Ask HN: Is the Great Resignation in tech real? If so, why?
I'd like to hear from HN about job changes and raises. Anecdotes are welcome, but ideally one of us works in HR and has systematic data.
But more importantly, I'd like to think through the reasons driving the Great Resignation. Below are several explanations with my own assessments.
1. People die from Covid, reducing the labor force. -> Irrelevant for tech workers
2. People get large checks from the gov and are not pressured to find job. -> Irrelevant for tech workers
3. People avoided changing jobs during the pandemic. So the high turnover now is simply making up for low turnover in 2020. -> This does explain the high turnover, but not the significant raises. Indeed, the number of workers and jobs remains the same--people are shuffling between places. To be convinced of this theory, I'd like to see that raises are flat.
3. Senior workers are retiring early due to pandemic-related revelation. Mid-level workers are thus getting more promos than usual. -> Seems plausible. To be convinced, I need to see mid-level workers getting raises, and entry-level workers NOT getting raises.
4. [My theory] Remote work allows better matching of people and jobs. Imagine that person A can deliver lots of value to company B, but is hitherto prevented to do so due to location. With remote work, Person A can now work for Company B and get paid higher accordingly. -> To be convinced, I need to see that remote job offers have higher comp vs comparable non-remote job offers. If this theory is true, then the Great Resignation/Remote Work makes the job market more efficient, creates value for society, and should be celebrated by employees and employers alike.
5. [My theory] The pandemic pushes society forward in terms of tech adoption, making tech workers even more valuable than before. -> Seems plausible, since tech has become more valuable as a whole (e.g. stock price), not just salary. If this theory is true, then it is again a good thing for both tech workers and the broader society.
269 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadGets even worse around promotions.
This is exactly why i switched jobs. My employer refused to adjust my pay for inflation.
IMO there _needs_ to be a complete recalculation of costs of living for the current year and an adjustment of minimum wages to reflect this.
We need to fight against giants that are using spam and sheer numbers to confuse pricing in the market. That applies to job boards, spam Chinese resellers, Amazon product listings, confusing Google ad prices and website listings, recruiters and heck even estate agents that thrive on information asymmetry in the market. There is huge value being lost/captured there for no reason other than a lack or restriction of information.
Sorry I'm rambling a bit.
That and the fact that I don't want to go work in blockchain/smart bulbs contribute to my decision to stay where I am for now.
Tech inflation has been happening for a while now for the small minority.
I think COVID just caused more people to tap into it because of some of the reasons you listed. So inflation isn’t COVID caused, but the excess market movement is.
For others, the taste of flexible remote work is preferred and so they'll resign and find a job that better suits their desired work-life balance.
Consequently, because companies are more flexible on location since they're remote, competition to hire talent has become a national game and not just a localized one. Therefore, salaries _must_ go up across the board to pay the risk premium of folks going to a FAANG. As such, companies that want top-talent in the midwest are going to have to pay significantly closer to Bay Area/FAANG rates, or settle for less than top talent (which is likely). For those who fall into the upper echelons of talent, though, the compensation and location are no longer mutually exclusive ventures. Again, this expansion of the game makes finding new work more attractive and with significant, and sufficient, savings, resignation is suitable while they lackadaisically find their next opportunity.
Compared to American families which are spread out with usually only the immediate family living together.
So it just looks like they have bigger families- but of course it's usually quite the opposite, they are just new to the country.
Personally that sounds, difficult. I cannot multitask, and frankly the lockdown was horrifically lonely for me. Stuck in the same place, all the time, with no opportunity to go out.
Do we really have to put our finger on exactly why? Maybe it's a million small things. Maybe it is one or two major things. But maybe we'll never know.
The world was VERY different for a year and a half. In that way, any different outcome wouldn't be surprising. Would I have predicted a great resignation? No. Does it surprise me? No.
1. There are, in fact, tech companies that still demand employees come into a physical office. There comes a tipping point in a laborer's market (tech being one of them) where this becomes sufficient reason to leave when there are plenty of reasonable alternatives that don't require employees be physically present.
2. Mental health is often overlooked in these discussions. The pandemic has been a huge source of stress, uncertainty, and general chaos. Many people (myself included) lost their usual outlets of stress (going out, meeting with friends, catching up with family, etc). From personal experience, this lead me to having a spat of time where I was burned out and had to lay off working at all for several months before joining a new organization. From what I hear, I'm far from the only one who's gone through such an experience.
3. In light of COVID, many people are facing the realities of mortality much earlier and more frequently than they would prior to a pandemic. Many of us have lost friends or loved ones if not to COVID, than to COVID caused problems (mental health, substance abuse, health problems that became critical due to lack of ER capacity). Having a brush with death is a strong incentive for people to reevaluate their situations and reexamine how they spend their time. For many people, work is not fulfilling and they may be more willing to adjust their lifestyle to prioritize things important to them that don't require as much money; or things that take them to other careers; OR give folks a kick in the pants to demand more from their current employers.
I suspect there's more to this trend; more nuance than is being captured by the current news cycles. The US has a diverse population of people in a variety of situations and the driving factors for hiring trends for bay area companies are likely not indicative of what employees are seeing from their side of the table.
Yeah, this is super evident in my circle of friends and colleagues. One senior-dev friend started an apprenticeship as a carpenter, another one opened a store for booze. Some others got serious about following their passion projects. Everyone seems to have a little crack or two.
In other words the flow is not only from in-person work to WFH, but rather people are flowing both ways and sorting into whichever lifestyle they prefer.
I think thats actually the endgame here: long-term all companies are going to have to pick Office/Hybrid/Remote as one of their core values and selling points, and there will be almost 3 distinct labor pools for each type based on what sort of work style a candidate wants.
That said, I personally would not mind some in-office work, even only one day or two days a week, or even alternating in-person weeks. WFH feels incredibly isolating at times.
I think the unique and extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic have been incredibly limiting, leading people to feel trapped. Hence it’s obvious why people rebel against being in-office, but also explains why the people who didn’t mind working in person now bristle against full-remote. Zoom fatigue and the isolation of full digital existence also contributes towards the demand for full-office.
It will be interesting to see how this changes after the pandemic, when more freedom and flexibility hopefully returns to the workplace.
For some socialization is stress relief.... for others, such as myself, it's stress.
I've seen this from friends who have moved in the past few months where the pay increases are not insignificant.
A simpler way of putting it is this: employers are set on giving employees cost of living increases, but a 3% COL increase can't match the 8% annual increase of the local market. Jobs that were going at 95K a couple years ago are at 115K+ today.
The vast, vast majority of companies are still hiring people locally.
Want to mention here, even though it may be "Irrelevant for tech workers", employment did not rise again when these checks ended. This line of reasoning is false.
Also, I bristle when people suggest the govnerment was just "handing out checks" willy-nilly. That seems to be the perception every time I hear someone complaining about "the government giving people checks."
If you were unemployed before the pandemic, you got nothing. So for example if you did seasonal work, and the pandemic hit during the off season, forget it. If you weren't employed for a fair bit of time before you lost your job during the pandemic, you got nothing.
If you were self-employed, you got nothing (at least at first. It took a while but they eventually came through.)
Getting any sort of welfare or government assistance usually involves a lot of paperwork and time and hassle. For example, WIC - Women with Infants or Children - a program for mothers who can't afford to feed an infant or child - requires them to come into an office in person during business hours, every 6 months, to "re-certify" their children.
Most states require regular paperwork and record-keeping to "prove" you were "actively searching" for work, and a signed statement that you did so, etc.
Many state unemployment offices were completely overwhelmed and I remember during the early months people who lost their jobs were getting really desperate because paperwork wasn't getting approved, payments weren't showing up, phones weren't being answered. Lots of redditors in my city were talking about not knowing how they were going to buy groceries because they'd been waiting for so long. I knew a fair number of people who ended up moving back with parents because they couldn't afford rent or groceries.
At least in my state the unemployment office that was so overwhelmed? Now they have lots of extra time on their hands, it seems, and are chasing down people they claim they overpaid.
Source on these quit rates?
Which is to say I'm applying like mad to find remote work since I like owning a house and having room to breath instead of paying multiples of my mortgage to share an apartment in a tech hub city.
But I also need to make up for the long-term damage the university job did to my earnings/early retirement potential.
I hope you can find a middle ground of decent pay and culture similar to academia.
Anecdotally, my personal experience supports (3a), since I tried to find a new job in mid 2020 and found the job market incredibly challenging, but then looked again in mid 2021 and ended up finding a job I was excited about.
The first (3j also strikes me as valid as the possibility of f2f interviews was basically zero. Between social distancing and the collapse of border crossing and air travel “sitting tight” was prudent. Remote interviews lead into (4).
Edit: the loss of external child care forced some workers home. It’s possible the positives of at home care shifted the balance vs the expense of external care. And now, perhaps due to the difficulty of securing it.
For IT I'd be wanting to hear what the Indian part of HN says.
Generally for the West it's been at the expense of the developing countries.
How is IT in India and other non Western countries doing? They should rule out 4 (Are they being matched better in the USA?) but could confirm 5.
2. People had a taste of remote work freedom. That's an extra bargaining cheap when negotiating.
People mental health went to the bin after being locked up for so long and they either: - had enough of their company - had enough of their job at all
Hopefully it will translate to more small business entrepreneurship. We definitely need those given that the pandemic favoured incredibly big businesses (unsurprisingly)
At first it seemed logical due to covid/wfh movement so I didn't think much about it.. but then the articles kept appearing. It struck me as paid placement especially when mixed in with unrelated news sections. I should have taken screenshots.
It's all very strange and I don't know why.
When we transitioned to full remote, all of this was stripped away and I was left to focus purely on a product that on its own I was not passionate about (think ad-like product). I was met with a sudden loss in motivation, burnout, and decided to take 9 months off to pursue a tech unrelated hobby.
9 months after leaving, I have accepted a position with a 50% raise over to my previous job.
I think covid was a splash of cold water that's caused many of the people in my circle to re-evaluate how they spend their time. Tech workers are so in demand that we can freely change jobs so it follows that many people would availing that option.
The team is also important, of course, but it's minor compared to the product as the way of working remotely is quite different from being in an office. To me it's mostly for the better, since everyone is focused on the product and not on some pointless team building events, company gossip or drama.
I hope you chose a more fulfilling industry than advertising. It's interesting that a sibling comment also mentions working on ads. I wonder what the breakdown of resignations per industry looks like, and how relevant remote work was in that decision.
It's very interesting to see how people look at relationship building with others. Many introverts on HN and Reddit see it as a mostly negative thing and equivalent people interaction and relationship building to drama, gossip, and forced friendliness.
At my workplace they came up with employee appreciation day. They make a slightly better lunch and they clap for you when you walk into the cafeteria. I much rather be allowed to leave 30 min earlier.
While I understand the pipeline where those ideas come from (management appoints one poor soul to quickly come up with something that looks fun on paper, is cheap, quick and doesn’t allow for any possibility of rule breaking), they don’t really help me bond with anyone.
What does help me bond is being part of a team with a great leader that makes everyone want to push in the same direction and makes us a unit. For that you need solid hiring that takes into consideration what team the to-be-hired person is going to be working with at a social level
One of my managers used to sneak around and whisper to people to go home early (like at 1pm) on days before holidays, now that was appreciated!
There is a difference between team building, workplace social dynamics, and genuine relationships. Thankfully, most of my coworkers recognize this. We work together as a team, the negative workplace social dynamics are at a minimum, and genuine relationships between coworkers don't exclude others or erode the confidence of others. Simply put, everyone behaves as professionals.
On the other hand, I have been in workplaces where the opposite is true. Team building exercises lead to cliques that reinforce certain relationships and erode others, coworkers undermine each other through gossip and use forced friendliness will conceal their intent. None of the relationships are genuine since you know that the drama will eventually lead to someone being in tears (sometimes in front of their coworkers) or leaving altogether.
For what it's worth, I have seen both situations arise outside of tech and both dynamics in play with both introverted and sociable people.
I think this is a seriously undervalued factor and something I was completely unaware of.
I used to always judge job opportunities either by how well they pay, or how interesting the work is. But in reality, the social factor is just as important.
So some time ago, I was trying to hire my first employee. I paid a lot of money for job ads, and got very little applications. I offered the same salary as the other tech companies in my city, and I really tried my best to attract people.
I couldn't understand why people instead only applied to work for boring consultancies or even for an online gambling company -- why would people prefer such mind numbing or even morally questionable jobs?
I realized that the social situation at work is really important. When I met people who worked at the online gambling website, they weren't talking about the actual work; they just told me about their awesome boss, and how they had fun with their team mates, etc. It didn't matter how interesting my project was, nobody wanted to sit all day in an office just alone with me.
Good social aspect is still in the eyes of the beholder, and for people like me, this blueprint absolutely isn't beneficial. Nor is the risk of looking for an outlier culture worth the potential benefits, when that same outlier culture can be much more easily found outside work.
And I think this played into it. I was pretty happy with my old position, but I did have some small desire to find something new. What always kept me back was the fact that I liked the people I worked with.
But as WFH has sort of dragged on, I found that the social bonds have become a much weaker glue for me and there's a minor burnout coming from how stale it is working from home. The camaraderie that kept me at my job sort of faded away. The monotony and increasing apathy toward the people I was working with really pushed me hard into wanting some kind of change, and so almost on a whim I applied for a job at a company that I've been itching to work for. And I got it!
So I'm excited about my new job. I think it'll be more impactful and interesting work where I'm going to get to grow my skills a lot. And my compensation will be doubled. I should be happy that the circumstances forced the change, but I'm also a little uncomfortable with the feeling that it was an impulsive decision due to a mental state that has been caused by temporary circumstances.
When you can get a 30% raise at a new job and there is too much psychological resistance for companies to give those raises internally, high turnover is inevitable.
COVID in countries that supply most of the offshoring has been devastating. Many people from India and Philippines resigning from their roles to move to Western nations to live a better life.