5 years ago I hit a burnout point and took a year off work. It was a huge perspective shift. I realized that my day-to-day of a rushed commute to work, a stressful and distracting office, thimble-deep coworker relationships and a life completely orientated around doing the above was an insane waste of my short time on Planet Earth. I reoriented my life around family, remote work, flexibility and balance. My quality of life has hugely improved and there is no turning back the clock.
When I saw what the pandemic was doing to nearly every professional office worker, I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in. Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.
> I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in
The headline and the anecdote in the opening paragraph of the article are somewhat misleading. The statistics about millions of people resigning aren’t from people choosing to leave the workforce or take sabbaticals.
It’s mostly people who are simply changing jobs due to the booming economy creating new opportunities and hiring pressure. Millions sounds like a big number, but in a country with hundreds of millions of people it’s only a couple percent of the workforce. Even during normal times, a million or more people resign according to these statistics, again mostly to change jobs.
To put it in perspective: The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, which is consistent with a booming economy. That means only about an additional 1% of workers are choosing to change jobs each month, which isn’t exactly the upheaval this article makes it sound like.
1. Even though the economy may be booming, that doesn't have to mean job changes aren't also driven by re-evaluation of priorities. The two may be complementary.
2. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. People that I would not have expected to leave - "heart of the team" kinds of people. This is after 4-5 devs (in a department of ~60) already made the choice to leave for other opportunities in the past few months.
Some relevant details: large SV-based SaaS with excellent financials, regarded as a good place to work, etc.
> The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, ... That means only about an additional 1% of workers ...
It's also 50% more workers, if I'm reading that right, which seems like it's potentially a big swing/change.
Similar to recent treatment of the housing boom in the media. People couldn’t afford homes before the pandemic so it’s unlikely they can now. The current market frenzy is what you expect with people moving. It’s not an increase in wealth of housing supply. It’s also heavily driven by speculation from large institutions who are capitalizing on restricted housing supply and rapid inflation. What it is not is some new era where everyone can now afford to buy a home or quit work for a year.
> Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no.
It's important to remember that everyone also had a one year traumatic experience. Physically confined for a year with the threat or reality of unpredictable agonizing death to you or loved ones in the middle of an absolutely insane US political situation is going to take a toll on people.
There's this media narrative that the past year gave everyone this beautiful moment of clarity about how to live their lives. There is some truth to that. But it's also true that it's given people a whole shit load of psychological damage to work through and I wouldn't be certain that all of these people making radical life changes are 100% in their right minds.
I think we're going to see a lot of lifestyle churn over the next few years as people deal with what they went through but any one who claims that the current rapid velocity of any particular pendulum is somehow a straight linear projection is lying to themselves. I look forward to articles a year from now about this "unexpected movement" of people going back to in-office jobs, or working longer hours at shit jobs because they burned through all of their savings, or just wanting more financial stability.
I don't think we can make many reliable extrapolations today based on the aggregate behavior of a huge number of psychologically traumatized people, while the trauma is still not even over. Articles like this read to me like someone during the Blitz seeing victory gardens and confidently predicting that after WII every Londoner is going to become a farmer.
I'm not saying that things will return to any pre-COVID state, just that after the shock we've been through, the entire interconnected spring-mass system of our lives has in no way settled down into a stable state yet. Shit is still chaotic.
Right, I'm from a small town myself and moved to a big city. Small towns are very convenient but life is more about having a convenient commute, easy parking and a big back yard.
I had the same experience [0]. The tunnel vision from work is so strong, that you forget about what's really important. Now, the office feels like a past life - I do not miss the commute, unnecessary meetings or facade of comradery. Ideally I don't have ever to go back to work, but even if I do the perspective shift has made sure I'll do it in a more balanced way next time.
I wrote a similar blog post [1] about why I'm taking a sabbatical and it's really fascinating to compare motivations.
> My thesis is that if I focus on enjoying the journey, everything else will follow.
I wrote:
> I don't have a single big project in mind for my sabbatical... I do have a single overarching theme, however: joie de vivre. Everything that I do, even the mundane stuff (especially the mundane stuff), I'm going to focus on enjoying it fully. How you do anything is how you do everything, as the Buddhists say. I have come to believe that the person who can enjoy whatever they're doing and make that joy contagious will actually end up accomplishing the most. Yet even if I don't accomplish anything, I'll still be joyful, so what would it matter anyways?
Hearing stuff like this a lot recently, I always think about the often repeated vision that Keynes had, saying that we (his grandchildren) would be working 15 hour work weeks. I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea.
Before I'm barraged with "what about people in the service industry!?" I do confess, I'm not sure what the argument would be - indeed, some people are perhaps only working part time at those positions, perhaps maybe around that 15 hour figure. But for those who work full time in the service industry, I guess I'm not sure what there leverage could be - raising the minimum wage perhaps? But that argument is age old and I've heard pros and cons both for and against. Also, in a country like the US where are social programs are far behind most of places like the EU for example, it's especially hard to argue or expect anything to actually become a reality for some of those service jobs. I guess only time will tell.
> I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea.
Not sure we're duped by the 40 hr / week idea so much as we're slaves to our desire for consumer goods. That and housing is very expensive now which means more work to pay for it.
The 15 hour work week prediction seems to have been an oversimplification unfortunately. Just the introduction of varied scarcity of labor and scalability (you try getting enough doctors for them to work 15 hours a week), let alone lack of "baton passability" of tasks between people. On a personal level an obstacle is the labor market's demands for those who want uncommon arrangements.
As a current status quo most jobs which would accept 15 hour weeks and more employees are lower valued and lower productivity ones. More retirement hobby jobs as a model than even something to sustain a spartan lifestyle. Higher paying and higher productivity jobs tend to be scarcer.
As we subconsciously blend anecdata from HN into our mental models, remember that we self-selecting to visit here commenting are already extreme outliers.
And also anecdotally, every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience, and is yearning to get back to the office - most for a full 5 days a week.
Anecdotally - I'm 30(just), I'm leading a team of people under 30, and everyone is saying that they cannot imagine ever working in the office again. Our company announced they will expect people to come in for at least 2 days a week from September and we're extremely unhhappy about it. If I get an offer for full remote from someone I can't say I won't be tempted.
I'm quite definitely under 30, and I just quit in order to stay remote. I'm so much more relaxed, and I can spend actual quality time with my wife and friends. I'm not sure why anyone would want to go back.
Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds.
We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings.
I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.
My own anecdote tracks. Never thought about the age correlation but most of my team are early 30s and younger. That group has been very negative about the remote experience. I'm much older and while I didn't like it at first, I'm in the camp of people who don't ever want to go back to an office. The people who are in between age-wise are a bit of a mix.
I wonder if there are regional issues at play too.
My office is in Manhattan. It's been my observation that few people that work in Manhattan actually live in Manhattan. Nearly everyone I know of dreads having to go back to the office, and one of the primary reasons is because of the nightmare commute into the island of Manhattan via the various clogged up chokepoints.
> every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience
I mean, we've been through major lockdowns/curfews/personal freedom restrictions, lots of people got sick, lots of people died, most non digital entertainment ceased to exist, most sports couldn't be practiced...
imho you can't pin point "remote work" as the main cause of why people felt miserable in the last few months
This is because a lot of them have social lives that revolve around the workplace, usually because they're still at their first or second place of employment and they don't have kids. When work leads to evening dinners and bar runs, it's a vital part of the social experience. When you work with a bunch of seasoned developers in their 30s and 40s, you find that they have taken ownership of their social lives and their priorities after hours often do not include you.
Any comment like this is immediately hit with a flood of "well I love working from home". I'm under 30 and absolutely miserable working from home. The lack of any social interaction with my coworkers combined with a personal lack of a social network outside of work has left me lonely and isolated. On a positive note the lockdown has pushed me to begin exercising, start eating healthier, stop drinking, and start learning a second language in prep for a long sabbatical abroad.
You kidding? I loved this pandemic so much, i want to marry it and have children with it!
No pointless work "morale events"; no wasting hours a day on commute; ability to do something useful while a build is building, like putting in a load of laundry instead of just reading HN while waiting; and spending a lot more time with my GF as she is also WFHing.
I suspect you are speaking only about people who are unable/unwilling to put effort into the "life" part of "work-life balance" and thus depend on the "work" part to give them what "life" gives to all others: companionship/friendship/fun/purpose
Commutes: heat, stress, grey, pavement, dirt and chemicals, danger, frustration, noise; all things that come to mind with commutes. Never again, I hope.
I had no special circumstances, I just made a choice to put years of savings to work for myself immediately instead of in the uncertain future. I sold everything and lived simply. Not everyone could do it, but many could who think they can't.
Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what, and even its worst places - its prison cells - compare favorably to the finest hotels of other countries. You have so many options you feel constantly overwhelmed, stressing about making bad choices because everything your primitive heart could ever desire is not merely available, but plentiful and cheap. And it'll recruit you if you're not careful. Money fails to motivate when you have enough of it regardless. Life wants meaning.
Imagine having all the time in the world, just thinking about everything. Your whole life.
Similar story. I left tech for about 5 months back in early Spring to refocus after delivery of a huge project (contract). Now looking at re-entering with a product/company I actually want to contribute to.
The first guy in the article is a dev. There's never been a better time to find work as a dev. Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before. On top of it all, if your firm wants people back in the office soon, now is the time to do loads of remote interviews so that you can keep being remote.
I was interviewing recently and almost everyone is at least partly remote, with a huge number of 100% remote. Even people that I know don't like the idea are bending and giving two or three days remote.
On the restaurant-type work, I'd say a bunch of people have been given a breather from the treadmill, and they're using it to look around. I see this as mostly positive, but it does suggest that a lot of people are completely swamped, working all the time, spending everything. The little bit of credit they got from the pandemic payment has unlocked a great reckoning with the labor market. Previously if you didn't like your job, you were screwed. Somehow find time to interview/upskill, or somehow jump the gap with your savings.
> Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before.
I may be naive, but I guess this office-work-exodus would result to improvements in office spaces in general to attract devs (or other employees in tech). This would also make it easier for people who are looking to move to the US to find office jobs, since the competition is less fierce. Am I off mark here and too naive?
Most people would be happier in offices with a door. Managers have decided that THEIR work is the only work that requires privacy and quiet.
Employees often equate their own job satisfaction by the differences between how their managers treat themselves versus how they treat the people under them. When you have your own office with a door and a white board and have a company card to expense your meals while your devs are working with their headphones on because of the noise level in their cubicles, you're going to have a problem.
First part wrong. Doesn't make any sense to try to improve an office to attract devs when so many devs are leaving the office. Office space improvements would be expensive right now due to various factors: labor shortage, materials inflation, etc. Plus the cheaper move is to snap up fancier existing office spaces since offices are in lower demand now, thus the price of existing ones will have decreased.
Second part you have a point. This is the best time to move to the US on an H1B. If you're an int'l student, this is the time to look for that office job that will hold you till a green card.
I'm in the UK too. But also remote means you can get a job "based" anywhere. Check out some US firms for instance, many are hiring and are happy with euro time zones.
I'm one of these. I'm an allrounder software dev in his late fourties, "lured" into a non-software middle management position by the promise of money and stability a few years ago.
In practice, the money has never materialized because our sector took a big hit and much of that promise was tied to incentives based on the company's success. I can't really blame anyone for this, but that's strike one as far as job satisfaction goes.
Second strike, I love writing code, and I don't get to do that a lot anymore. I'm listing these "pre-existing conditions" because I believe it's common for us quitters to have other areas of dissatisfaction that hadn't been enough to drive us over the edge by themselves.
Third strike, while my company does not support WFH after Covid, I did get to experience at least a partial WFH program, and it was absolutely wonderful. There's a problem though: I would absolutely like to continue working from home, but I also want to work on my own projects, on my own terms, on my own schedule. A traditional full time job is not compatible with that.
So I put in my notice for the end of this year, to allow current company projects to come to a conclusion and/or hand them off. I want to stress that for a man in my age group, with no significant savings or other safety net, this is extremely scary. It's just that this Angst is outweighed by the thought of staying on the treadmill hoping for an eventual reward that may never come and seeing the little time I have left drain away.
"...for a man in my age group, with no significant savings or other safety net, this is extremely scary"
I'm sorry you are in this situation. I applaud your self-awareness, and suspect you have enough skills and discipline to turn this around in the next few years. You may never get to the point of having millions tucked away for retirement, but do hope you can get to a point where you do have 'significant savings'. I'd measure that by your measure of 'extremely scary'.
My wife and I have no kids, so 'saving' has been somewhat easier 'by default' than some of our peers. That said, it's not automatic, and I know plenty of folks who are high earners who will manage to spend it all without 'significant savings' to speak of.
Thank you! Don't have too much pity though, I'm doing okay. I live in the EU, no spouse, no kids, no commitments really. Not planning ahead is 100% my fault, but it's not an existential problem (yet). It's just time to finally stop spending everything as it comes in.
It's kind of obnoxious to even admit this, but I always assumed I'd be a successful person at some point down the line. This was of course utterly ridiculous and led to some really bad decisions. It was exploitable by other people, too. My work made a few people rich, and while I was always compensated for my time, I never got a proportional cut from the outcomes. But it wasn't a bad life, and there is still some fuel in the tank :)
This article opens with a person experiencing burnout and choosing to leave a job where he needed to commute 1.5 hours per day, but the story isn’t really about people quitting work or leaving the workforce.
The majority of people resigning their jobs are simply changing jobs, and the article doesn’t provide any evidence that people are changing to remote work in large numbers.
The biggest driver of the increase in job changes is simply the booming economy. We poured stimulus money into the economy at unprecedented rates and this has created economic booms at every level. Companies are scrambling to hire and wages reflect this, so people are taking the opportunity to switch up their careers and collect a pay bump.
Most of the business world appears to be snapping back to business as normal at a rapid rate, but with a booming economy pouring fuel on the fire. The media has been pushing narratives that COVID changes everything and that we’re entering a whole new world, but aside from companies adding a little more flexibility it seems most are eager to simply return to business as usual.
On the ground, I’m not seeing a massive shift toward remote work like I keep reading about in these articles. Yes, there are somewhat more remote jobs, but companies are largely eager to return to in-office work. Even many employees I know are eager to get back to the office because remote isn’t for everyone.
Remember the housing market boom right before the bubble popped they propped it up with stimulus money everybody was like oh wow this is great houses are such a low price...... You're basically talking about the same thing there
No. I do remember people being like, 'holy shit, houses are getting so expensive' in the years leading up to the bubble popping. And knowing a few people stuck in their houses after real estate agents convinced them to buy at way more than market value.
What stimulus are you talking about? Mortgage rates were laughably high by today's standards. Maybe the $600 bush tax cut? I remember some first time home-buyers programs, but those were largely in response to 2008.
I have often worked remotely for years, but...I'm a contractor/consultant, and a programmer. I am unemployed several months out of the year, typically, and I am always intentionally short-to-medium term where I work.
I fear that many of the people demanding remote work now, will be surprised when (not if) the first layoffs come, and they find out that the person who's in the office every day is more awkward to fire than the remote person. Me, I'm always temporary, so I know this and am ok with it. I fear many of the people looking for remote work now think it will be just like office work, except they get to work at home. It's not. It's a much more tenuous relationship with your employer, and you have to always assume (e.g. in your budget) that you can/will lose your paycheck with little or no notice. If you're ok with that kind of perpetual instability, great, but I'm not sure most of the people looking for remote work now are aware of this tradeoff.
This is admirable but the truth is that these jobs will not disappear, they will simply be outsourced abroad. There’s swaths of competent people abroad that are happy to take your (overpaid) place and the major shift to remote work tools has made it all the easier to blend in your team even if they’re working from another country. On top of this, foreign workers usually get paid 1/3 of the American salary, so the employers are extra incentivized to outsource these jobs.
We'll have to see how that works out in the aggregate.
Here in the US, we pretty much outsourced our manufacturing to China.
This has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure.
A number of folks made a lot of money on this, but a much larger number of folks have really taken it in the shorts. Arguably, a lot of the troubles we've had, over the last decade, have found a root cause in this.
It's no secret. Pretty much everyone knows this, but the will to do something about it is weak.
It's been my experience, that when the pain gets great enough, the change will come. That's not always a good thing. Change like that, more often resembles an amputation, as opposed to a disinfectant swab and some stitches.
This narrative is largely false. Both because nothing was "outsourced" and because american manufacturing is at an all time high.
Automation ended the vast majority of high-labour manufacturing. What was left was only economical to do without automation at extremely low labour costs.
In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation.
>his has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure.
Is this true? I am under the impression that the US still has loads of high end manufacturing, it's just the low end stuff that no longer exists and even then it's partially due to automation
The software field expanded so much that there is a massive need for both in-house developers for tech firms and outsourcing for traditional businesses with legacy systems like banks, insurance etc.
In my experience, outsourced code is almost always harder to maintain and I haven't seen example of successful outsourcing of ongoing code maintenance.
I'm sure there's a lot of variance, but I don't think "outsourced everything" will be practical for most software businesses that place importance on quality of service.
Outsourcing can be great for developing a green-field new initiative, but at some point the in house folks are going to need to learn the new codebase so they can fix bugs, scale, and keep the lights on.
Outsourcing is not exclusive to India. What if they outsource to Italy? Spain? Ukraine? Greece? Hell even Germany.
All of those places have salaries that are a fraction of the typical US salary. US salaries are incredibly ridiculous on the global stage. And all of those places with actually good developers
The first counterargument that comes to my mind is timezones. I was on a team distributed across San Francisco, New York, London, Munich, Australia, Tokyo. Not being able to schedule a meeting time that works for everyone was a neverending source of friction and frustration. In other words while I don't disagree that there is a lot more work that can be outsourced, perhaps we will reach the limit earlier than you expect.
One growing trend in the US is outsourcing to South America. Lots of great value developers down there in the same timezone.
The second issue that still comes up is communication and culture. Successful cross cultural communication requires more clarity in messaging and tasks. It can work and can work well and deliver good quality at great prices, but the obvious savings are partially offset by the higher communication and management costs. Sometimes more than fully offset.
There are tons of competent developers in Central and South America in time zones close to the US. The language/accent barriers as well as cultural differences are much less than say India IMHO. On average the folks I’ve worked with haven’t been as good as US staff, but I bet the gap could close quickly.
Doesn't matter. I'm not sure what time it is in India, the Philippines, or the Czech Republic, but the support teams answer the phone between 8am and 5pm our time.
I’m on a slack channel with other startup founders and just this week I was seeing chatter about how asking rates for Eastern EU devs were skyrocketing lately
The answer is bigger than the question. Almost everyone in the West is overpaid because Western Society reaps the benefits of an underpaid working class on another continent. Out of sight, out of mind.
Yeah, the offshoring boom is over. Everyone is bringing those roles back to the US. The communication, cultural and skill gaps are too great and costs aren’t that much lower anymore. Anyone who has worked on virtual teams will back up how much less productive things are when having to juggle time zones even between the east and west coast of the US, much less different countries without overlapping work hours.
Nobody wants to offshore to India anymore because the business culture at the big body shops is totally unethical by western standards and there’s just an expectation of getting swindled on QoS; so people only ship low-value jobs like customer service over there. And even those are moving to South America for time zone reasons (and the business culture more closely aligns with the US).
From reading the article it seems like the job areas getting hit the hardest would be low level hospitality jobs and on-site jobs with little to no remote opportunity. I imagine those would be the hardest positions to outsource. People quitting their job at McDonalds are in more danger of losing their job to a high school dropout than a foreign agent.
China in 2000 and China in 2021 is like night and day in terms of standard of living, education etc. Just because it didn't work back then doesn't mean it wont work today.
It's really hard to outsource middle management and executive roles, which are the next step for most dev roles. So the outsourcing effect has lots of limitations.
I welcome outsourcing though. I do quality work and know what it's worth and can advocate for myself. Any foreign worker who can do the same is welcome.
On a tangential note, it really feels like we continue to live in a historic time. Maybe it's a completely personal experience but it just seems like so many basic societal assumptions are getting meaningfully challenged or brought into focus. The pandemic panic and subsequent lockdowns focused our relationships with other humans. The racism protests also. The "inner temple" of the US empire getting breached/"violated" focused thought around the existing global political order. Remote work and these supposed waves of resignations focusing thought around capitalism (as mentioned in other comments I'm on a 1-year sabbatical as of this month [1] and know a few people doing or considering the same so I definitely think there is possible truth to the story). All of these things have been bubbling for a long time, no doubt, but the focus on each one seems more intense lately.
A decade is too big of a window. It's tough to pick one decade over another but I do think I could pick one year out of every decade over the others. To put my thought another way, if you think of society as a system, you've got a short period where the rules are being changed, and then we let the system run its course for multiple years. Eventually there are some gross inefficiencies that become too big to ignore and we have another short period where the rules are changed again, and so on.
Agree and it's hard to find cohesive takes which stitch together all these events in a way that make sense, i.e. the analysis includes enough tech-awareness to believe it.
The only stuff I've found which felt in the ballpark of spot-on were:
1) https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-great-weirding
This was a fascinating series of essays that generally walks through why, after "Harambe" in 2016 or whenever, things seemed to have gone off the rails towards something new.
2) Cypherpunk movement's source docs. If I could bold, underline, and highlight this, I would. I have never read any group of literature/essays, especially with publishing dates in the 1990s, that more felt like a post-mortem on the 2014->2021 craziness than cypherpunk docs. I had actually wondered for a while where this core movement went, but the quick answer I've come to is cryptocurrency/e2e messaging projects absorbed a lot of it, and then the the writing often took a turn for the crazy/non-PC in the final 10 yards. But, they so accurately diagnose the growth of virtual communities and their pseudo-governmental influence, digital economy developments and all the second order effects, and so on and so on. If you're looking for people who really saw what was coming, this is the group. One of the good reads: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~wex/panoptic-paper.html
The first thing I said when the $600/week unemployment started rolling out was that people were going to realize how little they were being paid to work, and here we are. It's almost like they didn't know any better.
I'm sure the landscape is different for people already set in their careers or making some decent money, but everyone making minimum wage got to see how little $10/hr actually is.
Where I live, the $300 from the federal gov’t continues until early September but the $300 from the state ends this month, I could be wrong but I assume it’s going to differ moderately from state to state.
At any rate, a lot of people I know that quit have already found or started looking for a different job. Most people aren’t looking to keep living off the system so much as they are looking to find a job that doesn’t pay them _and_ treat them like dirt. Social services companies around here are literally offering $1000+ referrals because they can’t keep group homes staffed or run any community interactions. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that it’s not just about the handouts, it’s about people realizing how atrocious their working conditions were and not wanting to put up with it anymore.
Readit News
When I saw what the pandemic was doing to nearly every professional office worker, I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in. Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.
The headline and the anecdote in the opening paragraph of the article are somewhat misleading. The statistics about millions of people resigning aren’t from people choosing to leave the workforce or take sabbaticals.
It’s mostly people who are simply changing jobs due to the booming economy creating new opportunities and hiring pressure. Millions sounds like a big number, but in a country with hundreds of millions of people it’s only a couple percent of the workforce. Even during normal times, a million or more people resign according to these statistics, again mostly to change jobs.
To put it in perspective: The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, which is consistent with a booming economy. That means only about an additional 1% of workers are choosing to change jobs each month, which isn’t exactly the upheaval this article makes it sound like.
1. Even though the economy may be booming, that doesn't have to mean job changes aren't also driven by re-evaluation of priorities. The two may be complementary.
2. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. People that I would not have expected to leave - "heart of the team" kinds of people. This is after 4-5 devs (in a department of ~60) already made the choice to leave for other opportunities in the past few months.
Some relevant details: large SV-based SaaS with excellent financials, regarded as a good place to work, etc.
It's also 50% more workers, if I'm reading that right, which seems like it's potentially a big swing/change.
It's important to remember that everyone also had a one year traumatic experience. Physically confined for a year with the threat or reality of unpredictable agonizing death to you or loved ones in the middle of an absolutely insane US political situation is going to take a toll on people.
There's this media narrative that the past year gave everyone this beautiful moment of clarity about how to live their lives. There is some truth to that. But it's also true that it's given people a whole shit load of psychological damage to work through and I wouldn't be certain that all of these people making radical life changes are 100% in their right minds.
I think we're going to see a lot of lifestyle churn over the next few years as people deal with what they went through but any one who claims that the current rapid velocity of any particular pendulum is somehow a straight linear projection is lying to themselves. I look forward to articles a year from now about this "unexpected movement" of people going back to in-office jobs, or working longer hours at shit jobs because they burned through all of their savings, or just wanting more financial stability.
I don't think we can make many reliable extrapolations today based on the aggregate behavior of a huge number of psychologically traumatized people, while the trauma is still not even over. Articles like this read to me like someone during the Blitz seeing victory gardens and confidently predicting that after WII every Londoner is going to become a farmer.
I'm not saying that things will return to any pre-COVID state, just that after the shock we've been through, the entire interconnected spring-mass system of our lives has in no way settled down into a stable state yet. Shit is still chaotic.
[0] https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google
> My thesis is that if I focus on enjoying the journey, everything else will follow.
I wrote:
> I don't have a single big project in mind for my sabbatical... I do have a single overarching theme, however: joie de vivre. Everything that I do, even the mundane stuff (especially the mundane stuff), I'm going to focus on enjoying it fully. How you do anything is how you do everything, as the Buddhists say. I have come to believe that the person who can enjoy whatever they're doing and make that joy contagious will actually end up accomplishing the most. Yet even if I don't accomplish anything, I'll still be joyful, so what would it matter anyways?
[1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue
Before I'm barraged with "what about people in the service industry!?" I do confess, I'm not sure what the argument would be - indeed, some people are perhaps only working part time at those positions, perhaps maybe around that 15 hour figure. But for those who work full time in the service industry, I guess I'm not sure what there leverage could be - raising the minimum wage perhaps? But that argument is age old and I've heard pros and cons both for and against. Also, in a country like the US where are social programs are far behind most of places like the EU for example, it's especially hard to argue or expect anything to actually become a reality for some of those service jobs. I guess only time will tell.
Not sure we're duped by the 40 hr / week idea so much as we're slaves to our desire for consumer goods. That and housing is very expensive now which means more work to pay for it.
As a current status quo most jobs which would accept 15 hour weeks and more employees are lower valued and lower productivity ones. More retirement hobby jobs as a model than even something to sustain a spartan lifestyle. Higher paying and higher productivity jobs tend to be scarcer.
As we subconsciously blend anecdata from HN into our mental models, remember that we self-selecting to visit here commenting are already extreme outliers.
Weight our in(group)sights accordingly.
Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds.
We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings.
I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.
My office is in Manhattan. It's been my observation that few people that work in Manhattan actually live in Manhattan. Nearly everyone I know of dreads having to go back to the office, and one of the primary reasons is because of the nightmare commute into the island of Manhattan via the various clogged up chokepoints.
I mean, we've been through major lockdowns/curfews/personal freedom restrictions, lots of people got sick, lots of people died, most non digital entertainment ceased to exist, most sports couldn't be practiced...
imho you can't pin point "remote work" as the main cause of why people felt miserable in the last few months
No pointless work "morale events"; no wasting hours a day on commute; ability to do something useful while a build is building, like putting in a load of laundry instead of just reading HN while waiting; and spending a lot more time with my GF as she is also WFHing.
I suspect you are speaking only about people who are unable/unwilling to put effort into the "life" part of "work-life balance" and thus depend on the "work" part to give them what "life" gives to all others: companionship/friendship/fun/purpose
Imagine having all the time in the world, just thinking about everything. Your whole life.
What would you do?
There’s always an option. It might entail a more extensive change and change is hard, that’s for sure.
What a powerful question and distillation of what society is facing. I will think about this.
I was interviewing recently and almost everyone is at least partly remote, with a huge number of 100% remote. Even people that I know don't like the idea are bending and giving two or three days remote.
On the restaurant-type work, I'd say a bunch of people have been given a breather from the treadmill, and they're using it to look around. I see this as mostly positive, but it does suggest that a lot of people are completely swamped, working all the time, spending everything. The little bit of credit they got from the pandemic payment has unlocked a great reckoning with the labor market. Previously if you didn't like your job, you were screwed. Somehow find time to interview/upskill, or somehow jump the gap with your savings.
I may be naive, but I guess this office-work-exodus would result to improvements in office spaces in general to attract devs (or other employees in tech). This would also make it easier for people who are looking to move to the US to find office jobs, since the competition is less fierce. Am I off mark here and too naive?
Same thing for long commutes, they’re terrible.
But still companies keep building new cubicle farms in downtown cores. Maybe office workers are just done with this stupid shit.
Employees often equate their own job satisfaction by the differences between how their managers treat themselves versus how they treat the people under them. When you have your own office with a door and a white board and have a company card to expense your meals while your devs are working with their headphones on because of the noise level in their cubicles, you're going to have a problem.
Second part you have a point. This is the best time to move to the US on an H1B. If you're an int'l student, this is the time to look for that office job that will hold you till a green card.
I'm in the UK and not seeing any of this.
I work at CrowdStrike. Fully remote. Amazing compensation, team, work.
We're hiring too :)
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There's a lot of jobs, but there's also a lot of work to do for every application. Applying takes effort.
In practice, the money has never materialized because our sector took a big hit and much of that promise was tied to incentives based on the company's success. I can't really blame anyone for this, but that's strike one as far as job satisfaction goes.
Second strike, I love writing code, and I don't get to do that a lot anymore. I'm listing these "pre-existing conditions" because I believe it's common for us quitters to have other areas of dissatisfaction that hadn't been enough to drive us over the edge by themselves.
Third strike, while my company does not support WFH after Covid, I did get to experience at least a partial WFH program, and it was absolutely wonderful. There's a problem though: I would absolutely like to continue working from home, but I also want to work on my own projects, on my own terms, on my own schedule. A traditional full time job is not compatible with that.
So I put in my notice for the end of this year, to allow current company projects to come to a conclusion and/or hand them off. I want to stress that for a man in my age group, with no significant savings or other safety net, this is extremely scary. It's just that this Angst is outweighed by the thought of staying on the treadmill hoping for an eventual reward that may never come and seeing the little time I have left drain away.
I'm sorry you are in this situation. I applaud your self-awareness, and suspect you have enough skills and discipline to turn this around in the next few years. You may never get to the point of having millions tucked away for retirement, but do hope you can get to a point where you do have 'significant savings'. I'd measure that by your measure of 'extremely scary'.
My wife and I have no kids, so 'saving' has been somewhat easier 'by default' than some of our peers. That said, it's not automatic, and I know plenty of folks who are high earners who will manage to spend it all without 'significant savings' to speak of.
It's kind of obnoxious to even admit this, but I always assumed I'd be a successful person at some point down the line. This was of course utterly ridiculous and led to some really bad decisions. It was exploitable by other people, too. My work made a few people rich, and while I was always compensated for my time, I never got a proportional cut from the outcomes. But it wasn't a bad life, and there is still some fuel in the tank :)
For us WFH is an option because it boosts productivity: People often end up working later.
Leading a high-performance team, I should be able to do team-wide things as a reward to boost morale and combat burn out.
Yet here I am, seriously contemplating leaving.
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The majority of people resigning their jobs are simply changing jobs, and the article doesn’t provide any evidence that people are changing to remote work in large numbers.
The biggest driver of the increase in job changes is simply the booming economy. We poured stimulus money into the economy at unprecedented rates and this has created economic booms at every level. Companies are scrambling to hire and wages reflect this, so people are taking the opportunity to switch up their careers and collect a pay bump.
Most of the business world appears to be snapping back to business as normal at a rapid rate, but with a booming economy pouring fuel on the fire. The media has been pushing narratives that COVID changes everything and that we’re entering a whole new world, but aside from companies adding a little more flexibility it seems most are eager to simply return to business as usual.
On the ground, I’m not seeing a massive shift toward remote work like I keep reading about in these articles. Yes, there are somewhat more remote jobs, but companies are largely eager to return to in-office work. Even many employees I know are eager to get back to the office because remote isn’t for everyone.
s/oom/ubl/
What stimulus are you talking about? Mortgage rates were laughably high by today's standards. Maybe the $600 bush tax cut? I remember some first time home-buyers programs, but those were largely in response to 2008.
I fear that many of the people demanding remote work now, will be surprised when (not if) the first layoffs come, and they find out that the person who's in the office every day is more awkward to fire than the remote person. Me, I'm always temporary, so I know this and am ok with it. I fear many of the people looking for remote work now think it will be just like office work, except they get to work at home. It's not. It's a much more tenuous relationship with your employer, and you have to always assume (e.g. in your budget) that you can/will lose your paycheck with little or no notice. If you're ok with that kind of perpetual instability, great, but I'm not sure most of the people looking for remote work now are aware of this tradeoff.
WFH is a hybrid between employee and contractor.
Here in the US, we pretty much outsourced our manufacturing to China.
This has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure.
A number of folks made a lot of money on this, but a much larger number of folks have really taken it in the shorts. Arguably, a lot of the troubles we've had, over the last decade, have found a root cause in this.
It's no secret. Pretty much everyone knows this, but the will to do something about it is weak.
It's been my experience, that when the pain gets great enough, the change will come. That's not always a good thing. Change like that, more often resembles an amputation, as opposed to a disinfectant swab and some stitches.
Automation ended the vast majority of high-labour manufacturing. What was left was only economical to do without automation at extremely low labour costs.
In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation.
Is this true? I am under the impression that the US still has loads of high end manufacturing, it's just the low end stuff that no longer exists and even then it's partially due to automation
“Don’t get into IT or software development it’s all going to be outsourced.”
I'm sure there's a lot of variance, but I don't think "outsourced everything" will be practical for most software businesses that place importance on quality of service.
Outsourcing can be great for developing a green-field new initiative, but at some point the in house folks are going to need to learn the new codebase so they can fix bugs, scale, and keep the lights on.
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All of those places have salaries that are a fraction of the typical US salary. US salaries are incredibly ridiculous on the global stage. And all of those places with actually good developers
The second issue that still comes up is communication and culture. Successful cross cultural communication requires more clarity in messaging and tasks. It can work and can work well and deliver good quality at great prices, but the obvious savings are partially offset by the higher communication and management costs. Sometimes more than fully offset.
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How is it overpaid? Engineers provide a lot more value than they are getting paid. If anything, people abroad are underpaid.
Nobody wants to offshore to India anymore because the business culture at the big body shops is totally unethical by western standards and there’s just an expectation of getting swindled on QoS; so people only ship low-value jobs like customer service over there. And even those are moving to South America for time zone reasons (and the business culture more closely aligns with the US).
The difference in pay is not just due to proximity and will likely persist to some degree.
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I welcome outsourcing though. I do quality work and know what it's worth and can advocate for myself. Any foreign worker who can do the same is welcome.
[1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue
The only stuff I've found which felt in the ballpark of spot-on were:
1) https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-great-weirding This was a fascinating series of essays that generally walks through why, after "Harambe" in 2016 or whenever, things seemed to have gone off the rails towards something new.
2) Cypherpunk movement's source docs. If I could bold, underline, and highlight this, I would. I have never read any group of literature/essays, especially with publishing dates in the 1990s, that more felt like a post-mortem on the 2014->2021 craziness than cypherpunk docs. I had actually wondered for a while where this core movement went, but the quick answer I've come to is cryptocurrency/e2e messaging projects absorbed a lot of it, and then the the writing often took a turn for the crazy/non-PC in the final 10 yards. But, they so accurately diagnose the growth of virtual communities and their pseudo-governmental influence, digital economy developments and all the second order effects, and so on and so on. If you're looking for people who really saw what was coming, this is the group. One of the good reads: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~wex/panoptic-paper.html
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...
I'm sure the landscape is different for people already set in their careers or making some decent money, but everyone making minimum wage got to see how little $10/hr actually is.
At any rate, a lot of people I know that quit have already found or started looking for a different job. Most people aren’t looking to keep living off the system so much as they are looking to find a job that doesn’t pay them _and_ treat them like dirt. Social services companies around here are literally offering $1000+ referrals because they can’t keep group homes staffed or run any community interactions. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that it’s not just about the handouts, it’s about people realizing how atrocious their working conditions were and not wanting to put up with it anymore.