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Technical Debt’- A reason why your Software Developers
may be considering leaving your company.

By Vahid Haghzare, Director Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment &
Armie Garcia, Marketing Associate, Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment

One of the top IT Recruitment Agencies in Hong Kong, Dubai, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Singapore, and Japan, SVA Recruitment is an IT and employment agency that provides jobs, executive search, and recruitment services.

A New Reason Your Engineers may be considering quitting

In this article, Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment is going to reveal one major factor that pushes developers off the edge- ‘Technical Debt’.

It is that time of the year when many workers, particularly in tech, are looking ahead to a new year, and unfortunately for you, that also means reaching out to their IT Recruiter and considering transferring to another company.

A survey last month by the SVA Recruitment candidate network shows that there are other factors as to why your tech workers would want to quit besides money or work-life balance.

The survey showed that 51% of developers considered leaving because of technical debt. 20% of them feel vexed by technical debt and said that is why they left the company.

As the fourth most important issue cited by respondents, what is Technical Debt?

Technical debt, or 'code quality and codebase health', could be past coding practices by your previous engineers that they thought were smart at the time of being written, but turned out to be uninspected, uncertified, and unconventional.

The outdated or unsuitable programming language used when setting up backend systems is proving to be a major problem for developers today, who need to work through millions of lines of code that need succeeding language updates

This term also has a wide range from major IT implementation- for example, a core banking system that needs a 10-year period of bug fixes.

This ‘Technical Debt’ has been a major complaint from our Software developer candidates when discussing programming-related reasons why they are considering leaving.

Rewriting old code written by the past developers under different circumstances who may not have recorded their actions and the reason for it.

Or putting up with legacy systems instead of reconditioning them or building a new and improved system.

How to fix it

The best strategy to keep tech workers is to lower the yielding of staff, given the fact that hiring new developers costs much.

Many employers rely on typical offers of annual or Chinese New Year bonus incentives, increased salary, better opportunities, and flexible working time.

But this year prolonging a healthy codebase by precisely managing technical debt is proving equally imperative to retention.

Future developers of your company have to understand the reasons behind certain coding done by your current team.

A knowledge center of documentation should be considered being built for on-demand access and reference by all current and future members of the team.

Keeping your senior staff retained for the long term, or as an executive get involved yourself so you can personally continue passing down the history of the programming to new members during onboarding and on-the-job.

Consider also hiring folks who have a background and knowledge in languages you may have used before so that when they come in they are able to pick up the previous codes immediately.

Lastly, inspecting today’s codes, and ensuring to keep them polished, steady, and provable is the key to accessible, dependable, which is what every developer and engineer in your team wants when writing the next code.

Visit our Job page for more Job opportunities and the Current Candidate page for available candidates.

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Silicon Valley Associates is ideally positioned to support the continual demand from tech companies and IT Departments looking to hire in Hong Kong, Asia, and Worldwide. Please let us know if you would further advise on the above topic or your hiring needs