Your Code as a Crime Scene, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Have Your Code Motivate Retention

Quick, how many of your core teammates could leave your company before the codebase becomes impossible to maintain? Five or ten? As you’ll see in ​Measure the Truck Factor in Unhealthy Code​ later in this chapter, each developer leaving takes a piece of the collective knowledge with them. Working in a setting where you no longer have complete knowledge of the code can be frustrating for a developer and devastating to the business.

Surprisingly, few companies realize that offering a healthy work environment is the best way to retain developers. This means more than workplace flexibility, how friendly your managers are, or even if you get that ping-pong table for the cafeteria. While those parts of your environment ...