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Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?
536 points by MobileVet on Jan 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 746 comments
There has been quite a lot of press about the 'great resignation,' with employees leaving jobs in droves. This is likely hyperbole, but it does seem that there are a large number of people switching jobs.

If that is something you have done or are considering doing in the near future, why?

compensation
1180 points
company culture
661 points
new challenge / learning
438 points
flexibility (remote, hours etc)
293 points
life balance
281 points
other
133 points
change is good
72 points



I'll be departing my job at the end of the month. I had too many roles, affecting too many pieces of engineering, and my title didn't reflect my work. I needed to go down to a 4 day work week and have my title reflect my roles, but my manager attempted to call my bluff and essentially said it's not going to happen. I hinted about what my decision would have to be if these accomodations couldn't be made, but he didn't budge. When I gave my verbal notice, suddenly there was immediate backpedaling and said maybe something could be worked out. I declined because I don't negotiate like that. If you mismanage a negotiation, there is no do-overs just because you overplayed your hand. The trust is broken.


Same thing happened to me at my last company. I was over worked, wore too many hats, and was paid significantly less than my team mates who were more junior than I was (and had less responsibility). I had a handful of conversations that never amounted to anything. As soon as I put in my notice with a new offer in hand suddenly I was able to "set my price".

I left for other reasons as well, but it really shone a light on how management thought of ICs. Managers: proactively reward your ICs, don't wait until they're halfway out the door. I would honestly take a less aggressive adjustment in comp if it was done proactively, rather than waiting until I'm fed up and on my way out.


Too many roles / too many hats is far too common and why I find it hard to stay anywhere more than 4-5 years.

As a senior IC in a super-flat & growing org.. I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one.

Management administrivia I accumulate administrative things my manager doesn't want to do & pushes down I do unofficially own a part of the team Dotted lines of devs in my "team" that can be rolled in & out sprint by sprint

Customer success / product / architecture I collect customer requirements, translate them into stories & documentation I manage customer/manager expectations with status meetings & reports I project plan out 3 months of work with JIRA hierarchies/Gantt chart I design solutions given the requirements

Scrum I run our standups, sprint plannings, backlog refinements

Corporate citizenship I am involved in recruiting 5-10% of my week I run working groups / long running cross team tech org

Development I do IC work - directly assigned sprint deliverable tickets (analysis, development, infra creation) I need to accomplish

I've been looking at moving to a more official management role elsewhere so I can focus at being good at a few things instead of decent at all the things.


> I'm almost like a customer successs engineer, product manager, scrum master, senior developer and tech lead all rolled into one.

This is also me. Except I really like it. But I'm not sure what to do about it, it can reflect super poorly on a resume for some reason.

"Oh, your applying to be a Senior Engineer? Look at all this product management and developer manager experience on your resume, you must not really be serious about coding, you aren't strong enough technically, the developers won't trust you"

"Oh, your applying to be a Product Manager / Product Director. Look at all this programming and tech experience on your resume, you are really just a developer, you should just be pulling tickets from JIRA/Asana/Linear, you probably wouldn't be able to speak in non-technical terms in front of customers/clients/etc"

(loop on repeat)

I've not heard of a job name/title/role that accurately represents this sort of work, even though companies generally seem to like it, if I can somehow get through their application process.


Make multiple resumes and leave off details that aren't relevant (or are counter-productive) to the job you're applying for.


I believe there was a post on here recently that talked about a person leaving _off_ experience he had on his resume and end up getting _more_ callbacks.


I'm in a similar place, although I'm not really seeing any resume problems. Maybe my resume focuses entirely on my technical side. But on my previous project, I often spoke with stakeholders, helped our ever changing product owners, but I also worked on every aspect on the application (even infra, though that's really not my thing), guided juniors, decided the direction of the application, etc.

But that was only one project, so it doesn't really show up much in my CV. The main problem that recruiters have with me is that they don't know if I'm front-end or back-end, but I consider that a pointless distinction. I pick up whatever needs to be picked up, whether it's a single technical focus or everything else. (I'll even do infra if I really have to, though I'd rather not.) I like the diversity, but I also like to adapt to what the team needs.


I have similarly varied background and I have not had candidate employers put it through that lens.

If anything I find people tend to look upon varied experience as proof that you can add value on multiple fronts and across functions within the organisation, which should make you a slightly less common cog in the machine.


> I've not heard of a job name/title/role that accurately represents this sort of work, even though companies generally seem to like it, if I can somehow get through their application process.

I think you will find that generalists are valued in extremely small orgs like startups, skunk works, spin-offs, and the like. Titles, when accurate, are likely to be vague (eg. Founding Employee). As organizations grow, roles tend to specialize, and generalists are undervalued, but reliable long term career success still tends to accrue to folks that have t-shaped[0] skill sets that allow them to be extremely productive in their area of specialization, and extremely effective at collaborating with other specialists across the organization.

You seem to be getting dismissed as a dilettante, though it is being couched in terms of your expertise in whatever the person you're talking to doesn't feel qualified to assess, or whatever they aren't looking for in the role they are seeking to fill.

There is, however, more than one way to specialize over the course of a career other than your role in an organization per-se. For example, you can develop domain expertise in an industry (finance, healthcare, legal, telecom, entertainment, retail, agriculture), market (eg. regional VARs, enterprise software, small businesses), delivery model (SaaS, information products, durable goods), or product/service category (content management systems, adtech, databases, business intelligence). Don't go crazy with combining these into something too hyper-specific, obviously.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills


I believe you, but that's surprising. I've generally had my well-roundedness very well-received.


The problem is, some cannot believe that high performers, can be experts in multiple branches of a field.

Their development slows to a crawl, as they get stuck in one role. Yours, and others like you, just keep that intense growth happening.

It isn't necessarily their fault, either. Circumstances can keep someone slotted deep in a role, with no way to expand laterally.

So, they may literally think such breadth and depth of experience is just overstatement.


The other aspect is organizational appetite for risk.

The first company I worked for let anyone grow into any role they proved they could do. If you solved the hard problems you were the senior developer, if you took the reigns you were quickly promoted to lead/manager. Seniority didn't count for anything and roles were very fluid.

That's an uncommon situation and what I've learned is it's hard to imagine if you've spent a career in more traditional organizations.


Right, yes, this too.

I recall a contract with a government department. Very much like this. And the very lengthy discussion about the simplest things.


Do you have any experience with:

Azure, Data Engineering, Data Science? Cause I'll hire you


Did you consider skipping the non-relevant parts from the resume and interview discussion? Once you make it in, perhaps you can show them your full background.


I work on hiring 50% of the week and would love to see resumes like this! :)


Technical Product Manager

Followed by a one liner summary


TBH, reading this as a manager, I have to admit I feel like asking my engineers to take on SOME of these beyond-just-the-code duties... is a good thing? Obviously there are a bunch of caveats, and nuances to whether you want an IC engineer to be 100% coding and 0% talking to customers or doing admin (this seems bad), or is it 90% vs 10% (maybe okay), or 80/20 (sweet spot?), 50/50 (concerning), 20/80 (bad again), etc.

That being said, if you are doing all of these things, and not being fairly compensated for it, then that's definitely a problem. A $50k/year web dev position at some random agency, doesn't deserve this level of work from you, esp. if you could instead take all these responsibilities, and do them at a serious technology company or start-up, for 2x-5x the comp.


> TBH, reading this as a manager, I have to admit I feel like asking my engineers to take on SOME of these beyond-just-the-code duties... is a good thing? Obviously there are a bunch of caveats, and nuances to whether you want an IC engineer to be 100% coding and 0% talking to customers or doing admin (this seems bad), or is it 90% vs 10% (maybe okay), or 80/20 (sweet spot?), 50/50 (concerning), 20/80 (bad again), etc.

1. Agree 100% coding and nothing else is bad most of the time. You can leave out admin tasks but engineering is more than just coding, it's problem solving. Understanding requirements (e.g. by talking to customers) is crucial and also the best code is the code that had to be never written.

2. Think that is also in large part an individual thing, some people like to wear multiple hats to some individually varying degree while others don't.

3. It must work out in practice and you have to make sure the sum of both does not result in a value above 100%

4. I agree if the technical stuff is as low as 20% it may be better to just transfer in another role completely as it is hard to contribute meaningfully there then.


... and 5., try to avoid duties which involve a huge amount of smaller interruptions over the day.


I agree most engineers should be doing SOME things beyond code-centric activities. There are things that almost nobody, whether they're an IC or people manager, wants to have take up their whole day. That requires spreading them out across staff.

Problems arise when that work isn't assigned out explicitly, evenly, and thoughtfully. Sometimes there's important work that isn't really assigned to anybody, and it can end up landing with whoever is least willing to ignore it. Over time, that can lead to situations that feel (and/or are) unfair.


Ask them.

Some engineers just want to do engineering. Nothing else. But more often engineers will be happy getting involved with the customers in some way, or working to improve some process they don't like, or some even love doing documentation.

Best thing is to bring up options and ask if any of them sound appealing. Letting people choose their work generally gets you stronger buy-in to what they're doing.


Same. As an IC I like ownership. I'd be fine with most of that list assuming it was related to something I owned. I may not specifically like some task, but I'm fine doing it if it's because I'm the person responsible for something.

The biggest issue I would have with that list is the description of the scrum setup, and being directly assigned tickets. I find it more engaging if I'm given or find bigger problems to solve, completing individual tickets isn't as interesting.


Yes I love ownership as an IC.

It's more that I spend near-zero time on any coding anymore, but also have very little visibility into the wider strategy (because there kind of isn't one).

So I am tasked to have work for my customer(s) / 2-3 devs on loan to me, planned out for a few months. However my manager doesn't really give us what his quarterly goals are most quarters. Product team doesn't publish them very often either.

In order of time spent in applications top to bottom it looks something like - Zoom, Slack, Email, Jira, Confluence, Sharepoint, Gitlab, VSCode.


Right, I'm rather experienced and make many multiples of 50k/yr, so its not really a compensation thing.

It's more that it feels very ephemeral / tenuous as none of it is in an org chart or official. It is basically what problems management has to solve and what seniors are available at the moment.

I am, officially in title and org chart an IC. In reality 10-20% of my time is IC dev work. 6 months ago it was 50%, 6 months before that it was 0%.

Further it feels like too much of a time split to really get any better at any of the aspects - software dev, tech lead, product, people management of this role.

What does this look like in FAANG?


It can be better, but it also can be just as chaotic sometimes. On balance overall, FAANGs are probably better at managing this "IC utilization" rate if you wanna call it that, vs just randomly expecting you to pick up and wear all the hats all the time or that hats are chaotically assigned, with no plan behind it. Certainly FAANGs aren't perfect, but at least it's easier to find "reference implementations" because there certainly are some very high-performing and well-managed teams, and if you're not on one yourself, then you can at least have the benefit of being able to see-and-compare, which then provides a potential for betterment and learning from others (which might be harder in non-FAANGs).


Right, I like the term "IC Utilization Rate". I think for me its the chaos of the hat wearing. I went about 6 months doing pure project management with 0 leadership or development work.

I periodically go long enough with 0 hands-on dev that stuff in the SDLC has changed again. So I have to go poke around and figure out why my commit message formatting is rejected, which teamcity instance we are using now, and what QA box I should be testing on.

Also the unmentioned part for me is that while 10-20% of my time is Dev at best, 50% of it is high urgency fires I am brought in to extinguish because I have the most knowledge of that part of the code base and can ship whatever improvement in 1-2 sprints without needing to spend 2 sprints on analysis first.


I'm just a senior IC, and not at FAANG. But my employer does recruit from FAANG. 0%-20% sounds low for dev work, but the basic description looks somewhat familiar. We don't have project managers, and not all teams have product managers, so seniority can get you more of that work, and less dev work. I don't think ICs do managerial people management if you don't include mentoring. And I do know one or two directors who still code a lot. Maybe some FAANGS have senior positions with more IC dev work.


They do, but it's vastly easier to get promoted to those levels as a manager, because the organization needs managers to function, but super senior ICs are less critical.


For me it mostly depends on management staffing levels, if I'm in a standup with more management/business folks than developers I don't expect to spend a lot of time handling that side of the process, especially if we aren't in a place where we are stable from a technical perspective or have deadlines looming. On the other hand if I'm just directly reporting to a single person I'm much more open to lending a hand and pick up a lot of stuff.


My last title before I went on my own was CTO/Architect. And I was doing all the things you mentioned down to coding. I could not complain about compensation as it was very fair - $250K in 2000 (the last year). But I was becoming a wreck.

Now I have my own company and I still do all those things, LOL. Big difference being I choose what I do, how I do and obviously the size so I can chew it on my own or with my few trusty subcontractors. It is basically development of new products from scratch either for clients or for my own company and once in a while some very short hit and run type jobs. I now also leave plenty of time for myself to enjoy whatever activities make me tick.


Sounds like you could co-found a company, which could also be cool but in the other direction.


What you're describing is a Staff or Principal Engineer title and should be compensated accordingly.


Not even. This is far past what is expected of a staff, senior staff, or even principal engineer. This is a full-on technical cofounder, or hybrid cto/vpoe.


I have 2 yoe and end up doing all of these. Startup life I guess haha


> and was paid significantly less than my team mates who were more junior than I was

This is the kind of thing that any company doing this should be named, shamed and blocklisted.

There is no reason other than greed that a higher ranking employee shouldn't make at least as much as a lower ranking employee in total compensation. "Person was hired earlier and is okay with the lower wage" is, frankly, a reflection of a company hating their employees. It's a shame and an embarrassment.


I don't know. At every company I've worked for (as a junior, and as a senior) there were some juniors who clearly contributed more to the company's success than some seniors. I don't think this is an uncommon experience.

To me the "rank" of senior engineer should indicate the engineer's experience, and maybe their "wisdom" and depth of knowledge, not their salary. A senior engineer may slack off a bit and be less productive than an eager junior, or want to take on less responsibility; it seems fine in that case that the junior is rewarded with higher pay.

Know your value to the company, and negotiate compensation to match it (or exceed it!). I'd also suggest companies not tie pay to title.


Disclaimer: I'm not trying to say anything about or against your parent here.

This can be a very subjective thing. How do you 'rank'? This is not something that is completely clearcut, cut and dry and you are 100% accurate without fail.

Example: I have a guy on my team that is 'more junior' than some others. He's killing it though. He's consistently behaving like he's got 10 more years of experience than he does and people that had 20 more years of experience than him couldn't do 10% of what he does without fail.

Of course you could say that the Senior developer should never have been hired if he was actually a Junior developer that's just been around for some time already but hiring practices aren't perfect, people get hired on one team and move to another and you're the first to actually do something about it etc.


Ranking can be hard for sure, but once that ranking existsz paying the lower ranked person more is indeed unethical. If the lower ranked person deserves more money, give them the promotion and title.


In six months are you going to promote him? If not why not?


You are missing a few other questions and are assuming this can only go one way.

Are you going to promote him? If so, why? Are you going to give him a meager raise? If so why? Are you going to give him a proper raise? ...

FWIW, the "Senior" is no longer in play. I do not tolerate such incompetence for long. And yes I am doing everything I can to get the 'junior' a proper raise and a large bonus.


It's really hard to justify with management.

Instead saying "X left, we need extra budget to replace it" will often work.

It's idiotic and expensive for the company but what can you do.


Here's what you can do: Hold and express sincere trust in and appreciation of your employees.


Sincere trust and appreciation doesn't make my retirement any closer. Show your appreciation with cash.


Do both?


The comment said “employees”, not “employers” :)


I swear at some of these companies it is going to take engineering managers going on strike before corporate actually respects that we know how to run effective teams for the good of the business.


You get what you measure, and the only thing they know how to measure is negative outcomes.

You can't prove that giving me an extra 5k made me stay long enough to pay it back at >= our revenue targets.

The semi-healthy version I see play out is when people who want to be better use the loss of a customer or a coworker as fodder for pushing their agenda. Essentially it's one class of teachable moment. People learn from pain when nothing else works, and you can amplify or dull that sense of pain.


proactively reward your ICs, don't wait until they're halfway out the door.

[Insert frustrated comment here about how capable, sufficient and well-performing ICs are absolutely rewarded.....with more work and additional duties]


IC = independent contractor?


Individual contributor. So writing code yourself, not managing other people.


Thanks. I have never heard that term. At my company, we’d just call that a programmer/developer/engineer.


I was playing a board game with my 7-year-old niece recently. She negotiates the same way most companies do. She holds the line firmly until her bluff is called, and then backtracks quickly once it's too late.

The biggest différance is my 7-year-old will learn, while companies will continue to make the same mistakes.


I highly support playing negotiation and/or lying+consequence board games with children. The skills are lifelong, and the stakes are much lower than when they have to exercise them in the real world.

Coup [0] and Love Letter [1] are both easy entry and quick play examples.

Also, I got in the habit of making my kids negotiate their own payment for household tasks. With agreement based on the skill with which they do so. ;)

[0] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup

[1] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129622/love-letter


Cockroach Poker is another good bluffing game that 4-year-olds can play.


That's a good one to play with in-laws who don't speak your language as well.

But as much as I enjoy it, I'm not entirely convinced there's any more to it than straight up luck.


What part of Love Letter has negotiation or lying(+consequences)? In my house it's nearly strictly deduction.


Maybe it's because I played Coup first, but the way we play there's continuous talking about what's in ones hand. Which gives it more of a poker flavor.


Or maybe companies negotiate this way because it's an effective strategy. If, say, 90% of employees never call their bluff, they come out ahead, even if they occasionally lose someone. And backtracking later will convince some percentage of people to stay, while having zero cost if unsuccessful.

The optimal strategy for you and the company may differ because you can only work one place at a time, but the company employs many people at the same time.


The best people are the first people to leave. I've seen it time and again. Once you lose your best engineers, the prospects of the successful delivery of a quality product are greatly reduced.


Usually the 90% of the employees that don't call their bluff are the bottom 90%. If a company affords to lose the top 10% on a regular basis, it's a bad business model.


Meh ... It's the top 10% at interviewing and moving, not necessarily the most productive 10%, right? Although they may be over-represented.


Negotiation was one of my favorite classes I took in college, I think it should be taught as soon as possible. I must say applying it in real life under stressful conditions has been much harder than in the classroom! At the end of the day I think a lot of companies don't operate from a standpoint of both parties coming out fairly, which just leads to mistrust in the end.


It was one of my favorite classes too!

I remember that BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) was the most important factor (but the least interesting, it can't be improved as a skill). If the figures of employees switching jobs are as high as they say, that means either lots of impossible negotiations (misfits) or lots of negotiation failures.


Same, good ole BATNA! No better BATNA than being able to walk away from the table.


TIL there are colleges who actually have a class dedicated to the topic of negotiation.

Is this "new", say within the past 15-20 years?


I took it back in 2012 at a fairly large but run of the mill public college, but it seemed like a fairly mature class. I would imagine that given it’s prevalence in intelligence communities, it has probably been offered for a while, but maybe not everywhere.


It's more likely that those saying 'it's too late' don't have experience negotiating and have misjudged what 'too late' means.

Even in a 'kids board game' with short negotiations, there's literally no such thing as 'too late' - unless the game has already moved on to something else, but before next moves have really been taken, it's not too late.


It's like they all take the same crappy HR seminar from 20 years ago and haven't updated their skills since. Times have changed.


No, times have not changed. People are still human, employee problems are the same as ever.

HR was never good at dealing with this, that’s not a new thing.


People haven't changed, times have; the market currently favors employees in a way that pushes poor HR policies from "annoying" to "people call your bluff".


> I hinted about what my decision would have to be if these accomodations couldn't be made

I don't hint because it's too confusing. I try to very politely offer options, where one option is me looking for another opportunity. It's not as though it's a secret to either party that's always an option.


I wouldn't hint either, but because at best it puts you in an incredibly vulnerable position.

First, it indicates that you're willing to look for a new job, which decreases opportunities at your job. Maybe that means being passed over for larger projects, since they're less certain if you'll be there through the entire project. Maybe that means not receiving ongoing training, because they're uncertain that they'd benefit from it. Repeat this over a longer period of time, and your list of accomplishments comes short, because you've been denied opportunities.

Second, it opens you up to retribution. The USA has at-will employment, meaning that you can be fired at any time, and have no legal recourse for it. It can be for any reason that isn't explicitly prohibited, or can be for no reason at all. Looking for a new job is much less stressful when you already have a job. If you indicate that you might look for a new job without already having an offer, you could end up doing a more stressful job search while on a countdown to bankruptcy.

Third, even if you have an offer letter, it still isn't a position for effective bargaining. The employer could agree to the raise, wait a month until your offer expires, and then fire you.

I hate that it's a game that needs to be played. I hate the deception, and wish that there could be smoother transitions instead. But so long as the power disparity exists between employer and employee, you should never hint that you're looking for a new job until you are announcing your resignation, and you should never accept a counteroffer after having announced it. Maybe that would be different in a system with stronger unions or better protections for workers, but that isn't the system we're in.


>I wouldn't hint either, but because at best it puts you in an incredibly vulnerable position. First, it indicates that you're willing to look for a new job, which decreases opportunities at your job. Maybe that means being passed over for larger projects, since they're less certain if you'll be there through the entire project. Maybe that means not receiving ongoing training, because they're uncertain that they'd benefit from it.

I probably used to think this way too but I think it's somewhat foolish now. Unless you have a highly unusual contract or employment situation (usually involving family), there is always an implicit threat that you can leave. These "maybe" hypothetical opportunity carrots being dangled in front of you (and by you) just aren't relevant. You can literally say: "give me the training for this position and then put me on that project, or I'm taking an offer from your competitor and in two weeks I'm out."

edit: "and give it to me in writing with a guaranteed 6 months of pay subject to me meeting expectations" (if this is somehow illegal I'd be surprised).


I mostly agree with the above rationale, though I am skeptical about your first point. Having other options, in my view, is a strength. If a company can't put together something comparable to your alternative, it probably is time for a change.


I agree with your point. Marketability is the best job security. You should always be testing your worth to your firm and others. Maybe your company undervalues you -- be prepared to move on. Or, your market value might be lower than you think -- time to push yourself to enhance your value proposition.


That's not without risk if you don't already have an offer in hand, though. And it really is part of the manager's job.


Neither is hinting if you are assuming the person you are hinting to understands the hint. And if they don't understand, the hint is useless.


This.

Employer might not have even known quitting was on the table if there is only a hint. Be bold and direct to reduce miscommunication and you'll be the one standing with integrity.


To be specific about what my hint was, I said "it doesn't make sense to me that the company would be willing to lose me over letting me go down to 4 days." I'm fairly certain my point came across clearly, but my guess is that he thought I was bluffing.


Or ... instead of being 'bold and direct' and assuming that 'you are the one with integrity' ...

... try letting them know your position tactfully, and be reasonable by trying to understand your own demands in context, with eye on both industry norms and norms within the company, and creating a good outcome for both sides.

And dispense with this 'integrity' moralizing.

Much like young CEO's trying to nego with VC's, hiring managers and companies do this day in and day out, they see it all, moreover, they have a different set of objectives, which you have to respect and build them into your consideration.

It's definitely a good idea that they know you might have competing offers, or that you are strongly considering moving on, but those are things you definitely don't want to browbeat them over. A simple, tactful acknowledgement is good enough. I would recommend having a quick chat in-person about it. And stay away from hard lines or antics.

The grass is always greener on the other side, wherever you go it'll be great for 6 months and then you'll discover a bunch of things you don't like ... while there's definitely a lot to be said for moving on, sometimes I think that grinding is definitely under appreciated.


This is a bad idea. Never tell an employer you might leave until you have an alternative option. This only gives them an opportunity to look for an alternative to you.


quitting is always on the table, thinking otherwise is silly

people evaulate what they are doing constnatly


Middle managers in particular get paid in large part for "drinking the kool aid". They might honestly not realize that their subordinates might see other companies as a viable alternative since so much of their self worth is tied up in this one particular company.


Agreed - people who employ dishonest tactics during negotiation should be left alone at the table.

I have been in this situation in the past and it's always the right move to walk if they won't come to the table when you ask politely.


Yes, being dishonest during a negotiation often torpedos the whole interaction.

I tend to think there is a pretty broad space where most reasonable people will agree to what an honest discussion looks like.

Just remember, when it comes to companies and compensation, there are myriad ways a company can not lie and still mislead you.


Giving raises and promotions only when people have outside offers invents awful behavior all around. Yet so many companies do this “just this one time…”


Yes. Incentivising looking for other jobs instead of performing well.


Re "trust is broken" - I used to think like this and I understand, but I would encourage you to try a more nuanced POV. There's a decent chance your manager was simply not allowed to accommodate you, and your verbal notice unlocked options from upper management.


A good human being would say, "i'm not allowed to say this but...". Which good managers will do. You're on the path to leaving anyway.


If that got out, said manager may be marked by the bosses for opening Pandora's box. When people have dependents and mortgages on the line, "good" has very little to do with it. Sad but true.


A good manager would still make clear that their hands are tied and this is all they can offer at this time. They will have to check with upper mgmt for any further options depending on the response to their current offer.

There are a million legal/safe ways to say that the negotiation is not over just keep pushing.

It could also hint that the manager thought the commenter was one of those social cripples that cannot handle negotiations professionally but it doesn't sound to be the case.


Out of the million safe ways to say the negotiation is not over, quite a lot are so obscure that most employees would not even pick up on the subleties. (And if we're honest, we all know coworkers who wouldn't get that hint even if the manager outright told them their hands were tied at this point in the negotiation)


Without blaming the manager for the decisions of those above them, surely you have to see that this strengthens the argument that you shouldn't trust this person?


Maybe - I'm mainly making the point for future situations where it may make sense to stay if you don't adopt a binary trust mentality (which upper management probably does not have).


> There's a decent chance your manager was simply not allowed to accommodate you

A trusted party wouldn’t hesitate to explain the situation.


All that means is that the problem isn't managers but upper management micromanaging IC benefits.


> I had too many roles, affecting too many pieces of engineering, and my title didn't reflect my work [...] I hinted about what my decision would have to be if these accomodations couldn't be made, but he didn't budge.

My position exactly.

I won't be leaving my company, but I will be transitioning to a more defined role in a different department. Didn't sit too well with my current manager. He told me that I couldn't just leave like that. I offered him a 80/20 arrangement, and he didn't like it either.

I'll be transitioning anyway. It's just a bit bizarre that a manager would potentially alienate someone who seems to be indispensable for the operation.


> He told me that I couldn't just leave like that.

isn't the answer to that question "take it up with HR"? that was very gracious of you to even offer an 80/20 arrangement. Ironically, i bet HR would have a hard time with an 80/20 dual role setup.


Generally speaking, what's the general opinion on 80/20'ing your way into a lateral transfer?

I've done it a couple times, at best I ended up leaving, at worst, HR never actually recorded the transfer so when time came a few years down the road, it was on my resume, but come employment verification time, I (and the firm that had offered me a position) learned that archived employee records had me listed down under my prior role, not the one I had transferred into-and had since that point, used for experience in leveraging new jobs. I lost a job offer because of it.

Now I'm reticent to do any kind of 80/20's without written considerations from the company.


> Ironically, i bet HR would have a hard time with an 80/20 dual role setup.

I guess I thought I did my best to avoid burning any bridges, but I was actually bargaining against myself.


There are still too many managers who don't understand one of their primary responsibilities in a market that favors employees: making sure that their best engineers don't leave. The job market won't always be like this, but you'd think that they would have figured it out by now during the current run. It's been nearly a decade at this point, and the pandemic has tipped things even further in the favor of the people who make the sausage.


To be fair to the managers, from my experience managers themselves have little to say and it is mostly HR that determines rules like compensation. In our case, insanely, salaries are frozen. Nothing that your direct manager can do about it. Except, leave, and get hired the next day.


This is a fair point. It seems like standard policy at lots of places is to not budge significantly on comp unless a Valued Employee is prepared to leave. You then end up with one of the three scenarios:

- the employee leaves anyways, since it's too late to change their mind

- the employee stays, but there's a loss of trust and loyalty

- the employee never planned to leave in the first place, and exploited your broken system

Valued Employees should be rewarded preemptively.


Willing to be there is a study that shows that most of the time the employee will not leave or is bluffing and that financial analysis shows its better to just let it play out. This analysis is probably true in a lot of industries but tends to not work so well in tech. So many tech workers are just mercenary with our jobs that we just ask for what we want and by the time we ask we are already out the door. In tech the business should realize their job is to actively work to keep employees from seeking competing offers especially in the current job market.


There's an exception for every rule. As a manager I've fought HR to get pay rises during pay freezes. And won. Bad managers roll over when presented with obstacles, great ones fight for their team.


The great ones also realize that there are other things employees value and build upon those, along with compensation.


The great ones also just leave themselves, rather than suffering the toxic culture on two fronts.


I think this is an often missed point. The managers are often just as overworked as the employees but have to handle negativity from 2 directions, both their employees and their managers. They are just people and often their hands are tied due to company policy. They are often just cogs in the wheel as much as we are.


Pushy, bossy, extroverted, or "people person" managers do that. The whole thing is stacked against docile introverts, no matter how many reasoned and well thought out arguments they make.


I have been surprised how emotionally unaware many of my managers are. They are engineers who moved to management and seem to think reading a bunch of books on management will make them adept at the social skills needed to read and adapt to individuals and a teams emotional state. Compensation is huge but good software devs are all making enough to where a 20-30% swing in either direction isn't going to make or break us. I would happily take a 20% cut if I loved what I was doing and felt endeared of my manager and our goals.


20-30% ?? What kind of money are you assuming most people make. at anything over 100k a year that is a lot of extra money anything less and it is probably needed. It could simply be used to retire a few years earlier if nothing else. It could pay for vacation. It could pay off a vehicle. It could pay down a mortgage or appraisal gap in this market.

A 20% raise is huge at any income level.


Marginal value of money decreases the more money you have as consumption doesn't really scale up. Easily one should take a nice 500k/year job vs a stressful 600k/year job.


Most people aren't in a position where their choice is a nice 500k/year job versus a stressful 600k/year job thought.


The OP was explicitly talking about people making >>100k. At any rate, 5-600k is a staff/principle swe at a lot of tech companies, or even just a senior in some. Given this forum I am guessing that’s not an insignificant percentage of readers.


Surely in the higher income brackets the tax on it brings down the net considerably?


Except that it isn't.

Assume you are a superstar of some persuasion and you earn $100M/yr. Is a 20% raise a lot of money? It's not! Sure, it's an extra twenty million dollars, but what could you possibly want to buy with that money that you can't already purchase?

At some point $100k --> $100M the math changes. That point will be different for different people.


You and other people are discussing amounts of money that you could simply walk away from the world buy a yacht and travel the world for your entire life. This adds nothing to the discussion.


A nice yacht, a sports team, your name on a building .. there's always something.


Expenses always rise to meet income.


"Loved what I was doing"

"and felt endeared of my manager"

"our goals"

So 1 and 3 are a little bit more objective, you can determine those on your own.

But #2?

If you're worried about your managers 'EQ' - why do you not contemplate your own?

Do you assume a lack of visceral empathy from your manager means that they 'don't care' - and - even if they didn't care that much, why do you care?

It's nice when my manager says 'Great Work' and it's important to know I'm respected - that's a matter of professionalism, i.e. recognition of competence.

But I do don't care one bit otherwise.

My manager is busy. Putting out fires, dragged into stupid meetings. I would not want his job.

Why would I want to burden him with having worry about 'me'.

Reading this thread I'm a bit dismayed by a lot of emotion just brimming beneath the surface, I think small things have a tendency to collect up on people over time ... but I also don't suspect that staffers realize how much control they have over their disposition towards most of these things things.

I wish more people had experience managing or even with directorships, it can be brutal - those are probably the two, worst jobs in the system, and it's interesting how far the gap in understanding is between front-line contributor, and just one layer up.


I wasn't saying a manager should need to babysit the emotional state of all the team members, but I think they should be generally socially adept. I have had many managers who were unable to engage meaningfully in any way. People who could eagerly analyze my Meyers Briggs type but would be unable to talk about their vacation. My last manager would unintentionally haze new employees when they asked questions in meetings, he just could not express compassion and understanding with his face/tone so he seemed belittling and annoyed with them.


Managers can't control whether or not you love what you do, though. They can do their best to build an environment you enjoy being in, but that's about it. If you're bored or not enjoy the software or whatever else, they can't fix that.

They can control your compensation and make sure if they want to keep you you have at least a monetary reason to stay


This is not quite right and I think this is where we let our egos get away with us. Their responsibility is to maintain a good team, not the best person. In the cost benefit analysis, keeping a couple of pretty good people at the expense of your 'best' person might work out better. And a high maintenance person costs more than money.


I don’t get this type of management at all. The leverage is always in the developers/engineers hand. The company has essentially zero leverage when it comes to negotiating pay with highly in-demand employees. The only reality for the business is what they can feasibly pay you, and it’s likely much much more than what you’re getting now. Pretending like they have leverage in this position assumes the engineer is less informed. It doesn’t compute for me.

When I hire engineers I give them as close to the top dollar as I can and if that’s not enough there’s nothing else I can do. It’s not fun when they walk, but at least I know there was nothing else I could do.


> When I gave my verbal notice, suddenly there was immediate backpedaling and said maybe something could be worked out. I declined because I don't negotiate like that. If you mismanage a negotiation, there is no do-overs just because you overplayed your hand. The trust is broken.

Good for you!

This is something I always tell junior engineers who are looking for ways to negotiate for something (usually pay and/or promotions). Although it's very effective, negotiation by throwing a competing offer on the bosses desk usually starts a fire-drill up the management chain which gets you noticed in a not-so-positive way. It also leaves a lot of bad feelings all around.


The only way to know the price of your labor is to interview and see what the market says.

Companies are happy to have a non-competitive monopoly on your labor where they can unilaterally set the price. I think engineers (or anybody really) should try to get an offer or two every couple of years to anchor the price of their labor. Otherwise you leave yourself with a constant information asymmetry with your employer.

Your manager might be great, but a company wants to pay you as little as possible to get what they want from you. That's the nature of the labor market. And if you don't create a market for your labor then your employer gets to be the only bidder at the auction.


> The only way to know the price of your labor is to interview and see what the market says.

There are other ways to infer your value. Taking longer vacations, especially off season, can illustrate to people what it's like not to have you around. If they don't miss you, it's time to move on. If they do, it's time to remind your boss.

I knew one guy who was a career employee for a Fortune 500 company, he just moved around every five years, but this guy had the ballsiest negotiation tactic I've ever seen. When it was time to discuss a raise, he'd wear a suit to work and take two hour lunches. In one case he didn't even have time to talk to his boss before his boss approached him with a raise.


When the worker has another offer in hand, you've already lost as a hiring manager/org.


Not necessarily. You're at a disadvantage because you've suddenly lost the total leverage you once (thought you) had. It's still possible for the org to redeem itself. The issue is, no org takes the opportunity.

Part of the issue is that businesses have become so greedy people no longer even want to waste their time negotiating with them. Once I have an offer in hand, I can ask you for some things like a raise, reduced hours, etc. The general response will always be no. At that point I can tell you I have a competing offer in hand and you can then, when you realize you lost leverage too late, attempt to recover the situation. The issue at this point is that you've lost all my trust and I can see indirect retaliation as a reasonable followup should I choose to stay and relinquish my leverage. So it's almost always in my best interest to leave at that point and yes, you "lost."

Alternatively I could have leverage, or maybe I don't, but perhaps when I ask for a promotion or raise you don't immediately discard the discussion or tossed some canned "budgets are tight" argument when margins are visibly fat. You listen and evaluate (and not slowly) and make a decision not based on being cheap but based on actual value. Suddenly, I have a familiar devil I already know and a better setup than I did before. Suddenly you became competitive. No only did you take me seriously and perform an objective evaluation, you followed through with it. You just earned loyalty points which are hard to come by. I expect in the future if I come with another reasonable request, you'll evaluate and attempt to meet it fairly. I suddenly like you.

Now, if I have an offer in hand and I already know you cannot match it because I understand the financials very well and... you really can't afford it, then yes unfortunately you probably did lose. You may be able to compete by making other sacrifices that are less financial in nature but if the offer is significantly higher, unfortunately there's little way I'll stay. Early in my career from my first position I tripled my salary in my first move. My first employer was genuinely great but I knew they couldn't ever reasonably meet that offer so I didn't really even try to negotiate, I just gave them more notice than normal.


>You just earned loyalty points which are hard to come by.

Employers probably love when you give them "loyalty points" because they can be substituted for their more tangible "dollar points".


Based on my reading of the story the employer bought loyalty points with dollar points. How did they obtain them in your reading?


I don't think it matters how they're obtained. What is the value/meaning of a loyalty point if it can't be substituted with a dollar point? Either they only come in to play when you have an offer for exactly the same dollar value (after transfer costs), as a tie breaker of sorts, or they are eventually going to be valued at some dollar amount. i.e. this new employer is offering an additional $10 (after transfer costs) but I'm more loyal to my current employer.


^^^^ yes! Your worker already has one foot out the door and has seen the greener grass outside the door. Is it really greener? Probably not but will be to them!


Ah, the green pasture. It always looks green until one steps on it.


> Ah, the green pasture. It always looks green until one steps on it.

The grass doesn't change color when you step on it, but you might discover that it's just astroturf.


The greenest pastures are the most fertilized, so watch your step.


Employers make the mistake of seeing employees as a cost center instead of as revenue generators.

I recently finished a leadership class and the primary focus was on treating employees as people / human. This perspective makes it possible to make decisions that make for happy employees which, in turn, makes for more productive employees.

Employers that focus solely on cost are missing the forest for the trees; it's extremely short sighted.

I now work for a DAO in which decisions are made by "the community" (those with tokens have voting power). Not having a traditional leadership structure has been so liberating. Everything is fully transparent.


> When I gave my verbal notice, suddenly there was immediate backpedaling and said maybe something could be worked out. I declined because I don't negotiate like that. If you mismanage a negotiation, there is no do-overs just because you overplayed your hand. The trust is broken.

Agreed. That's like trying to take your money back once you see a river card that doesn't help you in poker.

Just doesn't work like that. Negotiate in good faith or accept the potential consequences.


This happens virtually everywhere. I hate it. This is such a common experience with any sort of providers as well. I called up my ISP because the internet speed was worse than what I was paying for. They "fixed" it. So far so good, but there were times when they did not want to do this, they tried to "rationalize" it away using bullshit pseudo-technical sentences thinking that they are talking to someone who knows nothing about computers and networking. Anyways, I told them that I am going to switch to another ISP, and after that they fixed it. I finally got what I am paying them for. Imagine how many people are not... without knowing about it!

Plus what you said specifically happened to my mother. Her employer knows that my mother is one of the best she has as an employee. My mother asked her employer for a higher salary, she refused, but after my mother said that she will be looking for other jobs because the work is too much for too little, she immediately was willing to negotiate a higher price.


Every time I leave a job, there's suddenly the money I was asking for available. If someone was asking for a raise and you couldn't give it to them, and then they turn in their notice, and then there's onus to retain them at their original ask, the only thing to say is "congrats, we definitely regret not making things work for you here".


Some people take "If you don't have time to do something right, you have time to do it over." as a task list.


"People don't leave companies, they leave managers."


I hear this all the time, but I've actually never left a manager. I've liked all of my managers. It's usually either some external force like a compelling opportunity or something with the org that is beyond my manager's control.


That saying really isn’t true. I know plenty of people that liked their manager but still left companies. There are plenty of reasons people leave companies that have nothing to do with their manager.


i’d say it was at least half true —i’ve definitely left both companies and managers!


I agree.


While I can understand your sentiment, I don't think you handled that negotiation very well.

Playing chicken by drawing hard lines in the sand is not negotiating - they were actually willing to budge, you were not.

Again, it's entirely your prerogative, just understand that this is not going to lead to optimal outcomes.

Finally, you mentioned something like '4 day work week' - in most situations today, it's completely off the table. If it's common in your company and you fit the policy, then sure, you can ask.

But if '4 day work week' is not policy at your company, then what you are really asking if for the company to change it's policy and open it up to everyone.

I'm sure you concede that you're not the only one possibly deserving such a flexible opportunity.

So your demand extends much broader than just yourself, and the consequences of giving this flex to one person, would mean an immediate negotiation with large numbers of other employees, which can be disruptive.

Of course, maybe they should have the policy, but it's definitely reasonable that they don't as well.

And finally, this assumes that they didn't have such a policy in place.

Consider what would have happened were you to have contemplated a counter offer from the company. There's probably an outcome in there that's pretty good for both sides, an when that happens it's a broader win for everyone.


I'm in the same situation but I don't really know what to do. I've been trying to extricate myself from a lot of stuff but the way things are structured it doesn't seem like I'm going to be able to just focus on one role. It looks like a lot of openings are offering a fair amount more than my current salary as well. The only thing holding me back at the moment is that I really like the people I work with.


You'll still like them after you leave. It's often nice to have a network of people you no longer work with.


Maybe by leaving you'll indirectly be helping them get the push they need to start look for something better themselves.

I know I dragged my feet but eventually enough people left that I was like, "Alright I have to find something new" and I ended up with a much better role and compensation as well, and probably should have left earlier. And I also like the people at the new place too, and keep in touch (somewhat) with my old coworkers.


In the same boat, I think this is something that's going on everywhere because of the market. I love the people but I'm spread so thin something is eventually going to explode.

I've basically given myself another year


Who’s to say you won’t like the people at your next job?


>> I really like the people I work with.

Quality of life can be a considerable part of compensation, imo.


> I declined because I don't negotiate like that. If you mismanage a negotiation, there is no do-overs just because you overplayed your hand. The trust is broken.

Not that it would be likely to happen, but you could also have doubled down. Now you'll need a 3 day work week and an additional 10% pay bump. There is some potential value in keeping emotion and irrelevant sentiment (like "trust") out of the equation.


> I declined because I don't negotiate like that. If you mismanage a negotiation, there is no do-overs just because you overplayed your hand. The trust is broken.

As a freelancer, this is a pretty standard scenario where you need to have somewhere to go when you tell an old (even cherished) client about your latest price rise. If the current employer needs extra time to think it over, even by a bluff call, it's nothing personal to me.

Not that I am a hardened business person, far from it - I just have a blasted view that there are no real friendships in business that trump the 'bottom line'. If I had had a different experience in my working life, I would have welcomed it! Contracts exist because trust in business is too risky a strategy.


Reading the comments here is quite fascinating. I have handed in my notice too for similar reasons.

I took this job with a pay cut so that I can do more coding as my previous experience was mostly support.

But after two years I haven't done that much coding.

Currently I wear too many hats too, and very little experience in any one them.


Ah, the old "take this job and shove it" gambit. Interesting. Let's see what the boss's next move is... Ah, the old "search in vain for a replacement and complain that this generation doesn't want to work" gambit. Interesting... Not.


Similar thing with me. Starting at a new job in February. Left because the title did not reflect my work. There was not much room for negotiation and I had a scouted offer on the table with better comp and more interesting work.


Is it just the title? Is it a problem that some people don't see you in that title?


As the old tech bro addage goes: Alpha as fuck


Beautiful. I remember hearing it said that if you're not willing to walk away completely from a negotiation, you have zero actual leverage. Bravo!


Negotiating courses often refer to this as the BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement). Considering what that scenario is and having it as your bottom line is the best piece of advice they impart.


Haven't looked at it in years but I remember Getting to Yes as being a great little book on negotiation. Maybe there are better books out there but I found it a good place to start.

There are a number of other things in there too. For example, you may not have the same priorities as the person you're negotiating with.


I'd recommend _Never Split The Difference_, by former Chief FBI Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss. Very fun read and widely applicable.

Spoiler: His advice is not to strong-arm, but to build trust with your counterpart.


Hostage negotiation is a game played once between parties. Most of daily life situations are repeated games, in which dynamics are different. I found that the author was biased by their experience in one-off games and their suggestions wouldn’t generalize well into repeated games. Unfortunately, there is no acknowledgement of this until the very end of the book. Still a good read though.


my wife and i actually read that as part learning to deal with my mentally unstable ex-wife. i thought it was good for repeated performances as well.


Not sure I understand the distinction you're making, isn't interviewing with one particular company a one-off game as well?


> Not sure I understand the distinction you're making, isn't interviewing with one particular company a one-off game as well?

No. In a situation where you're thinking of leaving, you are negotiating with your manager. That's a relationship that will continue if you stay.


Ah, you mean that one, not potential prospects.

Yep I agree on one hand but on the other, getting to that point is being 95% out the door anyway. Even if you stay, many managers and businessmen have very persistent bad memory and will remember you as the guy who twisted their hands or whatever. I've experienced this a long time ago; some of these people are very resentful and vengeful.

Often times staying at a place where you have thrown the "I'll leave for a better offer if you don't budge" card on the table successfully... is not worth it.


Also, I saw a lot of parallels with Playing to Win by David Sirlin [0], about competitive gaming.

One of Sirlin's points is that the most common reason casual players lose is because they restrict themselves to a subset of legal moves. I.e. they play the game they think exists, or they think is "fair", rather than the rules as written.

Transposed into negotiation, Voss feels very similar to me. Whereas most people get distracted with the minutiae, or their feelings about the negotiation, or 1,000 other non-rule parts... he treats negotiation as game.

Not in the sense of "fun" or "lighthearted" (he worked for the FBI!), but in the sense of understanding all the actual rules, and using those rules to win.

[0] https://www.sirlin.net/ptw


I hadn't thought of the connection yet, but now that you mention it there are indeed a lot of parallels. Thank you for pointing this out! :)


Terrible book that has some gems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21769264

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19059590

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25309966

Edit: Yes dang, I did copy/paste a prior comment of mine, but it seemed silly to post a link to a comment that itself is just links!


It's an OK book. I really liked "Bargaining for Advantage".


Having a BATNA that you're perfectly fine doing takes a huge amount of pressure off in a negotiation.


I feel like I can always replace “BATNA” with “alternative” or “option” and the statement conveys the same information.


People like secret words that show they're in a certain group. It's called PLSWTSTIACG.


It came out of research at Harvard (by the authors of Getting to Yes) and is related to game theory. So it's academic (and therefore jargony) but is probably also intended to be more precise than alternatives or options.

That said, for day to day use, understand your alternatives if the parties can't come to an agreement works perfectly well.


Yeah, makes sense. It's possible no-one felt it was okay to say, "do we just mean 'fallback' or 'plan B'?"


Oooh what's that? Tell me


Only ddg for PLSWTSTIACG is this post


People like secret words that show they're in a certain group.


IMHO there's a difference - alternatives and options are the things that you consider and discuss might offer to the other party within a negotiation, they are a part of it.

BATNA, on the other hand, is outside of that negotiation, it is the thing that you'll actually do if the negotiation fails. This will not always will match your statements during the negotiation about what your options are, it's something purely in your mind to compare with the actual alternatives being negotiated and something which, unlike these alternatives, does not require a negotiated consent of the other party.


Even just knowing the concept gets you halfway there, assuming you have any other options at all. It's a term everybody should know. BATNA BATNA BATNA!


Always be ready to leave the table first.

It doesn’t mean that you will; it doesn’t mean that you should. It means you are prepared. And this can be a huge advantage.


One of the good things that I think happened from the pandemic is that more and more people are realizing that tying up your identity and sense of self-worth in your job is a bad thing, that's why I'm very glad to see compensation so high on this list.

Sure, everyone wants to work in a good working environment, but I think the idea that "nobody left because of the money" is finally being put to bed.

The fact is that corporations and VCs have always realized that business is primarily just about the money, and their ability to get people to work for their "passion" has resulted in people getting underpaid. I'm always especially amused when people are expected to have "passion" when they're working at like a bank or an insurance company.

You work to make money. There are plenty of opportunities for hobbies and volunteering for passions. I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy what you do at work, but don't lose sight of why someone is paying you to do it.


There's another side of the coin. For people who's identity was "I am X job" then maybe the comp is a reason to go get better pay and not be so intrinsically tied to it. The other side is people realizing that in many ways, that thing you are spending 40+ hours a week doing is, in some very "slice the pie" of your time ways, a large part of you. Even if it's not an identity, it's a lot of your daily existence. So spending all that time somewhere miserable is also a problem, even if the comp is great. I don't think most people need to have some hyper fulfilling work life, as it is ultimately a business transaction, but it probably should at least be a neutral feeling and not a negative one.

An easy one here is the commute disappearing. People realizing they were giving away an hour or two or three that they aren't getting back that all of a sudden they did have back. Starts putting the perspective of your time writ large front and center.

Both those scenarios boil down to balance and people being skewed too far one way or the other.


The first part for sure. I raise the assertion that the feeling can be positive.


My passion is not doing stupid shit. As software developers we should be focused on automation so that we don’t have to do stupid shit.

Instead, at least in JavaScript land, it is only about tools. Automation be damned, because that means writing original code, god forbid. Thus we just do the same mistakes over and over like a mistake factory. Instead of doing any amount of self reflection we look for better tools. Rinse/repeat.

I have found quitting my job to work somewhere else means me risking what I have currently for something substantially less mature for more money and crappier benefits.


To expand on this, when can we stop asking “so what do you do?” as one of the first things when meeting someone for the first time?


It's hard to ask broader questions without it feeling awkward though; "what do you do" is so cliched it's "approved" small talk. Whereas something like "what are your hobbies" or "what do you dream of doing" or "what motivates you" feels very personal. There are some in betweens, but they all will likely be interpreted to mean job in the same way that "what do you do" is interpreted that way (despite being open ended).


I ask people what keeps them busy since I feel that is more open ended than what is your job


Yeah- I'm guilty of this, and try to ask something like "what are you into right now?"


I really like this version, will be implementing it!


I'm guilty of this in the past and I agree. Maybe in the future we can instead say, "What do you love doing?"


Yes, “but” company projects often reach a certain size because of the fact that they’re driven by potential profit and have large investment. Whatever hobby/volunteer task you may find, while it might be interesting it probably will not be as far-reaching as what a job could entail. (That’s not to say they couldn’t still reach a lot, e.g. thousands of downloads, just maybe not what a company project could do.)


The trouble is you soon get used to the extra money. So if you have only taken the job for the renumeration then you can become trapped in a role that you don't like but can't get out of.


I wish there were an "upvote this x 1000" button right now. Well said.


Rather than look for another job I retired at 63.5. My job was long hours, high stress, high visibility, continuous deadlines and changes that never ended at a large non FAANG company. Compensation was OK (not FAANG but OK for where I am). Everything I or my team shipped worked great; but lots of things with these challenges never shipped for political/idiotic reasons. So much budget was wasted on Exec whims and fantasy. I just grew tired of the frustration. If I were younger I would have left and gone to the local competition or even moved somewhere. But enough was enough after almost 6 years here.

I still write code but now its just for me to support my generative art. I still hear stories from my former team; not missing the nightmare at all.


I'm fortunate enough to be paying off my house next year and strongly considering an early retirement. Granted I'm in my 40's, I just yearn to work on something I can poor my heart and soul into even if it fails. My dream is to write a video game and the only thing prohibiting that is lack of time. I've done an IPO, I've worked for FAANG/MAMAA, I've done keynotes at conferences, I've been an IC, Manager, Director. I feel like I've got everything I've ever wanted out my career and I don't know where else there is to go. At this point I just want to take everything I've learned and apply it to something I own, full time. That's the next dream I guess. It's a scary thought, but working for other people for another 20 years seems just as scary.


I relate so much to this. Currently working at Google and I'd like to work on something that I care about. However, I still am in my early 30s and I don't think I have enough saved to do that yet even considering that GOOG went almost 6x since I was hired.


This thinking is a profound illusion I fell into. You might be surprised how far that money goes. And you also have the skills for more money to come in easily. You also probably spend way more than you need to survive.

Particularly if you don't have a family. You get one life. Take the leap.


Thank you so much for the kind words. I definitely have some thinking to do about it and you're right! Eventually I will have to take leap.


Funny. I'm in my 40s also but decided on a career in academia (CS) when I was younger instead of the tech industry. What a mistake.

I recently lost my job to due to a lack of funding and I'm a pretty difficult hire now: academia is done for me, if you haven't made it to professor by my age, you're obviously worthless.

But for an industry job, I'm facing the dilemma that I'm formally highly qualified but have no relevant (industry) experience to show. That is, I'm too mature for a junior position but too inexperienced for anything else.

To make things worse, I left the states over a decade ago, and thus have no relevant network there. Not that I have a network outside academia over here, either...

I'm so far removed from your situation (being able to pay off your house and thinking about retiring) that it's not even funny. My wife and I were only able to buy a tiny town house last year (< 1000 sq ft, shared walls with two other townhouses left and right), and will hopefully find some job that will allow us to pay off our loan over the next 20 years.


I'm a little bit older than you, similarly positioned financially, somewhat different career path. I actually tried my own thing when I was younger and it didn't work out... And later it's always so hard to leave. The more you got the more you want ;) Job sometimes drives me crazy but sometimes I get great stuff done. Lucky for me I've mostly worked for/with nice/good people.

If you think you got a handle on the business side of things I'd say go for it! That's always been the barrier for me, I think I can handle any technical challenge, but that's not good enough for a successful business...


I love software engineering and working with other coders. That said, the second I'm able to retire comfortably, I won't bat an eye.

I might still decide to work on something but very not primarily software. Maybe I'll teach, work on something more manual or do volunteer work.

Thankfully my wife doesn't read HN.


My wife always tells me I'll drive her crazy if I retire. One piece of advice is "retire comfortably" is a moving target. I could probably have retired 5 years ago "comfortably" and now I can retire "more comfortably" and yet it's probably not in the book (yet).


I hear this a lot. Curious what languages did you program in?


Any art you could share? I'm really interested.


Second this!


I post art every day on my twitter at https://twitter.com/digconart


Have you seen this: https://twitter.com/jonathanmccabeX ?


Hey, this is really good!


Congratulations on successful retirement. Hopefully you can have a healthy and interesting retirement and enjoy your family and loved ones to the fullest.

Honestly, probably should have done it sooner if you could have.

As a 30-something, most of my peers are not planning to work past 60, and most are planning to retire in their 50s. Unfortunately that seems to be a privilege of a certain level of job income and not all of my peers will be so lucky.


> but lots of things with these challenges never shipped for political/idiotic reasons. So much budget was wasted on Exec whims and fantasy.

Curious - was this a new(ish) phenomenon, or was this something that you experienced throughout your career and decided it wasn't worth it anymore?


Our 40 years you see everything. This last employer was known for this sort of thing, yet still successful despite their best efforts to mess everything up.


My old boss Eric Carlsen used to say, nobody left because of money.

They may get more money if they change jobs. But they start looking because they're unhappy. So when somebody asked for more money, he'd start by asking what was bothering them.


I think the old generation really bought into this, but the new generation knows it's a load of bull.

The poll makes it pretty obvious that compensation is the biggest reason folks leave, and it's the thinking of the old generation who doesn't know how to retain talent (they do, but they keep throwing pizza parties / sending out merch instead). It's a real "it can't be helped" mentality around retention.


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

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

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

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

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


And the executive compensation, is available to every employee. The age where management claim to have no money , internally giving huge bonus to themselves cannot be pulled anymore.


Also called 'table stakes', or 'must haves' in product development.


Strong disagree for me. I'm starting a new job in less than two weeks, but the current job I'm leaving has been the best so far in my career. Wasn't perfect by any means but it exceeded most of my expectations by far. My new job is paying 60% more than my current job, that's my reason for switching and not much else.


If you were so happy why did you start looking for another job? People don't leave because someone gave them an offer out of the blue. They have to start looking in the first place and whatever triggered that search is what's important.


I assume many people are smart enough to know that they need to increase earnings to gain security in life and stay ahead of inflation. Me being content at work is not going to pay the kids’ tuition, healthcare, or legal expenses. Or my expenses in 40 years.

A large amount of assets yielding healthy levels of passive income will.


> why did you start looking for another job?

I can think of the following, and there are probably others:

1. To know your market value so that you know what to ask for during your compensation review at your current company.

2. To practice interviewing skills when you don't need them, so that it's easier when you do

3. To network and learn about companies that might be relevant for you in the future (as in, you wouldn't accept an offer now, but if it looks nice you might apply again later, and if it doesn't you might consider it only as a last resort).

2. especially makes sense for coding interviews, and I've been advising the following to a few friends: ideally, one year before you actually want to apply, apply everywhere you can with such interviews. Your results won't matter anyway, you'll be able to apply again one year after, but you'll get a lot of real-world practice and an idea of what you might want to work on.


That's not true at all. I just switched a few weeks ago for a 50% increase that I did indeed receive "out of the blue". Emailed by a recruiter, I turned them down, they were persistent, and I took it.

I was not actively looking and the thought of leaving hadn't crossed my mind.


Because I'm trying to start a family and to move into a bigger house, and I knew that there were little to no opportunities for advancement/promotion at my current job. It's really not that complicated.


You were unhappy there were no advancement opportunities so you started looking?, OP is saying the same thing, if it was perfect people generally don't look for new jobs.

It is not because of loyalty it is because we are risk averse, a new job is a lot of risk. Many things can go wrong you may not like that new job, or even purely financially it can be risky as a new company may not pay as promised, shutdown, you get fired pretty quick and may not find a job at same compensation , or variable/ equity compensation wasn't as good as promised/imagined. All of these scenarios have substantial financial risk.

To take that risk(even if only financial) there has to strong motivation.


If I could have stayed doing the same thing I was (software development) for more pay I would have stayed. Might have gotten a bit stagnant/boring in a few more years but I would have been happy until then at least. The only potential advancement opportunity (salary-wise) would have involved changing over to being a DBA or a sort of DBA/developer hybrid role which would have been interesting (I would definitely prefer the hybrid role to being a pure DBA) but some statements from higher-ups about hiring freezes etc. made it clear that wouldn't happen any time soon (even though my direct manager was supportive and trying to help).


This is not true at all. I get 3-5 recruiter emails per day many of which state comp up-front. Recently the numbers have got so high that I have to admit, it’s tempting, despite being perfectly happy in my current role.


Maybe I should start opening those recruiter emails - I don't think the ones I have read ever included salary info...


At least on Indeed 1/2 to 2/3rds of job postings for C# developers include salary ranges, and I'm sure it's similar for other languages. It's pretty nice for getting an idea of what you're worth.


> People don't leave because someone gave them an offer out of the blue. They have to start looking in the first place and whatever triggered that search is what's important.

You don't have to look around to know that you're underpaid, just talk to people from industry and they'll tell ya


Recruiters are constantly contacting people these days. Some companies have reputations for paying well, so when you hear from them you sort of know what is coming.


Inflation, cost of housing skyrocketing, etc. I’m looking for a new job because my current one does not pay enough to own a house any more. You basically have to make FAANG bux to own a house here so that is why I started looking.

Otherwise I have quite high job satisfaction.


7% inflation is enough for some people to start looking.


In my case I did not look for another job. I was scouted (ex boss recommendation) and took the offer. I bet there are many others like me - frequently getting offers.


It can be true that the job itself is largely great and also that the person knows they could get a lot more money elsewhere, which causes them to start looking.


Late, but I will note that the more people pay the nicer they treat you and the less they expect from you.


Why is compensation #1 though? There is a threshold where you have enough money and it's easier to work with people you know and like. So, what do they need that extra money for? As I mentioned elsewhere housing is currently the #1 issues I see here in Canada that people are focused on. If you are a front line person, making $15 at a restaurant, plus renting where housing costs $1m+, you are probably looking for options (vs someone who owns a house and is making $150/hour as a dev).

This is a leading question to expand on why compensation matters. Personally, I fall into the group where I could probably make more but really like my group. So, there is risk with leaving (bad boss, toxic culture, too much work, etc) vs making more.


Do you know anyone where that threshold has been reached? Anyone with a family? Given the way inflation is going, I know maybe one person, and they're single with their mortgage paid off.


I recently just left my job for another because of inflation, if the price of things go up so should my salary. The value of my work did not get cheaper!


Not tying my job to expensive urban markets would help!

But I'm hesitant to describe my salary needs in terms of my household costs. I want to get paid by the value I bring first and foremost. And, similarly, what the market clearing rate for an engineer with my capabilities is. Not "market rate" unless I'm truly a median engineer, especially since companies tend to be underinformed about market rates.


If you're invested in a diversified portfolio then inflation shouldn't really make a big difference. So I think this is really some variation of FIRE 4% ... If you can live off 4% of your savings per year then the rest of it is just do you want to work more so you can buy more stuff ;)

I'm sort of in the same position as the parent. I've crossed the threshold, a little more money or a little less money makes no difference to me. I don't buy stuff I don't need. The amount of money that'll completely change my life is like x10 so likely won't happen (so moving from the "have enough" to the "mildly rich" category) and really I'm not sure that would mean anything to me anyways...

I want work that I can enjoy, with good people, that challenges me, and pretty much all the pay in the world won't make me go work for some sucky place (ofcourse everyone has their price, but my price would be higher than what they'd be willing to pay).


Personally, I’m still building for retirement. I have way more than enough to live every month, but way less than I’ll need to retire and be able to spend my early retirement (healthiest remaining) years traveling and still be confident that my spouse (with longevity in her family) will be well taken care of financially if she lives as long as the rest of her family tends to.

Retirement savings (and to a lesser extent because the numbers are way smaller, college savings) drive the need to accumulate 25x your annual expenses.


Yes. Even if I had my every theoretical need and want covered by my salary, it still makes sense to go for more, because it just goes right into savings and reduces my retirement age by X.

I have a sign "The Goal is to not have to work" right above my monitor in my home office. Every career/learning/spending/saving decision I make is in furtherance of this goal.


The threshold where you have enough has been driven up by crazy rents and house prices. Personally, I want my house paid off before I'm 40, so I shoot for maximum earnings and remote work that lets me live in a cheaper place. That ratio makes my ambition very attainable.

Related is the sustainability of work: I don't want to need high earnings past 40. I want to retire into a second career I'll find more fulfilling but which might pay dramatically less. Higher pay now is the only way I can achieve this.


Why would you pay off your house when you can keep the cash in an investment account making > 5% APR vs. the house loan which presumably is in the low 3s.


>> Why would you pay off your house when you can keep the cash in an investment...

I asked someone that in my mid 20's. He said "It's nice knowing I can support my family working at McDonalds if I have to." That stuck with me. Something fundamental changes in your life when you become debt-free.


> Something fundamental changes in your life when you become debt-free.

Being able to pay off a debt at anytime is equally freeing, for me at least. Paying off a loan with an interest rate significantly below inflation is not a great use of money[1] (and an opportunity loss). Putting that lumpsum into bonds (any bond with interest higher than the loan) is better, or even investing in stocks with a stop-loss. If I lose my job and have to flip burgers, that's when I'll pay off the loan and get a little extra from the investment/bond, thanks to the power of compounding interest.

1. Its the equivalent of someone offering you a 6- or 7-figure loan payable in 20/30 years at 2-3% when inflation is 6%, and you decline.


>> Being able to pay off a debt at anytime is equally freeing,

Let me remind you that in 2008 things were so screwed up, some lenders lost track of who owed what. Having a hard copy document that shows a debt was close out is not the same as having assets that could pay off the loan. Keep in mind too that it was also not a good time to trade investments for cash.

There are risks in every approach. I can't imagine taking out a loan on a property today and investing the money thinking it will beat the interest payments over the next couple years. At other times, it's less risky but the rates will probably also be higher at those times.


The opportunity loss is what I don't get. Without the debt you can take on new debt that could be say a rental property or business loan.

How is a bunch of money tied up in debt, and an equal amount invested to hedge that not a huge opportunity sink?


There is no loss of opportunity. You can borrow against invested money at very low interest rates, lower than mortgage interest rates, and people often do. In today's crazy real estate market, when people make "all cash offers" that is often just cash borrowed against securities. It is some of the cheapest debt that exists.


It's hard to argue in the abstract without figures and expected returns. If paying off the debt opens the door higher returns, then I'm all for it. All things being equal, I'll keep $250k cash with a $250k mortgage at 2.7% today, as opposed to a paid-off house and a $250k hole in my account.


> Something fundamental changes in your life when you become debt-free.

This to me is the only legitimate criticism, and it really boils down to risk-reward.

If you're holding cash for say a backup fund, great! That's good security and everyone should aspire to that. But also acknowledge that with 6% inflation, you're actually losing 6% on that backup fund.

Inflation is insipid. You _must_ take risk with your funds just to not lose the value of it.


You must take risks with everything. Owning a house, paid off or not, is risky in a multitude of ways.

At least monetary wealth can be diversely invested; so you have some control over it. Most of the risks that come from owning a house are completely out of your hands.


> Inflation is insipid. You _must_ take risk with your funds just to not lose the value of it.

This certainly seems to be the case, but it's fustrating. I can think of no fundamental reason why it should be so. Other than speculators and govt policies backfiring to destroy the safety of alternative places to keep your money besides cash.


Couldn't agree more!

Then add to that the fact that you're taxed on `gains` for investment.

So buy an ounce of gold. 1 year later sell it for 6% more than you paid. Cool, beat inflation right?

Well, no because now you pay capital gains on something that isn't really worth more than when you bought it.

Inflation _is_ a tax...

> govt policies backfiring

Yeah sure, they're `backfiring`...


There's nothing nefarious about it. The government doesn't want people hoarding cash, because it means the money isn't supporting the economy.


Not to mention the dramatic effects of deflation on growth.


I was being a little generous, yes. I wonder if that's what is triggering people.

The stated goal of govt seems to be low (but positive) levels of inflation and high growth. The current situation with high inflation and low interest rates makes even tax-free govt bonds undesirable. And they will need to raise rates. So I'd say policies are backfiring, yes.


Yeah, I don't get the downvotes. It's worse that they won't reply why either. At least converse when you are in disagreement.

> The stated goal of govt seems to be low (but positive) levels of inflation and high growth.

Yes, and I disagree with that position too, but people are taught Keynesian economics, so even beginning to unfurl that mess is asking for a downvote storm.

The same people that will argue inflation is beneficial for growth tend to believe they are also open minded, free thinking, and well `educated`. It makes for a difficult argument often resulting in a lot of pointing to `authorities` on the matter.


I think it's weird that people expect to just be able to just watch a pile of cash and have it maintain value indefinitely (or even grow in value). Every other resource you could trade for that money would decay over time.


Ah. No that's not what I meant. Option #1 is risk the money. Option #2 is sit on cash. You forgot about option #3: invest it somewhere that is both not risky and safe from inflation. Institutional investors have hedging strategies that achieve this. For us little people, there used to be crappy govt bonds that would safely give you the inflation rate more or less. Now they give you negative returns while inflation climbs. And of course the traditional hedges like real estate and precious metals are sky-high and dominated by speculators.


The buying power of your cash is surely decaying over time.


Yes, as would anything else. That's the point.


Well, real estate, gold, and bitcoin don't.


govt bonds aren't generally expected to decay over time either. But I suppose they are these days.


That doesn't mean literally paying off the low interest loan though.

You can save up so that you have enough money invested to cover all the remaining loan payments and consider that having paid off the house. But don't send the money to the mortgage company, invest it into something stable that pays more than the mortgage interest and you're better off.

(Not historically always possible, but with today's interest rates pretty easy.)


Yeah, but if the market crashes while you’re still overpaying your mortgage, now you’re out of a job AND potential savings that you can’t get back. With even inflation outpacing mortgage rates now, I’m not certain in what situation—even from a risk perspective—it makes more sense to pay down a mortgage more quickly than necessary. (With current rates at ~3%. Obviously in the late 80s it made sense to pay the house off as quickly as possible.)


I keep looking over the historical graph for broad indexes and I don't really see any window longer then 2-3 years where 3% would come out better. You just need a buffer to withstand those downturns.


VTSAX is a very popular broad-market index fund. Its price was overall flat from October 2007 to sometime in January 2013 - over 5 years - while returning dividends of around 1.5%. 3% beats that pretty handily.


>keep the cash in an investment account making > 5% APR vs. the house loan which presumably is in the low 3s.

One is guaranteed, one is not. Markets are volatile. I lived through 2001 and 2008 as a working stiff, that shit can drop on a dime.

Right now, I have no debts. House and vehicle are paid off and I have an "oh shit" account that's pretty good. I can sit here as a hermit for at least a year or two, three if I really hunkered down and pinched pennies. It's a good feeling; one less thing to worry about.

Now if I put all that money into the market and shit hit the fan, not only would I not be willing to sell stocks due to their price plummeting, I would still have a mortgage and car payment. I'd be in this situation for 6 months to a year. Not a great situation.

Ensure your freedom / ability to live first, then invest heavily, IMO.


This is something you can hedge against, which is known as a sequence risk [0]. There are investment vehicles with built in volatility buffers designed to avoid this https://paradigmlife.net/blog/episode/the-volatility-buffer-....

That 3 years of cash on hand would be better off in some kind of investment and if you're worried, supported by a volatility buffer.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sequence-risk.asp


This illustrates why rich people are rich, and have an easier time getting richer. Even if they don't have time or aptitude to learn about this kind of thing, they have family or paid professionals to guide them.


Canadian home prices have risen 70% or by $300,000 since 2015. There was almost a 30% jump just last year.

Source: https://www.straight.com/news/canadian-home-prices-have-rise...


House prices are increasing by >5% a year in a lot of the world.


This doesn't change the equation.

Go buy a house that will increase by >5%/year, but then don't pay it off any sooner than you have to.

Make the minimum payments, and invest in something that will return a stable 5%+ with your remaining income.

Just because the house itself increases in value, doesn't mean you should pay down the ~3% interest rate loan any faster than you have to.

And really, once you've built enough via this strategy, you should either invest in a more expensive house or buy a house to rent afterward.

This is all the consequence of inflation and easy money/loans, but the smart money move is to never pay off low interest rate loans. This is particularly true when inflation (acknowledged anyway) is 6%.

Using the 6% number, you're actually gaining (on average) 3% on a 3% loan just by using the cash.


I'm not sure exactly how it affects the calculations, but if the house is paid off, you can use the money that would have gone towards mortgage payments towards investments though. So instead of $1000/mo towards mortgage and $1000/mo towards investments, you could do $2000/mo towards investments. It's probably a smaller total return than your method, but it's way less leveraged.


Do the exercise on a spreadsheet. One row per year to make things simple.

Make 3 columns, "mortgage paid," "investment", "no-mortgage". Pretend the house is $100k. With the mortgage you get to keep that money and invest it, so first row in "investment:" should be $100k. Put $0 in the "no-mortgage" column, put $-421 * 12 in the "mortgage paid" column. I got that number from a mortgage calculator, assuming $100k loan and 3% interest over 30 years.

Then in row 2, "mortgage paid" cell should be previous cell - $421 * 12. You will keep paying this for 30 years.

"investment cell" should be previous cell * 1.05. We assume the investment return is 5% over long term.

The no-mortgage column stays 0. You spent the $100k to pay for the house, so it's gone right off the bat.

Repeat this for 30 rows (years). Then at the end look at the difference between investment vs. mortgage paid columns.

And then get back to me and tell me if you still think that is a "smaller total return" :-)


It’s always better to lever up if returns are greater than interest or inflation is higher than interest. And residential mortgages are the cheapest source of leverage available.


Cheapest and most easily attainable.


Risk.

I'm just old enough to remember what the financial crisis did to people's pensions. I'm happier to take risks with the rest of my money if my home isn't exposed to them.

During a crash I'd expect to lose on both earnings and investments. Losing my home as well would suck.


I don't trust banks, the market and the governments manipulating them.

You never know when they're going to pull the rug from the infinite growth market. Maybe Crypto will do that? Maybe a few more years of lockdown? Who knows?

I agree that it's an unlikely scenario, but I'd rather be poorer and own my house than be dependant on a bank - even if that means compromising on its size or location.


What investment can reliably get > 5% APR with low risk?


Over the timespan comparable to a mortgage? Broad-based equity funds.

The worst ever 20-year return for S&P 500 was +6.4% per year for the 240 month period ending in May 1979.

https://www.thebalance.com/rolling-index-returns-4061795


*assuming conditions over the next 150 years mirror those during the sudden rise of a single global superpower with control over the world's reserve currency and a continent full of unexploited natural resources at its disposal


For that contingency, you are going to want to be forming lots of political allies with lots of guns.


Not exactly what you're looking for, but in the US I series bonds are currently paying >7%. The biggest downside is you have to hold them for a year. The other issue is you're limited to buying $10k in a calendar year.


Currently paying. It is a variable interest rate, and it would behoove you to assume that if a treasury is paying 7%, then real inflation is much more. Hence the SP500 returning 30%.


Sure, but if you're looking for the lowest risk thing that's paying at least CPI inflation. A lot better than cash under the mattress (or a savings account for that matter...)


I paid mine off years ago. I got the same thing then. "Name me one investment I can put this 100k into that will pay 1500 a month". That is closer to 15% per year...


Your actual return is only the interest portion of the payment, so that's an odd way to calculate it


I get what you are saying. It is fair. But my goal was to have no 'payment'. So it would need to generate enough to cover the whole thing. It was like getting a 1500 per month raise.


Where are you getting 5% interest? Best I can find in the UK is about 2% on low balances.


not a bad idea!


> So, what do they need that extra money for?

FIRE. Money buys a lot beyond your monthly food and rent.

> I fall into the group where I could probably make more

If you don't know for sure it's also hard to judge if you're making the right decision. I also wouldn't risk a nice and stable situation for a +5%, but recent threads on HN have been mentioning way higher bumps lately, hence compensation #1 (again on HN, SV-centered etc.).

> there is risk with leaving (bad boss, toxic culture, too much work, etc)

The chance goes both ways though, there's also a chance you might end up at a better place on top of a better compensation. If you're risk-averse that might not be for you, but there's probably a compensation bump at which it makes sense even if you're risk-averse.


I'm single, in my late 20s, and live alone in a big city.

When $PREV_EMPLOYER closed the office in early 2020 and everyone shifted to remote work, I learned how much I depended on coworkers for daily social interaction. My friends live far away, so the last two years has been extremely isolating and lonely.

That lack of socialization meant work rapidly deteriorated into "just a paycheck" territory, and once that happens, there's no going back.


The format of the poll biases the results. You can select multiple options, and compensation might be the one that most people have in common -- but not necessarily the reason why people are leaving.

In other words, I think the results can only show motivating factors, but can't satisfy it as a sufficient condition for departure.


+1 anecdotally I think it is often a combination of factors. And once you start looking/ exploring and realize you can get a comp adjustment, then that becomes an easily quantified motivator to pull the trigger.


> Why is compensation #1 though?

> There is a threshold where you have enough money.

You've answered your own question.


Who is making 150/hour and owns a house as a dev in Canada ? Nobody that works for Canadian companies that’s for sure


Yes, if you live in Canada and work remotely for a US company.


In that case, you've likely already optimized for compensation, so it makes sense that it would be less of a factor in your next move.

US companies pay 2-3x as much at the top end (if you relocate, probably less for remote). With that kind of gap it's pretty hard for pay not to be a major factor.


What percentage of developers in Canada do you believe are making >= 150$/hour? People generally aren't that forthcoming with salaries but I'm not sure if I know anyone making >= 200k/year CAD. Am I in a bubble and should go job hunting?


Those jobs are out there. Depends on what area you're in and your level. Total comp.


Total comp it’s not that out it sight, $120k per year plus bonus plus pension can hit $200k at the right government outfit but $120k per year is $60 hr not $150


150/h is around 320k a year no? 200k a year is doable, even for Canadian companies


I thought Canadian houses were purely to be investment vehicles for foreign speculators. Canadians actually live in homes they own?


No, plenty of Canadian speculators as well.


Older ones I guess. According to Stats Canada over 6/10 families own their home.


I own my house in Canada (Vancouver area). I owned my house in Canada 20 years ago. Some of the younger people on my team can buy into this market because they've had the luck of working for a company that grew a lot and joining at the right time. Otherwise it's pretty tough. I got where I am over my very long career.


I work as a dev in Canada, for a Canadian company, and I own a house here.

I'm not making $150 an hour though.

I also don't live in Toronto, Vancouver, or Victoria.


They want that extra compensation for whatever they want it for. That's the thing about being paid a fungible - it puts the freedom to decide what to do with it where it belongs.

A publicly traded company I left some years ago had dozens of different little "things" they offered instead of better salary and/or better hours for the salary paid. They're now worth a tenth of what they were when I departed.


You answer your question in your post:

> $150/hour as a dev

That's about $25k/mo gross. Minus ~50% for taxes and vacation (hourly pay means you buy your vacation). So call it $13k net.

> housing costs $1m+

If you live in a top 10 major metro in the US, this is your city. So call housing ~$4k if you have a family. Now you're at $9k. Buy health insurance for $1500, tally at $7500. Did you mean to save 15% of your gross income, as is the guidance? Minus another $3,750. Tally at $3,750. You haven't bought food or paid for transportation, vacations, clothing, etc. yet. You're not an intense saver, so you need to be confident you can earn at this level for decades to come. You probably are in the process of eating the inflation of '21 & '22 as your contract is not going to re-price automatically, so your earning power is being eroded.

This is why people are pushing to earn more. If you are fortunate enough to have a spouse who is also a high earner, great.


Where I live a single family home starts at 1.3 million and townhouses are 1.2 CAD, in a town of 20,000 45 minutes from a major city.

$150 an hour is a charge out rate for a professional engineer not in programming or IT, and trades are closer to $100. $150/hr on salary you probably are in business consulting with a phd and charge out at $400/hr.

$9k usd/mo after paying taxes and for housing is not something that’s readily available here, I don’t think even in IT.


I was being generous to the poster, but also I was assuming hourly was not salary but rather a contract/freelance rate.


Do you like rock climbing too? Heh


Not yet… but mountain biking


Even people earning top 3% of salaries find houses to be expensive and most people will get indebted to buy a house. This is normality nowadays.

Money will always be a concern for the majority.

That said, I agree that once you've bought a house, you can cover your expenses and holidays, who cares about making more money. It's just not a very common position.


> Why is compensation #1 though?

If you view this multi-answer poll from the opposite perspective, the question is, when would someone leave for a lower compensation job? I suspect that would be an extremely low number. Higher on HN because of the demographic, but still low.


Most people are not making 400k as a dev. People are leaving due to compensation because it is a strong market for seekers right now, and all things equal it is not rational to leave 20k+ a year on the table if you have even partially complete information(which a lot of people do nowadays).


Might be worth saying "it is not rational to leave a 15% pay increase on the table" than 20k. At 200k / year, I would absolutely ignore a 20k pay increase if company culture sucked.


Inflation went up 7% in 2021. Inflation in popular urban markets was worse. Market rate for good engineers probably went up more than that.

Even a 10% pay raise was meh with that in mind.

How many engineering companies are prepared to give 15-20% pay raises to keep up with these kinds of conditions? How many are handing out 7% adjustments proudly?


With "compensation" winning maybe it's relevant to think about the effects of runaway inflation. Currently getting up to ~10% (US). It would make sense as peoples purchasing power diminishes they reassess their earning potential.


> Why is compensation #1 though?

Is this a serious question?


Retirement. I invest excess into sp500 and bonds and plan to retire early. Comp is a big factor here.


The poll is messing with your way of thinking.

Look at the poll and think on this statement:

"The majority of people leave a company because they are unsatisfied, not because of compensation."

The poll statistically verifies the above statement as true. Its just divided in a way that makes you think compensation is the main reason.

Still what the poll does show is that compensation is a significant factor, more than ever before.


To rephrase: Compensation has fewer total than the others combined. E.g. people leave more often for non-compensation reasons.

(Added in case you were being mis-interpreted, e.g. the downvotes. I think its an important and insightful point)


You can vote for multiple options in the poll, so this isn't really possible to unpack from the given numbers.


"Compensation" needs to be unpacked. It includes healthcare, contractual and scheduling freedom to pursue side projects, and company sponsored and encouraged opportunities for self-investment in skills and learning. Most of those "other" things are nontaxable.


I do find it surprising compensation is at the top.

I've never changed jobs over money. In fact several times I've taken new jobs that pay less on the promise of it being more fun.

Which is not to say I'll work for unreasonably low pay, I talk comp ranges with recruiters first to know if it is worth continuing the discussion.

But beyond a reasonable point, more pay doesn't make any difference (well, unless it's like 20x more, but nobody is offering that). A pleasant working environment, interesting projects, ownership, sane management, being respected, work/life balance and vacations; all of these are to me a lot more important than +/- 100K of pay.


"I've never changed jobs over money" and "+/- 100k"... lol, you're in a very, very different position than most of us if "+/- 100k" isn't a fundamentally life-changing kind of +/-.


To be fair, I am in Silicon Valley so that biases the numbers towards the higher end of the ranges. But I took a ~200K pay cut from my previous job to my current one because I went from a successful public company (not FAANG but similar pay) to a startup. Startups are a gamble for sure, maybe it's not worth anything. But the base salary is still good enough to pay all my bills, so that's good enough. I try to maximize happiness (I don't always succeed!), not income.


> But I took a ~200K pay cut from my previous job to my current one

I'm willing to bet that if ~90% of posters on HN would take a ~200k pay cut they'd have to pay their employer money.

You're most likely living in an entirely different world to regular folks.


It's an interesting topic, I always wonder where reality is. An argument for more transparent comp info.

When HN has comp discussions, everyone points out that approximately everyone with any experience is making way more than 500K with levels.fyi offered as the evidence. I've sometimes expressed some doubt about those numbers but I'm always labeled as uninformed. Ok so I guess everyone truly is making more than 500K.

Startups don't pay very well, so if > 500K is the norm for FAANG-level, then certainly 100K or 200K or 300K++ pay cut is the norm as well for going into a startup?


LOL 500k?! Dude (or dudedette)... That's more than specialist doctors make where I live (Ontario). That's mind boggling money. The average for a very experienced dev here is 120k-ish. CAD. You live in a bubble my friend.


FAANGs are at best half a million to 1 million people and there are at least 35 million developers out there, in total.

Even FAANGs don't pay that well except for maybe 10-20 select locations.

My point is that most devs worldwide, even with experience, make less than $200k in total. More like less than $100k.


If the compensation does not impact basic lifestyle, then yes people do like to choose better /interesting jobs provided their hygiene needs are getting met, that is becoming harder every year. Rents/ Mortgages / College Fees are all climbing higher than compensation increases at the entry level.

Even in tech there are a plenty of people paid less than 80 or 90k. On top of that these hefty student loans and high rent , steep mortgages that today's emerging work force is burdened with, it is not easy to ignore even small financial incentives when they are always trying to make ends meet and have to make basic quality of life sacrifices.


Compensation always affects lifestyle. If nothing else, it lets you spend your way to a negligible commute.


My point is not that compensation won't change lifestyle, it was that for basic needs lifestyle there is a compensation required ( i.e. living wage), people don't have luxury of choosing a more fulfilling job unless they are above that number.

---

Basic needs is somewhat commonly used term [1], while what is basic in one location or country is not same everywhere and there are degrees of subjectivity to it. It is quite politicized and US Census threshold of $25,000 /year for family of four is ludicrously low as defined today. [2]

While there can be arguments on what the number should be and even what constitutes basic needs, the idea of basic needs itself shouldn't be controversial

IMHO that in locations where traditionally you get a tech job it is higher than even 80-90k factoring in mortgages and student loans, things that are not included in U.S. Census Bureau methodology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_needs

[2] The reasons for such low bar is political, the methods used reflect that, one example is using a single number nationally is an insidious choice. Cost of Living in NY or the Bay Area,CA does not compare to say rural Montana . A sizable portion of the population lives in high density high cost of living parts of the country (jobs are there) and the number does not reflect that or is weighted by where the population actually live. There are plenty of other criticisms, on what is being included with what weight etc.


The poll does not make that obvious. The poll reflects that being one of the reasons that someone will have or has considered it. I upvoted 3 options even though I've been fired from all my jobs, because those are all factors I considered. It may or may not have been the most important consideration


More is certainly better, but at a certain point, you kind of know where the industry is, and that you're probably not going to get a radical bump (although maybe right now you are?), so while it still counts, you start looking at the other factors more.


Incorrect. The poll makes it clear compensation is the most common factor. It could be consistent #2 or #3 reason


Could just be a due to a lack of awareness.

Some people will leave a low stress/low-moderate wage job for a high stress, high wage job, but end up with a drug habit/in a mental ward/jail and then wonder for years what the cause of the trouble was. I've seen it happen a number of times.


That's a pervasive story that lots of people want to be true, but I can tell you firsthand it's not something you should bank on. I've definitely left jobs because money and only money. I've definitely watched co-workers and friends do the same.

There's definitely a ratio of job satisfaction / money where more money won't cancel out a toxic work environment (there's no reasonable amount of money that would persuade me to work for certain companies or return to certain jobs) -- but generally, I'm in it for the money. That's why it's a job and not a hobby. I got a mortgage, a family, and retirement to think about. I generally write off my work hours as an investment in those things.

If I start a salary conversation with my manager about more money and they rejoin with "what's bothering you?" that's not gonna go well. Now I want more money and you're being dismissive about it.


A thing that has contributed to this is that public company executives are required to disclose their compensation. So it becomes really easy for employees to know if they’re being shafted if execs are being given a ton of rewards while their own salary is frozen.


I think its more like nobody is leaving jobs just to paltry 5-10% pay bumps. Naturally people are far more likely to leave if we're talking like a 20% or more bump, even if they're satisfied where they are.


Yep, gotta agree. I picked up and moved 500 miles because of money. Sure, ATX is a tech hub and all that jazz. I moved from a place where top-end after 10 years was $80k-100k/yr, and there were few jobs to pick from. I moved and got 2.5x's my old salary.

Now I'm looking at starting my own thing and moving back. Why? Because money. (real estate) Yes, family would be close again. But when comparable homes are $600k vs. $275k...c'mon, I'm ready for these tech hubs to not be as necessary.


You can answer this with a little more nuance as a manager. I'd say "Let's talk about that, and also talk about what might be bothering you about working here". As others have said, for some people it's about money (need more or you are way underpaid), or you have things you hate about your job.

When you've got 10 or 15 years exp as a dev in the big tech cities, in my experience you expect to be paid market rates as an automatic thing but also you accumulate money over your career so it gets to be less important; I at least far more want more interesting work and no shitty work relationships wrt boss or time expectations. Being paid market rate is just the start, and that's easier to clarify. It's much much harder to know about the work situations you will be going into. I'm currently thinking of quitting my job after my 1 year stock comes in. My company is way over-working me and although I'm well paid in a sense at market rates, the job is not what I thought I was getting when I came there. I really struggled with how to answer my peers when they ask me about working there. I gave a mostly neutral recommendation.


That might have been true in the old days when competitors paid 10, 20, 30% more. Now some tech companies are paying like 2x, 3x, 4x regular dev wages and its a reason to dedicate your life to this.


Also, for folks who are renting. With the cost of housing going through the roof this is also a driving factor that makes people reassess location/job and if they want to be renting the rest of their lives. Cheaper location and 30% more can go a long way.


Its still true as a generality. I would say the majority leave because they are unhappy.

Its very rare to get 2x to 4x TC unless you switch to faang, which is not the majority at all.


> which is not the majority at all.

It doesnt matter if it's the majority. It only matters on a per individual capability.

I am capable of FAANG and thus to keep me my employer(s) must both give me work w/ high value and compensate me accordingly.


We're talking in terms of the general consensus. The topic of this conversation is a POLL attempting to gauge that general consensus.

You're switching the topic to be about you and your individual ability. You're obviously the center of this conversation. Good for you.


Explain what you mean by 2,3,4x more please. You can look at levels.fyi and if you are in a big tech see what the big companies are paying, that sets the market. In my experience the amounts of sometimes shockingly high, but eliminate a few crazy outliers and I see accurate rates. I'm a 20 year experienced principal engineer, and I see rates that match what I get.

So what would 2,3,4x mean. Do you mean that much over your current salary, or over the 'market rate'. If someone paid me 2 or 3x my market rate as a principal backend infrastructure engineer, I would take it, but a year ago when I was interviewing, the offers from the big guys were not that different.


What I mean is in my firm grads with 2 years experience are on $140k, and can make multiples in MANGA. If you already have a good SV tech salary you aren't going to make 3x unless you luckily hit a RSU jackpot.


Is principal engineer typical for 20 years experience where you are? Or are they typically stuck at senior engineer? Because if you're ahead of the average already like that, then indeed it will be hard to do better elsewhere.

Having said that, yes I agree it does seem that at higher levels companies are a lot better about fitting compensation to that of competitors.


Where I'm at, which is a near faang, previously I was working at one and had offers from them, it's not about time, it's about working on multiple projects with significant accomplishments, a mixture of leader and IC usually, but you can still code today. Even if I admit to myself it's harder to code these days :-)

I also see people really early in career 10;years getting principal jobs and I think that's just from competition.


It's not completely about time you mean. Time is just a rough proxy for experience. It's not just about significant accomplishments either, but rather significant accomplishments that are recognized by your employer. For all you know that senior engineer was single-handedly key to their last company's success, but their manager got all the credit while the engineer got a 1.5 multiplier on their annual bonus.

But sure. My question was more about the meaning of principal where you are. At some places it's more like just another grade of senior engineer. While at others it's equivalent to a decent rung of middle management and part of a different salary range, to which the current discussions about tech employee pay may not apply so much.


Yeaaaahhhh no. People leave because of money. People are leaving for money. And they would be stupid not to. Because companies have no loyalty. You are a human resource to be used up like any other. Like gasoline. The second they can save a few pennies this quarter you are gone. People used to stay for their pension. No pensions now. You have to fund your own retirement and that takes money.

I run my personal finances like a business. Whenever companies say "we're a family" or "we don't want someone only focused on money" I hear "we only hire morons". I an cognizant of cashflow, taxes, I'm very heavily invested and I take all of it very, very seriously in terms of structure, diversification, opportunity, tax efficiency, profits. Like any business should! Income is my biggest revenue stream and therefore the most important factor for my success a/k/a the success of my business (which is me). If I leave I'm leaving for money.

My relationship with my employer is a business one. I don't understand why managers / HR think it's some kind of therapy one. Your manager wants to talk about feelings? I don't write contracts for fun and friendship, they are for business and employment is a business relationship. I have an actual life that I am living and this business relationship is about money it is absolutely not my whole life and I'm more than happy to take my skills elsewhere for more.

I cannot fathom someone getting so wrapped up in their job as their identity that they literally pay money to the company to do it (by staying in a lower-paying position) but I guess it can happen, e.g. people go work for Apple which notoriously underpays as well as being kind of a poor work environment, but people still flock to them due to brand reputation. I don't have feelings about the companies I work for. I have strong feelings about the code I write, I strive for highest possible quality given the constraints. But who I am is the person who writes that kind of code, not who I write it for.


~Nobody left because of money so long as the money’s reasonably close. This environment has made it so the money is often not close.


This. It's a different game right now. As an employer it's very hard to take everyone's salary up 20% because that's what they might get elsewhere. So you don't. So people leave. But this won't last forever.


> But this won't last forever.

I feel like this quote is relevant, if slightly off topic:

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

i.e. You may run out of good candidates long before your competitors stop offering 20% more than you.


Plenty of companies are offering 20% more for new hires but aren't willing to bump the pay of their entire workforce by 20% at once, especially since much of the workforce might not be looking. They still may lose their best workers, but they can ramp up to the new budget more gradually.


Give it long enough and something irrational will just become rational. Especially when people have only ever experienced the irrational.


Ha. I've heard that for 20 years. And as an employer I don't see it ending soon. There's a boom right now, for sure, and wages are up, but I heard that in 2000 too. There was a slightly drop for a year or 2, but it's been steady upwards movement since then.


Steady growth is fine. The growth is not steady as of late, things have spiked in short order.


Tech companies are making record profits, more and more of the economy is being digitized and automated… there’s been a tech gold rush in the pandemic, giving tech companies the ability to compensate better than they did before.


Yeah, there's clearly no barrier to tech companies paying a good amount more, and still being incredibly profitable. The stock conversation is not that expensive for faangs for free but if the stock keeps going up. It's making it harder for regular companies to hire tech workers.


Yes, but salaries are spiking in non-tech companies too, and they are not having record profits.


Someone can be quite happy with their jobs most days, be compensated at a historically very fair level, continue to get RSUs, etc. But, especially as a younger person or as someone with kids in school, etc. if Google comes along and says you can work remotely for 2x your current salary, that is really hard for most people to turn down.


Is that true anymore? Everyone I know is always on the job market, even folks who haven't jumped employers in 10+ years are regularly in idle conversation with the job market.

But, the honest answer to your boss's question: what bothers me is trading my time for money. My comp doubled. I can now afford to stop working in 3-5 years instead of 10+ years. I think this attitude has become much more common in the last 5-10 years.


I think this is something that varies with age. At 30, I was very aggressive in seeking better pay and more interesting opportunities. 20+ years later, I'm pretty much near the peak of my salary band in my region, and the work and environment is good enough to stay. I also have the typical roots put down; home, friends familiarity with my community. Disrupting that would be very stressful and the rewards would have to be commensurate.

So why would I bother jumping to a new job for a 10% increase?

I think the Great Resignation is really for industries that have had stereotypically low compensation, coupled with shitty environments. And I'm glad that people in those industries have a lot more leverage to make things better for themselves.


Hard disagree there: remote is opening coastal salary bands up to people outside the coasts. This is apocalyptic. People in the bay are way way way better paid, and not really that much better (they all came from someplace else, remember? Y’all didn’t get every good dev in Kansas, just the ones that wanted to move.)


You're assuming my pay is markedly lower (for my role) than what I'd make on one of the coasts. It might be 10-15% lower, but not enough to compensate for shifting teams, getting accustomed to a new company/boss etc. Now if someone offers me 2x/3x?


Man I know a lot of kids getting major major bumps as FAANG kicks out RSUs to flyover country. Happy you’ve already gotten yours though.


> I'm pretty much near the peak of my salary band in my region

I assume you're not interested in working remotely?


I'm fortunate to be able to work remotely even though my company is located in the city I live in. It's a low COL region, so money goes pretty far, and I'm really not too far below what I think I'd make in other regions. Now if someone offers me 2x/3x and remote work? I'd be a fool not to consider it.


There is another side of it. Changing position for better working environment is unpredictable. With rare exceptions the job description and what was discussed during job interview is very different from the actual job I do after accepting an offer.


>Everyone I know is always on the job market

I think that's true for almost anyone--unless they're coming right up on retirement.

But there's a difference between semi-actively looking and occasionally responding to someone reaching out about something that actually looks interesting. Phone calls are rarely a bad idea unless they're complete wastes of time.


I just left my job at one FAANG for another FAANG. I felt like I was under-compensated and talked to my manager, they said "well, go get another offer and show you're worth more". I went and got an offer that was nearly 60% higher and at a higher ladder level. My manager and director tried to retain me, but upper management "did not want to play that game", which I guess is a nice way of saying I'm not worth that much to the company. I did get a nice raise and a big bonus and a big refresher but it wasn't anything near the other offer.

Now, I kinda liked my job and team - but TBH it wasn't the most amazing role ever - let's say it was 7.5/10. If all things were equal or the difference was insignificant I would have stayed probably. I wonder how much I would need to love my job to have stayed regardless of having such a higher offer.


This time, upper management was right and your manager was a fool. Once you have another offer, you're already halfway out the door. Encouraging employees to find other offers before they get a raise is encouraging employees to leave.

If you want to keep them, just give them the raise.


The direct manager probably couldn't do that and he was blunt about what kind of proof he needed to show up the line to get upper management moving.

It's just that the offer received was above anything allowed from the top level.


If people feel like they aren't being fairly compensated they'll definitely leave over the money.


This is exactly right and I think a good example of why we shouldn't generalize.

I grew up poor - and judge me however you'd like - but I'd put up with less ideal conditions if the pay was worth it.

Reminds me of in college when I was a waiter - I typically didn't mind a table's behavior if I knew they were going to tip well.


> but I'd put up with less ideal conditions if the pay was worth it.

They are called golden handcuffs for a reason. I think for the majority of people, they will do this. I know I will.


The thing is, in today's environment you can almost certainly get more cash comp at another company, almost no matter where you are. The stock can hold you back. The new company will probably give you more, but there will be a cliff. Often you can negotiate for something like giving you the stock money you'd get in the next 6 months as a hire on bonus.

If you worked at a company for a few years and they went ipo, that's a different situation.


The first of my friends to switch companies recently may have had another reason, but the rest switched when they heard how much he was making at his new job.


This may be true where switching jobs might buy you a 7% or 12% pay increase. But in a field where switching jobs can result in a 100% or more pay increase, money itself can become a primary motivator. There are people reading this who make $80k that are doing literally the same work as someone else in their town who is making $300k or more.

Maybe $80k -> $100k isn't a primary motivator, but $80k -> $300k is more of a "retire earlier" type of motivator.


*nobody who was well compensated left their role due to money.

If I can leave my job right now and make 30% more than my current salary for doing the same work as my current company is only giving out 3%-4% a year max pay increases than I am a fool for staying.


Well, my landlord raised my rent 40% this year. So you better believe that made me start looking for another job

It's nice to think an employees's world revolves around office culture. Until Bright Horizons hand you that $4500 childcare bill (food not included, of course)

I could move to a lower COL city. But said job decided not to approve anyone moving to a remote location, we have to be ready for that return to office riiight around the corner


I worked at a very large corporation that had a pay freeze for years. I didn't leave because of money, I just worked less each year. After more than five years of being underpaid, I was working only a few hours a week. Eventually I got laid off, decent severance. I miss all the spare time I had.

I love my current job, but there will come a time when they are no longer willing to increase my pay above inflation (I suspect this year will be a test), and when that happens, I'll leave.

Money is the only reason I'm here. Shockingly, I can keep myself occupied and amused without scrum, a non-technical manager, or Jira tickets.


I'm quite happy with the work environment of my current job. But I bet I can earn more money, so I'm interviewing. I'm specifically only applying to companies I'd really like to work for, though - I'm not trying to keep myself afloat.

After all, why not? It's not like you have to take a day or two off to potentially fly out for the on-site these days. It's been years since I played the interview game, so I need to keep my skills sharp. And if I get a better offer at a company I'd like to work for, why not take it? If the offer's not better, I can politely decline.


I work at a company that pays on the low end for its industry and I have watched no fewer than 10 people (of ~50) leave in the last two years. When I asked each of them why they decided look for another job, they all said they were not making enough to survive/save long term and they needed more money. I have stuck around, despite the low pay, because it is otherwise the best workplace I've ever had and I like the owners, but I have also recently started looking because I need to make more money as well if I am to have a secure future.

Maybe people do start looking because they're unhappy, but it seems like a cop-out to say "nobody left because of money", if the reason for the unhappiness is that they're not making enough money.


Honest question: did he say how often the answer was "I need more money"? Most of the times I changed jobs, it was for reasons not related to money, but there was this one time that I actually needed more and ended up leaving because of that.

Ironically, it was one of the best jobs I ever had, but you can't actually pay for your newborn's healthcare with job satisfaction.


To examine this a different way: I have not ever gone a year in this industry without having to deal with some bullshit that made me annoyed / frustrated for multiple weeks.

But when my pay is good, I am much more likely to push through the bullshit and get back to the good stuff. When the pay is bad, I start thinking about touching up the resume and sending it around.

The corollary is that if I know I’m severely underpaid, I’ll probably be out the door within a year even if I am mostly content with the job. I’m 7 years into my career and this corollary has proven correct for 3 job changes now.


I think the saying has lost its meaning when it's misquoted.

Correct phrasing: "Nobody leaves because of their paycheck."

Money disparity among coworkers absolutely can lead to dissatisfaction with the employer. Bad culture of annual raises can lead to dissatisfaction. Money disparity with competitors can lead to dissatisfaction with the employer.

So, yes, people aren't leaving because they're getting a paycheck, but that's too pedantic, even for me, because it obfuscates the issue so much people misunderstand it and then misquote it.


And that's how your old boss used to talk people about getting more money. Kids cost money. Mortgage costs money. Food costs money. And the biggest money trap of all is retirement. If you can't afford to retire from your current job, why stay?


I recently left because of money. I loved where I was at but I'm 40, I don't have a partner, and I want to buy a house already. I'm Canadian and got a job with a US company which worked out to be an almost 50% increase, so nothing they really could have done, unfortunately.

Well, I also really wanted to write Elixir professionally, and now I am! :) So it's not 100% true that it was all about the money.


Unfortunately not true in my experience – the flow that I hear of happening a lot nowadays:

* Employee is happy (enough)

* Recruiter reaches out saying "we'll pay you your_current_comp * 2"

* Employee thinks "hmmm that seems **ing crazy, I wonder what's going on"

* Checks resources like levels.fyi or their network and realizes that they could _theoretically_ make (current_comp * 1.5), and probably pretty easily make (current_comp * 1.5)

* This leads to bitterness in some cases, or frank discussions of how to get paid more in others

I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing fwiw but it requires employers to anticipate comp issues as benchmarks change.


I quite literally just quit and my decision was 90% because of compensation. I more than doubled my pay, which completely changes the material circumstances of my life.

Do engineers leave for 10% raises? Probably rarely. But for 50%-100% raises? That seems like a damn good reason to leave.


I changed jobs last year because I was unhappy that I wasn't making enough money. These two things aren't completely unrelated.


I've left jobs I was happy at for more 20% more money. And ended up just as happy.


Me too. I left for 25% more money. I'm also still just as happy. Both my new company and old company are excellent places to work.


Maybe that was true in old days when jobs also give you some security. Covid proved that there is no “job security”: as soon as your employee runs into a little bit of revenue trouble, the lay offs will start.

So money is very very important.


That doesn’t make any sense for my case. I always kept talking with recruiters just to see what’s available and as soon as there was a chance for a significant raise I took it


Depends on how much money. If I can get 50K-100K a year more? (significant if you make under 250K annually) Then I'll probably look around even if I'm fairly happy.


He is right but only partially. A lot of people are unhappy about the money they make. you can’t escape your environment where you see someone else doing better than you in some small aspect or area of life but then is generalized to them doing better than you and hence the urge to have more money.

Most of the time things start from there and then the unhappiness snowballs to other areas of life


What’s bothering me? Everything is so expensive and I have so little time.


Sounds like a money problem.


A review of the housing market should disabuse one of this notion in a very big hurry.

Sure, after a point, it's not about the money.


What a ridiculous statement, of course some people leave because money. They didn't get as big of a stock refresher as they wanted, they looked at levels.fyi, they asked a colleague how much they make, etc.

Perhaps some people start looking because they're unhappy and then learn they're underpaid but I personally know many people that started looking because of money—not the other way around.


People leave some jobs because of money: low paying jobs, generally. But I think this statement is more correct than not.

If people are quitting successive jobs for incremental pay raises, it probably means they hate things other than their salary, but don't believe those things are going to improve.


I think this may only be technically true in a way that is unhelpful as a model for either employers or employees, and I'm not sure it's still true in the current day.

The immediate thing that caused me to start looking for a new job, most recently, was that I had a performance review / bonus conversation that went poorly (for me). It's a little hard to distinguish whether the thing that made me unhappy was getting the feedback of "We don't value the things you want to do with your career" or getting the feedback of "and, therefore, we will dock your pay." (In fairness to them, it's not clear the things I wanted to do with my career were in fact valuable to them.)

However, once I started looking, I discovered I was being seriously underpaid, and I really should have already been looking for new jobs. There's just a bootstrapping problem here - you don't know your market value until you start getting offers, and you have to start looking in order to start getting offers.

With new norms about talking about pay (this very website is a good spot, for software engineers) and sites like levels.fyi, I suspect I would have come to this conclusion a little earlier, on the basis of money. It's hard to estimate your market value but you now have a better idea of what the ballpark is.

(I suppose the other option is to continually be "looking," whether or not you have an active desire to leave. I know some people do that. But I personally find that exhausting.)


In the past when people where spending 15 years in a company and the market was less competitive, yes.

Job hopping is the new default for engineers, most people after a few years in the industry realise their value goes up every once and then and that they can leverage that to get a salary bump.


below the age of 35-40, i don't feel like you should stay at one job more than 2-3 years. How do you know what's out there if you're not trying other things out? Once you've been around the block a few times it's then time to settle down, dig in, and drain as much cash to your checking account as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem


...If they are paid or have saved enough, maybe.

I just left a job that I loved for a big raise. I have a policy of seriously considering applying for similar jobs that offer salaries well above mine. Turns out, I love this job too, but I get more money.


Yes, this is true, but the money (or lack thereof) can be the thing making them unhappy.

I agree in principle, though. Looking and applying for jobs is stressful. Attending interviews even more so plus it will cost you holiday. People aren't just doing this speculatively just in case they can get a better offer elsewhere. People only go through this if they are thoroughly unhappy in their current position, for whatever reason.


The sociological aspects are always prime to me. When I find a rhythm, a place and a group, a lot of my minds goes relaxed. Even if the job is boring, even if the pay is lame.

And yeah every time you get sad or suffering at your job you get the reflex to want to be compensated for the pain. Or you can even think of sabotaging the place a bit.

I actually left a fake job paid very well because of the toxicity.


> he'd start by asking what was bothering them

lack of money


I would leave any job if the competition offers a significant raise. I don't think this attitude is very prevalent nowadays.


In my case more money is #1 reason for leaving. My job is just that - a job. I give my all while I’m working, and I expect to be compensated accordingly. I have a family already, I don’t look for another one at work. I keep it professional with a few jokes here and there. My comp affects my retirement, so I act accordingly.


“What is bothering me is i cannot afford a house in this area and my boss keeps dodging the pay question”


My old boss ... used to say, nobody left because of money.

Maybe your old boss never worked for minimum wage.


The only people I know who say that are small business owners trying to give their management employees a pep talk, but not giving them the budget to hire good people.


This is simply not true in many cases I’ve seen and experienced first hand. There are a lot of interesting problems and people to work with, many times the pay is the final deal breaker or maker when deciding between options (and when deciding to leave).


People whose financial needs are not being met, do leave because of compensation.


I don't think this is true anymore. Look, most of us here make good money. But look around, things are getting crazy.

I think get what you can get while you can get it and sock away as much as you can.


I am happy at my current jobs, then a few of the big 5s wanted me to interview, so I interview. Once they give me more money, I will leave.


What's bothering me is the money you pay is not enough to cater for my expenses.


If you're married, you can see the hilarity in this.


well, if you are massively underpaid... you will leave just for money


If money isn't the issue then you won't mind us flipping salaries, will you, boss?


A former boss of mine said something similar:

"People don't quit a company, they quit their manager."


People quit for all sorts of reasons.

I really liked my managers at Qualcomm (Rick Hammerstone and Edu Metz), but NVidia came along and I had always wanted to see how they managed to be so dominant in the industry.

There were other reasons for me to quit, but my managers definitely weren't one.


I had an employee who used to tell me: “there are only two people in my life that I have explicitly chosen to be with: my wife - and you”


True for me in one situation. Worked for a large corporation and could not find any lateral movement within, either. Had to leave the entire company because I was growing frustrated (after too long - 1.5 years) with my manager appeasing his bosses at the expense of focusing on the career growth (learning, responsibility, impact) of his direct reports.


> Former boss

...


I had a job that I enjoyed and excelled at. I did great, got good bonuses so I didn't move for 10 years. Then I got laid off. It was really really hard to find work again as my background wasn't full of hot technology, and I had no experience of modern interviewing (like leetcode). I dont want to be in that position again, so I'm interviewing again after a few years already.


In the tech industry, I'd generally recommend looking around every 3-4 years, unless you have golden handcuffs and you don't think that can be beat elsewhere. Any longer than that and you risk settling into a box of which you may become unable to think outside. Any shorter than that, and you probably aren't maximizing your potential, in terms of promotions and learning those fresh perspectives and new tech that will benefit you in your next role.

At some point, you may get to the level where you're happy with your comp and happy with your responsibilities, in which case it might actually be best to stay around as long as you can. Not my cup of tea, but it's definitely something to think about.

In other words, good on you for looking around after a few years!


It can be more than just golden handcuffs. If you stay at a place for 4+ years you hopefully have a lot of clout and connections. That kind of situation can get pretty comfy.

Starting all over again kinda sucks. The older I get the less I look forward to doing the hustle to gain cred in new orgs.


Definitely. You're not wrong. But one of the downsides of sticking around for 4+ years is, like I said, there is a _risk of_ (ie, not guaranteed) becoming kind of a stick in the mud and the company then could suffer from your leadership/clout rather than benefiting from it. I've worked at several companies where the leadership had been there for 8+ years, and that led to inertia and small-C conservatism and reluctance to adopt new technologies or paradigms that would really accelerate company growth. The companies were generally successful, but working there was kind of a slog and it was tough to attract new engineers to work on old tech in outdated paradigms. That said, there are plenty of folks who _like_ the old tech, so it's not necessarily a deal-breaker for anyone.

All that to say: you aren't wrong. If you're in that position and you don't want to leave, that's really the company's problem and not yours. Do your own thing! I support it 100%! (Not that you need my support, but you have it anyway!)


> unless you have golden handcuffs and you don't think that can be beat elsewhere

Luckily this is becoming less likely now that more companies are allowing remote work. I live in a relatively small city and have interviewed at every local company that interests me. My previous employer was by far the highest paying of all of them. I was able to find a remote job that broke my golden handcuffs by almost 2x.


The other golden handcuffs are vesting schedules.


FWIW I have the active, recent interview and work experience and even after preparation and attempts for an entire year, I did not find a new job.


Good luck. I dont really understand it how there is this huge shortage but employers still are so picky.


Rather than quit or retire, I lingered in hopes of being laid off (letting my high pay level, ageism and existing "we don't need Senior Engineers; we have really smart management to do the thinking ahead etc. for the junior engineers" attitudes run their natural course). I "achieved" being laid off 4 months ago at age 58 and collected a nice (9 months' pay) severance package as a precursor to (this month) finally deciding to retire.

I still loved (and was/am capable of) doing the work, but having gone another few rounds of "Leetcode interview process" in the past few months, and having realized that I've reached the end of my willingness to tolerate what seems to be near-pervasive "Agile cargo-cult ceremony" (and everywhere, "Agile is whatever we decide it is") and (less pervasive but still frequently encountered) technically clueless headline-chasing (micro-)management in the presence of increasing active monitoring/collection of (remote) employee activity metrics and pervasive exhortations (mapped to KPIs) to "deliver innovation!" and "do it together!". Why run the Leetcode gauntlet (which seems to closely resemble Final Exams Week from my Uni days, with the same intense cramming prerequisite) only to land in a team/management circumstance of uncertain quality (bail out and do it again?)?

Likewise I've realized that maintaining my W2 income via FTE at my age and position would mostly serve to raise my tax bracket and preclude me from taking minimally taxed withdrawals from my IRA starting in a few months (these have to be taken sometime, and the less taxation, the better).

The process of "letting go" of my working career and adopting a true retirement mindset has taken me at least the past 4 months (I might not be done with it yet), because I do really love and have excelled at the hands-on work (and being self-taught and very motivated to stay abreast of much of what is changing for the better in SW Dev, I've been operating in long-term independent self-study mode for my entire career, turning this background process off is proving challenging).


> "we don't need Senior Engineers; we have really smart management to do the thinking ahead etc. for the junior engineers"

Wow, this bit makes so much sense. In my experience, most managers tend to add more layers, almost as a goal, but pay little attention to the seniority in such layers.

For example, one of the managers I work with, restructured the organization in a way that would essentially put him at a VP level, given the company guidelines; but most of the team leads had less than a couple years of experience in their roles. Senior engineers with any experience and weight in the company were a rarity.


There was an article which I ran into thanks to HN a few months ago[1] that served to explain something I experienced at my employer 8(?) years ago: my role was abolished (legislated out of existence by HR and/or Finance); the role was unique to me, and I had held it very successfully for about 8 years at the time, but apparently, if you have a role that isn't found in some HR Dept or Finance Dept (or US Federal Dept of Labor?) book enumerating all jobs, even if engineering management finds it valuable, it will be abolished. I was shuttled off into a series of less aligned roles, and within 1 year, left that employer for a startup.

From the linked article:

Another place the non-fungibility of people causes predictable problems is with how managers operate teams. Managers who want to create effective teams end up fighting the system in order to do so. Non-engineering orgs mostly treat people as fungible, and the finance org at a number of companies I've worked for forces the engineering org to treat people as fungible by requiring the org to budget in terms of headcount. The company, of course, spends money and not "heads", but internal bookkeeping is done in terms of "heads", so $X of budget will be, for some team, translated into something like "three staff-level heads". There's no way to convert that into "two more effective and better-paid staff level heads". If you hire two staff engineers and not a third, the "head" and the associated budget will eventually get moved somewhere else.

One thing I've repeatedly seen is that a hiring manager will want to hire someone who they think will be highly effective or even just someone who has specialized skills and then not be able to hire because the company has translated budget into "heads" at a rate that doesn't allow for hiring some kind of heads. There will be a "comp team" or other group in HR that will object because the comp team has no concept of "an effective engineer" or "a specialty that's hard to hire for"; for a person, role, level, and location defines them and someone who's paid too much for their role and level is therefore a bad hire. If anyone reasonable had power over the process that they were willing to use, this wouldn't happen but, by design, the bureaucracy is set up so that few people have power.

These observations ring completely true to me. I'm a generalist, not a single-purpose actor, but the value that such an actor brings seems to run directly against the bureaucratic compulsion to categorize each employee.

[1] https://danluu.com/people-matter/


In my experience, HR is the worst part of any company, specifically in terms of understanding humans. If you’re even slightly outside their notion of “normal” you’re fucked. These are the same people who jealousy guard their power while maintaining ageist/racist/sexist policy.

I’ve honestly never met a decent human who worked in HR.


If I learnt anything about HR departments, is that they work for the company, not for the employees.

Rest assured, their job is to keep executives happy.


> letting my high pay level, ageism and existing "we don't need Senior Engineers; we have really smart management to do the thinking ahead etc. for the junior engineers"

> Why run the Leetcode gauntlet (which seems to closely resemble Final Exams Week from my Uni days, with the same intense cramming prerequisite)

It seems like a massive waste that we've decided to essentially kick someone like you, with lots of experience who isn't really all that old, out of the workforce. But that's a dumb thing we decided to do as a society so, not your fault, so enjoy retirement!

In a well-run system I guess we'd offer engineers in their mid 50's a role that incrementally decreases the amount of work done directly, and overtime refocuses to an advisor role. Institutionalize that experience. Maybe every couple years decrease the number of days worked per week.


Just after being laid off, I was thinking I would love to find part-time work in my profession, but as far as I can tell no such thing exists (for an unknown such as myself). Non-W2 contracting might be as close as I could get, but in that case, it'd be "a few months on (40+ hrs/wk), a few months off" rather than 20 hours per week steady work.

Having now experienced the absence of the daily grind for over 4 months (for the first time in my adult life), I am getting so used to being away from it that I realize I would probably have a hard time going back to the grind, regimentation, and employer expectations of "gung ho" spirit pursuing the idealistic mission statement proffered by top management (yes, I'm cynical). So in the end I think where I'm at is good for me for now. I've been blessed to have a successful, lucrative (though perhaps only slightly above average in my field) career that (combined with aggressive saving and investing for that duration) enables me to uncouple from it at this time without financial worry. And you never know when a sufficiently interesting (while simultaneously lacking in BS) opportunity might appear...


I'm a little younger than you but feel the ageism too. 10-20 years ago I had no problem getting jobs now I feel like the guy on the playground who's always picked last when choosing teams.


(This probably belongs on one of the many Leetcode interview threads ongoing, but ...)

Yes, and while going thru the past few months' "let me see if I can find something that engages me and my interests (w/o too much concern about pay level)" job search, I repeatedly ran into Job Descriptions containing criteria BS/MS CompSci, EE, or equivalent required. I have a BSEE, but in fact, the underlying premise of Leetcode testing is CompSci. So the allowance for EE degreed candidates is IMO bogus/deceptive. I never got near a CompSci Data Structures or Algorithms course during my uni days, and aside from Leetcode, never suffered an inability to get my job done due to that omission.


Thanks for writing about your experience. It's kind of nice to see some wisdom being dropped about the current/long term affairs of what makes many company experiences very similar. It seems extremely difficult to find something that breaks the mold.

And congratulations on retiring! What do you think you'll do now? Given that you're wholly self-taught, I would assume you would dive in to your interests.


Thanks.

What do you think you'll do now? Given that you're wholly self-taught, I would assume you would dive in to your interests.

I have one personal Open Source project that I will likely continue to slowly enhance (I was its only user, and I used it at work, so less need for enhancement going forward). I have some other stuff (CGI Perl) which I run on my home server, which I'll probably enhance. And a few related things I'm thinking of starting work on (in definition phase right now). All very utilitarian stuff just for me. I've sent (had accepted) a tiny PR or two to a project I used daily, but I doubt I'll get more involved than that.

But that's looking at the SW Dev side of my life, which has dominated my time for the past 30-odd years; drawing back from that (continuous learning engagement) while understandable (in the sense that breaking any 30-year-old habit is tough, and if no longer being employed in the sector, what's the point?), makes sense. I need to find other things beyond tech stuff to spend time on; home repair is a probable direction, and auto repair too. I did that stuff to some degree always, but always because I was a cheapskate who objects to paying beaucoup for what I (these days anyone capable of watching Youtube can figure out how to) do, and do to my own satisfaction (perfectionism) level (vs. accepting what a contractor is content to deliver).

Besides that (which won't consume much time), traveling (by motor vehicle) the western USA with a lot greater frequency is on my agenda. I'm not sure what else might happen; I'm open to opportunities, but not really to frivolities... fortunately now I'm in no rush to achieve any goal.


You could be a consultant/contractor instead, not have to go through the leetcode gauntlet, and not buy into corporate culture BS - go in, do the work, rinse and repeat, and switch clients whenever you want


Lol I know someone who lined themselves up to be made redundant much like a surfer manoeuvring to catch a wave. It worked and they too got about 9 months. Not as old.


For more than a year I've been trying to get it clear to my boss that I'm too stressed and need a less chaotic workplace. The last months I've had constant headache and fuzzy vision. I checked my blood pressure and it was 180/95. Ten months earlier when I last checked it it was 130/83. On medication now, but my heart beats so hard sometimes I think I need more medication.

When I told my boss about this, he said the usual friendly words about I need to do what I must and that he was relieved the problem was found. I nearly exploded when I read that and told him that high blood pressure is the symptom, the cause is my workplace. Got no good answer to that. I spoke to someone more senior than me and it seems hopeless to resolve this without leaving, so that's what I'm going to do. Leave, and start my own company.

I can't work for someone who lacks empathy and is dangerous to my life.


> Leave, and start my own company.

I don't think that's going to be less stressful... Good luck though!


It's a different kind of stress though. I'd say, go for it. You probably won't get it right on the first attempt. It's really good to have some cash saved. And be open to getting back to work for a company while you try. Best wishes to you!


Yeah I think many who’ve been in bad work situations like this don’t realize that not every company is like that. There are sane employers and teams out there that treat each other with respect. Please take that into consideration before going the other extreme of trying to start your own company, unless that’s always been a goal of yours


I imagine the sources of stress would be very different which may help. The increased agency may also help. Different people respond differently to different types of stress, I think.


No joke. When I was founding a startup, I went cave diving on the weekends to relax.


I'd suggest leaving and taking a break until your health issues are under control. Serious stress takes some time to work through the system. Be well!


Feel free to message me if you’re interested in strong work life balance and interesting work!


Wish I had seen this thread earlier, as this will get burried now. Oh well, here it goes: I am seriously considering leaving my current position as a lead developer because I am basically taking on the role and tasking of SCRUM master, architect, build engineer, DB admin, UI/UX consultant, technical writer, and not to mention - developer! I often find myself writing unit tests until 11 or 12 because I am stuck in meetings all day, writing requirements, coordinating with other teams, pairing with and mentoring junior devs, and haven’t had a chance to write any of the code I had committed to for the sprint. Sure, I can delegate, but a majority of the team can’t do UI, and no one, not even our PhD-level PO can write requirements in proper English that make sense, so I have basically taken this over as well. Everyone else seems to simply attend meetings and play-act their roles, leaving myself and 2 or 3 of the other senior devs to do 90% of the work (or re-work), all while leadership hounds us to over-commit every sprint and yell at us when we carry over tickets. While I am paid decently, it’s maddening and I am experiencing true burnout. I feel like I could probably work for Amazon and do the exact same work for $700k. Ok, I’m probably not smart enough for Amazon, but I am hoping that I can find a less stressful project for better compensation.

Icing on the cake: my company drastically changed our benefits this year such that our medical copays are double and our deductibles are far higher, so I am effectively taking a cut. Our team was also promised a retention bonus if we remain with the company during the recent re-compete but none of us have seen said bonus for nearly 8 months now and management explains it away as being due to the fact that we’re on a “bridge” contract.


The first thing that needs to be done in this situation is to stop working overtime. By working overtime and completing everything that needs to be done you are sending the message "yes, everything is fine, we got this". If you stop delivering on time, questions will be asked why - and only then things might start changing.


I experienced something similar in terms of having to juggle numerous responsibilities spanning multiple roles. It is unfortunate and not only is your company taking advantage of you, your coworkers are too. This is at least what I experienced where I'd go out of my way to help others yet those I helped rarely paid it back.

I'm in between jobs now and am down leveling in my new role to a senior developer from an architect/manager/lead dev with just as much pay and comparable benefits and plenty of other appealing aspects. It took me 4 months to find the right position, but I was patient. The excitement and relief are palpable.

FAANG companies have never interested me much so I'm willing to take a lower comp, but I still do really well for my area.

My point is that it just isn't worth the headache. A retention bonus probably isn't life changing money so ask if it is worth it at all. Maybe you'll get it before you find that new job, maybe you won't. But focus on what will make your life better, not just compensation and titles.

You're being taken advantage of and not compensated for what you bring to the table.

Good luck!


You’re right about the retention bonus not being life-changing money, but it’s actually a pretty nice chunk (roughly a month’s salary). It’s more about keeping promises and trust. When companies start taking away perks and compensation or weasel their way out of promises, it’s a red flag. I left a really good position at a major defense contractor for similar reasons, then came back to work as an IC for far more moolah.


I recently realized that changing projects, and if it’s not possible within a company, then companies is a very healthy thing. And it’s healthy exactly because you get to drop all that baggage you were carrying and start fresh.


There are two questions at the core of this: "What made you look" and "What made you leave". They can have the same answers but this isn't a great poll IMO.


https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/ is a classic article (and an incredibly important read for anyone in engineering management) that essentially argues that these two questions are fundamentally equivalent.


Jesus, I just looked at this article's bullet points for the factors that we evaluate in an instant when considering leaving a job. And where I failed every line. :\

I knew that I was looking for something else but I hadn't consciously realized it had gotten that bad.

    Am I happy with my job?
    Do I like my manager? My team?
    Is this project I’m working on fulfilling?
    Am I learning?
    Am I respected?
    Am I growing?
    Do I feel fairly compensated?
    Is this company/team going anywhere?
    Do I believe in the vision?
    Do I trust the leaders?


These are great. Thank you. I'm adding them to my calendar to answer quarterly.


Good god. All "No" and 2 "mixed/maybe" for me.


interesting. I'm a solid 'mixed' on these, although, I'm p/t contractor, not fte.

not respected, not growing, not strong trust.

learning - some, but I don't like some of what i'm having to learn (not terribly useful outside this project).

fulfilling... occasionally, but more often not.

It's not 'that bad' for me yet, but have been trying to watch out for these signs. I've been in your shoes - where it has gotten 'that bad', and often you don't realize until you're already there.

Good luck to you!


If your "shields" went down because you had a negative workplace experience, but then you found out that you could double your salary once you started looking, I think it's totally fair to consider both the toxic culture and the compensation your "why" factors.

It's easy to use something like compensation or new challenges as a post-hoc rationalization for making a move too, even when the real reason you started looking is perhaps different and requires some introspection. As an example, you might not start looking because you want more money, but it's fairly socially acceptable to say "I left because I was made an offer I can't refuse" as a justification when you do actually leave.


I would argue that the best world for employees is one in which their shields are always down.


It's sure the best world for recruiters.


I'm not leaving my job yet, but strongly thinking about doing it in the near future.

The reason is simple: I am not employable.

I mean that in a good way.

I hate being an employee. I hate having to go by the rules that other people make up even though I strongly disagree with. I hate being in an industry that does not share my engineering values.

So to that end, I voted "company culture" on this pool.

More importantly, I want to create things of value.

All the jobs I've worked so far have been bullshit jobs. The thing I'm paid to make ultimately does not provide any real value to society - sometimes it provides negative value.

And, I want to set an example to my children: don't be an employee, and don't strive to be one.


Become a contractor?


I left my very good job in the bay area and relocated to a "quality of life" city and am taking a some time off now.

As a manager of a large team, COVID definitely made the last couple of years hard. If not for productivity, then certainly for team cohesion. It's like the famous Milgram experiment; it's just easier for people to behave in unsympathetic ways when everyone else is just a face on a screen. I also noticed that (IMHO) the 'wrong' people kind of took over the attention of the org. In person, the pillars of the org were the desk locations of the strongest engineers and mangers that helped guide the team. In this new world, the pillars of the team because the people who were the most social on Slack, creating channels and commenting everywhere. Maybe I'm getting old, but it felt like a bad culture shift.

So, I answered 'company culture' but it's really a mix of a lot of things--my framework is always 'what am I going to get out doing this job for the next few years'. If answer isn't something really important, I'm out.


Feel sad to hear such stories. It should have not been in this way. There have been many companies doing remote for years and sharing experiences out loud. And Slack can be used wisely, with just a little bit of discipline.


There was a huge disconnect between management at the top and those on the ground.

I think some managers never learnt to correctly judge workload and responsibilities. They we're rewarding those with minor responsibilities for achieving goals and harshly punishing those with huge responsibilities for minor misses.

This inability to judge workload and responsibilities was previously hidden by people's presence in the office giving bad managers a proxy but now the flaws in that management style are being exposed in the most extreme way. Entire teams are disbanding since as soon as one member of an overworked and under-rewarded team leaves the problem for that team is exacerbated.


I saw a great quote on HN a few weeks ago that went along these lines:

"Managers don't know if you coded it right, but they sure know if you missed a deadline."


At least in large enterprise software world, I have noticed in recent years that managers are starting to offload everything to the individual contributors. For example, in the early 2000s when I started my career I remember managers would do project management and interface with other teams, among other things. I've started that at least in my last 3 positions, managers will typically offload this work to engineers, who don't typically have the skillset to do these things and thus causing a suboptimal operating environment.


I have seen the same as well. It also causes the managers to be disconnected from the realities of the team. Since they've delegated most everything, they don't need to pay attention and are free to go play politics with the other managers and senior leadership. This then leads to poor decision making by the managers when they actually need to make decisions.


I recently left a “good steady pay, low learning, low growth” company for a “risky pay, tons of learning, high growth” company.

I think COVID exacerbated winners and losers. The gaps between companies offering opportunity and stale companies is growing. People won’t stay at a company that rewards 2 years of heads down pandemic work with “Due to current conditions, we can’t fund bonuses. Raises will be less than inflation, and we can only promote people when their boss leaves.”


I just started a new job. The CEO of my previous employer decided to do a surprise reorganization which involved firing the entire management chain above me. My new manager after the reorg asked me on the first day “so, what do you do here?”. I’d been working there for 9 years so I didn’t take that as a good sign.

My new job is fully remote, has very interesting work, and my compensation almost doubled.

I have already referred 4 of my previous colleagues to my current company.


My previous organization has been totally emptied out during the Great Quittening. All of us left for various reasons, including mismanagement, and the eminent impossibility of pay raises that kept up with the hot market + inflation. I was fielding offers at 20% past my previous base salary, plus MASSIVE equity upside, at a much more exciting company. I feel bad for any engineering leaders attempting to retain people right now.


(Throwaway for obvious reasons)

The market's been extremely hot the past 10 years. Anyone making a good tech salary and investing has done extremely well. I have enough to never work again. I didn't want to leave my team, but at some point your portfolio fluctuates every day by more than your salary and you have to ask yourself what's the point?


Assuming a salary of $100k, and 0.5% daily fluctuation, that's a portfolio of $20 million, which is a sizable amount.


Ha, I was thinking more like 10% fluctuation on $3 million against a salary of $300K. The total and the volatility could both easily happen if the user invested early in crypto.


Yep this is closer to the truth. I'm not a crazy crypto guy and don't blab about it at work, so nobody has any idea. I bet there are more people like me out there than you think.


It's not uncommon for the stock market to fluctuate by 2% in a day (like today actually), which means he'd only need a portfolio of $5 million.


Given the username, it's possible portfolio is in crypto, which would have much greater fluctuations.


I think they probably mean monthly fluctuation and salary.


Easy. Strong mission statement. We’re all so lucky to have a set of skills that have impact millions of people for the better. Reach out if you’re interested in a solid mission statement (also great work life balance and pay)


I left my job last may. I was a web developer at a branding /marketing agency. The office/people were great, no complaints about the work place at all. But after 5 years (and a similar stretch as an in-house before that), I just felt VERY burnt out. Every day was the same, projects were meaningless, coding wasn't challenging, I felt like an imposter and bored at the same time, I wanted to build my own 'thing' and felt i was running out of time.

I was so checked out at the end, I bombed a big project and was totally stressed over it the entire time. After that, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision while doing a post-mortem with my boss to resign (probably would have been fired anyways).

Haven't worked since May 2021. Worked on my own project for several months, but the burn out is real and I can't seem to get back to a spot where I am 'excited' about anything let alone coding, even for myself. It has definitely taken its toll on my wife and family, and I have started to look for work again although I know this just leads back to burn out feeling and feeling of failure, which I realize I was struggling with before I resigned.

I haven't been able to complete projects - personal, work, home, coding , non-coding - for a long time now and am struggling to figure out why and how to overcome (at this moment I am procrastinating putting up baseboards in our ALMOST finished basement with reading and replying to HN).

In the end, although it was in essence a selfish move that spans many of the options in the poll, I think I quit my job because mentally I needed a break from what I was doing and really don't want to do it for anyone else ever again. The biggest problem with this is that i waited too long to do this and now i can't find the motivation/drive/will/self-dicsipline to even do it for myself now due to extreme burn out.


Man, I felt this hard and I'm surprised burnout isn't on the poll. For me, I have no real complaints about my team or work, and the ones I do have ping me more as a symptom of burnout - e.g. I'll get frustrated that the team likes to over engineer, when realistically it's to a small enough degree to never meaningfully impact maintenance costs. The work is chill, I work fewer than 8 hours a day and get pretty decent praise. But still I want to leave. I even get paid more than I will in most places, but it doesn't matter because I can't make myself feel anything but dread at working somewhere else. I just want to take 3-12 months to reset. Luckily, I have few enough obligations right now that I should be able to manage that. I just want to make it another 40 days (but who's counting) until yearly bonus and equity pay out.


I feel for you!

Quick question, what would you like your legacy to be? What words do you want people to say when they speak about you and the life you lived?


Why? Because people can. They either have enough opportunities with flexible work arrangements that are too hard to resist, or they have either enough savings to bridge periods of unemployment, or certain jobs started paying more.

All of these issues are interesting to dive into. The first one will lead with the society accelerating the switch to a highly digital life (think metaverse). A lot of the existing business infrastructure will go out of business when that happens, and a lot of the new infrastructure will be built to support the new lifestyle. My guess is that this will benefit the FAANG + unicorns and will hurt the SMBs.

The second one I find difficult to wrap my head around. I had no idea that someone working as a waiter has enough savings to just quit their job without moving back in with their parents - it certainly was not true for me back in the day. Perhaps that's what people are doing - moving in with their parents for the benefit of not exposing themselves to health risks? Fair enough if that's what's happening, but somehow I doubt it. The other option is that everyone just switched from one type of a low-skill career to another with less exposure (eg: hospitality to remote customer support) - except that everyone is running their call centers at low capacity these days, so what gives?

The last one is the strangest of them all. Where is the money for those extra wages coming from? Surely, there are a verticals here and there with fat margins that can easily pay more and remain profitable, but the efficient market theory would make you believe that this wouldn't be possible across all industries. And yet, the results of this survey indicate that compensation is the main driver for most people on HN. My only explanation is that the HN audience is primarily in the digital space, which as a whole has benefited from the pandemic and can pay more.


Some other people were taking advantage of work form home, and their slacking was pissing me off, so I looked. Then I got an offer which amounted to a 50% raise.


On similar note (but maybe not too similar): My work switched from being a in-office company to everything-remote. Productivity took a big hit because we were a small, tight-knit company, and people stopped talking with each other. Left it to take a job in a company that will never switch to remote-only. Much happier again.


It failed cause it took a team that worked in X way and made them work in Y way. Siloed work and faulty communication is an issue with in-person too, just differently.

Happy you found something that works for you, but you're overgeneralizing.


It failed because only 25% of the team actually wanted to go remote, the rest of us feel we're more productive in a non-remote environment. Work was never siloed (remote or not).

I'm not saying remote/no-remote is right for everyone, just talking about what works for me/the ones close to me, YMMV obviously.


He is not generalizing at all, he said what happened to his team.


Probably the same people who are saying they are much more productive working from home.


Don't think so. I'm highly productive working from home. But when I went to the office, we mostly ended up drinking and playing video games. I can't do maths without hours of quiet contemplation of the problem. In an office, that's almost impossible.


So, I left a huge job to work on my own stuff. Specifically, I'm working on infrastructure for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/ using a new language and new SaaS platform.... I'm definitely shaving the Yak here.


Today was my last day.

I moved to the UK for a pretty awesome job. These last few years have led me to re-evaluate my priorities, and I'm moving back home to be closer to family and old friends.

Many of my international colleagues (especially European) have made similar decisions.


Similar situation in my current workplace. A lot of ppl are quitting to take some time off to gather thoughts and help family go through those tough times.

In IT if you are a good dev and keep youself up to date, it will be not hard to find a nee job.

But finding a new family will be a lot harder..


We've had a few European colleagues move back home since the referendum. It's sad but entirely understandable.


For me, the proverbial final straw came when I delivered a dinosaur utility company it's first churn propensity score. Bit of background, my manager and their manager were non-technical and I had this thing running in evaluation mode for a few months with excellent lift in the top couple of percentiles. I had the statistics well grounded, and this thing was due to go in against basically nothing, renewal teams randomly calling prospects.

Anyway, before this thing goes live, I see a few managers printing out pages of Excel sheets and arranging them on a conference table to validate the model with literally pencil and paper. They didn't know what a percentile was until I explained it.

I handed in my notice the Monday following that weekend. Sometimes, if you're not trusted to do a good job, it's not worth trying.


I don't understand what happened here and why you left. Were they checking your math? Were they seeing if the suggestions made by the model made sense to them? Why would either of those things be upsetting to you?


> first churn propensity score

Could you expand on what this means?


I selected other. I was working in the Air Transport Industry as the pandemic kicked off. Three months in we started having weekly meetings to "update" us on the situation, saying the company has money to weather the storm, expecting that storm to be just a couple of months at the time. Then there was the call for voluntary redundancies, reduced hours, discontinuation of bonuses, reduction of benefits. Once that talk started, I decided I wasn't going to hang around. I've seen situations like this play out before and this time I didn't want to be part of it. One night, a recruiter on LinkedIn slid into my DMs with a position that I was interested in. Two weeks later I had an offer on the table and accepted. Now I'm happily working in the Video Games industry.


I recently changed because all of the above at once:

- spent 3y at prev job, which is typical interval where 1) learning starts to plateau, and you realize all the unchangeable constraints that block you from delivering things you'd like to deliver; 2) you are in company long enough that you're the reference point for dozens of things and people keep pinging you all the time; and you somehow end up in a box that you can't get out of; at the same time getting recognition/promotion is hard if you're in a large group of folks with similar level of exp and company is not growing

- salary-wise, recent market move has been bonkers, and getting a bump at $prev_job being even a slice of the current market rates was unimaginable.

- there definitely is a FOMO when you see all the new technologies that everyone seemingly embraces while your company does not (TypeScript! Github Actions! Cloudflare workers! and what not), and you start thinking you'll become unemployable soon

- trying to check out a slightly different kind of organization and under a different business model and different scale

- remote: due to covid everyone's been remote and will be for a while, but it was only semi-reflected in the prev company's way of working and it was not clear what will be the way forward; shifting to proper full remote / async gives me some kind of stability in how to think about work and life for a while, and makes it possible to move far away from the office if I decide it's worth it


I gave my notice today with an unofficial job offer. The acquisition changed the atmosphere of the company and slowed us down. The parent company swore not to change us yet they did and started pushing us to adopt all of their systems for no good reason. When I started there it was kind of still in the startup phase and was quite a lot of fun - not anymore. One sad thing about this industry is that almost wherever you go is going to be beholden to some massive entity or at the very least a board of people who just want to make money even at the detriment of the product.

The other element is salary. My salary just wasn't keeping up with inflation and I've benefited greatly by moving on.


Actually I just started a new job, and it's been a nearly two months now and I'm really not sure if I want to continue working their or not.

I've tried to give it a chance and thinking, "Oh, it's just different to my last place".

My new place is very heavy on the time metrics, which I think is the reason for me not feeling it.

I'd worked on smaller tickets for a couple of sprints, and then this sprint was happy that they gave me a bigger ticket to sink my teeth into. However, as soon as they assigned it me, I was told this is 'sprint goal' ticket and it really needed to be finished. I was like, "I would love to take the ticket as I'll get to grips with things a lot faster working on this stuff but it's important to get done then maybe I'm not the best bet".

So I talk to senior, get ideas on implementation and go ahead. Everything takes longer as I like to know what I'm working with. I get it working, but start to hit issues that make it feel like I'm not going about it correctly. Get told to do it another way, so did that but as I just dived into it due to time pressure, got a bit stuck and asked the senior for assistance. He's always busy so didn't get back to me, and when I logged on this morning, he'd linked a branch where he'd basically done all the work for me.

I appreciated his help, thanked him and wrote some more tests for the branch and did the testing. It did make me feel like a complete failure though..

Worst thing is, his code was so obvious that I'm kicking myself for not slowing down and thinking about it but the time pressure was getting to me I guess.

Well, long text but did feel good to write that down :) Focus on improving for the future.


It's ok to check in with your old manager. (hey wanna get lunch? hows it going? etc) I went back to an old job after 9 months after having lunch with my old manager. I got a 25% raise out of it in total. I saw the grass wasn't greener and I came back to the job that I wanted when I had left originally. I was able to move up quite well after I came back, there was no harbored doubts.


Back when I left there was a ceiling to compensation but no limit to exploitation. More and more would get piled onto me, more and more skimmers would be inserted between me any my salary. It just got to the point where there is not a number that would justify the way I was living.

I wasn't and didn't have in prospect a way to get the compensation in accordance to my supposed worth to any of the companies I worked for. So then I asked myself where is that money going? What am I enabling by being locked out of that much cashflow?

Following up on that direction of inquiry got me answers that I could not, physically endure. I will never be able to trust the judgement of others come before me they way I used to. The game I inherited was nihilistic to a degree incommensurate with the crowdedness imposed by growth.

Those come after, that game will not inherit. Their landscape is cynical and disjointed from the reality of people around them, aimless in it's idealism. It is possibly the right way for them to be, to survive or even thrive. For about 4% of them. Same as the nihilistic system was benefitting about 4% of us back in my time. Probably was the same back when it all ran on slave labour.

I got to understand Thiels' "competition is for losers" quip. 96% are flushed out, so this must be what the system is for. Selection, not improvement or enrichment.

But I sure know I won't be participating. You can't "change the system", it can only die to a more cynical system. I've seen it happen and I'm not playing any more.

I will not be voting. I will be doing.

My children will not go to your schools. I will be teaching.

I will not listen to a doctor that never leaves his office and is paid for my being sick.

I am too old for this shit.


Reading through the comments is interesting, I seem to be one of the few looking for a more intense job rather than less.

My current job, given who our customers are (the code does something a little more serious than advertising), should be a lot more intense than it is. At present we're just half-assing everything and cashing the checks. Sure it's easy, the pay is industry median, and the benefits are above average. That's not why I got an engineering degree though. What example does that set for my future kid? Bust your ass to get a STEM degree so you too can find a mediocre job with a sandbagged contract to comfortably mooch off of using a tiny fraction of your talent? I can't even really justify it from a "looking after my family" standpoint, because while the income comfortably pays the bills it certainly isn't going to pay my kids' future college tuition and buy us a good house. If I'm going to turn into a jaded clock puncher there are much more lucrative clocks I should be punching.

I'm not so naive as to expect zero bullshit and engineering purity, money is ultimately the game at any private corporation. But we could be making the same money and doing a lot more. Issue is there's no business incentive to do that, and no way for me to provide said incentive in the short or even medium term. Even if I went management there's no single position I could target that would make a difference below the Executive level, and the longer I work here the more I see how that's by design.

What with a kid on the way I'm staying put for the next 6 months at least. Don't want to be changing insurance during the wife's pregnancy and she'll obviously need some stability after the fact. But after that I'm looking for a job that's 50% bullshit instead of 90%. If I can say one thing for this job, it gives me a stable platform so I can be picky about my next position :)


One thing to consider is that some of the folks looking for less intensity at work are hoping to shift that intensity into hobbies or other endeavors. I think and hope the example this would set is more along the lines of: do whatever you need to make enough money to sustain yourself and maximize the time you have to live life and explore what the things you're curious about. This might work especially well if you'd prefer pursuing your passions as a hobby instead of a career.

Less intensity shouldn't necessarily mean the product is half-assed, though, so I think I understand your perspective.


Don't get me wrong I'm not looking down on anyone looking for a less intense job. Plenty of slave-driving middle managers out there that bring all the wrong types of intensity to a job and are worth leaving. Even with good management working your 40 and clocking out is a fine way to fly assuming the 40 hours is productive. People have different priorities in life and that's fine.

But at my current workplace most of our time is wasted on maintaining and occasionally being forced to exacerbate inefficiencies, rather than working toward eliminating them. Just to name a few examples: All of our package dependencies are managed by hand with no time/money in the budget to implement any sort of automated dependency management, the software itself is hacked together from several pieces of internal corporate software that were never originally intended to work together and thus have a ton of redundancies, the hierarchy (or lack thereof) of the various software teams is WAY too loose to enforce good organization, and the infrastructure is begged, borrowed and stolen. All of this and more is what generates most of the "work" that gets done. Most of the time we're either putting out fires or treading water, or adding new features over the objections of senior engineers and then ripping them out when they don't work (so serious money does exist, just for all the wrong things).

The only reason any of this makes money at all is because it's a very specific niche we've cornered and like it or not we're the only functional game in town. In theory it should be an important mission, that's what attracted me to it in the first place. Sadly the powers that be don't give a damn.


A large majority of job switching this past year is largely due to covid.

Industries being affected differently, working arragements changing, and a big one being that during the pandemic many people were afraid to resign during a time of crisis and held on to jobs that they normally would have gotten rid of sooner.

Then of course you have the resulting inflation and price mismatches in the job markets and it's often easier to switch jobs than to negotiate higher salaries.

I don't think your poll options really allow you to capture the big picture.


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

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

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

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

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

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


I left my last gig as a datacenter tech when my employer made it abundantly clear that any of us dying of covid were “acceptable losses”. At the outset they immediately moved to make sure we were classified as “essential” and then attempted to compel us to keep working. When employees began dying I left.

Because fuck you thats why. I’m not dying so some douchebag can have a second yacht. I’m happy to let the entire system burn to the ground.


Very much this.


To make a crude but I think apt analogy, the boom in remote work is like Tinder opening up the dating market. If you are the hot item, you now have a vastly larger number of suitors to choose from and can up your standards. Before, things were much more geographically constrained and the market was less efficient.


A mix of a few things really:

- All the coworkers who I was more friendly with left the team/company and now I've been feeling completely detached from the team.

- the stock run-up has provided me with a (false?) sense of more financial independence.

- a handful of life crisis with a dash of imposter syndrome. Zero idea what I want to be doing with my life but being stuck as low level IC for a long time is hurting my already depleted ego - can't seem to avoid the pitfall of comparing myself to others.

All in all, just feels like I need a break and that it's probably time for some changes.


stock run-up? Hasn't the market been sideways since November (Asking for my own edification/portfolio)?


I suspect they're thinking longer term than 3 months. The S&P returned nearly 29% in 2021, 18% in 2020 and 38% in 2019. That is doubling your money (nominally) in 3 years which is fantastic compared to the averages.


Money and opportunity. I'll be leaving for 50% more pay and a company that's 1000x bigger than anything I could find locally. That means room for growth, knowledge, the ability to work in different areas and with more technology, and the ability to learn from the best in the industry.

The worst part, is also the part that enables this, it is a 100% remote position. Having multiple small children at home can be a challenge (even there is a sitter), as well as spouse that mostly works from home.


i'm leaving goldman after 12 years next week after our yearly compensation discussion. i started right after the crash (and one of their best years), i loved the culture out the gate. i am in the tech, often called strats, apparatus that straddles trading and technology. it's been a great place to be as the perceived "value add" against the exodus of voice traders.

but the culture has changed. we can't land the best and the brightest anymore. our tech stack is antiquated and arguably the company's biggest risk. we work long hours, and it somehow was able to get worse during this pandemic. the new mgmt has made comp allocations to the trading side of the business an after thought; a cost cut. little to no innovation or investment is flowing to this side. and they want us back in our seats, back on the trading floor, two feet from our overworked and diseased co-workers as soon as it's politically viable.

above all i (and many of my colleagues) have been promised for several of these years that compensation and work/life would improve. That "the firm's performance was soft" or "the division didn't get the allocation expected" or "this year was a challenging environment" but always "next year is looking much better." they've traded on their name. it used to mean something to be hired and work for goldman sachs. that means so much less now. they've made a point to say that compensation will be good this year, but, whatever it is, it won't be enough. it's not the money; at least, not all of it. i feel i've been fooled for many of my 12 years into thinking things will change. we've now been through a pandemic. we've watched out friends and families get sick or die, and the lockdowns and time at home have finally changed our perspectives on what really matters.

so, next week, i am going to take whatever it is they give me, and kindly submit my resignation. i'll be taking time to be with my friends and family, some of whom are terminally ill, and to plot my next move. i look forward to enjoying my work, respecting my managers and colleagues again, but it will be when i am ready. maybe a month from now, maybe a year.


If I've learned anything in my brief 10 year career so far it's that we shouldn't wait for things to change, almost especially if it's explicitly promised that they will change. It's not worth the risk of disappointment. If you want your work life to be better, you have to MAKE it better. Not wait for someone else to.


I think as you make your way up the career ladder it starts to become less about compensation and more about the culture and politics. I would accept less compensation to work in an organization with clear goals, clear accountability, and a better, more open culture.

One item missing above is “People”. The people you work with directly on a day to day basis, including of course your own leadership make a huge impact in your work satisfaction.


Left about 6 months ago, and was basically shocked at the compensation bump I got. As someone full time remote since 2017, working at the latest place since 2018, it felt like a new world looking for a job in 2021. So many more options, which basically makes it a job-seekers market.

But while the compensation bump is nice, the thing that got me seeking was the company itself. After an acquisition by VMWare, I watched it deteriorate over a year or two. To make anything happen, you had to basically go into "hero mode" working tons of hours, etc. And then you'd see pretty incompetent managers, the kind that treat engineers like cogs, continue to get promoted. Oh, and add no real clear direction on the products themselves.

So I guess that's "company culture"? I think there's a lot of people in this bucket, where "too much stupid at the current place" plus "lots of opportunity" means it's time to look around.


I have enough money saved up, whereas I don't really need to work for at least 6 months.

This is assuming I don't even try to adjust my spending, push come to shove. I can probably last up to a year without a job.

I remain employed because frankly otherwise I'd be bored.

Once COVID gets under control, I think I'm going to probably live in another country for at least 3 months.


Before the pandemic started I would have quit my job if they didn't let me/us work 100% remote. But they changed the policy, and I'm now happily living in Michigan (rather than New Jersey). Went from 1hr+ commute each way to 1min "commute" with loads of benefits.

I'll never work in an office again - 100% remote or bust.


We should trade - as soon as I can, I’m 100% office or bust. I miss being around people :(


Not sure if these count as company culture but: Frequent hiring freezes, blown out projects that never make progress, IT support outsourced to SEA where tickets that took hours before take days instead, upper management more focused on making new acquisitions rather than integrating existing business units, and so on.


I got a new manager in Q1 2021 and she was super toxic. She was a terrible communicator and made me feel so bad about myself. Nothing was ever good enough. I never sent her something and received a "This looks great. Good job" - Everything was nitpicked. Why put forth effort when she will just tear down anything I create and tell me to rebuild it? Mind you, I am aware when I make mistakes, but the final straw was when I went above and beyond, did a super great job creating some documentation for her, and excitedly sent it to her thinking "She's gonna love this! I killed it!". She sent me back a huge wall of text essentially telling me to redo it (with a ton of comments added to the original MS Word document).

I resigned in December with no new job lined up. I got tired of crying before my biweekly '1 on 1' meetings with her. It's crazy because before she came, I was doing great. Our previous manager was excellent. She was run off by a toxic co-worker in my department who was the most experienced (He would make her life a living hell through small bits of periodic sabotage).

This was my first job out of college (Information Security Analyst). The work I was doing was extremely tedious and didn't require any skill whatsoever - It was basically data entry & sending emails. I understand that the newbies have to earn their stripes, but I was approaching 2 years with this company, and I felt like I was crippling myself as each day passed. Shouldn't I have been performing risk assessments and reviews, and LEARNING? I have to grow so I can support the company, right?

The rest of my team (with more seniority) were working on projects with a lot of depth. Meanwhile, I'm sending emails to people for 30 hours per week (access reviews performed manually by sending hand crafted AD group reports for a company with 3,000 employees...). My technical skills (Networking, Linux/UNIX, Cybersecurity) were starting to atrophy due to lack of use. The company I worked at payed EXTREMELY WELL, but I looked to the future and didn't like the idea of being handcuffed to this one company due to my lack of growth.

I also believe one of my co-workers was trying to sabotage my work. He would feed me bad information (at critical moments) which would completely derail my project down the line eventually (despite him specializing in his role for 20 years) - I sometimes wonder if he was threatened by me (or maybe I'm just full of myself?).

Either way, it was a great experience for a while. But then it was awful.


While I completely agree that change is good, and flexibility, company culture and life balance are incredibly important, the reason I left my job in October was compensation.

I started at that project as a freelancer, but the client had a hard rule that they couldn't hire freelancers for more than two years (because the tax service might consider them employees instead), and after two years I wasn't ready to leave, so I became an employee. I knew I had to take a pay cut for that, but the pay cut turned out to be much, much larger tan I expected. That simply made it a temporary thing. I don't regret continuing that project for another year, and I did try to negotiate better salary that might allow me to stay longer, but when that turned out to be impossible, I left.

I'm freelancing again.


I quit my job in November because ... I was burned out, and life is short, and the last two years were incredibly stressful, and my partner and I had an opportunity to do something else: we bought a sailboat, and we're going to go explore the world for a while.


Curious to find out if anyone is able to achieve strong career satisfaction working less than less than 20 hours a week.

For me, I've always looked at the exchange of time for money. The problem with that is that you can't exchange money for time, only time for money.

Realizing this, I set work to 0. There seems to be a step function at 40 hours - the "full time job", but I haven't heard of many people that are successful in traditional software engineering jobs with a 20 hour work week, aside from perhaps those that work for themselves and have their project in "maintenance".


> you can't exchange money for time, only time for money.

Most of the money people spend is to save them massive amounts of time.

  - Don't want to farm for a season to eat? Go buy food at the market.
  - Don't want to build yourself a small cabin on the outskirts? Buy or rent a home somewhere convenient.
  - Don't want to walk from NYC to SF like the pioneers? Buy a plane ticket and be there in 6h.
  - Don't want to make some item yourself? Buy it from a store and pay extra for delivery.
  - Don't want to (learn to) do some maintenance task yourself? Hire a handyperson.


I was a fulltime employee for about a decade. Quit to attempt to launch some products with a friend. Wasn’t very successful and started to get stressed out about savings going down so managed to find a 6hr/day contracting job, with the rest of my time still working on my own products

Have been doing that for close to a year now, and am trying to raise rates so I can move to a 3-full-day workweek instead, which I feel I can utilize better

Motivation hasn’t been great lately, feel like I’m at a crossroads as to what to do with my career and feel like need to decide soon.

If you reply with your email would be happy to chat more about it!


Probably not a good idea to post my email on hackernews.

Thanks for the reply. I understand motivation can be tough. I'm also at the point where I'm wondering if I should go back to the more traditional route. Have you shipped any of your products? I feel like that's pretty key to being to able to talk about your accomplishments in the event of failure.


Culture is such a vague term and everyone has their own definition. Not only that, but also the answers to what a good culture is are even more vague. Like embrace transparency or move fast and break things. At best these statements apply metaphorically to an imaginary scenario. If it stands for let's get together and drink beer every Friday that's more tangible, but I haven't seen companies codifying those lately and instead gravitating toward more vague non-sensical statements to keep most people relatively happy and certainly not to piss anyone off.


Poor Management, being left to rot while being managed by proxy of Jira.


(voted "other") I left my job in September due to burnout. In turn, that was due to being too invested in wanting to do good work, at a company that just didn't function at a basic level and thwarted my efforts at every turn. AND having this be the third similarly disastrous company I worked in within a 2-year span.

I took 4 months off and will be starting a new job in a couple weeks at a company that appears to be well-run and staffed with smart people. Also for significantly more money, but that's just icing.


I don't know if someone is going to read this (I doubt it, this post already has 519 comments), but I am in a weird situation. I am Lead Engineer in a startup that works well in technical aspects. I attend the daily, check what my team is doing, and that's most of my days. If my PM asks for some bug fixing, I usually can do it quickly (after running some tests), or someone from my team can do it. I am trying to improve the general quality of the architecture (update stuff, improve security, etc), but most of the time I am quite bored. Nothing much to do, not challenging, etc.

The paid is slightly below market for a remote position (EU startup hiring in 3rd World Country, although I have a Master Degree in Computer Science), and I am sure I could get a better paid job. But I am not sure if I want to be 8 hours in front of the computer working. Right now, the boredom (which is awful most the time) allows me to do my own things / hobbies / etc, those days that I find something new, exciting, etc. If next Monday I want to read a book about Play Statino architecture, I know I will be able (except something bad happens in Production). But I don't find anything interesting, I will probably spend the day looking at Hacker News, Reddit, newspapers, etc.

I don't know what to do. I am not sure if I want to look for a new job that will make me hate Mondays (right now, most of the days are the same to me - weekends are different because my girlfriend / friends are available for plans), but at the same time, I don't want to waste my best years without taking advantage of my skills...


Maybe it's time you build something to challenge yourself in your free time, like code a game, a open-source library, learn a new language (programming or not), maybe even start a business, etc


I think the recruitment industry themselves kicked off the whole "great resignation".

By promoting the idea that employees are going to resign, it forces employers to quickly get into "recruitment mode" - as we all know, recruitment takes time (and money). Better be prepared!

Since there is now an abundance of job adverts, and hype, employees who previously were _not_ thinking about changing roles are now considering it.

Employees get higher wages and the recruitment industry gets a boost.


What you are seeing here with the labor market is essentially the same thing we are seeing with real estate. It is a liquidation and recapitalization into a higher asset class. People selling their homes, cashing out and using their equity to get a larger home with a larger basis for appreciation.

Similarly for the labor market, employees taking their experience and recapitalizing into other roles with better benefits and pay.

What you see is effectively a greater polarization between those who do well and those who don’t. See amazons de facto policy of give the top tier best benefits, raised and comp and to hell with the rest.

So where do things end up? Well, the rich get richer. Ultimately everyone moves up since there’s such a demand for (houses|labor). However as we see with first time home buyers, it gets harder, those who are paying more end up demanding more.

Furthermore there is a never ending supply of labor which is why companies like Amazon are not taking this as seriously as you’d expect. There will always be H1b de facto slavery which creates a large inventory pool. However the “housing” is effectively top tier employees which command top dollar.

Ultimately I don’t think the system changes except for the best of the best. Because as always it is very supply constrained.


> See amazons de facto policy of give the top tier best benefits, raised and comp and to hell with the rest.

I think the last part of that is really important.

Your comment made me think back to 2002 when I was playing a game called Diablo II. I used to substantially overpay for things because the things I were buying helped me make 10x the amount I was investing (all in game currency). I didn't care that I was buying things for 2-3x what others were offering to pay.

Salary and the value you produce (direct or indirect) is the same deal. If an employee generates a million dollars of value a year, paying them 300k instead of 150k is still one of the best investments you can ask for -- especially if you amplify this to 10 developers. Now you're talking about making 10 million dollars while only "overpaying" 1.5 million. That's a ~6.5x return.


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


I've wanted to leave my job for years, haven't found anything to replace it though. My discontent is with the company culture moving from self hosted open software and standards (and no JS requirement) to proprietary SaaS that requires JS. From XMPP to Discord. From self hosted trac to GitLab EE. OTOH I've been able to increase the amount of open source I work on and decrease working on the proprietary internal components.


I have been programming on the same team for 2 1/2 years and have a very hazy idea what salary I could be making. So one reason for going out and getting offers will be to get an idea of that. If they offer the same or near what I make I am more likely to stay. If my pay is bumped $20k that is more enticing, and even more enticing the higher it is.

So I chose compensation, but company culture and life balance are part of that too. There was a reorg about a year ago, and not long after that people have been complaining about how much workload there is, and how we're not given the tools etc. to deal with it. I gave polite responses to recruiters prior to December, in December I had my first phone call with an inside recruiter in 2 1/2 years. The other night I was programming at 10PM to make a deadline the next day and fired off two applications, maybe just because it made me feel better (although the positions looked good).

It's not just workload, if my workload was refactoring and learning the technology deeper I might not mind the hours, but it is a lot of meetings with multiple teams and a lot of bureaucratic stuff.

The workload/culture just increases or decreases the timeline somewhat. I am socking away enough money a month, I know the team and the stack and have the institutional knowledge (almost everyone on the team joined later). I would also prefer to spend a few months reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs to practicing Leetcode. But crazy workload and culture stuff speeds up my timeline - I am switching from SICP to Leetcode, and am more apt to interview at places "before I am ready". But if work calms down more I might push the timeline out more.


I’m actively trying to hire folks like you. Solid work life balance, good pay, and strong company culture with a meaningful mission statement.


I wonder how much compensation is working as a proxy for appreciation, in this poll. That's to say, if your company really valued your contributions and made that apparent (but couldn't match a higher offer), would you still leave?

Company culture as the #2 answer seems to add weight to this...

To be clear, there's no better way to value your employees than pay them well. But I think people's motivations here are driven by more than just $$$.


I left my previous job because breach of trust - if you're telling me for months that we're going to use language A, and then you go with language B, then that's not really treating your team with respect. I'd be happy learning new language, if it's right for the job. Making a decision on a whim is not something one should do, without consulting with people that actually built the platform.


is this in the tech industry or the economy as a whole? people in the service industry are leaving because it's even more miserable during a pandemic


> it does seem that there are a large number of people switching jobs.

Some of the attrition was deferred because they would have left in 2020, but decided to wait.


Uncomfortable/unpopular reasons:

  1. More money, companies are throwing money at engineers
  2. Companies are having trouble hiring and it's getting easier to get a job
  3. Inflation concerns, need more money
  4. Most jobs suck (I work at 4 companies now and have worked at 30 companies in my 10 year career)
  5. Retiring early, read reason 4. Working for a company sucks.


I've bounced between engineering lead and engineering manager for most of my career. I was an engineering manager (internal IP) at a MSP that got acquired early in the pandemic, and chose to move to another (better-reputation) consultancy that got acquired by the same large multinational in 2019, but didn't get rebadged instantly. I enjoyed being an IC for a year, and managed to grow an account from 0 to 20+ staff in that time, got "promoted" back to management again - found that the company was in complete limbo due to an as-yet-unannounced fold-in to "megacorp" and left.

I've now gone to a basketcase of a smaller company, in a player/coach role - and I'm happier than I've been in a long time.

It wasn't for the money - I took a pay cut. I have more problems than I had at my last role - the key thing for me is I have the latitude again to solve problems.

Whether it's pure technology or people, either way it's a system engineering issue - and the more "fun" the problem - the more fun I've found I have solving it.


Why wouldn't you list vax mandates and general covid policies as responses?


I'm curious about this, as well. In fact, I have 17 days left before I'm placed on unpaid leave for this very reason--despite being 100% remote and the coercion and adverse actions being violations of my state's employment law.


I'm actually in a very similar situation - in fact I'm trying to go on unpaid leave as a preemptive measure. I would happily undertake other mitigation measures, including working remote, biweekly testing, masking etc., and my (extremely supportive) boss has been trying to pull off some alternative arrangement for me, but he's not the one who decides these policies.


This is plainly a rare enough reason so it would fit under Other, same as the comment about long COVID.


This poll lacks a “my job makes me miserable and a bad spouse/parent”.


I feel that's filed under "company culture", no?


You're missing a relevant option for HN: became an entrepreneur.


While I have gotten regular promotions I'm just vastly underleveled. I went to my skip asking for a level adjust and he laughed. I went to his boss who said yes, aboslutely, I'll inform your chain up to me. I went back to my boss, he said yes. I went to my skip, he said, absolutely not, provide me a ranked list of all employees and why you're better than all of them.

The problem is I'm underpaid, but the real problem is all the old garbage swirling around companies that don't respond to their management, but do expect those reporting to them to fall in line.

I could do incredible things if I wasn't treated like an underskilled know-nothing and given the authority to manage a lot more (finance, people, strategy etc). My skip just happens to be a company lifer who was coddled by previous executive leadership, so he thinks he doesn't need to change ever.


I left because they kept setting a return to work date, and then pushing it further and further without ever offering permanent work from home options. It showed a lack of respect for their employees by not letting them plan their futures.

Additionally, there was a lot of surveys and manufactured consent internally. It was all so silly.


My last job was I think maybe a somewhat less common story than I see here. I definitely did want more money and could see the raises begin to slow down as I reached the upper half of my pay band. What really had me looking though was that I was using dead-end proprietary tooling, with no team to work with, becoming the single point of failure on one of my department's main "products" I guess if you could call it that. It also still involved a lot of mind numbing work and dealing with red tape since it was a defense job.

It was about year 3 and I needed to leave or I'd get pigeonholed there forever, so I just took the first appealing job offer that I scored and bounced. Decent raise but the new environment has made my resume massively more appealing (using very in-demand tech, managed to get a fast title bump, I lead a small team now, etc).


Kids. We have 2 toddlers and are expecting again. Both of us had parents who were teachers, which meant their working hours lined up perfectly with our school hours and holidays. Raising multiple kids is pretty tough if you don't have that luxury! Tracking doctors, dentists, caretakers, after school activities, etc was exhausting, and for virtually all of these you need some kind of backup plan. Especially with a third child, there would be virtually no way for us to handle,say, a COVID wave. My wife is high earning and our tastes are pretty humble.

At one point, this might have been a hard decision, but COVID and a child on the way feel like we've had an extra nudge in this direction. The labor market is so tight and my specialty is in enough demand that I feel like I could jump back into my field in another few years if it makes sense for us.


I have enough money to be comfortable and even mid six figures isn't enough money to justify renting out my brain and creative energy full time toward solving someone else's problems.

If companies want experienced SWEs like me, you need to offer very part time positions. My maximum commitment is 3 days/week.


I can find myself saying yes to all of these with my most recent move. I think Compensation in many cases is a canary for other issues. If I don't like the company culture, life balance, product I am working on, etc. I may do that for enough compensation. If the compensation stops being worth it you move.


I left my job at an ad agency this past week because I was asked to train and manage a team of three brand new employees within my first month on the job. All the while I was expected to "ship" advertising reporting and execution deliverables that I myself wasn't fully in the swing of doing.

For 6 months my managers told me "things will get better when the team starts to get comfortable." But at the same time they'd constantly critique the shoddiness of the work and not provide help. This left me to train and execute all at once. After that 6 months it was becoming clear that the attitude of management was going to put me in really tough positions. And it was unclear if and when my team would get to a level of competence where they were confident and able to execute the job on their own.


"company culture" is a polite way to say assholism. I personally don't really mind working at a place for long hours, moderate pay.

I think there's still a bit of robber baron culture in SE Asian companies. People who get away with firing pregnant women instead of giving maternity leave, docking pay for some arbitrary reason like not punching in. Because there's no early stage investors here, a lot of tech companies are founded by industrial robber barons, but the same techniques that worked for factories don't work when it's an employee's market.

At a lot of companies I've worked at, I'm also surprised how much the company owners don't care about it. About 80% of employees treat work as "just something to pay the bills", but the ratio is the same for employers.


I jumped from a small startup to a larger company in 2021 because I was getting bored with the work after a few years and felt that I had stopped growing. I needed a new challenge, and I have some goals that I recognized moving to a larger company would help me grow to achieve. I also wanted to be paid more because the amount of time and work I put in the compensation wasn't competitive. At the much larger company there are many learning programs available to me, stock with value, and more compensation.

I did enjoy wearing many hats and carrying a lot of responsibility for a while, but the pay wasn't worth the stress. I'd like to revisit working at a startup again some day, maybe after I've reached more of my professional goals and bring more value to a company than just code.


That's the opposite direction I'm trying to head. I'm at a huge company (relatively, I guess - 300+ ppl, got acquired by a several-thousand ppl company) and I'm eyeing a startup. I hate how corporate and over-policied everything has become.


I am looking to leave soon to increase how challenging my work is and gain new skills. Honestly intended to leave my current role 8 months ago, but my leadership suffered a huge wave of departures and I didn't want to leave my employer out to dry with no Director level leadership. Since then I had the opportunity to hire 11 new team members in the "new-normal" era of remote hiring, which I feel has increased my skills even further.

Also our new company culture (we were acquired) is one of using a lot of contractor resources to quickly build something, and throw it over the wall to our permanent staff, its just not healthy for the team long term.

I favor iterative approaches that are tightly coupled to customer feedback. Compared to our current rapid build outs with long feedback cycles.


> I favor iterative approaches that are tightly coupled to customer feedback.

I have the same issue with my current company. My best work has been done without a bunch of layers of management, just give me a user with a problem that needs solving and let us work together on it.


I appreciate your loyalty - that’s pretty rare these days. Reach out if you want to explore a new opportunity (public company, good mission statement, good work life balance, good comp)


I took a nearly 50% pay cut when I started my current job. I had enough in savings that I didn't need the extra money and I really wanted to learn more about crypto, so I took a crypto job and I'm much happier here than I was contracting, despite the significantly lower pay.


I left my job last April entirely due to compensation. It was also due to life balance, but I was willing to sacrifice some life balance in exchange for higher salary.

I was working 60+ hours a week and on call three nights a week at a consulting firm doing engineering. My manager told me I was doing a phenomenal job and the entire year-end review cycle agreed - I scored higher than 95% of my peers and told I was "invaluable" to my team. Most of that was less because of my engineering skills and more because I was just pouring my life into this job.

Then, I got a 2% raise (yes, 2.0%, about $100/month). meaning I was still paid less than everyone who had just been hired. Many of those new hires weren't even engineers! I quit pretty fast for an 80% raise.


I voted company culture, but that's not the whole picture.

I was laid off about a month ago (2 weeks before Christmas; "non-performance business-related decision"), but I was job searching anyway. Why? Because nobody freakin' listened, and my position wasn't taken seriously. Call it strategy misalignment, bad culture, whatever.

After joining, I learned they had 4 CIOs within 3 years. As a mid/sr. level engineer, I was teaching senior management about my position while also learning about it myself. I still don't know how many they laid off during the annual review period, but it was at least several to a couple dozen.

I'm done. I know now why so many retire early to farms, baking, wood working, homesteading, etc. Corporate can have their BS.


I just want to note I've left different jobs for different combinations of these reasons! I checked 3/7 of these boxes.

Don't interpret this survey as "Most people's primary reason for leaving is compensation", because the survey does not ask this ;)


I joined a startup a decade ago which was great and taught me a lot in the early years. I stayed all that time though because of options. Made a bit from them, took some time off for personal study/projects, and eventually moved to a bigger company to start learning something outside the small technological bubble I'd been working in until then. I don't know if I made wrong decisions but I feel a bit bad about it because I love having highly skilled colleagues, learning new technology and how things are done by teams that do them well, and I think I could have got to a significantly more technically advanced position than I am now by not staying so long at the first place.


Someone should make a thread asking the opposite question: Why are people staying at their jobs?


Miserable, but pulling in $800k/year for the last several years at a FAANG. I have a net worth of $8M and in my 40s. Everyone around me leaving.

Tempted to take a massive paycut to join a startup. But why not milk FAANG a bit more while the gravy train lasts?


I guess you could negate the outcome of this?

-> Leaving because of not learning stuff, Staying because of learning new stuff -> Bad compensation, good/sufficient compensation ..

Although I imagine there could be less positive reasons:

* Few job opportunities / ..


Great idea, done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29939432


I suspect that the so-called Great Resignation follows a period of nobody leaving their jobs, presumably due to fear of what was to come amid the pandemic. Last year reports were indicating that a record number of people wanted to leave their jobs, but weren’t, thus giving us a glut of people ready to leave all at once instead of doing so over a longer period of time like they normally would. This would also explain the so-called Labour Shortage we were hearing about. With people not looking to job hop, people applying for work dried up, leaving a liquidity problem. In normal times employers always have someone ready to leave their current position in which to hire.


Labor shortages are also a problem of workforce participation. While the big headline number that most news organizations cover is unemployment numbers, the one that is really important with the pandemic is Workforce Participation. AKA: "the proportion of the working-age population that is either working or actively looking for work". Check out the stats for this: [0]. We are still down 1.5% from where we were pre-pandemic (63.4 - 61.9). With the workforce age population being around 204 million people, that means that we are down about 3 million people.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...


I live in Iowa and we were at full employment pre-pandemic. Everybody who wanted a job had one, and businesses all over the state were short of staff just like they are today. Politicians were speculating on ways to get disabled people and stay-at-home-moms into the workforce, overlooking our chronic brain drain of people going to out-of-state universities and never coming back. Our return to normal was always going to be that, but everyone seems to have forgotten.

Here's an article from 2019 about it, but the situation is just no longer in the conversation because unemployment benefits (which ended ages ago) is an easier target than making it suck less to live here: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/721086615/in-this-town-you-ap...


Thanks for the article btw, as an Iowa State grad, that was a fun article to read.


The vast majority of the drop in Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is Boomers permanently withdrawing from the workforce (some of which may have been accelerated by the pandemic, both because of convincing people they didn't want to keep working and disability, but while there may be some temporary unretirement driven by improved working conditions and rising costs & pay, most of that won't reverse.)

The “working age” band has a lower end, but no upper end, so demographic bulges passing through retirement age produce LFPR drops.


Previous company went through a fairly disastrous change in management. I was the 5th person out the door on a team of 8. New manager was super "data driven" so productivity plummeted as we were inundated with piles of new processes - a 3 day lab test (no additional cost other than my labor) took me over 6 weeks to get management approval and sign offs for. But, we didn't have any "old data" (because the processes were all new) to prove that things had gotten much worse.

Wife has commented many times on the change in my personality, as I'm not ending most days furious and miserable.

Guess that's "Company Culture" for purposes of the poll.


I left my last job partly because my role didn't match my responsibilities or my compensation, and they played games with a promotion. That wasn't a dealbreaker all on its own, the other part was that I was bored and nothing I was working on or leading really felt like it was worth it, it was just work for the sake of work.

To be honest, as soon as I realised that I was mentally checked out, the writing was on the wall. Neither a pay rise or a promotion would have kept me there for much longer because I would still have been carrying the legacy around with me.

There was no counter offer when I resigned. I suppose I'm grateful that we skipped the bullshit there.


Mismanagement would be good option.

I decided to open my own company just because there is a horrendous management culture in the North America.

Last company I had worked about three years ago had a really bad management culture where managers were total talentless pricks. Now, that might be okay if compensation was crazy high but company also had below average industry wages.

I also figured out that you can pay people really low wages so long as you act decent towards them. I don’t have real employees at the moment but I got some contractors. I pay them insanely low wages, but I frequently praise them and thank for their work. So far I got really good results with this arrangement.


You're missing an option for management IMO.


Mission is the big one for me. I refuse to work any longer for companies that make humanity and the environment worse. I'll become a bartender before I work for another company whose sole purpose is to extract wealth at any cost.


Don't bar tenders sell addictive products that lead to poor choices and some of the most systemic problems in our society?

How about becoming a math teacher?


That's a very good point. I must have overlooked it because I like to drink, so I didn't draw a correlation between the person serving me my drinks and the person enabling the many problems resulting from alcohol.

I dropped out of school partly due to how painful it was for me to learn math. If there's some school out there that wants to let me teach any way I want... I might consider it. But I should probably learn math first. :)


Current job is focused on $x and I want to do $y. I guess that's similar enough to new challenge/learning?

Another reason - job is too easy and undemanding or there just isn't that much to do. I could have coasted and collected a paycheck (I did for a little bit) but I just knew that it's bad for me to stay there long term. I imagine this is some people's dream job though.

And more money of course is a factor. I once left a job that I really enjoyed doing for one that I suspected wouldn't be that great just because I could more than double my salary (it's not that impressive, I was just severely underpaid at the first job).


My last job was a dead end: small software group which had survived many mergers and lived inside a mining/valve manufacturer. The only interest upper-level management had in our group was cutting costs. This caused a lot of dysfunction in our group, which lead to stagnation of the product and any learning/challenges. Plus I was underpaid.

A buddy had approached me a year or so prior to quitting with an idea and we developed and won an SBIR grant from NASA which ran the second half of 2021. The results weren't quite strong enough for commercialization, in my opinion. So I will be on the market in a month after more studying.


I've been in that situation twice. The first time I stayed 6 years too long; the second one I stayed 2 years too long. I've never experienced a merger where I worked that the absorbed company to be worth staying.


Today is my last day at my current job. I had a colleague leave last year after he had some issues with his team, and I learned that a significant salary bump was pretty easy to get. I was _really_ bored at my role, and didn't see a strong future for our project and company, so I started looking.

I'll be starting a new job at the end of the month. Salary is over 2x my current pay, and if you include equity the total compensation will be 3.5x my current pay. I will have to relocate (which I wanted to do anyway), but I can't fathom why anyone _wouldn't_ be looking right now given the state of the job market.


> I will have to relocate (which I wanted to do anyway), but I can't fathom why anyone _wouldn't_ be looking right now given the state of the job market.

Could it be that most of your compensation bump is due to the relocation rather than the current market? To take extremes, moving to SV from almost anywhere in the world would result in such bumps, but that was already the case a few years ago.


Flexibility (remote) w