Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

I stopped working because my savings have exceeded my capacity to project into the future

The meta for everyone in software development is to change jobs every two to three years to increase your income.

But people generally leave when the company stops being fun for you . I doubled my income at a job I enjoy after leaving another company and joining a startup and doing some freelancing in crypto / hyperledger software prototyping. I also lucked out since I was hired in 2019 and I paid all of my credit card debt and my investments made my net worth increase to $200k.

Just this week I chose to move laterally within a company. But that does entail leaving my former role, so I think the psychology is similar.

I had been working in a game development role, developing gameplay features. The position I moved to is developing service infrastructure for the game developers.

For a bit of history, my software career started at this company developing tools for the customer support department (I actually originally worked in customer support and my development promotion came about because I was developing tools for myself and my teammates). That went on for a number of years and I enjoyed it. I also did a bit of anti-cheating work, which I pushed for, so that was a good time too. Then I was placed onto this game feature role without any say in the matter.

I knew even before this change occurred that I don't care about commercial game development. I have plenty of amateur game development experience, but it's not something I have any interest in doing all day every day, especially when the motivation is commercial rather than artistic, and especially especially when higher-level decision makers relentlessly interfere. What I care about to the extent I can happily do it on a daily basis is making tools that make those around me more effective, pretty much regardless of what they're doing, because that makes the people around me happier.

So when I was asked if I was interested in this role, although I negotiated terms a little bit, basically I realized I had no actual leverage because just the work itself was such an appealing change to me. Incidentally I did get a substantial raise, but I'd made up my mind before that was even presented.

I also had some minor frustrations with the team I left, but I honestly think the team itself was on a promising trajectory, just the larger game development organization they were in (and my new team is outside of) was not. So I suppose in the "People don't quit jobs, they quit managers" frame, I quit the senior leadership of the game.

I like the notion of breaking job satisfaction into "motivators" and "hygiene factors" (Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory [1]).

Motivators actively cause job satisfaction. Things like finding personal fulfillment, meaningful work, and other top-of-Maslow's-hierarchy stuff.

Hygiene factors cause dissatisfaction in their absence, but aren't standalone motivators. Salary probably fits in this bucket - if you learn that you're underpaid, you're likely to feel demotivated and look for work elsewhere. If you learn that you're overpaid, that can cause dissatisfaction too (feeling like you have to serve out the rest of a prison sentence until your shares/options vest is pretty common in our industry).

Compensation isn't everything, but if it seems unfair, it's absolutely enough to motivate people to make changes. I think we're seeing a reevaluation of labor market expectations with the whole Great Resignation thing, where those who are in demand are realizing just how demanded their skills are (and getting pissed off that they're undercompensated in their $current_job), and the old generation you speak of is trotting forward with their fingers in their ears, blinded by normalcy bias to the fundamental shift happening in front of them - a big labor market awakening.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory

My anecdote is that because of a large stock decline since starting, unless my company gives an unheard of refresher grant, then my income is going down something like 25-30%. They're no longer competitive because they have infrequent comp adjust cycles and other companies pay target comp with today's stock price. I think people who start new jobs now are going to make bank when the tech sector recovers, albeit maybe a few years.