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Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

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Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#181

Post by xenihn »

spockz wrote: post #151
xenihn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still too many managers who don't understand one of their primary responsibilities in a market that favors employees: making sure that their best engineers don't leave. The job market won't always be like this, but you'd think that they would have figured it out by now during the current run. It's been nearly a decade at this point, and the pandemic has tipped things even further in the favor of the people…

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.

This is a fair point. It seems like standard policy at lots of places is to not budge significantly on comp unless a Valued Employee is prepared to leave. You then end up with one of the three scenarios:

- the employee leaves anyways, since it's too late to change their mind

- the employee stays, but there's a loss of trust and loyalty

- the employee never planned to leave in the first place, and exploited your broken system

Valued Employees should be rewarded preemptively.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#182

Post by teachrdan »

enricozb wrote: post #147
miscoinceptions wrote: post #66

(Throwaway for obvious reasons) The market's been extremely hot the past 10 years. Anyone making a good tech salary and investing has done extremely well. I have enough to never work again. I didn't want to leave my team, but at some point your portfolio fluctuates every day by more than your salary and you have to ask yourself what's the point?

Assuming a salary of $100k, and 0.5% daily fluctuation, that's a portfolio of $20 million, which is a sizable amount.

Ha, I was thinking more like 10% fluctuation on $3 million against a salary of $300K. The total and the volatility could both easily happen if the user invested early in crypto.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#183

Post by jabroni_salad »

kyrra wrote: post #119
randomdata wrote: post #92

I suspect that the so-called Great Resignation follows a period of nobody leaving their jobs, presumably due to fear of what was to come amid the pandemic. Last year reports were indicating that a record number of people wanted to leave their jobs, but weren’t, thus giving us a glut of people ready to leave all at once instead of doing so over a longer period of time like they normally would. This would also explain…

Labor shortages are also a problem of workforce participation. While the big headline number that most news organizations cover is unemployment numbers, the one that is really important with the pandemic is Workforce Participation. AKA: "the proportion of the working-age population that is either working or actively looking for work". Check out the stats for this: [0]. We are still down 1.5% from where we were pre-pa…

I live in Iowa and we were at full employment pre-pandemic. Everybody who wanted a job had one, and businesses all over the state were short of staff just like they are today. Politicians were speculating on ways to get disabled people and stay-at-home-moms into the workforce, overlooking our chronic brain drain of people going to out-of-state universities and never coming back. Our return to normal was always going to be that, but everyone seems to have forgotten.

Here's an article from 2019 about it, but the situation is just no longer in the conversation because unemployment benefits (which ended ages ago) is an easier target than making it suck less to live here: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/721086615/in-this-town-you-ap...

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#185

Post by juancampa »

nathias wrote: post #10

I quit my job to move into web3. edit: I don't know why I'm getting downvoted, but I can guarantee you I'm not the only one.

I didn't downvote you but I can guarantee you it's because "web3" is this fuzzy hyper-hyped term taken over by the crypto mob, which includes people doing genuine work but also speculators. The latter group is probably not liked by the HN crowd and, by not giving details about your career move, you might have sounded like someone from that group.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#186

Post by jokethrowaway »

protonimitate wrote: post #172
daenz wrote: post #54

I'll be departing my job at the end of the month. I had too many roles, affecting too many pieces of engineering, and my title didn't reflect my work. I needed to go down to a 4 day work week and have my title reflect my roles, but my manager attempted to call my bluff and essentially said it's not going to happen. I hinted about what my decision would have to be if these accomodations couldn't be made, but he didn't…

Same thing happened to me at my last company. I was over worked, wore too many hats, and was paid significantly less than my team mates who were more junior than I was (and had less responsibility). I had a handful of conversations that never amounted to anything. As soon as I put in my notice with a new offer in hand suddenly I was able to "set my price". I left for other reasons as well, but it really shone a light…

It's really hard to justify with management.

Instead saying "X left, we need extra budget to replace it" will often work.

It's idiotic and expensive for the company but what can you do.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#187

Post by cwoolfe »

enricozb wrote: post #147
miscoinceptions wrote: post #66

(Throwaway for obvious reasons) The market's been extremely hot the past 10 years. Anyone making a good tech salary and investing has done extremely well. I have enough to never work again. I didn't want to leave my team, but at some point your portfolio fluctuates every day by more than your salary and you have to ask yourself what's the point?

Assuming a salary of $100k, and 0.5% daily fluctuation, that's a portfolio of $20 million, which is a sizable amount.

It's not uncommon for the stock market to fluctuate by 2% in a day (like today actually), which means he'd only need a portfolio of $5 million.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#188

Post by capableweb »

folkrav wrote: post #126
capableweb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On similar note (but maybe not too similar): My work switched from being a in-office company to everything-remote. Productivity took a big hit because we were a small, tight-knit company, and people stopped talking with each other. Left it to take a job in a company that will never switch to remote-only. Much happier again.

It failed cause it took a team that worked in X way and made them work in Y way. Siloed work and faulty communication is an issue with in-person too, just differently. Happy you found something that works for you, but you're overgeneralizing.

It failed because only 25% of the team actually wanted to go remote, the rest of us feel we're more productive in a non-remote environment. Work was never siloed (remote or not).

I'm not saying remote/no-remote is right for everyone, just talking about what works for me/the ones close to me, YMMV obviously.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#189

Post by antisthenes »

coldcode wrote: post #132

Rather than look for another job I retired at 63.5. My job was long hours, high stress, high visibility, continuous deadlines and changes that never ended at a large non FAANG company. Compensation was OK (not FAANG but OK for where I am). Everything I or my team shipped worked great; but lots of things with these challenges never shipped for political/idiotic reasons. So much budget was wasted on Exec whims and fant…

Congratulations on successful retirement. Hopefully you can have a healthy and interesting retirement and enjoy your family and loved ones to the fullest.

Honestly, probably should have done it sooner if you could have.

As a 30-something, most of my peers are not planning to work past 60, and most are planning to retire in their 50s. Unfortunately that seems to be a privilege of a certain level of job income and not all of my peers will be so lucky.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#190

Post by calchris42 »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #125
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is compensation #1 though? There is a threshold where you have enough money and it's easier to work with people you know and like. So, what do they need that extra money for? As I mentioned elsewhere housing is currently the #1 issues I see here in Canada that people are focused on. If you are a front line person, making $15 at a restaurant, plus renting where housing costs $1m+, you are probably looking for opti…

The format of the poll biases the results. You can select multiple options, and compensation might be the one that most people have in common -- but not necessarily the reason why people are leaving. In other words, I think the results can only show motivating factors, but can't satisfy it as a sufficient condition for departure.

+1 anecdotally I think it is often a combination of factors. And once you start looking/ exploring and realize you can get a comp adjustment, then that becomes an easily quantified motivator to pull the trigger.
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