When people leave their jobs, they often give polite reasons: “looking for growth,” “better alignment,” “more flexibility.” But after years of hiring, managing and losing people — some to better opportunities, some to burnout — I’ve come to believe that most job satisfaction boils down to just three things.
Everything else is noise. Perks, policies, titles or offsites can help, but they’re not foundational. Strip it all away, and here’s what people really care about.
1. Great compensation
Fair pay is the baseline. Competitive pay is the magnet. Exceptional pay is the reason someone stops taking recruiter calls.
Compensation isn’t just about money. It’s about respect. People associate their salary with how much they’re valued, trusted and taken seriously. If your top performers feel underpaid, you’re not only risking turnover, but also signaling that excellence isn’t worth rewarding.
Keep in mind that “great” doesn’t mean highest on the market. It means high enough to remove money from the list of concerns. You want your people to focus on doing meaningful work and not negotiating a raise every year or calculating how many extra hours it takes to afford a vacation.
Aside from base salary, this includes equity, performance bonuses and clear, transparent criteria for increases. When people understand how pay decisions are made and believe the system is fair, they stay longer and give more.
If you’re a manager, your job is to advocate for the budget your people deserve. Don’t wait for someone to bring it up in a performance review. Be proactive, because your competitors already are.
Related: This Is What Job Seekers Want the Most
2. Smart colleagues to learn from
No one wants to be the smartest person in the room forever. People want to grow, and that happens fastest when they’re surrounded by others they respect.
High performers seek challenge. They’re looking for both job stability and stimulation. A team full of sharp, thoughtful, curious people is more motivating than any job title or KPI. If your team is full of generalists who never push boundaries, your best people will quietly leave for places where they feel outmatched in the best way.
However, this doesn’t mean hiring for raw IQ. It merely means hiring people who ask great questions, give meaningful feedback and stay open to being wrong. It means creating an environment where learning is constant, through debate, collaboration, code reviews, design critiques or customer debriefs.
A strong culture of learning does more than retain top talent. It builds institutional resilience. When people feel like they’re leveling up just by showing up, you don’t need to rely on carrots and sticks. The work can become its own reward.
3. Momentum or success with the product
You can pay well. You can build a dream team. But if the product isn’t going anywhere, people lose steam.
Everyone wants to feel like they’re part of something that’s working — or about to work. In fact, I tell my team at OysterLink every day that we’re going to be something bigger than what we’ve accomplished so far. It’s all about traction, clarity and the belief that progress is real.
People don’t need perfect outcomes. They need forward motion. When the product gains users, solves real problems or unlocks new opportunities, it energizes the team. It reinforces the sense that time spent here is time well invested.
Lack of momentum, on the other hand, creates drag. Teams lose urgency. High performers feel stuck. Meetings start to feel like exercises in optimism rather than planning. You don’t have to be winning in the market every quarter. But you do need to show a path to winning and make sure every person on the team knows how their work contributes to that journey.
As a leader, this means communicating product progress often and honestly. Celebrate real wins. Be transparent about setbacks. And connect the dots between individual work and company goals. People will run through walls when they believe they’re running toward something meaningful.
But what about everything else?
You might be wondering: What about flexibility? Culture? Work-life balance? They matter — but they tend to act as modifiers, not drivers.
A strong culture makes the three core factors more sustainable. Flexibility helps retain talent, especially if the work and people are already strong. But no one stays at a job just because there’s a remote policy or free snacks.
If you underpay, even the best culture won’t save you. If your team isn’t learning from each other, remote-first won’t fix the stagnation. If your product is going nowhere, even generous PTO policies will feel like a consolation prize.
People don’t leave because of snacks or slogans — they leave when they don’t feel valued, challenged or part of something that’s moving forward. Get the core three right, and the rest is optimization. Get them wrong, and everything else is damage control.
When people leave their jobs, they often give polite reasons: “looking for growth,” “better alignment,” “more flexibility.” But after years of hiring, managing and losing people — some to better opportunities, some to burnout — I’ve come to believe that most job satisfaction boils down to just three things.
Everything else is noise. Perks, policies, titles or offsites can help, but they’re not foundational. Strip it all away, and here’s what people really care about.
1. Great compensation
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