How to retain your star developers!

The secret is to build a better work place...

• Quality of work - find challenging work and match them with the interests of the individual. Day-to-day work should energize the individual rather drain her. As a developer, I have many times craved for my regular work to turn interesting enough so that i don't have to work on pet projects outside work to keep up my learning and motivation.
• Healthy open culture - while it's quite hard to build one, it's quite easy to break it. To build such a culture,
  • Kill favouritism
  • Inculcate feedback culture - encourage instant transparent first party feedback, it will be worthwhile considering to keep the feedback mechanism well insulated from the evaluation mechanism (just to encourage openness and to kill bias)
  • Empower - let your developers take decision on behalf of you within their scope, also never one should feel her idea wouldn't fly into action within the company.
  • Trust and build trust
  • Build a safety net to encourage learning from failure - never one should fear of failure, it kills innovation.
  • Encourage healthy, open and opinionated discussions - such discussions are generally a by-product of passion
• Peer quality - get the right people together
• Work life balance
• A good pay - so that it just doesn't bother them.

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