Ask HN: Is the Great Resignation in tech real? If so, why?

My personal experience with ex co-workers who have taken other positions is that the main reason for them going elsewhere is because market compensation is highly competitive and most jobs require fewer responsibilities. For one of them, his kid's school location was also a factor: his mother wanted him in a Montessori school and it was a 20 minute drive out of the way every morning.

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.

Can you clarify what "2x/3x salary increments" means? Are you saying people are tripling their salary? Or do you mean, like, 3x a normal (~3%) raise, or whatever?

There is more money chasing fewer workers.

Yes, it's real. IMO it's the following - 1. tech has flourished during the pandemic, and that plus money printing means there is a ton of demand and money floating around to attract talent. 2. after 18 months of working from home and being miserable during covid, people are ready for a change. that's why we see a lot of new home purchases, job changes, moves, etc. It seems liek covid has basically accelerated people's timelines by several years because they realized life is short, things can change in a flash, and they reassess whatever it is they're doing and whether it's something they want to keep doing, and a lot of the time the answer is no. Increased demand/$$ plus increased supply = ton of movement between jobs

I worked for a university, lifestyle job with bad pay but plenty of time off. But when a plan to fix pay schedules was shelved and replaced with furloughs due to the pandemic, I took the first thing I could find, which was with a local company that's a total cultural mismatch and where my skill are underutilized.

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.