You’re Months Away From Another Engineer Exit
Your competitor’s Q4 hire is shipping features fully ramped and productive. You approved the same role in January and it’s now July, you’re still interviewing, and your roadmap keeps slipping because you don’t have the capacity they do. You finally make an offer, celebrate the acceptance, spend a month onboarding, and then at month six they schedule a 1-on-1 and quit. The exit interview is professionally vague about “pursuing new opportunities” and you realize you have no idea what actually went wrong.
From what 21 CTOs told us, technical debt is worse than you described, or the team culture doesn’t match what you promised, and by month six they’ve seen enough to know it won’t change. Don Allen, VP Engineering at Moda Operandi, sees this pattern constantly: “Most exits happen when they realize the technical debt is worse than we described, or the team culture doesn’t match what we promised in interviews.”
Run the numbers. Six months fully loaded at $180K annualized is $90K burned, plus another $60K-80K to backfill the role, and now you’re starting the four-month recruiting cycle over while your competitor ships your roadmap. Your team’s demoralized because they invested time onboarding someone who’s gone, and the person who quit is telling other engineers at conferences exactly why they left.
They Hit the Codebase and Realize You Lied
The interview process highlighted the exciting new platform work. You talked about modern practices and clean architecture. Then they start day one and discover 80% of their time goes to maintaining legacy systems nobody mentioned, held together with duct tape and hope. They ask when you’ll address the architecture problems and get vague answers about “later this year” that sound exactly like what the person before them heard.
The disconnect happens because you’re solving for hire urgency, not hire retention. You emphasize the vision and downplay the current reality, thinking you’ll fix the debt before it becomes their problem. But they hit the codebase immediately and realize you’ve been living with this debt for years, which means it’s not actually a priority and probably never will be.
They don’t quit because the technical debt exists, they quit because you weren’t honest about it. Engineers can handle messy codebases if they know what they’re signing up for and see a real plan to improve it. What they can’t handle is discovering the job they accepted doesn’t actually exist.
The Team Culture Isn’t What You Sold
You promised collaborative decision-making and work-life balance in the interview. The reality is weekend deploys, last-minute priority changes, and decisions made in Slack channels they’re not invited to. They don’t need ping pong tables or unlimited PTO. They need the work to match their skill level and the team dynamics to not make them dread Monday mornings.
When you assign them grunt work for three months because “we need to get this shipped first” and promise interesting projects are coming later, they’ve heard that before. Senior engineers especially can smell the bait-and-switch coming because they’ve seen it at their last two companies. They start taking recruiter calls they would’ve ignored at month two, and by month five they’re scheduling interviews during your sprint planning meetings.
Remote Flexibility Disappeared After Month 3
You sold remote flexibility in the interview, then started the “we work better together in person” hints at month three, then announced RTO mandates at month five. Mike Sinoway, CTO at OutMatch, built his team specifically around remote flexibility because it’s a retention driver: “We’ve stayed fully remote and that has been a big differentiator for us. There’s been a lot of folks who have left some of those big companies because they’re being mandated to go back into the office.”
When you pull back on flexibility you promised, they don’t see it as a minor policy change. They see it as proof that other promises aren’t reliable either, and if you lied about remote work you probably lied about the career growth path and the equity value too. The RTO announcement doesn’t just lose you one engineer, it loses you everyone who joined specifically because you weren’t like those other companies forcing people back to the office.
Fix This Before Your Next Hire
Pull your last three engineer exits and ask someone other than yourself: what did we promise in the interview versus what they actually experienced day to day? Not the official line you tell the board, the actual daily reality your engineers live. Then fix the interview process to show both the exciting vision and the current technical debt situation, because engineers who self-select out during interviews cost you two weeks of recruiting time. Engineers who quit at month six cost you $90K, six months of roadmap delay, and credibility damage with every engineer they talk to afterward.
Create a 30-60-90 day check-in that explicitly asks about expectation versus reality gaps while there’s still time to course-correct. And if you can’t actually fix the technical debt or culture issues driving exits, at least stop promising in interviews that you will, because the next engineer who quits will be more expensive than the last one.
Why Great Engineers Quit in Month 6, from Sonatafy’s Engineering Intelligence Hub. Insights drawn from over 160 CTO interviews on Software Leaders UNCENSORED. Practical tools for technical leaders navigating team retention and engineering culture. Explore more at sonatafy.com/software-solution-directory/
