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Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#381

Post by staller »

I jumped from a small startup to a larger company in 2021 because I was getting bored with the work after a few years and felt that I had stopped growing. I needed a new challenge, and I have some goals that I recognized moving to a larger company would help me grow to achieve. I also wanted to be paid more because the amount of time and work I put in the compensation wasn't competitive. At the much larger company there are many learning programs available to me, stock with value, and more compensation.

I did enjoy wearing many hats and carrying a lot of responsibility for a while, but the pay wasn't worth the stress. I'd like to revisit working at a startup again some day, maybe after I've reached more of my professional goals and bring more value to a company than just code.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#382

Post by mym1990 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #282
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…

I was playing a board game with my 7-year-old niece recently. She negotiates the same way most companies do. She holds the line firmly until her bluff is called, and then backtracks quickly once it's too late. The biggest différance is my 7-year-old will learn, while companies will continue to make the same mistakes.

Negotiation was one of my favorite classes I took in college, I think it should be taught as soon as possible. I must say applying it in real life under stressful conditions has been much harder than in the classroom! At the end of the day I think a lot of companies don't operate from a standpoint of both parties coming out fairly, which just leads to mistrust in the end.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#383

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

natnatenathan wrote: post #278
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #218

Mission is the big one for me. I refuse to work any longer for companies that make humanity and the environment worse. I'll become a bartender before I work for another company whose sole purpose is to extract wealth at any cost.

Don't bar tenders sell addictive products that lead to poor choices and some of the most systemic problems in our society? How about becoming a math teacher?

That's a very good point. I must have overlooked it because I like to drink, so I didn't draw a correlation between the person serving me my drinks and the person enabling the many problems resulting from alcohol.

I dropped out of school partly due to how painful it was for me to learn math. If there's some school out there that wants to let me teach any way I want... I might consider it. But I should probably learn math first. :)

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#384

Post by myownpetard »

davewritescode wrote: post #243
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…

> When I gave my verbal notice, suddenly there was immediate backpedaling and said maybe something could be worked out. I declined because I don't negotiate like that. If you mismanage a negotiation, there is no do-overs just because you overplayed your hand. The trust is broken. Good for you! This is something I always tell junior engineers who are looking for ways to negotiate for something (usually pay and/or prom…

The only way to know the price of your labor is to interview and see what the market says.

Companies are happy to have a non-competitive monopoly on your labor where they can unilaterally set the price. I think engineers (or anybody really) should try to get an offer or two every couple of years to anchor the price of their labor. Otherwise you leave yourself with a constant information asymmetry with your employer.

Your manager might be great, but a company wants to pay you as little as possible to get what they want from you. That's the nature of the labor market. And if you don't create a market for your labor then your employer gets to be the only bidder at the auction.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#385

Post by throwaway_aws22 »

I'm tempted to leave because of how employees are graded.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-Amazon-rates-employees-z3...

Management must shoehorn their reports into these percentages.

Even if you have a team of high performers, HR expects someone to be graded as LE, which means likely put on a PIP and at risk for termination.

It's frankly disgusting to treat people this way.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#386

Post by mud_dauber »

Leaving end'January.

1. Wife is retiring at same time. Physically beating on her (commercial kitchen). 2. Was recruited by HW company. Hiring mgr quit without notice, so I spent 3 months looking for stuff to do. No KPIs, feedback or direction. 3. Thanks to covid, we haven't gone out for 18+ months. Saved 85% of salary, so we can have pretty cheap ObamaCare coverage next year by living off savings.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#387

Post by claudiulodro »

reedjosh wrote: post #179
nicoburns wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House prices are increasing by >5% a year in a lot of the world.

This doesn't change the equation. Go buy a house that will increase by >5%/year, but then don't pay it off any sooner than you have to. Make the minimum payments, and invest in something that will return a stable 5%+ with your remaining income. Just because the house itself increases in value, doesn't mean you should pay down the ~3% interest rate loan any faster than you have to. And really, once you've built enough…

I'm not sure exactly how it affects the calculations, but if the house is paid off, you can use the money that would have gone towards mortgage payments towards investments though. So instead of $1000/mo towards mortgage and $1000/mo towards investments, you could do $2000/mo towards investments. It's probably a smaller total return than your method, but it's way less leveraged.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#388

Post by c7DJTLrn »

I gave my notice today with an unofficial job offer. The acquisition changed the atmosphere of the company and slowed us down. The parent company swore not to change us yet they did and started pushing us to adopt all of their systems for no good reason. When I started there it was kind of still in the startup phase and was quite a lot of fun - not anymore. One sad thing about this industry is that almost wherever you go is going to be beholden to some massive entity or at the very least a board of people who just want to make money even at the detriment of the product.

The other element is salary. My salary just wasn't keeping up with inflation and I've benefited greatly by moving on.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#390

Post by steveBK123 »

chris11 wrote: post #359
strgcmc wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH, reading this as a manager, I have to admit I feel like asking my engineers to take on SOME of these beyond-just-the-code duties... is a good thing? Obviously there are a bunch of caveats, and nuances to whether you want an IC engineer to be 100% coding and 0% talking to customers or doing admin (this seems bad), or is it 90% vs 10% (maybe okay), or 80/20 (sweet spot?), 50/50 (concerning), 20/80 (bad again), etc.…

Same. As an IC I like ownership. I'd be fine with most of that list assuming it was related to something I owned. I may not specifically like some task, but I'm fine doing it if it's because I'm the person responsible for something. The biggest issue I would have with that list is the description of the scrum setup, and being directly assigned tickets. I find it more engaging if I'm given or find bigger problems to s…

Yes I love ownership as an IC.

It's more that I spend near-zero time on any coding anymore, but also have very little visibility into the wider strategy (because there kind of isn't one).

So I am tasked to have work for my customer(s) / 2-3 devs on loan to me, planned out for a few months. However my manager doesn't really give us what his quarterly goals are most quarters. Product team doesn't publish them very often either.

In order of time spent in applications top to bottom it looks something like - Zoom, Slack, Email, Jira, Confluence, Sharepoint, Gitlab, VSCode.

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