Who Is Driving the Great Resignation?

https://hbr.org/2021/09/who-is-driving-the-great-resignation

by rbanffy • 5 years ago

63 118 5 years ago

wesleytodd• 5 years ago

A few weeks ago I searched for "pandemic related to increased reports of mid-life crisis" but couldn't find anything. This data could back up my theory in that the increase in resignations seems to be mid-career folks.

yhoneycomb• 5 years ago

Could also be that more and more people are child free, which makes them less reliant on a job.

lazide• 5 years ago

Small anecdotes if it helps anyone.

- a lot of (most?) people are really stressed out by the pandemic, and suffering from some kind of mental health crisis or discomfort. This can push someone to finally resign a borderline job, or switch careers if they were struggling already with burnout. I also know several friends who had marriages blow up during this time that otherwise would have kept going indefinitely, and that often leads to rethinking many other life decisions.

- the constant ‘work from home’ has also allowed many people flexibility to pursue side projects, invest in other parts of their lives, and try things they otherwise wouldn’t because of the lack of flexibility. This opens up new lines of thinking other than ‘keep turning the crank at this specific job as hard as I can’

- stock market valuations have skyrocketed. For folks with large stock portfolios, many went from ‘doing ok, maybe retire in 5-10 years if I keep doing this’ to ‘fuck you money’ in the space of a year and a half.

- for everyone else, there is a severe crunch of staffing in many companies, and some are willing to pay people based on that, leading to shaking up a stagnant wage pool in many markets. Many of the stagnant wage pools were at companies that were already not very good at showing caring and empathy for their workers, or outright abusive. A lot of people are switching because of one or more of these factors, and enjoying massive raises and better working conditions because of it.

- as more folks resign and/or switch, and when it actually works out well for them, others notice and are more willing to do the same.

monkeydust• 5 years ago

I wonder in tech if this is also down to the rocketing stock market valuations and how this is factoring into companies creating enticing total comp packages. Works if markets keep moving up.

alexpetralia• 5 years ago

It is trickle-down inflation: too much capital chasing too few companies chasing too little labor, also chasing too few goods (asset inflation, wage inflation, consumer goods inflation).

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

They dance around that a lot of this is simply about salaries.

duxup2• 5 years ago

Is it? Is there information that indicates that?

ajkjk• 5 years ago

At least in tech, most of the people I know who have stopped working recently are quitting because they don't feel like it anymore. We're all making plenty of money, enough to take time off, and the work sucks, especially when it's remote, so why keep doing it?

chrismcb• 5 years ago

Because it is fun, even better when it is remote. Plus the gobs of money you mentioned. There is plenty of cool tech work out there. If you think it sucks then yeah that is a good reason to quit

willvarfar2• 5 years ago

My own personal data point is that, with COVID, some tech companies are embracing remote work and suddenly I can enter a much wider and higher paid job market without having to relocate.

Companies that aim to get butts back in the office are going to have a huge brain drain.

daxfohl• 5 years ago

The opposite effect could be in play here too: remote employees feel less connected to their team and are more willing to quit.

Guest42• 5 years ago

Anecdotally, I've seen 4 people leave for career advancement versus 1 that left due to wanting to be in the office.

matsemann• 5 years ago

The fact that I hadn't seen my coworkers in a year made it easier to switch. No denying that. Loved my previous workplace, great people, great work. They went above and beyond in all matters. Would probably not have risked a move in normal circumstances.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

Just a personal anecdote, I feel way closer to my current coworkers (who I've only met in person twice) than at my first job where I simply didn't have much in common with any of my coworkers. If you really click then you can get along online, but if you work with someone in-person, there's no escape if you don't like them.

imglorp• 5 years ago

One slight variation on remote: last year we learned which companies are loyal to, and value, employees. Plenty of companies released people preemptively, simply to make a couple of quarters look good.

If the relationship is going to be that minimally frangible, people will hesitate to relocate to a company town at great impact to their family, only to repeat every time a shadow crosses some book.

Remote people can have some defensive stability.

vkou3• 5 years ago

If the relationship is going to be that minimally frangible, people will hesitate to relocate to a company town at great impact to their family, only to repeat every time a shadow crosses some book.

Most tech jobs are not in single-company towns, they are in tech hubs, which have a large number of alternative employers.

Spooky232• 5 years ago

Tech has the additional factor of companies using their billions of dollars sitting around unproductively to entrap their companies.

Some of the cloud companies acquire talent to keep their customers trapped. I have colleagues who are system administrators and are getting $500k comp as individual contributors, way in excess of their value. One bank junior vp type guy got a 3x pay increase, because he knew where the bodies were buried for a major cloud implementation.

peakaboo• 5 years ago

I read it as "huge butt drain" since you talked a about butts in chairs. :)

Bombthecat• 5 years ago

Google just bought a pretty expensive office though..

feketegy• 5 years ago

I would go insane if I had to stay home all day everyday.

I don't advocate for full office neither, a hybrid model like 3 days home 2 days office, or whatever combination of this I think is the way to go.

Also, a lot of people forget that the World is not comprised of just office workers. There are jobs that simply can't be done from home.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 years ago

If you are a tech company and want to retain your workers I think there are two things you can do:

1) Make sure you are paying your workers close to what they could get just by switching to the same role at a different company.

2) Make sure that you offer permanent remote roles.

Just from my anecdotal experience in tech, most of the people who have left companies recently have left for one of these two reasons: either they were getting a big bump in compensation, or else the old company did not allow permanent remote work.

duxup2• 5 years ago

I wondered about this a lot.

There's lots of "people are resigning, they don't want to work for $15 an hour" articles that to me combined labor related ideas that I'm not sure are that related.

To me this article at least asks a lot of valid questions / possibilities.

It’s also possible that many of these mid-level employees may have delayed transitioning out of their roles due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic

That and other ideas there seem valid and interesting. Unfortunately the article doesn't provide a lot of answers.

random12345678• 5 years ago

More money.

cellis• 5 years ago

Sacre bleu! This is Hacker News!

devoutsalsa• 5 years ago

Someone on YouTube made an interesting point that what we’re seeing is people quitting jobs they would have left much earlier, but couldn’t because of the pandemic. Basically a lot of people deferred quitting in 2020 and now the 2020 batch is quitting with the 2021 batch.

nightpool• 5 years ago

Yes, the article you're commenting on already makes that point :)

    It’s also possible that many of these mid-level employees may have delayed transitioning out of their roles due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, meaning that the boost we’ve seen over the last several months could be the result of more than a year’s worth of pent-up resignations.

duped• 5 years ago

I didn't go to Harvard but I can tell you why myself and people I know resigned in tech - money. And time, but time is also money.

codezero• 5 years ago

I haven't seen an exodus from my company, but there must be a larger one - as I've had a huge pipeline of new candidates lately that is great.

Others have mentioned a few things you can do and they seem to match with what my company has done:

1. Review salaries, pay more fast, retain who you have, there's a razor's edge and although money isn't everything it will definitely help in the very near term while you figure out other retention approaches.

2. Go fully remote. A lot of people want to be in offices, but very few will actually go given the option _right now_ - our office is empty, even when it's optionally allowed open. Pay consistent salaries. Let someone else figure out that regional salary stuff when the dust settles.

Another thing that seems important, but may just be a trend at my company: get specific with career development.

People joining your company now want to know how you will care for them long term. A large reason in my opinion for the exits is that folks are not willing to accept a company treating them like a contractor perpetually. They want to be invested in, see concrete growth and advancement. This is harder to do at small startups, but it's important for people to feel safe/stable during a weird criss.

aaron-santos2• 5 years ago

I love how asking people why they are leaving is not on the list. Instead it's gathering metrics and data. If you treat people like numbers, that's sort of the explaination right there. Anything to avoid actually building a working relationship.

lrem• 5 years ago

Asking why they leave is risky. You might learn things you don't want to learn.

willvarfar2• 5 years ago

Standard advice is to be falsely positive in exit interviews. The internet is awash with guides to not burning bridges etc.

monocasa• 5 years ago

You need both. It's important to see the forest through the trees, but it's also helpful to not run into the tree right in front of you.

cbhl• 5 years ago

You know what else mid-career employees tend to have?

Children.

Constantly changing return dates is stressful for parents; you can't buy/build/sell a house that fast. Especially if kids have now gotten to run around in the burbs in a nice detached house away from the Bay Area. If the key decision makers aligned return-to-office with the school year and said "we will not ask you to return until an August where The Vaccines are widely available for kids" then I think you'd have a lot less attrition in that group.

rcpt• 5 years ago

People are getting fuck you cash from stocks, housing, crypto. What's the point in working for a few thousand dollars every other week when your portfolio swings double that every day.

user-the-name16• 5 years ago

People, on average, lose money trading crypto. This is just a simple mathematical property of the crypto market.

On paper, it looks like a lot of people made a lot of money. But in actual money, on average, you will lose.

anon9001• 5 years ago

You've got it exactly backwards, just look at the market cap change over time: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

In a bull market, anyone can make money with just about any bet.

tick_tock_tick2• 5 years ago

This is just a simple mathematical property of the crypto market.

What? I don't doubt that people on average lose money but I don't know of anything fundamental about crypto markets that makes it a mathematical property...

rhacker2• 5 years ago

It isn't about averages of a single person. If we're talking about 500 people (for example), if 220 win big on Crypto, that's 220 people with "f*ck you" money. Even if the other 280 lose money and the average is "loss" that doesn't stop the others from leaving a job.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

On average people have made tons of money. The earlier involved the better. If the market is growing you will see values increase.

sbarre3• 5 years ago

The focus in the article on mid-career people was interesting.

I wonder how many of those people are (finally?) realizing that hoping for advancement in the same company is the slow path for most people, and that taking your skills and experience somewhere else in a hot market is - all other things being equal - often a better option for your own career growth.

All things are not equal of course, so I'm sure it's more complex than that..

But anecdotally I know several mid-career people who have changed jobs in the last year in part because they had never bothered to look at what they could actually get with their skills and experience, and were shocked to find out they were seriously undervalued and underpaid at the job they had been at for many years.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

I guess it depends on how you define "mid-career". If you assume people generally work from, say, 20 years old to 70 years old, mid-career would be about 45. As a 45-year old in tech, I can emphatically say, the days of switching jobs for a 10+% comp bump are long, long in my past. I remember my first job change was from $45K to $60k, an incredible +33%, but each subsequent hop has been significantly less, until my most recent job change which was around +0.5%. Most of us will reach a plateau, and I'd argue by mid-career (again, assuming in your 40s), you're finished hopping for advancement salary-wise.

EDIT because I can't reply: Got it--busted for not reading the article! Considering 30 year olds "mid career" makes me feel pretty old!

sbarre3• 5 years ago

I meant "mid-career" as defined in the article. I thought that would be obvious, my apologies.

They defined it as 30-45.

sbarre3• 5 years ago

I hear you! Same here, I'm also in my mid-40s and was thinking "huh, I guess I'm old now"... :-)

mcguire• 5 years ago

Step one: figure out who is leaving.

Step two: "Ask yourself which factors could be driving higher resignation rates?"

Step three: Fix it.

And somebody said the Harvard Business Review was worthless.

canadianwriter• 5 years ago

A lot of management consulting is exactly that - the answer is simple when you look at it this way, but they need to back it up. That's why they quantify it and don't just say "fix it".

They studies thousands of companies to come up with the above - you could make it up on the spot but that study gives them way more credence. It's like when science is done on something we consider obvious - it's still valuable to have the data.

THey also guide on examples of what sorts of things to look into. Most companies have serious noise to signal ratios with their data - this tells people what data to actually look at.

Spooky232• 5 years ago

“Study” is a big word. Typically it’s gather facts to provide the answer you are being paid to provide.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

Who? Stupid managers with a desire for control. Want to keep your workers and even get better ones? Raise the f*ing salaries.

rhacker2• 5 years ago

At some point where is this money coming from?

bklaasen• 5 years ago

"the top 1% wage grew 138% since 1979, while wages for the bottom 90% grew 15%"

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

shoto_io• 5 years ago

A hypotheses that isn't wildly discussed: Maybe some people hold off their career decision for the better part of 2020. After all, "safe" seemed reasonable choice back then. Now, the wave is coming and people start switching jobs.

marketingtech• 5 years ago

The marketing world is currently a game of musical chairs with buyers and sellers switching sides or people making lateral jumps to different clients or agencies.

The cost of switching is lower with remote work - fewer social bonds with coworkers, fewer fringe benefits to consider (travel, fancy office, expense/entertainment accounts), no change in commute.

People are willing to try the same job in a new company for the shot at an easier to climb corporate ladder because the only cost to switching is swapping one company-owned laptop and phone for another.

kylecordes• 5 years ago

I have hired over a dozen people so far this year, and interviewed a substantial multiple of that.

About half of interviewees, when asked what they are looking for in a new position, answer some variant of: my current/old job wants us to come back to the office full-time.

Of course it's hard to say how permanent this all will be, what things will be like in a decade. But for now, requiring on-site work is a significant disadvantage in hiring and retention.

RIMR• 5 years ago

Leaders are driving the Great Resignation.

My wife's employer not only expected people to return to the office 100%, but they moved their headquarters outside of the city center to a cheap property near an airport since WFH began.

Then they announced a couple weeks ago that there was mandatory return-to-office orders for mid-October, and I overheard on the Zoom call from one of their execs "I really should be seeing more smiles over this news".

In the past month they have lost half of their workforce.

It's absolutely bonkers that some employers don't realize that they have to respect and accomodate their employees. The pandemic is teaching the most heartless of leaders an important lesson on the reciprocal nature of humanity right now.

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

I gradually dropped out a few years ago. I worked my way up in tech, wearing many different hats, for about 20 years, to a three-page resume and being able to find a six-figure job at the drop of a hat.

But the trade-off was not getting enough sleep, and feeling like my life's energy was being directed to making the world worse, not better. My work amounted to improving the efficiency of profit-making of the business, and getting a small piece of it to keep. I worked in finance supporting applications to facilitate MBS. I worked in advertising agencies to facilitate the sales of harmful products like petroleum and sugar water. All in all, my conscience was not clean.

Then there was the stress of arbitrary deadlines. And the constant disappointment of shipping something written haphazardly and then retired after a couple of years, replaced by another pile of crap.

It was a great learning experience. I think of it as university, where you also do a whole bunch of useless and pointless busywork in order to learn the skills. But eventually, it was time to go and move on.

I live primarily fregan lifestyle now, meaning I avoid using money as much as possible, for both ethical and practical reasons. I am generally able to sleep as much as I want, meditate as much as I want, and refactor my code as much as I want. I am almost never in a rush, and I feel much calmer and happier.

aprdm2• 5 years ago

Was there any industries that you cared about and could apply tech to? That's usually a good way to go about it, instead of chasing money/profits.

For example: Clean energy, a non profit, etc.

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

I worked for a non-profit, and it was largely the same, minus the chasing profits part. The salary was lower, and perhaps the negative impact was smaller, but I did not feel a positive impact at all. It still felt like I was largely feeding and validating the same processes.

I don't know about others, but I just don't feel like I am designed for living the same schedule day in, day out, week in, week out, year in, year out, until I look back on it and wonder, where did all the time go?

And you know what, that feeling has gone away for me. I don't remember the last time I felt that "time is slipping away" feeling. In fact, I often feel the opposite: Things which happened just a day or two ago feel like several weeks have passed, and time has stretched out.

GongOfFour• 5 years ago

Do you own your home?

aneutron• 5 years ago

Quite simple actually: Needed more money, wasn't approached by my company for a customary salary increase negociation in a timely manner, looked for another job.

I like the people, but timing is everything in life, unfortunately.

xtracto• 5 years ago

That was more or less me: I liked the place were I worked, shit I opened the office and created the team in my country, it was "my baby". However, after COVID hit, a lot of people in my team started leaving for higher paid jobs (like double the salary) and way better benefits (including working from anywhere).

Meanwhile, my boss who "did not believe in remote work" was adamant that we had to go back to the office, even after we had had 2 different COVID outbreaks.

Eventually I got an amazing offer for 2x the salary, amazing benefits and working from anywhere (also more technical and no people managing). It was a no brainer to me.

mdorazio• 5 years ago

Is there any actual granular data for this that I’m missing? How many of these resignations are actually moves to another position vs quitting entirely? What’s the breakdown by industry? The high-level early/mid/late career stats provided aren’t particularly illuminating.

move-on-by• 5 years ago

As someone who just started looking, here is personal reasons:

* Major layoffs early in COVID meant more work for everyone not laid off

* Being run to death to implement new must-have features to keep the business going with the new COVID restrictions (different businesses saw this in their own ways - needing curbside pickup interfaces being a common one)

* Getting further into COVID, starting to hear how great business is doing with massive unforeseen profits - but not seeing any of those profits in my paycheck

* Not able to get approval to get back up to pre-covid staffing levels means everyone is continuing to be overworked

octokatt• 5 years ago

I'm surprised I hadn't seen this in the list, but my money is on Response to Second-Wave Crisis.

In the first wave of COVID-19, we saw which companies could handle the work-from-home crisis and which did poorly. Ultimately, though, a lot of people didn't feel like they could move jobs because suddenly they needed job security as well.

In the current wave of COVID-19, at least in the US, we saw the same crisis management play out, but now the market has adjusted to remote work. The idea of going through an entirely remote interview process didn't seem as foreign after a year of Zoom meetings. People were more willing to look, and with vaccination more willing to explore.

Potentially as well, a lot of folk might just want something new. Novel experiences are lower right now because of safety measures, so the idea of staring at a screen with different problems is a little more exciting.

mrtranscendence5• 5 years ago

I can only speak for myself. I left a role a few months ago that I enjoyed and was good at because I felt it was career-limiting. I'm a data scientist by profession, but I wasn't actually doing any data science; I was more of a technical resource. I wrote Python and R packages for interacting with company resources, using cloud storage, handling fiscal dates, etc, and consulted on moving teams to Azure from our on-prem infrastructure. It was great, but it seemed that I was shedding the human capital that would further my career in data science in favor of being a quasi-engineer (higher paid but less skilled).

I dunno. I realized it was a mistake to leave soon after I did. The company I worked for had great benefits, great work-life balance, and -- importantly -- other opportunities I could have transitioned into if I wanted. And the pay potential is only a bit worse. So I ditched the new job and I start back at my former employer on Monday, funnily enough.

I guess all this is to say that there's not one answer to why people are leaving -- we all have our individual reasons. It isn't just about salary, as some comments here indicate, but it's not just about remote work either.

Who Is Driving the Great Resignation?

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