In addition to the issues raised before, I'm curious about one thing:
How does he treat his developers?
For example, the guy mentions that it's mostly 9-5. Does that mean that the boss expects 20 hours days for 3-4 days for a weekend to ship the latest version of their software (for the "big X.Y release")? Do 2 or 3 of these weekends and developers see a pattern, and look for less crazy places.
Likewise, how is the development process managed? Is it chaos: "OMG GOTTA PUT OUT THIS FIRE, DROP EVERYTHING?", or does it have some planning and order to it? (I don't care if it's waterfall, Agile, Kanban or Scrum - is there some order to the system so managers know the status of the system?)
How is their status reporting? I really don't like being asked every 15 minutes how Ticket 29 is coming along. Daily standups are great (and usually the best frequency. I've also done two daily standups per day, and it felt nanny-ish).
Yes, turnover is a hard problem. Sometimes it involves being generous with the benefits if you can't be generous with the salary. Sometimes it involves changing your development process.
Sometimes it involves changing your expectations: engineers don't expect to be around for 5-10-15 years at a company because that's not how jobs work any more. I almost laugh when I hear the "where do you expect to be in 5 years" question, because, odds are, I'll be one or two jobs removed. (This is not just a tech sector problem: the national average job length seems to be 3-5 years).
Comments
In addition to the issues raised before, I'm curious about one thing:
How does he treat his developers?
For example, the guy mentions that it's mostly 9-5. Does that mean that the boss expects 20 hours days for 3-4 days for a weekend to ship the latest version of their software (for the "big X.Y release")? Do 2 or 3 of these weekends and developers see a pattern, and look for less crazy places.
Likewise, how is the development process managed? Is it chaos: "OMG GOTTA PUT OUT THIS FIRE, DROP EVERYTHING?", or does it have some planning and order to it? (I don't care if it's waterfall, Agile, Kanban or Scrum - is there some order to the system so managers know the status of the system?)
How is their status reporting? I really don't like being asked every 15 minutes how Ticket 29 is coming along. Daily standups are great (and usually the best frequency. I've also done two daily standups per day, and it felt nanny-ish).
Yes, turnover is a hard problem. Sometimes it involves being generous with the benefits if you can't be generous with the salary. Sometimes it involves changing your development process.
Sometimes it involves changing your expectations: engineers don't expect to be around for 5-10-15 years at a company because that's not how jobs work any more. I almost laugh when I hear the "where do you expect to be in 5 years" question, because, odds are, I'll be one or two jobs removed. (This is not just a tech sector problem: the national average job length seems to be 3-5 years).