>Walter please take this as a funny reply ;-)
>
>>Let me explain. This is a discussion I had with my business partner. You can hire the best developer in the world, but if it takes 9 months to get up to speed (yes, this what we are looking at) and jumps ship after 12 months, he / she is not a great developer from our perspective.
>
>If that person jump ships after 12 months then perhaps it's because you're a crappy employer :-D

From the developers that left, we know its a combination of factors. For one, it was the distance to the office and the travelling he had to do. For another it was they could get a job at google.com which would be much more exiting on their resume.

There also were some organizational issues that left some employees leaving. None AFAIK, asked for a raise, but especially the young .NET developers were using us a company to put on their resume and had no intention to stay for very long in the first place.

Its tough enough to get qualified and capable programmers. It is even worse to trying to keep them.