A company lost five senior engineers in 18 months. Exit interviews cited compensation. The real problem: information does not flow upward through organizational hierarchy. By the time problems reach executive level, they have metastasized into resignation decisions made months earlier.

CodeGood

Senior engineers leave not for compensation but because their technical judgment is ignored, creating loss of agency. Organizations filter bad news through hierarchical layers—by the time executives learn about problems, engineers have already decided to resign. Skip-level conversations and direct communication channels allow executives to hear ground truth months earlier, when intervention is still possible. Replacing five senior engineers costs $1.4M+; preventing departures through early problem identification costs a fraction of that. The barrier isn't cost but admitting internal processes are broken.

Why Your Best Engineers Are Interviewing Elsewhere, CodeGood

The convenient fiction of chain of command