According to some surveys
turnover at tech companies or how long people stay there before they leave for a different job is just two years on average
and there's actually a gap that gets created in skills of programmers because of this. Today we're going to talk about some misconceptions
about how skills are spread across a software company right after this.
Hi, I'm Jayme and at Healthy Software Developer,
I want to help you have a long career where you don't get burned out,
you don't get pushed around by people that don't really understand software development,
and you can just have a healthy career. In the many years that I've developed software,
it's been really frustrating when I come across
really talented programmers or professionals in any aspect of software development
and they leave within two years on average.
This is a statistic
you've probably seen all over the place
and it's actually been true in the many companies that I've had the opportunity to work for as an employee and as a consultant. And
one thing many tech companies have heard, but I don't think they appreciate
is the fact that every time you hire someone new onto your project even if let's say the job request that's out there on
LinkedIn or monster.com or through a recruiter or however, it's
circulated says you know "here's 10 or 15 different software development technologies"
"we'd like the new hire to know" and maybe some experience in our industry,
every software product that you'll ever work on is a little bit different and
sometimes a lot different and so this
conception that you can bring somebody onto a project and within two weeks their productive is just false.
Even if you bring someone in and they're able to write code quickly and gel with the team they've got a lot of learning
usually to do about how does that specific business work and how have they decided to use
technology there to actually build their product? If we look at this chart
you can see that when someone new is hired into a software company to work on a project even if they're really
experienced it takes time until they really hit their stride and are most productive on that project.
It could even take up to two years for them to really know the business and everybody at the company well enough that they're
really at their most productive.
And that's unfortunately right around the same time that many employees leave.
If we were to look at how many people work on a software project and what their skill level is,
what many managers and leaders of companies like to think is that it follows a
standard deviation, which is what this chart represents.
And this just shows that in the middle are the most people. Meaning, if we had a software project
let's say with ten people
the majority of the people on that project might be at maybe a medium
sort of level of skill and that's what you see at the top of this bell curve.
But there's some outliers on the right side there might be a few top
performers and on the left side. There's gonna be a few people that unfortunately perform
maybe not as well as everybody else.
But because of the turnover in most tech companies the reality is that the true distribution of skill is closer to this chart.
Because there's so many people coming into the company to replace people that have just gotten to the point that they're most skilled,
most employees are at a lower level of skill because they're still
ramping up on the company culture and the business and the solution. And so one of the best things that I think
software development companies can do to really get a lot of productivity and get the most
creativity out of their people, is to create an environment where people like working there!
And if that means that you have to allow software developers to be more autonomous and do things on their own with less
hand-holding, and that means there may have to be less predictability because there's less
estimating that's done because estimating is just too hard for the large quantity of work that your project might involve,
(and you can go back and watch my video on agile
budgeting where I talk about why that's just a plague in our industry),
anything software companies can do to keep people there longer and give them ownership over software projects and
allow them to use new technology when they want to and have them do less estimating and less of the grunt work
they don't want to do to try to predict things and be more lean,
that's gonna increase the chance that all that money that a company's spent
bringing a new employee on and getting them up to speed and getting them to the point that they can really be most productive
isn't constantly wasted every couple of years.
So if you unfortunately worked for a software company
that's had high turnover or at least most employees leave within two years or less,
leave me some comments below. If you're new to my YouTube channel
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So until next time,
Thanks.