I recently wrote a new talk on Engineer Growth and how we can engage and empower the engineers we work with. Now, I'm motivated to help folk grow because I love seeing people progress. It's fabulous. But that can be a hard sell.

I needed to get some research done, to give out some numbers in my talk. Folks love numbers!

Even better, I can back them numbers up! I got links, fam!

Let's begin with a big number. The 2024 Stack overflow survey asked whole piles of professional engineers about satisfaction at work. It found only 20% of developers reported being generally happy.

Why might that be?

Well, this bit isn't based on survey data, sorry. But this fella called Frederick Herzberg (a 20th Century American psychologist) had a "Motivator-Hygiene” theory. Which basically summarises what’s important in a job, yer ken? It placed Achievement, Growth Opportunities, Advancement, and Recognition as key motivators.

Is that what's going on?

Is there data to back that up? Back to the surveys.

Robert Walters (a recruitment company) provides some data points. 91% of Millennials want rapid career progression. But, no surprise, they don't always get it. And what happens? 20% leave for better career development opportunities.

Another one of their surveys (this one from Back in 2015) found 44% of professionals cited a lack of progression as a major contributor for leaving their role.

This data indicates that many people want to grow and achieve their goals. And when they don't get that? They leave.

But it could be worse. As the saying goes: What if they stay? Stay unhappy, and stagnate.

Time to talk about retention.

They say it's much easier to grow the talent that you have than find new. I wanted to quantify that, so, yeah, I did some more googling.

The costs of replacing a skilled engineer were hard to tie down. I saw figures ranging .between 50% to 200% of an employee's salary to replace them. And that's outside the cost of actually paying your new person.
(If someone has some good data, and by data I mean links, on this, drop me a line, and I’ll update.)

Stagnation

What if they stay and we don't fix this?

Gallup (an analytics and advisory company) found only a third of U.S. employees were engaged, meaning they were highly involved and enthusiastic about their work and workplaces. However, Top-performing organisations average 70% engaged employees. That must be better than PIPs and terminations, right?

Let's close our numbers with a positive stat

The HR Digest - without a link to survey data (boo!) says that in 2022, companies that invested in employee development saw a 58% increase in employee retention and a 24% increase in productivity.

It does look like active career progression aids retention of talent and avoids staff stagnation. And it builds reputation and attracts good engineers.