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His post from today, "The Diving Save" [1], is also quite relevant to this: how do you keep someone, once they've started to check out?

[1] http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-diving-save/



One way is to give more interesting work and/or work that is a natural possible progression in the employee's career. That technique helped my company woo me over into staying, along with a modest salary bump (although I was seeking much more - career progression mattered a lot to me).

From a personal perspective - I've turned to the quit mentality due to boredom after my first job after not having enough to do, and at my second job I converted over after immense deadline pressure for half a year when combined with significant underpayment (extreme frustration).

The best pre-emptor would be to be proactive in addressing these problems. If your company is exerting too much pressure on developers, then you probably did a poor job hiring enough employees or incentivizing them enough - I'm looking your way startups.


> If your company is exerting too much pressure on developers, then you probably did a poor job hiring enough employees or incentivizing them enough

I've noticed this to be a huge issue when it comes to large companies who try to defend the situation saying we are "lean" and reduce forces by "cutting the fat." I'm currently in a situation where I've become "The Guy" for two entire product lines and its gotten to the point where they keep tempting me with "You'll be on Next Generation SOON". But soon, in my eyes, will never come because I'm a single Engineer maintaining hundreds of thousands of lines of code, code that deals with an OS no one else uses, in build environments no one else uses.

What I use to think of as job security has become a pill that induced boredom.


I would be less inclined to be saved with a dive since all I'll be thinking at the back of my mind is that I'm (to quote the article) "working at a company where folks apparently need to resign in order to have a real conversation about their roles.".




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