Here’s a bit of truth: we as developers tend to job hop a bit. It isn’t always an ideal situation but it’s just how our industry is. Experience is worth so much that wages often can’t keep up. My first job was at a bank where everyone got a raise of a few percentage points each year. That’s fine for most jobs, but because of the value of good developers, I was able to leave the bank after 3 years, and get a 40% raise by moving to a new company. Now the bank certainly had the money to pay me that much, but because of their corporate culture, they couldn’t give me that kind of raise. It’s something we see over and over again. Good developers leave for new jobs because their current employer won’t give them the money they’re worth. I don’t know what has to change among employers to convince them to pay what their employees are worth, but a good developer’s value isn’t based on what they’re currently making, it has to be based on what they could get in the market (at a different employer).
Now, there are a few things that play into the tendency to job hop. First, in my region, developer wages have been lower than the national average for at least 10 years. That’s partly due to a lower cost-of-living, but it’s also partly just artificially low. To the benefit of those of us in the region, that’s starting to change. That makes it difficult for employers when their previously happy employees are now asking for $20k raises, but it’s hard for me when gas prices suddenly go up $0.30 per gallon too. Sometimes that’s just what happens in a free market. So here’s an employer and now their employees want raises to do the same job, either you pay them, or they leave. One of those is a lot cheaper for the employer, and I can guarantee it’s not going through a hiring process. It also happens because the talent pool is shallow. A partner of ours recently did a job market evaluation and found that the unemployment rate among .NET developers in the Sioux Falls region was about 1%! (That 1% was basically unemployable) That shallow talent pool also drives wages up. Now, there will always be people who are looking for more money, and in fact I’ve never met a person who couldn’t use more money. Money isn’t the only thing we get from jobs though, and there comes a point where more money isn’t the only evaluation we’re making when we look at our job opportunities.
The second thing that tends to play into job hopping is boredom. At some point in most jobs, you’ve learned all you can from the people you work with, and from the things that company does. Unless you’re constantly challenging yourself to learn new things, you’ll get bored with the mundane details involved in the day to day stuff. Most of us that are programmers got into the job for the problem solving aspect of it. While we’re aware that we have to do the boring parts (and the yak shaving), we don’t want to be stuck in that all the time. Instead we want to work on new technologies, and innovative things. This falls partly on the developer to stay motivated, and partly on the leadership to give those people opportunities to do interesting things. I’m the lead developer where I work, but I have to give my teammates things to do that challenge them otherwise they get bored and start looking for new opportunities to learn. (There are some developers who got in the business because they knew they could get a paycheck and are just interested in keeping their job easy. This doesn’t happen to them.)
Finally, people move to a new job because of opportunity, and really opportunity for advancement. I recently had a good friend of mine leave because he got the opportunity to be the lead developer at a different company. I couldn’t give him that opportunity here, and neither could my boss. We’re not a big company and we don’t have a need for two lead developers. Sometimes people are just going to get better jobs, and there’s nothing you can do to keep them. Again, that’s part of a free market. This is why you hope people leave though, because they’ve succeeded at your company and are going on to bigger and better success.
Our industry has always had some degree of people moving from job to job, and it seems to be at a higher rate than most other professions, that’s partly because of the value of experience, and partly because of pay, and sometimes just for new opportunities. Hopefully we can all find a way to pay the people we have what they’re worth, keep them interested, and give them the opportunity to succeed.
SD Code 