On reasons why our employees (asked to) leave

And no, it's not because of Corona :) Read below about the most common reasons why employees leave our company or why we ask them to leave, and how we make such decisions!

We are building a transparent business (software development service / IT Agency to be more specific) and want to share some of the most common reasons why our employees leave the company (or frankly more about why we ask them to leave), how we make decisions, and so on.

a) The employee decided to quit and go to work for another company or start his own (usually freelancing) business.

In such a case, our internal decision-making process is simple:

If an employee generates income (or services) for our company which exceeds employee associated costs (e.g. salary, taxes, etc) and we see the possibility to make our bid in an attempt for the employee to stay in our company, we make such bid. 

However, in most cases, we will probably not make a bid, because we try to raise salaries automatically, when employee jump from one long term project to another, on the higher rate (this is usually correlated with engineer level increase).

Till today we lost very few employees because of that, and we did not make any bids on them because it does not make any sense - they asked to make a bid without "a jump" in revenue (or worse after failing in some projects)

For those of you who want one simple rule to grow your salary, it's this:

Make yourself irreplaceable.

The more you irreplaceable for the company, the more company will pay you, if you decide to ask more or because of goodwill (yes, this is our preferred way!).

P.S. in order to become irreplaceable one probably need to work a LOT and HARD and SMART. You get an idea, but I will probably write some blog post about this in the future :) 

P.P.S. Stalin said that there are no irreplaceable people. And it's true. However, in some rare cases, for business, it does not make sense to replace employees because it's easier to keep current, even if expenses on salary increase. After all, if employees generate profits, good business will not want to lose that. That's exactly the best-case scenario to ask for a salary increase in my opinion.

b) Some employees might be forced to exit our company because they did not follow the “process” well (e.g. running timers our customers require, work much fewer hours than was agreed in the contract, etc) or not being honest (or worse lie), etc. This is the most common reason why we ask employees to left our company till today.

I would go that far that say that ability to follow the (development/engineering/team/SCRUM/any_other) process with a focus on detail matter more than any “coding” skills or framework knowledge. 

c) Some employees might be forced to exit our company because they do NOT want to work on something which is important for the company. You will be surprised, but that's a pretty frequent reason that's why I put it into a separate topic. Employees do NOT want to work with Software Stack A, employees do NOT want to work with client Y, etc. We can understand that if it's crap technology experienced employees may not want that. We can understand that if it's toxic client employees absolutely reject it (and we too!). However, it actually never happens for us this way. Opposite: Employees may found own reasons which usually go down to the fact that she/he did not want to learn new things (even if they are very modern things, like the latest frameworks or languages). We are not going to keep such employees.

The moment we understand that it's the personality (culture) of employee which prevents “continues learning” - firing decision is made.

d) Some employees might be forced to exit our company because they just can't work on our or customers’ tasks efficiently enough, even after we spend too much time on that (honestly happens only 1 time over the few years we have in our company).

When we make a hire of Junior for the first work in her/his life, I honestly tell:

Your code quality most probably will not be a reason why you will be asked to left the company. It's how you write it (and more frequently how / why you NOT write it) will probably be the reason.

There are probably other cases I forgot or some "mixed" cases. Generally, we are thinking not in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality and culture fit. 

Our culture is simple:

Learn more, work hard, and smart and you will eventually get paid more (much more).

The more we work in the market, the more we have people who share our core values and people who don't leave us for one reason or another.

We are interested to hear reasons why employees leave (quit/fired from) your company too!