Good Developers Don't Trust Employeers

21 points by externalreality 7 years ago | 6 comments

Good developers who are open minded and free spirited don't trust employers. This is the conclusion I have drawn after spending far to much time researching articles and academic papers theorizing why tech turnover is so high. There are 2 reason actually:

1. Companies over hype the position (like requiring an Architect's training when the job really requires a construction worker). The Architect will likely leave the job in 1.5 years (which is the average turnover rate at many tech companies)

2. Trust between companies and tech developers is low. Tech environments are pretty hostile at times and developers absorb all of this. They wait for employers to address these problems but only receive lip service and wishful thinking. Trust devolves. After multiple rounds of this, developers develop a general distrust for companies in general and leave at the first sign of higher pay or better benefits. Loyalty is rare.

These are the major take aways I got from hawking every article and paper on the topic I can find. If you have a good article on the topic and care to share it, please do. I will definitely read it carefully.

playing_colours 7 years ago |

Good developers are the ones who have many years of experience. They got their battle scars and can recognize insincerity, poor ethics, and lack of expertise in employers. They became better in soft skills, got marketing, domain knowledge.

I noticed that often a few lines of job advertisement, a half hour meeting with a company say enough to effectively notice the patterns of bullshitness and run away.

quickthrower2 7 years ago | |

Any company that’s about to be taken over = run away based on my small bias sample size.

deeteecee 7 years ago |

Regarding #1 for expectations of a position, many people don't know how to properly articulate the position well. I say unfortunately, it's up to the candidate to do his due diligence and ultimately, still test the job in the early phase. Now, if it's really far off, that's just poorly done then.

2. Just sounds like bad companies or big companies to me. Makes sense to me, move on. That's the sign of a good developer as well as a strong individual in my book.

duxup 7 years ago |

What does anyone mean by "trust employers" or things like that anymore?

Do you trust you'll get a paycheck? I generally do.

Do you trust years of "that promotion is coming"? If it is years then you've got your answer, it's not about trust.

Leaving for higher pay isn't about "trust" IMO, it's just an option that you take or don't.

navyad 7 years ago |

Very true with the company having shitty managers living in old ages, imposes the brainless day to day activities like updating number excel sheets instead of on focusing on actual work. ++ for office politics.

jones1618 7 years ago |

There's a 3rd reason: In my experience, tech employee turnover is often directly related to corporate/executive turnover. You can hire into the most forward-thinking, technology-valuing workplace and then find that a merger, acquisition or management purge transforms your company into a hide-bound, change-averse organization that suddenly sees research as an extravagance and development as a red-line expense counting against the bottom-line.

I've seen this devolution happen at least three times in my career at three different companies. In every case, it results in devaluation, then exploitation, then burnout of previously enthusiastic, talented developers who soon leave. Sadly (even if you are a staunch capitalist in the executive suite) this "streamlining" almost always proves misguided as the company inevitably loses all technical credibility, innovation stalls and it loses any competitive edge it might have had along with market share.