The infallible recipe to make all your developers abandon ship

The infallible recipe to make all your developers abandon ship

Looking for the perfect recipe to screw up all your code projects and send your developers scurrying? Only a few ingredients are essential are needed, starting with lack of recognition, poor work/life balance, no telecommuting, loss of meaning…

The nexten.io team has rolled up its sleeves to offer you a list of the worst practices to adopt. Now’s it’s up to you to decide whether you want to apply them — or avoid them at all costs. We recommend the second option!

A 007-style work/life balance

It’s well known that being a developer is a field job where you’re in contact with customers day after day. We therefore strongly recommended you ask your team of developers to come to your workspace every day of the week. Telecommuting, remote work? Forget about it!

Adjusting working hours and accepting your employees’ requests for time off? No need: like every secret agent, developers’ private lives are intimately intertwined with their professional lives, and every emergency must be dealt with as quickly as possible. This, even if it’s on a Sunday night (and especially if you started production on Friday like any self-respecting developer).

A slingshot bonus

To scare off your best partners, don’t congratulate them for the success of your projects, and above all, never offer them a promotion or a raise during the annual meeting. After all, your developers have all signed contracts and already receive a reward for their efforts and results: their salary. Besides, developers said at the get-go that they were ambitious, right?

On the other hand, you can also delete any interview to avoid having to receive various feedback from your developers. What use would they be, if not to clutter up your already busy schedule?

A challenging workload

To make sure your developer team works (and works well, because you’ve noticed that they’ve been twiddling their thumbs sometimes), it’s important to create a work atmosphere that includes a few of the following: pressure, anxiety, zero standards or processes, super-short deadlines, and finally, an incomplete AND unclear starting brief.

The icing’s on the cake if your sales team is already productive: pass on recruiting new developers and pile more work on the current team. After all, it’s only under pressure that the best emerge!

A vision as clear as a crystal ball

It seems that some employees are losing meaning at work. What an idea! These people would probably like to have their future predicted in the palm of their hands, like a fortune teller at a local fair.

A clear guiding strategy, a common project where each party knows its role to play, shared company values, precise deadlines, explicitly detailed expectations? Don’t spend too much time on these issues: everyone knows that establishing transparency and trust within your team can ONLY play tricks on you!

Computer development BEFORE personal development

The developers on your team have no say. They were hired for one reason and one reason alone: to crank out code, and to crank it out on time — without even knowing the ins and outs of the current project. It would be a real time waster to share the client’s expectations or marketing study with them that was done before the development phase. And time is money.

Your developers are there to code, not to develop personally, or to grow within their workspace. If they want to learn new languages for example, or sign up for training, deny them any requests. Code comes first.

Now you have the best possible recipe to make sure you lose the best people on your team. All the ingredients are there for you to carry out this heavy task as manager. Don’t thank us. Instead, thank the team of developers who support you day after day!