Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

221–230 of 270 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a large company that changed to become remote first in 2020, and we are seeing similar rates of churn. I am not sure this is the whole story.

I think maybe it has to do with isolation. 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…

> Those 10 minutes before standup starts, feels like an eternity.

I'm sorry, I don't understand this. You could join the meeting earlier and just talk about private stuff with your team members. Similar to what you would do in a physical office. Talk about what you did on the weekend or plan for the next one, what movie you watched, what you'll have for lunch.

And I think it is important to build these social interactions into a WFH environment. The thing that I feel really helps bonding with customers and colleagues, is talking about our kids (at least with those that have kids).

And of course it depends on your team, but in our team it's no problem at all to say you need to leave earlier.

I've said so in some discussions already here on HN: I would go back to the office if commute would be much shorter (by bike) and it wouldn't be an open plan office.

I dislike the amount of online meetings I have now, but it's ok. I try to reduce it by actively removing unnecessary participants and trying to make communication asynchronous.

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

#222
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appropriate retention based raises actually require a huge quantity of finesse and genuine ability from line managers and HR. 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.…

Sounds like management needs to reduce friction in order to improve efficiency. There is no argument that it is more efficient to lose a successful employee who already knows your business and hire a new one who does not. 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…

The problem here is the competing offer. By the time someone has gone through the work to obtain an offer elsewhere they have already mentally decided they are making the move. It also poisons the well a bit in terms of recruiting/interviewing as offers come late in that process so if they are being done to farm offers to present for a counter-offer that is likely also happening to your pipeline for other companies, this is bad for everyone.

Retention has to be pre-meditated, you need to identify the market is moving and factor that into your budget. You are -already- doing this in the current system by accounting for market rates to cover attrition. So instead of -having- attrition just pay the retention raises and cut out the middleman and the disruption.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, as a hiring manager, our stance on remote is one of the first questions I get asked. BUT, I hear roughly equal numbers of people who want Full-Office as who want Full-Remote. 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…

I am fully in support for full-remote work as a policy, as I view WFH as right or at least an advancement that has been needlessly deprived from many white collar professions for a long time. 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 o…

Not sure how it is today, but I felt DigitalOcean had the right mix pre-pandemic: 50% onsite and 50% remote. We could choose which we wanted as time went, and remotes could fly in and work from the office about once per quarter. This allowed me to be remote while also developing in-person relationships with a lot of employees, as there were always some people in the office (revolving remotes and regular onsites). It was the best of both world!

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

#224
I’ve recently resigned and will be looking for something new in the new year.

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

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

#225
post #63

It's completely to do with work from home. Everyone is fed up after what they had to deal with in 2020, and tech workers (almost 100% of them) got to work from home, many for the first time ever. After everything they've been through in 2020, it makes zero sense to willingly go back to work in an office where you put yourself at risk and have to deal with all those horrible things you had to deal with before 2020. So…

I think that the number of people that want to go remote, are not the same as the number of people that we think want to go remote. 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, becaus…

I've had the opposite experience. We had a team of 25 devs in Rhode Island, only 3 wanted to stay in the office in any capacity and all were open to the idea of permanent WFH. Several were excited about being able to move as a result.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a large company that changed to become remote first in 2020, and we are seeing similar rates of churn. I am not sure this is the whole story.

I think maybe it has to do with isolation. 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…

I just find this perspective to be largely BS. Have you actually worked from home and/or are you really just a CEO worried that this whole office expense you've paid for for years is/was worthless? You are correct that most people tolerate the job/company they are at, and this extends to the bullshitty "make the CEO feel important" things like social events, camaraderie, etc., which you seem to be in the minority for liking, but this is a point for remote work, not against it. With WFH, you get to eliminate almost all of those things, take back control of your life, actually see your kids and your spouse, sometimes even for most of the day, and if you need to tune out you tune out. The after-hours issue of work bleeding into your home life is exactly the same as it was before because you still get the same emails and github notifications and error notifications you'd normally get after hours if working in an office -- nothing on that front changes. The same computer/screen issue sounds like a personal problem but in my case I do game on a different machine so I guess use some of that engineer salary to buy multiple machines? On the flip side, when I did work in an office I actually used my gaming laptop there as my work machine so this really has nothing to do with WFH vs office.

> Thus people let those feelings build up, often without knowing it, and when that bubble burst

How about the feeling of a 45-min to 2 hour commute at the start and end of every day, draining your energy so you start out your day at work already 30% drained, and get home 1-2 hours after work ends, 160% drained, and can't give proper attention to your spouse/kids? Or what of the feeling of having to live literally near your office and being tied down, forever, unless they decide to "relocate" you to some arbitrary location you've never even been to before (oh how nice of them!).

How about that constant feeling of being watched, feeling guilty about something as mundane as checking your bank account balance to tell the spouse whether they can make a purchase, or double checking the time of your kid's doctor's appointment, or (god forbid) browsing HN for a few minutes to unwind?

With WFH you can put your family first, and your job has to just hope that you're getting things done. It's the biggest transfer of power from employers to employees that has happened in a long, long time, and it's extremely positive for the labor force. I hope it happens in every sector, for every job that could conceivably be done remotely. Work will never be the same again.

As far as the media goes, I don't know what you've been reading/watching, but almost every article or mention on the news of WFH recently actually downplays public excitement for WFH and downplays the ~20% productivity gains from WFH that have been seen across the board in the tech industry. The media conglomerates don't want people to WFH, so they say "oh no some people want to WFH they = bad" when it's really most people, and the shift is inevitable and completely out of their control due to market forces anyway. Soon there won't be offices left to work in, because no employer is going to be able to justify the increased costs and decreased productivity of office working.

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

#227

If you are a big employer but lack quality applicants due to labour market shortage. Could it be worth risking some churn, with the possibility of increasing new applicants by seeding the ' great resignation ' in the media?

There has been a lot of weird reporting around this topic. From the beginning where there was no numbers to back up the news stories, to people creating weird manager strawmen to make it seem like any company that wanted people back in the office was as bad as slave plantation overseer.

It's all very strange and I don't know why.

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

#228

I see lots of good points in these threads about macroeconomics and the pandemic, but I was surprised to not see more talk about tech specifically, or the bigger elephant in the room: remorse about being paid lavishly for work in the attention economy. We're living in a period of remarkable disinformation, and many of our employers profited from it. When your bread comes from pumping bile into people's brains it migh…

> remorse about being paid lavishly for work in the attention economy. 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 t…

That's a good point. I guess my point may be applied more broadly, i.e. I see a rise in social conscience about the impact of one's work. Somebody working in travel may become concerned about their climate impact. A robotics engineer may not want their work applied to weapon systems... et cetera. I've found it rather difficult to find a for-profit enterprise to employ me that doesn't have some ethical dilemma that comes along with the job.

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

#229
post #159
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the american paradigm of "going out on your own" at 18 and not starting a family until you have had a career is what fuels this psychological damage. Immigrant types with big families seemed to not have this problem and are ok with whatever allows them full wfh. Myself, I never once lamented the lack of physical interaction in the office; it was a burden precisely because my full religious/family support grou…

… immigrant types? What “type” is an immigrant? Not all immigrants have “big families”.

It's an optics issue. Immigrants will come often come with family in tow and often live together.

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.

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

#230
post #165
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The companies here in the EU of which I heard that they allow remote work pretty much limited their employees to stay within the EU while working. Is this different in the US?

Despite what people think it's difficult for a company to pay someone who is living in a country where the company doesn't have a presence, for tax reasons. We (Red Hat) are mostly remote but we can only hire people who live in countries where we have a local office, and there's no such thing as a nomadic employee, or at least not for more than a few weeks.

Thats interesting. I know of several solutions called PEOs that offer the ability to pay employees in a great variety of countries.
Post reply on HN