“have you got a minute?”

Software engineers often change jobs with an average tenure of less than 2 years. There are many reasons to resign, but why do engineers resign so often?

While many people leave their jobs because they are unhappy, that is not the only reason. There may be circumstances or unforeseen events that take precedence. It could be family, relocation, health, life changing opportunity or starting a startup.

Behind all the advantages, titles, and dazzling techniques, there’s an elephant in the room. Let’s explore some of the causes and scenarios.

• People should feel part of something bigger than their product or project. When people engage with a company’s mission and purpose, they are more likely to stay, especially if their project or product comes to an end. They may be happy to change teams rather than searching externally.
• Engineers can feel incomplete if their role, product or outcome has little impact. They may only want to work in a domain that is important to them. such as climate change.

• Hiring a single great engineer and putting them in a toxic environment won’t fix it. They will probably get frustrated and leave. Address the root cause before they get involved or be upfront about the situation and challenges. Sometimes a company doesn’t make for a great engineer. A great swimmer can’t swim in the mud,
• The team is working to please the manager or individual. Instead, the team must have a mission. Everyone, including the manager, should work towards that mission. would be a great manager service tax and help the team succeed.
• Long-term exposure to negative politics and toxic situations can affect a person’s mental health. Letting go and caring less is a skill. When someone finally finds out they’re thinking about work 24/7 and discussing toxic colleagues over dinner every night. May be due to a change.

• An imbalanced team with too many superiors with differing strong opinions can result in friction and frustration. Similarly, a team with few seniors and many juniors that does not challenge the senior’s decisions can be harmful. Culture screening and/or structuring teams proportionately reduce this risk. Well-balanced teams provide an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop together.
• organizational mismatch. Some engineers prefer structure, titles, and clear responsibilities. Others thrive in chaos and obscurity. Culture fit screening is important here.
• Lack of role transparency, especially those that can help mediate conflicts. For example, a new engineer struggling to work with a coworker may be unaware of who can help with mediation. It can exist in a flat hierarchy if the roles and responsibilities are unclear. In these circumstances, people may try to handle it or leave it alone. Not everyone will move on to CTO.
• People may simply be looking for a safe environment where they are heard and heard. Some engineers want to be able to influence the product, processes, and culture, while others just want to be told exactly what to do.
• Some people won’t last long, no matter what. For example, Gen Z is changing jobs at a rate of 134%. more than in 2019, Organizations that accept this and adopt accelerated onboarding to make engineers productive as quickly as possible can really find the positives in it.

• Limited career development opportunities. This can result from a lack of communication and understanding of the desires of the individual engineers. For example, an individual contributor may want to dive deeper into a core technology or product to grow into a subject matter expert. Others prefer the challenge of rapid proto-typing using a wide range of technologies. Or simply, there’s no opportunity to take on more responsibilities, work with the technology stack, or make that move to management.
• Challenging tasks and lack of meaningful results.
• the sadness. A company may have a strategic plan to focus on and focus on its existing offering. Instead of growing and investing in new products and services. People can get bored, and the new direction may not match the aspirations of others. For example, those looking for an IPO.

• Paying employees less, or falling behind the market. A certain interval can be tolerated. But when times get tough, employees who are undervalued have less motivation to stick around. Triggers include moving towards a technical direction, not aligning with the employee’s ideas. A key symptom is to leave without a secure second job. Companies must operate regularly Trimodal Salary Benchmark Against local, regional and global companies.
• Lack of communication and unsafe environment. An employee is unhappy with their pay increase or missed promotion and feels they are unable to discuss it. Management gets to know for the first time after the employee resigns.
• Companies often deal with meaningless and unsatisfactory work with huge compensation packages. It may work for a certain period of time, but generally, people eventually give up.
• Many tech companies reward and increase employee engagement by allocating equity packages with multi-year vesting schedules. Also known as golden handcuffs. This works well to retain employees, especially if the company is public.

• Excited to start that work working on cutting-edge technologies? Only to find a legacy codebase with on-call support on your first day. Or maybe that management position just disappeared? You can bet that there are open IDEs, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn behind it.
• Employers must ensure that the job description and interview match reality. Candidates should have plenty of opportunities to ask questions. Similarly, candidates must gather enough information to decide whether the company, job and role are mutually suitable.
• An engineer has a culture fit interview with Team A, but is reassigned to Team B on their first day. Many candidates mutually assess their potential peers. If Team A and B have very different cultures and ways of working, there is a risk that it may not work well.

• A technical team may have little autonomy and be unable to make important decisions. This may include solution architecture, processes and technology choices. Perhaps there are too many slow processes and red tape to get the job done. Over time, small repetitive tasks can become very frustrating. Some of the early red flags include the time taken to check out and run the codebase and the steps required to ship a feature.
• Employers that offer flexibility will always win.

Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are many great tech organizations that care deeply about people and culture. Investing heavily in safe, supportive and people-centered engineering cultures.

Let’s keep learning and do our best to make sure people leave for good reasons.

Have a nice day!