Ask HN: Did you change jobs during the Great Reshuffling and regret it?
The Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffling pretty much started in 2021 and is still going very strong today. It's hard not to feel like you could be missing out if you don't take the opportunity now to pursue a better job, especially one with better pay and work-from-home arrangements. That's how I felt as my coworkers started moving on to better roles, and when the recruiters started hitting me on LinkedIn, I decided to pay attention. Now a month into my new job, I feel like a traitor and sell-out. I had a long tenure at my previous role and had life pretty easy. I can't help but feel that the current wave of job changing is fueled by hype and greed, and honestly I do not think that companies deserve to be screwed by all this turnover. While I am confident I can do fine in my new role, I have a nagging disappointment about contributing to this current trend.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadPerhaps companies should better look after their employees and give them a reason not to leave. Many of us are fed up of being underpaid and undervalued. Add to that the increasing demands to return to an office and it's not hard to see why we're jumping ship to work for businesses that pay better and offer remote working arrangements.
I changed jobs almost a year ago and have zero regrets. I had a long tenure too. What did it get me? Maybe a 2-4% raise a year if I was lucky (which we all know is a pay cut in disguise when you consider inflation). None of us should feel that we have to be loyal to a business. That same business would lay you off in a heartbeat if it would save them money.
Well, when inflation was around 2-3%, it was alright: one could more or less keep up, without having to change.
But this year inflation skyrocketed and now that's definitely not good enough.
Most other companies would view e.g. 7 years progressing experience worth more than 4 years.. or 5 years with AWS experience is better than 2..
So I would argue it is not alright, unless it was the anomaly, not the expectation...
If your title does not change after 3-4 years, you can assume that management has no real intention to help you with career progression.
If your job title changes but you don't get a salary increase with it (apart from inflation matching), then that is probably the time to go to the job market and see what that title is worth elsewhere.
this is what they say, but companies don't actually operate this way in my experience. companies tend to expect more of you after you've been there a while, whether or not they formalize this with a promotion. the title denotes a fairly wide compensation band with a lot of variation.
We are definitely less protected towards this sort of event because of Brexit, but this is bigger than that.
How are companies being screwed? By one half of an at-will relationship exercising their will? Do you have as much sympathy when companies cut employees loose, often with too little notice? All in all, your concern sounds naive.
If you've contributed to anything it's waking up companies with lazy leadership, mediocre managers, and culture-less culture. These place are real.
And I myself am proud for having pushed myself away from the table and stated, "Not for me. No thanks. I'm leaving. There's no sustainable future here."
Did you actually care about better pay or WFH arrangements?
My hypothesis is that a significant chunk of the people who changed jobs circa 2021 are people who would have changed jobs in 2020 if there hadn’t been a pandemic, but held off for about a year while things shook out.
An account called "buttocks", with corresponding smiley in description... the potential for being trollish in nature is relatively high.
Certainly I can attest there's some greed involved in my current job hunt. But the greater factor is getting to work on what I really want to work on. I want to feel excited to go to work, like I'm serving a useful purpose, and not just contributing to society's ills and bankrolling of some rich white dudes. For me that means I have to change jobs. This is just a great time to do it.
There has been a huge uptick of “I hate my new job what should I do?” posts in an advice/mentoring community I’m part of.
The common theme in the posts is people who had quite comfortable positions at their previous employer but maybe didn’t realize it at the time. They went out and got higher paying jobs at companies that were desperately in need of engineers where they tend to have higher wages, shorter interviews to get people in the door. When the new job demands higher performance commensurate with the higher compensation and the company want everyone performing at a high level, it comes as a shock to the system to people who were accustomed to lax companies with lax delivery schedules.
Of course there are people for whom the opposite has happened or who are doing the same work for better pay now. Those people are happy! But I think the “great resignation” narrative being repeated over and over again created a lot of FOMO that also churned people out of otherwise comfortable jobs at good companies, with mixed results.
The, I you're comfortable where you are, the gains needs to be hi.
That's me! The new company lured me in with a lot of money, but they were a dysfunctional mess (nobody even knew what the architecture is...). I quit after two months.
Even though it has been challenging at times, I have never been happier with this decision.
If you were financially independent before changing jobs, then there may be an element of greed to it. But even a financially independent person may change jobs for a vast number of reasons that don't involve accumulating wealth for the sake of it.
If you are not financially independent (i.e. you fall somewhere between a wage slave and a nearly financially independent person), there is no way you changed jobs out of greed. Inflation is high enough that ordinary people will either get a raise or become noticeably poorer in the next couple of years.
I don't blame either of them leaving though the one who is leaving again has certainly burned some bridges and lost any good will he had from the coworkers they repeatedly leave in the breach.
A lot of the comments are anti-company, and I get that though I don't they they are always deserved or relevant. In our case it's the people who didn't leave who have to deal with the extra workload while the company tries to fill positions where you can't just pluck some yahoo off the street.
In the end if you made the move because it was best for you and not out of malice then I wouldn't feel any regret.
https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
If they only divided up the work I don't see a good reason to feel pressured.
A company is not a person, and when the going gets touch, it will not treat you like a person either.
Seriously, congratulations on your new job.
Loyalty to people? Sure. But corporations aren’t people.