The Missing Fear

When I hear from developer managers and people looking for developers, one topic keeps coming up. How do you get developers, or anyone for that matter, to stay at a job when they get an offer for a lot more somewhere else? You need to give people a good reason to stay that goes beyond money.

There has to be something left to accomplish at the current job that gives employees a reason not to leave. In basic game theory, you learn that people abhor...almost more than anything...to lose out on something valuable. They will even act irrationally in order to avoid losing.

The dread of losing something valuable is one of the most compelling drivers of even irrational behavior

One of my favorite books on this topic is Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior . In the second chapter, they talk about a Harvard MBA Professor who auctions off a $20 bill to the highest bidding student. Everyone is welcome to make a bid as small as $1. The catch is that no matter what the students bid, they have to honor it.

Students start bidding trying to get $20 for a deal, but eventually, everyone drops out except for the top two bidders. The bidders continue until they reach amounts as high as the record $204, which the teacher always donates to charity.

At some point, students stop bidding to win the $20 and start bidding to avoid losing the auction. If you want to keep people around, there should be something they'll lose if they leave. I ran one of my weekly polls on this topic, which you can still vote on.

Why we Stay

I've been thinking of why I've stayed at companies and why I chose not to move when other opportunities came along. I stayed when I perceived future value. But, how you can give your employees FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)? You have to have an up-skilling plan with a clear path for growth.

FOMO Up-skilling

Execute a clear, actionable progression plan that gives employees things they'll be missing out on if they leave. Start with the job interview and ask people where they want to be eventually. That often comes up during an interview, but gets quickly forgotten after you get the job.

The most important thing you can do for your employees is to have an Up-skilling First program. That means a commitment to growing from your internal talent before onboarding outsiders. I know sometimes you need to bring people from the outside, but be honest, that's probably because you didn't have an appropriate internal plan for growth.

There's danger in having a growth plan from the company's point of view. When it works, they have to hire someone like you again, and that's costly, but Up-skilling is always cheaper and better for the company culture.

If you're complaining that people don't want to hang around, this is what you're doing wrong. I talked about this with Michael Jenkins in my series of interviews for The Toolbox. Look in about the 10 minute range for the question on UpSkilling.

FOMO-U for Developers

Say I start out as an intern in college. I'd feel like there's a long way for me to go, and that my internship is a great set of things to explore. At this point, I'm learning whether this job is really for me. Can I handle the long hours? Am I enjoying running into developer issues? How about working with others in a team instead of doing the assignments by myself? Internships are designed so people and employers to figure out if this career is right for those involved.

As you move up the ladder to the Junior Developer ranks, money can be a strong motivator. This is probably where companies lose most developers, especially if they're not getting paid competitively, or if they don't have a FOMO Up-skill plan.

You get experience working with real projects and clients. Maybe you're part of developing tests, data entry, small new features, etc.

Taking extra money at another company might mean going to a job with higher pay, but you might get stuck doing things you don't like for quite a while. You can make a compelling argument to help this level of employee stay if you show them they are going to miss out on a lot of potential learning and growth.

A Mid-level Developer gets to be in charge of specific features or projects. A Senior Developer gets to lead Agile Teams, experimental features, more conceptual work. At even higher levels, you might teach about entrepreneurship, starting your own development business, build your own startup and raise capital.

Employees need a compelling reason to stay. Let them know that there is a lot of value in staying on board through an up-skilling program.

The Recap

Let's take a look at some of the important things going on in the world of Web Development.

Qwik

Qwik is superior to things like Astro's partially Hydrated Islands because instead of having to load entire frameworks or state, it breaks each interaction into its own small piece of code.

You have to see it to believe it. I hate that I haven't even gotten started being proficient with Astro and I totally get that Qwik is better in some ways. Although they are solving different problems, the resume-ability engine is superior to what everybody else is doing. I don't relish using the React or JSX syntax so I hope that this approach gets picked up by all other frameworks. This is the future my nerdy peeps.

Surreal DB

With what's probably the most adequate name I've ever heard, SurrealDB is a new cloud database that is like the Swiss army knife of databases. It creates schema-less databases that can optionally include a schema (why not) and be queried using traditional SQL Queries.

But, that's not all, it also lets you easily create CRUD support with a REST or GraphQL API. Like Firebase, it manages real-time and offline synchronization of your data. It even combines all this with Authentication and it's written in Rust for speed. Check out this video from the always awesome Fireship.

Honestly, just when I think I can't be impressed any further, two technologies like Qwik and SurrealDB make me feel like I'm just getting started learning things. We'll have to see how easy these are in comparison to other things. I'm a big believer in simplicity being the best feature, but these are really great ideas.

PartyTown

This was something I learned from watching the video about Qwik. There is a library called Partytown that lets you offload all of the scripts that are not part of your application into web workers. Think of all of the extra code you have to load with your application that isn't your application. Google Analytics, ads, trackers, etc.

Now you can take all that code and defer the loading of these secondary elements to a web worker. Brilliant!

Conferences Galore

Folks, conference season has arrived and a lot of these now have in-person options. However, these will all be streamed or will be placed online at some later date, so signup to get notified. I'm adding these here in date order.

First is NextJSConf . A conference clearly focused on a single, but incredibly important project, specially for React Users. This is, of course, put together by Vercel, who manages the project. I've done a lot of demos and reviews of these tools and honestly, if I were strictly a React Developer, it's probably what I would use.

NextJS gives React everything it needs including image management, routing, server side rendering and a lot more. They keep improving the product regularly, so it's always impressive.

If I could only watch a single conference, I'd probably go for the first ever ViteConf . Why? Because everything is using Vite now (Including the above mentioned Qwik). This conference is jam-packed with an impressive list of speakers including Evan You (Creator of Vite and Vue.js), Rich Harris (Creator of Svelte), Ryan Carniato (SolidJS), Nate Moore (Astro). I'm flipping impressed.

Another one to keep an eye on is the JamStack Conf . This one is run by Vercel's competitor Netlify, who hires a lot of brainpower including Zach Leatherman (Eleventy) and boasts a lot of great speakers as well. The one session that I won't want to miss is the OSS panel, where some of the creators of the most important projects are embracing collaboration .

I haven't gone shopping in a while, so I'm really happy that GitHub is finally hosting its GitHub Universe conference in person this year. As you know, something like a third of all my clothing is from GitHub. Okay, I'm a fanboy. I'll also be attending in person this year, so look for me if you're going, or maybe you'll catch me screaming loudly when they pan the crowd during the event. The full schedule will be out soon, so keep your eyes peeled.