> When people say they want career progression, and opportunities, what they mostly mean is they want more money.
Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases).
What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you.
Most people want confirmation of their own beliefs about themselves -- they want the company/boss/coworkers to be showing respect and show that they value your work. People want to see that their work is accomplishing something and a lot of people can go to great lengths to lie to themselves that this is the case. And a lot of people also want progress, they want to see themselves doing new things, getting more responsibility, advancing their careers.
I hired and said goodbye to A LOT of software developers. And I do understand that it is difficult to get an honest, unbiased response when you ask them for the reasons for their decisions to leave.
But at the same time you get to experience trying to get people to stay and seeing what works and what does not. Giving raises works relatively rarely -- it only seems to delay. They are already discontent with their job and the higher salary only functions as a sort of gold handcuffs. After quarter century of doing this I literally am still to see a situation when a developer is offered a higher salary and suddenly becomes enthusiastic about their job to have a long fruitful career.
So what does work? Trying to find what causes them to be discontent in the first place and trying to address it. Do they feel they worked for too long in one project? Are they bored intellectually? Are they not getting along with their current boss? Changing the project without any raise is in my experience one of highest success rate things you can do in this situation. That success rate may not be very high (people tend to leave anyway) but at least I have a lot of good stories of people who changed teams and things clicked for them and they liked their new team. The only things that worked better in the past are changing the project WITH upgrade to the salary to reflect the market, and, for the ultimate highest employee-keeping potential - promotion to manager.
If people really did care mostly only about money, upping their salary should have greater success rate than moving them to another team and yet it is the opposite.
Now... this all assumes software developers and we know software developers are not exactly starving. If you are earning very little compared to your needs or when those needs grow suddenly people tend to really start paying way more attention to just monetary compensation.
This depends entirely on your raises. This year I left a unicorn startup to join a faang and got 100%+ increase in pay. I would’ve been happy to stay if the company could beat it, but they wouldn’t budge past 20%. In fact, I went down in level/titles so arguably, I don't care about the respect nearly as much as I do about the pay difference.
I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, I find that a lot of developers particularly younger millennials and generation Z put very little emotional investment in their jobs and treat it as a means to a financial end and nothing more, and honestly I think this is a healthy approach.
So that regard they would prefer more money and couldn't care less care about arbitrary internal recognition, it's a job nothing more, unless you're actually working in a genuinely meaningful field like advancing medical science for example.
Every time I've ever switched jobs (particularly anything revolving around e-commerce) or other meaningless drivel it's been about the money pure and simple.
Nah, what you say is valid only for people doing menial tasks.
Sure, cheap developers implementing the same endpoint over and over for 20 years for a paycheck are like that, but a good chunk of them actually cares about solving a problem and get recognition in the form of life changing money.
How is a person receiving calls from customers and trying to solve their problems much different from say my job which is receiving calls from coworkers and trying to solve their problems.
Sure, I am paid many times better and the problems I am dealing with are way more complex and varied and I know a lot of people who are asking me for help, the calls are over Slack or Zoom and the timelines and involvement in the issue is much higher. Otherwise, this is the same job.
But to say that the people who are less capable are somehow composed differently psychologically, more resistant to doing repeatable work... it is the same as thinking that people in poor places on Earth are somehow very much different from us, less intelligent and outspoken. This is simply not true -- just go and visit places (and not just tourist attractions). Go to youtube and see people visiting places. Go to library and read a book about people visiting places.
Everybody says that the first thing they experienced is this feeling of everywhere in the world they thought being so much different, actually being very much the same as home. Buildings are different, views are different, weather is different, wealth is different. But the people and their daily problems are strikingly the same.
People who are paying low wage jobs have exactly the same kinds of problems, they just also have other problems like paying their rent that is keeping them doing the job they don't want to be doing because they just don't have any other option.
Nah, that has been proven to not be true (at least in most cases).
What usually happens is a combination of various factors, money being one of them. And when money is part of it it usually psychologically functions as a proxy for whether your company/boss cares for you.
Most people want confirmation of their own beliefs about themselves -- they want the company/boss/coworkers to be showing respect and show that they value your work. People want to see that their work is accomplishing something and a lot of people can go to great lengths to lie to themselves that this is the case. And a lot of people also want progress, they want to see themselves doing new things, getting more responsibility, advancing their careers.
I hired and said goodbye to A LOT of software developers. And I do understand that it is difficult to get an honest, unbiased response when you ask them for the reasons for their decisions to leave.
But at the same time you get to experience trying to get people to stay and seeing what works and what does not. Giving raises works relatively rarely -- it only seems to delay. They are already discontent with their job and the higher salary only functions as a sort of gold handcuffs. After quarter century of doing this I literally am still to see a situation when a developer is offered a higher salary and suddenly becomes enthusiastic about their job to have a long fruitful career.
So what does work? Trying to find what causes them to be discontent in the first place and trying to address it. Do they feel they worked for too long in one project? Are they bored intellectually? Are they not getting along with their current boss? Changing the project without any raise is in my experience one of highest success rate things you can do in this situation. That success rate may not be very high (people tend to leave anyway) but at least I have a lot of good stories of people who changed teams and things clicked for them and they liked their new team. The only things that worked better in the past are changing the project WITH upgrade to the salary to reflect the market, and, for the ultimate highest employee-keeping potential - promotion to manager.
If people really did care mostly only about money, upping their salary should have greater success rate than moving them to another team and yet it is the opposite.
Now... this all assumes software developers and we know software developers are not exactly starving. If you are earning very little compared to your needs or when those needs grow suddenly people tend to really start paying way more attention to just monetary compensation.