Build an engineering team people want to come back to

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Key takeaways:

• A returning employee is a strong culture signal, especially from someone with real alternatives.
• Build an engineering team that outlasts who’s currently on it.
• React to resignations like wins, not losses.

Someone who used to work for me left, spent time somewhere else, and then shared that they wanted to come back. When I asked why, they described their new engineering team as “grey – with everyone in their own lane.”

That phrasing stood out to me not because of what it says about the other company (I have no idea whether it’s fair), but because of what it implied about how they experienced our team: bright, colorful, and collaborative.

It can be hard as a manager to know, for sure, that the culture of your team is great. However, someone leaving, seeing an alternative, and coming back to say so is a pretty strong signal. That signal is also weighted, as the engineers who leave, who want to come back, and who you want to come back are usually the ones with the most options. This means a return is a comparison someone made with real alternatives available to them.

This has happened to me several times now, on a few different teams. Now I operate under an assumption that the people on my teams will be people I know and work with for many, many more years.

Where I learned it

My first major management job outside of the tech sector was at a large retail store with seasonal traffic.

A large percentage of the staff for summer and the winter holidays were college students who would work with us for just a handful of weeks. Bringing on someone brand new for one of these roles meant we had extremely limited time to train and get them working before they were gone.

There was no version of that job where I kept anyone and retention wasn’t the objective. What I could affect was enticing the same people to come back in both June and December so that we had fewer and fewer brand new employees each season and more returning employees, already onboarded to our company and to their role.

I had no leverage on pay. It was set, and every other store hiring on that block was offering the same. The only variable I controlled was whether the eight weeks had been worth repeating.

I’ve applied what I learned there within all of my engineering teams since, to the same result. It comes down to three things: a team that exists apart from the people in it, feedback sized to a career, and a resignation you don’t treat as a loss.

The team has to exist apart from the people currently in it

Ask someone what a team is like and they’ll usually describe who’s on it. That’s a fair answer, but it has a short shelf life. What I’m after is the part of the description that would still be accurate two years after everyone they worked with has gone – the standard of performance, the challenging and exciting problems, the teamwork, and the memories created.

Protect the bar

It’s pretty rare for a team to not know if there is a team member struggling to meet expectations. Whether they’re the ones covering work, dealing with issues in the person’s blast radius, or just spending a lot of time supporting them – it’s often the case that performance issues are visible within team dynamics.

So when you hold the performance bar and handle difficult performance cases supportively and efficiently, it affirms that a standard of performance isn’t decorative, it’s required. Your strongest engineers feel this first and most. They’re the ones absorbing the work, and they’re the ones with somewhere else to go.

Give people real choice about what they work on and make sure they’re growing

“What do you want to learn this year” is a question often asked in a performance management context and not revisited, but making actual assignment decisions with the person and where their interest and growth is a genuine input is just good business. For years I’ve given people the opportunity to stack rank the projects they want to work on or the teams they want to be on, and I love some of Daniel Terhorst-North’s thinking on this subject.

Design opportunities to work together

When the returning engineer described the culture that wasn’t working for them, they said “everyone in their own lane.” It wasn’t that the work was dull, but that it was solitary. Design projects in a way that makes people feel like they’re truly on a team and with opportunities to both learn from others and to teach others.

Make memories

Creating an environment where memories can be made is part of what can make work feel more meaningful in people’s lives. Introduce novelty into the workday and look for opportunities to break away from the norm – that’s the quickest path to creating a shared memory. I find milestones and celebrations to be the lowest-lift place to do this because it’s not too uncomfortable to be a little zany in that context (themed parties, unexpected excursions, etc). The science of memory is incredibly interesting and I often recommend new managers read up on the subject.

Feedback sized to a career, not a review cycle

Performance management loops are designed largely for managers to speak to the current cycle, which is useful in terms of specificity. However, when we stretch the horizon, often the feedback we want to deliver changes shape. It can help me say the hard thing earlier, when it’s still a small correction. I get specific about what might be working well for someone now, but I can already see that it will hold them back two levels from now.

There’s a plainly self-interested version of this: if I’m going to be in a room with this person again in five, eight, or 20 years, I’d much rather they’d already worked through their issues, learned, and grown. Dodging a hard conversation now just means I’ll have a harder conversation later.

A resignation isn’t a loss to manage

The moment someone tells you they’re leaving is the moment they find out what you actually think of them. Most of the machinery around resignations treats them as a gap to close, with processes to kick off for backfill, transition plans, and coverage. All of that indeed has to happen, but none of it should happen first, because the first thing is the only part anyone remembers.

On a team where people are constantly leveling up (that great team culture you’ve been building!) you already know how to react when someone gets better at their job: you get excited. You celebrate, congratulate, you tell people. A resignation is no different, so if my reaction is anything less than enthused, I’ve communicated exactly how conditional my interest in them always was. My go-to when someone comes to a 1:1 with “that look” on their face is to close my laptop, lean in, and say, “how exciting! Tell me literally everything.”

Once someone leaves I set myself a check-in cadence on my calendar. Whether it’s a scheduled meeting or just an email or text to check in, I try to take the responsibility for maintaining the relationship. Sometimes life gets in the way and it’s not absolutely consistent, but even just a few points of outreach clears what is, objectively, a pretty low industry bar. Effort is the difference between being a manager someone used to have and someone who was in their corner either way.

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Final thoughts on building engineering teams people want to come back to

Admittedly and importantly, a team people remember fondly is not automatically a team that was good for everyone on it. The people who come back are, by definition, the ones it worked for. They’re a biased sample and they’re also the only sample that talks to me. The person who left because the team was chattier than they liked or because they didn’t always feel included doesn’t send me a note two years later telling me what it was like. 

Matching a compensation number isn’t always in your control, but designing teams people want to return to can be. Treating the horizon of our working relationship as long is cheap to be wrong about. If I treat someone as a colleague for the next 20 years and they never speak to me again, I’ve lost nothing. If I treat them as a two-year hire and I’m wrong, I’ve spent those years skipping the conversations that would have made them, and us, better.