Ask HN: How to keep young developers

I work as a team lead in San Francisco and I have a problem. My younger developers don't stick around. I work in a smaller Engineering department and have to compete against huge internet companies for hires. I cannot compete on salary or technology, Google pays way more and plenty of others have more interesting technology stacks and development tasks. My approach to this has been to try to give my developers a path to the future. I do regular career development one-on-ones to identify what sort of things my developers are interested in doing, setting career development goals, and ending up with tasks for myself to steer their tasks more to the things they are interested in and providing training resources. I have also pushed, in what I thought was a judicious manner, for them to have greater ownership over areas of our systems. Finally, I do my utmost to publicly recognize their accomplishments.

Sadly, I continue to lose young devs. To a person, they say it isn't anything personal, they were happy with my leadership, but they didn't want to deal with the stress of my workplace or they had another opportunity they wished to pursue. I'm at my wits end, is this a fruitless desire on my part? Is there some secret sauce I am missing that would inspire my young devs to stay?

OP isn't focussing on young devs but on retention of devs.

OP also says they can't compete on price, so older devs (more experience, higher wages) may not be affordable.

Unfortunately I don't have a direct answer for you on this. However, what does jump out at me from your description is that you describe a utopia environment where developers are guided on a path to their future, own their code, and are recognized for their achievements. Yet, in the next paragraph you state that one of the reasons they state for leaving is "stress of my workplace".

I don't know you, the company, or how you manage, but could the attention you are placing on "career development" and recognition of accomplishments be causing added stress or unwanted attention in the workplace? Maybe they want to come to work, do their job, and go home without this feeling that they are being forced into a specific career path or having to meet certain career development goals.

Anyway, just a thought. It was something that stood out from your description. On the other hand, unfortunately without being able offer competitive pay or technology, many developers may just use your company as a stepping stone. You could try talking to upper management or HR and throw the burden on them. It costs a company a lot more to continuously hire rather than just paying a competitive salary to begin with. Show management how competing more on salary could save on hiring costs.

More-experienced devs might actually be more cost-effective. If you can find an experienced dev who can do the work of 2 junior devs, you might be able to save enough money to pay them a more competitive salary that will keep them from leaving.

The money that's "saved" by hiring junior devs and underpaying them is quickly eaten up by the costs of employee turnover:

- Lost productivity of new devs: nobody sticks around long enough to actually become productive with the domain and the tech stack. (And their mental focus is on finding a better-paying job, not doing better in their current job.)

- Lost productivity of senior devs: they're constantly spending time interviewing and training new junior devs.

- Recruiting costs, such as headhunter fees.

Also, two junior devs cost twice as much in benefits and overhead (health insurance, paid vacation/holiday/sick days, computer hardware, etc.) as one senior dev.