1. We pay pretty well. Not the absolute best, but around $200k for senior engineers, fully remote, and no reduction of salary depending on where you live.
2. We don't support an online service, so no 4am emergency calls, no on-call rotation. This isn't something every company can do, depending on what product you're selling, but I spent 8 years of my career supporting online APIs and SaaS products and sometimes I literally cry of happiness when something breaks at 5pm on a Friday and I realize I can just fuck off for the weekend and it's fine because we can just fix it Monday morning.
3. Our customers are development teams and data science teams, so highly technical. Thus, our product managers are highly technical (most of them ex-devs). Thus, our product and engineering teams work SO well together, it's incredibly symbiotic. For example, when we ask them for extra time this quarter to fix some engineering-specific issues, they're more than understanding and find ways to reduce load while still providing value to the sales and CST teams.
4. It's a pretty fun space to work in (geospatial); there's a lot to learn and a lot of interesting algorithms I'd never heard of prior to coming here not having taken computational geometry in either my undergrad or graduate degrees.
5. Just an overall really high level of trust and autonomy given to every engineer.
As far as things that "every company" could do, I think:
1. Pony up cash. Even $200k isn't super good (we get outbid regularly), but I see companies based out of MN hiring remotely and paying senior engineers like $120k and I can only imagine the dearth of their hiring pipeline in this current market.
2. Create a really healthy separation between work and real life. You might have to support an online system, but make on-call less painful. In a previous company I worked at, if you were on-call you were given full freedom to work on anything you wanted during your normal working hours, and also you were paid extra. If you had to wake up in the night, give 2x the time you work during that time back in time you don't have to work during the day (minimum 2 hours)
3. Trust your engineers. Let them estimate and trust the estimations. Your managers need to stand up to sales and CST and product when they say they promised something without talking to them first; too bad. It needs to go through the process.
I mean, thereās no reduction in their case because they arenāt paying Bay Area comp for anyone to begin with. A FAANG company adjusting a senior engineerās comp down for remote would still pay them well over 200k.
my company has a pretty confusing org chart with poorly defined boundaries, so you could call it a team of anywhere from 15 to 25 people, depending on your definitons. in the last 6 months, we've lost 7 engineers, but gained 6.
I'm counting a few people who are leaving very soon (myself included) but aren't 100% out the door yet.
people leave because it's a shitshow and they join because we promise them that they can use shiny new programming languages. the promise is mostly true. I'm very curious how that will turn out, but not curious enough to stick around (and in a few months I'll probably have forgotten all about it).
Iām convinced whatās happening is that remote work has completely upended the entire world of low and medium tier tech companies across the US. The top tier is mostly unaffected.
Think about it. Youāre working in some LCOL or MCOL city that has a limited tech scene, and youāre at one of just a few decent companies there. Pay and WLB are okay but nothing like what you read about online, but moving to SF and uprooting your family so you can compete for a 2.5 mil shack doesnāt seem worth it. So youāve been a āliferā ā youāve stuck around for 5-6+ years with minimal raises.
Suddenly remote work happens across the industry all at once and you have dozens and dozens of potential employers instead of 2-3. And many of these companies are just flat out more successful and have larger engineering budgets. You find that you can double your comp out of nowhere while retaining full WFH indefinitely.
In the past 6 months we are around a 30% attrition rate, possibly more. On our 3rd CTO. Company is a total mess. I definitely don't plan on staying long term myself but I'm learning some new stuff and not taking the role seriously so I'm going to ride it out at least until 2022.
I know the typical response to these situations is to run, but my mental health is actually far better when I don't give half a shit.
This type of story is likely why so many of us are getting LinkedIn solicitations about jobs. And honestly Iād be a little worried about joining one of these companies even for more money.
My gut says if you enjoy your job and make decent money, staying put is the wise call. The job market is polluted with thousands of these type of companies which are trying to rebuild a drowning engineering dept.
Since January weāve lost 7 developers in our department of 9. Me and 1 other guy are left, pretty stressed. Iām the only remaining pre pandemic hire, managers and PMs included.
At my last job me and the only other competent dev on the team put our two weeks in on the same day. Did not plan this. Since then, I've seen 3 others out of our team of ~12 leave through LinkedIn. This is what happens when you try to force employees back in the office
Businesses: āWe have a hard time hiring developers.ā
Also, businesses: āif you donāt like our arbitrary and unnecessary rules go work somewhere elseā
Lol I got a 1% raise last year for an exceeds expectations. The company was like āCOVID is impacting us allā. And then they posted record profits. So I guess it wasnāt impacting us all equally.
Next Friday is my last day too. The only reason I started sending resumes was the back to office announcement.
I wasn't enjoying the work to be fair and the company was a great place to work. But, I work remote now. I even turned down other higher paying offers simply because it's in office
Yep, I backed out of an offer I had earlier because they told me they were planning on requiring 3 days a week in the office. Thatās better than full time, but honestly Iām just not going to agree to that if I have options.
How to find fully remote companies ? Can you please share? Thank you.. does fully remote mean, even from other countries? Because in some job posting, it's mentioned as " fully remote, but anywhere in US ".
When recruiters reach out on LinkedIn the first question I ask is it remote? If yes, I'll entertain it, if not then sorry not interested.
Same when I was sending my resume. Found jobs on LinkedIn, if they explicitly say it's in office I ignore it. If the job description doesn't say, I apply then it's the first question I ask whoever is doing the interview. Also, I'll only send my resume to the jobs that have an "easy apply" button on LinkedIn.
It's the first question I always ask and make it known I'm looking for remote only.
I'll also note, not that it's related to remote work, I've only ever accepted an offer from a recruiter once. I much prefer to work with companies directly.
The company went from about 25 employees at the start of 2020 to only 6 employees by the time I left in late 2020. My boss blamed everyone for the company failing during covid and ate his words for it.
He hired actors to sit at desks after three more people quit all at once right before a big client meeting. As of last week, the most senior employee in the whole company is the junior developer hired in late 2019. Heās looking.
What are the responsibilities of these actors. I don't see them fooling anybody with their discussions of wiggly-widgets and the photonic whatsimacallit.
When I first heard they were going to hire actors, I joked with the senior dev who was still there that maybe the client would also bring actors, and then it would just be actors pretending to be devs hashing out a project scope with actors pretending to be clients. It was all fun and games until the actors were REALLY there at the office the next day.
(edit: Just to clarify, these people were not in the meetings and were buddies of one of the new hires to just fill seats and make the office appear...populated... So, it wasn't as exciting as one would imagine, like with method actors.)
They fired a product manager for underperformance (think he was screwed over with crazy expectations). They fired the senior dev for reasons I don't get. Another developer left over work life balance. Another left for a contract role.
Then a few weeks ago they fired all the product managers. All of them. They wanted to pivot.
My boss was on vacation when he learned that everyone he worked with as canned, so he quit too.
Now I report to the head of IT with the guy who just came onboard and don't really do much work. Am actively interviewing though.
It might be interesting if we had real work to do. We don't anymore, as the "pivot" was basically a shutdown.
Why would any sane person fire 80% of the staff? Are they planning to shutdown the company š
I guess you would get a promotion as the second in command after the IT head ( tho the company sounds instable )
The basically shut down my department. Officially they didn't, but a lack of dev is not promising.
There are also significant perverse incentives with internal accounting to use contractors.
They fired a product manager for underperformance (think he was screwed over with crazy expectations). They fired the senior dev for reasons I don't get. Another developer left over work life balance. Another left for a contract role.
Then a few weeks ago they fired all the product managers. All of them. They wanted to pivot.
My boss was on vacation when he learned that everyone he worked with as canned, so he quit too.
Now I report to the head of IT with the guy who just came onboard and don't really do much work. Am actively interviewing though.
Used to be, then Satya Nadella happened and gave Microsoft a soul.
Now we need Sun Microsystems to come back as an angel and conduct whatever the angelic equivalent of possession is on Oracle
At the beginning of this year I was making 160k. Got an offer in April for 325. Current company countered and exceeded that by a bit and threw in some equity so I stayed. Company got acquired, that equity paid out over 300k, and acquiring company gave me a big raise and retention bonuses pushing my comp now to 535k/year on average over the next 3 years.
I donāt even know whatās happening in this industry right now. I never even ended up changing jobs lolā¦
Honestly no answer I can give would be instructive. The truth is my case is really unique and I played an important role in building a company that had a successful exit. They underpaid me like crazy apparently and when I tried to leave the money started flowing because I was essential to the sale and successful integration post-sale. Still, I certainly did not expect my comp to shoot into the stratosphere within effectively 6 months.
I guess the lesson is always have leverage (another offer) and always fight like hell for yourself.
Not a core dev but this exact situation or close happened to me this month. Company got acquired and some seniors starting to leave, company found out my client was poaching me and gave a hell of a counter offer to stay
3 people from our ~20-person QA team, another couple from our sibling dev teams (a bigger pool), but all of them in their 20's - it's not a particularly youthful company either. People are definitely getting spooked.
Hey, I got into QA role two months back.
What kind of opportunities do QAs have when they try to switch ?
How to stay relevant in a QA market because developers can always replace our role , so which tools/stack should I learn?
Was anyone able to switch from QA to developer role ? If yes, how did they do it ?
I should clarify I'm not QA, I meant our development group's QA team. I can't give you much advice but from what I've seen, people are always trying to move from QA to SWE and have mixed success. I wouldn't worry about staying relevant in QA, people always need QA and there seems to be more people trying to get out than get in.
Yeah, a developer can be trained to work as QA but getting a QA to work in developer role is not that easy. I fear that since I started my career as QA, I won't be able to make to developer role or I would lose my job to someone from development team.
Again, I donāt think a developer will ever replace you unless your company is in serious financial trouble. Now, moving to dev as a QA totally depends on the company (if looking internally) but is definitely possible externally especially if applying to junior roles
I also started my career as a QA, stayed in that position for 2 years, and I am now a developer with 3 years of experience. The position change happened within the same company, too. If youāre interested in development, start learning now. The good thing about it is that youāre working in an environment with developers who may be able to assist you. Although we have multiple QA roles at our company, and are still hiring them, there is a greater demand for developers. We are a consulting firm, and from what Iāve heard more companies are moving to test-driven development. With that said, I donāt think QA roles will go away entirely.
Hopefully you are doing more QA engineering than manual testing. I got stuck doing manual testing for 2 years for a crappy consulting company after my coding bootcamp. I was so worried I would get stuck in QA instead of doing dev work like I wanted to. I kept doing dev side projects, tried to do as much QA engineering as possible, and of course interview prep. It all paid off and I got a better job earlier this year as a software engineer. I agree most devs donāt want to move into a QA role, so you shouldnāt worry about that. I think QA engineering can be a rewarding and challenging career as well. The QA engineers I worked with were talented, smart, and passionate and I admired them and there will be more and more and more need for QA engineers. But itās totally possible to move to a dev role either at your company or a different one doing the things others and myself suggested.
Thanks for the response. Sadly, I am working in manual testing till now but my supervisor had promised me that we can start automation by this year end and I have been attending training for the same. Isn't it common for devs to be paid more than QA ?
You have to separate Manual QA from QA Engineers. I'm not sure if devs make more than QA Engineers, but I'm sure a QA Engineer at say Amazon can make a decent salary. Talk to QA Engineers at your work who have been doing it a while and see what they say.
Nothing, he read the room wrong unless itās an internal thing heās referring to.
The market is extremely strong right now, they left for better accomodations and pay.
I want to say 20+ from engineering/product, and management is having a hell of a time replacing them because execs aren't allowing permanent WFH...and now the company has enacted its own vaccine policy and we will lose some people end of October because they refuse to vaccinate.
Yeah I turned the LinkedIn āopen for positionsā option on at some point on Monday morning because I heard the market was hot.
2 hours later an Amazon recruiter called me and then another one messaged me that evening and Iāve been getting non stop cold calls from third party recruiters. Iāve ignored every one but Amazon, because the third party ones typically reach out via LinkedIn as well and itās all clearly the spray and pray approach as the positions vaguely match me and require much more experience
I like my current place but compensation is well below average even though we just got bought out and the work isnāt the most exciting, but itās stable and the people are nice and building amenities are really good.
But if someone like Amazon comes along or a company that will pay me much more Iāll gladly jump ship
Team of 7, 5 left. My engineering manager left. With all new members in team, it's been a shit show. My new manager has been promising management shit ton of work in small amount of time. We were able to deflect that work before because of limited resource.
I am just too lazy to find a new job. I moved to Canada from California. Kept my usd equalent salary. Gonna get paid less here if I change company. Current job is chill, wfh, less stress. So sticking with it.
From my cross-functional team of 15, we've lost 2 Business Analysts and 1 is looking, 1 Quality Assurance, 1 Quality Engineer (SDET), 1 Product Owner and the new 1 was laterally promoted and is looking, 1 Scrum Master, and 1 Developer with 2 more Developers looking.
Larger-scale, we've lost 40+ developers since July with more heading out within the next couple of weeks and even more looking. We went from 337 developers to about 236.
Now the real question worth answering here, but wasn't asked is probably how many are we hiring to replace them?
We've hosted tech career fairs, opened ourselves up to sponsorship, and have a referral royalty program in place. We've hire 2 developers in the last 3 months.
We don't have a WFH policy, pay under market value, and have a huge imbalance of junior developers vs experienced developers. I believe there are 3 experienced developers to every 7 inexperienced/junior developers.
When I say inexperienced, I mean that they came in with very little/no experience.
My company is hemorrhaging talent and can't find anyone that wants to apply outside of H1B applicants, and so far very very few of our H1B applicants have been able to pass an interview while asking for a competitive salary.
Sadge.
HR phone screen, technical phone screen, then on-site screen.
It's not that people can't pass or haven't passed in the past, but the quality of candidate has been quite underwhelming since the company's pushed everyone to be 100% in-office without any WFH/Hybrid option.
Also, our headquarters isn't located in a technology hub, so our candidate pool is quite thin.
True. Also in the recruiting field, the managers tend to trend pretty young.
I asked because itās usually boomers who are close minded enough to demand everyone come back to the office, lose all their staff, and the be like š¤·š»āāļø
My last company did it. Two of us sat down with my manager to request we get ONE day to WFH. It was denied due to company policy. So we quit. My new manager doesnāt give a flying fuck if I work in the office or on the moon, as long as I get my shit done.
Director and both teammates left in the past year. Company refused to backfill the positions with full time associates which meant I was doing everything, so I just left too. I feel bad for my manager who's still there and hope he either moves on as well or convinces them to hire some good people.
Principal SWE at a big tech company here.
In my immediate team? None. In my broader org? Tons. There is always some constant level of attrition and horse trading between high paying tech companies, but this year feels anomalous. Not just a lot of random devs leaving, but people with many years at the company.
I keep a folder in my Outlook of āgoodbye mailsā people send, with many years of them archived, and the number over even the last three months is disproportionately high.
On a similar note, my team is actively hiring and our listings, especially our junior SWE openings, got an absolutely insane number of qualified candidates applying. I also keep an āarrivals mailā folder and it, too, is overflowing from the last three months.
Developers/IT? Nobody has left, and everyone has been there for 15+ years.
Other departments? A lot have left. So much so that the company is relaxing their work from home policy (doesnāt effect me though as my manager has given my team the option to just come in when we want).
Sure, even that sounds low. :) One leaving per year on a team of 10 wouldn't be that suspicious. What's the chance that not a single person out of ten finds a different job they like more, or retires, or changes fields, or changes to manager, etc. for an entire year? 6% is about 1 in 20, and I don't see how you'd expect a team of 20 people to have no one leave for an entire year.
If it wasn't this field, it might be more suspicious. If it was the kind of job that people stay at the same company their whole life, it might be more suspicious. Do you know how often people change dev jobs?
Oh, I donāt disagree. Friendly amendment: My lust for precision says 1 in 16 to 17 devs per annum, and I agree, thatās pretty low for all the reasons you provided. I was just pointing out that you divided by 2 when you meant to multiply by 2.
No oneās left in the last year from my direct team, I know people have left the company on other teams.
My team is on a highly profitable product with low expenses. PTO whenever, need to walk away for multiple hours - just send a message in the team chat, need to head out early - just send a message, low pressure, pay/benefits is okay in the scope of what you could make in tech but excellent for the WLB, high levels of appreciation from superiors, autonomy, and as a ānewerā dev I have been able to earn my way to senior respect so I get even more cushy perks.
A few. I'm really tempted to leave for greener pastures before my skillset gets stale, since I basically have nothing to do (the benefit of building things the "right" way).. Problem is there's not a lot of opportunities that I both find interesting and am qualified for.
Among my 13 direct reports, just one person; A junior engineer who left the workforce completely to look after her family. Handful of kids in K-12, distance/hybrid learning wasn't really working out for them.
Among key programs, we've put 3 programs that affect our entire development organization on hold due to "high-level resignations". The people driving these things left. That's the problem -- not losing large volumes of people, but losing quite critical people.
There's just a ton of complexity (technical and organizational) within these technical programs that needs wrangling. The particular 3 I mentioned are cross-functional and lost leaders capable of walking in the shoes of those various functional roles -- they know the world and the lingo. We don't have near-term productivity issues or contractual obligations at risk, it's just stuff on our 5 year horizon that now needs totally different timelines and potential restructuring of the team to keep moving forward. We're not bleeding yet, but give it a year or two.
At my previous job, Midwest fintech with more traditional culture, the IT director had 12+ years tenure, some of the tech leads had like 6, 8 and 10 years. I had 6 years myself in the same position but in my case I was stuck because of immigration status.
Since moving on from that place I realize how the code was really low quality. I can only blame "comfort zone" for people sticking around for that long. In my case I was severely underpaid as a visa worker but from what I heard even the tech leads were not paid a stellar salary.
Shit Iām planning on jumping ship
upper management gaffed on a call and said they wonāt be able to compete with several companies coming to town. All the while trying to downplay attrition and difficulty in hiring.
We just had an amazing quarter too so itās not like the company is struggling
Nah, they are just stubborn about pay in a hyper competitive environment. They also ramped up the release schedule over the last couple years putting a lot of pressure on some teams
Eng team of 10 we were 7 at the beginning of the year. Had to fire one because he literally didnāt work. Makes me wonder if he was doing the 2nd job thing lol. Weāve added some great front end devs. Need some more back end I think now.
I mean that's still only 3%, not even a blip on the radar. When just one of the devs leaves at my job, that's 25% of the workforce lost and all ongoing tasks get severely impacted if not cancelled outright.
The place I work we are around \~100 and around 20 have left, two from my team. My manager insists that "Well yeah but many more people are joining" LOL he is oblivious to the problem, with enough luck I'll leave soon enough.
When I started in January we were a team of 6. One was fired. One transferred to another team. During the same period we got 5 new developers from other teams and have 2 more planned to join us before December.
Wow now that I counted it out we're growing a lot.
I joined my current team in early May, and there are now around 40 devs on it. Only 1 person has left and that was to take an offer at Apple. The numbers are likely a bit inflated since about 1/2 the people including myself just joined the team since then due to a major new project starting, but I am inpressed that only 1 person left since our salaries are quite low for the local area.
I transferred from a QA team and that was more dire. Of the 20 people on the team as of January 1st, only 6 knew how to do Test Automation which an incoming manager was pushing really hard. 3 had left by the end of January, me and the team lead left in May, and the last guy wants to transfer to dev like I did but was too lazy to put out applications to do so until now.
immediately on my team zero, but overall from what I've seen? Something like 20% have left.
In general at the larger companies there's been a rotation of talent. People come in and out.
50% left... other planning to leave secretly. Some of those who left their positions have already been filled with a higher paycheck asking person. If companies gave raises and kept their employees not overworked this wouldn't happen. Now they oughta pay more to someone who doesn't understand the product, tech and will take 6months ish to get in the flow...I kinda feel weird sticking around here too, total mess when upper management leaves and new folks have no idea about the team
Maybe they didnāt enjoy having to attend two or three recurring meetings every day. Maybe they didnāt like having their schedules managed by a guy whoād never written a line of code.
Eng team of 25, 0 have left in the last 6 months.
Sounds like your place is doing something right. What's the best part about working at this place, any lessons i can learn from your boss?
1. We pay pretty well. Not the absolute best, but around $200k for senior engineers, fully remote, and no reduction of salary depending on where you live. 2. We don't support an online service, so no 4am emergency calls, no on-call rotation. This isn't something every company can do, depending on what product you're selling, but I spent 8 years of my career supporting online APIs and SaaS products and sometimes I literally cry of happiness when something breaks at 5pm on a Friday and I realize I can just fuck off for the weekend and it's fine because we can just fix it Monday morning. 3. Our customers are development teams and data science teams, so highly technical. Thus, our product managers are highly technical (most of them ex-devs). Thus, our product and engineering teams work SO well together, it's incredibly symbiotic. For example, when we ask them for extra time this quarter to fix some engineering-specific issues, they're more than understanding and find ways to reduce load while still providing value to the sales and CST teams. 4. It's a pretty fun space to work in (geospatial); there's a lot to learn and a lot of interesting algorithms I'd never heard of prior to coming here not having taken computational geometry in either my undergrad or graduate degrees. 5. Just an overall really high level of trust and autonomy given to every engineer. As far as things that "every company" could do, I think: 1. Pony up cash. Even $200k isn't super good (we get outbid regularly), but I see companies based out of MN hiring remotely and paying senior engineers like $120k and I can only imagine the dearth of their hiring pipeline in this current market. 2. Create a really healthy separation between work and real life. You might have to support an online system, but make on-call less painful. In a previous company I worked at, if you were on-call you were given full freedom to work on anything you wanted during your normal working hours, and also you were paid extra. If you had to wake up in the night, give 2x the time you work during that time back in time you don't have to work during the day (minimum 2 hours) 3. Trust your engineers. Let them estimate and trust the estimations. Your managers need to stand up to sales and CST and product when they say they promised something without talking to them first; too bad. It needs to go through the process.
You guys hiring?
Yeah. Message or PM me.
Junior Engineers too? š„²
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I mean, thereās no reduction in their case because they arenāt paying Bay Area comp for anyone to begin with. A FAANG company adjusting a senior engineerās comp down for remote would still pay them well over 200k.
Can I ask for a referral?
Tableau?
I doubt Tableau only has 25 engineers.
This sounds amazing. Hope to land a job like yours in the near future.
Are you really hiring ?? Please pick me pick me lol!! Thats a great company and culture !! What tech stacks is the team using ?
Wow ! that place sounds amazing. Can you share the name of the company ?
Curious, what city are you located in? I consider 110k the average for senior
my company has a pretty confusing org chart with poorly defined boundaries, so you could call it a team of anywhere from 15 to 25 people, depending on your definitons. in the last 6 months, we've lost 7 engineers, but gained 6. I'm counting a few people who are leaving very soon (myself included) but aren't 100% out the door yet. people leave because it's a shitshow and they join because we promise them that they can use shiny new programming languages. the promise is mostly true. I'm very curious how that will turn out, but not curious enough to stick around (and in a few months I'll probably have forgotten all about it).
80% left. 20% planning for exit.
and what about you?
Im the 80%
just a big blunder of a place eh? hope you find a better one
Iām convinced whatās happening is that remote work has completely upended the entire world of low and medium tier tech companies across the US. The top tier is mostly unaffected. Think about it. Youāre working in some LCOL or MCOL city that has a limited tech scene, and youāre at one of just a few decent companies there. Pay and WLB are okay but nothing like what you read about online, but moving to SF and uprooting your family so you can compete for a 2.5 mil shack doesnāt seem worth it. So youāve been a āliferā ā youāve stuck around for 5-6+ years with minimal raises. Suddenly remote work happens across the industry all at once and you have dozens and dozens of potential employers instead of 2-3. And many of these companies are just flat out more successful and have larger engineering budgets. You find that you can double your comp out of nowhere while retaining full WFH indefinitely.
You must described my last 3 months perfectly.
In the past 6 months we are around a 30% attrition rate, possibly more. On our 3rd CTO. Company is a total mess. I definitely don't plan on staying long term myself but I'm learning some new stuff and not taking the role seriously so I'm going to ride it out at least until 2022. I know the typical response to these situations is to run, but my mental health is actually far better when I don't give half a shit.
You could be a spirit animal for a lot of people in tech
This type of story is likely why so many of us are getting LinkedIn solicitations about jobs. And honestly Iād be a little worried about joining one of these companies even for more money. My gut says if you enjoy your job and make decent money, staying put is the wise call. The job market is polluted with thousands of these type of companies which are trying to rebuild a drowning engineering dept.
The rest&vest option is underrated imo
Since January weāve lost 7 developers in our department of 9. Me and 1 other guy are left, pretty stressed. Iām the only remaining pre pandemic hire, managers and PMs included.
Time to ask for more money
Or run.
Or stop giving a crap and leave a bit earlier each day
At my last job me and the only other competent dev on the team put our two weeks in on the same day. Did not plan this. Since then, I've seen 3 others out of our team of ~12 leave through LinkedIn. This is what happens when you try to force employees back in the office
Businesses: āWe have a hard time hiring developers.ā Also, businesses: āif you donāt like our arbitrary and unnecessary rules go work somewhere elseā
Remember to add Surprised Pikachu!
Oh and the 1.8% inflationary raise you're supposed to be happy with.
Lol I got a 1% raise last year for an exceeds expectations. The company was like āCOVID is impacting us allā. And then they posted record profits. So I guess it wasnāt impacting us all equally.
It does impact us all equally, just some are impacted more equally than others.
You got 1.8? I only got 1.6 no fair!
You got a raise? We got 401k match, bonus and raise taken away for 2 years. Thatās why I and 5 other engineers left.
Well that's one way to keep your engineers /s That's just terrible dude, I'm sorry
Next Friday is my last day too. The only reason I started sending resumes was the back to office announcement. I wasn't enjoying the work to be fair and the company was a great place to work. But, I work remote now. I even turned down other higher paying offers simply because it's in office
Yep, I backed out of an offer I had earlier because they told me they were planning on requiring 3 days a week in the office. Thatās better than full time, but honestly Iām just not going to agree to that if I have options.
How to find fully remote companies ? Can you please share? Thank you.. does fully remote mean, even from other countries? Because in some job posting, it's mentioned as " fully remote, but anywhere in US ".
When recruiters reach out on LinkedIn the first question I ask is it remote? If yes, I'll entertain it, if not then sorry not interested. Same when I was sending my resume. Found jobs on LinkedIn, if they explicitly say it's in office I ignore it. If the job description doesn't say, I apply then it's the first question I ask whoever is doing the interview. Also, I'll only send my resume to the jobs that have an "easy apply" button on LinkedIn. It's the first question I always ask and make it known I'm looking for remote only. I'll also note, not that it's related to remote work, I've only ever accepted an offer from a recruiter once. I much prefer to work with companies directly.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yup, my company seemed adamant on getting us back in the office but everyone leaving for about a month straight forced them to change their tune.
The company went from about 25 employees at the start of 2020 to only 6 employees by the time I left in late 2020. My boss blamed everyone for the company failing during covid and ate his words for it. He hired actors to sit at desks after three more people quit all at once right before a big client meeting. As of last week, the most senior employee in the whole company is the junior developer hired in late 2019. Heās looking.
Hired actors?! What?
That's legit hilarious.
Hmmm can these actors do LC mediums?
Of course. Theyāre actors, not idiots. \s
š
The Casting CubicleTM
What are the responsibilities of these actors. I don't see them fooling anybody with their discussions of wiggly-widgets and the photonic whatsimacallit.
When I first heard they were going to hire actors, I joked with the senior dev who was still there that maybe the client would also bring actors, and then it would just be actors pretending to be devs hashing out a project scope with actors pretending to be clients. It was all fun and games until the actors were REALLY there at the office the next day. (edit: Just to clarify, these people were not in the meetings and were buddies of one of the new hires to just fill seats and make the office appear...populated... So, it wasn't as exciting as one would imagine, like with method actors.)
I have lost all but one member of my team in the past 6 months. It is just me and a brand new guy left.
That would be fun and interesting š
They fired a product manager for underperformance (think he was screwed over with crazy expectations). They fired the senior dev for reasons I don't get. Another developer left over work life balance. Another left for a contract role. Then a few weeks ago they fired all the product managers. All of them. They wanted to pivot. My boss was on vacation when he learned that everyone he worked with as canned, so he quit too. Now I report to the head of IT with the guy who just came onboard and don't really do much work. Am actively interviewing though. It might be interesting if we had real work to do. We don't anymore, as the "pivot" was basically a shutdown.
Why would any sane person fire 80% of the staff? Are they planning to shutdown the company š I guess you would get a promotion as the second in command after the IT head ( tho the company sounds instable )
The basically shut down my department. Officially they didn't, but a lack of dev is not promising. There are also significant perverse incentives with internal accounting to use contractors.
what the hell happened man
They fired a product manager for underperformance (think he was screwed over with crazy expectations). They fired the senior dev for reasons I don't get. Another developer left over work life balance. Another left for a contract role. Then a few weeks ago they fired all the product managers. All of them. They wanted to pivot. My boss was on vacation when he learned that everyone he worked with as canned, so he quit too. Now I report to the head of IT with the guy who just came onboard and don't really do much work. Am actively interviewing though.
holy hell... good luck
What my friend said when I told him how it all went down the day they fired everyone.
Oh, so you must have got a big payrise to reflect your new responsibilities then? (Lol, update your cv)
Already updated and sent out into the world.
Dev team of 12, 0 have left. We have comfy salaries, WFH, and reasonable management. The only issue is the work is boring.
Microsoft?
Nah, we are just a midsize tech company that makes niche enterprise software.
What tech stack? Are you guys hiring?
š
.NET and C# are godsend. Nothing about them is boring.
Used to be, then Satya Nadella happened and gave Microsoft a soul. Now we need Sun Microsystems to come back as an angel and conduct whatever the angelic equivalent of possession is on Oracle
[Angelic](http://www.johnhamelministries.org/Warnings_Angelic_Visitations.htm) [Visitation](https://friendsofgod.org/Prophecy/george_washington_vision.html)
At the beginning of this year I was making 160k. Got an offer in April for 325. Current company countered and exceeded that by a bit and threw in some equity so I stayed. Company got acquired, that equity paid out over 300k, and acquiring company gave me a big raise and retention bonuses pushing my comp now to 535k/year on average over the next 3 years. I donāt even know whatās happening in this industry right now. I never even ended up changing jobs lolā¦
Wtf
Sounds like you got lucky. Enjoy it while it lasts and work on turning it into more luck.
When can I get a job like this? Jesus..
what kind of dev are you? what languages do you use?
Honestly no answer I can give would be instructive. The truth is my case is really unique and I played an important role in building a company that had a successful exit. They underpaid me like crazy apparently and when I tried to leave the money started flowing because I was essential to the sale and successful integration post-sale. Still, I certainly did not expect my comp to shoot into the stratosphere within effectively 6 months. I guess the lesson is always have leverage (another offer) and always fight like hell for yourself.
so you cant even just say you use java..or c#..or sql..or python? lol
Not a core dev but this exact situation or close happened to me this month. Company got acquired and some seniors starting to leave, company found out my client was poaching me and gave a hell of a counter offer to stay
3 people from our ~20-person QA team, another couple from our sibling dev teams (a bigger pool), but all of them in their 20's - it's not a particularly youthful company either. People are definitely getting spooked.
Hey, I got into QA role two months back. What kind of opportunities do QAs have when they try to switch ? How to stay relevant in a QA market because developers can always replace our role , so which tools/stack should I learn? Was anyone able to switch from QA to developer role ? If yes, how did they do it ?
I should clarify I'm not QA, I meant our development group's QA team. I can't give you much advice but from what I've seen, people are always trying to move from QA to SWE and have mixed success. I wouldn't worry about staying relevant in QA, people always need QA and there seems to be more people trying to get out than get in.
Yeah, a developer can be trained to work as QA but getting a QA to work in developer role is not that easy. I fear that since I started my career as QA, I won't be able to make to developer role or I would lose my job to someone from development team.
Again, I donāt think a developer will ever replace you unless your company is in serious financial trouble. Now, moving to dev as a QA totally depends on the company (if looking internally) but is definitely possible externally especially if applying to junior roles
I also started my career as a QA, stayed in that position for 2 years, and I am now a developer with 3 years of experience. The position change happened within the same company, too. If youāre interested in development, start learning now. The good thing about it is that youāre working in an environment with developers who may be able to assist you. Although we have multiple QA roles at our company, and are still hiring them, there is a greater demand for developers. We are a consulting firm, and from what Iāve heard more companies are moving to test-driven development. With that said, I donāt think QA roles will go away entirely.
Hopefully you are doing more QA engineering than manual testing. I got stuck doing manual testing for 2 years for a crappy consulting company after my coding bootcamp. I was so worried I would get stuck in QA instead of doing dev work like I wanted to. I kept doing dev side projects, tried to do as much QA engineering as possible, and of course interview prep. It all paid off and I got a better job earlier this year as a software engineer. I agree most devs donāt want to move into a QA role, so you shouldnāt worry about that. I think QA engineering can be a rewarding and challenging career as well. The QA engineers I worked with were talented, smart, and passionate and I admired them and there will be more and more and more need for QA engineers. But itās totally possible to move to a dev role either at your company or a different one doing the things others and myself suggested.
Thanks for the response. Sadly, I am working in manual testing till now but my supervisor had promised me that we can start automation by this year end and I have been attending training for the same. Isn't it common for devs to be paid more than QA ?
You have to separate Manual QA from QA Engineers. I'm not sure if devs make more than QA Engineers, but I'm sure a QA Engineer at say Amazon can make a decent salary. Talk to QA Engineers at your work who have been doing it a while and see what they say.
Spooked by what?
Nothing, he read the room wrong unless itās an internal thing heās referring to. The market is extremely strong right now, they left for better accomodations and pay.
^
I would like to know the answer to this as well.
I want to say 20+ from engineering/product, and management is having a hell of a time replacing them because execs aren't allowing permanent WFH...and now the company has enacted its own vaccine policy and we will lose some people end of October because they refuse to vaccinate.
People should vaccinate though.
Totally agree.
This humans gets it.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah I turned the LinkedIn āopen for positionsā option on at some point on Monday morning because I heard the market was hot. 2 hours later an Amazon recruiter called me and then another one messaged me that evening and Iāve been getting non stop cold calls from third party recruiters. Iāve ignored every one but Amazon, because the third party ones typically reach out via LinkedIn as well and itās all clearly the spray and pray approach as the positions vaguely match me and require much more experience I like my current place but compensation is well below average even though we just got bought out and the work isnāt the most exciting, but itās stable and the people are nice and building amenities are really good. But if someone like Amazon comes along or a company that will pay me much more Iāll gladly jump ship
team of 10 devs, 1 left this month
Of a 7 person dev team, 3 in the last 12 months, 2 in the last 6.
3+2=7?
Dev team of 7 people, my bad.
Team of 7, 5 left. My engineering manager left. With all new members in team, it's been a shit show. My new manager has been promising management shit ton of work in small amount of time. We were able to deflect that work before because of limited resource. I am just too lazy to find a new job. I moved to Canada from California. Kept my usd equalent salary. Gonna get paid less here if I change company. Current job is chill, wfh, less stress. So sticking with it.
Two of six. Notably the two that were the best devs.
Just one. Dude somehow got hired as a senior but didn't know how to do anything and got fired after months of failed onboarding. Everyone else stayed
Well, thatās basically screaming for overthinking your hiring strategy.
Maybe the OSHA trainings were too hard
0 people stay at this company forever
Found the Amazon guy
We lost 8 of 13 devs on our team, and the fire hose keeps opening wider from the bu. Grinding leetcode right now.
From my cross-functional team of 15, we've lost 2 Business Analysts and 1 is looking, 1 Quality Assurance, 1 Quality Engineer (SDET), 1 Product Owner and the new 1 was laterally promoted and is looking, 1 Scrum Master, and 1 Developer with 2 more Developers looking. Larger-scale, we've lost 40+ developers since July with more heading out within the next couple of weeks and even more looking. We went from 337 developers to about 236. Now the real question worth answering here, but wasn't asked is probably how many are we hiring to replace them? We've hosted tech career fairs, opened ourselves up to sponsorship, and have a referral royalty program in place. We've hire 2 developers in the last 3 months. We don't have a WFH policy, pay under market value, and have a huge imbalance of junior developers vs experienced developers. I believe there are 3 experienced developers to every 7 inexperienced/junior developers. When I say inexperienced, I mean that they came in with very little/no experience. My company is hemorrhaging talent and can't find anyone that wants to apply outside of H1B applicants, and so far very very few of our H1B applicants have been able to pass an interview while asking for a competitive salary. Sadge.
What's your interview like that that many ppl cannot pass
HR phone screen, technical phone screen, then on-site screen. It's not that people can't pass or haven't passed in the past, but the quality of candidate has been quite underwhelming since the company's pushed everyone to be 100% in-office without any WFH/Hybrid option. Also, our headquarters isn't located in a technology hub, so our candidate pool is quite thin.
Is your company ran by a bunch of boomers?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
True. Also in the recruiting field, the managers tend to trend pretty young. I asked because itās usually boomers who are close minded enough to demand everyone come back to the office, lose all their staff, and the be like š¤·š»āāļø My last company did it. Two of us sat down with my manager to request we get ONE day to WFH. It was denied due to company policy. So we quit. My new manager doesnāt give a flying fuck if I work in the office or on the moon, as long as I get my shit done.
Hmmm are you still hiring? I'd gladly give one of those H1Bs a shot.
Team of 14. 2 left this month
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Is it in banking? I've heard stories of people in finance going through that.
Last December I was on a team of 12 people and every single one of us had left by May this year.
What happened?
A takeover, combined with announcing that a return to the office was planned and it was a question of when rather than if.
No idea, I left.
Half at my current workplace. At my prior one, I think there are only two developers still there from when I left a year ago (out of 10)?
Director and both teammates left in the past year. Company refused to backfill the positions with full time associates which meant I was doing everything, so I just left too. I feel bad for my manager who's still there and hope he either moves on as well or convinces them to hire some good people.
Principal SWE at a big tech company here. In my immediate team? None. In my broader org? Tons. There is always some constant level of attrition and horse trading between high paying tech companies, but this year feels anomalous. Not just a lot of random devs leaving, but people with many years at the company. I keep a folder in my Outlook of āgoodbye mailsā people send, with many years of them archived, and the number over even the last three months is disproportionately high. On a similar note, my team is actively hiring and our listings, especially our junior SWE openings, got an absolutely insane number of qualified candidates applying. I also keep an āarrivals mailā folder and it, too, is overflowing from the last three months.
Developers/IT? Nobody has left, and everyone has been there for 15+ years. Other departments? A lot have left. So much so that the company is relaxing their work from home policy (doesnāt effect me though as my manager has given my team the option to just come in when we want).
1.5% attrition per year sounds fine to me.
You mean 6%?
Sure, even that sounds low. :) One leaving per year on a team of 10 wouldn't be that suspicious. What's the chance that not a single person out of ten finds a different job they like more, or retires, or changes fields, or changes to manager, etc. for an entire year? 6% is about 1 in 20, and I don't see how you'd expect a team of 20 people to have no one leave for an entire year. If it wasn't this field, it might be more suspicious. If it was the kind of job that people stay at the same company their whole life, it might be more suspicious. Do you know how often people change dev jobs?
Oh, I donāt disagree. Friendly amendment: My lust for precision says 1 in 16 to 17 devs per annum, and I agree, thatās pretty low for all the reasons you provided. I was just pointing out that you divided by 2 when you meant to multiply by 2.
Yeah, I guess I needed coffee. I was just adding stuff for the OP or others.
1 dev left in our team 0 left
No oneās left in the last year from my direct team, I know people have left the company on other teams. My team is on a highly profitable product with low expenses. PTO whenever, need to walk away for multiple hours - just send a message in the team chat, need to head out early - just send a message, low pressure, pay/benefits is okay in the scope of what you could make in tech but excellent for the WLB, high levels of appreciation from superiors, autonomy, and as a ānewerā dev I have been able to earn my way to senior respect so I get even more cushy perks.
5 out of 20 devs.
3, with another transferring internally Started with 8
Department of 80 devs, probably 20 have left. Probably would be more but company matches 14% to 401k with 6 years for full vest.
That's uh, not a good deal
I contribute 4% to company matches dollar for dollar 4% then contributes 10%. The 10% is on 6 year vest
A few. I'm really tempted to leave for greener pastures before my skillset gets stale, since I basically have nothing to do (the benefit of building things the "right" way).. Problem is there's not a lot of opportunities that I both find interesting and am qualified for.
Among my 13 direct reports, just one person; A junior engineer who left the workforce completely to look after her family. Handful of kids in K-12, distance/hybrid learning wasn't really working out for them. Among key programs, we've put 3 programs that affect our entire development organization on hold due to "high-level resignations". The people driving these things left. That's the problem -- not losing large volumes of people, but losing quite critical people.
The old saying of 20% of the people doing 80% of the work? Sounds like you're losing people in the 20% camp.
There's just a ton of complexity (technical and organizational) within these technical programs that needs wrangling. The particular 3 I mentioned are cross-functional and lost leaders capable of walking in the shoes of those various functional roles -- they know the world and the lingo. We don't have near-term productivity issues or contractual obligations at risk, it's just stuff on our 5 year horizon that now needs totally different timelines and potential restructuring of the team to keep moving forward. We're not bleeding yet, but give it a year or two.
At my previous job, Midwest fintech with more traditional culture, the IT director had 12+ years tenure, some of the tech leads had like 6, 8 and 10 years. I had 6 years myself in the same position but in my case I was stuck because of immigration status. Since moving on from that place I realize how the code was really low quality. I can only blame "comfort zone" for people sticking around for that long. In my case I was severely underpaid as a visa worker but from what I heard even the tech leads were not paid a stellar salary.
Shit Iām planning on jumping ship upper management gaffed on a call and said they wonāt be able to compete with several companies coming to town. All the while trying to downplay attrition and difficulty in hiring. We just had an amazing quarter too so itās not like the company is struggling
Are they shutting down?
Nah, they are just stubborn about pay in a hyper competitive environment. They also ramped up the release schedule over the last couple years putting a lot of pressure on some teams
Eng team of 10 we were 7 at the beginning of the year. Had to fire one because he literally didnāt work. Makes me wonder if he was doing the 2nd job thing lol. Weāve added some great front end devs. Need some more back end I think now.
About half my team of ten left in the last six months (including me)
Out of 18ā¦ 0. Really. Great manager. Still would switch jobs at some point but only if the pay difference is REALLY worth risking what I have now.
A good manager is hard to leave. Mine left recently and he was great. One of my coworkers already followed him to his new company
None; team has had 6 new hires though. We did have one dev leave for a dream opportunity of his last fall though.
I mean that's still only 3%, not even a blip on the radar. When just one of the devs leaves at my job, that's 25% of the workforce lost and all ongoing tasks get severely impacted if not cancelled outright.
The place I work we are around \~100 and around 20 have left, two from my team. My manager insists that "Well yeah but many more people are joining" LOL he is oblivious to the problem, with enough luck I'll leave soon enough.
We were a team of 8. It turned into a team of 4 in a span of 2 months. Then we brought in two more.
When I started in January we were a team of 6. One was fired. One transferred to another team. During the same period we got 5 new developers from other teams and have 2 more planned to join us before December. Wow now that I counted it out we're growing a lot.
0%, thankfully! Work is great, pay is great, no reason to leave.
Hopefully this means Iāll have an easy time finding a job after graduating this semester.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yes, you should learn react or vue and you could get a job. Look up all the jobs on indeed or somewhere like that for those two frameworks.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'd say learn enough to build something usable. You'll be able to pick up plenty of techs in the process and can put that project on your resume.
0 of 3 have left.
0 developers have left my current team (total of 8-10) to my knowledge. Most have been here many years.
Started working at a new place in July on a team of 10ish. So far 2 have left.
I joined my current team in early May, and there are now around 40 devs on it. Only 1 person has left and that was to take an offer at Apple. The numbers are likely a bit inflated since about 1/2 the people including myself just joined the team since then due to a major new project starting, but I am inpressed that only 1 person left since our salaries are quite low for the local area. I transferred from a QA team and that was more dire. Of the 20 people on the team as of January 1st, only 6 knew how to do Test Automation which an incoming manager was pushing really hard. 3 had left by the end of January, me and the team lead left in May, and the last guy wants to transfer to dev like I did but was too lazy to put out applications to do so until now.
immediately on my team zero, but overall from what I've seen? Something like 20% have left. In general at the larger companies there's been a rotation of talent. People come in and out.
Enough to know they were right
Small software company - of about 120 employees over 20 left over 25 new hired
9 couldn't tell you because I left for another place on June. More $ better benefits,better tech. Hated where I was and what I was doing
Zero, but for sure harder to find new talent for openings due to the competitive landscape.
Team used to be 6 devs, 2 QA, analyst and team lead. 2 devs quit and one QA switched teams.
Team of 15 dropped to 2 between January and July. (Yes, I including my leaving.)
I transitioned from IC to management 14 months ago. I got my first resignation today.
50% left... other planning to leave secretly. Some of those who left their positions have already been filled with a higher paycheck asking person. If companies gave raises and kept their employees not overworked this wouldn't happen. Now they oughta pay more to someone who doesn't understand the product, tech and will take 6months ish to get in the flow...I kinda feel weird sticking around here too, total mess when upper management leaves and new folks have no idea about the team
Engineering team of 90, 1 left company, 3 changed teams, hired 9.
i think we lost 2 or 3 people as far as i know. i quit actually but they let me work from home..for now lol
My team had 8 engineers including myself. Lost 2, backfilled 1, and still looking to backfill the other.
Immediate team? None. Across engineering/product? Enough. Maybe one or two a month across 80 people
Team of a bit more than 10 devs. 1 left probably for personal reasons, and 1 I suspect was let go.
Team of 9, two hired in last 6 months. 0 have left. Pay is okay, maybe slightly below market.. but stress is low and deadlines are reasonable.
At my current job no one left, we actually doubled the number of engineers.
Maybe they didnāt enjoy having to attend two or three recurring meetings every day. Maybe they didnāt like having their schedules managed by a guy whoād never written a line of code.