Why Top Developers Quit, Supporting Underperformers & Thriving in Recession
Issue #16 Bytes
☘️ Welcome to learning-rich Sundays ⤵️
Thriving in Recession with Leonid Bugaev: Guide for Tech Leaders
Welcome to another episode of exploring tech leadership! In a recent 🎙️podcast session, Leonid Bugaev, Head of Engineering at Tyk, shares his insights on navigating economic downturns, building business context for engineering teams, and maintaining motivation during challenging times. From understanding economic patterns to setting strategic priorities and fostering transparent communication, Leonid covers it all. Your host, Kovid Batra, guides the conversation, ensuring you gain valuable strategies for leading effectively in uncertain times. Get to the full podcast ⤵️
Article of the Week ⭐
5 Reasons Why Your Best Developers Will Quit
Anton Zaides brings you a practical breakdown of the motivations, values and mind space of your most cherished high performers in the hopes that you will learn how to value, cherish and keep them for as long as possible.
“When a developer quits, it’s almost always because they feel one (or more) of [these] 5 things. So to keep them motivated, we ‘just’ need to figure out how to make them feel valued, connected, challenged, growing, and passionate about their work.” —Anton Zaides
He organizes the main levers for quitting into 5 pillars of dissatisfaction with their appropriate positive superpowers. We’ll look into each of them.
An interesting way to answer why developers quit is to use the inversion mental model - what does an unmotivated developer feel?
Unappreciated (and/or underpaid).
Lonely.
Bored.
Stuck.
Apathetic.
When a developer quits, it’s almost always because they feel one (or more) of those 5 things.
He does shape them in a hierarchy, but let’s not read too much Maslow into it.
Unappreciated
Salary and Recognition are the main levers for this dissatisfaction.
A great way to retain a financially-motivated individual is by rallying them behind a core mission, a calling and a core vision of the company. But they still have to feed their family so make sure you don’t trade one for the other, it’s just short-term. Your best employees need to feel they are valued by being well-compansated.
Recognition is best explained by another human need: significance. This is best done within the social circle of the employee: immediate manager, reports, peers and skip-level. The salary is a thank-you for showing up and doing good work. Recognition is a public reminder that you are proud of having hired them, specifically.
Superpower when nurtured well: Valued
Lonely
Employees feeling like they’re a part of the team is one of the biggest predictors of employee retention. They will value their boss. They will shape friendships that may extend to outside-work life.
That’s not to say force everyone to be friends. That will have the opposite effect. On the contrary. Anton suggests there to be a space for fun and connection within the office during working hours. While also making sure the organization policies don’t get in the way of such organic interactions.
Superpower when nurtured well: Connected
Editor’s Note: Hey—this is Denis. I really felt this one. I left many environments early on my career due to office politics and shenanigans about who is allowed to talk to whom, sit here or there or what level of fraternisation is tolerated within office walls. Forced into a silo of one? I’m out.
Bored
Boredom is healthy in small doses. However, as a constant state it is a response to being unstimulated and unfulfilled on a larger scale which opens doors to anxiety, frustration and toxicity.
Ask your engineers what will stimulate and challenge them. It’s not the same for everyone. Create a mental model for who finds what interesting, then make sure interesting tasks get spread around appropriately.
“When people are responsible for important projects, they will feel less like code-writing parrots, and take more ownership.”
Superpower when nurtured well: Challenged
Stuck
This one touches on personal growth and personal development the most. It is a long game with an uncertain and growing time horizon. Everyday fulfilment keeps energy high, but lasting satisfaction is achieved through taking on discomfort in growing and learning.
In engineering careers these are expressed as progress along career ladders, bonuses and autonomy (being able to pick interesting projects or teams).
Manage expectations well and play a farmer, not a chess player.
Superpower when nurtured well: Growing
Apathetic
This one is for the soul. Your engineers are healthy? Well-paid? Friendly? Social? They still may not stick around for a long time to produce their best work unless they know they are with this team and company for a reason. A Vision that they can call their own mission and own. Passion is an output, as Simon Sinek says.
Anton reminds us that the best way to stoke passion in an engineer is to involve them in the business and product-side of things, creating a holistic understanding of their work and service to customers.
Superpower when nurtured well: Passionate
⏯️ Webinar: ‘The Hows & Whats of DORA
Enjoy this learning-filled webinar organized by Typo to answer all your DORA- Hows & Whats with practical tips on implementing engineering metrics- Featuring DORA expert Nathen Harvey, DORA lead at Google Cloud.
Other highlights 👇
Scope? Hmm.
James Stanier elevates the level of understanding and insight contrasted by our capital A- Agile overlords who want us to distract ourselves with tickets, velocity and creep. When the basis of decision making is an endless list of wishes and ingredients, it is nigh impossible to set expectations to anyone’s satisfaction.
Pragmatically, James highlights that for most code, merely writing it is a much simpler task than estimating a timeframe for its completion. That is—unless the code itself is unconstrained with an infinite budget.
As a response, many first-time leaders opt to solve this problem two-folds:
constrain the budget (finish by
dateX money)ask the team to go faster (ie. don’t spend the entire budget)
But poses challenges of its own.
If you have a good team, there's no magical and sustainable way to "just go faster". And scope very rarely tells the whole story; at least, how we often use that word: it can overindex on a product-centric view of the world.
There is no silver bullet for this. No formula, unfortunately. Read around, experiment, and find what works for [your organization] and teams.
James proposes different axes of cutting up work.
Thoroughness
Thoroughness is defining how much of the domain you want to explore. How deep, how many iterations, how much risk? It holds the tension of three forces: scope, scalability and sustainability.
Instead of going faster, the team has conversations with stakeholders about relaxing or improving on these forces.
Trade-offs
Those conversations produce trade-offs. Hopefully trade offs documented as decision records for future validation. More thorough takes more time, less thorough may produce unsatisfactory results. This bar is usually the main dynamic tri-point in a project. It is what the project managers are driving.
The appetite and scale of trade offs will shift throughout the project’s lifespan. Think of it as a time-derivative of Thoroughness → What is the appropriate curve of change for thoroughness for this product? Startups may favor low-to-high to speed time to market. Enterprise integrators may opt for high-to-low to appease security and regulation concerns.
Check out the full article below to wrap up this topic on how to present it to your team and stakeholders 👇
How to Help Underperformers
Luca brings us fresh insights on a frequently-discussed sore point: what to do with underperformers as a manager? Even worse, what to do when you’re considered to be the underperformer?
Luca believes that 80% of performance issues are systemic, not individual. Good performance is a result of clear expectations and individuals who are supported by strong cultural values, effective systems, and good management. Building a strong team is more important than finding so-called "10x engineers."
Once you have a clear definition of what high performance looks like in your organisation, he suggests the following procedure to benevolently help those in need:
👏 Reinforce: “keep doing this thing you are doing”
👍 Acknowledge: “you did this differently and it works!”
🩹 Correct: “this is not working, try this instead”
To expand further with the Accountability Dial and Underperformance Checklist, check out the full article below 👇
🔗 Do I need a Mentor? Let’s Connect.
1:1 mentorship sessions with empathetic & experienced tech leaders to enable your accelerated growth 🚀
That’s it for Today!
Whether you’re innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
Hope you signed for your 1:1 Mentorship session!
See you next week(end), Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Writers of the week - Anton Zaides, Luca Rossi, James Stanier
Sponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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