There are so many articles teaching you the management of software projects and teams. Lots of talks about processes, motivation, and so on. In this post, instead, I would like to concentrate on the not so popular issue that most of companies are facing. The issue of too many programmers quiting your team every year.
Let's imagine...There is a company, lets call it SupaCo, which has outsourced all of its business critical software development efforts to good reputation offshore service provider - RepuSP. RepuSP has hired the team of 25 software developers constantly working for the SupaCo. Everybody is happy :) RepuSP charges 40 EUR per hour and is happy to have almost a 2 million yearly contract. SupaCo is happy to have professionals working for them and fewer problems they need to manage.
Interesting stuff starts to happen after one year. Vendor manager from SupaCo, who is responsible for relations with the service realizes the fact, that every quarter one developer quits the team. From service provider perspective it is no a big issue, as it makes only 16% attrition rate which is not too bad for the industry.
But SupaCo vendor manager tries to calculate how much the problems is worth in euros/dollars. Simple calculation gives him the following:
But the training costs is not the only factor you should consider. Be also prepared for:
Good luck with offshoring/outsourcing/near-shoring/opensourcing/multi-sourcing
Mark
Let's imagine...There is a company, lets call it SupaCo, which has outsourced all of its business critical software development efforts to good reputation offshore service provider - RepuSP. RepuSP has hired the team of 25 software developers constantly working for the SupaCo. Everybody is happy :) RepuSP charges 40 EUR per hour and is happy to have almost a 2 million yearly contract. SupaCo is happy to have professionals working for them and fewer problems they need to manage.
Interesting stuff starts to happen after one year. Vendor manager from SupaCo, who is responsible for relations with the service realizes the fact, that every quarter one developer quits the team. From service provider perspective it is no a big issue, as it makes only 16% attrition rate which is not too bad for the industry.
But SupaCo vendor manager tries to calculate how much the problems is worth in euros/dollars. Simple calculation gives him the following:
- SupaCo pais 40 EUR per hour for each developer (~6,400 EUR/month)
- It takes 2 months to train new developer
- 1 developer from active team should mentor the newcomer for this period of time
But the training costs is not the only factor you should consider. Be also prepared for:
- Every quiting employee punches hard the good relations between SupaCo and RepuSP.
- Some know-how is not easy to transfer just by the training.
- There is a risk you would need to pay quiting employee to be available to answer questions.
- It could take another 3 to 6 months for new programmer to reach efficiency of previous specialist.
Good luck with offshoring/outsourcing/near-shoring/opensourcing/multi-sourcing
Mark
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