What do developers care about in 2020?
Ive been getting a lot of questions lately on whats making developers tick / attracted to certain roles. Clients of mine have been making offers to engineers and losing them to the Googles /Atlassians/Canvas in Sydney. First off I’d say &#8211; you can’t really compete with those businesses. They have so much money &amp; clout now, so don’t take it personally and let them go there if they want..
Here’s my opinion on what’s attracting software developers in 2020 &amp; how to retain them. Needles to say selling a role based on pizza and arcade machines doesn’t cut it anymore..
Flexible working; Often the 1 st question I’m asked when speaking to candidates.The companies doing this well are generally larger and therefore, find it easier. They are allowing 1 day a week that can be worked at home. I don’t mean ’1 day at home if they’re expecting a delivery or theres a reason’. Saying that will just create the impression that they actually cant work from home. 1 day a week allocated to them, provided their tech lead has signed off/is aware. In Sydney / NSW, lots of people live up to 2 hours away, each way. So that extra Friday can really make a difference. Bare in mind as well – that a lot of developers are more productive when people aren’t tapping on their shoulder in an office.
Tech Leads and managers do expect engineers to be present on Zoom/Skype for their stand-ups though and also check through what they produced when working from home.
Greenfield tech; A fairly obvious one, but I’ve seen a few developers quit their new jobs recently because they were told they’d be working on the latest tech. In some cases what’s actually happened is they’ve started their new job, only to be put in a legacy team and told ‘you’ll be in one of the newer teams in 6 months or so. Its fairly easy to feel you’ve been led on here a little. So make sure if you’re a hiring manager or recruiter and you’re telling people they’ll be in a certain team, that that’s the team they’ll be in from day 1.
Having a say; I’ve seen some cases in the last year where senior software 
developers have quit their jobs because they’ve felt like they’re not allowed to contribute to a project. Senior engineers feel they should have a certain level of independence / responsibility to speak up and have input on the way things are done. These are often developers with 10+ years of experience and they want to work in places where solutions are discussed and differences in opinions are heard. Obviously there’s a commercial aspect here – you can’t just go changing a dev language on a multi-million dollar programme, but if a manager or tech lead is telling the entire team that its their way or the high-way and the team cant openly discuss other better or faster ways to do things, it often takes away the enjoyment element.
Making sure all the devs in a scrum have input into what’s going on / feel included and can voice an opinion is a big plus at work.
Career Paths / learning; Saying people can get promoted and grow their career paths is great but how are you actually measuring it? I think a process where a manager sits down with a developer and maps out 5 key objectives that they want to achieve in a quarter is a good way to measure this. Have a profile set up for them individually in whatever CRM you use and tick it off as you go. These can be say, 3 things within work and 2 outside of work (that are still related to becoming better in their day to day).
If your business has a bonus scheme of some sort too, their dollars awarded to them can be tracked against their OKRs (objectives / key results)..
Achieving a certification too can be a great incentive for a developer. Paying for an online course to be done at home (example, an AWS cert) can be really beneficial to them personally and also you as a business.
<h2>Lunch / learning sessions on a Friday</h2>
Brown bag lunches / learning session – call them what you want. Everyone knows Friday afternoons are fairly un-productive at work so wrangling the team together, grabbing a beer and having a brain storming session about what technology people are learning about at home and what could potentially be brought into the stack is a great team-bonding exercise. Perhaps one person could be chosen each week to do 
a short talk on something they’re learning about at home?
These are just a few insights that I feel are current at the moment. Im sure there are many more (like hackathons!). What ways are you keeping your staff engaged within technology at the moment? Id love to hear! Comment down below.. 
Cheers! Nick