Author: Martin Zugec (31 Articles)

according to Wikipedia, brain drain is

is a large emigration of individuals with technical skills or knowledge, normally due to conflict, lack of opportunity, political instability, or health risks. Brain drain is usually regarded as an economic cost, since emigrants usually take with them the fraction of value of their training sponsored by the government.

Brain drain is very common in IT world – in general, we change companies every 3 years on average. Most companies try to fight with this using money (or benefits), however I don’t think it is best approach – there is always someone who is willing to pay more and that’s also reason why many internal employees becomes consultants or freelancers.

Based on my experiences, most IT guys are changing jobs because of money OR because they are too bored and are stuck with repetitive tasks. You can solve money problem – but what to do with boring jobs?

If you want to keep your IT brains in your company, good way to do so is to use their geek disadvantages – technical guys (well, at least good ones ) love gadgets and loves to play. Building automated environment can be considered gadget in fact – it is a child of IT people and they take care of it and try to improve it over and over again. Automation is win-win situation – business can save money in many scenarios and it keeps IT guys happy about what they are doing.

Many people are afraid to automate – they think they could loose their jobs if they do so. In real life, it depends. If you are forced to automate by business, it’s usually done in order to save some money – to get rid of some employees. If YOU are the one that is pushing automation, story is different. If business knows that you need 2 days to install new server, they usually don’t know that you spend 1 hour installing new server and then rest of time improving your automation techniques (so next time you need half an hour to install server and got even more time for automation ).

If you got solid automation strategy, sooner or later you end up with very robust solution and your people will take different approach to new problems (not discussing how, but discussing what would be the best way). The bigger and more advanced is your automation platform, the harder it is for you employees to leave and start from scratch somewhere else (especially in case they are not sure if they will be allowed to automate at new job and that maybe they will need to do all those boring repetitive tasks again).

Of course there are employees that doesn’t like automation at all and prefer to do everything manually, but be honest – are these people truly your biggest asset, or can you easily replace them if you need so?

Martin