This article is all about developer retention and how to keep your software developers happy. But, the main point of this post will be on how to empower your developer, whether they’re on-site, remote, or freelance.
How to empower software developers on your team?
The answer: Understand what the market value of your developer is, and respect it.
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Developers are very valuable. A study from Stripe discovered that a majority of C-Suite execs agree that the survival of their companies is more dependent on the availability of high-quality software engineers than the availability of money.
That means developers are actively being shopped for by recruiters. And your developer is likely already taking interviews with those recruiters, or at least has thought of doing so. According to a 2021 report by Stack Overflow, about 75% of developers are either actively looking for a job or open to new opportunities.
What you have to do is grasp the value of developers across the market and, more specifically, their value amongst companies comparable to your size and financial capabilities. Then you have to make sure your offering to your developer is competitive and, hopefully, much better.
There likely isn’t a value discrepancy in the developer market. There probably aren’t a bunch of quality developers that are unknowingly being grossly underpaid, or are completely unaware of their market value, that you can tap into and hire for cheaper than market value. And if there are such developers, they likely aren’t going to stay in the dark for long. So don’t bet on that being an option.
Your default thinking should be that your developer is hearing multiple offers every week, each offer validating his or her market value.
You have to know their market value, respect it, then make comparable or much better offers. Now, what exactly should you be offering?
Only offer what’s within your means, of course. Unless you’re Facebook or Google, throwing extraordinary amounts of cash at them, providing deep tissue massages, or supplying an all-day day-care for their pet iguana may not be possible for you.
Instead, here are some things that you can most definitely provide your developers:
1. Let Your Developers Solve Creative Problems
These problems can help satisfy their desire to learn and improve their skills. Providing developers with creative problems also keeps them motivated and sharp. A good example would be something Google does with their developers, called the “20% time.”
In their 2004 IPO letter, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page explained this philosophy. They wrote,
We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. [This] empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner.
According to Business Insider, some products that emerged from 20% time include Google News, Gmail, and Adsense.
Hackathons (or hack days), training days, and Google’s 20% time are just examples of ways a company can better challenge and engage its software engineers.
Read More: How to Create a Remote Work Culture That’s Supportive, Positive & Fun
2. Offer Career Advancement
Offering career advancement is a great way to recognize your developer’s efforts and time spent with the company. If you have a developer who wants to be challenged, that’s a trait that you’d want to feed. One way of doing this is by providing them with more responsibilities and challenges.
If you’re a smaller company, your developer might be the developer. And since you may not have too many employees, vertical movement to a Lead Developer or VP may be easier to offer as an incentive.
You can be confident that your software developer will remain happy when you acknowledge their experiences and time with your company with a promise of increased compensation and a title with prestige.
Providing your developer with more opportunities to sustain a work-life balance can be a reward for their effort. For that, you can provide perks such as remote work or the ability to work non-standard hours.
3. Provide Your Developer with the Latest Tools
Keep the tools and tech that your developer is using updated to the latest and greatest. Software engineers typically enjoy trying out the newest technologies because it makes it much easier for them to learn, create, and do their jobs.
Differential’s blog says that if your developer foresees the remainder of his or her career at a company locked in an antiquated technology, he or she will likely look for new work.
Some developers agree with the sentiment that being stuck on a team that uses old technologies is like being a carpenter using drills cranked by hand instead of a power drill.
“Nothing infuriates me more at work, than having to be stuck on a team with a programmer who writes code like he did 10 years ago,” says a developer on StackOverflow. “The frameworks have evolved,” he continues, “Not using the new tool, and trying to hack something together the old way is usually detrimental to the quality of what is being built. Be it in code or in wood.”
Read More: How to Integrate Freelance Software Developers Into Your Current Team
4. Keep Your Developer Engaged, Always
You shouldn’t wait until the exit interview to discover any gripes your engineer has with your company.
Jason Cole, a tech consultant for small business engineering teams, warns, “If someone who’s been coming to you with their ideas suddenly stops, it’s a huge sign they’re on the way out the door.” He suggests monitoring your developer’s boredom. Because if you don’t, then you can expect them to search for a place that will.
One solution to this problem can be to have “stay interviews” with your developers when you notice a drop in productivity and ideation.
A Gallup study showed that 50% of 7200 adults surveyed decided to leave a job to escape a certain manager.
Stay interviews or one-on-ones, as they’re more widely known, “provide a great opportunity to build a strong and open enough relationship to the point where your direct reports trust that they can share their feelings about what you could be doing differently” says a former Google executive.
Asking questions like, “Are you happy? What’s making you stay? What would make you leave?” says Diane Scarborough, a former interim VP for People and Culture at Sprint Connect. “Asking ‘Are you okay?’ isn’t illegal.”
Scarborough suggests probing your programmer. Mentions of a longing to work on newer technologies or of friends working on ‘cool’ projects at other companies — these are red flags, she says, even if these comments are made off-handedly.
5. Have Your Developers Work on New Projects
One way to annoy your developers is to take their attention away from building new applications to maintaining and fixing old ones.
Greg Warden, the VP of Engineering at DigitalOcean, considers this a pain point for developers. The solution he suggests to this issue is to identify common problems that you usually encounter after a software release and then create a delivery pipeline that automates that process.
According to Forbes, a few ways to do just that include “conducting better-automated tests before the software gets released in the first place, building extra time into developers’ schedules in the weeks after release, or even hiring developers specifically dedicated to patching up post-release problems and maintaining older apps.”
Read More: 5 Reasons Why Your Engineering Management Style Isn’t Working
Wrapping Up
When your software engineer is happy in their role, they’re able to significantly increase the output of the team or company that they’re a part of.
According to CNBC, “Software developers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, but their skill set makes them a uniquely deep source of innovation, productivity and new economic connections. When deployed correctly, developers can be economic multipliers — coefficients that dramatically ratchet up the output of the teams and companies of which they’re a part.”
Giving your developer creative problems to solve, offering career advancements for the efforts they’ve put in, keeping their tools up-to-date, checking their engagement with your company, and keeping them working on new challenges are a few key tactics you can employ to empower your developer and retain them in your company.
If you have any other suggestions, do let us know in the comments section below!
No company will be perfect at all of these tactics. But as long as your actions towards your developer are backed by good intentions and you understand and respect their value, your developer will be glad to come in on Mondays.
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