Tech companies that retain their engineers best

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

More than half of our first 20 employees are still with us, like Alexis Georges. 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 over fifty new Product Delivery teammates in 2021 and are still expanding. 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.

At ReadMe, you’re a full person. Not just an engineer.

On the engineering team, nobody has left in the past four years. What’s more, everyone who was hired since the start of 2020 is still at ReadMe. Our Head of Product, Marc, was our first engineer and has been here for more than six years. Over the pandemic we’ve made efforts to support the mental health and overall well-being of employees, and stay connected and collaborative in a hybrid way.

Our Head of Engineering, Rafe, has been here for almost three years. As he puts it, “ReadMe rewards creativity, and provides space to work on complex problems with incredible people.” Kanad, our Developer Advocate, has been here for almost four years. He says, “The biggest thing [that’s kept me at ReadMe] is the variety of experiences I’ve had, and the ability to explore my web development interests as they’ve evolved over time.”

Emily, an Enterprise Engineer, has been here for two years. As she explains, “What I love about ReadMe is the people – both on the engineering team and company-wide. There’s a strong culture of caring about people, work/life balance, and good perks. Within the engineering team there’s a lot of flexibility and adaptability – the way we scope out work and deadlines is fluid, allowing for a manageable workload. From what I've seen, everyone on the team is respected and given autonomy over their work. People are also allowed to make mistakes without blame or shame. It’s a welcoming, friendly, collaborative environment.”

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!).

We hire artists, not assassins.

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 the crazies, where creative and passionate people thrive!

We are all artists in our own way, driven by our love of the product, team, and mission. 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. Yasmine recently joined the marketing team with an exciting focus on ramping up developer adoption among our fast growing user base. Ruud joined us from Instagram, where he led their API backend infrastructure. Their interests and enthusiasm is contagious. As a last example, Ryan owns developer advocacy at Doppler. His love for building communities helps us stay connected to and inspired by our users.

While passion remains our main driver, we also have some pretty great benefits. In addition to paid family leave (for all new parents regardless of gender), we also support people who might need help growing their families with fertility treatment benefits. We conduct regular compensation reviews in order to make sure everyone is paid competitively and equally and also a dedicated wealth advisor. As part of onboarding, new hires can take advantage of an hour-long session to understand their equity compensation package, how they can best plan their actions, and more.

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!

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. We raised a $20M Series A at the end of 2021 and plan to double in size by the end of 2022, so we’d love to hear from you!

We enjoy working and growing together!

As our team has steadily grown during the pandemic years, we’ve maintained a close-knit, collaborative, and fun community! Although Propel didn’t originally start as a remote-first company, we quickly learned how to adapt to this new way of working.

While we’ve a thriving and interactive team culture on Slack and Zoom, we still make the time to meet in-person at team and company-wide retreats and events. In March 2022, we had a karaoke night near our Brooklyn office after celebrating our Series B announcement!

Some members of our engineering team would like to share their favorite part of working at Propel:

• Jonathan: “Probably the people. Everyone here seems to really care about what we are doing and care about helping others grow and succeed.”
• Ruthie: “Propel is a deeply empathetic, people-first company, both in regard to our users and our co-workers. I get to work on something incredibly meaningful with teammates I enjoy spending time with and learn a lot from.”
• Mohan: “I love having agency over what I work on, which I really didn’t experience before Propel. Being able to write proposals and having some influence over what I spend six weeks of my life on is so nice.”
• Charles: “I love everyone I work with – I get to learn and improve through every interaction.”
• Beresford: "The freedom. You can be as forthcoming with your goals as you want and work on said goals at your own pace; It feels like the opportunities here are way more plentiful than in most places."

It’s also important to mention that since our founding in 2014, we’ve had only one IC member on our engineering team leave. (In July 2021, they went on to pursue building their startup, and we hope they’re doing great!) So if joining a fun, collaborative, mission-driven team speaks to you, we look forward to hearing from you!