Tech companies that retain their engineers best

LaunchDarkly is doing bold new things to ensure our employees are engaged.

Many team members who were part of the founding team are still here. Alexis Georges, Engineer, and Andrea Echstenkamper, Director of Marketing, have been here since 2015. The respect that we place on our employees' lives outside of work makes working at LaunchDarkly enjoyable.

When the pandemic first arrived, LaunchDarkly adapted quickly. We rapidly transitioned into a remote-first company, making all the requisite changes to ensure that everyone was supported during this difficult time. We added benefits such as a home-office stipend, and changed how we worked together to ensure that everyone had the resources they needed to get their jobs done effectively. We continue to invest in collaborating closely, even though we are physically distant.

It has paid off. Our business and team continued to grow. We hired dozens of new Product Delivery teammates in 2021 and will continue to scale throughout the year, adding new people from all over the U.S. You can learn more about our high performing team here.

The average tenure at Carbon Five is 5 years.

All of the partners have been here for 11 or more years. There is a big difference between having a product-type versus a consulting-type of involvement at a company. Some people want to have ownership in a product over many years, and potentially move up in title and in a hierarchy. However, for us on the consulting side, we love learning, leveling up our skills, and enjoy doing it quickly. You might go from doing data-warehousing work with Java to building a platform with Node to developing in React Native for a mobile application. People who like diving into different domains and code flourish here.

Each year, we provide our team members with an annual professional development budget of $2,000 to attend conferences, complete certifications, and enroll in classes or other training relevant to their field. If working on new things every 4-6 months with a senior team appeals to you, we’d love to hear from you. (Note: we usually hire about one associate engineer per year per office.)

We consistently hit our quarterly goal of 95% employee retention.

There’s a good reason folks at Lever tend to stay here. As Christina (a senior software engineer) says, “there’s a very positive culture here, where you don’t have the ‘10x developer.’ Everyone is collaborative and supportive.” We regularly make space for team bonding, whether it’s in-person (when it’s safe to do so of course) or virtually. For example, we got creative with remote activities like team cooking challenges, book clubs, talent competitions, and more. Our CEO even taught a class on baking bread.

We’re extraordinarily proud of the company we’ve built so far (not to mention humbled to be recognized as the #1 place to work in San Francisco, as well as a top workplace in the entire United States). Our people are Lever’s biggest competitive advantage and we’ll continue investing in our “Leveroos” and people-first culture.

Automattic employees tend to stay at Automattic: Our retention rate for Code Wranglers and JS Engineers is 86% over the last 5 years.

By the end of your (typically) six-month program, you’ll know the details, from travel tips and internal tools to how we communicate in our distributed setup. More importantly, you’ll have a friend outside of your team and an understanding of what most teams do at Automattic.

Your work isn’t fully reflected in your assigned responsibilities or documented in whichever task tracker your team might use. We give you autonomy so you can make an impact beyond your role. And we believe in bringing something above and beyond your role to your team and our company.

When it’s time for a change, Automatticians are encouraged to consider switching teams. For example, our Happiness Engineers (technical support) do 3-month rotations working on new products and have transitioned to Code Wranglers, QA Engineers, and Technical Account Managers. Meanwhile, developers regularly switch teams to work on other products within Automattic. This type of change gives you a fresh perspective as you dive into different projects the company is working on and live up to our Creed: “I will never stop learning.”

Qualia is a place to build careers.

We’re a close-knit team, and many of our engineers have been at Qualia from the beginning. Since our founding in 2015, most engineers have remained on the team, and of those few that left, several decided to return.

As we continue to grow, our aim is to ensure that everyone at Qualia feels, above all, excited to be a part of the team. We’ve made a commitment to maintain our vibrant culture while continuing to improve our employee experience as the company scales. In addition to offering comprehensive health benefits (learn more about our benefits below under Work/Life Balance!), we’ve developed a robust onboarding program for new hires, professional development opportunities, and we’re actively involved in community-focused volunteering. When the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order transitioned Qualia to work-from-home, we placed an even greater emphasis on keeping employees engaged through biweekly all-hands meetings, virtual events, and team bondings (online cooking classes and trivia are recent examples!).

If you ask team members why they love working at Karat, you’ll likely hear it’s because of the people.

Everyone here is working for one common goal and leaves their ego at the door. “I’ve never worked with a group of more motivated, mission-driven people,” says Jason. Despite onboarding and working remotely, the team is proactive about maintaining a sense of closeness and building a cohesive culture, says Cynthia. For those who are interested, the engineering team holds regular social hours (think playing different board games), Zoom lunches 2-3 days a week, as well as a weekly book club discussion (about different articles or books) on Fridays.

It’s this extremely collaborative, supportive environment that Elayne credits for helping her decide whether to move into a people management role. “I don’t think I would have taken a management position at any other company. It’s because I have such a high degree of trust in everyone on the team [at Karat] that I decided to become a manager.” The opportunity to learn and grow is abundant as we tackle real-world problems, so it’s an exciting time to join the team!

We hire artists, not assassins.

While it’s true, we’ve had zero churn from the company so far, high employee retention is more about value alignment than anything else. Our goal from day one is to work with people who share our values and understand why we’re building what we’re building on a deeply personal level. We sometimes joke that we’re a home for crazies because security people tend to be disliked at companies for always saying, “No.” However, at Doppler, you are the champion! We have all been that super niche person who pushes back before, but now that we’re a part of a security company, we’re amongst similarly-minded peers.

We should let you know that we’re extremely passionate people. Our first hire, Tom, has a deep seeded passion for security and privacy. (He reads privacy policies the way most people watch Netflix, no joke.) For Tom, it is not a task, but a way of life, and we appreciate how he brings that passion to our team. Ruud joins us from Instagram, where he led their API backend infrastructure. He has built out all of our integrations and focuses on growth at Doppler. His interest and enthusiasm is contagious. As a last example, Ryan owns developer advocacy at Doppler. His excitement for building communities helps us stay connected to and inspired by our users, and we love his talent for distilling information.

We hire artists, not assassins. Assassins will only pull the trigger if they are paid, but artists will happily work for free until the day they die because they love what they do. Thankfully everyone at Doppler is very well compensated but the passion being our main driver remains the same.

We have 12+ engineers, 1 started in 2013, 1 in 2014, 2 in 2015, 3 in 2016 and 5 in 2017 (fibonacci!).

We pride ourselves on working closely within the engineering and product teams to make sure everyone is working on products which are fulfilling and challenging for them. You can learn more about the members of our team here. If you are interested in opportunities within engineering or product please feel free to email our Recruiting Manager to start the process and learn more: [email protected]

There’s a reason so many of us have stayed for 6, 8, 10+ years.

Rusty, our Director of Engineering, has been with us for nearly six years, Eliot for almost 8 years, and Patrick for 10 years, just to name a few! Not only that, but our first five engineers are all still with the company and only two people have left the engineering team in our 10-year history. While we’re always doing our best to point you in the direction the team is going in, at Iora your time is really your own (and that includes your work time). In fact, on the Chirp team we have dedicated “engineers time” where you get to use a portion of your time in a sprint to work on whatever you choose. This can be pretty much anything that furthers your growth. For example, one engineer is learning a front-end tech that we don’t currently use, and another is doing a deep learning dive on web accessibility. You can only work so hard before you burn out, and we actively try to keep the pace sustainable.

Our average company-wide tenure is 5+ years!

Not only is the average company tenure indicative of this great work environment, but our SmugMug Customer Support Heroes’ average tenure is also almost double that – clocking in at ten years! Part of why people choose to stay here is because we work hard to create consistent growth opportunities. Managers have their direct reports’ growth as an established and continued focus, and they are equipped with the knowledge and resources to succeed. We also publish career ladders and promotion processes, in addition to ongoing education opportunities.

Celebrating each other and our wins is essential to us, which is why we take the time to applaud work anniversary milestones with monthly recognition presentations. At your five-year mark, you can expect some awesome swag. Once you reach the ten-year mark, we’ll send you and your family on vacation to a destination of your choosing. Team members have enjoyed everything from diving off the coasts of South Africa to drinking from coconuts on the beaches of Hawaii.

Render is a place where you can grow your career.

Most startups aren't known for high employee retention, but if it wasn't obvious by now, we're not like most startups. Commitment and ownership are core qualities you'll find in each of us, which is part of why Render is a place where people want to stay and grow their careers. We strive to create a supportive work environment based on mutual respect and continuous learning through regular 1:1s, team meetings, and Slack discussions driven by empathy and candor. We also offer an equitable compensation model. This includes regular compensation parity reviews, employee-friendly stock option exercise windows, and generous benefits for you, your future, and your loved ones. Finally, we’re in this for the long run, which means placing a premium on managing work/life balance. We take care of ourselves and actively make sure we keep the pace sustainable to avoid burnout.

Our average tenure across the team is 3.2 years.

In order to build the right technology for our diverse group of users, we’ve built a team that’s truly able to understand, translate, and innovate on care. We have backgrounds spanning healthcare, non-profits, government relations, social work, technology, and more. Women make up 69% of our HQ team, 37% of our Engineering team, and 55% of our leadership team. We believe it’s this incredible, caring team combined with a deep investment in personal growth (see above) that has led so many people to stay. In fact, the tenure of the Product team is particularly long – we have veterans who have been here for 6+ years as founding Engineers and Designers who are still pushing our mission forward. Since joining, many of us have matured not only in our technical disciplines but as people, families, and members of our communities.

In 2020, our team made the switch to be distributed. Like a lot of other organizations, we had to figure out what that meant for our workstyle and culture. We thoroughly enjoyed the days when we could all gather as a team, eating lunch together each day, doing spontaneous whiteboard sessions in our offices, and Eng-Design pairing at our desks. Today we’re investing in new ways to collaborate and gather virtually so we can stay connected to our awesome teammates. If you’re interested in learning more, we’d love to hear from you!