Stack Overflow: More Developers Are Thinking About New Jobs
Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey — one of the largest surveys of software professionals, with tens of thousands of respondents — has tracked a consistent trend: a growing percentage of developers are either actively looking for new jobs or open to new opportunities. The most recent surveys show that roughly 60-70% of developers are either actively job searching or would consider leaving for the right offer.
This is remarkable for a profession with above-average compensation, strong demand, and historically high job security. Developers are not leaving because they cannot find work. They are leaving because the work they have is not working for them.
What the Data Shows
The Stack Overflow survey breaks job satisfaction into several dimensions: compensation, work-life balance, learning opportunities, management quality, and alignment with personal values. Compensation consistently ranks as “adequate” or “good” for most respondents. The dissatisfaction clusters around other factors:
Limited growth opportunities. Developers who feel they are not learning — either because the work is repetitive, the tech stack is stagnant, or the company does not invest in development — are the most likely to look elsewhere. For a profession that attracts people who enjoy learning, stagnation is intolerable.
Poor management. Technical managers who micromanage, non-technical managers who do not understand the work, and absent managers who provide no guidance or advocacy — all correlate with intent to leave. The old saying that people do not leave companies, they leave managers, is well-supported by the data.
Meaningless work. Developers who do not understand why their work matters, or who believe it does not matter, disengage. The developer maintaining a legacy system that generates revenue but receives no investment, or the developer building features that no users want because a stakeholder insisted, experiences the motivational equivalent of running on a treadmill.
Process overhead. Excessive meetings, lengthy approval processes, complex ticketing workflows, and heavy-handed code review practices reduce the time developers spend actually coding. When a developer spends more time in meetings and filling out forms than writing code, the job stops being the job they signed up for.
The Retention Problem
The cost of developer turnover is substantial. Estimates vary, but replacing a mid-level developer typically costs 50-200% of their annual salary when you account for recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, ramp-up time, and the knowledge lost when the departing developer walks out the door.
For senior developers and those with deep institutional knowledge, the cost is higher. The developer who understands why the system was built the way it was, where the landmines are in the codebase, and how to navigate the organization — that knowledge cannot be documented or transferred in a two-week notice period.
Despite these costs, many organizations treat retention as a compensation problem. They offer raises and bonuses when a developer gives notice, hoping money will compensate for the issues that drove the decision. This works temporarily — the developer stays for another six to twelve months — but it does not address the root cause. The same dissatisfaction reasserts itself, and the developer leaves anyway, now with a higher salary expectation for their next employer.
What Developers Actually Want
The survey data, combined with broader research on developer satisfaction, points to a consistent set of priorities:
Autonomy. Developers want input on what they build and how they build it. Not unconstrained freedom — most developers understand business priorities — but meaningful participation in technical decisions and the ability to choose their tools and approaches.
Growth. Continuous learning is a core motivator for most developers. Companies that provide learning budgets, conference attendance, time for experimentation, and challenging technical problems retain developers longer than those that offer only higher salaries.
Impact. Developers want to see their work used and valued. Clear product metrics, user feedback, and visibility into how their code serves the business create a sense of purpose that sustains motivation.
Respect for time. Meeting-free blocks, reasonable on-call rotations, realistic deadlines, and the expectation that evenings and weekends are personal time. Not as perks — as baseline working conditions.
Technical health. A codebase that is not drowning in technical debt. A deployment process that works. Monitoring that catches issues before users do. The tools and infrastructure to do good work, maintained and improved over time.
The Organizational Response
Companies that retain developers well tend to share certain practices:
They conduct regular one-on-ones focused on career development, not just project status. They invest in developer experience — the internal tools, processes, and infrastructure that affect daily work quality. They create technical career tracks that allow senior developers to advance without becoming managers. They minimize unnecessary process and protect focused coding time.
Companies that lose developers tend to share different practices: performance reviews that feel arbitrary, technical decisions made without engineering input, constant reorganizations that disrupt teams, and a culture that treats developers as interchangeable resources rather than professionals with craft and judgment.
The Bottom Line
When more than half of developers are thinking about new jobs, the problem is not with the developers. It is with the jobs. Compensation is a factor but not the primary one. The primary drivers are growth, autonomy, impact, and respect — the conditions that make knowledge work sustainable and satisfying. Companies that provide these conditions retain their talent. Companies that do not pay the turnover tax.