Have You Become The Reason People Leave Your Company?
It’s not only management that can force people to abandon ship.
It’s commonly said that “people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers” and speaking from my own accidental tenure in the Grand Game of Software Engineering I’d say that this statement is pretty accurate.
Whether it’s micro-management, aggressiveness, pettiness, rigid adherence to corporate doctrine, or just general incompetence, managers can make any software engineer’s life, progressive or not, a thoroughly miserable experience and cause them to move on to pastures new.
However, it is possible that the semi-technical, or indeed sometimes the technical, people in an organisation that can evolve into something that itself becomes offensive, repulsive, and ultimately fatally toxic when it comes to retaining employees.
We’ve discussed in the past how employees can become company fixtures — managers or not — and how this can be avoided.
Today we’re going to discuss how becoming such a permanent fixture, an employee who has lost their will to develop and even leave the company themselves, can sow the seeds of ultimately terminal toxicity in the workplace¹.
Once an employee has spent a significant amount of time with a company, no matter what their position, it becomes…
