Learning Something New.

Software development, as a profession, is a super quick moving behemoth. Let's take the state of the front-end over the past 10 years:

Whatever is the chosen path for a developer (back-end, front-end, devops), the process of staying up to-date and relevant is going to be a never-ending blitz.

Often times companies utilize this fact to entice developers with a robust 'learning and development' budget. This often attracts developers who are intrinsically motivated to better themselves. Of which will, in turn better the company they work for. These perks could be as low-touch as a prepaid Visa card per year, where others are a pooled amount of money alloted to specific purchases. Some policies are more inclusive than others but, the thing that matters is that a policy exists and is available to everyone.

If you are interviewing for a developer job at any company, I can't stress this enough:

Push for information around learning and development during the reverse interview process.

If for some reason the company is small and they have a fixed budget, cool! These kind of budgets should not be deal breakers when it comes to assessing a career move. Situations like this allow devs to share the financial load from one year to the next.

However, if the story is that there is no learning and development budget... Well that's a whole lot like: