I did the smart thing and quarantined myself with my family. They docked my after saying they would pay me. And now I’m looking for a new job. I’m the only person in the entire company that can do my job. It took them over a year to find me. I can’t wait to watch it all burn down and it cost them a massive chunk when all they had to do was keep their word and they couldn’t even do that.
Involved in a large/5-year project with a 2 member team. We've attempted to browbeat the lead architect into providing estimates and hit deadlines (he never meets them). Over time he's lashed out, and now it's more contentious than ever. Management has had enough and wants him gone. Second developer does not have the skill set to continue on with his work, so we'll need to bring on a new lead. What kind of impact could that have on a project of this magnitude?
It sounds like that could have a potentially big impact. Hindsight is always clearer than at the time, but letting someone go on for years with a troublesome track record like that sounds like it may have been a mistake. Of course that’s easy for me to say not having been there. I have learned the hard way that “rockstar” (hate that term) developers can be a real problem. Especially if they lord their skill over others, don’t spread knowledge and document anything, or fail to improve estimating. Estimation is such a touchy issue as even after 20 years I still get it wrong, and not rarely. But I find when estimates are off enough to put the project in serious jeopardy it’s more often a problem of trying to commit to work with inadequate understanding of the requirements or technology, or trying to estimate too much at once. YMMV.
With the Net, a good coder can just be his own boss. It's what I did. I would've made the same money (maybe more) being an employee, but I wouldn't have had anywhere near the amount of free time and lower stress and moral compromises.
Man you 100% right, we have so much to learn, even i currently spent 30 hours per Week only learning!!!! Other times working and i play games on saturday 4 hours straight ;)
For real. In my first interview in the channel with Scott Nimrod he made the point that we’re being asked to estimate how long it’ll take to learn something we’ve never done before! Ridiculous.
Straight out of college, my working experience has been like this: Startup company - 5 months Unemployed - 9 months Local company - 6 weeks Unemployed - 9 months Startup company - 10 months Unemployed - 14 months Local company - 8 months Unemployed - 3 months (current) To sum this up, over the past 5 years I have been employed for only 2 of them.
I've recently come upon your channel and am glad I found it. I'm looking to transition into the industry and am finding these videos quite helpful. The things you said in this video ring very true from my non-software past as well. One observation that I will make from a previous job (I will avoid giving specifics that might be identifying information) where there was abnormally high turnover is that it was, to some extent, deliberate. I think the way corporate America does middle management creates a severe perverse incentive. Middle managers tend to be insecure. They don't want employees rising through the ranks and outshining them. Even if they have some stock options, middle managers are also typically far enough removed from their team's performance to have an incentive to retain people. The dynamic that occurred on my team was an increasingly byzantine set of internal procedures that were designed--most likely deliberately--to prevent autonomy on the part of the juniors. I once was able to get a project spearheaded by going directly to the organizational head, after my immediate manager tried to quash it. Organizations with more than ~6 people need hierarchy to function, but as a society we really haven't made much progress in resolving the perverse incentives that result.
Good insights. Yes we need hierarchy to group people by competence, but we need upward mobility or interim rewards to keep people engaged since not everyone can be at the top. The problem is usually the people who rise to the top feel entitled to a disproportionate amount of the pie, so they leave everyone below them scrambling for scraps - and this tends to cause less ethical people to behave badly. This ends up being a downward spiral until there's a new leader with an appreciation for the importance of keeping the staff growing and rewarded, or a buyout happens. At least that's been my experience so far.
I work at a company that Switch owners many times and every time we do they try to change things just for the sake of changing things and some people leave.
I only got a $5K raise after a year at the company I work for which is my first. Definitely considering switching companies to get more diverse experience and to get a bigger paycheck
It’s hard to make those decisions for sure. If you can make more and have a bigger growth opportunity sure. Sometimes staying longer at places helped me only in that it took me a year just to start understanding the business well enough to really understand where technology wasn’t being used best to solve problems. Definitely a balancing act.
Is hard to keep smart talented people in the same job for more than 3 years...not really companies fault, u can keep throwing money or whatever freedom you want to give them but they will leave eventually unless they are not talented enough to find something else better. Hire more old people they tend to stay very long.
Where I work...the good...the average programmer has been there over 20 years...I have been there 9 years and I am the newbie. The bad...my boss refuses to specify in anyway what he wants for a project. Instead it gives you a few word directive you go off spend a month or two on something...then he shares what he wants. Had a round table meeting with just about everybody in the company including my bosses boss...this was pointed out by almost every developer in the room. What come of that...NOTHING. Me I put in my time...get paid...and don't get wrapped up in it or angry with it. I just make my products the best I can and leave it at that. So it goes.
Yeah, it's funny being the youngest and newest full time guy on the team despite being senior level and having worked there for 9 years. There are a handful of older guys who have been around for less time, but they're contractors hanging around until a project wraps up.
Professionals don't want to be treated like incompetent upstarts. We want and expect respect from our management who don't know 💩 about the technical aspects of the work. Leave it up to the experts, us and don't micro-manage.
I just gave my quitting notice at a bad company that makes jr devs estimate sequential tasks they've never before done without any real requirements. They continiously told the clients that we were "mid dev with 3 (or 4) years of experience"
It's not only a need to have a great/fun/appreciated place to work, but it's raises. We have too many businesses that have the mindset of "I can't give you a raise to match current market right now, so here's 3% and you should be happy." While at the same time they are willing to let that person leave, with all their knowledge and spin-up already completed, and give that new person that same raise during hire claiming that's the only way we can give a raise that matches the current market. Should that person quit, re-apply, and deman the new market rate?
Not a software job, but I'm currently working for an org that doesn't put any effort into teaching anything org-specific. I'm expected to get by with just technical knowledge. It impresses my managers and coworkers, but it doesn't translate into anything meaningful because of that lack of resources relating to my actual employer. At this org, people on my team pick and choose their tasks, and I find that I'm often reluctant to take a lot of the tasks because I'm expecting to run into a bunch of hidden pseudo-policies. I'm often scolded for things that come completely out of the blue. It makes me insecure about a job that I'm well-qualified for, and it makes it just an awful experience. Been wanting out for a long time, but breaking into software dev -- my actual field of interest -- has been a huge barrier. Everyone wants 10 years of non-academic experience in a dozen different technologies, most of which have only existed for 2. The bachelor's degree that they require doesn't mean much to them -- nor does the fact that I've been doing personal projects since I was 10. Bonus: somehow, they think the "entry level" search tag is appropriate for those listings.
It's not just in the programmer space but also in software sales. Training is woefully inadequate in many cases and there are just too many players in the decision making process. It's an analysis paralysis environment consumed with minutiae as opposed to looking at the big picture. High neuroticism and low agreeableness culture.
Interesting. Yeah high neuroticism and low agreeableness seems to be the default personality type these days with the panic state of the pandemic and fear of the unknown!
@@HealthyDev People often assume that higher pay equals stickier employees, but higher pay doesn't always mitigate a toxic work environment. I always said that I would be glad to forgo a higher $20K base salary if it means having better work life balance and a less stressful work dynamic. Focus on a culture where reasonable expectations and patience are valued.
Another reason is, due to sh*tty process, or the employer is just treating software projects as more of providing "consulting" optics to the client, people just don't hit their full potential, do a mediocre job, so after 2 years of software getting built and being out in the wild, real shortcomings will start to surface. At that point, nobody wants to be around to "fix" the house of cards. They spit out something for a while then they hit the road for another company, another project. When you are on a same project for several years, you garner so much knowledge about ins and outs of everything, and establish so many repertoire with people involved in the project (250+ resources) and all the external partners, that you become a go to guy where EVERYONE comes at you at the same time, 24/7. It gets exhausting and takes away a lot of time from the role that you were hired for, a.k.a. software development. Again, who wants to be in that position and suffer? You are basically a tech lead and project manager at that point doing all sorts of administrative work. It's suffocating.
I just left a job I had been at for ~3 years, stagnant pay and pushing me back into the office. Miss my team. New job is much easier.... kind of hate it.
I'm almost at my 2 years mark and I want to leave for being passed up for a promotion from a newbie just being on our team for 6 months, WTH? I want a higher raise and promotion plus bonuses please!
I know a family friend who has worked at Microsoft, Seattle for 17years, started in 2003 a software dev, making 85k, don't know how they manged to keep him there for so long
I personally think people leave because they can get paid way more. People become way more knowledgeable (top performers aka 20% of stuff who do 80% of work). Company only raise their salary a bit and they leave.
You mentioned that devoting time to estimation creates a bad environment. Are you referring exclusively to long-term SAFE type estimation or short term too? While I agree that estimation takes time and effort and can be stressful and unreliable, I could only picture not estimating working in a research environment or a waterfall type product driven environment without the constant customer feedback loop you mentioned in your video about true vs. fake Agile. Involving customers means deadlines and involving them frequently means frequent deadlines. How do you recommend making both customers and devs happy?
Can you expand a bit on why you feel involving customers means involving deadlines? More about your thoughts on that will help me answer your question.
I think the motivation to leave to another company lies on financial reasons. The problem is that the employer knows he has invested a lot of money in his employee since he first started two years ago. As you said, it's hard to be very productive in the first one or two years. So when the employee comes and asks for a raise, he will not get as much as he will get from other companies, after the two more years of experience. And that is because, nobody gives a 50%-100% raise. But after two years working for company A, if you switch to company B, you might get 50% to 100% more that you actually have at company A. Yet maybe it is tricky for the companies to give such big raises, since developers already earn a lot in comparison with other industries (although that is a bit of a stupid way of looking at things).
Yeah that’s not a sustainable strategy. People hit their cap pretty soon if they really get a 50-100% raise a couple times. It’s short sighted for companies to not make it worth employees with an understanding of the business want to stay. When they do that they just encourage talent poaching.
I do game dev but have only worked for a month so far. It seems stagnating to work at the same place for longer than 3-4 years. Which is unfortunate I would love to work at the same company for a long time. But if I get laid off, wouldn't it be a negative that I stayed for so long? Especially if the company you are working at isn't doing something that is industry standard. The numbers say you have worked 4 years, yet you lack the skills to deserve that number.
Here in Brazil we suffer a lot with high turnover. Mostly because we lack professionals and how strong the international market can be. In the software industry, a company from Germany can hire a cheap Brazilian to work remotely and pay in euro, which has a conversion rate of 1 euro to 5 reais.
What happens is that whenever they take in someone new, the tasks and projects they work on *MIGHT* match their skills and abilities. If they do they do well, management notices, management designates this person as having satisfactory work. Management then uses this as "proof" that it's possible to be productive early. Then someone ells comes in, the projects and tasks they are set to do happen to not match their skills and abilities perfectly. Management then concludes that this person is useless or a problem because they have seen in the past the ones that happen to hit the nail on the head and assume that is how it's "supposed to be" so anyone who don't meet that same level, well there must be something wrong with them.
Great observation. Recency bias. I've seen it in action too. Really hard to fight that one, but it's definitely possible! Keep educating people about this!
Why do you think this trend happens? Do you think it's because a lot of new hires will apply for a position for a salary they know is low to gain experience, and then leave when they feel they can't progress to get a better salary elsewhere?
I think the industry incentivizes leaving because companies refuse to raise the wages of their current employees enough to keep them, and they use rigid processes like fake scrum where everyone is held to estimates that burn people out and make them bail.
Hey there. It really depends on what you’re expecting to get out of it. If you want to make a lot of money for little effort - everyone does, don’t buy the hype. If you like researching, learning, solving problems and (this is a big one) explaining what you do differently to different people so they support your work - it’s a job with high potential for creativity and financial support. You will find a lot of people who complain and have a hard time seeing anything redeeming in it (and I was there the first decade of my career), but it’s often that they don’t want to work with other people or grow their soft skills to keep progressing. Without more context on your situation, I can only offer some general stuff like this. Hope that helps some.
@@HealthyDev That is the most amazing reply ever. I am 53. Hard worker. Working as a nurse aide. Will try and get an associates soon in web dev or programming. Need ALOT of work on my people skills. You are truly amazing for that reply. Thanks again.
That’s kinda of funny because I’m planning to get into IT and I’m learning CCNA and that was my career plan. Work two years for a low entry level salary at a company and then leave for a higher salary after my two years of experience, making me mid level
That's fine as long as you can perform at that level. This becomes an issue once you've done that once or twice, and for companies that need to make good use of their money and have a healthy culture on their teams etc.
Healthy Software Developer Gotcha. I only plan on doing that once for the salary bump. If I’m happy with the culture, my pay, my boss, my coworkers, and goals there, I’ll definitely stick around long term.
Visit the page for the show at the link below and click the subscribe button - you’ll get a list of all the places you can access the show from: jaymeedwards.com/shows/healthy-software-developer/
The problem is that software development is hard, but management is even harder. It would be interesting to analyze the skillset OF THE BOSS over time, I would say. People run away from incompetent bosses, usually. Their inadequacy is ultimately the cause of an unhealthy work environment.
It’s true that most companies have dysfunctional ways of measuring the effectiveness of management. There tends to be too much focus on conformity and predictability and not enough on the healthiness of relationships and culture. We often as an industry promote great individual contributors who are not good managers because they want power and recognition more than helping the people they manage to be successful!
@@HealthyDev Do companies over there evaluate the managers? That's crazy... Here in Brazil there's no such thing. Managers are smart and don't get blame for nothing. If things go well, of course they take all credit. But when the opposite happens, well the it's the devs fault, "they are the ones who estimated". Tldr: It's never the manager's fault.
@@jamzbraz that's a very company-specific thing. Most companies I've worked with do have a process by which managers are evaluated. How that works varies a lot.
Healthy Software Developer it’s not always because they want power and recognition, but because generally if you don’t move into a management role your career plateaus, there’s an expectation in the workforce that the way "up" is into management, whether you have the inclination or ability to manage or not. There’s a lot of societal pressure to keep going up if you want to be considered successful
@@jamesbrooks9321 definitely. I've fallen prey myself to succumbing in many ways to societal pressure. But I resisted going into full management, and I'm still glad. I help many managers of all types as a consultant to work better with devs, and help devs understand managers better - but I don't believe my purpose in the industry is to do 100% people management. Nothing against it, it's just not what I feel called to do.
Ah interesting. My younger son very recently finished an associate’s degree in Japanese (he paid for it himself!) and wants to live over there for a couple years.
I work in a very small web agency that originally did print only, the boss doesn't understand software, he doesn't understand management, i am the only developer, ther other are designers or Wordpress designer with some basic programming skills. Since i am developer and could handle projet in any php framework and Js framework, I get to work on project they couldn't handle before I came. He expected me to do a quotation ofr a 70k$ projet as fast as a small site made in wordpress, expect me to deliver a software on a date that I define at the start of the projet, he doesn't understand that schedule could slip because it is not easy to estimate task duration. After one year and a half, I am considering moving away, what holds me to do this is I can work on interesting technologies. My pay is not high, but is enough for me to live, I won't bother if he doesn't raise me as far I learn new things, for me it's the deal. But lately he showed me he really lack tech culture, and I think that will be a problem in the long run.
It’s common sense. If you believe data is required to make these arguments working with more companies may illuminate it for you. I can understand how you feel if you haven’t seen how prevalent this is yet. Thanks for the feedback.
Two years? Are you serious? My experience is that new developer who ended school can do more harm than good in first two years of his carrier if he is given a complex task (well simple low level code is enough). Ok, you said that about experienced developer to reach his top productivity. In my experience employees who stayed longer are valuable in one different way - they sort of form company culture. They are part of the company, they are sort of proud of company achievements because it's partially their success and they are somewhat more motivated to stay here and make it viable place to work. New employees are somewhat against company, they want to have income, they want benefits and they don't give a **** about product they are creating and if they can find a place which is better payed they just go, because they have not many friends here and they do not feel being part of the company. But might point of view can be biased and it's based on two companies I worked in (for 12 years and for 2,5 years)
It sounds like you may have come around to it by the end of your comment. But just to clarify, I’m not talking about a hire’s previous experience in the industry - that’s a different topic altogether. I’m just talking about the misconception that an employee can make high impact contributions without spending significant time with the company. And how this misconception wastes money and is counterproductive to most companies’ fears around productivity and engagement of their employees. Hope that makes sense.
Software engineering is a great career for the foreseeable future. Good pay, good benefits, remote workout option. Outsourcing hasn’t happened to any meaningful degree as yet.
Pay's OK. Outsourcing is expensive and complicated. Those who've done quickly found out it was neither easy nor really cheaper. It does depend where you outsource to, but in the cheapest countries the software companies are basically sweatshops and employees are paid to work fast.
There is no career in this industry unless you're top of the class, have the right connections and a perfect personality. The demands of these "employers" are insane and fictional.
No matter how you spin it, programming on a tough project is not an 8-5 job, good paying projects are difficult, that is why you are getting paid. It's hard to find dedicated people who are willing to sacrifice for team, everybody wants to be Steve Jobs without putting in the time.
People with a day job aren’t trying to be Steve Jobs. Why should they be expected to sacrifice their work/life balance when the upside is nothing near an investor or partner? See www.linkedin.com/posts/garyvaynerchuk_as-a-business-leader-manager-if-you-really-activity-6689960670546452480-PYzg
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Are you trying to convince your tech company to keep the environment healthy so others want to stay there longer? Leave me your thoughts below!
Healthy Software Developer this is the problem I always have with most of the companies I've worked with. They just don't value the programmer's desire to R&D and learn new skills or provide right place for them (technically, environmentally and financially). We are always thirsty for new challenges and improvements and if we think the environment is stopping us to improve with a routine, We simply leave. If only they could value these, it would be a lot better for the both sides. Right ? (Btw this is my experience from most of the companies in Iran)
It is more likely a natural selection process - these unhealthy companies are going to lose ultimately - even they know the direction to be healthy. There are always people who deny, or go through the motions.
In my country as a software developer you can't have a place to be called home. They spect low turnover?
The way to convince your bosses to treat you better is to unionize. It's weird how (assuming you can survive their retaliation) once you're unionized, your bosses are SUDDENLY willing to consider that treating you well might be okay for profits after all!
@@draxiss1577 unions in my country are so shitty and corrupted, that I don't think they help
It's sad that most companies stop valuing their existing employees immediately after hiring them.
The solution is to give higher and faster pay raises. People don't realize tech workers move up in value faster than other industries
That’s definitely a big component agreed! You can’t pay people enough to deal with excessive micromanagement though, which is what I was trying to (politely 😉) say!!
@@HealthyDev Wow! You're still replying even after two years. :D
Yi Nian Lee yep he replied to one of my other comments on a different video that is older as well. He’s the man.
@@HealthyDev yes you can, I'll take 100million EUR per week for this alone
@@showmytime9177 lol I know you say that now, but working for a Karen gets annoying real fast bro 😂
Just wanted to say how refreshing it is to find a channel that talks about the realities of software dev, rather than the "ZOMG I'm amazing and my company is amazing and this particular product or development technique or language or tool I'm trying to sell you is amazing" nonsense that pervades most of dev talk on the internet. Kudos.
Thanks Andy. I've been on that side of thinking I had some "silver bullet" solution to this stuff too. It took me years to become a bit more balanced. And I'm still learning. Good to hear you're getting some value out of it!
I think the problem is even deeper than that. To me, there are three phases: ramp up, peak productivity, and technical debt swamp. What I have seen is that it takes about 6mo to 1yr to get up to speed. Then, you can really get into a groove and accomplish some big thing that is both exciting to work on and rewarding at the end (both in terms of cash or promotion and pride for a job well done). At this point, you are maybe 1.5 to 2 years in, you are now a "veteran" in the project. At this point, people have left and left over their systems for you to maintain, you are the most knowledgeable about the whole software stack, you've got your own "big thing" to maintain, and everyone wants your opinion in meetings and planning documents. At this point, you can't really get any meaningful work done anymore, your speed drops to zero, at least in terms of the measurable impact of your personal contributions because it's hard to "monetize" your contributions to maintenance, discussions, decision making, or on-boarding junior people / answering everyone's questions about everything. So:
1) Turn-over is a vicious cycle because as you burden the "veterans" with so many "juniors" to mentor, you lose more veterans, and the more juniors you will need to replace them.
2) The staggering speed at which software goes from "awesome new feature" to burdensome technical debt, especially if poorly written, is very much a driving force for turnover.
Dam... Man, that is so sad. I hope that doesn't happen to me!
A friend of mine works in a small start up, that on the surface has a great environment. When you dive deeper into the company, it is anything but healthy. The boss once told a set of new hires that he was the best at the company and no one else at the company could compare. Not only did he mention this but he did it at lunch with the team present. That is a clear sign to move on IMO. It is a challenge to change the way management thinks or goes about their business. Mind you, relationships / environments are a two way street and this is all from one perspective.
People will only attract and keep top talent if they:
1. respect their developers regardless of the developers skill level
2. understand the sacrifices being made by the team members
3. pay competitive wages as the employee grows
Hey thanks for sharing this. Definitely some good things for folks to think about.
Every time a company says the word 'fun working environment' my brain parses that statement to mean 'we don't give good pay rises'
Me too.
When I heard work hard play harder, that means you need to OT a lot because they don't have enough employee to work on the project.
And in my experience they then misquote Dan Pink to justify it.
@@tangdaniel3434 I don't like "play hard", I'd rather "play relaxing", so it's a double minus for me.
Great topic!
I agree with the skill level gap.
However I believe turnover is only one of the factors the causes this skill gap
Given the following:
1). There are developers who stayed for more than 5 years that are ineffective, and more of a liability (Wage Thieves -- that's what they call them in Japan).
Can't be fired due to labor laws (depending on the country).
2). There are short tenured developers who have contributed a lot.
- Career plan / Salary per value efficiency.
- The project / environment was not exciting enough as you gain mastery.
- Didn't belong to the "valued employees" that receives special treatment due to lack of tenure.
There's a pattern I see, on the ineffective ones.
"They lack passion - regardless of tenure."
Also burnout, the bigger the flame the faster you burn.
(Insert Performance vs Tenure = Consistency)
Excellent points.
I focused on what employers might consider so the environment is more enticing, so I didn’t explore all you have here. Thanks for sharing.
As for people who aren’t in a position to grow, that definitely contributes to low overall skill across a team or company, but I think it’s more natural as part of a typical career.
this has been every job since i graduated university (experienced devs resigning, thus putting more pressure on the rest of the team including new hires, which leads to more people resigning including new hires)
the earliest i resigned a job for another was 9 months (3 senior devs including my mentor resigned on the first month I started that job)
my current job, the lead resigned 6 months in, another senior dev resigned just last month, its been an year for me at this place and im already looking for my next gig
companies need to get out of the mindset employees are expendable, when someone resigns, they are taking all the knowledge with them
It is usually after 2 years that a software developer leaves the company as they can make much more money in a new position than they would ever get in raises. +2 years under your belt means you should have 10-30k+ per year. Staying at your current company just won't offer that.
Yep, and that's symptomatic of employers not wanting to offer a growth path to keep people there. If companies gave people more opportunities to grow, rewards, and responsibilities - they could get the value out of them to prevent them from leaving. It's a comforting lie that you can just replace someone with 2+ years experience at a company with a new person and they'll just "drop in" and do the same stuff in a couple weeks. LOL
@@yannisone7148 well there are several reasons to make a career decision and benefits is only one of them. There's also career growth opportunities, impact (on the business or customer), and work/life balance. I talk about this in the free career guide PDF on the front page of my website. As developers we focus (in my opinion) too much on benefits, and sometimes career growth (especially technical) at the expense of impact and work/life balance.
@@HealthyDev Not only this, but it's more cost effective to give a 30%+ raise to keep up with the market demand for 2+ year SD or any other position. It costs money and time to find and hire a new employee. I think it's estimated to start at around $10,000 to onboard a new employee to the point where they can start doing work, not productive work. Now if you work for IC (intelligence community) and you have a TS/SCI, that costs the company over $100,000. It would make sense the pay the employee more once they have received the TS/SCI, but most companies don't. You can take your TS/SCI to another company that will pay you an extra 30-50% just for having the TS/SCI on top of any other type of salary increase.
Companies feel like employees SHOULD be loyal. When in fact, employees loyalty is directly related to the companies loyalty to the employee.
I think there are three critical keys for retaining an employee: growth, experience and money.
@@CodHumors I couldn't agree more.
that's a massive pay rise. I've never seen anything even close to that. Heck, I've not seen my income go up AT ALL in over a decade. After compensating for inflation I now make probably less than I did when I first started as a programmer over 25 years ago.
I've been on my project for just over 2 years. I'm the last person left from the original team, and in same cases there have been 3 or more people that have cycled through a specific role. Due to poor documentation and high churn, I am basically the teams wiki, which is not good for my productivity.
Oh man. I’ve been there...sorry 😢. Hopefully they staff back up, give you the time to brain dump into an actual wiki, or you find something better!
I've been there, but I've been on this project for around 6 years. I wasn't in the original team, but I am the one who's worked the longest on this project. From personal experience I can tell you that you can lessen the load on yourself by taking some time to actually document all those things that people usually ask you. That way, you can just point them to an actual 'wiki' instead of being the 'wiki' :)
@@SuperPranx Yes!!! Documenting patterns in wikis is IMHO one of the most underutilized skills by many developers. Awesome that you are reaping the benefits.
@@HealthyDev My company had the WORST documentation strategy. Documents purtaining to certain behaviors, etc were just randomly placed in different confluence spaces. (multiple confluence spaces for many projects that share the same devs) When they should have just had 1 confluence space, and folders & actual organization of the documents. Not to mention no one ever had time to actually write the documentation, cause the company refused to spend money on it. I asked so many times "Can we PLEASE go through our confluence and get rid of the old documents that are no longer relevant, organize all the diff spaces into 1 collective space for the overall product, etc" and they looked at me like I was insane. Like, yea, it'll take a bit of time, oh well, you can only blame the old managers on the project for letting it get this way.
There were documents in there about how the old PMs handled the project & weird docs with super old ticket numbers & old devs that were no longer with the project, some not even with the company anymore having a conversation in the comments that was completely useless to the current devs. It was so annoying, we ended up using the MS Teams wiki to link to and organize the confluence wiki. It was so stupid.
Not only that. When you loose someone, especially when everyone is under pressure, usually the rest of the team needs to pick up the slack, which is not good for morale, and they too will have to learn to maintain the code that belonged to the leaving member. Hiring more people during crunch time is bad, because now the rest of the team will have to use their time to get the new guys up to speed, or worse, you'll pay them for doing nothing, because no one have time to explain anything to the new people. I am amazed how many managers dont understand this.
I'm lucky enough to have worked for the same company for 10 years now, with little staff turnover. Your colleagues become like family, they habe patience with your flaws and quirks. Last year, I was placed on a new system that was going to replace our existing system. Everything changed. Angular was a steep learning curve in its own right, web development comes with a ton of security concerns that makes development harder, slower and more frustrating. Add to that the lockdown that changed everything and made work feel like solitary confinement. Last year was such a negative experience that I literally cried in January at the thought of another year like that. Still, O decided to stick it out. Why? Because the fellowship of my colleagues, and a 10 year history of a company that really took good care of me. As much as I hate to admit it, I would be an idiot to switch jobs in these uncertain times. Not only will that not make this horribly convoluted new technology go away, I'll have to learn it anyway in a new work environment among new people who dont know me, with the pressure of having to proof myself all over again. I know its the wild west out there, and finding a good employer is as rare as chickenteeth. This year is better than last year, and maybe I'll feel even better next year. But had I not have that positive experience of my company, I'd probably wouldve left long ago, thinking I dont need this in my life. And I dis think that, but never seriously enough to act on it. My company bought my loyalty, and now its paying dividents.
Great testimony to the value people like yourself bring to a company when the culture considers people and not just profits. Thanks for sharing this!
I think this channel is going viral. RUclips algorithm is finally pushing it to more people. Keep up the videos, they're great !
Thanks Brooklyn. 👍
I just watched 15 of his videos today alone. 😂
It just came up in my recommendations, too - great content - glad I found it!
Me too
@@HealthyDev I think Im almost done watching all of your amazing videos. Thanks for the great content, its pure gold! When will you publish new ones????
At the places I’ve been at it’s usually a conflict between those who control the resources and those who do the work. The good ones who do the work want to do the best job and be an example for the rest of the team. This means high quality. However, the ones who control the resources take it as a personal attack on them and equate high quality with high cost and make it their goal to get you to take as many shortcuts as possible and to lower your quality standards. Because they don’t understand the work, they can’t understand how higher quality leads to higher team productivity. You don’t see a conflict and want to do the right thing for the company by doing high quality and high productivity. This can involve spending time up front to learn a new technology, but the resource managers see this as another wasteful activity and try to make you start producing before you know what you are doing and you feel like you are conflicted between doing what is best for the company and doing what the people who control the resources want you to do. If you don’t do what they want you to do, they can starve you for resources. If you do do what they want you to do, your work is going to be much lower quality and much lower productivity. Ideally you’d like to do great work and lead the team by increasing productivity and quality. In reality, you realize going up against them will mean you’re being undermined at every turn. At some point you realize their is no way to win, so you take your skills and go elsewhere where you hope you can ramp up soon enough to maybe get more respect at the next job where you might be able to make it work. Rinse and repeat. It seems like it is a bad system, but from a high performing employee who wants to do the best for the system, it’s the only rational course, that by building up your skill set across various companies, you can make the biggest impact. Sometimes you can make things work by working clandestine for a while, but it’s madness and eventually the controllers of the resources will go so far as to let you go all the while saying you are the best employee they have except you lack flexibility or didn’t understand the business or some other reason.
Management still looks at everyone as a replaceable cog in the wheel.
I get the feeling they don't want to rely on any one person too much. Politically this puts them in a less strong position.
@@SerBallister Exactly. The focus is not on new exciting products, product quality or even profitability. Its about politics, friends and family.
Do you mean it's a bad thing that everyone is replaceable? Isn't it good if they made a mistake in hiring?
@@SerBallister No, I think it puts them in a stronger position when they can replace everyone.
@@erik9817 That's what I said ?
I can confirm that this is pretty much how this works. The company I am working for has so high turnover that at this point some of the people need to work on multiple areas and positions at the same time as the more experienced people are leaving and the new ones are not able to replace them. If 10% of people on your project alone is leaving within 2 months period and you hear from the top that "well, it's expected that some people will leave" you know that it's time to pack your stuff and get out.
Greate videos man. Keep em up. You almost sound like my own thoughts. Now I know these stuffs and issues are not only happening to me
Glad to hear you relate. Thanks for the feedback!
The business can't accept the idea that they shouldn't have their fingers in each person's day to day activities. My company justifies all their micromanaging as required by government regulation, which is BS. I spend a third of my job dealing with useless bureaucracy, and it's only growing. The typical dev I work with is about a year out of college, so I spend another third of my time training them and answering questions. The other third of my time is spent converting one data type to a slightly different data type to fit together two systems that were written by people who didn't have a sufficient understanding of the business to come up with a sensible abstraction. Needless to say, we hardly get anything done. Any new features we manage to squeeze in are hacked as fast as possible and cause way more problems down the line. I probably won't last another year.
I’m sorry. I’ve been in situations with similar frustrations but yes that sounds especially difficult. I hope you’re able to detach when you aren’t working so you can enjoy life some until you find something better. 👍
The software company which I am working at serving a very specify manufacturing industry that produce products that affect every single people in the world, and the customers of us are really billion dollar revenues company.
The domain knowledges that required to understand the software products for being productive, I would say is a way more than 2 years.
I have been here for 11 years.
Just 3 years ago when I was considered as a relative new employee in the company (average about 12 years of working experience), a new management comes in which directly or indirectly contribute to 85% of employee leaving, I am just becoming one of the most experience developers in the company just in 2 years time OMG.
When some of the older employee resigned, they told the HR to keep the old people as many as possible, and all they do is to keep hiring new people for replacement.
Sorry that’s really frustrating when an inexperienced manager shakes things up. Hopefully it settles down soon!
people like to learn, right about (2 years) when the rate of learning stalls and, consequently, productivity is highest, they leave, I don't think it's coincidental... the way to keep them, would be to increase the cost of leaving (pay more, improve environment quality, increase subjective value of employees, etc.), I guess...
Hey thanks for the feedback! I agree people can get bored around that time, that is part of it. In the series of videos in a playlist of this channel called “The LifeCycle of a Software Product”, I offer some strategies for how businesses can create more learning opportunities (and innovation). Not a silver bullet, but some things I don’t see enough companies consider. YMMV
Yup. People act in a way that they believe is in their own best interest. At my last company, I could set a clock on every new college grad my company hired. In two to three years, they would move on for a much bigger payday with one exception: one who spent any working hours working on a graduate degree. Not that I'm complaining: it meant that cheaper young programmers wasn't there long enough for management to believe they could replace me.
The overseas programmers had even more frequent turnover, and I can't blame them in the least. At their pay rate, of course they would find something better (either more pay or a better opportunity) within a year or so. You would no more than get them trained to use a new technology (forget learning the business), and they would quickly leverage that new skill into a new job.
Great video. Programmer skills are definitely not on a normal distribution regardless of ramp up time. It is a heavily skewed distribution with the median further on the left side. Hence companies desire to find those few and far between rockstar programmers that really push tech forward. There is a whole lot companies can do to lesson ramp up time. But to this date, I still know companies, teams, that write horrendous spaghetti code, to quote "we don't need comments" and run into non-stop points of programming equilibrium between adding something and breaking something. Turnover is one of the worst things you can have on a tech team. And its cost, between recruiter fees, ramp up time, delays, changes to accommodate, time from other devs to get to know and learn to work with new person, time to train them, etc... far FAR exceeds a decent raise. Fortunately, I work somewhere, were HR works with me on this, and my teams has next to no turnover.
I've seen it. Very specialized roles that take _years_ to fully get up to speed and productive, with extreme turnovers (e.g. the average tenure in a team is less than 2 years). Management doesn't care. 😢
I worked as a senior web developer at a well known online store. My first month was horrible The supervisor for that section was a jerk. I left within the second month. We had two juniors came on the same time as me four months later they all left.
Sometimes the most well-oiled process in a company is the revolving door...it’s hard to help these companies. Yup, sometimes we just have to re-evaluate and move on!
I thought "Healthy" and "Software Developer" aren't supposed to go into the same sentence.
healthy as overweight makes seance
You are right.
Better to say, " software developer's healthy".
Right?
There is no shortage but low pay. They can't find someone who will accept that kind of pay.
Enter H1b visas
This is spot on! We have been consulting for a Big Company TM and there has been a turnover of above 30% and they're really going off the rails !!
Nobody knows anymore entire parts of the codebase because "the one that worked on it" left the company and took all of it is knowledge with them. Its really a pain.
One thing I would add though, is that in a complex environment. If you are the new hire, you can do a lot to reduce the time it takes to make you productive. But it will require taking advantage of all the opportunities, big and small that you can find. Ask so many questions, not just about the tech, but who all the people are and how you can work with them, introduce yourself, be friendly and cooperative, navigate people problems, constantly be trying to understand the landscape, the business, make a huge effort on those fronts. Not just the project of the moment you are working on
Great insights, yep understanding context is important. Unfortunately college and boot camps don't teach this - at least in my experience. If more people did what you suggest they would definitely be productive quicker - I'm not sure it would completely nullify the gap I mention in the video but it's certainly worth the effort regardless!
Another great video Jayme! My average tenure per employer is around the 1.5yr mark as well. For me, I set big goals for myself, and if I can achieve those goals within the environment I'm in, I stay, and if I can't, I relocate to where I can. I deplore formal performance management processes, because they require pigeon holed responses fitting into a specific employers environment, instead of encouraging broader and more far reaching goals. In my book, every employees goal, who wants it, should be to eliminate their employer as a roadblock
Awesome perspective. With me being the primary provider for a family, I look for something a little more stable, but I know that’s not everyone’s situation. Thank you!
If I can go to any other company that pays more, makes me work less, and uses technology that I like I would go there. If a company really wants to hold people who is talented they should pay more and give extras.
Another thing I noticed after almost 20 years in software development is: the more time you stay in an organization, the more likely you will be pushed to maintain legacy code, and the less chance you have to be part of new projects, which usually are full of young people that could benefit from all you learned. At least in my case this was decisive to leave a couple of jobs, specially because I knew that none of the authors of the new, badly wrote and projected system would stay to nurse their creation and it would eventually end up in my hands.
Some companies hire people for the sole purpose of blaming them for the failures in the project. This shady scapegoating practice let's management bid on projects and make promises they know they cannot keep. When production goes over budget and over time, management can say it was because of this one employee slowing things down. It's a way for them to avoid looking bad or changing how they operate.
I’ve wondered if this is possible but not wanted to think of something so devious. Hopefully it’s rare...
I have seen that happen. Its not pretty!
An interesting video and thank you Jayme. Although some companies and some HR staff/managers will say they want their hires to stay longer, and the sentiment is genuine, it is also true that new employees, many at least, want to stay there. Its a two way street - companies put in the effort to search, but so do hires. However, once the hiring has occurred, the company they work for may not really be the company they saw from the outside. Likewise, the employee may not be exactly what was seen before an offer was made. So as you say, to paraphrase, there is an onboarding time, to learn aspects of the business etc. (Both parties are really learning about each other.) You stated 2 years for this. I generally agree, but I would offer that this can be at least 6 months or a year. I generally set myself professional milestones, at increments of 30 days, to *onboard myself*. Increasingly, however, the companies I run into expect 100% efficiency within 2 weeks, which is largely unrealistic given the large software landscape any professional software person works in. I think if the employee comes in with enthusiasm, a willingness to take notes, ask a few questions, listen, be reliable, and try to contribute - then its worth it to keep that employee for up to year. Even after 6 months, a 'new hire' will be lightyears more productive than within the first two weeks.
Thanks you’re absolutely right. The “two week onboarding” myth is ridiculous. It takes that long for someone to get familiar with working as a cook in a restaurant and hopefully without insulting anyone in the dining industry, the number of variables we face in IT joining a team is astronomical. It’s just not a realistic expectation!!
I think I have shied away from many jobs out there that have a long laundry list of requirements. I mean, what's the difference of 3 years of GIT experience vs 3 months of GIT? Really not much at all. But job requirements are rediculous.
This isn't always the case, but I find "culture fit" (wildcard they can use for any reason to reject you) can actually work in your favor during hiring. I've seen people get hired who don't have the requirements but they have a great attitude and just seem like a cool person to work with. The interviewing process in this industry is so broken. We treat interviewees like we're shopping features for a car, not an individual. It really needs to change...
At most companies, it's easier to leave to get a raise or promotion. Can come from poor management, lack of appreciation (viewing software as cost center), and/or politics.
When companies operate under tight deadlines, the first things to go are tests, docs, training, etc. Add in the creep of tech debt and the company has created an artificial skill gap out of thin air, where it isn't the skills of the developers but product knowledge.
nastier: in many companies there's either time for training and "employee development" or there is money for it.
When there's time it means there aren't enough projects to keep everyone working overtime (and thus not enough money coming in to pay for things like training), when there's money coming in everyone is working overtime and weekends to keep the delivery deadlines so there is no time that can be set aside for training.
End result is that for the company it's easier to replace people than to train them and let them grow, even if you do not promote them.
Rather than send someone on a 3 week training course to learn some new technology or whatever, create a job opening for someone who already has that skill and shunt someone on staff who's "getting outdated" from one deadend project to the next until they either quit, burn out, or make a mistake serious enough you have "reason to fire" them.
And so the rat race continues.
Oh my. You are so right about this. Companies definitely need to learn to keep their people closer. I have been working for 2 years in the same company. When I joined I was a small junior and now, I am one of the veterans 😂 Just because so many people left and other new people joined. Except the team leads, almost everyone is new... So it is super hard to keep track of everyone and everything. As a "veteran" you also need to train the new joiners, but at the same time you are expected to deliver top notch stuff. Well, you kind of cannot because you have so many stuff on your plate... You cannot handle all of it. Without stressing about it and over-working your a** off.
My career lasted six years. I didn't burn out. But I was moved under a manager who may have been burned out. I asked him for another project to work on besides the tiny one I already had, which was in a maintenance mode. He said no ("Until you've established a track record with me, you don't get to pick and choose what you work on. I'm not keeping you in the dungeon of this project, you're not digging yourself out of the dungeon."). Then he got mad at me for not producing...whatever it was he wanted. He didn't know what he wanted. He wanted me to figure out what to do to this finished project. Actually he wanted me to invent one-day projects.
Doh. That sounds like a very confused manager. Sorry you had to deal with that.
Thank you for the content! My Unit has a high hire/leave rate. I just gave up to train the new guys. My Cheff does to try to keep a core team. It is horrible
This content is great man. Hope you share more.
If I stop learning and growing on the job then I need to get paid much more in compensation if they want me to stay. If I can be hired another place where I can keep learning and growing on the job for the same pay then I am leaving. If it is a large company then they can also just move me to a different project if they do not want to pay more. I think this is why so many leave around the time they are most productive. They feel like their growth is stagnating.
Yes exactly. I talked about how companies can provide more growth opportunities in the playlist about the software product lifecycle on the channel. I have a feeling you may have experienced some of the same things I have.
I worked at a mid sized transportation company. The turnover rate was 3 months.
Basically our CTO would blow a gasket every other minute, would routine single out employees for public shaming and had only cursory understanding of the technology we used. Temper and ethical flaws aside, I Usually wouldn't expect a CTO to have a deep understanding of tech but he insisted on playing infrastructure, enterprise and software architect.
Compound that with no documentation or specifications, you just knew you had your very own slice of hell when you worked there.
At one time they hired a department manager, he told me he decided to find other work on his first day after our CTO blew the mother of all gaskets.
Wow, some great insights here! It is absolutely shocking how many misconceptions run rampant throughout the software industry. I’ve absolutely seen that it can take a year or more for developers-including senior hires-to get ramped up at companies that deal heavily with *existing code*, which is what, 90% of positions? 95%? It seems like the programmer mythos still revolves around startups dealing with greenfield code where everything is starting from scratch, even though that is just totally not representative of what most programmers actually do. Even the rock starriest of rock stars is going to need to take time to get acclimated to existing code and domain, and then understand how to navigate the politics of the company.
Also really like the idea of pointing out how all software projects are different. A lot of people in the .Net enterprise world where I come from definitely have very rigid ideas about how to do things, and follow an extremely rules-based (and really, fear-based) approach to development that doesn’t always result in time and effort being spent on the right priorities. But it’s certainly much easier for an organization to impose rules than to deal with nuance.
Hits close to home. Looking at switching jobs right now after 1.6 years or so at my current one. Feels like my familiarity with the codebase and architectural practices is quite high at this point, but the features I'm being assigned to do are arguably senior software engineer level now (despite me being a software eng 1). Not sure why they'd expect me to stick around and put up with that.
On a similar note, I became a veteran/lead developer in the auto industry after 1 year not due to turnover, but incessant hiring. I was the 10th person added to the team that eventually grew to nearly 60. The perpetual onboarding pushed everyone that was productive to hide in their corners and horde their slice of the code. This created a false equivalency in so many ways. The manager could not focus on any one person's contributions and thus everyone became equal in his eyes. This destroyed most of the rapport from those who were productive and put in a lot of effort since they were no longer appreciated as much. Plus, most of the newbies ended up flailing around for over a year due to an unclear vision of the final product mixed with constant onboarding and process changes. I think this situation is tangentially related to what you're describing. I believe the ramifications of high turnover and perpetual hiring is akin to a snowball that's incredibly difficult to stop from growing. "People don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad management." (Poor salary/advancement should be inclusive with bad management)
I’m a front end dev at a property firm. My wife, kid and mother in law all got Covid. I somehow didn’t officially get it. Both my tests came back negative but I was still have a lot of symptoms. So I did the smart thing and quarantined myself with my family. They docked my after saying they would pay me. And now I’m looking for a new job. I’m the only person in the entire company that can do my job. It took them over a year to find me. I can’t wait to watch it all burn down and it cost them a massive chunk when all they had to do was keep their word and they couldn’t even do that.
Involved in a large/5-year project with a 2 member team. We've attempted to browbeat the lead architect into providing estimates and hit deadlines (he never meets them). Over time he's lashed out, and now it's more contentious than ever. Management has had enough and wants him gone. Second developer does not have the skill set to continue on with his work, so we'll need to bring on a new lead. What kind of impact could that have on a project of this magnitude?
It sounds like that could have a potentially big impact. Hindsight is always clearer than at the time, but letting someone go on for years with a troublesome track record like that sounds like it may have been a mistake.
Of course that’s easy for me to say not having been there. I have learned the hard way that “rockstar” (hate that term) developers can be a real problem. Especially if they lord their skill over others, don’t spread knowledge and document anything, or fail to improve estimating.
Estimation is such a touchy issue as even after 20 years I still get it wrong, and not rarely. But I find when estimates are off enough to put the project in serious jeopardy it’s more often a problem of trying to commit to work with inadequate understanding of the requirements or technology, or trying to estimate too much at once. YMMV.
After watching your videos, I'd say we, as stakeholders, contributed to this situation.
It’s a difficult situation and we can all easily make mistakes. It’s never too late to make some sort of improvement if you can get support!
That is exactly the problem that Amazon has.
Thanks for the video! I didn't think about this curve before. And about all it's consequences.
You’re very welcome. Glad it helped!
With the Net, a good coder can just be his own boss. It's what I did. I would've made the same money (maybe more) being an employee, but I wouldn't have had anywhere near the amount of free time and lower stress and moral compromises.
@perfectionbox Curious, what business do you run?
@@maricadsouza6959 Daylon Graphics
Man you 100% right, we have so much to learn, even i currently spent 30 hours per Week only learning!!!! Other times working and i play games on saturday 4 hours straight ;)
For real. In my first interview in the channel with Scott Nimrod he made the point that we’re being asked to estimate how long it’ll take to learn something we’ve never done before! Ridiculous.
Straight out of college, my working experience has been like this:
Startup company - 5 months
Unemployed - 9 months
Local company - 6 weeks
Unemployed - 9 months
Startup company - 10 months
Unemployed - 14 months
Local company - 8 months
Unemployed - 3 months (current)
To sum this up, over the past 5 years I have been employed for only 2 of them.
Why do you keep leaving? And haven’t you learned to find another job before leaving your current one?
I've recently come upon your channel and am glad I found it. I'm looking to transition into the industry and am finding these videos quite helpful. The things you said in this video ring very true from my non-software past as well.
One observation that I will make from a previous job (I will avoid giving specifics that might be identifying information) where there was abnormally high turnover is that it was, to some extent, deliberate. I think the way corporate America does middle management creates a severe perverse incentive. Middle managers tend to be insecure. They don't want employees rising through the ranks and outshining them. Even if they have some stock options, middle managers are also typically far enough removed from their team's performance to have an incentive to retain people.
The dynamic that occurred on my team was an increasingly byzantine set of internal procedures that were designed--most likely deliberately--to prevent autonomy on the part of the juniors. I once was able to get a project spearheaded by going directly to the organizational head, after my immediate manager tried to quash it.
Organizations with more than ~6 people need hierarchy to function, but as a society we really haven't made much progress in resolving the perverse incentives that result.
Good insights. Yes we need hierarchy to group people by competence, but we need upward mobility or interim rewards to keep people engaged since not everyone can be at the top. The problem is usually the people who rise to the top feel entitled to a disproportionate amount of the pie, so they leave everyone below them scrambling for scraps - and this tends to cause less ethical people to behave badly. This ends up being a downward spiral until there's a new leader with an appreciation for the importance of keeping the staff growing and rewarded, or a buyout happens. At least that's been my experience so far.
I work at a company that Switch owners many times and every time we do they try to change things just for the sake of changing things and some people leave.
I only got a $5K raise after a year at the company I work for which is my first. Definitely considering switching companies to get more diverse experience and to get a bigger paycheck
It’s hard to make those decisions for sure. If you can make more and have a bigger growth opportunity sure. Sometimes staying longer at places helped me only in that it took me a year just to start understanding the business well enough to really understand where technology wasn’t being used best to solve problems. Definitely a balancing act.
Great points.
Is hard to keep smart talented people in the same job for more than 3 years...not really companies fault, u can keep throwing money or whatever freedom you want to give them but they will leave eventually unless they are not talented enough to find something else better. Hire more old people they tend to stay very long.
Where I work...the good...the average programmer has been there over 20 years...I have been there 9 years and I am the newbie. The bad...my boss refuses to specify in anyway what he wants for a project. Instead it gives you a few word directive you go off spend a month or two on something...then he shares what he wants. Had a round table meeting with just about everybody in the company including my bosses boss...this was pointed out by almost every developer in the room. What come of that...NOTHING. Me I put in my time...get paid...and don't get wrapped up in it or angry with it. I just make my products the best I can and leave it at that. So it goes.
Yeah, it's funny being the youngest and newest full time guy on the team despite being senior level and having worked there for 9 years. There are a handful of older guys who have been around for less time, but they're contractors hanging around until a project wraps up.
The turnover problem is indeed huge
Professionals don't want to be treated like incompetent upstarts.
We want and expect respect from our management who don't know 💩 about the technical aspects of the work. Leave it up to the experts, us and don't micro-manage.
I just gave my quitting notice at a bad company that makes jr devs estimate sequential tasks they've never before done without any real requirements. They continiously told the clients that we were "mid dev with 3 (or 4) years of experience"
Interesting vid, thanks!
It's not only a need to have a great/fun/appreciated place to work, but it's raises. We have too many businesses that have the mindset of "I can't give you a raise to match current market right now, so here's 3% and you should be happy." While at the same time they are willing to let that person leave, with all their knowledge and spin-up already completed, and give that new person that same raise during hire claiming that's the only way we can give a raise that matches the current market. Should that person quit, re-apply, and deman the new market rate?
Yes. They should if they can afford to.
People like me take 5 years to go pro, 2 years I'm still a dumb ass.
Sometimes I feel like a dumbass at 24 years in. It’s not you, it’s just the nature of this beast. Keep going! 👍
no worries, 5+ years and I'm still a dumbass :)
Not a software job, but I'm currently working for an org that doesn't put any effort into teaching anything org-specific. I'm expected to get by with just technical knowledge. It impresses my managers and coworkers, but it doesn't translate into anything meaningful because of that lack of resources relating to my actual employer.
At this org, people on my team pick and choose their tasks, and I find that I'm often reluctant to take a lot of the tasks because I'm expecting to run into a bunch of hidden pseudo-policies. I'm often scolded for things that come completely out of the blue. It makes me insecure about a job that I'm well-qualified for, and it makes it just an awful experience. Been wanting out for a long time, but breaking into software dev -- my actual field of interest -- has been a huge barrier. Everyone wants 10 years of non-academic experience in a dozen different technologies, most of which have only existed for 2. The bachelor's degree that they require doesn't mean much to them -- nor does the fact that I've been doing personal projects since I was 10.
Bonus: somehow, they think the "entry level" search tag is appropriate for those listings.
It's not just in the programmer space but also in software sales. Training is woefully inadequate in many cases and there are just too many players in the decision making process. It's an analysis paralysis environment consumed with minutiae as opposed to looking at the big picture. High neuroticism and low agreeableness culture.
Interesting. Yeah high neuroticism and low agreeableness seems to be the default personality type these days with the panic state of the pandemic and fear of the unknown!
@@HealthyDev People often assume that higher pay equals stickier employees, but higher pay doesn't always mitigate a toxic work environment. I always said that I would be glad to forgo a higher $20K base salary if it means having better work life balance and a less stressful work dynamic. Focus on a culture where reasonable expectations and patience are valued.
@@alphacentauri8083 absolutely. Paying higher for a toxic workplace is an excuse, not a solution.
I love your analysis. You are great
You're too kind. Thank you, appreciate the feedback. 👍
Another reason is, due to sh*tty process, or the employer is just treating software projects as more of providing "consulting" optics to the client, people just don't hit their full potential, do a mediocre job, so after 2 years of software getting built and being out in the wild, real shortcomings will start to surface.
At that point, nobody wants to be around to "fix" the house of cards. They spit out something for a while then they hit the road for another company, another project. When you are on a same project for several years, you garner so much knowledge about ins and outs of everything, and establish so many repertoire with people involved in the project (250+ resources) and all the external partners, that you become a go to guy where EVERYONE comes at you at the same time, 24/7. It gets exhausting and takes away a lot of time from the role that you were hired for, a.k.a. software development. Again, who wants to be in that position and suffer? You are basically a tech lead and project manager at that point doing all sorts of administrative work. It's suffocating.
I just left a job I had been at for ~3 years, stagnant pay and pushing me back into the office. Miss my team. New job is much easier.... kind of hate it.
Now we're also seeing the companies returning to office, driving away the employees.
I'm almost at my 2 years mark and I want to leave for being passed up for a promotion from a newbie just being on our team for 6 months, WTH? I want a higher raise and promotion plus bonuses please!
I know a family friend who has worked at Microsoft, Seattle for 17years, started in 2003 a software dev, making 85k, don't know how they manged to keep him there for so long
I personally think people leave because they can get paid way more.
People become way more knowledgeable (top performers aka 20% of stuff who do 80% of work). Company only raise their salary a bit and they leave.
You mentioned that devoting time to estimation creates a bad environment. Are you referring exclusively to long-term SAFE type estimation or short term too? While I agree that estimation takes time and effort and can be stressful and unreliable, I could only picture not estimating working in a research environment or a waterfall type product driven environment without the constant customer feedback loop you mentioned in your video about true vs. fake Agile. Involving customers means deadlines and involving them frequently means frequent deadlines. How do you recommend making both customers and devs happy?
Can you expand a bit on why you feel involving customers means involving deadlines? More about your thoughts on that will help me answer your question.
I think the motivation to leave to another company lies on financial reasons. The problem is that the employer knows he has invested a lot of money in his employee since he first started two years ago. As you said, it's hard to be very productive in the first one or two years. So when the employee comes and asks for a raise, he will not get as much as he will get from other companies, after the two more years of experience. And that is because, nobody gives a 50%-100% raise. But after two years working for company A, if you switch to company B, you might get 50% to 100% more that you actually have at company A. Yet maybe it is tricky for the companies to give such big raises, since developers already earn a lot in comparison with other industries (although that is a bit of a stupid way of looking at things).
Yeah that’s not a sustainable strategy. People hit their cap pretty soon if they really get a 50-100% raise a couple times. It’s short sighted for companies to not make it worth employees with an understanding of the business want to stay. When they do that they just encourage talent poaching.
I do game dev but have only worked for a month so far. It seems stagnating to work at the same place for longer than 3-4 years. Which is unfortunate I would love to work at the same company for a long time. But if I get laid off, wouldn't it be a negative that I stayed for so long? Especially if the company you are working at isn't doing something that is industry standard. The numbers say you have worked 4 years, yet you lack the skills to deserve that number.
in the software company I work for the turnover is greater than 10 years ^^'
and it creates other problems...
That would be another good video ;). You’re absolutely right.
True true, as always.
Hey, I'm looking for a job. Where should I send my resume?
This is so true
Here in Brazil we suffer a lot with high turnover. Mostly because we lack professionals and how strong the international market can be. In the software industry, a company from Germany can hire a cheap Brazilian to work remotely and pay in euro, which has a conversion rate of 1 euro to 5 reais.
What happens is that whenever they take in someone new, the tasks and projects they work on *MIGHT* match their skills and abilities.
If they do they do well, management notices, management designates this person as having satisfactory work.
Management then uses this as "proof" that it's possible to be productive early.
Then someone ells comes in, the projects and tasks they are set to do happen to not match their skills and abilities perfectly.
Management then concludes that this person is useless or a problem because they have seen in the past the ones that happen to hit the nail on the head and assume that is how it's "supposed to be" so anyone who don't meet that same level, well there must be something wrong with them.
Great observation. Recency bias. I've seen it in action too. Really hard to fight that one, but it's definitely possible! Keep educating people about this!
Amazing video
You may be right, though why is industry behaving as if everything reinvents itself?
Why do you think this trend happens? Do you think it's because a lot of new hires will apply for a position for a salary they know is low to gain experience, and then leave when they feel they can't progress to get a better salary elsewhere?
I think the industry incentivizes leaving because companies refuse to raise the wages of their current employees enough to keep them, and they use rigid processes like fake scrum where everyone is held to estimates that burn people out and make them bail.
Would you say this field is still worth getting into?
Hey there. It really depends on what you’re expecting to get out of it. If you want to make a lot of money for little effort - everyone does, don’t buy the hype.
If you like researching, learning, solving problems and (this is a big one) explaining what you do differently to different people so they support your work - it’s a job with high potential for creativity and financial support.
You will find a lot of people who complain and have a hard time seeing anything redeeming in it (and I was there the first decade of my career), but it’s often that they don’t want to work with other people or grow their soft skills to keep progressing.
Without more context on your situation, I can only offer some general stuff like this. Hope that helps some.
@@HealthyDev That is the most amazing reply ever. I am 53. Hard worker. Working as a nurse aide. Will try and get an associates soon in web dev or programming. Need ALOT of work on my people skills. You are truly amazing for that reply. Thanks again.
@@micjakes1 happy to help!
That’s kinda of funny because I’m planning to get into IT and I’m learning CCNA and that was my career plan. Work two years for a low entry level salary at a company and then leave for a higher salary after my two years of experience, making me mid level
That's fine as long as you can perform at that level. This becomes an issue once you've done that once or twice, and for companies that need to make good use of their money and have a healthy culture on their teams etc.
Healthy Software Developer Gotcha. I only plan on doing that once for the salary bump. If I’m happy with the culture, my pay, my boss, my coworkers, and goals there, I’ll definitely stick around long term.
How do I find your Google Play link?
Visit the page for the show at the link below and click the subscribe button - you’ll get a list of all the places you can access the show from:
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The problem is that software development is hard, but management is even harder. It would be interesting to analyze the skillset OF THE BOSS over time, I would say. People run away from incompetent bosses, usually. Their inadequacy is ultimately the cause of an unhealthy work environment.
It’s true that most companies have dysfunctional ways of measuring the effectiveness of management. There tends to be too much focus on conformity and predictability and not enough on the healthiness of relationships and culture. We often as an industry promote great individual contributors who are not good managers because they want power and recognition more than helping the people they manage to be successful!
@@HealthyDev Do companies over there evaluate the managers? That's crazy... Here in Brazil there's no such thing. Managers are smart and don't get blame for nothing. If things go well, of course they take all credit. But when the opposite happens, well the it's the devs fault, "they are the ones who estimated". Tldr: It's never the manager's fault.
@@jamzbraz that's a very company-specific thing. Most companies I've worked with do have a process by which managers are evaluated. How that works varies a lot.
Healthy Software Developer it’s not always because they want power and recognition, but because generally if you don’t move into a management role your career plateaus, there’s an expectation in the workforce that the way "up" is into management, whether you have the inclination or ability to manage or not. There’s a lot of societal pressure to keep going up if you want to be considered successful
@@jamesbrooks9321 definitely. I've fallen prey myself to succumbing in many ways to societal pressure. But I resisted going into full management, and I'm still glad. I help many managers of all types as a consultant to work better with devs, and help devs understand managers better - but I don't believe my purpose in the industry is to do 100% people management. Nothing against it, it's just not what I feel called to do.
Can you please provide links to those charts?
I'm sorry I don't have these anymore.
Do you have some connection with Japan? I've seen you bow at the end of at least a couple of the videos.
Ha!!!! No I don’t. Somebody else made a comment about that hilarious!!! I honestly don’t know why I started doing it 🤣🤷♂️
@@HealthyDev I lived there for a year and came back to the US. A year later, I still bow sometimes without even thinking about it.
Ah interesting. My younger son very recently finished an associate’s degree in Japanese (he paid for it himself!) and wants to live over there for a couple years.
I work in a very small web agency that originally did print only, the boss doesn't understand software, he doesn't understand management, i am the only developer, ther other are designers or Wordpress designer with some basic programming skills. Since i am developer and could handle projet in any php framework and Js framework, I get to work on project they couldn't handle before I came. He expected me to do a quotation ofr a 70k$ projet as fast as a small site made in wordpress, expect me to deliver a software on a date that I define at the start of the projet, he doesn't understand that schedule could slip because it is not easy to estimate task duration. After one year and a half, I am considering moving away, what holds me to do this is I can work on interesting technologies. My pay is not high, but is enough for me to live, I won't bother if he doesn't raise me as far I learn new things, for me it's the deal. But lately he showed me he really lack tech culture, and I think that will be a problem in the long run.
I change jobs almost every 6 months :D
So vague with no proof to back up the charts you put on the screen. How do I know you’re right?
It’s common sense. If you believe data is required to make these arguments working with more companies may illuminate it for you. I can understand how you feel if you haven’t seen how prevalent this is yet. Thanks for the feedback.
Two years? Are you serious? My experience is that new developer who ended school can do more harm than good in first two years of his carrier if he is given a complex task (well simple low level code is enough). Ok, you said that about experienced developer to reach his top productivity.
In my experience employees who stayed longer are valuable in one different way - they sort of form company culture. They are part of the company, they are sort of proud of company achievements because it's partially their success and they are somewhat more motivated to stay here and make it viable place to work. New employees are somewhat against company, they want to have income, they want benefits and they don't give a **** about product they are creating and if they can find a place which is better payed they just go, because they have not many friends here and they do not feel being part of the company.
But might point of view can be biased and it's based on two companies I worked in (for 12 years and for 2,5 years)
It sounds like you may have come around to it by the end of your comment. But just to clarify, I’m not talking about a hire’s previous experience in the industry - that’s a different topic altogether. I’m just talking about the misconception that an employee can make high impact contributions without spending significant time with the company. And how this misconception wastes money and is counterproductive to most companies’ fears around productivity and engagement of their employees. Hope that makes sense.
Programmer problem? No problem! Just outsource to India!
We gotta let them in! Otherwise we would be racist… yikes! 😬
If you don't know how to keep your programmers at your company don't cry "shortage of devs" nonsense. It just turns into a scam tactic.
Software engineering is a great career for the foreseeable future. Good pay, good benefits, remote workout option. Outsourcing hasn’t happened to any meaningful degree as yet.
Pay's OK. Outsourcing is expensive and complicated. Those who've done quickly found out it was neither easy nor really cheaper. It does depend where you outsource to, but in the cheapest countries the software companies are basically sweatshops and employees are paid to work fast.
There is no career in this industry unless you're top of the class, have the right connections and a perfect personality. The demands of these "employers" are insane and fictional.
looking at the graph: people leave after 2 years because then they understand how fucked up the code base is....xD
That can definitely be a cause!
No matter how you spin it, programming on a tough project is not an 8-5 job, good paying projects are difficult, that is why you are getting paid. It's hard to find dedicated people who are willing to sacrifice for team, everybody wants to be Steve Jobs without putting in the time.
People with a day job aren’t trying to be Steve Jobs. Why should they be expected to sacrifice their work/life balance when the upside is nothing near an investor or partner? See www.linkedin.com/posts/garyvaynerchuk_as-a-business-leader-manager-if-you-really-activity-6689960670546452480-PYzg
And then Boeing did a thing.