Write a long-form blog post

**Why Your Best Engineers Keep Leaving (And It's Not the Money)**

The exit interview said "better opportunity." The real reason was sitting in your sprint board the whole time.

When a senior engineer resigns, the instinct is to counter with comp. But after talking to dozens of people who left mid-sized SaaS teams, a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with salary bands.

## They Stopped Learning Six Months Ago
At Linear's early team, engineers rotated ownership of subsystems every quarter. The ones who stayed cited that rotation more than equity. Stagnation is a slow resignation.

## Meetings Ate the Maker Time
A staff engineer at a 200-person fintech tracked her calendar: 22 hours of meetings a week. She left for a company that protected four uninterrupted days.

## The Roadmap Felt Like Theater
When engineers can't trace their work to a real customer outcome, motivation evaporates. Shopify's habit of tagging every ticket to a merchant metric kept that line visible.

## Recognition Went to the Loudest
Quiet contributors who shipped the hard infrastructure watched credit flow to demo-friendly features. They noticed.

**Takeaway:** Retention is built in the daily texture of the work, not the offer letter. Audit learning, focus time, purpose, and credit before you audit comp.

**Alternative headlines:**
1. The Real Reason Senior Engineers Quit
2. Four Retention Killers Hiding in Your Sprint Board
3. It's Not the Money: Why Great Engineers Leave
4. Your Exit Interviews Are Lying to You
5. Comp Won't Fix a Boredom Problem