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As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

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Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#141

Post by PragmaticPulp »

srackey wrote: post #134
dougmwne wrote: post #11

5 years ago I hit a burnout point and took a year off work. It was a huge perspective shift. I realized that my day-to-day of a rushed commute to work, a stressful and distracting office, thimble-deep coworker relationships and a life completely orientated around doing the above was an insane waste of my short time on Planet Earth. I reoriented my life around family, remote work, flexibility and balance. My quality o…

And also anecdotally, every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience, and is yearning to get back to the office - most for a full 5 days a week.

I’m seeing similar sentiment among my peers.

Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds.

We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings.

I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#142

Post by beauzero »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #86
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you? Why not? Because of financials? Job availability in your region? There’s always an option. It might entail a more extensive change and change is hard, that’s for sure.

If you’re young, have no children, and don’t mind picking up and moving and giving up local connections, sure. That’s not common, though. Really though, the solution is to change jobs. Despite how it looks from HN comments, there are plenty of companies out there with good work life balance. Painting this as a false dichotomy between staying in burnout-inducing jobs or dropping everything to become jobless isn’t help…

I found this working for state government. Trying to put my skills to use helping taxpayers get what they deserve in usable government websites. There is a lot of "feel good" there...feels like it did back in 96-97.

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#143

Post by lowercased »

ud_0 wrote: post #127
lowercased wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...for a man in my age group, with no significant savings or other safety net, this is extremely scary" I'm sorry you are in this situation. I applaud your self-awareness, and suspect you have enough skills and discipline to turn this around in the next few years. You may never get to the point of having millions tucked away for retirement, but do hope you can get to a point where you do have 'significant savings'.…

Thank you! Don't have too much pity though, I'm doing okay. I live in the EU, no spouse, no kids, no commitments really. Not planning ahead is 100% my fault, but it's not an existential problem (yet). It's just time to finally stop spending everything as it comes in. It's kind of obnoxious to even admit this, but I always assumed I'd be a successful person at some point down the line. This was of course utterly ridic…

Oh... EU... your 'social safety net' is ... stronger than ours in the US. I am nervous/scared about the future, and I have about 3-4 years of expenses in savings (not counting investments and retirement accounts). But I'm still somewhat 'nervous/scared'.

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#145

Post by HarryHirsch »

srackey wrote: post #134
dougmwne wrote: post #11

5 years ago I hit a burnout point and took a year off work. It was a huge perspective shift. I realized that my day-to-day of a rushed commute to work, a stressful and distracting office, thimble-deep coworker relationships and a life completely orientated around doing the above was an insane waste of my short time on Planet Earth. I reoriented my life around family, remote work, flexibility and balance. My quality o…

And also anecdotally, every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience, and is yearning to get back to the office - most for a full 5 days a week.

That's baffling, haven't people got friends?

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#146

Post by mywittyname »

lumberingjack wrote: post #119
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65

This article opens with a person experiencing burnout and choosing to leave a job where he needed to commute 1.5 hours per day, but the story isn’t really about people quitting work or leaving the workforce. The majority of people resigning their jobs are simply changing jobs, and the article doesn’t provide any evidence that people are changing to remote work in large numbers. The biggest driver of the increase in j…

Remember the housing market boom right before the bubble popped they propped it up with stimulus money everybody was like oh wow this is great houses are such a low price...... You're basically talking about the same thing there

No. I do remember people being like, 'holy shit, houses are getting so expensive' in the years leading up to the bubble popping. And knowing a few people stuck in their houses after real estate agents convinced them to buy at way more than market value.

What stimulus are you talking about? Mortgage rates were laughably high by today's standards. Maybe the $600 bush tax cut? I remember some first time home-buyers programs, but those were largely in response to 2008.

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#147

Post by danuker »

kayamon wrote: post #123
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many of us it's actually been a wake up call about how important it is to be physically present with coworkers and a realization of how much the office actually does offer in terms of productivity and morale boost. I know this is a very unpopular opinion here on HN threads about this situation. And all power to the people who love remote work. But out of all the engineers I know personally and of all the people o…

I spent the last few years doing remote work, before COVID. I don't want to waste any more years of my life staring into a rectangle. If I go back to programming it's sure as hell going to be onsite. It's all fun and games at first. "Look, I can work from home in my underpants!" Then after a while you realize you're just sitting there alone in your underpants.

> to waste any more years of my life staring into a rectangle

Do you not stare into a rectangle on-site? Do you prefer to additionally go through soul-sucking commute?

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#148

Post by ianai »

samsquire wrote: post #87

All the power to them! I think society has to invent new kinds of work* or introduce UBI. There's too many people toiling away in low wage jobs which will never escape and will have to work until 68. You would have thought that a job that nobody wants to do would pay more than one that is cushy. * Getting rid of manufacturing has gotten rid of a huge amount of jobs that provided stability to our economies. Now all ou…

I think a suspicion is that UBI could help transition the market from being intimately dependent upon positive growth to stasis. Though I also have to question whether that's needed when there's so much inequality. Definitely, equality would bring more energy and resource use...then there's the developing parts of the world.

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#149

Post by mywittyname »

School-Cotton wrote: post #98
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like every year there’s a new study showing how cubicle farms are bad for productivity and health. Everyone hates them. Same thing for long commutes, they’re terrible. But still companies keep building new cubicle farms in downtown cores. Maybe office workers are just done with this stupid shit.

I would love to be in a cubicle farm rather than the school-cafeteria-inspired open office dystopia.

Cubes done right are fine. I had "office cubes" with 6ft tall walls and ~40sq ft of space, and they were awesome. Plenty of space to stretch out, room for a bookshelf and a chair for visitors, a computer desk and a writing desk.

Noise could be a little much, but people were generally polite and quiet.

My next job was literally a desk in the middle of the floor. All the prime employees had desks that went along the edge of the wall, forming a horseshoe and, when they ran out of room, they started putting desks in the center. So i was basically working on a stage in front of 40 people. It was awful, but I never slacked off! (well, i went for walks a lot)

Re: As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'

#150

Post by danuker »

mywittyname wrote: post #146
lumberingjack wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the housing market boom right before the bubble popped they propped it up with stimulus money everybody was like oh wow this is great houses are such a low price...... You're basically talking about the same thing there

No. I do remember people being like, 'holy shit, houses are getting so expensive' in the years leading up to the bubble popping. And knowing a few people stuck in their houses after real estate agents convinced them to buy at way more than market value. What stimulus are you talking about? Mortgage rates were laughably high by today's standards. Maybe the $600 bush tax cut? I remember some first time home-buyers prog…

I suspect it's the Fed injecting liquidity: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
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