Retaining Software Developers is a significant challenge for teams. According to the Infragistics Reveal Survey, 37.5% of respondents expected difficulty in finding developers in 2023. To retain talent and keep DevOps engineers happy, we need to know how to make them unhappy. Join me as I discuss antipatterns in management, development, testing and monitoring patterns that can stop you retaining awesome software engineers. Outline

• I’ll cover:- Alert volume evaluation, and how we alert bombardment leads to burnout and alert fatigue. I’ll also cover best practices for on-call rotation and BYOD usage to stop engineer burnout even when they’re not on call.
• SLO and metric comparison across teams, and how comparing team metrics rather than improving metrics such as DORA over time for a single team breeds animosity and demoralises engineers.
• Code reviews with jerkish or unhelpful comments, and the difference between radical candour through constructive feedback and pulling people down.
• Tool overload, and how selecting a common toolbox reduces the need for context switching.
• Flaky or poor testing, and how it builds mistrust and apathy in platform quality.
• Constant work items and a lack of learning time, and how a lack of training opportunities and space to grow leaves engineers feeling stuck.
• Lack of support for conference attendance and speaking, and how community connections help engineers grow and learn.