It's not that they dislike the work and are leaving the industry - they are seeking companies and leaders within the field that will better recognize and utilize their talents.
Attrition is very expensive. You lose tribal knowledge, and then face months or years of ramp-up training. Getting a handle on turnover can give your enterprise a significant competitive advantage. This is at least recognized by company leadership in many cases and lip service is paid. However, very little meaningful action is taken to address the problems. There's a pervasive attitude of defeatism about it and seems to be a common tech industry myth that there is no way to increase engineer retention and no reason to improve interview outcomes because tech workers just want to frequently change jobs anyway.
I was recently in a meeting with a C level executive who said... "People bounce around in Tech, that's just the way it is. They're in a job for a year or two and they leave." I just want to set the story straight on this type of thinking. Good talent does not leave a company just for fun. There aren't many people who enjoy that type of change. Most of us create long lasting relationships with our colleagues and leaving them is hard on us. Talent leaves because they're seeking something. It's leadership's role to understand those needs. As a leader if you ignore those needs you're letting them walk, they're not leaving. - KA, product designer
Engineers dislike interviewing for jobs at least as much as anyone else, and probably more given the comparatively poor state of industry practices. It’s a massive time commitment and the experience is mainly painful rejection. They aren’t doing it for pleasure. Actively pursuing something new makes a powerful statement about how miserable one is in a current role.
Our industry leads the nation in turnover. If we can improve staff training for conducting interviews, focus on hiring engineers that are better long-term fits for the company, stop paying an inordinate amount of attention to things that don't really matter, and take meaningful steps to increase retention, we will reduce turnover and increase organizational efficiency and profits. Let other companies pay the price for having poor interview practices and ignoring retention problems. Interview Engineering's material and forum aim to be a resource to help you do that.
I think a big part of the reason is C level pay has increased exponentially over the last few decades, while lower level employees has only gone up linearly. I think leadership and executives are more willing to deal with turn over instead of lowering their own compensation to support their engineers.