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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For most of us, we just tolerate the job/company we are currently at. Social events, camaraderie and a sense of "we are in the same boat" causes people to continue on. Then lock-downs came and suddenly all of that is gone. You are now stuck in isolation with the thing you actually deep down dislike or resent. Previously, going to the office was like fighting in a pit, but at the end of the day you got to escape by going home and decompress. But if you workplace is also your home, you don't get to escape anymore. The same computer/screen that used to bring you joy, now triggers ptsd/resentment feelings. Thus you are stuck with your demon, consistently, without reprieve/escape. Thus people let those feelings build up, often without knowing it, and when that bubble burst, they feel they need to run away and quit. Some might even start questioning their whole career path and the nature of the work, and thus the nature of our society and economy. Thus the whole drive to work gets short circuited by those feeling of resentment when you want to work again.
That's just my personal feelings around it. I get the feeling when I look at our Jira board. Those 10 minutes before standup starts, feels like an eternity. Our scrum master is no longer my "friend", I just see them as a person that cracks the whip at this point. All while being unable to escape it all, since I have stuff that needs to get paid. Oh, and all this is at good employer doing meaningful work. Cannot imagine other peoples' dread if they get stuck in the same loop.
From my immediate team(20), there are two people who will go full remote. The _vast_ majority want something blended or flexible. Then there are some people ~3 who want to be in the office full time.
Granted this is for the UK.
I suspect that there is bias in news for remote only, because they are the sort of people who already put out a curated vision of them selves (ie linkedin infulencers) We know the archetype, and we know that they are not remotely representative.
My hot take is that it’s a few factors.
* pent up demand from last year with people not moving out of fear but now feeling certain of the future
* remote work opening up a larger selection of companies to work at.
* tech companies having record profits and all wanting to expand at the same time.
And I feel like #3 is the most important one. They all want mid-senior developers but every other company wants them too so they go in to a bidding war and their wallets are stuffed right now so the bids are huge.
This will probably continue until a new wave of developers reaches senior level but by then the market may have failed to predict tech companies growing at an even faster rate than they are now.
The robber barons of the industrial revolution seeded their greed DNA as the basis for industrialization - which while obviously gave great progress, but at the heaviest of costs.
This is my theory on non-tech jobs too. You get stuck in a rut with a shit job waiting tables, when the pandemic hits and your restaurant shuts down. We’ll now you have to take a crack at that other career you told yourself you’d try, or you’d move back home like you meant to. Friction is hard to overcome. But when something external acts as a catalyst, matching improves. Less friction between employees switching jobs/careers/industries/locations is a great thing.
The people complaining about difficulties hiring were probably the ones benefitting from high friction. Now it’s working against them (it’s harder to pick up your life and move back to that shitty job you hated than to stay and do something else).
A lot of people, more than most of us realise, are stuck living hand to mouth. No time or money to train themselves up to do something different. No way to build the networks that are often needed to transition. That feeling of having to run to stay still.
When the treadmill stops you have to do something. Perhaps it's swallowing your pride and borrowing money from a friend, or moving back in with the parents, but I reckon a lot of people discovered that when they needed it there was some credit in the system, note to mention actual credit in the form of government help.
So now all those people who were busy being busy have some time to actually think about what they want to do.
Instead of cheap outsourcing, I’m seeing more of an approach where salaries are cut slightly because they no longer need to be staffed in the Bay Area, and the job then offered to anyone anywhere in the world.
99% of Indians who work on outsourced projects, don't make any where close to that money. In fact the very reason outsourcing exists is because of price arbitrage.
FANG's are an exception to this, but that only proves the rule. Bulk of the world needs software written and maintained for cheap.
Outsourcing is very different to employing remote workers. When you outsource you're essentially giving up a lot of direct control over how work is done, who is doing it, what quality processes are in place, and what the deliverables look like. Companies like to control those things, and will often pay a premium to maintain control over them. Remote work maintains that control.
Part of this is visible because many remote roles are advertised as only being open to people in the same country, or timezone, or even state. Companies want their employees to be able to talk in real time (which is actually a little annoying..)
I don't think there's much similarity between outsourcing and remote work.
I mean, this is probably true, but in enterprise software, companies are paid by their customers to control those things and enforce various compliance standards like SOC-II. The difference between a piece of workflow SaaS charging $1K/month and $25K/month is fulfilling those compliance standards, so there are clear economic incentives in play.
I fully expect the pendulum to swing the other way from favoring intra-US remote work like it is now.
Highly competent developers phoning it in from Peru, totally unlike the 1990s, very much seems like it'll be an extremely prominent trend in the future.
But seriously, even outsourcing to American companies becomes labor-intensive and frustrating. Everyone overpromises, underdelivers, and you spend as much time managing external entities as it would take to do the work yourselves. It is useful and necessary because of the shortage / intractability of senior engineering talent, but it's always better to hire that senior talent than outsource imo.
So yes, it’s up, but the news articles trying to explain this as some sort of society-wide shift and pushing anecdotes of people leaving companies en masse are getting ahead of the numbers. It’s also ignoring the sharp downward spike in quit rate during the start of the pandemic, which has produced some ripple effects.
The economy is also booming right now with the influx of cash, people staying home and spending more on tech, and low interest rates. Every company that can take advantage of it is doing so by hiring.
Yet these numbers need to be kept in perspective: they're quit rates for all non-farm jobs. The quit rate for any individual job sector can be much higher than the average rate. So while the average quit rate isn't way higher than the past few years, it certainly seems like the tech sector is seeing a lot of shuffling around.
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.
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.
However, not all workers share the same lateral mobility. In tech it’s easy to reinvent yourself, to work remotely, and to change your industry. It’s also a high paying industry, so many people are financially situated to quit.
So you have two catalysts, 1) covid imparts the equivalent of a mass mid life crisis, and 2) employees in tech wield a lot of power. I hypothesize that these events combined and formed a feedback loop of employees quitting, driven by big raises granted precisely by the staffing issues caused by the quitting. The more turnover, the more desperate companies became to not be left without butts in seats when the music stops.
> As luck would have it, global healthcare plans seem reasonably priced. My partner and I got covered under Aetna's MHP Exclusive plan (their most comprehensive package) for under $300 a month total (not $300 per person).
As an Australian, this figure seems ridiculous, even if it were in $AUD! To give you an idea, I pay around $45 AUD/mo (but I've never had to use it because free healthcare).
I pay about 600 EUR a month and that only covers up to 3 months abroad (but abroad can be anywhere) — for longer trips I still do at least a “major medical” policy and I have MedEvac insurance, so my effective price for an ad-hoc global insurance is probably more like 700-800 per month.
Which on the one hand is horrendous, but on the other hand very competitive with serious global policies that cover everything everywhere for someone my age.
These are great for getting temporary coverage while you wait for a residence permit, but there are few use cases for them outside of that. In Germany, I actively try to steer people away from them.
[1] I wrote this: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance
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.
2) my partner and I are hoping to have a kid, the pandemic really highlighted the child care issues in our country. We basically decided if when we have a kid (which we've been unlucky in our attempts during the pandemic) were going to be a single income home and one of us won't work. At dual income, 25% would go to taxes, and 30% would go to paying for daycare. This, in turn, puts pressure on the other to seek those "city wage" remote jobs, which is probably a 100% raise, but raises job security and satisfaction concerns... But that encourages resigning and moving up the pay scale.
Competition - simply beautiful!
Remote is making people reevaluate work/life balance in general, some people that aren't getting their preferences matched in this regard are thus leaving.
Huge amounts of liquidity means there is now a lot more money sloshing around in the pockets of startups and public tech companies that raised money in the 2020/2021 equities boom. Tech companies suck at retention based raises (I still have no fucking clue why this is) so there is a large amount of reshuffling happening as people move to take advantage of better wages being offered elsewhere.
Even if a company is willing to do so in in good faith, a rarity, a "market price" raise consumes an extraordinary amount of paperwork and HR time and effort.
You take your employee, often parked with a nebulous job title and a role that has morphed entirely from the one they were hired for.
Then you have to define their current role and skill-set exactly, then research the correct band to index that role to in the job market.
For my extremely diverse cross functional team, understanding the market price for the SQL engineer vs the Python engineer in my niche is absurdly complex.
Half the reason they don't do it is because it's just genuinely so much effort to go to. And most of the time the engineer doesn't even appreciate it because they're jumping ship for a change of scenery more than anything.
If HR is infact the reason why this doesn't happen then HR is hamstringing the rest of the company.
The difference between companies with high retention vs low retention is massive in my experience, both in terms of code quality and morale. Anecdotally companies with higher retention did better with raises but also generally better with hiring (so they had higher quality employees worth awarding raises to).
A good system would be to always grant the retention raise when presented with a competing offer (without all this work you described), with a short window of time to allow for someone up the chain to veto.
People with disabilities experience the pandemic the same as everybody else. Of course. However they don't have the same opportunities.
yadaeno wrote that he took some time off and when he returned he got a raise [0].
This would be riskier for me.
Sometimes people tell me to have positive thoughts. I will find a good position if I only try hard enough.
I understand that because people don't like to think about depressing things.
However indulge me and conduct a thought experiment. Try to estimate the percentage of tech workers with disabilities and their average salary.
What do you think: Is the percentage the same as elsewhere? Is the salary the same, higher or lower? Why?
Pretending to not be depressed or manic behind a camera once a day is so much easier than doing so a full day in person. I’m never going back to an office if I can avoid it.
A story: Fifteen years ago I and my colleague from class we were selected as top engineers of our class fresh from university for an ambitious project. However that project got cancelled two months later. My colleague phoned once and immediately found a different job and left the same day.
Because of my disability I don't phone. I needed three months to find a different job.
I agree with you that remote makes more things possible and makes working easier.
But it is about to find a job at all. And if I found something I wouldn't have the same power to negotiate salary and benefits as others and must accept what is given to me.
Luckily I don't have the need to look for a job.
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.
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)
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.
Getting a very significant raise to stay in the same role is a strong signal that the company doesn't value its people and will pay you as little as possible in the future. I'd bet any money that your next 2 or 3 reviews will come with no further raises because "you just got a huge pay increase".
1. I had been there < 3 years, and was at my only other job was 1 year, and I think that has at least slightly negative connotations on a resume to some.
2. I get to be team lead (of a team of 2, yeah), which is not something I would get to do anywhere else, given my 4 YOE.
3. I like my team and WFH and WLB and taking a chance on a new company when the comp would be the same sounded risky.
4. I didn't actually have any offers. I had made it to 3 on-sites and had a few more in the pipeline, but most were for lower compensation than my counter-offer. I went ahead and did the on-site that was for more comp afterward (I told my boss I was doing this), but I didn't get the offer there either, so I didn't really have another option to choose instead.
5. 200k is top-of-band for non-tier-1 companies for my area / YOE, and more than half of the tier 1 companies in my area were over an hour commute.
I had a coworker leave to be an L4 SWE at Google earning the same in 2017. I don't know if the anecdote is relevant to the 2021 Great Resignation if people were doing the same thing 4 years ago (unless your colleague got an L3 offer for that amount).
With that said, given how this is my plan no matter what, it has actually freed me from whatever circumstances can arise at work.
I mostly quit because I had a baby in 2020. My CEO told me about 6 months ago I was "too close to my son" in one of my 1-1's I think largely because I wore him on a few zoom calls to give my wife a break right after birth. I let that fester for awhile... stuck in endless brain loops analyzing my life and where I spent my time. A week after watching my 1 year old enjoy a cupcake with a smile for his birthday -- I quit. I miss many of the great people... but life is too short. It was the time put into something vs the time put into relationships I care about the most that made me punch out.
I have no idea what's next... for now I just want to enjoy some time with my wife, kids, and family which financially I'm so thankful I am able to do. We only have time and health!
Gets even worse around promotions.
I quit my old job in June to take a position that would be permanently remote forever after my old company decided they wanted us all back in the office again. It was actually kinda painful: I'd made a lot of friends at my old job, and my last day was two days before my five-year anniversary there, so it was a pretty sad goodbye. Also my new job pays so much more than my old one that it's almost comedic. Funny thing is, I've heard (thanks to going out drinking with my ex-boss) that the whole company is fully remote again after a short experiment with "hybrid" and they're paying way more than they used to thanks to getting acquired by one of the largest ISPs in the country, but I'm still not going back... nothing against anyone there (who are, again, actual friends of mine now) but I've learned so much about modern tech stacks (AWS! K8s! Helm! Terraform!) at my new job that I'd be an idiot to walk away from it.
I got put under the CEO'S twin brother who did not trust the tech stack I was using (never mind that three of our critical SAASes we were subscribing to -- including payments!! and 24/7 alert monitoring!! used that stack) "it was an unknown quantity" -- and then we had arguments about hiring (he pushed through a hire that three of the four tech reviewers thumbs downed, and I personally flagged as problematic because he had wrong code and asserted during the interview "I am certain it's correct" -- his code was so crap and hard to understand that took me three hours of writing a property testing framework to find the bug), then he forced onto a team someone "with Amazon experience" who I thumbs downed because his code was shit and didn't read the instructions (which is part of my interview acceptance criteria). I had found some great "almost seniors"/"early senior" devs who had the right attitude to figure shit out and deliver code, but he didn't want to hire them because they "weren't senior enough".
Anyways shortly after that I quit with no immediate prospects, and pretty quickly got a great job on a fantastic team (though the codebase is very brownfield), so I'm not sad I resigned.
Pre-covid, my professional satisfaction came mostly from interacting with students. The academic freedom to explore essentially whatever you are interested in is also good compared to any tech job, so the job is not that bad (even if pay is not great compared to industry).
Currently however, with everything online, I essentially have to teach a blank screen, which sucks.
I am exploring alternatives, although I am reluctant to quit my job.
It's due to venture funds, remote work & high demand ...
Cash is cheap. US, Europe & Japan have unleashed >$9 trillion since the pandemic in stimulus checks & buying of bonds in the market. Global venture funding hit a record high of $221B with 250 start-ups becoming unicorns this year. Coinbase debuted publicly with a market cap of $89B on its opening day. Indian start-ups have received a record funding of $8.76B
Salary Difference is Huge . The average salary of a software developer in the US is $107K with senior developers commanding $300K in San Francisco, a stark difference compared to India. Demand for talent is coming from all industries, the automotive sector hired more software engineers than the tech sector last year, all the more reason for going remote
Which means remote postings have risen by 457% since the past year! Engineers prefer to continue WFH as it enables flexibility, increased productivity & reduced commute times. Even the challenge of different time zones can be solved using good asynchronous communication in remote work
To recap, an engineer can work for - FAAMG (Remain the top pick) - US & EU software giants (Coinbase, GitLab, Automattic) - 3000 India Dev Centers (Eg: John Deere) - IPO-bound unicorns (Zomato, Paytm, MobiKwik) - Freshly funded start-ups (100s) - 2800 IT services firms
What is the impact?
Attrition rates in Indian IT will be at an all-time high of 22-23% this year. Top-tier candidates now get multiple offers with an eye-popping 2x-3x (not 20%-30%) raise. The 2-3 month notice period means candidates continue interviewing after accepting the 1st offer. Developers are consistently learning new skillsets on AI, Machine learning, cloud computing, automation, blockchain to be in high demand. No doubt, multiple founders have recently tweeted about this new competitive market & candidates informing before joining date
Recruiters & founders need to differentiate themselves not just with cash, but also with ESOPs, buybacks, venture backing, eye-watering benefits, rapid career growth & work even harder to retain existing talent
The war for talent is on
What this means is you need to keep investing money to even stay afloat, hence the VC investment madness.
India has seen this trends in the past too. And it doesn't end well. When businesses don't make profits the employees suffer. Loans are defaulted, homes are lost and careers are set back by decades. I call this job tourism.
I've been there and been through this several times. In the early 90s I remember it was considered a windfall period for managerial talent in India. When ABCL(Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited) collapsed it unleashed hell on people. Dot com burst, 2008 crash. It all starts with crazy salaries and ends in tears. In 2008 I personally remember filtering out resumes of people whom we called 'job hoppers'. Have a frequent jump trial on your resume? Congrats a lay off now means you will be job less for 2+ years. Even when you do get a job after that time, it's not like they'll be offering 500% hike on the market standards. If you don't show the jumps on the resume first question we'd ask is 'Can you explain the gap in your resume'.
Where do you think the exhaustive background checks come from?
But now it has turned against companies!
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.
I have no way to know if that is typical. I doubt it is, but I've certainly seen practically every local dev company I know advertising roles.
The pandemic made me rethink what's important, to stop relying on the perceived stability that a stable job gives, quit my job and go study a Bachelor's degree in music.
I think I'm not alone in this sense... People have difficult or lonely time, which forces them to rethink priorities, understand that there's no guaranteed stability and hop onto the next step in their life. In tech, more often then not, the next step in one's life is a better salaried job.
If your net worth hits a couple M, you make 200k/year just on interest. For a salary to make any difference to a person living a middle class life, they are going to need to pay you in the upper 6 to low 7 figures.
That prices you out of the market so may as well stay home and play with the kids.
Life is too short to grind away at the office working on someone else's dream if you don't have to.
Commonly large deviations over shorter timeframes and rare deviations over longer timeframes. The last 15 years have been one such deviation, maybe GP figures that's the normal now.
The vast majority of tech jobs are not working with consumer facing products.
The companies that occupy the space on our phones and web browsers may seem like the majority of the tech world when it’s all you see every day, but it’s really a smaller fraction of everything going on in the world. There’s a lot of tech out there that doesn’t involve the small handful of companies that dominate social networking and entertainment apps.
1: given parents a taste of new options for schooling their children. Many people tried tried out homeschooling and are planning to continue. This move decouples K12 education from real estate decisions and provides even more incentive to have a work/life balance that allows parents to be more involved in their kids' education.
2: let people vote with their feet more easily WRT state income taxes. People realized that they can now move to a low/no-tax state and take home a lot more money. Even if you take a 10 percent pay cut to move elsewhere, everything is cheaper than in SF/NYC. Your take-home pay is the same since there's no state income tax, and you can afford much more house/car/vacation/etc. in your new location.
We have seen a lot of turnover this year. Many people have left for higher wages.
"Mid-level workers are thus getting more promos than usual."
I'm a midlevel. They want to give me a low rating because they said I'm slow. So no promo for me. I haven't seen promotions for others pick up either.
My guess would he that there is increased retirement attrition, which we are seeing at my company. I think there is also increased demand for technology (like online ordering, delivery service, and other pandemic related shifts).
I mainly work with cloud workloads and it's without a doubt people that work in my fiel dare moving from jobs because of the lack of full remote work.
I can't complain about my company ever since we went home we signed an extension contract to work from home at full time. We also managed to start recruiting across the country and not just the "local city" where we settled in.
Source on these quit rates?
Here is Why I believe this trend is likely to continue and why:
Economic climate: the money being ploughed into tech startups and co's has not only grown but grown by 100% YoY see here: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/global-vc-funding-h1-2021-m... -Tech companies are the predominant receipent of these VC $$$.
Mindfulness/Actualization: I would say I am satisfied with my current job but the past 18 months brought about the perfect storm, I moved from SanFran to a small town in WA with no friends or family close by- so I had a lot of time to think and introspect. Secondly, I lost ever $ I saved since I started working ($392k to be precise)... this loss, helped me understand the real value of money- what it is worth and what it isn't, having some money saved aside- will no bring you happiness but losing it- will definitely lead to a reduction in happiness. - This leads me my hypothesis on why, this trend is happening at large and now, people introspect their lives and realized "good enough" is really not good enough- it made them yearn for more, more in some cases meant money or a higher title- like it did for me.
Emptiness Syndrome: This is my own coinage, the way I would describe this as is trying to understand the meaning of life, what is it- just getting paid enough to stay fed, to afford rent and then what? A lot of folks started to search for a meaning to their lives... See google trends on "meaning of life" and "Suicide hotline number".
These 3 powerful forces, created the perfect amalgamation for the "great resignation" - Companies with a shit ton of money, -People having time to introspect, and the Emptiness syndrome.
PS. These are the ramblings of a 27 year old, single guy with nothing to watch on netflix and nothing better to do at 2.31am at night on a Saturday.
Was a very dumb move :) I actually sold out a day before my birthday at the start october... so I can start my 27's on the right foot, losses teach us and make us better :)
Not in tech.
I've seen this from friends who have moved in the past few months where the pay increases are not insignificant.
Some companies have figured out there is more to life than trying to pretend HTML and JavaScript are some kind of forced shoehorn Java or Python extension. Many have not. If moving to one of these competent companies means eliminating my wasted time commuting to an office plus a substantial pay raise then so be it.
first, no, not irrelevant. what on earth even justifies thinking that?
second, disability from covid is far more widespread than death. some studies indicate 10% of covid cases turn into long covid, becoming essentially permanent. that's much higher than the death rate.
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.
Now the remote client has died from COVID, and I can’t decide what I want to do.
Seeing how quickly one can go from living to not living, it makes me question my priorities. How many vacations did I indefinitely postpone because my work couldn’t be without me? Answer, many… some years with naught but one handful of holiday days.
If one’s work brings great joy and satisfaction, then that IS living. But for those of us who have yet to discover what our real meaningful passion is, we probably should not postpone the things that make us happy. Live while you can.
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.
Especially considering that the current expected salary of a CEO is extremely distorted by the fact that it’s decided by a board usually filled with other CEOs..
The embarrassing thing is that bloody Adam Smith warned us of this a few centuries ago:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices”
1. Why is it more pronounced in tech specifically? 2. Is there a significant fraction of people who’ve quit and still haven’t gone back or is it overwhelmingly job changes?
- I just got a promotion from associate systems engineer to systems engineer. There was an associated raise :) - My boss is great. Can't remember names to save his life, but he's great at managing people. - My work life balance is exactly where I want it. We could be going back into offices, but there's no pressure here. I can skip the commute whenever I want to and put that time into going to see friends. - My employer's good about lateral movement within the company, and I want to be a full on software engineer. I got here from my once a week bike repair job with them and a tech support gig elsewhere. This is so doable.
I definitely make less money than I could elsewhere. But I've got good benefits. I've got good people around me. I have the flexibility to have the social life I want. I like what my company does. I like what they're trying to do. If it's up to me, I'll be around a decent while longer in two or three more positions :)
The only things that've changed from covid are: - I work from home most of the time - I have more work in my backlog to automate away the jobs that were cut at the start of covid (I work for a retailer. There were some spectacularly enormous losses for a few months there)
I also think the Pandemic has acclimated some families to the notion that one person may need to re-skill or look longer for a job (say your typical double income couple). One may need to stay home to watch the kids, whoever is out of work at the moment. It’s a shift in sentiment, one which once upon of time may have felt horrible. During the Pandemic, tons of families were going through this, so it didn’t feel weird or abnormal that one person was on the bench for a bit, as everyone in America was going through it. I think families are no longer pressuring themselves and actually opting out of not taking that crappy 6-month contract job, or that job at Wendys, and giving each other the latitude to prep for better jobs.
These changes are giving a little power back to the people. We expected the pandemic to be over in 2020 and it never happened, so we all had to learn patience and it spilled over to a lot of other things in life, including evaluating jobs.
Last but not least, many Americans have not gone to the theater, or ate in at a restaurant at the rate they were doing pre-pandemic. I haven’t stepped foot in a movie theater in two years, and have only eaten inside of a Diner twice in two years. The chip shortage made it so you can’t even buy expensive toys like a PS5 or that new graphics card. We were forced to learn consumption-reduction, and I think many people realized it’s not so bad. Expenses go down, and suddenly you are not so desperate to hop onto any job that comes your way.
My reasons are:
- done this for a while. Being on COVID projects gave me a taste of different but similar
- was surrounded by talented and some not so talented contractors making silly money whilst I was the only permanent employee making probably half. That wasn’t different but the noise got louder in my head. Why not you? Was the question in my head as I rapidly rose to lead a team of 14
- remote work. One of the things holding me back was worrying (unnecessarily) about having to go to strange places to do contract work. But my role did that already before COVID and since COVID so much more opportunity to do things remote means the size of the pond is bigger
- A colleague did it. Someone I mentor. And they grew and got stretched so much by new contexts in new projects. It reminded me of that feeling i got from the COVID projects. Purpose and being stretched to learn new stuff
4) is true. Now companies have to compete a lot more for our labor.
5) is true. It also leads to a corollary: our workload has gone up since our services are in greater demand.
There's also the point that inflation is on the rise, despite what the fed says. We can see that housing prices are up 50% since the start of the pandemic in many areas. We can see that everything we buy has gone up by 20%. You have to pay a 75% surcharge to get a new graphics card. The inflation in these major sectors makes it feel like our salaries and yearly increases are smaller. Additionally, as the market has gotten more competitive (for labor), industry wages have gone up.
Many had frozen hiring and everyone is hiring at once ATM. So you get inflated pay and designations.
Some tech workers are reevaluating their career track.
I am ok to move if I can change my career to pure engineering. I worry that if I do not I might stagnate.
Quantitative easing has found its way in property and crypto asset price rises, in addition to inflated startup funding.
The latter is finally trickling into higher wage competition. People then move jobs as way to hop salary.
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.
There are two ways to reduce prices:
1. Reduce need: air travel, commute, commercial real estate, sears, middle management, highway speed traps, paper, wars, suits, gold, diamonds, brokers, theatre, stadiums, crowds
2. Increase productivity: software, internet bandwidth, gpu, nvme ssd’s, solar, batteries, youtube, hacker news, wikipedia, wsb, zoom, twitter, linkedin, Robinhood, tiktok
The vast, vast majority of companies are still hiring people locally.
This is probably across many industries and professions, but one particular thing was extremely helpful for software engineers looking to change jobs - time for leetcode.
It's much, much, much, much easier to learn and practice leetcode problems and other related technical coding interview stuff while you're WFH than if you're in the office.
First, your theory 3 leads to the 'increase' in resignations. Last year any job you could hold was a port in a storm. This year people resumed shopping around for the best job.
As for the pay raises, I think it's because tech faired better during the pandemic than other industries. In general, the pandemic was a wealth-consolidating event and tech fared well.
So; higher wages, more choice. Even if you don't like remote working that much it's part of the choice.
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.
Why any developer outside of US wouldn't take advantage of this opportunity?
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.
From my experience, this is the first time since the virus-drama started that I felt safe enough to take the step.
But I was unemployed when it hit the fan, and the first year was really tough since it was pretty much impossible to find jobs around here.
Heh, that was my plan. I ended up just settling for more money again.
And all because a colleague goaded me into reassessing where I was and where I wanted to be (they didn't do it nicely).
Due to the acquisition I'm in the position to talk to random people all over the organization from a semi-outside perspective and it has given me some insight I was lacking of this company, I assume many anglo-american companies share:
1. This company cannot divert the course of their goal to lower engineering cost, it's engrained in their financial models that push them towards IPO. -> Lowering engineering cost meant opening up offices in europe, eastern europe and asia and paying slightly above the local rate. -> This strategy is starting to fall apart as the labor quality from these places AT THE PRICEPOINT is dropping, as the experienced engineers have started working for full U.S. or full central european salaries and aren't going back. It will take a lot of time until the "our HR just isn't effective at hiring & retaining"-narrative changes into the "our strategy doesn't apply to the global labor market anymore"-narrative because the waters are extremely muddy.
2. If you pay for actual data, you can basically only get simple spreadsheets of salary/profession & level, the sources of which seem very unreliable and the conclusions you draw from them unhelpful. The employees themselves also don't make good decisions as on their behalf and so false signalling is going on a lot.
3. It takes management clout to push through U.S. Salaries for people in lower-income environments and is depending on the company culture frowned upon so kept a secret if it occurs. This has the potential to create cabals and "more equal than others" pockets in the org-chart.
4. The very people tasked with retaining their teams are also affected by the shifting landscape themselves and depending on their stance become very emotional around this topic as the pressure on them increases. Some develop a stockholm-syndrome-esque attitude when they personally don't want to leave or feel they don't deserve more, that creates tension because they quickly arrive at unhealthy points of the discussion and say things like "if you are only in it for the money, this is not the place" which is something you don't ever want your manager to phrase like that, although because of 1-3, this is going to be true for quite some time.
5. The employee-part of the discussion about payscale and cost-of-living adjustments is just getting started as inflation is increasing, open Q&A meetings have started to revolve around this topic. As much as the communication is centered on positivity for this company, this seems to cloud every other topic as a segment of the employees have stopped thinking further ahead than 6 months as they seem to wait how this will play out.
All in all, I'm very unsure if I will be able to stay at this company because of this situation, ironically this would hurt me financially, but the environment does not feel like a healthy one where I'd not only enjoy my time but will do anything but crisis management.
If I was more financially secure I'd resign in a heartbeat, so looking around for a remote job.
This sums it up.
Then I heared from freelancer friends that now almost all their projects became remote only as well.
I quit my job a few months ago and work as a freelancer from home now.
-Wireless infrastructure and APs companies that perhaps didn't have wireless infrastructure in place were now forced to. [AP for tablets due to take out increases] -suddenly end users were forced to grant remote access to their home lan and pcs -crypto has really taken off
We will both be resigning in the near future to move overseas.
on 4: there is some systemic data that has been available for years that this is the case. Wouldn't be surprised for the awareness to have spread and people adapting accordingly.
Also the job market has really changed I think. Salaries seem to have increased and wfh seems more accepted.
Lockdown was a catalyst for offline to online. Tech was the epicenter of this. This also fueled deliveries, which requires tracking and optimization (of packages and the hordes of new delivery people). Then other related stuff - remote communication, payments, etc, etc. There was just endless tech stuff to do. Even hardware stuff like drones had more demand.
There was also a sudden drop in things that rich people could invest in. Early 2021, a lot of companies decided capital was cheap and companies with good revenue started raising money, then hiring/expanding. Crypto boomed and bust again, but it fueled some more startups who made money off crypto infrastructure.
A lot of tech workers were forced to come to office during the pandemic. A factory worker might be a lot more tolerant to this. But I found it highly insulting and inefficient to risk my family's lives for something of lower productivity, and that was the last straw. Plus offices were poorly maintained and being downgraded at this point. I decided I did not want to return to office after the next lockdown and started job hunting at this point.
Mid-late 2020, people started quitting jobs. The surge in demand combined with the drop in supply created a kind of vacuum.
This probably wasn't felt in richer countries, but remote work meant that it suddenly made sense to outsource to other countries. In developing countries, we had a double surge from developed countries. Australians decided to outsource to Malaysia and other companies. Suddenly Malaysian companies were competing with Australian wages, making more people quit. I was personally getting offered 2.5x wages and the interview bar was much, much lower than usual. A good job used to take weeks of interviews, and now it was a weekend.
Mid 2021, remote/hybrid work was already offered up front. I basically rejected all interview offers that didn't allow remote, unless on site was necessary (e.g. drones or factory machinery). My sister was an intern and did the same - normally interns would be told to screw off for any disagreement.
By Aug 2021, I'd have a very good company inviting me to interview with them almost every week. Oil conglomerates, brands like Nokia and Motorola, Fortune 500, unicorns offering top tier wages and vacation time, small companies that pay well for routine maintenance work. Companies that rejected me in the past were suddenly offering the jobs again (you know that thing where they say they'd keep your resume on file?)
Eventually I did end up with a dream job, where I get to focus on making the users happy.
tl;dr: market forces created a lot of good jobs. So people are resigning and moving closer to theirs, which isn't necessarily better pay. Developing countries have a windfall thanks to remote, followed by startups, but the extra demand means everyone else feels it too.
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.
