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How to NOT keep your software engineers…

I see a lot of organisations struggle to keep good software engineers. Although they pay their engineers well they see their best people leave and they cannot figure out why?!

Here are some of the malfunctions I noticed:

  • Respect: Treat your software engineers as overgrown children that play around with “toys”. Don’t involve them in any kind of decision making but micro manage them instead.
  • Involvement: Keep your software engineers as far away from business as possible. It’s not their job to understand business problems, their job is writing code.Don’t involve them in any kind of the non-technical decision-making processess. Throw requirements over the wall to engineering and expect them to implement it.
  • Hardware and Tooling: Provide your software engineers with outdated systems with unsufficient resources(writing code cannot require a powerful machine, right?). Deny any tool that can improve productivity and makes the life of your engineers easier. 
  • Accountability: Measure your developers on the lines of code they write(more is better), the number of bugs they create(less is better) and make exactly one developer responsible for a specific piece of code(how can you blaim the right person if multiple people work on the same code base?). Even better provide financial benefits for your top code writers. In the end software engineering is all about writing code, right?
  • Silos: Create organizational silos where engineering, testing, deployment are separated as much as possible(remember the accountability rule).

Any other unhealthy behavior you noticed?

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