#3 What’s the retention rate of our technical personnel?

This is a key indicator, not just of morale and culture but also of the systems used by your company to run the business, interact with customers, and collaborate with each other.

In my experience, if you have a lower-than-average tech retention rate, your tech is also below average. If you have people leaving at a high rate, it means you’re losing continuity and knowledge. And if people are leaving out of frustration, especially your developers, IT, Engineers, QA, etc — I guarantee you there are problems with your systems. When those folks flee, just like any position, we need to have methods for that knowledge to be learned by new employees, and the work needs to be done by others. I’ve seen companies literally keep an employee that they knew had another full-time job (and was mostly phoning it in at their job for both companies) because due to the speed of tech and their rate of retention, they couldn’t afford to lose one more person.

Don’t just take my word for it:

Based on a 2019 Stack Overflow survey of 90,000 Developers, results indicate that

•15.2% are actively looking for a job.

•21.9% are very to slightly dissatisfied with their jobs.

•32.4% changed jobs less than a year ago and another 26.8% in the last 1–2 years (59.2% = 2 years or less).

A recent headline showed a Netflix engineer quitting despite making $450K/year:

“The projects and meetings blended together, and they felt like small variations of each other after a while. The engineering work began to feel like copy and paste.”*2

*1https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/04/09/the-2019-stack-overflow-developer-survey-results-are-in/

2: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/quit-job-netflix-engineer-making-135100469.html

This can get pricey

When tech staff leaves, it can cost between 100%-150% of an employee’s salary, and that’s before we factor in the loss of knowledge, speed to market, lost opportunities, etc….

Follow-up Questions:

• What are our engagement survey scores amongst our tech staff?
• How is the retention rate of our technical staff impacting the business?
• How does this impact our long-term strategy and investment?

Interested in reading the full series? Links below to 7 Questions Board Members Should Be Asking

#1: What are the ages and annual costs for our most critical systems?

#2 How much tech debt do we have, and how much is it costing us annually