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“Great resignation” wave coming for companies

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Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#61

Post by Semaphor »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #30
dreen wrote: post #7

Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too? I've never had a gap year, it was all school, then immigration, work, university, more work. Any holiday time you fly back home. I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing. edit: thank you…

>I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing. You hear a heck of a lot more about it on HN than happens in reality. Maybe I don't hang out with the trust fund crowd enough but I don't know ANYONE who's taken a "gap year" where they weren't doing something for ~40hr/wk in order to make a buck. I know a few people who didn't jump right into career stuff after college…

In Germany, gap years after school or sometimes university are pretty common (at least for the middle class). They do often work, but rarely in a field related to what they studied or want to do. Instead, it’s travel-financing jobs.

It used to be that it was more a thing for women, but that probably changed since draft was abandoned (before that the gap year for men would usually have been military service or alternative civilian service)

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#62

Post by ahelwer »

aphextron wrote: post #41
dreen wrote: post #7

Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too? I've never had a gap year, it was all school, then immigration, work, university, more work. Any holiday time you fly back home. I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing. edit: thank you…

>Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too? Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just w…

Beyond the distasteful idea that we should always act in a way demonstrating obedience to potential employers, the solution to this is extremely easy. Gap year? No! I am merely doing independent consulting. Do I actually have any contracts? So many questions!

Plus if you actually use the time to work on OSS instead of traveling or whatever I have no idea how an employer (that you'd want to work at) could fault you for that. Seems like a huge asset.

You may enjoy this article by our friend NNT: https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#63

Post by itronitron »

toyg wrote: post #48
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing. You hear a heck of a lot more about it on HN than happens in reality. Maybe I don't hang out with the trust fund crowd enough but I don't know ANYONE who's taken a "gap year" where they weren't doing something for ~40hr/wk in order to make a buck. I know a few people who didn't jump right into career stuff after college…

I learnt of this sort of thing only after I moved to the UK, where it's traditional for wealthy and middle-upper-class kids to take a long break between college and university - a habit that probably comes from the times of the "grand tours" of continental Europe in XVIII and XIX century. I've met people who do it on a 6-months basis - 6 months travelling, 6 months earning. They don't make much, their career is somew…

In the US, before Jerry Garcia died, it used to be called 'touring with the Dead'

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#64

Post by toyg »

sokoloff wrote: post #44
elevenoh wrote: post #12

An anecdote: a handful engineers I've worked with (and they're all high quality) have resigned from traditional bigtech to work in open source finance within crypto. It's as though pandemic solitude gave many the mind-time to ponder their authentic values hierarchy. I'm glad more bright minds will be spending less time working directly or indirectly on ads. It's hard to watch.

I’m not passionately anti-crypto, but moving some of our best minds from ads to crypto[currencies/tokens] is not an obvious triumph to me.

Money gotta money. At least crypto is a slightly-less-obnoxious industry than ads and tracking...

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#65

Post by JumpCrisscross »

koheripbal wrote: post #18
quititor wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I believe the conclusion based on the survey. Resigning and "thinking about quitting [your] job" are very different things. I've spent my whole working life thinking about quitting but I've rarely actually quit, the pandemic hasn't changed that.

Unless rent and mortgage payments somehow evaporate, there won't be some massive wave of resignations.

> Unless rent and mortgage payments somehow evaporate, there won't be some massive wave of resignations

The prediction isn’t a massive wave of unemployment. It’s people switching jobs. They will still be earning money, just perhaps elsewhere.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#66

Post by austincheney »

I was looking around recently, particularly at startups, but then chose to stop. Here is my reasoning:

* I am currently employed with great benefits. If I am going to throw that away there needs to be something of value in exchange: leadership position, architecture, or some other increase of responsibilities. I wasn’t seeing this.

* If your primary platform or language is JavaScript everybody wants a tool jockey. They claim to want somebody full stack. But when you really press for details the really want somebody to do react on the front end and play around with their cloud provider. The services piece in the middle is where things get strained in a full stack interview. If tools are the direction of work I have already lost interest. Why would I want to give up stable employment with great benefits to wire tools together? I would rather just stare out the window.

* The idea of a senior engineer is incredibly convoluted. It sounds like people want somebody who can mentor in a vacuum. You can only mentor so much about dicking around with tools. If you try to mentor past that and the culture is just go dick around with tools you are either mentoring too much or not enough. Either way you are a horrible senior incompatible to the new organization. Worse is when they ask you to guide and train junior developers without leadership support. Really if that should work beyond vague hints you need a title. Excellent juniors have a passion for learning but many juniors aren’t excellent, just want a paycheck, and feel insecure when challenged.

From going through the exact same conversation several times in a row I get the impression many employers kind of know what they want to build, kind of guess at what they need, and completely guess at what qualifies as execution planning but cannot put any of that together into a single vision.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#67

Post by aphextron »

sfeng wrote: post #50
aphextron wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too? Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just w…

I think this is horrible advice. I’ve hired all sorts of people with voluntary time off on their resume. Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year. Life is about more than just working, if you have the money to take time off to enjoy your life you shouldn’t not do it out of fear.

>Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year

You're right, it doesn't. But it brings up all sorts of questions in the mind of your interviewer as to the true nature of your departure, and it immediately puts you at a huge disadvantage.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#68

Post by cube00 »

elevenoh wrote: post #12

An anecdote: a handful engineers I've worked with (and they're all high quality) have resigned from traditional bigtech to work in open source finance within crypto. It's as though pandemic solitude gave many the mind-time to ponder their authentic values hierarchy. I'm glad more bright minds will be spending less time working directly or indirectly on ads. It's hard to watch.

What's the business model to work within open source crypto as a full time job?

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#69

Post by elevenoh »

AlexDanger wrote: post #51
elevenoh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too? Yep, that's what I'm seeing already. Financially incentivized OSS (much of which falls under the label 'crypto') is very attractive if you're in the top percentiles of competence & drive. Has there ever been an open, competitive, global, beurocracy-free, low barrier to entry market like this?

Can you give some examples of this financially incentivized OSS that falls under 'crypto' ?

Much of crypto codebases are open source, where at the end of the day you're pushing to an OSS codebase.

If you're paid by a crypto co., foundation, grants, or are financially incentivized by your crypto holdings to contribute, you're often within the bounds of both OSS & crypto.

example: devs that've contributed to Defi projects e.g. uniswap, or received ethereum or solana grants for their OSS code (i think nearly everything user-facing in these organizations is OSS).

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#70

Post by hooande »

What I don't understand is that everyone still has roughly the same expenses as they did before. The basic economics of rent, groceries, child care, car payments, etc have not changed. I'd think people might move from one industry to another. But how can a wave of people afford to quit?

I guess people are living off of their savings, but that seems like a temporary solution. At the least I'd expect to see a similar wave of people re-entering the job market in 6-12 months. I'm still not sure what to make of this general trend, though

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