Exploring, Analyzing, and Benchmarking the Job Satisfaction Levels of Developers

The long-term participation of trained and competent employees is required to improve the morale, productivity, safety, value, and autonomy of an organization. In small and medium-sized software industries, the long-term involvement of developers will not only boost the efficiency of software development but also help train their team members. Although software industries have managed to stimulate developers’ productivity and reduce their turnover with a better compensation plan, the incentive through money has caused contradictory arguments. Hence, there is a need to employ a more systematic way to explore, analyze, and calibrate the developer’s needs, so that the managerial roles can make informed decisions and incorporate influential motivators to increase a developer’s job satisfaction level. In this respect, we are conducting an empirical study using the basics of Maslow's theory, a motivational theory in psychology, to (1) explore the developer’s motivation level in software industries, (2) benchmark the developer’s needs for job satisfaction at each level, and (3) analyze the job-hunting factors for developers’ turnover. We conducted a questionnaire-based study to gather feedback from 128 developers in 10 software industries with four types of analyses being conducted. The results indicate that satisfaction levels can vary across software industries, but the management can anticipate developers’ high-level needs from their low-level needs to determine influencing and motivating factors for job satisfaction improvements.