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Ants Doing Legwork: Investigating Motivators for Software Development Career Abandonment

Published: 05 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Context: Career abandonment (turnaway) among software developers may be associated with many factors related to the profession. Identifying and understanding how these factors can affect those professionals is essential for organizations to design more effective retention policies and better understand the phenomenon. Objective: This study aims to identify motivators that may be associated with the turnaway phenomenon among software developers, in addition to dimensions with which those motivators are associated. Method: A qualitative study was conducted with 15 former software developers from different regions of Brazil. Results: We have identified 49 different motivators, among which the most cited were professional stagnation, lack of financial recognition, lack of professional regulation, and work overload, among others. We classified those motivators into seven software engineering dimensions, mainly: software engineering professional practice, management, and economics. Conclusion: The results of the study suggest, grounded on the collected qualitative data, a number of hypotheses to further research, relating turnaway to the types of activities of software development. We hope these results contribute to devise effective strategies for organizations to retain developers, additionally minimizing the social cost of turnaway to those developers.

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  • (2024)Development methodologies for IoT-based systems: challenges and research directionsJournal of Reliable Intelligent Environments10.1007/s40860-024-00229-910:3(215-244)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SBES '21: Proceedings of the XXXV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 2021
473 pages
ISBN:9781450390613
DOI:10.1145/3474624
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 05 October 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Career Abandonment
  2. Qualitative study
  3. Turnaway
  4. motivators to turnaway

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SBES '21
SBES '21: Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 27 - October 1, 2021
Joinville, Brazil

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Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

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  • (2024)Development methodologies for IoT-based systems: challenges and research directionsJournal of Reliable Intelligent Environments10.1007/s40860-024-00229-910:3(215-244)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024

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