I'm a lead software engineer on a polyglot team that requires broad knowledge and in-depth knowledge on distributed computing.

If I can give any advice to engineering managers when someone quits: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. The last three people that have left my team are people I know personally. Hearing an engineering manager berate and degrade someone who I have been through incidents, significant refactors, mentoring, debates, and late night delivery with is a new experience entirely. The first time it happened I had to talk the engineering manager down from making someone a non-rehire, the second time I didn't even bother. My judgement of them was fully passed on to the company and the leaders above this engineering manager that gave them accolades and excuses.

Most of the time when I leave a team it's because something either in the management chain like a process or a manager themselves failed me on such a deep level that the hope that gets me out of my bed that says, "We'll do something great today!" has departed me. This post reads to me like that is inevitable, but it is not. If you listen, ask questions without assumptions or judgements, and act as an enabler instead of a Lord or Lady then you'll strike long careers out of engineers. They may leave out of better bonuses or incentives, but they at least won't leave because of you, and one takes a substantial more amount enticing than the other.

>But this role wasn’t a fit, and the timing was off. The environment was not correct. The work didn’t have the impact they wanted, finding their dream job instead. Perhaps I was ineffective at communications, championing above, or slow at sponsoring elsewhere

This seems to miss the most obvious reason. That they found more money elsewhere. Of every developer I have seen leave, their primary motivation was a higher pay. Having a team you like is nice and all, but owning a house or being able to go on nicer holidays is better.

The company I worked at this year is falling apart because all of the actual talent has found higher paying jobs and all that is left is the juniors who will struggle to keep things running.

I'm a senior engineer with over a decade of experience. Most engineering jobs I've left, it was because the manager viewed themselves as an authority with power to force me to do things their way rather than as an enabler who would trust my expertise and help remove blockers to getting things done. In those roles, I'd spend more time chasing the managers' scattered thoughts through endless link trails deep in the bowels of Slack and Jira than actually doing engineering work. When I left, and the managers asked me for feedback, I always told them that everything had been great and I had just accepted a new opportunity. Leaving is not the time to burn bridges.

The default expectation is: people are not going to stay long in your company. It's a given. What you can do to improve things it a bit:

1) pay a bit over market rate (5-10% is ok)

2) create a culture where approachability, kindness and responsibility are more important than anything else

3) offer (but don't enforce) specific workplace settings

4) offer (but don't enforce) work-from-home/work-from-office balance

5) periodically encourage people - feedback is very important

I enjoyed reading this. _As an engineer_, I have always had trouble with determining how to go about putting in my notice. I know that it’s “just business”, however I still get consumed by how my manager at the time will take it. Reading this gives me a sense of relief and I hope it helps when that time rolls around again.

>No one is irreplaceable, and no one is an island.

I've watched a business fall apart slowly after the only developer on the legacy project left. Nobody knows the old framework, nobody wants to waste time learning something that won't advance their career, and finding an existing person familiar with it is search for a needle in a haystack.

A developer can find a new position in a matter of weeks. A business takes months to fill a position, then months more to ramp up as the new hire has to learn the unfamiliar code base. In a market with lots of competition, it can be catastrophic, but management has the mindset that we're all cogs until it's too late.

A tangent: I think it would be a smoother transition we extended the professional expectation of giving two weeks notice to employees before they are let go. I'm more or less serious.

As it stands, employees give at least two weeks notice to employers before quitting, and employers give no notice whatsoever.

The benefit of the employee giving notice (from the company's perspective) is that management has a little time to move people around and try to cover for the missing person. The benefit from the offboarding employee's perspective is that they won't get a bad reference for their next job.

But, if an employee is leaving because they've found a new job (the most common case, I think) then they probably don't need a reference from this position, because they have their next job lined up already. Maybe it would be nice to have one later, but it's not strictly needed. At most, it's a weak enticement.

The obvious argument against giving notice to employees from a management perspective is that the employee will either sabotage the company, not do any work, or just take two weeks of vacation.

However, this is the case where the employee would actually need a good reference from their current company, because they do not already have a job lined up. If anything, you'd expect them to be less likely to behave badly than they would be in the typical case, where they find their next job and put in their two weeks notice afterward, because they need that reference.

When a company lays off an employee, they never give any notice, and the team with the missing team member is left to figure out what to do about it. Even though this can be a major disruption to the team, we don't typically hold it against the company: it's just how things are done. But, should it be?

Of course, the other reason to lay someone off without notice is that you can't afford to pay their salary for even two more weeks, but that's another situation. I'm talking about when someone is being laid off because of pro-active downsizing, or because they're not living up to their potential, or whatever.

> But rarely do I find something to keep the person on, their mind already made up. I respect that. When I close the video meeting, I settle. My mind is racing. “Can I try something to bring the person back?”

It's interesting reading this, as I have always been too -- shy? underconfident? I don't know -- to ever mention my job search to my manager, until I got an offer and accepted it. I worry about it being obvious that the time off I request is for interviewing and perhaps them placing obstacles in my way. I wonder if it's ever a good idea to mention a job search when one doesn't have any offers in hand yet.

> Or the baffling outcome, their asks were all achieved as they exit.

It is not baffling.

It is self respect.

I don't like important stuff that has not been completed. If I spent months on an important work it would feel like giving up. I would feel like a fraud abandoning it and letting it go to waste, because of my own decision. And so I try to focus one last time and push hard to have quality closure.

An interesting observation is how your focus suddenly improves when you have made your decision. You know all your long term plans no longer make any sense and so you stop worrying. You can finally have quality rest at home as various problems prevent you from achieving peace of mind. You know you can ignore bullshit. Or it suddenly stops being irritating anymore because you know you will not have to deal with it for long. You know you can finally say no to all distractions.

Another article where managers show how detached they are and just regurgitate empty manager speak about how emotional and empathetic they are. No single mention to promotions. For some reason companies prefer to waste money and time hiring and training replacements rather than having proper career progression internally. For most developers leaving is the new career progression.

Open your eyes. Reality is shouting in your face. The dozens of dubious management books by "experts" are just making you feel good about not tackling the problem.

I gave notices (verbal) twice during my employment in the 90s (On my own since 2000). In neither case I was eager to leave but I've felt that my remuneration had fallen too much comparatively to a market rate. In both cases I first went and got an offer for much better money and then asked my CEO to match it (we both understood what will happen if he will not). In both cases the offer was matched and the case settled.

So, author, you claim to see the breakup coming. Yet, at the moment the employee gives their notice:

> find levers to negotiate

The time during which you "see it coming", when I the employee am asking more … pointed questions, usually about the company, how its run, the team's responsibilities or work or pay etc. … that, that is when you have the levers to negotiate. That is when you are still the BATNA.

But by the time I'm giving you notice, those levers are gone.¹

I also am pretty sure the last manager I gave notice to did not see it coming. He had a very quizzical look when I asked for the 1-on-1 mentioned in the article. He too, tried to fight what was by then destiny.

¹just in case someone tries to argue "everyone has a price": yeah, I'd agree. But I've not had anyone offer it, and by that time, it's far too high because of what you'd be asking. (Me to renege on a deal, me to stick with something I'm dissatisfied with, and it'd be a "pay replacing happiness" sort of an offer, which is why it'd be costly. You've had the chance to change the "happiness" part, and usually, the demonstration has been "we're unwilling to address those grievances")

(Also, too often, I think, the "problems" run deeper than the authority of the direct manager has control over. My last manager was in that situation: there was very little I think he could actually do. And that, in itself, is a problem.)

Whoever wrote this sounds like an awful manager: extremely self-centered and mixes poor rationalizations with pseudo empathy so as to seem as a decent person. In other words, I find that managers with that much... personality are the hardest to manage (harhar!); they can be extremely flippant in their behavior and unpredictable with demands. Maybe they take the job too seriously? You just need to keep push some boxes around on zenhub and send some emails my dude, this isn't the crusade and you sure ain't no knight (lmao).

Here's a real-world story of getting "exited" of my humble self - more a programmer (or code monkey) than an "engineer" really - see The Strange Case of Mammad Kabiri @ Uniqa Software Service. [1]

[1] https://github.com/bigkorupto/mammad-kabiri-uniqa

When I first saw this I figured it was going to be about what it does to the team, that managers don't seem to get. I was told once, after losing half the team, that they didn't want to lose momentum.

That's not the only problem here, when we stay with same company our salary and revision are less when compare to later hire. So money matters. Also new tech and knowledge are also lacking.

Work is work, folks get too involved. I don’t think it’s healthy to take it personally if someone chooses to leave the team. In fact I’ve never understood this.

My role as a manager is to ensure you grow enough to move on to something better. That’s the contract, you give your best to the team while you’re here and we try our damndest to find good opportunities for you regardless of what it means for us.

I just have no misconceptions about our relationship, you’re here to push it and I’m here to challenge you to do that.

Beautifully written - I don't necessarily mean the content, but the quality of writing. Have you tried writing more serious things (I mean more than blog posts)?

> I wasn’t expecting those intense feelings when walking away the first time. They don’t write that in any of the books I read.

I want to make a movie to capture the feelings :)

Large hierarchical orgs are surely one of the circles of hell. The way the whole manager-culture setup warps peoples minds never fails to amaze me.

> Of every developer I have seen leave, their primary motivation was a higher pay.

That's the polite thing to say, without bruising egos or burning bridges. I left my last job because I felt unappreciated after being skipped over promotion, even after accomplishing all the tasks I had agreed to with my manager would give him the capital to push for my promotion. Instead, other members of my team got promoted - and that was the primary reason I started looking around.

The fact that I'd be paid more wasn't the primary reason, few people leave a job for a lower paying one, so it's often an effect, rather than a cause. When asked in my exit interview, guess what I said my primary motivation was? Hint - it wasn't "I'm disgruntled because you didn't keep your end of the bargain"

> Of every developer I have seen leave, their primary motivation was a higher pay

I've never seen this ever in my entire 37 year career. I'm not saying it doesn't happen just that I've personally never seen it. All the devs I know work on stuff they choose to work on and are passing up money for jobs they're less interested in.

> Having a team you like is nice and all, but owning a house or being able to go on nicer holidays is better.

You spend maybe two to four weeks a year on a nice holiday. The rest of the time, for around 8 hours a day minus weekends, you are going to be spending with a team. Even if you live in a nice house and you're remote you're still going to be spending that 8 hours a day with a team.

If you don't like the other people in that team, or they don't like you, that's a big chunk of your life that's not going to be pleasant, however much more money you make.

And the few that don’t leave for higher pay, leave to go work with those that left for higher pay or because morale is low because of people leaving.

By my estimates from hundreds of informal exit interviews I have done with colleagues that have left, I’d wager 60-70% left for higher pay or due to second or third order effects caused by those that left for higher pay.

Half of the remaining engineers left to pursue new opportunities. Almost always these were engineers whose first job out of school is at the current company and they hit 4 years. Many of these won’t cite pay, but almost all got offers way higher than what their first employer out of school is paying them four years later.

Those that left because of a bad manager were in the minority. Most engineers frustrated over a bad manager transfer teams within the company instead of leaving the company.

As a lead/senior, money was a factor, especially because I was being underpaid compared to the rest of the industry for my experience. But I was working in a field for a company doing things that I wouldn’t find in most roles. I turned down a significantly higher paying role once because I wasn’t very interested in the work that I’d be doing.

Not saying you're wrong, but that's also a great reason to give when you don't want to talk about the real reason.

I quit my job with the primary motivation to work on something else, with someone else. The old company just was no good fit, not good for me. I effectively earn less money now, two yearns into the new job, than when I left, but I am more happy. Sometimes, the grass really is just greener on the other side, and it may not be because of the money. Sometimes its tasks, culture, or even people.

>> Of every developer I have seen leave, their primary motivation was a higher pay

My motivations for leaving so far:

- Working with more relevant technology. Maybe higher pay in the long run

- Getting experience in different roles. Again, long run thinking

- Getting out of anything related to real estate in 2006

- Moving across the country to chase a girl

- Knowing that my manager was going to quit and that he was the only one allowing me to work remote.

- Douglas

- Entire department off-shored. Was working remote so I could have stuck around I guess. Wasn't worth it.

What companies don't seem to get is that they are stack ranked constantly according to a very brutal standard.

In this ranking system there is no place for every employer from position 2 down, even if they're a good prospect.

This is not at the instigation of the employee, but the employers themselves, who all have contracts saying "while you work for us you can't work for anyone else".

Covid has exacerbated this, as these days the work you need to put in for an annual performance review (more forms) often approaches what it takes to land a new job (zoom) ... so if you have to sell yourself to your current company, why not repackage the assessment and send it to a handful of other companies and select the top bidder.

> Of every developer I have seen leave, their primary motivation was a higher pay.

YMMV. Of developers I saw leaving, including my direct reports, almost no one was driven by money. There are actually two primary reasons. 1) their performance was suboptimal and it was easier to change the company than to push themselves uphill 2) relocation. Most of those who chose that patch was taking siglificant lifestyle downgrade, even if net pay was somewhat better.

Most folks don't look for higher pay if they're satisfied with their job. Once they are unhappy and start looking, then it always looks like "They left for higher pay" which is technically true. But doesn't address the root cause.

Agreed. Salary discrepancies and less equity have been the biggest reasons I've seen cited by peers who left, along with getting a promotion.

I've left many positions, but never once has it been because of pay. Usually, it's because I grew bored with the position.

This is a solid list, and it is true.

(Kindness/Responsibility) If I’m well paid, but someone is a full-on jerk to me/my team (particularly if they are at a very high level — in fact the higher the level the smaller the slight needs to be to have big impact), I will start to look, and it’s only a matter of time until more money finds me.

(Balance) If my wife starts telling me she misses me, or that my kids miss me, or asking why I couldn’t come to the performance, I will start to look, and it’s only a matter of time until more money finds me.

If I’m paid under market.. we’ll, I’m gonna find out soon, and then I will start to look…

One I didn’t see in your list is working to align people with work they want to do. Not always easy, but something can always be done, and the effort to try is almost as important as the result. If I’m stuck doing meaningless work, or never able to complete something, or (worst of all) watch the new hires come in and do my projects because I’m stuck working outages, I will start to look…

6) offer a professional development path where people feel they are growing and not stagnating doing the same thing over and over again

Agreed.

On Office vs Remote: This is a really, really difficult one.

The company I just left moved to a remote-priority hybrid model, where the office was "heavily suggested" two days a week and "absolutely optional" every other day. As you could imagine, those two statements mean the same thing; its optional every day.

I left because I love the office. I love the separation between work and home. I love the drive in; getting time to listen to podcasts or new music. Most of all, I love the company; I love collaborating in person, spontaneous low-stakes communication about little issues in their dev environments or problem solving, stuff that would never make it into Slack, but we're better off talking about it.

Not enough of the team feels the same way, so most days it was just me and maybe 3 or 4 other people (out of a dozen+). So, I left to find a company that was more aligned with what I want.

But, here's the ironic part: in the frank conversations I had with other team members, many are on the opposite side of the fence. The two-day-a-week "heavily recommended" was too much office time. They want full remote. Some of them were bold enough to just do it; management (and COVID) isn't at the place right now to enforce too harshly. Many still feel guilty about it; how there are people like me going in most days, which is aligned with the corporate mandate, and they're not doing it. One person left, citing this as a deciding reason.

Point being, I think any model can work; full office, full remote, or hybrid. No matter what companies do, there will be churn, because every choice is different in some way to what employees have either gotten used to (remote during pandemic -> full office) or what employees miss (full office pre-pandemic -> remote). And if you choose hybrid, you seriously need to enforce it; if you enforce it, some people will be unhappy with the model you pick, but that's better than not enforcing it and causing everyone to be unhappy.

On Positive Feedback: For me, it feels the best if its specific feedback not on the basic completion of tasks, but on the quality of completion. Not "Thank you so much for staying late to help with that customer issue", but "The way you solved that customer issue was pretty creative man, thanks for jumping in on that." That feels so much better (for me).

One of the big things I took too long to learn, and am still trying to improve in, is understanding how valuable positive peer feedback is. Not just approving great PRs with zero feedback or a "LGTM" "+1" ":thumbsup:"; I love putting line comments in that say genuine positive things I feel about lines, like "That's an awesome solution" or "I didn't know you could do that in typescript" or "I really like this, I'm definitely going to start doing that". The first hurdle I had to cross was, actually, having these thoughts more often; to reframe PR reviews from "its how we control risk on production merges" toward "its an opportunity to help the submitter improve their code" and even further into "its an opportunity for me to stay up-to-date on how the entire codebase is evolving, and how other devs solve problems."

Be specific, and be genuine. If I can't give genuine positive feedback, then either: the person I'm giving feedback to isn't really living up to any positive feedback, or in my experience more commonly: I'm not seeing the good in their work and effort, and its my responsibility to improve my ability to recognize it, so I can actually be genuine.

As a manager, one of the great joys of my job is watching people I've trained and mentored grow and outgrow my organisation, and leave to take on far better roles that are more exciting and challenging that anything I can offer them if they stay.

It's also one of the biggest challenges to me, replacing those people, who are often top performers on my teams. But that's my job. It's what I do for this organisation. "As an engineer" I hope you never consider holding your own career progress back just to make that part of my job easier. If that's a serious problem for me, then that's because I failed at _my_ job. I need to have contingency plans and succession plans and we both need you to not be irreplaceable. When I've got my ducks in a row, my reaction is "Right, time to accelerate $otherDev's seniority, temporarily move those @responsibilies to @colleagues with a handover, and call up HR/recruiting to hire in someone with @skillset. Let's plan some celebratory drinks."

When you're ready, and when a great opportunity presents itself, do not spend a second worrying about how I'll need to deal with you leaving. While you've probably just made a whole bunch more work for me as I scrabble to fill the gap you're leaving, I will genuinely be happy for you and proud of you for getting there.

(And I will try my hardest to communicate that pride and happiness much better than I show my frustration and stress as I do the hard parts of my job.)

I'm feeling somewhat guilty right now and all I've done is chucked out a few resumes and booked in a few interviews

Fact is though I wouldn't be looking if the company was as loyal to me as vice versa I guess. I actually really like the job and the people but I need to at least keep up with inflation to avoid feeling like a clown haha

As did I, it was refreshing to see this.

I'm not necessarily in software engineering (operations/architecture), but the weight on my manager(s) at times has been what's kept me here.

Not always directly on them, but the vacuum they mention. Everyone on my team is a champion of their realm, and I can't help but assume the worst if I were to leave.

I might not love the place, but the people and the core of what we do - absolutely. Sometimes it indeed just isn't the right time.

"however I still get consumed by how my manager at the time will take it."

Usually nobody really in management cares unless they are complete psychos. And the team will not miss you much either because other people usually step up. People who leave are forgotten quickly.

I either don’t care at all and am glad to be out or I care so much that I tell my manager ahead that I’m dusting off my resume and starting the hunt.

In the later, the team has a head start finding and onboarding my replacement. As we all know, the main issue here is that the customary 2 week notice is insufficient time to find your replacement. If it’s truly just about money or something like that, it also gives them an opportunity to give you what you feel is fair or they know what is going to happen if they don’t.

Leaving a company is a six-week process where you give your notice four weeks in, after all your loose ends are already cleaned up. Part of that first section is finding out from both your manager and HR how they expect/want to get notice. There’s no way to do that without foreshadowing a bit, which also makes things easier when the time comes.

When you get fired sometimes you do get notice, at times 3/6 months.

Many places will let you go immediately but are required to pay notice pay.

As an employee working notices are soulcrushing fearful periods where you have to find new work while working with esteem low. The layoff with pay allow you to refocus and reframe your experiences with a safety net.

From my experience at several (large, well-paying) software companies, I feel like this is already the case.

Employees who leave voluntarily will usually give as much notice as they can. There is no fixed guidance or expectation, but just good form to tell at least your manager as soon as you have made a decision. It isn't uncommon for people to publicly announce their departure 6-8 weeks in advance.

For people who are fired for bad performance, there is usually a PIP or other probationary period which would count as notice.

For layoffs, there will be severance (2-3 months is common).

The only time I have seen abrupt departures is for entirely unavoidable reasons – theft, sexual harassment, family issues, visas.

In US tech companies the norm absolutely is not to fire people with zero notice or severance. It's typically more of a six month process where employees are explicitly told that they're on the way out at months before they're fired. When people are terminated immediately, it typically comes with a severance package of some sort (usually in exchange for a legal agreement to not sue the company).

So in my country the legally mandated minimum employer to employee notice after an initial three months is two weeks, plus an additional two weeks for every five years service of the employee up to eight weeks total. The exemptions are mostly limited to gross negligence or criminal misconduct. They can put you on garden leave for that time if they really don't want you in the building, but they have to pay you.

The conventional wisdom would be to never mention a job search until you have an offer in hand and you are ready to hand in your resignation letter. If you do mention it, you will be perceived as having half a foot out the door and if your job search falls through (as many do) then you have just telegraphed the fact that you're highly disengaged.

But you don't need to actually mention the job search. If you can put your finger on what's wrong with your current role and you have at least a little trust with your line manager, then you can just say "I'm not happy about XYZ in my role, I want to improve it, have you got any ideas?". And be prepared to bring it up several times.

I don't think anyone is expected to tell their employer they are job hunting.

IMO no, it's never a good idea.

Once you announce your intention to leave, you've broken trust with your employer and manager. Why assign the good projects to someone with one foot out the door? If they decide not to leave, was it because they want to be here, or because nobody wanted them? Are they going to leave in a few months anyways?

It's like when your significant other says they want to break up with you - "no, please I can change!" is never the right next step. You can end up together, but spend at least 3 months apart first.

I was once fired after sharing with my manager that I was looking elsewhere. I had other managers at the same company who were safe to share this with, but my manager at the time was not, in retrospect.

Keep it to yourself; it just isn't worth the risk.

It's really depends on your relationship with your manager. 99% of the time, it's a bad idea to say you're interviewing. If your manager is someone you trust, and they genuinely have your interests in mind, you can talk to them and they can use their influence to try to solve whatever problem is making you think about leaving.

If you're not confident that's the case (and unfortunately it's rare), it's too risky to make it known you're interviewing. It is often better to discuss whatever is making you unhappy, but without saying that you are considering leaving because of it.

I would (and have) kept my cards close to my chest when searching for a new job. I think the employee/manager relationship is a delicate one because on the one hand you're human beings and you develop a relationship as human beings working together. There might be some friendship there. On the other hand, your boss represents the company and will do what's best for the company.

When you're looking for a new job, you're doing what's best for you; what's best for the company is secondary. If you let your employer know you're searching, they'll start prying and trying to make changes to make you happy. That's reasonable, but at this point they may make promises they can't keep. Obviously, if you are unhappy and think they can change things, share those concerns, but if they aren't doing enough for you that you want to look for a new job, then you've sort of given up on them.

> I wonder if it's ever a good idea to mention a job search when one doesn't have any offers in hand yet.

The modal manager's response is to fire you if you mention it.

As a manager, even if you see The Signs, you rarely have 100% confidence: it's hard to tell if they're taking days off because they're interviewing or because their toddler is sick again. And if you take a punt and ask if they're going to leave, that's not going to go well: even if they are, they're going to deny it until the offer is signed, and it's going to come off as adversarial.

IMHO, once the switch of "I can't take this anymore and I want to leave" has been flipped, it's very difficult to flip that back. So your job as a manager is to do regular check-ins at sufficient frequency to identify and correct any issues before they get to this stage -- although as you say in your last paragraph, often these are outside your control. Which is why I've had X people leave my team in the past year, and am currently interviewing myself.

> (Also, too often, I think, the "problems" run deeper than the authority of the direct manager has control over. My last manager was in that situation: there was very little I think he could actually do. And that, in itself, is a problem.)

Yep. Particularly at larger companies your immediate manager can often do little more than perhaps offer a mild pay raise or slightly alter working conditions.

I'm currently planning on leaving some time in the next couple of years (sticking around for family reasons in the near-term) because I've realized our business model isn't what I thought it was when I joined, and that engineering really is a cost center past a certain baseline, which explains the utterly mediocre equipment/procedures and lack of leadership/low morale. I'd rather work somewhere where engineering is a profit center. Nothing my immediate manager can do about that.

I don't think the author was suggesting that it was the right time to think about this - they were more just reflecting on their emotional response.

When I close the video meeting, I settle. My mind is racing. “Can I try something to bring the person back?” A list of grievances sets in, and I go through a loss cycle for days. It’s a breakup. I let go.

That doesn't read to me like they're thinking that finding something to bring the person back is a plausible outcome.

Agreed; if you’ve accepted a job offer, reneging on that deal because your current employer made you a better offer isn’t a great look. It’ll be remembered by the hiring company and the individual who made the offer, and that can follow you around for a long time, making future job searches a lot harder.

I think the author was talking about a low false negative rate (all the people who leave showed signs of leaving), but not a low false positive rate (many of the people who show signs of leaving don't leave).