10 Reasons Your Star Programmer May Be Looking to Leave
Top programmers are not easy to find. It takes time to cull through dozens, if not hundreds, of resumes to find the magic combination you want, and it takes hours to perform interviews. After all of that, you still need to jump through hoops to make sure that your best candidates accept your offer rather than someone else’s.
Yet all too often, these hard-to-find (and hard-to-hire) employees are neglected once they come on board. While proper compensation is, of course, a large part of employee retention, the top programmers need more than a great pay check. Here are 10 reasons why your star programmer might be looking to leave, and what you can do to convince them to stick around.
#1: Poor pay
No one works purely out of a charitable nature. So when your best people feel like their pay is severely out of line with market standards, they may start to view other pastures as being much greener than yours. Your worst enemy in retaining the stars is the thought, “I am the worst paid senior developer in this town.”I see a lot of companies that look at what the market is like only when they hire someone. Meanwhile, your best people are often aware of what is happening in the market consistently. If you have not re-evaluated your pay packages in a while, you need to. While the package may have been competitive when you hired someone three years ago, your best employees may be able to get a substantial raise by making a lateral move (if not taking a higher level position) to another employer.
#2: An uncertain future
The best people often have no intention of leaving until something out of the ordinary prompts them to stick their toes in the job market waters. At one company where I worked, the trigger for a mass exodus was the sale of the building our employer was renting to a major company that obviously was not going to keep leasing to us. A lot of people panicked and wondered whether the loss of the office space would prompt a move of the operation to another city. Instead of sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop, they left. At another company where I worked, a large layoff spooked those who survived, and they left as soon as they could.There is little you can do to prevent these outside influences from occurring, but you can do a lot to reassure your people when they do happen. Your best programmers are not dumb; they know when you are trying to puff them up with hot air instead of being forthright. When these events happen, give your people the straight truth and show them what you and the company are doing to prevent the need for your stars to lose their jobs. It’s a tough path to walk, but too many managers cave in to the temptation to cover up the problems — and those cover-ups tend to drive people out even faster.
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