title: Is it possible manage developers with high turnover if you can't lower the turnover rate?
body: <p>I lead a small group of programmers in a university setting, having just moved into this position last year.  While the majority of our team are full time employees, we have a couple of people who are traditionally graduate assistants.</p>
  
  <p>The competition for these assistantships is fairly intense, as they get free graduate school tuition on top of their salary while they have the job.  We require that they sign up for at least a year, though we consider ourselves lucky if they stay for two.  After that, they get their master's degree and move on to bigger and better things.</p>
  
  <p>As you can imagine, hiring and re-training these positions is time- and resource-intensive.  To make matters worse, up to now they have typically been the sole developer working on their respective projects, with me acting in an advisory and supervisory role, so wrangling the projects themselves to fight the entropy as we switch from developer to developer is a task unto itself.</p>
  
  <p>I'm tempted to bring up to the administrators the possibility of hiring a full- (and long-haul) developer to replace these two positions, but for a school in a budget crisis, paying for two half-time graduate assistants is far cheaper (in terms of salary and benefits) than paying for one full-time developer.  Also, since I'm new to this position, I'd like to avoid seeming as though I'm not able to deal with what I signed up for.  For the forseeable future, I don't think the practice of hiring short-term graduate assistants is going to change.</p>
  
  <p>My question: <strong>What can I do to create an effective training program considering that the employees may be gone after as little as a year on the job?</strong>  </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>How much time should I invest in training them, and how much would simply be a waste of time?</li>
  <li>How much time should they take simply getting acclamated to our process and the project?</li>
  <li>Are there any specific training practices or techniques that can help with this kind of situation?</li>
  <li>Has anyone dealt with a similar situation before?</li>
  <li>Do I worry too much, or not enough?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>By the way, and for the record, we do the vast majority of our development in Perl.  It's hard to find grad students who know Perl, while on the other hand everybody seems to have at least an academic understanding of Java.  Hence <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/141641/what-constitutes-effective-perl-training-for-non-perl-developers">this question</a> which I asked a while back.</p>