>>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.

'xactly what I meant by need to fine-tune your specific contracts to each dev.

>For one, it was the distance to the office and the travelling he had to do.

Offer him more home office for instance

>For another it was they could get a job at google.com which would be much more exiting on their resume.

some you probably cannot win ;-)

>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.

Here incremental small pay raises from a lower start value might lessen the churn...

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

Still better compared to too many idle programmers causing a race to the bottom resulting in competition tanking app prices ...