All healthy companies are much alike; all dysfunctional ones are dysfunctional in their own way. For instance, every healthy company I’ve worked at has fairly consistently spent time and effort to make sure their employees are appreciated and productive. They’ve spent time involving the employees in the process, giving them workable goals to progress towards, and generally making sure that their people are taken care of so that they can take care of the company. And while such stability is laudable and makes the places fun to work, if you really want the good war stories, you have to work at a dysfunctional place.

Judging by the actions of a few companies I’ve encountered over the ten and a half years of my full-time, professional programming career, many companies would like to quickly lose their most talented people, preferably to their competitors and preferably for easily and cheaply avoidable reasons. Towards this end, I’d like to offer a list of suggestions of ways to make absolutely certain that your development staff is interested in greener pastures, no matter how much barbed wire they have to climb to get to them. Here are my suggestions for how to achieve near perfect turnover (except for sadists) within a three to four year period.