#6 Thou shalt recognize and retain your top talent

Too many software development books concentrate on technology or management practices. At the end of the day, a lot of your success in software development will come down to who you have working for you and how happy they are in their work. You can have the best technology and organize your team in the best way possible, but if you have the wrong team it won't do you much good. Another surprise, given the effort so many organizations put into recruiting talent, is their failure to recognize and retain that talent after they join the organization.

Organizations that are successful at retaining their top talent start by recognizing their top talent. There are plenty of metrics that can be gathered around a developer's productivity and quality. Don't forget, however, more subjective criteria as summarized in Table 1-3. Who are the developers who always show up at other code reviews and make constructive comments? Who is known as the "goto" person when you have a tough bug to find? Which developers really understand the business you are in? Who has the best contacts with your customers? Be sure not to concentrate 100% on hard metrics and overlook such factors as these. Once you know who you want to keep around, go about thinking of ways to make it happen.