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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?

#731

Post by mym1990 »

drdeadringer wrote: post #719
mym1990 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TIL there are colleges who actually have a class dedicated to the topic of negotiation. Is this "new", say within the past 15-20 years?

I took it back in 2012 at a fairly large but run of the mill public college, but it seemed like a fairly mature class. I would imagine that given it’s prevalence in intelligence communities, it has probably been offered for a while, but maybe not everywhere.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#732

Post by mym1990 »

javitury wrote: post #530
mym1990 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was one of my favorite classes too! I remember that BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) was the most important factor (but the least interesting, it can't be improved as a skill). If the figures of employees switching jobs are as high as they say, that means either lots of impossible negotiations (misfits) or lots of negotiation failures.

Same, good ole BATNA! No better BATNA than being able to walk away from the table.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#733

Post by minton »

Thorrez wrote: post #681
minton wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IC = independent contractor?

Individual contributor. So writing code yourself, not managing other people.

Thanks. I have never heard that term. At my company, we’d just call that a programmer/developer/engineer.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#735

Post by geekster777 »

NiagaraThistle wrote: post #206

I left my job last may. I was a web developer at a branding /marketing agency. The office/people were great, no complaints about the work place at all. But after 5 years (and a similar stretch as an in-house before that), I just felt VERY burnt out. Every day was the same, projects were meaningless, coding wasn't challenging, I felt like an imposter and bored at the same time, I wanted to build my own 'thing' and fel…

Man, I felt this hard and I'm surprised burnout isn't on the poll. For me, I have no real complaints about my team or work, and the ones I do have ping me more as a symptom of burnout - e.g. I'll get frustrated that the team likes to over engineer, when realistically it's to a small enough degree to never meaningfully impact maintenance costs. The work is chill, I work fewer than 8 hours a day and get pretty decent praise. But still I want to leave. I even get paid more than I will in most places, but it doesn't matter because I can't make myself feel anything but dread at working somewhere else. I just want to take 3-12 months to reset. Luckily, I have few enough obligations right now that I should be able to manage that. I just want to make it another 40 days (but who's counting) until yearly bonus and equity pay out.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#736

Post by ericmcer »

jollybean wrote: post #568
ericmcer wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been surprised how emotionally unaware many of my managers are. They are engineers who moved to management and seem to think reading a bunch of books on management will make them adept at the social skills needed to read and adapt to individuals and a teams emotional state. Compensation is huge but good software devs are all making enough to where a 20-30% swing in either direction isn't going to make or break…

"Loved what I was doing" "and felt endeared of my manager" "our goals" So 1 and 3 are a little bit more objective, you can determine those on your own. But #2? If you're worried about your managers 'EQ' - why do you not contemplate your own? Do you assume a lack of visceral empathy from your manager means that they 'don't care' - and - even if they didn't care that much, why do you care? It's nice when my manager say…

I wasn't saying a manager should need to babysit the emotional state of all the team members, but I think they should be generally socially adept. I have had many managers who were unable to engage meaningfully in any way. People who could eagerly analyze my Meyers Briggs type but would be unable to talk about their vacation. My last manager would unintentionally haze new employees when they asked questions in meetings, he just could not express compassion and understanding with his face/tone so he seemed belittling and annoyed with them.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#737

Post by ironmagma »

The reason is that employers are not communicating with each other, competing effectively. Instead of granting raises, they would rather see someone quit, then gradually (or not gradually) raise their offerings and train a new person. It makes no sense because they still have to pay a higher salary and now they have to train someone, but that’s corporate America for you.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#738

Post by ta988 »

Because I was in academia and it was an unhappy place full of politics, over inflated egos, backstabs, friends hiring, pressure for meaningless things. And half if not more of published papers in my field were overhyped in-vitro experiments with no real world applications. You have seen that cannabis and covid one this week? That's a typical example of that, lots of publicity around experimental artifacts with no biological relevance. I am super happy to have left this insanity.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#739

Post by LightG »

The company I worked at was great for 3 years. 2021 was a year where we were left - almost criminally - understaffed and the remainder employees picked up a huge amount of bits of others peoples roles. Rehiring was slow, despite available resources. WFH was cancelled at short notice. No obvious reward for carrying the compay for 6-12 months.

Employers, we'll only take so much.

I'll be gone within 6 weeks.

Re: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

#740

Post by webmaven »

maxsilver wrote: post #435
steveBK123 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many roles / too many hats is far too common and why I find it hard to stay anywhere more than 4-5 years. As a senior IC in a super-flat & growing org.. I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one. Management administrivia I accumulate administrative things my manager doesn't want to do & pushes down I do unofficially own a part o…

> I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one. This is also me. Except I really like it. But I'm not sure what to do about it, it can reflect super poorly on a resume for some reason. "Oh, your applying to be a Senior Engineer? Look at all this product management and developer manager experience on your resume, you must not really be…

> I've not heard of a job name/title/role that accurately represents this sort of work, even though companies generally seem to like it, if I can somehow get through their application process.

I think you will find that generalists are valued in extremely small orgs like startups, skunk works, spin-offs, and the like. Titles, when accurate, are likely to be vague (eg. Founding Employee). As organizations grow, roles tend to specialize, and generalists are undervalued, but reliable long term career success still tends to accrue to folks that have t-shaped[0] skill sets that allow them to be extremely productive in their area of specialization, and extremely effective at collaborating with other specialists across the organization.

You seem to be getting dismissed as a dilettante, though it is being couched in terms of your expertise in whatever the person you're talking to doesn't feel qualified to assess, or whatever they aren't looking for in the role they are seeking to fill.

There is, however, more than one way to specialize over the course of a career other than your role in an organization per-se. For example, you can develop domain expertise in an industry (finance, healthcare, legal, telecom, entertainment, retail, agriculture), market (eg. regional VARs, enterprise software, small businesses), delivery model (SaaS, information products, durable goods), or product/service category (content management systems, adtech, databases, business intelligence). Don't go crazy with combining these into something too hyper-specific, obviously.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills

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