Ask HN: Is the Great Resignation in tech real? If so, why?

Pre-Covid much of my job satisfaction came from the sense of comradery of working on a team. Even as an introvert I enjoy interacting with coworkers, and being intune with the needs of the group and generally helping other people succeed.<p>When we transitioned to full remote, all of this was stripped away and I was left to focus purely on a product that on its own I was not passionate about (think ad-like product). I was met with a sudden loss in motivation, burnout, and decided to take 9 months off to pursue a tech unrelated hobby.<p>9 months after leaving, I have accepted a position with a 50% raise over to my previous job.<p>I think covid was a splash of cold water that&#x27;s caused many of the people in my circle to re-evaluate how they spend their time. Tech workers are so in demand that we can freely change jobs so it follows that many people would availing that option.

I think, quite simply, remote work in the tech sector has redefined work-life balance. Rather than work 9-5 and go home and disconnect, you can mix and match personal and work tasks throughout the day. This reduction in sole focus on &quot;work time&quot; has led a lot of us to realize that work isn&#x27;t everything. As such, for those who have significant savings, resigning and taking a sabbatical or an early retirement is an attractive option as it allows us to maximize our life balance.<p>For others, the taste of flexible remote work is preferred and so they&#x27;ll resign and find a job that better suits their desired work-life balance.<p>Consequently, because companies are more flexible on location since they&#x27;re remote, competition to hire talent has become a national game and not just a localized one. Therefore, salaries _must_ go up across the board to pay the risk premium of folks going to a FAANG. As such, companies that want top-talent in the midwest are going to have to pay significantly closer to Bay Area&#x2F;FAANG rates, or settle for less than top talent (which is likely). For those who fall into the upper echelons of talent, though, the compensation and location are no longer mutually exclusive ventures. Again, this expansion of the game makes finding new work more attractive and with significant, and sufficient, savings, resignation is suitable while they lackadaisically find their next opportunity.

I think there a variety of factors at play in the tech sector driving hiring trends:<p>1. There are, in fact, tech companies that still demand employees come into a physical office. There comes a tipping point in a laborer&#x27;s market (tech being one of them) where this becomes sufficient reason to leave when there are plenty of reasonable alternatives that don&#x27;t require employees be physically present.<p>2. Mental health is often overlooked in these discussions. The pandemic has been a huge source of stress, uncertainty, and general chaos. Many people (myself included) lost their usual outlets of stress (going out, meeting with friends, catching up with family, etc). From personal experience, this lead me to having a spat of time where I was burned out and had to lay off working at all for several months before joining a new organization. From what I hear, I&#x27;m far from the only one who&#x27;s gone through such an experience.<p>3. In light of COVID, many people are facing the realities of mortality much earlier and more frequently than they would prior to a pandemic. Many of us have lost friends or loved ones if not to COVID, than to COVID caused problems (mental health, substance abuse, health problems that became critical due to lack of ER capacity). Having a brush with death is a strong incentive for people to reevaluate their situations and reexamine how they spend their time. For many people, work is not fulfilling and they may be more willing to adjust their lifestyle to prioritize things important to them that don&#x27;t require as much money; or things that take them to other careers; OR give folks a kick in the pants to demand more from their current employers.<p>I suspect there&#x27;s more to this trend; more nuance than is being captured by the current news cycles. The US has a diverse population of people in a variety of situations and the driving factors for hiring trends for bay area companies are likely not indicative of what employees are seeing from their side of the table.

It&#x27;s completely to do with work from home. Everyone is fed up after what they had to deal with in 2020, and tech workers (almost 100% of them) got to work from home, many for the first time ever. After everything they&#x27;ve been through in 2020, it makes zero sense to willingly go back to work in an office where you put yourself at risk and have to deal with all those horrible things you had to deal with before 2020. So it&#x27;s simple -- companies that try to make their employees go back to the office are losing tech workers to companies that embrace remote work. This creates the perception of a mass exodus, which increases the value of everyone&#x27;s labor, which results in even more people switching jobs so they can cash in on their increased value, but I assure you, the root cause of this is the sudden realization that work from home is possible, and&#x2F;or that non-shitty working conditions with a higher salary is indeed possible and easily attainable in this industry.

&gt; Remote work allows better matching of people and jobs.<p>This is my theory on non-tech jobs too. You get stuck in a rut with a shit job waiting tables, when the pandemic hits and your restaurant shuts down. We’ll now you <i>have</i> to take a crack at that other career you told yourself you’d try, or you’d move back home like you meant to. Friction is hard to overcome. But when something external acts as a catalyst, matching improves. Less friction between employees switching jobs&#x2F;careers&#x2F;industries&#x2F;locations is a great thing.<p>The people complaining about difficulties hiring were probably the ones benefitting from high friction. Now it’s working against them (it’s harder to pick up your life and move <i>back</i> to that shitty job you hated than to stay and do something else).

I still remember the days when people were posting on Slashdot that software engineering has no future in the US because it&#x27;s all moving to India. As we know, that turned out not to be the case. Tech companies have been willing to pay literally 10x for engineers to work from their US headquarters. Now folks are again claiming that the era of remote work is upon us. Maybe that&#x27;s true. But be careful what you wish for.

A lot of anecdotes in this thread, but it’s important to keep it in perspective: The current employee turnover rates are higher than they have been, but when you look at the numbers it’s about 2.8% monthly quit rate compared to an average of around 2%: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;JTSQUR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;JTSQUR</a><p>So yes, it’s up, but the news articles trying to explain this as some sort of society-wide shift and pushing anecdotes of people leaving companies en masse are getting ahead of the numbers. It’s also ignoring the sharp downward spike in quit rate during the start of the pandemic, which has produced some ripple effects.<p>The economy is also booming right now with the influx of cash, people staying home and spending more on tech, and low interest rates. Every company that can take advantage of it is doing so by hiring.

I think inflation is a part of it. There is more money around but always the same internal reluctance to give raises that match the market. So higher inflation implies that more people have to switch jobs in order to take advantage.

My theory is that covid imparted a large amount of mental and emotional strain on the population at large, leading workers to contemplate big life changes, i.e. grass is greener effect.<p>However, not all workers share the same lateral mobility. In tech it’s easy to reinvent yourself, to work remotely, and to change your industry. It’s also a high paying industry, so many people are financially situated to quit.<p>So you have two catalysts, 1) covid imparts the equivalent of a mass mid life crisis, and 2) employees in tech wield a lot of power. I hypothesize that these events combined and formed a feedback loop of employees quitting, driven by big raises granted precisely by the staffing issues caused by the quitting. The more turnover, the more desperate companies became to not be left without butts in seats when the music stops.

In June 2021 I left Google after 6 years. I outlined my motivations here [1]. Long story short it&#x27;s a conscious bet that time and energy are scarcer commodities for me than money. I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;ll last a full year but I think I have a few months left in me.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kayce.basqu.es&#x2F;sabbatical&#x2F;prologue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kayce.basqu.es&#x2F;sabbatical&#x2F;prologue</a>

My theory is a combination of (3a) (you have two 3&#x27;s :) and an additional hypothesis that you didn&#x27;t mention: people have a pandemic-induced sense of pent up angst and unease with their life, and so they are making life changes in an attempt to find happiness again. Obviously, changing jobs won&#x27;t relieve the pain the pandemic has caused, but I&#x27;d argue there&#x27;s a subliminal desire to try to change <i>something</i>.<p>Anecdotally, my personal experience supports (3a), since I tried to find a new job in mid 2020 and found the job market incredibly challenging, but then looked again in mid 2021 and ended up finding a job I was excited about.

1) remote work opened doors that were not possible before. We lost a junior employee to a company paying Texas tech hub wages in an area where <i>most</i> don&#x27;t make 6 figures before 10 years experience or management. They probably feel they got the employee cheap to.<p>2) my partner and I are hoping to have a kid, the pandemic really highlighted the child care issues in our country. We basically decided if when we have a kid (which we&#x27;ve been unlucky in our attempts during the pandemic) were going to be a single income home and one of us won&#x27;t work. At dual income, 25% would go to taxes, and 30% would go to paying for daycare. This, in turn, puts pressure on the other to seek those &quot;city wage&quot; remote jobs, which is probably a 100% raise, but raises job security and satisfaction concerns... But that encourages resigning and moving up the pay scale.

Remote and increased liquidity are the two biggest drivers.<p>Remote is making people reevaluate work&#x2F;life balance in general, some people that aren&#x27;t getting their preferences matched in this regard are thus leaving.<p>Huge amounts of liquidity means there is now a lot more money sloshing around in the pockets of startups and public tech companies that raised money in the 2020&#x2F;2021 equities boom. Tech companies suck at retention based raises (I still have no fucking clue why this is) so there is a large amount of reshuffling happening as people move to take advantage of better wages being offered elsewhere.

Let me add something about a tangent subject: What about tech workers with a disability? I hope you find this interesting, even if this answers your question only indirectly.<p>People with disabilities experience the pandemic the same as everybody else. Of course. However they don&#x27;t have the same opportunities.<p>yadaeno wrote that he took some time off and when he returned he got a raise [0].<p>This would be riskier for me.<p>Sometimes people tell me to have positive thoughts. I will find a good position if I only try hard enough.<p>I understand that because people don&#x27;t like to think about depressing things.<p>However indulge me and conduct a thought experiment. Try to estimate the percentage of tech workers with disabilities and their average salary.<p>What do you think: Is the percentage the same as elsewhere? Is the salary the same, higher or lower? Why?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28974320" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28974320</a>

The second (3) is quite valid as “I’m tired of this sh*t” affected all those close to retirement who didn’t need short term cash flow. Folks with no kids, the kids out of the house and the house paid for.<p>The first (3j also strikes me as valid as the possibility of f2f interviews was basically zero. Between social distancing and the collapse of border crossing and air travel “sitting tight” was prudent. Remote interviews lead into (4).<p>Edit: the loss of external child care forced some workers home. It’s possible the positives of at home care shifted the balance vs the expense of external care. And now, perhaps due to the difficulty of securing it.

1.Inflation. Money is worth less now that we printed so much more. Same reason why you see companies raising a lot at crazy high valuations. Nobody wants to keep cash because at some point the price of everything will catch up. Stock, house, crypto going up can be explained as that. 40% of dollars have been printed in the last 12 months. People trust businesses, houses and even crazy cryptocurrency with no real basis more than their government not printing infinite money.<p>2. People had a taste of remote work freedom. That&#x27;s an extra bargaining cheap when negotiating.<p>People mental health went to the bin after being locked up for so long and they either: - had enough of their company - had enough of their job at all<p>Hopefully it will translate to more small business entrepreneurship. We definitely need those given that the pandemic favoured incredibly big businesses (unsurprisingly)

&gt; People get large checks from the gov and are not pressured to find job. -&gt; Irrelevant for tech workers<p>Want to mention here, even though it may be &quot;Irrelevant for tech workers&quot;, employment did not rise again when these checks ended. This line of reasoning is false.

anecdote: This year, I was on a team of 2 and my coworker left for Google for a little under $300k. I told my boss I was going to quit to do interview prep and said I was making onsites for companies offering $200k, and they offered me $200k to stay. That was a 90% raise for my teammate who left and a 60% raise for me.

I quit in September this year as a director of engineering after working at the same place for 13 years. It has been a a learning experience. I had worked remotely on and off with the company throughout my tenure and the pay and bonuses were good enough for me. Loved the people that I supported, the variety work I did, etc... minus a few changes at my leadership level.<p>I mostly quit because I had a baby in 2020. My CEO told me about 6 months ago I was &quot;too close to my son&quot; in one of my 1-1&#x27;s I think largely because I wore him on a few zoom calls to give my wife a break right after birth. I let that fester for awhile... stuck in endless brain loops analyzing my life and where I spent my time. A week after watching my 1 year old enjoy a cupcake with a smile for his birthday -- I quit. I miss many of the great people... but life is too short. It was the time put into something vs the time put into relationships I care about the most that made me punch out.<p>I have no idea what&#x27;s next... for now I just want to enjoy some time with my wife, kids, and family which financially I&#x27;m so thankful I am able to do. We only have time and health!

Switching employers, especially in tech, to get more money is not a new thing due to COVID. For whatever reason, employers are more likely to hire new talent at a higher pay grade than give equivalent raises to current employees. I know lots of folks in tech who would switch jobs every 2-3 years and get a much more significant raise each time than by staying with their current employer.

My own anecdotal evidence says that I&#x27;m part of it.<p>I quit my old job in June to take a position that would be permanently remote forever after my old company decided they wanted us all back in the office again. It was actually kinda painful: I&#x27;d made a lot of friends at my old job, and my last day was two days before my five-year anniversary there, so it was a pretty sad goodbye. Also my new job pays so much more than my old one that it&#x27;s almost comedic. Funny thing is, I&#x27;ve heard (thanks to going out drinking with my ex-boss) that the whole company is fully remote again after a short experiment with &quot;hybrid&quot; and they&#x27;re paying way more than they used to thanks to getting acquired by one of the largest ISPs in the country, but I&#x27;m still not going back... nothing against anyone there (who are, again, actual friends of mine now) but I&#x27;ve learned so much about modern tech stacks (AWS! K8s! Helm! Terraform!) at my new job that I&#x27;d be an idiot to walk away from it.

I think #4 is definitely right (though not necessarily the entire story). For my entire career, it has been necessary to either move to SF &#x2F; the Bay (blech) to work for most of the world class tech companies, or work for one sprawling enough to have lots of satellite offices (mainly Google and Microsoft). Now I&#x27;m seeing opportunities at all kinds of great companies that I can actually apply for. This started before the pandemic actually (I date it to Stripe&#x27;s &quot;remote headquarters&quot;) but has really picked up. Nowadays if I click through to the careers page of a company I admire and might want to work for, I&#x27;m surprised if they <i>don&#x27;t</i> have a few remote positions. Only a few years ago, what always happened in the situation was &quot;local only, based in the Bay&quot; -&gt; close tab.

I worked for a company where I had a great relationship with the CEO and directly reported to him. There was a reorg the January of 2020 and I remember thinking, &quot;I&#x27;m on the bottom of this org chart&quot;, even though the product I was building was supposed to be worth 5x the current revenue of the company, and I was the only person full-time on it and was architecting it to be scalable and low maintenance (we can&#x27;t afford Amazon level support staff).<p>I got put under the CEO&#x27;S twin brother who did not trust the tech stack I was using (never mind that three of our critical SAASes we were subscribing to -- including payments!! and 24&#x2F;7 alert monitoring!! used that stack) &quot;it was an unknown quantity&quot; -- and then we had arguments about hiring (he pushed through a hire that three of the four tech reviewers thumbs downed, and I personally flagged as problematic because he had wrong code and asserted during the interview &quot;I am certain it&#x27;s correct&quot; -- his code was so crap and hard to understand that took me three hours of writing a property testing framework to find the bug), then he forced onto a team someone &quot;with Amazon experience&quot; who I thumbs downed because his code was shit and didn&#x27;t read the instructions (which is part of my interview acceptance criteria). I had found some great &quot;almost seniors&quot;&#x2F;&quot;early senior&quot; devs who had the right attitude to figure shit out and deliver code, but he didn&#x27;t want to hire them because they &quot;weren&#x27;t senior enough&quot;.<p>Anyways shortly after that I quit with no immediate prospects, and pretty quickly got a great job on a fantastic team (though the codebase is <i>very</i> brownfield), so I&#x27;m not sad I resigned.

Not a tech worker per se, but I do teach computer science at a higher education institution.<p>Pre-covid, my professional satisfaction came mostly from interacting with students. The academic freedom to explore essentially whatever you are interested in is also good compared to any tech job, so the job is not that bad (even if pay is not great compared to industry).<p>Currently however, with everything online, I essentially have to teach a blank screen, which sucks.<p>I am exploring alternatives, although I am reluctant to quit my job.

There is good evidence in terms of attrition numbers published by major tech companies --- it has gone as high as 22%!! India is also experiencing a major demand for software developers<p>It&#x27;s due to venture funds, remote work &amp; high demand ...<p>Cash is cheap. US, Europe &amp; Japan have unleashed &gt;$9 trillion since the pandemic in stimulus checks &amp; buying of bonds in the market. Global venture funding hit a record high of $221B with 250 start-ups becoming unicorns this year. Coinbase debuted publicly with a market cap of $89B on its opening day. Indian start-ups have received a record funding of $8.76B<p>Salary Difference is Huge . The average salary of a software developer in the US is $107K with senior developers commanding $300K in San Francisco, a stark difference compared to India. Demand for talent is coming from all industries, the automotive sector hired more software engineers than the tech sector last year, all the more reason for going remote<p>Which means remote postings have risen by 457% since the past year! Engineers prefer to continue WFH as it enables flexibility, increased productivity &amp; reduced commute times. Even the challenge of different time zones can be solved using good asynchronous communication in remote work<p>To recap, an engineer can work for - FAAMG (Remain the top pick) - US &amp; EU software giants (Coinbase, GitLab, Automattic) - 3000 India Dev Centers (Eg: John Deere) - IPO-bound unicorns (Zomato, Paytm, MobiKwik) - Freshly funded start-ups (100s) - 2800 IT services firms<p>What is the impact?<p>Attrition rates in Indian IT will be at an all-time high of 22-23% this year. Top-tier candidates now get multiple offers with an eye-popping 2x-3x (not 20%-30%) raise. The 2-3 month notice period means candidates continue interviewing after accepting the 1st offer. Developers are consistently learning new skillsets on AI, Machine learning, cloud computing, automation, blockchain to be in high demand. No doubt, multiple founders have recently tweeted about this new competitive market &amp; candidates informing before joining date<p>Recruiters &amp; founders need to differentiate themselves not just with cash, but also with ESOPs, buybacks, venture backing, eye-watering benefits, rapid career growth &amp; work even harder to retain existing talent<p>The war for talent is on

If you are a big employer but lack quality applicants due to labour market shortage. Could it be worth risking some churn, with the possibility of increasing new applicants by seeding the &#x27; great resignation &#x27; in the media?

Until recently I was at a small software company of about 30 people. The management pushed for a return to the office, and Covid meant there are many more remote work opportunities in the UK, so I left for a new role at a bigger company. So did another 5 developers (although two of those were recent graduates so I&#x27;d have expected them to move on). In total that was about 1&#x2F;3 of the development team ended up leaving in the space of 3 months.<p>I have no way to know if that is typical. I doubt it is, but I&#x27;ve certainly seen practically every local dev company I know advertising roles.

Very anecodtic, but I&#x27;ve been working as Dev Lead in a startup before and throughout the pandemic.<p>The pandemic made me rethink what&#x27;s important, to stop relying on the perceived stability that a stable job gives, quit my job and go study a Bachelor&#x27;s degree in music.<p>I think I&#x27;m not alone in this sense... People have difficult or lonely time, which forces them to rethink priorities, understand that there&#x27;s no guaranteed stability and hop onto the next step in their life. In tech, more often then not, the next step in one&#x27;s life is a better salaried job.

Pre-covid to me it felt like I had to follow an employers rule of employment to the letter. Post-covid; it very much feels like I am on my own conditions here, both salary and terms of where I work (100% remote). Also feels like part of the resignation wave is coming from employers still believing they can run their company on pre-covid terms.

Equities have done great during covid. If you were invested in tech which many in FANGM were via ESPPs and RSUs, wealth likely significantly increased.<p>If your net worth hits a couple M, you make 200k&#x2F;year just on interest. For a salary to make any difference to a person living a middle class life, they are going to need to pay you in the upper 6 to low 7 figures.<p>That prices you out of the market so may as well stay home and play with the kids.<p>Life is too short to grind away at the office working on someone else&#x27;s dream if you don&#x27;t have to.

I see lots of good points in these threads about macroeconomics and the pandemic, but I was surprised to not see more talk about tech specifically, or the bigger elephant in the room: remorse about being paid lavishly for work in the attention economy. We&#x27;re living in a period of remarkable disinformation, and many of our employers profited from it. When your bread comes from pumping bile into people&#x27;s brains it might lead one to considering something less destructive, more meaningful, and more sustainable. The sheen of SV was sullied, now its all secrets, leaks, congressional hearings, and spin doctors incanting. Tech was once magical in its appeal - not just about profit, but about transforming society to something more egalitarian and hopeful. The events of the last few years broke that spell.

Yes, it&#x27;s real. IMO it&#x27;s the following - 1. tech has flourished during the pandemic, and that plus money printing means there is a ton of demand and money floating around to attract talent. 2. after 18 months of working from home and being miserable during covid, people are ready for a change. that&#x27;s why we see a lot of new home purchases, job changes, moves, etc. It seems liek covid has basically accelerated people&#x27;s timelines by several years because they realized life is short, things can change in a flash, and they reassess whatever it is they&#x27;re doing and whether it&#x27;s something they want to keep doing, and a lot of the time the answer is no. Increased demand&#x2F;$$ plus increased supply = ton of movement between jobs

COVID has also:<p>1: given parents a taste of new options for schooling their children. Many people tried tried out homeschooling and are planning to continue. This move decouples K12 education from real estate decisions and provides even more incentive to have a work&#x2F;life balance that allows parents to be more involved in their kids&#x27; education.<p>2: let people vote with their feet more easily WRT state income taxes. People realized that they can now move to a low&#x2F;no-tax state and take home a lot more money. Even if you take a 10 percent pay cut to move elsewhere, everything is cheaper than in SF&#x2F;NYC. Your take-home pay is the same since there&#x27;s no state income tax, and you can afford much more house&#x2F;car&#x2F;vacation&#x2F;etc. in your new location.

I&#x27;m looking for other jobs. There&#x27;s a long history of the company screwing me over and eroding benefits. I&#x27;m applying to other jobs, some of them permanently remote, with potential compensation around 50% higher than my current job.<p>We have seen a lot of turnover this year. Many people have left for higher wages.<p>&quot;Mid-level workers are thus getting more promos than usual.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m a midlevel. They want to give me a low rating because they said I&#x27;m slow. So no promo for me. I haven&#x27;t seen promotions for others pick up either.<p>My guess would he that there is increased retirement attrition, which we are seeing at my company. I think there is also increased demand for technology (like online ordering, delivery service, and other pandemic related shifts).

Honestly from my perspective, the companies that don&#x27;t adapt to remote work to IT related jobs that don&#x27;t work require &quot;physical place&quot; are the ones who are gonna loose talent.<p>I mainly work with cloud workloads and it&#x27;s without a doubt people that work in my fiel dare moving from jobs because of the lack of full remote work.<p>I can&#x27;t complain about my company ever since we went home we signed an extension contract to work from home at full time. We also managed to start recruiting across the country and not just the &quot;local city&quot; where we settled in.

I think the incredible stock market gains and home price growth over the past few years have helped a lot of people feel confident leaving their jobs for a sabbatical that otherwise might not. I know in my own case, even if a lot of the nominal growth is due to devaluation of the dollar, seeing a 7 figure balance on my net worth statement for the first time has definitely put swagger into my step over the last year or so. I haven&#x27;t quit yet, but I wouldn&#x27;t hesitate if something changed and I stopped enjoying my job.

Mostly no - if you look back more than a year, you&#x27;d see that quit rates are modestly higher than normal, but balanced out by the very low quit rates in 2020. If you do 2 year averages, the past two years looks the same as 2018-2019 or 2016-2017.

Ever since I graduated I have worked in technology, SAAS (B2B) specifically I am 27 year old- Male, SAAS (B2B) specifically. I just accepted an offer to leave one of the hottest companies in the Bay (Went from 400 mil (2.5 Years ago, when I started) to 6 Billion today), I work in sales and have now been a part of 3 unicorns in the last 5 years. (All of them I started as an employee when they were small, 1 is worth 1.3B another worth 8B)<p>Here is Why I believe this trend is likely to continue and why:<p>Economic climate: the money being ploughed into tech startups and co&#x27;s has not only grown but grown by 100% YoY see here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.crunchbase.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;global-vc-funding-h1-2021-monthly-recap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.crunchbase.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;global-vc-funding-h1-2021-m...</a> -Tech companies are the predominant receipent of these VC $$$.<p>Mindfulness&#x2F;Actualization: I would say I am satisfied with my current job but the past 18 months brought about the perfect storm, I moved from SanFran to a small town in WA with no friends or family close by- so I had a lot of time to think and introspect. Secondly, I lost ever $ I saved since I started working ($392k to be precise)... this loss, helped me understand the real value of money- what it is worth and what it isn&#x27;t, having some money saved aside- will no bring you happiness but losing it- will definitely lead to a reduction in happiness. - This leads me my hypothesis on why, this trend is happening at large and now, people introspect their lives and realized &quot;good enough&quot; is really not good enough- it made them yearn for more, more in some cases meant money or a higher title- like it did for me.<p>Emptiness Syndrome: This is my own coinage, the way I would describe this as is trying to understand the meaning of life, what is it- just getting paid enough to stay fed, to afford rent and then what? A lot of folks started to search for a meaning to their lives... See google trends on &quot;meaning of life&quot; and &quot;Suicide hotline number&quot;.<p>These 3 powerful forces, created the perfect amalgamation for the &quot;great resignation&quot; - Companies with a shit ton of money, -People having time to introspect, and the Emptiness syndrome.<p>PS. These are the ramblings of a 27 year old, single guy with nothing to watch on netflix and nothing better to do at 2.31am at night on a Saturday.

In Germany salaries are the same as 2 years ago, but grocery prices increased by 13% in the last 12 months alone... So I will work as little as possible, because all the money I earn worth less and less each month.

6. Inflation is pushing everything up but pay rises in your current jobs and not following that price curve. Jumping to the next job generally gives you a pay bump but if you include inflation, the current bump looks higher than normal.<p>I&#x27;ve seen this from friends who have moved in the past few months where the pay increases are not insignificant.

I am looking for a job where I actually write code for real engineering problems. That does not mean <i>play house</i> with some framework bullshit in a permanent newb capacity. The web is 30 years old and yet many companies&#x2F;developers still struggle to write the code to populate content into a web page and require stumbling around in the dark hoping a bunch of tools do their job for them. WTF? Worse, some companies like to have endless meetings all day accomplishing nothing while they blindly search for simple organizational solutions.<p>Some companies have figured out there is more to life than trying to pretend HTML and JavaScript are some kind of forced shoehorn Java or Python extension. Many have not. If moving to one of these competent companies means eliminating my wasted time commuting to an office plus a substantial pay raise then so be it.

6. People hear about a Great Resignation in the media, that includes a big pay raise. They want in on the action, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. FOMO.

pretty harsh knowing a tech worker who&#x27;s been disabled by covid and seeing you write off deaths from covid as irrelevant without any explanation.<p>first, no, not irrelevant. what on earth even justifies thinking that?<p>second, disability from covid is far more widespread than death. some studies indicate 10% of covid cases turn into long covid, becoming essentially permanent. that&#x27;s much higher than the death rate.

My personal experience with ex co-workers who have taken other positions is that the main reason for them going elsewhere is because market compensation is highly competitive and most jobs require fewer responsibilities. For one of them, his kid&#x27;s school location was also a factor: his mother wanted him in a Montessori school and it was a 20 minute drive out of the way every morning.<p>A simpler way of putting it is this: employers are set on giving employees cost of living increases, but a 3% COL increase can&#x27;t match the 8% annual increase of the local market. Jobs that were going at 95K a couple years ago are at 115K+ today.

I quit my primary (sr swe) job which was crushing my soul to do remote work for a client for the same pay.<p>Now the remote client has died from COVID, and I can’t decide what I want to do.<p>Seeing how quickly one can go from living to not living, it makes me question my priorities. How many vacations did I indefinitely postpone because my work couldn’t be without me? Answer, many… some years with naught but one handful of holiday days.<p>If one’s work brings great joy and satisfaction, then that IS living. But for those of us who have yet to discover what our real meaningful passion is, we probably should not postpone the things that make us happy. Live while you can.

Low interest rates -&gt; cheap capital -&gt; lots of tech funding -&gt; lots of jobs.

I worked for a university, lifestyle job with bad pay but plenty of time off. But when a plan to fix pay schedules was shelved and replaced with furloughs due to the pandemic, I took the first thing I could find, which was with a local company that&#x27;s a total cultural mismatch and where my skill are underutilized.<p>Which is to say I&#x27;m applying like mad to find remote work since I like owning a house and having room to breath instead of paying multiples of my mortgage to share an apartment in a tech hub city.<p>But I also need to make up for the long-term damage the university job did to my earnings&#x2F;early retirement potential.

Salary increases are minuscule if you stay at the same company, but switching around let’s you avoid the power imbalance between structurally underpaid employees and overpaid CEOs..<p>Especially considering that the current expected salary of a CEO is extremely distorted by the fact that it’s decided by a board usually filled with other CEOs..<p>The embarrassing thing is that bloody Adam Smith warned us of this a few centuries ago:<p>“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices”

Some follow up questions I think are helpful,<p>1. Why is it more pronounced in tech specifically? 2. Is there a significant fraction of people who’ve quit and still haven’t gone back or is it overwhelmingly job changes?

I don&#x27;t have a response, but I do want to +1 the posters extremely well-formulated question (and answer).

To play devil&#x27;s advocate, I&#x27;m staying where I am. I think long term I&#x27;m better off here. Why?<p>- I just got a promotion from associate systems engineer to systems engineer. There was an associated raise :) - My boss is great. Can&#x27;t remember names to save his life, but he&#x27;s great at managing people. - My work life balance is exactly where I want it. We could be going back into offices, but there&#x27;s no pressure here. I can skip the commute whenever I want to and put that time into going to see friends. - My employer&#x27;s good about lateral movement within the company, and I want to be a full on software engineer. I got here from my once a week bike repair job with them and a tech support gig elsewhere. This is so doable.<p>I definitely make less money than I could elsewhere. But I&#x27;ve got good benefits. I&#x27;ve got good people around me. I have the flexibility to have the social life I want. I like what my company does. I like what they&#x27;re trying to do. If it&#x27;s up to me, I&#x27;ll be around a decent while longer in two or three more positions :)<p>The only things that&#x27;ve changed from covid are: - I work from home most of the time - I have more work in my backlog to automate away the jobs that were cut at the start of covid (I work for a retailer. There were some spectacularly enormous losses for a few months there)

A lot of younger people out of college still live at home. They are free of financial burdens so they can easily switch jobs or take time off. There’s a lot less risk, and one of the better side effects of the overpriced housing&#x2F;rental fiasco.<p>I also think the Pandemic has acclimated some families to the notion that one person may need to re-skill or look longer for a job (say your typical double income couple). One may need to stay home to watch the kids, whoever is out of work at the moment. It’s a shift in sentiment, one which once upon of time may have felt horrible. During the Pandemic, tons of families were going through this, so it didn’t feel weird or abnormal that one person was on the bench for a bit, as everyone in America was going through it. I think families are no longer pressuring themselves and actually opting out of not taking that crappy 6-month contract job, or that job at Wendys, and giving each other the latitude to prep for better jobs.<p>These changes are giving a little power back to the people. We expected the pandemic to be over in 2020 and it never happened, so we all had to learn patience and it spilled over to a lot of other things in life, including evaluating jobs.<p>Last but not least, many Americans have not gone to the theater, or ate in at a restaurant at the rate they were doing pre-pandemic. I haven’t stepped foot in a movie theater in two years, and have only eaten inside of a Diner twice in two years. The chip shortage made it so you can’t even buy expensive toys like a PS5 or that new graphics card. We were forced to learn consumption-reduction, and I think many people realized it’s not so bad. Expenses go down, and suddenly you are not so desperate to hop onto any job that comes your way.

I haven&#x27;t personally seen a huge uptick in resignations where I work. What I have seen, though, is that it&#x27;s very difficult to hire anyone. We seem to be losing people at the offer stage. And I work somewhere where an opaque &quot;compensation group&quot; in HR makes the offers, so I have no idea how out of touch they are with the market. We have many positions that have been open more than a year.

More than anything… being remote gave everyone a wide playing field. Both for employers and employees. Employers started to look out all over the country ( sometimes world ) to find talent and employees jobs. If it’s remote, you don’t need change your settlement and still make more money and further your career at convenience and from same office room.

Anecdote: Number of departures around me has increased but not significantly. At least half of the people who departed was because companies they wanted to work for no longer required them to move to new state (ahm.. California). Number of recruiters cold emailing me has gone up at least 2X. Open positions are harder to fill these days.

I’ve recently resigned and will be looking for something new in the new year.<p>My reasons are:<p>- done this for a while. Being on COVID projects gave me a taste of different but similar<p>- was surrounded by talented and some not so talented contractors making silly money whilst I was the only permanent employee making probably half. That wasn’t different but the noise got louder in my head. Why not you? Was the question in my head as I rapidly rose to lead a team of 14<p>- remote work. One of the things holding me back was worrying (unnecessarily) about having to go to strange places to do contract work. But my role did that already before COVID and since COVID so much more opportunity to do things remote means the size of the pond is bigger<p>- A colleague did it. Someone I mentor. And they grew and got stretched so much by new contexts in new projects. It reminded me of that feeling i got from the COVID projects. Purpose and being stretched to learn new stuff

3) is true. It took some time for some companies to catch up with their hiring processes, so it was harder to change jobs for a while.<p>4) is true. Now companies have to compete a lot more for our labor.<p>5) is true. It also leads to a corollary: our workload has gone up since our services are in greater demand.<p>There&#x27;s also the point that inflation is on the rise, despite what the fed says. We can see that housing prices are up 50% since the start of the pandemic in many areas. We can see that everything we buy has gone up by 20%. You have to pay a 75% surcharge to get a new graphics card. The inflation in these major sectors makes it feel like our salaries and yearly increases are smaller. Additionally, as the market has gotten more competitive (for labor), industry wages have gone up.

The pay raise has nothing to do with the workers themselves.<p>Many had frozen hiring and everyone is hiring at once ATM. So you get inflated pay and designations.<p>Some tech workers are reevaluating their career track.<p>I am ok to move if I can change my career to pure engineering. I worry that if I do not I might stagnate.

I feel my company has had a greater number of departures this year than in past years. But I don’t know if it’s because a competitor is offering higher wages, or if I’m noticing a higher number because everyone decided to stay out last year.

I suspect the following is a big factor.<p>Quantitative easing has found its way in property and crypto asset price rises, in addition to inflated startup funding.<p>The latter is finally trickling into higher wage competition. People then move jobs as way to hop salary.

I would posit that most of your points are relevant for the economy as a whole, but you are missing inflation, which is probably the 2nd or 3rd most important factor for the economy as a whole (after your number 2 and your first number 3), but the single most important factor for tech workers, who are seeing huge comp increases due to stock packages in an M2 fueled bull market. That, and remote working trends, as you mentioned.<p>When you can get a 30% raise at a new job and there is too much psychological resistance for companies to give those raises internally, high turnover is inevitable.

Before covid and normalization of remote work, I couldn’t afford a quality on-site programmer. With covid I was able to hire a better quality remote programmer for a lower cost. Work is now getting done that was not happening before.<p>There are two ways to reduce prices:<p>1. Reduce need: air travel, commute, commercial real estate, sears, middle management, highway speed traps, paper, wars, suits, gold, diamonds, brokers, theatre, stadiums, crowds<p>2. Increase productivity: software, internet bandwidth, gpu, nvme ssd’s, solar, batteries, youtube, hacker news, wikipedia, wsb, zoom, twitter, linkedin, Robinhood, tiktok

Every tech company was forced into remote working, suddenly now every tech worker is (really) competing on the global job market, and the market is adjusting to the new offer&#x2F;demand. That’s my theory.

There is more money chasing fewer workers.

I moved jobs to secure a full remote position. The pandemic just highlighted what was important for me in life, and gave me less patience to put up with other aspects I would have tolerated earlier.

Unintended consequence of WFH during 2020-2021 is that it made the job search easier. Much easier to schedule virtual interviews than having to use up vacation days.<p>This is probably across many industries and professions, but one particular thing was extremely helpful for software engineers looking to change jobs - time for leetcode.<p>It&#x27;s much, much, much, much easier to learn and practice leetcode problems and other related technical coding interview stuff while you&#x27;re WFH than if you&#x27;re in the office.

Almost everyone thinks about their jobs in terms of the people they work with, what that get paid for and sometimes the bigger purpose of their endeavor. Purpose was up until now not the biggest reason. But somehow in the pandemic it&#x27;s importance in the average employee&#x27;s mind has grown. Don&#x27;t know why but I have seen people make career changes. Perhaps it is due to lack of working with people you liked (since everyone is remote).

I think there&#x27;s no fulfilling narrative, just boring risk-aversion and economics at play.<p>First, your theory 3 leads to the &#x27;increase&#x27; in resignations. Last year any job you could hold was a port in a storm. This year people resumed shopping around for the best job.<p>As for the pay raises, I think it&#x27;s because tech faired better during the pandemic than other industries. In general, the pandemic was a wealth-consolidating event and tech fared well.

I think it&#x27;s as simple as; more companies are offering fully remote roles, which means wages are higher (at least in the UK where it&#x27;s centering to London wages, 20% higher than elsewhere). People are more open to these roles because the pandemic has shown them remote can be OK as a compromise.<p>So; higher wages, more choice. Even if you don&#x27;t like remote working <i>that</i> much it&#x27;s part of the choice.

Anecdotally, it&#x27;s the opposite for me and my friends. We are new graduates who joined the workforce in 2020, and the value of our initial stock grants has atleast doubled. That&#x27;s made it very attractive to stay for atleast 4 years rather than jump interview hoops for another company who&#x27;d probably pay less in stock&#x2F;sign-on bonuses.

I can see many incompetent&#x2F;below average tech workers being replaced with offshore workers (e.g. India and Phillipines) once international travel is permitted again.<p>COVID in countries that supply most of the offshoring has been devastating. Many people from India and Philippines resigning from their roles to move to Western nations to live a better life.

In every HN thread that discusses this, there&#x27;s one very important aspect often completely missing: international remote work. I changed jobs a couple of months ago, accepting a remote position at american company, and my income increased 4 times.<p>Why any developer outside of US wouldn&#x27;t take advantage of this opportunity?

I think many programmers left due to their stock appreciating in the $millions. The rest enjoy higher salaries.

FWIW your theory 3 (the first one, &quot;people avoided changing jobs during the pandemic&quot;) was verbally confirmed by Google HR in a recent internal conversation known as TGIF. It was also mentioned that if attrition rates for 2020 and 2021 were averaged, it wasn&#x27;t abnormally high.

My friends in the last 4 years got 2x&#x2F;3x salary increments without COVIDs help.<p>Tech inflation has been happening for a while now for the small minority.<p>I think COVID just caused more people to tap into it because of some of the reasons you listed. So inflation isn’t COVID caused, but the excess market movement is.

I just quit my job to find something more interesting to do.<p>From my experience, this is the first time since the virus-drama started that I felt safe enough to take the step.<p>But I was unemployed when it hit the fan, and the first year was really tough since it was pretty much impossible to find jobs around here.

It&#x27;s real, I&#x27;m due to start a better role in a boot strapped company, that&#x27;s just received VC funding; and for nigh on double my current salary.<p>And all because a colleague goaded me into reassessing where I was and where I wanted to be (they didn&#x27;t do it nicely).

It&#x27;s real but it&#x27;s temporary. The pandemic had enabled a lot of tech workers to save money (not commuting, eating out, going on vacations, moving out of the bay area) and so many are taking time off to relax. They&#x27;ll all be back when the money runs out.

I&#x27;m an executive at a european SaaS Company that got recently bought out by a larger one from the anglo-sphere. The management of the parent company is fighting tooth and nail to retain people and hire additional ones as they have strong growth targets, and are adding more HR Staff because of this.<p>Due to the acquisition I&#x27;m in the position to talk to random people all over the organization from a semi-outside perspective and it has given me some insight I was lacking of this company, I assume many anglo-american companies share:<p>1. This company cannot divert the course of their goal to lower engineering cost, it&#x27;s engrained in their financial models that push them towards IPO. -&gt; Lowering engineering cost meant opening up offices in europe, eastern europe and asia and paying slightly above the local rate. -&gt; This strategy is starting to fall apart as the labor quality from these places AT THE PRICEPOINT is dropping, as the experienced engineers have started working for full U.S. or full central european salaries and aren&#x27;t going back. It will take a lot of time until the &quot;our HR just isn&#x27;t effective at hiring &amp; retaining&quot;-narrative changes into the &quot;our strategy doesn&#x27;t apply to the global labor market anymore&quot;-narrative because the waters are extremely muddy.<p>2. If you pay for actual data, you can basically only get simple spreadsheets of salary&#x2F;profession &amp; level, the sources of which seem very unreliable and the conclusions you draw from them unhelpful. The employees themselves also don&#x27;t make good decisions as on their behalf and so false signalling is going on a lot.<p>3. It takes management clout to push through U.S. Salaries for people in lower-income environments and is depending on the company culture frowned upon so kept a secret if it occurs. This has the potential to create cabals and &quot;more equal than others&quot; pockets in the org-chart.<p>4. The very people tasked with retaining their teams are also affected by the shifting landscape themselves and depending on their stance become very emotional around this topic as the pressure on them increases. Some develop a stockholm-syndrome-esque attitude when they personally don&#x27;t want to leave or feel they don&#x27;t deserve more, that creates tension because they quickly arrive at unhealthy points of the discussion and say things like &quot;if you are only in it for the money, this is not the place&quot; which is something you don&#x27;t ever want your manager to phrase like that, although because of 1-3, this is going to be true for quite some time.<p>5. The employee-part of the discussion about payscale and cost-of-living adjustments is just getting started as inflation is increasing, open Q&amp;A meetings have started to revolve around this topic. As much as the communication is centered on positivity for this company, this seems to cloud every other topic as a segment of the employees have stopped thinking further ahead than 6 months as they seem to wait how this will play out.<p>All in all, I&#x27;m very unsure if I will be able to stay at this company because of this situation, ironically this would hurt me financially, but the environment does not feel like a healthy one where I&#x27;d not only enjoy my time but will do anything but crisis management.

Asshat bosses want bums on seats in plague pit openplan offices even if #WFH is eminently possible and as someone over 60 even vaccinated I&#x27;m still more at risk than I&#x27;d like.<p>If I was more financially secure I&#x27;d resign in a heartbeat, so looking around for a remote job.

&gt; I think covid was a splash of cold water that&#x27;s caused many of the people in my circle to re-evaluate how they spend their time. Tech workers are so in demand that we can freely change jobs so it follows that many people would availing that option.<p>This sums it up.

I choose my job based on the commute time. One month after starting, covid hit and I worked remote only.<p>Then I heared from freelancer friends that now almost all their projects became remote only as well.<p>I quit my job a few months ago and work as a freelancer from home now.

The chaos and government intervention merely accelerated trends in the economy.

COVID-era restrictions to Europe and India are dropping on November 8th. Be prepared for a reflux of desperate migrants who will happily take those jobs. (Disclaimer: I&#x27;m one of them).

I&#x27;m about to quit this coming Friday, for most of the same reasons stated by everyone else in the last few months, so not going repeat them. I do not live in America but have similar issues where I live.

In my case, and some other people I know (though not all in tech) it was a lot of things that existed for a while, and covid was just the last drop. Not sure I can generalize it, but it&#x27;s my experience.

as a layer1 technician, I&#x27;ve noticed a roll out of certain tech that couldn&#x27;t or wouldn&#x27;t have been implemented without pandemic.<p>-Wireless infrastructure and APs companies that perhaps didn&#x27;t have wireless infrastructure in place were now forced to. [AP for tablets due to take out increases] -suddenly end users were forced to grant remote access to their home lan and pcs -crypto has really taken off

My wife and I are excited to work overseas after being unable to travel since 2019.<p>We will both be resigning in the near future to move overseas.

Don&#x27;t like remote work. I like working at office. Like interacting directly with colleagues than through video chat.

the first three should expect a pay rise on average (similarly to what&#x27;s happening), as most job changes are associated with a pay rise.<p>on 4: there is some systemic data that has been available for years that this is the case. Wouldn&#x27;t be surprised for the awareness to have spread and people adapting accordingly.

Also, the building of the new Amazon HQ is having an effect on the DC Metro area labor pool.

I think at my current work place that I&#x27;ll soon leave management was caught completely off-guard by wfh. They used to have wfh occasionally but people were mostly using the time for 20% stuff so to say. Technically it&#x27;s not that demanding but socially (or rather politically) and they completely failed to translate this into the online sphere. More than half of the original team either changed internally or left. For another team it was even more. Personally the time has been stressful and I&#x27;m looking forward to spend a few months working on some creative projects.<p>Also the job market has really changed I think. Salaries seem to have increased and wfh seems more accepted.

Inflation.

very insightful

In my experience, it&#x27;s a real thing.<p>Lockdown was a catalyst for offline to online. Tech was the epicenter of this. This also fueled deliveries, which requires tracking and optimization (of packages and the hordes of new delivery people). Then other related stuff - remote communication, payments, etc, etc. There was just endless tech stuff to do. Even hardware stuff like drones had more demand.<p>There was also a sudden drop in things that rich people could invest in. Early 2021, a lot of companies decided capital was cheap and companies with good revenue started raising money, then hiring&#x2F;expanding. Crypto boomed and bust again, but it fueled some more startups who made money off crypto infrastructure.<p>A lot of tech workers were forced to come to office during the pandemic. A factory worker might be a lot more tolerant to this. But I found it highly insulting and inefficient to risk my family&#x27;s lives for something of lower productivity, and that was the last straw. Plus offices were poorly maintained and being downgraded at this point. I decided I did not want to return to office after the next lockdown and started job hunting at this point.<p>Mid-late 2020, people started quitting jobs. The surge in demand combined with the drop in supply created a kind of vacuum.<p>This probably wasn&#x27;t felt in richer countries, but remote work meant that it suddenly made sense to outsource to other countries. In developing countries, we had a double surge from developed countries. Australians decided to outsource to Malaysia and other companies. Suddenly Malaysian companies were competing with Australian wages, making more people quit. I was personally getting offered 2.5x wages and the interview bar was much, much lower than usual. A good job used to take weeks of interviews, and now it was a weekend.<p>Mid 2021, remote&#x2F;hybrid work was already offered up front. I basically rejected all interview offers that didn&#x27;t allow remote, unless on site was necessary (e.g. drones or factory machinery). My sister was an intern and did the same - normally interns would be told to screw off for any disagreement.<p>By Aug 2021, I&#x27;d have a very good company inviting me to interview with them almost every week. Oil conglomerates, brands like Nokia and Motorola, Fortune 500, unicorns offering top tier wages and vacation time, small companies that pay well for routine maintenance work. Companies that rejected me in the past were suddenly offering the jobs again (you know that thing where they say they&#x27;d keep your resume on file?)<p>Eventually I did end up with a dream job, where I get to focus on making the users happy.<p>tl;dr: market forces created a lot of good jobs. So people are resigning and moving closer to theirs, which isn&#x27;t necessarily better pay. Developing countries have a windfall thanks to remote, followed by startups, but the extra demand means everyone else feels it too.

Generally it&#x27;s kicking out foreign workers and banning&#x2F;discouraging people from expensive things&#x2F;ideas like international travel, living in cities is &#x27;cool&#x27;, leaving the house to see friends rather than watching Popcorn Time.<p>For IT I&#x27;d be wanting to hear what the Indian part of HN says.<p>Generally for the West it&#x27;s been at the expense of the developing countries.<p>How is IT in India and other non Western countries doing? They should rule out 4 (Are they being matched better in the USA?) but could confirm 5.

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