Engineers Stay 1–2 Years. That's a Crisis.

01 /The Concept

When a developer leaves, they take with them months of undocumented decisions that the next hire has to piece back together. When a new developer arrives, they inherit a context no one properly handed over. Silo Team was built to break this cycle – bringing structure and transparency to both sides of the transition.

This Scandinavian startup is still building its beta waitlist, but it just closed $1.16M in funding on top of an earlier pre-seed round, which signals early conviction from investors.

The underlying problem is growing: developer churn has increased across the industry, meaning companies face the expensive cycle of losing engineers and replacing them more often than before. Each transition costs roughly double the annual salary for that position – factoring in recruitment, ramp-up time, and lost productivity while the new hire finds their footing.

Much of that cost comes from inherited chaos. Departing developers leave behind undocumented codebases, idiosyncratic tooling choices, and institutional knowledge that lives nowhere except their own heads. New hires don't just need to learn the code – they need to absorb the team's workflows, libraries, and conventions from scratch.

Silo Team brings planning and visibility to both offboarding and onboarding. The platform provides templates for different developer roles, contributed by both the Silo Team team and the broader user community. Companies can also build their own template libraries, either from scratch or by adapting existing ones.

Onboarding templates can include milestone-based assessments that track whether a new hire has genuinely internalized key tools and knowledge areas – not just moved through a checklist. Team leads and HR managers get a real-time view of where each transition stands.

Between onboarding and the eventual offboarding, developers can call on Silo Team's AI assistant to get quick answers about internal tooling and codebase conventions – a searchable institutional memory that doesn't depend on any one person staying.

02 /Why It Matters

Developers currently average one to two years per role before moving on. If the typical tenure is eighteen months, with the first six spent ramping up and the last six mentally checked out, the window of peak productivity narrows to roughly half the engagement – six actual months of full output.

Tenure also scales with company size. Engineers at larger companies tend to stay roughly 1.5 times longer than at smaller ones, which compounds the onboarding problem at the SMB level.

Experience matters too. A developer with one to three years of experience averages about nine months per role; someone with fifteen or more years can hold a position for nearly four. Experienced engineers may simply have a clearer sense of what to expect – and a higher tolerance for the familiar frustrations.

The math points squarely at small and mid-sized companies as the segment where this problem bites hardest:

- Their average developer tenure is shorter than at large firms.

- They're more likely to hire junior engineers, since senior talent gravitates toward the biggest names.

- And they tend to have weaker internal documentation and knowledge management systems to begin with.

Silo Team is also making a claim that well-structured onboarding increases developer retention – that engineers who get up to speed faster are more likely to stick around. The logic mirrors subscription product design: when new users can't quickly see the value of what they've signed up for, they churn. The same dynamic plays out with new hires. Poor onboarding is a retention problem, not just a productivity problem.

The numbers back that up. 80% of developers report onboarding at a new job as unnecessarily long and exhausting – costing at least 30 extra working hours in the first month alone. Meanwhile, 71% of team leads manage the process entirely by hand, with no dedicated tooling or automation.

This was tolerable when developer talent was more stable. Now that engineers have become mission-critical assets in nearly every industry, and economic pressure is pushing companies to reduce waste and preserve institutional knowledge, the cost of bad transitions is no longer ignorable.

03 /Opportunities

The obvious direction is developer onboarding platforms. But the insight Silo Team has applied – that onboarding quality is entirely downstream of offboarding quality – is the real design principle. The two processes can't be separated, which is why a unified platform makes more sense than tools that address only one side.

Other startups are digging into adjacent angles.

Augmend, [covered previously](/review/najdi-bolshoj-rynok-a-tehnologii-najdutsja) last summer, built a platform where developers record their screen with voice narration to document their own work. Those recordings get indexed and added to a searchable knowledge base powered by an AI assistant. It raised $2.2M in its first round.

Cortex, also [reviewed last summer](/review/na-bolshom-rynke-voznik-novyj-interes), lets companies build internal developer portals that standardize onboarding, code practices, and documentation. It has raised $52.7M, with $35M in the latest round.

With the global developer population approaching 30 million – and churn increasing across the board – this is a large market with a genuine, compounding problem. Companies are already paying for bad transitions; they just haven't been paying for solutions yet.

The broader principle extends well beyond software. Many professions suffer equally from poor knowledge transfer when people leave – roles where onboarding is slow, where success depends heavily on what the previous person left behind, and where institutional knowledge sits uncodified in someone's head rather than anywhere findable. Those are exactly the segments where a Silo Team analog would find a ready market.