DE Churn From Fragile Stacks

Senior data engineers quit stacks that page them at 3am, and the exit interview says “growth”.

When a senior leaves, the response is usually a counter-offer or a survey. Nobody looks at the on-call rota, which hasn’t changed in a year.

On one migration I led, we moved more than 150 database artifacts off a legacy estate that broke constantly. What I remember is the week after. Firefighting stopped being the default state of the team.

People who spend their days restarting failed jobs learn nothing. A year of that and your most senior engineer has twelve months of incident tickets and no architecture on their CV.

I wouldn’t blame them for leaving.

So if you’re losing seniors, go through your last 20 incidents. How many came back to the same root cause? How many actually needed a person awake at 3am?

I’d bet most of your retention problem is sitting in that list. Not all of it. Money is money.

What’s the incident your team keeps solving over and over?