Relating Voluntary Turnover with Job Characteristics, 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 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.Comment: 4 pages, no figures, 3 tables. Final version for ICSE CHASE 201

Heterotrophy as a tool to overcome the long and costly autotrophic scale-up process for large scale production of microalgae

Industrial scale-up of microalgal cultures is often a protracted step prone to culture collapse and the occurrence of unwanted contaminants. To solve this problem, a two-stage scale-up process was developed - heterotrophically Chlorella vulgaris cells grown in fermenters (1st stage) were used to directly inoculate an outdoor industrial autotrophic microalgal production unit (2nd stage). A preliminary pilot-scale trial revealed that C. vulgaris cells grown heterotrophically adapted readily to outdoor autotrophic growth conditions (1-m3 photobioreactors) without any measurable difference as compared to conventional autotrophic inocula. Biomass concentration of 174.5 g L-1, the highest value ever reported for this microalga, was achieved in a 5-L fermenter during scale-up using the heterotrophic route. Inocula grown in 0.2- and 5-m3 industrial fermenters with mean productivity of 27.54 ± 5.07 and 31.86 ± 2.87 g L-1 d-1, respectively, were later used to seed several outdoor 100-m3 tubular photobioreactors. Overall, all photobioreactor cultures seeded from the heterotrophic route reached standard protein and chlorophyll contents of 52.18 ± 1.30% of DW and 23.98 ± 1.57 mg g-1 DW, respectively. In addition to providing reproducible, high-quality inocula, this two-stage approach led to a 5-fold and 12-fold decrease in scale-up time and occupancy area used for industrial scale-up, respectively.Agência financiadora project FERMALG 017608 Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) UID/Multi/04326/2019 project FERMALG (AVISO) 32/SI/2015info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio