Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

To be fair to the managers, from my experience managers themselves have little to say and it is mostly HR that determines rules like compensation. In our case, insanely, salaries are frozen. Nothing that your direct manager can do about it. Except, leave, and get hired the next day.

Explain what you mean by 2,3,4x more please. You can look at levels.fyi and if you are in a big tech see what the big companies are paying, that sets the market. In my experience the amounts of sometimes shockingly high, but eliminate a few crazy outliers and I see accurate rates. I'm a 20 year experienced principal engineer, and I see rates that match what I get.

So what would 2,3,4x mean. Do you mean that much over your current salary, or over the 'market rate'. If someone paid me 2 or 3x my market rate as a principal backend infrastructure engineer, I would take it, but a year ago when I was interviewing, the offers from the big guys were not that different.

For more than a year I've been trying to get it clear to my boss that I'm too stressed and need a less chaotic workplace. The last months I've had constant headache and fuzzy vision. I checked my blood pressure and it was 180/95. Ten months earlier when I last checked it it was 130/83. On medication now, but my heart beats so hard sometimes I think I need more medication.

When I told my boss about this, he said the usual friendly words about I need to do what I must and that he was relieved the problem was found. I nearly exploded when I read that and told him that high blood pressure is the symptom, the cause is my workplace. Got no good answer to that. I spoke to someone more senior than me and it seems hopeless to resolve this without leaving, so that's what I'm going to do. Leave, and start my own company.

I can't work for someone who lacks empathy and is dangerous to my life.

I recently changed because all of the above at once:

- spent 3y at prev job, which is typical interval where 1) learning starts to plateau, and you realize all the unchangeable constraints that block you from delivering things you'd like to deliver; 2) you are in company long enough that you're the reference point for dozens of things and people keep pinging you all the time; and you somehow end up in a box that you can't get out of; at the same time getting recognition/promotion is hard if you're in a large group of folks with similar level of exp and company is not growing

- salary-wise, recent market move has been bonkers, and getting a bump at $prev_job being even a slice of the current market rates was unimaginable.

- there definitely is a FOMO when you see all the new technologies that everyone seemingly embraces while your company does not (TypeScript! Github Actions! Cloudflare workers! and what not), and you start thinking you'll become unemployable soon

- trying to check out a slightly different kind of organization and under a different business model and different scale

- remote: due to covid everyone's been remote and will be for a while, but it was only semi-reflected in the prev company's way of working and it was not clear what will be the way forward; shifting to proper full remote / async gives me some kind of stability in how to think about work and life for a while, and makes it possible to move far away from the office if I decide it's worth it

Maybe that was true in old days when jobs also give you some security. Covid proved that there is no “job security”: as soon as your employee runs into a little bit of revenue trouble, the lay offs will start.

So money is very very important.