Across the clients I've worked with over the years it's often bureaucratic disempowerment that drives good engineers away.

When they cannot affect change or encumbered with toil - be that from painful change management processes, restricted or privacy invading operating system controls, or a work from office policy.

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noir_lord 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That and/or a single bad direct line manager.

One of the best managers I worked under when I was young used to say "people don't leave companies, they leave managers" and he was right.

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whstl 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is the second best advice I ever got in my career.

The best one was still "Listen to reports when they come to you, even if you're focused on your own task."

I wish there was this kind of advice for dealing with unreasonable CTOs and VPEs. I got lucky in my last job, but it took years.

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sevensor 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Less punchy but close to the truth: people leave for a lot of reasons. I can’t think of a time I’ve quit over a bad boss. Bosses come and go, even bad ones. If you only ever have bad bosses, that’s an executive problem, not a manager problem.

	▲	whstl an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I guess the point is that a lot of those other reasons are caused by managers. Gotta put up fights with other teams to do your job? Manager should be unblocking you. Got no tools, bad computer? Manager should be putting up a fight. Low salary? Manager should be negotiating on your behalf. But on the other hand, maybe I'm just old fashioned. Today, in the world of micromanagement, line-managers aren't expected to be much more than cannon-fodder to be blamed by C-levels when developers are unhappy.
	▲	AnimalMuppet 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I have quit because of bad management, but never because of one bad boss. (Or it may have been one bad boss, but it was high enough up the management chain that I didn't know specifically who it was.)

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port11 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I recall from the Lost Connections book that this was one of known causes of depression. People doing the same job, but with a sense of empowerment and ownership, were quite protected from such a negative outcome.