Live data from Hacker News

“Great resignation” wave coming for companies

axios.com

71–80 of 1001 posts

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#71
post #9

Hiring is just picking up. If you didn’t grab the best people during the pandemic because you had an incredible glut of qualified people applying, good luck doing that shit now.

During the pandemic it was almost impossible to find qualified engineers.

Because everyone is clinging to their jobs in times of uncertainty.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just w…

Learn to prevaricate better... And meet a friend who will do it for you. "Yeah, I was the CTO of a startup. I learned a lot. Call this guy who was the CEO, he'll tell you about it."

>"Yeah, I was the CTO of a startup. I learned a lot. Call this guy who was the CEO, he'll tell you about it."

Ah yes, an intricate lie. The very foundation of a solid working relationship.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#73

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…

What do you mean by “tools”? Generally I think of “tools” as anything that assists you in building, deploying, or operating a (production) service, but not the service itself. For my definition, the firebase CLI is a tool, but Google Cloud Firestore (a no-SQL data store) is not. At the places you talked to, was everything service-y left to a separate back-end/infra team?

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#75
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…

I've done this twice: the first time back in 2007 when I got made redundant and decided to use the time and money to study and indulge in my dream of writing a book; more recently (which is still ongoing) to recover from burnout and rediscover the joy of coding.

I do not consider this time to be "gap year", but rather an investment in, and a reward for, myself. Why do I need such luxuries? Because time is short and nothing is destined. None of us are guaranteed to make it to retirement age. My Dad died when he was 54; my brother when he was 53. My sister survived her heart attack when she was 60 - luckily it happened when she was at work; she was a cleaner at a hospital.

Keep a roof over your head, make sure you have enough food to live on. Don't leave it until the last minute to start looking for paid work. Most importantly, enjoy your time away from the capitalist treadmill - with good fortune this can become an investment in yourself that you'll never regret!

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#76
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…

>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? Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just w…

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 gap year is a data point - no more, no less. It may lead to more substantial data points, or it may be a non-issue. If you do as many here suggest and lie through your teeth about it ("I was a CTO! I was working on startup! Independent consulting"), you may get away with it, but likely not (even if you think you did); and if caught in prevaricating or lying about your experience and work activities, that is a far far bigger and more immediate red flag than the gap year itself.

Also - sure, knowledge doesn't expire, but oh boy skills do get rusty! A year into my new management-y role, I felt how rusty my sysadmin skills were getting. Two years in and you shouldn't give me root access again without some catchup :-).

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#77
post #70

What I don't understand is that everyone still has roughly the same expenses as they did before. The basic economics of rent, groceries, child care, car payments, etc have not changed. I'd think people might move from one industry to another. But how can a wave of people afford to quit? I guess people are living off of their savings, but that seems like a temporary solution. At the least I'd expect to see a similar w…

> The basic economics of rent, groceries, child care, car payments, etc have not changed.

For some people, they have though. Quite a few people moved out of the bay area/NYC, some have partners that lost jobs and have chosen to focus on child care instead, some have sold 1 of 2 cars because remote work no longer requires a commute.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#78
post #68

An anecdote: a handful engineers I've worked with (and they're all high quality) have resigned from traditional bigtech to work in open source finance within crypto. It's as though pandemic solitude gave many the mind-time to ponder their authentic values hierarchy. I'm glad more bright minds will be spending less time working directly or indirectly on ads. It's hard to watch.

What's the business model to work within open source crypto as a full time job?

Crypto organizations hire, give grants & ofc anyone can buy a token [if there's one present] & start writing code / content etc. to make that token more valuable.

For many, their wealth is derived more from crypto / token capital gain than traditional income. Its increased risk no doubt. More upside & downside.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing. You hear a heck of a lot more about it on HN than happens in reality. Maybe I don't hang out with the trust fund crowd enough but I don't know ANYONE who's taken a "gap year" where they weren't doing something for ~40hr/wk in order to make a buck. I know a few people who didn't jump right into career stuff after college…

In Germany, gap years after school or sometimes university are pretty common (at least for the middle class). They do often work, but rarely in a field related to what they studied or want to do. Instead, it’s travel-financing jobs. It used to be that it was more a thing for women, but that probably changed since draft was abandoned (before that the gap year for men would usually have been military service or alterna…

Are you sure about middle class O_o

Higher-middle and upper class more likely? Kids which need to earn their money usually go straight into apprenticeship or university and earn money promptly.

Re: “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

#80
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is horrible advice. I’ve hired all sorts of people with voluntary time off on their resume. Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year. Life is about more than just working, if you have the money to take time off to enjoy your life you shouldn’t not do it out of fear.

>Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year You're right, it doesn't. But it brings up all sorts of questions in the mind of your interviewer as to the true nature of your departure, and it immediately puts you at a huge disadvantage.

As an interviewer I recognize people might take time off work for a variety of reasons and never give a lot of thought to unemployment gaps. I’ve found very short stays at previous positions (say less than a year) to be more of a warning; I want people who are likely to stick around.
Post reply on HN