
How to Reinvigorate a Software Team - ianrathbone
When a team is in a little rut and isn’t sure how to get out, how do you turn it around? Good people leave, testers and developers alike. I know it’s a big conversation but how do we give everyone a reason to stay and love their jobs again?
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hitsurume
#1 reason why people leave their jobs is because of their managers. A good IC
will stay with a good manager, a good IC will leave instantly with a bad
manager, and easily find another job (because they're a good IC, duh). So if
all your good people leave, and all the not as good are left, then your team
is gonna be in a "rut", and nothing you can do will stop that until you fix
what was the real problem, replacing the manager that forced good people to
leave. I've been on teams where all the good people leave, and the people who
either hate change or don't have as many oppurtunities stay, but just do the
bare minimum.

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potta_coffee
It's really difficult to recover once all the good ones have left. How do you
attract good devs after that? If they interview onsite, they will see the
warning signs if they have any experience. I've wondered this a lot because at
my last company, management pretty much drove off anyone competent. Not just
developers, but across departments.

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hitsurume
Assuming you're in the position of power, you have to clean house in your
company / department and weed out all the bad management / policies that drove
people out in the first place. Then, you in theory will have a large amount of
budget to work with (since people have left, and people have been fired/let
go) and you can use that budget to incentivize good people to work there.
Competitive salaries, equity, benefits etc. A lot of good engineers like small
teams / companies because they believe they can make a bigger impact on the
culture and direction of the company.

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sergiotapia
It's your job as a manager to inspire your team.

Cultivate their professional growth, give them opportunities to learn and grow
and expand their skillset. Allow them to work across realms, for example let a
backend develop fix something on the mobile codebase. Novelty works as a quick
fix and as a pick me up.

I manage a team of 8 engineers and recently we've started doing friday
potlucks where each person after lunch picks a ticket from the backlog. Tiny
things that need to get done and we just never do kind of stuff. The idea is
they get a breather from a large, mentally taxing ticket and head off into the
weekend with a win under their belt and their load off their mind. It's not
like going home on friday with your huge ticket weighing you down.

Try it out, everybody on my team loves it.

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dyeje
The first step to increasing retention is figuring out why people are leaving.
Start doing regular 1 on 1s and exit interviews, listen to what people are
saying, and fix the problems.

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sarcasmatwork
I'd say it depends on the "rut" which is vague.

Are you doing agile software development?

Give everyone on the team a chance to provide input and make suggestions.
Everyone has input. It may be good, bad or just a moot point but giving people
the chance to give input is a great start.

Is it all work and no play? Team building events outside work are always good
for the team. Shows appreciation and gets everyone out of the work work work
mentality...

Is the pay and benefits worth it for what people are doing?

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quintes
What’s happening with the project? Or the manager?

Project possible in terms of timeline? Scope? Is there a plan?

How is the team morale? Why is it like that?

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muzani
Normally, it happens when the work they put in doesn't match with the results
they expected.

