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“Great resignation” wave coming for companies

axios.com

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Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#411

Post by mattgreenrocks »

dreen wrote: post #7

Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too? I've never had a gap year, it was all school, then immigration, work, university, more work. Any holiday time you fly back home. I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing. edit: thank you…

FYI, frame this as freelance consulting when you apply for your next job. You can talk about wanting something new and striking out on your own for a bit.

IMO what you find out is a year is a long time without work from a time perspective. Hope you enjoy your year off!

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#412

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

reverse_list wrote: post #400
tgtweak wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the alternative perspective and productive-pessimism, but anecdotally in my immediate social circle of engineers, 5 have changed jobs - all for substantial upgrades, and not 1 of them was for a job that required office presence or downgrade in quality of environment. The last year has been so strong for online tech that there is a heavy vacuum effect on the available talent. FAANG are struggling to fill…

These comments about how the market is on fire for developers always make me sad. Not your fault, but outside the US (and maybe western/northern Europe) you get lowballed hard, even with years of experience. And the supposedly lower CoL doesn't make up for it, at all, not even remotely. I'm not even talking about getting crazy bay area compensations, I'm talking about hoping something better than a $25k-$45k range fo…

Out of curiosity, where are you located?

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#413

Post by handrous »

TameAntelope wrote: post #264
austincheney wrote: post #66

I was looking around recently, particularly at startups, but then chose to stop. Here is my reasoning: * I am currently employed with great benefits. If I am going to throw that away there needs to be something of value in exchange: leadership position, architecture, or some other increase of responsibilities. I wasn’t seeing this. * If your primary platform or language is JavaScript everybody wants a tool jockey. Th…

Regarding your second point, I think it's good to know what interests you, but there's a lot of quality ideas out there that don't have hard tech components, and if they invent hard tech problems to keep their engineers interested, they're probably not going to last very long. IMHO, the "all JavaScript tech stack, connected together by a cloud provider via tooling" pattern is probably among the faster ways to get an…

IMO the only way to make that stuff engaging is to move "up" a level and be the one picking the tools to solve the problem, interacting with users/clients, that kind of thing. Basically, start your own business or become a product manager at a place where product manager is a fairly expansive role.

Otherwise, I agree, it's all of: fucking boring; frustrating; and unrewarding. But, it's also most of the market for developers. :-/

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#414

Post by austincheney »

TameAntelope wrote: post #264
austincheney wrote: post #66

I was looking around recently, particularly at startups, but then chose to stop. Here is my reasoning: * I am currently employed with great benefits. If I am going to throw that away there needs to be something of value in exchange: leadership position, architecture, or some other increase of responsibilities. I wasn’t seeing this. * If your primary platform or language is JavaScript everybody wants a tool jockey. Th…

Regarding your second point, I think it's good to know what interests you, but there's a lot of quality ideas out there that don't have hard tech components, and if they invent hard tech problems to keep their engineers interested, they're probably not going to last very long. IMHO, the "all JavaScript tech stack, connected together by a cloud provider via tooling" pattern is probably among the faster ways to get an…

The business should be inventing the problems, because that is (hopefully) driving the revenue that keeps you employed. Usually the business has all kinds of wonderful ideas of which some are practical and vetted while others are a distraction. If you are thinking in terms of automation, internal training, and service fulfillment you probably aren't properly aligning solutions to expense reduction. The benefit of writing original software is innovation and IP (even if open source and liberally licensed) that can generate additional revenue for the business.

If you current approach is entirely dependent upon tools it will be boxed in to a set of configurations and flexibility is lost. From what I have seen on HN the greatest challenge for most early stage startups is finding product-market fit, which means you need to pivot at a moment's notice. That ability to pivot is far more significant than whether you can have a website up in 2 days versus 2 weeks.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#415

Post by vidarh »

ryandrake wrote: post #388
Wonnk13 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Never piss off your employees by taking away something they feel entitled to. I've read one of the easiest ways to break moral in an office is to simply take away the snacks. Forget nap pods, or walking desks- don't touch my clif bars!!

Steve Blank wrote about this: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

I like the one who suggested the answer to the question of how much the free drinks cost should be "less than the cost of hiring a single engineer".

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#417

Post by wsc981 »

the_fire_friar wrote: post #188
wsc981 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2016 I took about half a year off, staying in Thailand and working on my hobby projects. Was one of the best, most happy periods in my life. It made me more focused on trying to reach early “retirement” so I can work fulltime on my hobbies. Hopefully I can achieve this goal before I’m 45 years old.

Me too! I made this site to help: https://fiers.co

Nice, seems like a useful tool!

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#418

Post by baseballdork »

ls612 wrote: post #294
obstacle1 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trust fund crowd You're on a discussion board filled with software developers and tech employees generally. The vast majority of such workers make a lot of money. If you're working in tech and you can't bank enough to take 6m-1yr off, you're doing your finances wrong. It doesn't require a trust fund to avoid the hedonic treadmill and save up.

Heck, I’m a poor grad student who gets a stipend from my program and is lucky enough to have parents willing and able to pay my rent. My total income including that family support is probably around $40k and I saved a ton of money this past year since I couldn’t do anything. I can only imagine how much someone in my situation with a FAANG income would have saved.

Obviously if your parents are paying your largest expense, you can save a ton of money. I would assume most people aren't that fortunate.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#419

Post by jkaplowitz »

refurb wrote: post #342
admissionsguy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not getting health insurance in most European countries unless you are working or registered as unemployed and remain at disposal of the local job centre. And the whole meme that a 65% tax rate +25% vat on most products on top of it (I am in Sweden) is somehow worth it financially because "fReE HeAlThCaRe" is laughable.

Indeed. In Canada if you’re out of the country longer than 6 months you’re not longer insured (in Canada). And in fact, insurance doesn’t cover you outside the country anyways.

Varies by province. In Quebec, they have a similar absence rule to what you described (for being outside Quebec even if in another Canadian province), but they entirely exclude absences of under 21 days from the calculation, and they have a bunch of exceptions, including a "once every 7 years" exception for miscellaneous personal reasons including leisure vacations that just requires you to notify them in order to qualify. And in theory they will reimburse expenses outside of Quebec, even outside of Canada, but only at Quebec's very low rates.

Still, yeah, very different than how US health insurance works, agreed.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#420

Post by jlokier »

ghaff wrote: post #171
NikolaNovak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the advice is a reasonable thing to consider; a lot of responses (and presumably downvotes) are either "It doesn't matter to potential employers", which is categorically untrue - it'll matter to some, raise a question to others, and be irrelevant to others yet. How you answer that question is important, and it's fascinating that other half of comments is, basically, "Lie!". When I'm interviewing candidates, a…

Someone who has been doing "independent consulting" for six months or a year is pretty transparently obfuscating that they were unemployed. I'd probably view it in a better light--not that there's anything wrong with doing or trying to do some consulting on the side--if they were just open about taking some time off.

Heh, I did "independent consulting" for over a decade.

It's also the most densely packed section of my resume because it was by far the most interesting and diverse range of work in that time.

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