3 Steps I Took to Stop Losing My Best People

At Yahoo, my top engineers quit long before they handed in their resignations. I didn’t realize they had already left—until it was too late.

Ravi stood in my doorway, his expression unreadable.

No laptop. No notebook. Just a single sheet of paper, folded in half.

I closed my laptop.

He stepped forward, placed the letter on my desk, and slid it across the surface.

Resignation. Effective in two weeks.

I looked up. “Why?”

A pause. Barely a second, but long enough.

Then, a quiet shrug.

"I don’t think it really matters if I stay."

No frustration. No resentment.

Just resignation—the kind that had set in long before he walked into my office.

I should have seen it coming.

Six months ago, Ravi would have fought tooth and nail over an architecture decision. I remember one meeting where he went head-to-head with a Distinguished Architect for over an hour.

"If we build it this way, scaling is going to be a nightmare," he had argued. "We’re setting ourselves up for months of tech debt just to hit an arbitrary deadline."

Back then, he cared enough to fight.

But in the months leading up to this moment?

Every tech decision got the same response: “Sure.”

He wasn’t agreeing. He was disengaging.

After he walked out of my office, I sat there for a long time, staring at the paper.

Not at his resignation—at my failure.

I thought I was keeping things moving. But in reality, I was letting the spark die right in front of me.

At first, I told myself Ravi was an exception. But when I looked around, the reality was uncomfortable.

If I wanted to stop the next resignation letter from landing on my desk, I had to take ownership of what I’d missed.

I had to fix it.

Step 1: Stop Rewarding Compliance. Start Rewarding Ownership.

Most managers love quiet engineers.

The ones who don’t push back.
The ones who never “cause problems.”
The ones who take the ticket and move on.

And that’s exactly how you kill a team.

Because great engineers don’t want to just write code. They want to build something that actually matters.

So I stopped asking, “Can you take this ticket?”
And started asking, “How would you solve this?”

At first, nothing.

The team stared at me, waiting for the real directive.

Then, Julia—the one who usually played it safe—tilted her head. “Honestly? If we’re fixing this, we should rebuild the whole thing. Otherwise, it’s just duct tape.”

A few months ago, she would have kept that to herself.

But that day?

The whole team leaned in.

Because the moment people own the problem, they stop being another cog in the machine. And they start building something they believe in.

Step 2: Bring Back the Fight

Quiet quitting isn’t when people leave. It’s when they stop caring enough to argue.

Once, Ravi fought for everything.

The right architecture. The right performance optimizations. The right balance between speed and sustainability.

But in his last six months?

Every debate got replaced with a shrug. Every disagreement with a quiet nod.

So I started pushing back.

“Is this really the best solution or the easiest?”
“Sell me on this—why is this the right approach?”
“If this fails, why will it fail?”

I expected resistance.

Instead, Julia raised an eyebrow. “Alright, let’s debate.”

That’s when I knew we had momentum again.

Because people don’t fight for things they don’t care about.

Step 3: Make the Work Mean Something Again

The problem wasn’t workload.

It was meaning.

Every Monday: “Here’s the sprint backlog.”
Every Friday: “Here’s what we finished.”

I was confusing motion with impact.

So I stopped tracking how many story points we burned.

And I started showing the team what actually changed because of their work.

Deploy times: down 78%.
Production incidents: cut in half.
Revenue loss from outages: nearly gone.

I pulled up the numbers in our all-hands.

Then I turned to the team.

"This isn’t my slide."
"This is yours."

No forced applause. No “great job, everyone.”

Just a moment where they saw the real impact of their work.

And suddenly?

People started caring again.

---

Weeks later, Julia stayed behind after standup.

"Got a sec?" she asked.

She hesitated, then smirked.

"I was thinking… we should just rebuild that service. Stop patching it."

"Isn’t that too much effort?"

She rolled her eyes. “It’s the right way to do it.”

"Alright. Let’s debate this with everyone."

No one clapped. No one made a big speech.

But something was different now.

The team wasn’t just checking boxes.

They were building something real.

And that?

That’s what stops quiet quitting.

The Bottom Line

People don’t quiet quit because they’re tired.

They quiet quit when they stop believing it matters if they try.

So your job isn’t to motivate them.

It’s to make the work feel worth it again.

And when you do?

They won’t just stay.

They’ll fight to build something great.

I never got Ravi back.

But I made sure I never lost another one like him.

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