Your Best Developers Are Updating Their LinkedIn Profiles

You won't see it coming.

There's no dramatic resignation. No shouting match with management. No obvious warning sign that your best developer is about to leave.

What happens is quieter. They stop volunteering for new initiatives. They're a little less engaged in meetings. They still deliver their work, but the spark is gone. The side projects they used to tinker with on Friday afternoons have stopped.

Then one day, you notice their LinkedIn has a new headshot. Their profile has been updated. The "open to work" setting isn't visible to you, but recruiters can see it.

Two weeks later, they hand in their notice.

The exit interview will say "better opportunity." Better salary, better title, better growth prospects. All true, technically. All missing the point entirely.

They're not leaving for more money. They're leaving because they can't build here anymore.

What the Exit Interview Doesn't Capture

Exit interviews are corporate theatre.

HR asks a standard set of questions. The departing employee gives diplomatic answers. Nobody wants to burn bridges. Nobody wants to create awkwardness. So the real reasons get translated into safe language.

"I'm looking for new challenges" means "there are no challenges here, just maintenance."

"I want to grow my skills" means "I've learnt nothing new in two years."

"It's a great opportunity I couldn't pass up" means "anywhere is better than this."

"I have nothing negative to say" means "I have plenty negative to say, but what's the point?"

The exit interview captures the surface. It doesn't capture what's actually happening, which is this: your builders have concluded that building isn't possible here. So they're going somewhere it is.

The Slack Channel You Don't Know About

Here's what your departing developers aren't telling you but are definitely telling each other.

There's a Slack channel. Or a WhatsApp group. Or a Discord server. It has a name like "Tech Refugees" or "Survivors" or something darkly humorous that captures the shared experience.

In that channel, they talk honestly.

"Just got my third idea shot down by the architecture board."

"Spent six weeks on a proposal. Never even got a response."

"They hired three more contractors instead of letting us build the thing ourselves."

"Remember that automation project? Still 'under review' eight months later."

"Got told we can't use that framework because it's not on the approved list. The approved list hasn't been updated since 2019."

This is where the truth lives. Not in exit interviews. Not in engagement surveys. In the private channels where people feel safe to say what they actually think.

And what they think is: this organisation has forgotten how to build. If I stay here, I'll forget too.

What Builders Actually Want

There's a persistent myth that developers leave for money. Offer a higher salary, the thinking goes, and you'll retain your talent.

It's not wrong, exactly. Money matters. But it's not what builders optimise for.

Builders want to build.

That sounds obvious, but most organisations don't actually provide it. They provide tickets to close. Bugs to fix. Maintenance to perform. Meetings to attend. Documentation to write. Vendor integrations to troubleshoot.

They don't provide the experience of creating something that didn't exist before. Of solving a real problem with code you wrote. Of shipping something and watching people use it.

That experience is increasingly rare in enterprise IT. The work has become operational rather than creative. The role has become "technology administrator" rather than "builder."

And builders know the difference. They might not articulate it in the exit interview, but they feel it every day. The gap between what they trained to do and what they actually do. The gap between what's possible and what's permitted.

When a recruiter calls offering a role where they'll actually build things, they listen. Not because the salary is higher. Because the work is real.

The Compounding Cost

When a builder leaves, you don't just lose a person. You lose everything they carried.

You lose knowledge. The understanding of why things are built the way they are. The history of decisions. The context that lives in someone's head and never made it to documentation. The new person will spend months rediscovering what the departed person knew.

You lose relationships. The trust built with other teams. The informal networks that get things done. The ability to pick up the phone and sort something out without scheduling a meeting. The new person starts at zero.

You lose momentum. Projects slow down. Priorities get reshuffled. Other team members pick up slack, stretching them thinner. The thing that was almost ready to ship sits unfinished.

You lose culture. Builders attract builders. When good people leave, it signals to other good people that leaving is an option. The Slack channel gets more active. More LinkedIn profiles get updated.

You lose credibility. The remaining team watches who leaves and draws conclusions. If your best people are leaving, what does that say about staying? The ones who remain start wondering if they're the smart ones or the stuck ones.

And here's the worst part: the knowledge of how to build leaves with the builders. Every departure makes the organisation slightly less capable. Over time, you're not just losing people. You're losing the institutional memory of how to create things.

The Contractor Trap

When builders leave, organisations often replace them with contractors. It's faster than hiring. It's easier to justify. It fills the seat.

But contractors don't rebuild capability. They mask its absence.

A contractor has no incentive to build institutional knowledge. They're here for a project, then they're gone. They'll deliver what's specified, but they won't invest in making the organisation better at building.

A contractor doesn't train your permanent staff. They don't mentor junior developers. They don't document the things that need documenting. That's not their job. Their job is to deliver scope and move on.

A contractor is expensive. Not just in day rate, but in the hidden costs: the ramp-up time, the knowledge that leaves when they leave, the dependency on someone who isn't loyal to your organisation.

Every contractor you hire instead of fixing the underlying problem is a bet that you can keep buying capability forever. That you'll never need to develop it internally. That the market will always provide what you need at a price you can afford.

That's a bad bet.

The Warning Signs

By the time someone hands in their notice, it's too late. But there are earlier warning signs, if you're watching.

Silence in meetings. The person who used to propose ideas has gone quiet. They're still present, but they've stopped contributing. They've learnt that contributing doesn't lead anywhere.

Reduced scope of concern. They used to care about the whole system. Now they only care about their specific tickets. The boundaries of their attention have shrunk to match the boundaries of their influence.

Minimal engagement with improvement efforts. Training programmes, hackathons, innovation initiatives—they're not interested. They've concluded these things are theatre, not substance.

Increased focus on portable skills. They're learning things that will help them somewhere else. Cloud certifications. New frameworks. Skills that aren't specific to your organisation. They're building a bridge to their next job.

Gallows humour. Jokes about how things work here. Sarcasm about processes and decisions. It's funny, but it's also true, and they're not laughing with the organisation anymore. They're laughing at it.

If you're seeing these signs, the LinkedIn update has already happened. You just haven't seen it yet.

The Conversation Nobody Has

Here's what would actually help: an honest conversation.

Not the exit interview, which happens too late. Not the engagement survey, which is too abstract. A real conversation between a leader and a builder, where both people tell the truth.

The builder says: "I wanted to create something valuable here. I've tried. I keep hitting walls. The governance process takes longer than building would take. The approved technologies are years out of date. Every idea gets stuck in a queue that never moves. I've stopped trying."

The leader says: "I hear you. I've seen the same things. I don't know how to fix it. The structures that block you also constrain me. I want to change them, but I don't know where to start. What would it take for you to stay?"

That conversation almost never happens. The builder assumes the leader doesn't care or can't change anything. The leader assumes the builder is just angling for more money. Both sides miss the actual issue, which is that the organisation has become a place where building isn't possible.

If you're a leader, have that conversation. Before the LinkedIn update. Before the resignation letter. Find your best builders and ask them directly: what would it take for you to stay? What would need to change?

Then listen. Really listen. Because they're telling each other the truth in Slack. They might tell you too, if you make it safe.

What It Takes to Keep Builders

You can't fix this with compensation. You can't fix it with ping pong tables or free lunches or wellness programmes. Those things are nice, but they're not the point.

Builders stay where they can build. That means:

Permission to try things. Not permission after six months of governance review. Permission now. "Go try it and show us what you learn."

Modern tools. Not the approved list from 2019. The tools that builders actually want to use. If your developers are fighting their development environment, they're not building—they're coping.

Problems worth solving. Not just maintenance and bug fixes. Real problems that matter. Problems where the solution doesn't exist yet and creating it requires creativity.

Autonomy over approach. Tell them what outcome you need. Let them figure out how to achieve it. The moment you dictate the approach, you've turned a builder into an executor.

Time to build. Not 100% utilisation on delivery work. Protected time for experiments, learning, and creating things that aren't on the roadmap yet. Twenty percent time, or something like it.

Leadership that shields them. Someone who absorbs the organisational nonsense so builders can focus on building. Someone who fights for them in the meetings they don't attend.

None of this is complicated. It's not expensive. It doesn't require a transformation programme or a consultant or a new operating model.

It just requires deciding that keeping builders matters. And then acting like it.

The Choice

Right now, somewhere in your organisation, a good developer is updating their LinkedIn profile.

They haven't told you yet. They might not even have decided to leave yet. They're just... preparing. Making sure their options are open. Hedging against the growing suspicion that this isn't going to get better.

You have a choice.

You can wait for the exit interview. Hear "better opportunity." File it away. Post the job req. Start the cycle again.

Or you can try to understand why building has become impossible here. Fix the governance that kills ideas. Update the approved technologies. Create space for real work. Have the honest conversations.

The builders haven't given up on building. They've given up on building here. That's a different problem. And it's one you can actually fix.

But not after they've left. Only before.

Their LinkedIn is open in another tab right now. What are you going to do about it?