To hire and retain software engineers (and other great technologists): your first steps should be trust and value

Many traditional companies are asking the same questions. Why can’t I hire the software engineers (and other talented technologists) I need? Why don’t they stay? Why do my best people keep leaving once I’ve trained them?

There are a lot of obvious answers to these questions. Talented technologists are in demand by traditional companies and digital natives. Traditional companies are often perceived to lack the brand, mission and feeling of excitement that newer companies have. Newer companies may have different compensation structures.

I believe that these reasons are largely valid. However, I think that there is a deeper reason that is more important: many traditional companies have not yet learnt to truly value and trust their technologists. And I believe that this reason is rooted in the history of how technology functions have evolved in large, traditional companies.

As usual, I have a sample size of one: my own lived experience as a technologist over the last 30+ years. Here’s a deliberately simplistic version of the evolution of how traditional companies have thought about technology talent over that time:

1) Who are all these people and what in the world do they do? Our business suddenly seems to depend on the IT department. We don’t really understand what all these people do, but they keep telling us that they need more time and money. We don’t know where all this time and money is going, but things seem to break when we don’t provide it.

2) We think we’re in control now. We’ve introduced project management methods, structured systems analysis methods, controls, reporting and metrics. We’re not sure that anything is faster or cheaper, but at least we know how far we are over budget or behind schedule. We’ve converted our needs into a list of instructions, so at least those programmers will know what to do.

3) We’ve made some strategic sourcing choices. Now that we think about it, we realise that software development and systems management aren’t really our core business. We’re not a technology company, we’re a bank / insurer / logistics firm / retailer. There are companies out there who will do this more efficiently and cheaply than we can.

4) We want our developers back! It turns out that we are a technology company, just as much as we’re a bank / insurer / logistics firm / retailer. The way in which we use technology is fundamental to our ability to serve customers and grow our business. Can we get those developers back? Can we hire some new ones?

5) Why do we still have a skills gap? We’ve run a hiring campaign. We’re a respected national or global brand. We offer competitive salaries. We’ve even run some agile and DevOps initiatives. But it’s still difficult to attract and retain talent. Yes, we still have lots of those oversight processes, but we learnt in the 1990s that we need them to keep those technologists under control. Don’t we?  And, no, we still don’t really know what these technologists do for a living, but everybody tells us we need more of them. What are we doing wrong?

This is, of course, a caricature. It’s not intended to blame people in leadership positions who made choices with a limited view of the future. I have made several of those choices myself.

But I think that this caricature is helpful, if we look for the common themes that run through the story. And I think that the most important theme is that, through all that time, most companies have not learnt to trust and value their technology teams.

By contrast, the companies which I have seen be most successful in attracting, retaining and developing technologists are those which have embraced the beliefs that those technologists are fundamental to their success, and that technologists should be trusted to solve problems and build and run solutions. There are lots of changes that can be made to hiring plans, brand propositions, compensation structures, and methods, but if those do not proceed from a belief that companies should trust and value their technologists, they will likely be in vain.

Furthermore, I believe that trust and value come from understanding. My story started in the late 1980s with companies whose business leaders did not understand what their technology functions did. More than thirty years later, this is still the case for many business leaders - despite the increasingly obvious dependence of their companies on technology. My final thought, therefore, is that, if business leaders want to understand why they are struggling to retain technologists, they should start by trying to understand - and appreciate - what those technologists do.