Decisions taken by teams of developers directly affect business outcomes. But outside of the obvious impact of software that helps run the business, developers can also influence their pay levels – as long as there’s proof offered alongside a demand for more cash.
At least, that’s the message from Ankush Choudhary Johal, who published his experience of getting developers’ salaries raised, along with the code he and his colleagues developed to evidence the business benefits that higher renumeration would bring to the organisation.
By increasing the team’s salaries by 30% across all levels, the churn rate of developers (how often staff left to take up a different position) at his company fell dramatically. The recouped cost of ‘churn’ more than compensated for the extra monthly outgoings. The result was a positive line item in the business’s books.
Key to the success was calculating the true cost of a developer, especially a senior developer, leaving the team – something that was happening too often as talented team members left for better-paid positions. The cost of attrition was found to be high, with leaderless departments losing productivity during the vacuum between a developer leaving and their replacement getting fully up to speed.
When new staff members arrive, it takes time for the institutional knowledge of the departee to be learned from scratch by their replacement. Johal and his team built a “churn tracker” that captured “all hidden costs of attrition” using the organisation’s own financial data. The hidden costs are, of course, in addition to those from elsewhere in the business created by the processes of advertising a new role, sifting applicants, hiring, interviewing, training, and so on.
As well as open-sourcing the algorithms they used, Johal and team were similarly transparent with regards to pay structure and actual salaries. “92% of engineers said they trusted the compensation process post-announce, up from 54% in 2025,” Johal reported on the company website.
The return-on-investment code, written in Go, showed that although the average base salary at the organisation rose to $201,500 from $155,000, the churn rate of developers was halved. With an annual cost of churn therefore halved, the company saved $1.1 million overall. “A 30% salary increase for a senior engineer costs $55k/year, but saves $193k in churn cost if it prevents one churn every 2 years — a 250% ROI,” Johal said.
The company also saved six figures annually spent on proprietary compensation management platforms, which were less trusted among developers than the open algorithms the company adopted – tools written collaboratively by the workforce.
The bottom line of the organisation’s story is that it’s salary above most other concerns that keeps engineers at a particular company. Perks such as remote working or secondary benefits may add to the attractiveness of a role, but if another company is offering more money, people leave. Paying the market rate (and one that’s calculated openly) and operating transparently made for good buisenss practice. Johal and his team were able to prove their case, in ways that were verifiable and acceptable by developers and business owners alike.
The company also took great care to consult with and take feedback from employees, with town halls and internal publications that detailed the processes of the exercise.
(Image source: Pixabay under licence.)
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