  High rates of turnover among software developers remain, involving additional
costs of hiring and training. Voluntary turnover may be due to workplace issues
or personal career decisions, but it might as well relate to Job
Characteristics, or even Job Satisfaction and Work Exhaustion. This paper
reports on an initial study which quantitatively measured those constructs
among 78 software developers working in Brazil who left their jobs voluntarily.
For this, we adapted well-known survey instruments, namely the JDS from Hackman
and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model, and Maslach et al.'s Burnout
Measurement. In average, developers demonstrated low to moderate autonomy
(3.75, on a 1-7 scale) and satisfaction (4.08), in addition to moderate
exhaustion (4.2) before leaving their jobs, while experiencing high task
significance (5.15). Also, testers reported significantly lower job
satisfaction than programmers. These results allow us to raise interesting
hypotheses to be addressed by future studies.
