The Importance of your Local Development Community

I recently saw a post on LinkedIn, I’m fairly sure it was an advert for in house training but the message rang true. One manager turned to the other and said “If we train our developers they’ll get better and leave!” To which the other manager replied “But worse, if we don’t then they might stay!”

One of the most common reasons I hear from departing team members is boredom, that they want to go somewhere else and learn new things, use new technologies, and learn from other people. I myself have preached to friends on many an occasion that you learn more in your first few months at a new job than all the time afterwards combined.

You want the most eager, hungry, and interested developers on your team. You want to be able to retain them by introducing them to new ideas. It’s also your responsibility to keep your long serving members of staff from stagmenting and falling into a development rut.

The answer is often closer than you may think!

Local groups of developers are not hard to come by. I’m based in Leeds and to my knowledge we have Agile Yorkshire, Leeds Sharp, Leeds Code Dojo, and Leeds DevOps. Groups of people who meet regularly to discuss ideas, listen to speakers who bring new and exciting topics to the table. By visiting these groups I’ve been introduced to AngularJS, Microsoft Cognative Services, F#, .NET Core, and many many more…

By encouraging your developers to attend these events you motivate them to go out and find new ideas and technologies. Far better for them to have a night out, come back full of new knowledge than decide they’re fed up of using the same technologies over and over.

So how can you encourage participation in these events? Why not arrange to go as a group? Encourage someone to speak and bring the team along to support them. Plan a team night meal afterwards or ask someone to bring ideas back to your own internal training. Who knows, you may even bump into your next hire while you’re there!