Dot-com 2.0: Attracting and retaining IT workers

It really does feel like the 90s again, and this time I’m old enough to be in the workforce. IT workers are in high demand while their numbers drop, leading companies to return to jeans and bean bag environments to keep us happy. My employer’s working hard on perks to keep morale up as any IT company.

Gift certificate for my team

I wear jeans and a t-shirt to work unless I know I have a meeting with another group. You saw the photos from the trip to the falls. On Saturday I spent the day solving puzzles, deciphering codes and dungeon crawling in emptied out underground parking garages for Puzzleday. Yesterday the boss 3 levels above me handed out gift certificates to a high class shopping district in a neighboring city.

In two weeks, the company will be holding The Game, the 48 hour non-stop treasure hunt in Seattle, for which I just signed 3 legal waivers to start the application process. The amount of work that goes into some of these morale events is astounding — all in the name of retaining talent. It’s a good time to be a developer… again.

Posted on July 4, 2007 in Personal, Stumbling

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  • http://www.ilovecode.com Sara

    I was actually going to school when extras like this ended. I went to the Univ of washington and people who were a year ahead of me were offered 20k signup bonuses to start. and then it happened. The marketplace was flooded with developers, especially in the seattle area. Salaries declined, bonuses were non-existent.

    But that doesn’t mean that jobs weren’t there for the taking. Some straight out of school with a CS degree could demand at least a 50k salary in small towns where developers were few and far between. You just needed to be willing to relocate. So I did.

    Alot of industries though are realizing that it takes more than a competitive salary to keep employees happy. Allowing them to have flex hours is HUGE and so much work is done online or on computers that alot of people can get away with working from home a couple days out of the week. Benefits like this are worth more than extra money on that paycheck.

  • Dan

    Really, “U-Dub” as they seem to call it? That’s neat, seems to be ‘the school’ to go to around here.

  • http://www.ilovecode.com Sara

    Yep.. Finished in 2002. Then in 2003 I moved to Arizona to that small town in the middle of nowhere :)