Relating Voluntary Turnover with Job Characteristics, Job Satisfaction and Work Exhaustion – An Initial Study with Brazilian Developers

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 emotional responses, such as Work Exhaustion and Job Satisfaction.
This paper reports on an initial study which quantitatively measured job characteristics, job burnout and satisfaction 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's Burnout Measurement. 
73% of the professionals presented a high level of exhaustion in their last job, 71% felt low autonomy, and 69% reported low satisfaction in the job. However, no significant trends were observed for graduation level; for job position, the difference between developers and testers was significant for Job Satisfaction.
These results allowed us to raise interesting hypotheses to be addressed by future studies.