Dec 4

You might not stop to think about it during your busy day but companies like yours have a lot of money riding on their software development teams. Loosing one of your developers, especially one of your more talented ones, would directly translate into a loss of revenue.

Stop for a minute and think about your software developers. If one of them came up to you and quit today, what would you do? Are you doing everything you can to retain them? Probably not, but that's okay, better late than never.

Why You Should Be Managing Retention

The most obvious reason you should manage employee retention is to avoid the hiring process. Replacing a software developer is never easy, regardless of the current economy.

Think about two drastically different economies, the dot-com bubble and the current recession.

Ten years ago companies were turning down work because they couldn't higher developers fast enough. If you try to find a talented software developer today you'd be in the same boat.

It's taking companies at least 4 weeks just to find a developer that barely meets their requirements. I've worked with several companies over the last 6 months that have left no stone unturned in their quest to find talent.

That's not to say there aren't quite a few software developers looking for work, because there are. Unfortunately for managers reviewing resumes the vast majority of available developers are mediocre.

If you lost one of your more talented developers today it would probably take you about 2 months to find a replacement. But what about the other not so obvious side effects to loosing a developer?

Domain Knowledge

Your developers most likely have specific domain knowledge that hasn't be adequately shared across the entire team.

Whether it's special insight into how a process works or the sole understanding of a specific code base, you should be worried beyond just a developer quiting.

At the very least you should manage retention so you can spread domain knowledge and responsibility across the team in order to reduce your risk.

Training a New Hire

First, get it out of your head that your new hire will be able to "hit the ground running". That's ridiculous.

Even if you find someone that knows every bit of technology that your company is using they still won't have any exposure to how your company is using that technology.

Realistically it will take a new hire at least a week just to get his bearings.

He'll have to fidget with his new computer, install all the developer tools the team is using, figure out how to get the code from the team's revision control system, and then stare blankly at the thousands of lines of code that the team works in every day.

Nobody hits the ground running, no matter how badly you need them to.

Low Hanging Fruit: Friday Lunches

It's truly in your best interest to manage retention and keep your development team happy and a well-oiled machine. And since it's Friday, let's start with an easy one: Friday lunch presentations.

Each week a different developer will present something new to the entire team during lunch on Friday. Ideally the company will foot the bill for lunch.

What should they present? Anything they want, as long as it's not related to work. No code reviews, architecture ideas, or anything else related to the day-to-day business of the company.

What Are Your Developers Passionate About?

Why can't they talk about work? Because they talk about that stuff everyday anyways and you want to promote new ideas and get a chance to see what your developers are passionate about.

If you have a better understanding of what technologies and gadgets your developers are passionate about you have a head start on making them happy. You could always ask them what they're passionate about, but this is more like having them put their money where their mouth is.

This public display of passion has a beautiful side effect, sincere passion is contagious.

It's very possible that your Friday lunch presentations will spark a fire in the less than passionate developers on your team. And you want passionate developers, don't you?

Helping the Team Jell

The people you work with have a huge affect on how much you enjoy your job.

If your software development team is just a bunch of people that work near one another you shouldn't expect much of them. On the other hand, if you have a well jelled team full of passion they're likely to accomplish great things.

Having the developers share their passions once a week will go a long way towards creating a team worth working with.

People Like to Play With Cool Toys

If you take a close look at your most talented developers you'll find that they tend to like playing with cutting-edge technologies. They may even be involved with several open source projects.

It isn't always possible to incorporate these ideas and technologies at work, but every once in a while you may come across something that will boost your competitive advantage.

Just wait until you're having lunch one Friday during a presentation and the developers sitting next to you says "Hey wait. If we do something like that here we could double our transaction throughput."

Guidelines

Here are some simple guidelines to get you started:

• Rotate through the development team so that everyone has a chance to present. Nobody likes an attention hog.
• Provide lunch for the team and reserve a conference room for at least an hour.
• Presentations should be between 30 and 45 minutes, giving the presenter time to eat before the presentation.
• Topics can be anything, new gadgets, new programming languages, reviewing a previous vacation, etc. Just steer clear of work topics.

So Many Ways to Manage Retention

Developer presentations on Fridays are just the tip of the iceberg. They're also an easy and non-gimmick way of building a strong team.

During the dot-com bubble companies installed slides in the office and gave away kayaks to the employee of the month. Studies after studies have show that these sorts of compensation tricks do little to motivate people.

Building relationships and creating an environment where people freely share ideas costs almost nothing but provides lasting benefit.

This is just the first part in a series about retaining developers and reducing turnover. Stay tuned.