Cross Border Bytes – Issue 6

What developers want from hybrid, how stay in budget when benchmarking engineering salaries and what happened to team culture in remote?

Community data: Developers want optional office days

Off the back of our Developer Nation report earlier this year, we asked developers what makes a desirable hybrid policy. The result is clear: Devs want office visits to be optional.

Tech lead Jonica Brown and Lead Senior Software Engineer Sean Higgins also pointed out that a blanket approach is often not in the interest of getting solid work done:

Community resources

Community events

Community insights: Stay in budget when benchmarking engineering salaries

Despite the current job market, hiring software developers has not become any easier. It's just become hard in a different way. There's still a lot of competition for top developers and businesses still need to be conscious of developer’s salary expectations.

According to OfferZen’s latest developer nation report , a felt lack of compensation remains the top reason developers leave their roles.

Pieter Rautenbach , Engineering Director at takealot.com shared his tips on benchmarking tech salaries to ensure you keep your developers happy while sticking to your budget:

His top 5 tips?

1. Create a roadmap

It’s important to have a plan before setting out to build or restructure a team. Outlining your strategy will help understand what your team needs to do to meet its outcomes and ensure you’re able to identify who you need on board to achieve those goals.

2. Benchmark salaries

Benchmarking your salaries is the best way to gauge whether they’re competitive.

You can download our 2024 Developer Salary Benchmarking Report to get an idea of South African developer salaries.

3. Communicate openly and honestly

Understanding what developers want and letting them know what you have to offer can help attract developers who genuinely want to work for your business.

Being open and honest in this context helps to ensure that those who aren’t interested drop off at an early stage in the recruitment process. This will save you loads of time and money in the long run.

4. Offer good non-monetary benefits

Non-monetary benefits can make a huge difference when you’re creating remuneration packages that attract and retain talent. What’s needed here is to identify desirable perks that set your business apart without busting your budget.

Not sure how your benefits compare? You can learn more about common benefit packages in our latest developer hiring & retention data report .

5. Collaborate and negotiate

Hiring managers might come across developers whose salary expectations are out of their budgets but who would be a great fit for the team and company.

Want to tap into the South African dev talent pool? On OfferZen, 200+ new developers from South Africa and beyond go live every week. Get access here.