I'm not sure if this is happening all over the company or just here, but the attrition is truly getting out of hand. I'm not sure why so many people are leaving. Yes, the situation is not ideal but it's not that bad either. I honestly feel like I'm missing something obvious that everybody else has figured out.
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Sounds like Matt Becker needing a book to point out what others have figured out on their own. “Someone tell me what to do and think!”
I work in an engineering group of ~25 people: At least 20% plans to leave, 60% are frustrated and 20% in a burnout condition.
Let me share by view:
- ) Understaffing: Not quite unusual in this industry. Here it is applied in a way that people are put in positions they are not burning for. E.g. Real researchers get product developers.
- ) An ongoing staff-refreshment initiative: Since years mainly young and unexperienced people are added. At the same time there are not enough experienced people anymore that can help them stepping up. Experienced people must work with tons of unexperienced people. If there is time to train young people, our senior guys would enjoy doing it.
Engaged Senior people get frustrated, start sabotaging projects or quit. Many employees are convinced there is a clear tactic to pest away people to strive to the goal of youth.
- ) (No) involvement of staff in their allocation decisions: You get assigned on another task and mostly hear about this weeks after that reassignment happened. Your personal development interests are not considered. You are a cow on a cattle-market.
- ) An agonizingly bad middle management layer: Most managers don't have experience in the field they manage. This is only stand able if they'd listen to technical advice. But they don't. This drives the workforce nuts. No ownership taken if you need something. Very slow decision making. Heavy whitewashing with tons of bleach in the reporting to upper hierarchy. No faith in the subordinates.
The management layer is trained in using the same wordings. You change the manager; You get to hear the same phrases. After working 1+ years you get a 100% score in BS-bingo.
- ) No ability to develop your career. You are hired, you stick to your job forever. Activities are ongoing to change this; They are there to give young people the idea of working for a company interested in people. If you talk to those youngsters, they don't believe in it after only short periods of time.
- ) Failure of upper management to merge groups together: Newly added groups result in long ongoing political fights, affecting the engineer level of work. Causes: Very slow decision making. Peers from politically affected groups don't support each other...
- ) Engineers are told explicitly to do no engineering delight. Engineering delight is not existing since the blue umbrella turned into the multicolour 3-letter company. But they keep themselves entertained by introducing new procedures to generate "project lead delight par excellence with cream, crumble and a sugar coated grape".
- ) No meaningful investments in equipment. What is more frustrating than a manager telling you that you cannot buy something cheap and then complains that you spend time in developing your own tools even though you explained that strategy over days?
- ) Lack of trainings. An E-learning portal is not a training, it is a non-sophisticated joke.
- ) Project management: Does not exist. The lack of it turns the engineering force into a work condition spending 70% of business day in talking and 30% in engineering.
This is my specific view, but my mates are riding the same wave.