Why software employees leave and how to understand why
Engineers and product staff leave for many reasons beyond salary. How to run an exit conversation in a software company, read the pattern and act on it.
6 min readRead articleAn e-commerce software provider builds platforms and tools that let merchants sell online. Here is how to manage engineers, merchant support and onboarding teams whose busiest day is when their customers hold a big sale.

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Share your requirementsAn e-commerce software provider offers storefronts, shopping carts, catalogue and order tools, payment links and plug-ins that merchants use to sell online. Its teams include platform and plug-in engineers, front-end developers, merchant onboarding staff, support agents, partner managers and account executives. The pressure is uneven. Festival sales and campaign days send merchant traffic far above normal, and any slowdown is public and immediate. Support staff speak to small merchants who are anxious and not technical, while engineers answer to a stream of change requests. Release timing, on-call duty and merchant patience all depend on a stable, well-prepared team. See also HR for IT and software.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in e-commerce software providers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Festival and campaign peaks demand extra hours and calm judgement, and they come with little compensating rest.
The people who know the order and payment systems are paged most and carry the biggest burnout risk.
Support agents spend hours explaining basics to someone worried about lost sales.
Some onboarding staff set merchants up well, others leave gaps, and early churn follows.
Engineers are asked to build custom items for one merchant, which clashes with product roadmaps.
Agents say bugs are not fixed, engineers say tickets arrive without detail.
Pressure to ship before a big sale leads to weak testing and weekend fixes.
Agency managers handle demanding partners with unclear rules on who gets help first.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Operations and Governance; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Performance Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for information technology and software, not in general.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a e-commerce software providers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A calendar of known sale dates, a rota for support and engineering, a clear allowance and rest days afterwards, using the attendance and shift process.
A calendar of known sale dates, a rota for support and engineering, a clear allowance and rest days afterwards, using the attendance and shift process.
A wider rota with runbooks so more engineers can respond, rather than the same two people each time.
A wider rota with runbooks so more engineers can respond, rather than the same two people each time.
A checklist and short training for every onboarding specialist, tracked through the employee onboarding process for new hires.
A checklist and short training for every onboarding specialist, tracked through the employee onboarding process for new hires.
A short form for support to pass bugs to engineering with the detail needed, agreed by both groups.
A short form for support to pass bugs to engineering with the detail needed, agreed by both groups.
A rule that stops risky changes before peaks, agreed by product and engineering leaders.
A rule that stops risky changes before peaks, agreed by product and engineering leaders.
Written rules on response time for each partner level, so managers are not left to negotiate each case.
Written rules on response time for each partner level, so managers are not left to negotiate each case.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Peak-day rotas, on-call duty and recovery time that are fair and recorded.
A steady first month for engineers and support agents so they learn the platform properly.
Merchant empathy, product and troubleshooting skills for the support and onboarding teams.
Goals that balance speed, quality and merchant outcomes for each role.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in information technology and software, and one on each of the topics this page points to.

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Know the dates, plan the rota weeks ahead, brief everyone on the plan and arrange recovery time afterwards. Staff cope better when the load is expected and shared.
Widen the pool with runbooks and shadowing, rotate the duty and pay a clear allowance. Track who has been paged most and adjust.
Give them training that builds confidence, limits on back-to-back difficult chats and a path to specialist or onboarding roles.
Agree a ticket template and a weekly review of repeated issues. Joint ownership of the fix list helps more than blame in either direction.
Only through a clear rule that weighs effort against roadmap, and with leader approval. Otherwise engineers become a service desk and morale falls.
We would ask about peak-day rotas, on-call load, onboarding quality and ticket hand-offs. A sensible first project is a peak and on-call plan with a ticket standard. Scope goes into writing before you decide.
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