Workers are stuck in place because everyone is too afraid of a recession to quit

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-job-market-recession-outlook-workers-quitting-hiring-trends-2024-8

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

164 158 2 years ago

“I feel trapped here,” Amanda said. “I’m financially screwed if I leave, and that’s why I don’t, or can’t leave.”

This is so common. People are afraid of and unprepared for income and status setbacks. Sometimes you need to take a couple steps back to get back on track. (I’m currently taking a step back and I’m intimately familiar with the uncertainty of it.)

jt2190• 2 years ago

What is "taking a step back" exactly? Leaving a job that you don't like for one that you do like but pays less?

fy20• 2 years ago

That's the position I'm in. My current employer has not grown as they sold to me when I joined (they've actually got smaller) and has gone through a big cultural shift that doesn't jibe with me.

I've received an offer from a company that seems to have a lot better alignment... But it pays 10% less. Meanwhile my current salary has not kept up with inflation over the past couple of years.

mcsniff• 2 years ago

IMO, it can also be a philosophical thing.

"What do I want out of my one short life? To spend it toiling away unhappy 90% of the time and spend money trying to be happy the remaining 10% or find something I enjoy doing the majority of the time that can also pay some bills?"

A lot of people are asking themselves these questions, and if you're not -- why not?

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

It could be "pay cut for different domain" or "pay cut for better location but lower CoL". In a more extreme case you can re-spec to another industry altogether. You may not make anywhere close to what you made in tech, but you have 7 figures in stocks and 6 figures in savings anyway. Money is no longer a worry, why not follow a passion?

In addition, it can be non-job motivations. e.g. you take a year off to travel for a bit, or engage in some hobby that you know won't make any income. I wouldn't mind doing some art classes if I ever got to that kind of money to live off of for years.

chasd00• 2 years ago

This is what’s called the “golden handcuffs “. You want to leave but the current job is pretty good and you likely won’t be able to find something better.

paxys• 2 years ago

"I want to leave but I have $2.5M worth of RSUs vesting in the next two years" = golden handcuffs.

"I want to leave but if I do I may not be able to find another job and may not be able to pay rent" is instead the reality most Americans face.

keyle8• 2 years ago

No, golden handcuffs are when you're in for a massive payout if you stick it. In this case, this person is trapped. So just regular handcuffs.

steve_taylor• 2 years ago

That's not quite it. Golden handcuffs refer to financially significant unvested shares or options (e.g. RSUs) that you will forfeit if you leave the company. Some companies include quarterly RSUs as a significant percentage of total comp. They have a vesting schedule of four years, so that at any given time, employees have almost four years of unvested RSUs. (After four years, some RSUs fully vest and more RSUs are added.) No one wants to leave that much money on the table.

jokoon5• 2 years ago

I live in France, and financially I'm fine not working, I have a few savings, welfare is enough for me.

What is truly problematic is the social isolation, the inactivity, and a feeling of not being included.

I could go working any job for 20h per week if it did not feel alienating and so competitive and busy.

The work mentality is survival of the fittest on steroids.

Work is a binary ingroup or outgroup. People who are out are seen as undeserving and seen as lesser people.

That's why people want to keep their job.

2-3-7-43-1807• 2 years ago

given your financial situation, aren't you in a position to trade salary for satisfaction?

bix6• 2 years ago

Which companies have great training programs and happy lifetime employees?

The main one that comes to mind is Costco.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

If you read /r/costco, supposedly the new bosses have changed a lot of things for the worse, especially for the non floor employees.

Spastche• 2 years ago

the only thing I can think of is the military and that's only in some circumstances

silisili• 2 years ago

Anymore, it's rare to find. UPS used to create lifers because their benefits were so good, including free education and a stipend for an apartment even. That's all gone, I think, as they were paring it back in the late 90s already.

And nearly everyone has gotten rid of pensions, sadly.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

Defined-benefit pensions stopped making sense for a variety of tax and other reasons--including that to get any benefit you typically needed to stay at a place at least 5 years with 10-20 years to get a big benefit. A benefits friend of mine tells me there are some newer programs that work differently from the traditional ones though they're still not that common as far as I can tell.

zem• 2 years ago

when i interviewed with nvidia they said they aimed to be the kind of company where people stayed forever and worked on long term projects. ultimately the interview process moved too slowly for me (i had been laid off and needed to find and accept another job fast), but i was impressed with everyone i talked to and would believe that that was not just a pitch but actually reflected their values.

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

I've heard they retained well, and basically took the forefront in both AI and GPU vending in general. That plus the specialized knowledge needed to work with such tech leads me to believe that claim. They'll be stable for decades unless something catastropic (depression level) happens.

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

Plenty in Asia. But in the west, that's a hard question. Especially since the few that come to mind, like Costco and In n Out, aren't exactly "lifetime careers" for most people.

Apple came so close. Still very young, but their retention seems better than competitors and they dodged a lot of the layoff stuff the rest did (with caveats. They simply "did not renew" contractors). But that came to an end in May.

I'd probably need to look up some companies in trades, but my impression is many of those are small businesses as opposed to a corporate career.

mellow-lake-day• 2 years ago

Not TSMC

One big problem is that TSMC has been trying to do things the Taiwanese way, even in the U.S. In Taiwan, TSMC is known for extremely rigorous working conditions, including 12-hour work days that extend into the weekends and calling employees into work in the middle of the night for emergencies. TSMC managers in Taiwan are also known to use harsh treatment and threaten workers with being fired for relatively minor failures.
TSMC quickly learned that such practices won’t work in the U.S. Recent reports indicated that the company’s labor force in Arizona is leaving the new plant over these perceived abuses, and TSMC is struggling to fill those vacancies. TSMC is already heavily dependent on employees brought over from Taiwan, with almost half of its current 2,200 employees in Phoenix coming over as Taiwanese transplants.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...

fundad2• 2 years ago

It seems like the employers have a lot to gain by spreading the fear of a recession to make the job market to be more favorable to them.

Didn't the Treasury secretary quip “The enemy keeps postponing when the recession’s going to come... They are dying to have a recession. They can’t bear going into next year’s election with the economy the way that it is.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/wilbur-ross-democrat...

Wait, that's the former Treasury secretary, they sure knew how to do petty.

Vaslo• 2 years ago

“Vanity Fair” lol

prewett• 2 years ago

And now the wheel turns... Two or three years ago everyone was quitting.

robotnikman• 2 years ago

Just one part of a cycle that keeps repeating, hopefully.

wahnfrieden• 2 years ago

Wealth transfers are resulting in greater accumulation at the top with each pass

thr0w4• 2 years ago

I have a feeling the party's over for good for software engineers. The industry has had a lot of time to build up abstractions and deliver them via frameworks and SaaS products. Now the market is mature - everyone and their mom is glued to the internet, cozy with their well-worn apps. I'm struggling to think of some new frontier that will require mass quantities of raw skilled labor. At least not in our lifetime. This is the internet boom come to rest.

thr0w4• 2 years ago

My personal favorite article/thread title was "Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era". Remember that? Good times.

rachofsunshine5• 2 years ago

We hear this from candidates pretty often (it's the second most common specific reason for a candidate to turn down outreach for a job, after "please don't match me with crypto companies" [1]), although we're new enough that I can't make an apples-to-apples comparison for how common it was prior to the current environment.

What's odd is that, on paper and for the engineering jobs we work with specifically, it doesn't seem like that's actually more justified now than it was a year or two ago. The tech hiring market seems to have bottomed out and to be (unsteadily) on its way back up. Two years ago, prediction markets [2] were pretty confident a recession would occur by this point, but it hasn't. They're now down to about 25% that it'll occur by the end of this year, although the fact that the percentage has stayed flat even as time has run out suggests markets are a bit more bearish now than they were six months ago. And they think [3] that large interest rate cuts are coming.

But perhaps a few years of frustration and seeing others struggle has taken its toll in ways that go beyond object-level economic predictions. Experience with rough conditions might've made people more risk averse, or make them feel more secure in the job they do have (after all, there's a good chance they've survived some layoffs at this point), both of which could (rationally) make them stick where they are even if their opinions of the broader economy were the same or better.

----

[1] EDITED to add: reasons they turn down outreach we actually send, meaning it's not disqualified by some structured info we have about their preferences. For example, we know whether a candidate wants a remote job, so even though ~60% of our candidates are looking for remote jobs only, that wouldn't be in this ranking.

[2] https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-the-us-enter-...

[3] https://manifold.markets/barak/by-how-much-will-the-fed-cut-...

fundad2• 2 years ago

What's demoralizing is employers aren't motivated to fill the listed open positions and the only thing real and worth our time is our present, paying job. It's understandable, it costs nothing to list an opening and costs a lot to hire someone.

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

There is that too. So much disrespect in the interview process vs. 2 years ago. It'd be unheard of for me to not at least get a polite "we were looking for X/Y/Z" if I got in contact with a human at some point in the process. Now it's a fortnightly occurance that some recruiter reaches out to me, talks for 15 minutes, and then is never heard from again. Sometimes they schedule a call and proceed to never make the call (and ofc never respond on LinkedIn to re-schedule).

It just all sucks. The process was already pretty bad IMO, but now you're being treated as random quota fodder, with no interest to even pretend the position exists.

cjbillington• 2 years ago

FWIW, the fact that the recession market on Manifold doesn't resolve until the end of 2025 (to give the NBER time to declare a recession) limits how low people will push the probability. I'm the biggest NO holder, and my credence is closer to 10%, but the rate of return isn't attractive enough to bet it lower. This is somewhat asymmetric, since bettors who expect a recession also expect an earlier payout.

I made this derivative market to try to address the issue somewhat, but not much trading yet:

https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-manifold-pric...

darth_avocado• 2 years ago

Layoffs are still happening in tech (Cisco, Intel, Intuit to name a few in the last couple of months) and companies that are hiring, have very few roles or are very selective in their hiring process.

And beyond hiring, internally, the companies are being hyper focused on performance. People are being let go despite working hard and going above and beyond.

The comparison really is: Do I leave my current job which may pay less but won’t fire me or do I go to a new company, risk performance based firing and then be unemployed for months before I find the next job.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

People are being let go despite working hard and going above and beyond.

This is what primarily scares me and my circle. I'm not going to look for another job while I see and know people far smarter than me being let go from positions far more important than mine.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

the companies are being hyper focused on performance

If you are being paid some multiple of six figures would you not expect this?

VirusNewbie• 2 years ago

Right but a year ago, FAANG and deca-corns weren't even hiring at ALL. There was almost no headcount. Sure it's not a boom, but there is hiring, teams are getting backfills, it's not great but it's not near as horrible as it was.

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

What's odd is that, on paper and for the engineering jobs we work with specifically, it doesn't seem like that's actually more justified now than it was a year or two ago. The tech hiring market seems to have bottomed out and to be (unsteadily) on its way back up.

I mean, as someone out of a full time job for 15 months now (4 of those by choice), I can't really blame them. Of course, I'm an extraordinary case in games that seems to be hit the hardest out of most domains, but the fallout hasn't seemed to bottomed out in this industry just yet.

And in tech specifically: it's not like these interview processes are just a drink with the founders and a firm handshake anymore. You gotta weigh the question of "do I REALLY want to study trivia and go through 5 stages of calls" vs. the potential upsides of a new job/pay raise. Many tech professionals are probably not scrap for cash, so there's no financial pressure to jump at the next step up if they are focusing on security.

Two years ago, prediction markets [2] were pretty confident a recession would occur by this point, but it hasn't.

Layoffs and the previous COVID bailouts probably "helped" in that regard.

And indeed. As you said, it caused an even more extreme dichotomy of financial pressure between the middle class and below and the asset owning or upper-middle+ (who weren't laid off). Where the former may as well be in a depression while the latter two are on cloud nine, trading houses like baseball cards and growing money by just letting it sit.

Is that better than a proper recession? I can't say, but you can understand why the former group can feel that way, and even feels bitter at the latter. Being told that the economy is soaring while your income barely increased 10% that barely covers rent. While rent surged 30% in the past 5-8 years.

zmgsabst• 2 years ago

K-shaped “recovery” is socially dangerous for that reason:

- you have net positive statistics, so the government doesn’t intervene

- you have a class that controls the levers of power growing substantial wealth in “services” and other extractive portions of the economy; and accompanying growth in large institutions or government

- you have a largely devastated productive and working economy; and accompanying collapse of SMBs

In whatever sense we’re not in a recession, that’s only because economic looting is so profitable on paper, we’re marginally positive. But that false signal of “not recession” can suppress normal responses and allow the country to move into socially unstable territory.

xbmcuser• 2 years ago

In my opinion the US and many european countries are going through stagflation where parts of the economy that went down or decreased dramatically with covid are recovering so you have economic growth in those areas but the rest of the economy not doing so good as well parts losing the covid boost.

cma• 2 years ago

What are non "object-level" economy predictions?

rachofsunshine5• 2 years ago

I mean "as distinguished from their general principles for decision-making, e.g. risk aversion". Maybe not a great use of the term.

tomcam• 2 years ago

Great perspective, thanks. Are you seeing fewer openings? Same quality or lower?

rachofsunshine5• 2 years ago

More and higher quality. That's not a data-driven observation, though, it's just my own subjective impression (though it is one backed up by everyone else in the hiring space that I speak to right now).

Terr_• 2 years ago

Two years ago, prediction markets [2] were pretty confident a recession would occur by this point, but it hasn't.

Do prediction markets in general even predict well? Someone might stake out a losing long-term prediction, but in a way where it isn't profitable to bother taking their money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178750

nine_zeros• 2 years ago

Tech industry has actually had a recession in jobs but not a recession in earnings.

This is a prime example of how our society has become so precarious for the middle class while the rich just keep getting richer.

tootie• 2 years ago

That's not really true and not really a thing. Unemployment in tech is even lower than the general economy. It just stopped being massively overheated.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

The 2010s and early=on in the pandemic were extraordinary for (certain) jobs in tech. The meme of I can quit my job Friday and have a significantly higher-paying job by the end of the next week may not really have been the norm in tech, But it was certainly unheard of with professional jobs, inclusing in engineering, historically unless you were a celebrity of some sort in the field.

jdietrich• 2 years ago

This article appears to be plagiarised from Business Insider:

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-job-market-recession-outl...

jawns4• 2 years ago

It's not technically plagiarized, because it attributes many of the direct quotes to Business Insider. But it's an example of repackaging content produced by other sources, a practice sometimes called "churnalism."

This type of appropriation of content has been happening for well over a century. See this Supreme Court case from 1918: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._...

tacticalturtle• 2 years ago

No, this is straight plagiarism.

Those references to Business Insider were self references that the original BI article made:

A 24-year-old employee working in histology named Amanda, who spoke with Business Insider

And

Raymond Lee, the CEO of the career outplacement firm Careerminds told BI.

There is no rearranging of facts here - these phrases, and the rest of the article - are copy and pasted.

dang• 2 years ago

Thanks - we've updated the top link and banned the other site (https://boredbat.com/american-workers-are-stuck-in-place-bec...).

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Thanks. Based on some checks, BoredBat were doing this frequently, if not exclusively.

Also pulling old content, leaving 404s, making them an unreliable archive as well.

jawns4• 2 years ago

In 2020, COVID caused the most dramatic rise in unemployment the U.S. had ever seen. Employees who were lucky enough to avoid being laid off during the first few months of the pandemic largely hunkered down and resolved to stay with their current employer until the dust settled, even if they would otherwise have been looking to change jobs.

This led to a phenomenon in 2021 and 2022 called the Great Resignation, a period where hiring began opening up again. All of those employees who'd been itching for an exit saw an opportunity to make their move.

One of the interesting effects of this higher-than-normal employment migration in a relatively short period of time is tenure synchronization, where a large percentage of employees have been with the company for the same amount of time. Naturally, there will be some variation in when they decide to make their exits, but this synchrony does increase the chance of a mass exodus event once they've passed the year of average tenure.

There are other macroeconomic phenomena that are contributing toward sustained "phase locking" of the amplitude of employment migration. Post-pandemic, we saw an era of high inflation, and that caused many companies to veer back into more cautious territory and question whether they'd over-resourced themselves during the hiring boom. This led to rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023. These conditions have also led to downward pressure on wages. Thus, many employees are waiting until the next hiring wave to make their move.

These factors are likely to induce even more phase locking than the tenure synchonization alone, which means that we could see a second or even third "Great Resignation" event occur during the current decade as employees' synchronized tenures lead to voluntary exits that coincide.

keyle8• 2 years ago

In 2020, COVID caused the most dramatic rise in unemployment the U.S. had ever seen.

I'm afraid this isn't accurate, unless your history of the U.S. is 10 years.

Izkata2• 2 years ago

This goes back to 1948 and they're correct for that time span: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

The lockdowns forced a lot of people into unemployment for a variety of reasons on top of the normal "it was a recession" ones.

underlipton• 2 years ago

Another view: a lot of people were laid off at the beginning of 2020. To prevent a total meltdown, unemployment assistance was made unusually robust (for the US). With the stimulus, it was not unheard of for people to be getting more in unemployment than they'd ever made actually working. Likewise, PPP loans meant that anyone with even a trivial business and a handful of employees could apply for support.

The "Great Resignation" (a clever bit of branding; people were moving to better jobs, not resigning) coincided with that easy money drying up. Businesses had to actually start making money again, as did workers (many of whom re-skilled during the pandemic). Higher-than-normal employment migration might have just been people coming out of unemployment, gig work, and whatever jobs they took just to ride out the crisis.

Also, high inflation coincided with the increased numbers at many companies. The layoffs came after inflation started to cool (probably an important contributor to stagnating wage growth), and probably were related to the Fed continuing to raise interest rates and putting off a pivot to dropping them until... Well, they still haven't done a cut, yet.

eltoxo2• 2 years ago

It is also the normal state of the economy to not job jump because it is normally hard to get a job.

The far from equilibrium state was software jobs with 0% interest rates the last decade.

Then you have people who entered the workforce during this time believing this is how things have always been and always will be.

Surprise! That was a temporary state we are never going back to in your lifetime.

It is like when I was young, every song had to have a guitar solo. To hear a song with no guitar solo was so weird. I assumed things would always be this way. Neither the guitar solo or the 2016 software job market is ever coming back the same way it use to be.

tmiku• 2 years ago

Not related to the content of the article, but did anyone notice how those graphs become more saturated when you mouse over? It made me expect an interactive graph but it's just an artifacty jpg. Interesting little flourish.

cryptica2• 2 years ago

Situation is quite ridiculous. People are working jobs they don't like and being low-performers on projects they have little control over while working on side projects that they like (for free) and not able to monetize their high performance on those projects. But no matter how good their side projects become, they cannot monetize them due to monopolizing forces. Earning money nowadays is all about having access to money which comes out of a safe money printer.

Yes, I could be doing all this useful stuff which makes 100x better use of my skills than my day job but those things don't pay because I won't be able to find any users for it. I don't have much time for it. I could find users but not users who are hooked to a money printer and can afford to pay. I'm sure most users would love it if they spent 20 minutes trying my side project, however, this is too high of a barrier.

The company I work for is already well hooked into a money printer and already has its own users but, unfortunately, I cannot produce my best engineering work there because there is too much legacy code and, understandably, my colleagues are as beaten down as I am over this industry so the will to innovate is severely limited. The best we can provide is stability.

I've (unfortunately) learned to perceive software complexity as a friend; in the same way as security consultants perceive hackers, as pharma companies perceive chronic illness and as those who build mouse traps perceive mice.

I already got burned badly for innovating at a previous company and experienced politics getting in the way in a mind-bendingly disturbing way so I'm not keen to experience that again!

Repeatedly in my career, I have seen the low-performers and outright saboteurs being promoted and the innovators being suppressed so my goal now is to emulate those people and engage in political bs. It's the only way. I'm a little bit older, I have to think about my finances now. I know how money flows through the economy and I just go straight for the jugular straight out of a money printer... Printing leafy, digital monetary goodness straight into my bank account. Oh that feels nice.

dgfitz• 2 years ago

I too cared once about technical excellence, and was burned badly.

Good code ships, even if it’s dogshit. Works for everyone else, fuck it.

matrix872• 2 years ago

I used to have the same cynical feeling until I realized that there's very little overlap between the things that are actually cool to work on vs the things that other people need done. And if you prioritize the former over the latter, you're essentially trading off easy money for more stress

During the 9-5, the goal is to solve other people's problems. It's not pretty but it's what we're paid to do

zo1• 2 years ago

Totally fair point, work isn't supposed to be fun. It's being paid to do something that provides something of value to the person doing the paying.

However, at some point, employers heavily leaned into the whole "work is fun/rewarding/meaningful" shtick in order to skimp out on actual tangible compensation. So I'd argue that an informal "contract" was made or implied, whereby I agreed that "job is fun/rewarding" would form part of my compensation.

And that's going away now as people are realizing they were duped. There's only so many free perks, parties and vending machines before you realize "this place is f-ing toxic, the clients treat us like shit, and my boss really isn't treating me like 'family' and being loyal to me."

FencePost12• 2 years ago

So quit.

cryptica2• 2 years ago

Why? I'm not in it for myself anyway, I have a greater purpose now; to help create to inflation. I just have to get paid more than the value I provide to society.

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

Earning money nowadays is all about having access to money which comes out of a safe money printer.

I argue that's always been true. Most of the big tech we know today came from very privileged backgrounds that allowed them to take risks that'd be unthinkable for many of us. drop out of college early, run 2-3 failed business to the ground, being booted out of one company and come back later to the same company as an executive, etc.

It takes money (or a lot of your time) to make money, that's always been true. The money it takes these days are just so high.

Wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, and I'm sorry you gotta navigate this way. I still have some decades to try and get something I can truly own be sustainable, so I want to at least make use of my youth while I have it.

eltoxo2• 2 years ago

We are also only counting the winners who all took huge risk. Many more took huge risk in the past and lost everything.

It strikes me as rather absurd to believe it was better in the past when capital was much harder to come by.

Imagine trying to get startup funding in the late 80s when a person with capital could get 9% annualized on a short term US government bill. Good luck with that.

whack• 2 years ago

I can empathize with the article. Earlier in my career, I would interview with any company that offered a significant pay increase. "Why would anyone turn down a 30% pay raise" was my mentality. Then I had a couple of jobs that didn't go well because of personality mismatches and politics. Which made me realize that even if I'm confident about my technical skills, that's no guarantee that I'll land on my feet at a new gig. Fast forward another few years, and the recession made me realize that I can't just snap my fingers and land a new better-paying job anytime I want.

Combine both these factors, and I'm now ignoring recruiters who are begging me to interview for insanely well-paying openings. I have a decently well-paying job with good work-life balance, and colleagues who respect me. And I have no interest in throwing that away just to navigate a political minefield at a new job

away2718282• 2 years ago

I do know various people who left a job with a former employer because they weren't happy and seemingly landed fine AFAIK. I mostly stuck things out for a bit because I was mostly retiring. Otherwise, I'd probably have done the same even if the end-result was retiring a bit early.

whateveracct• 2 years ago

yeah i don't love my job at all but it's...fine. they call it work for a reason.

a few years ago, i'd bail. not an option today since i like money. gonna ride this gravy train a bit more. not gonna do it with a smile though.

keyle8• 2 years ago

This is a fair point. Earlier in my career I jumped ships so many times I had to move to another city to find 'new work'. It was a rather small city with companies buying off each others etc.

I learnt throughout these episodes that people make companies, not some branding or marketing dep.

My motto for the last 20 years has been "find good people, do good work". Emphasis on __good__, not great, best, immaculate, amazing, nonsense. But definitely good. My standards are pretty high though!

brightball• 2 years ago

“Don’t mess with happy.” - Brad Scott

citizen_friend3• 2 years ago

this sounds a lot like the psychology of having nothing to lose vs something to lose. You play more aggressively and are more successful in the former case.

KolenCh2• 2 years ago

Define successful. I think you two had an opposite meaning of what successful is.

kranner• 2 years ago

Arguably GP is already successful in their current position with respect to overall satisfaction, if one treats satisfaction as a boolean.

soared• 2 years ago

Sounds more like you have enough financial stability to not need a pay increase. People who are early in their career struggle to pay bills/rent/etc and so have to take every 30% they can - only until they don’t need to anymore.

brailsafe2• 2 years ago

Maybe, but it's more a matter of other kinds of luck and changing values. I'd make the same trade if I could, but because there's never been a time I could have chosen to stay on past the year and a half marker (always laid off or w/e), it's crucial I try and get as much as possible in that short time. Had I not been laid off, there'd definitely come a time where I'd prefer to just take half a year off and come back than start fresh.

My impression is that for people with that choice, they're often unable to convince themselves they don't need the money, since there's always a way to rationalize it, and so they continue making choices exclusively on that basis

scrapcode• 2 years ago

Exactly where I'm at. It took a recent offer for ~30% more and all of the same benefits after a multi-stage interview to really slap me in the face with an appreciation of all of the other things aside from salary that I am happy about where I am at. It has taken me about a decade and plenty of other positions to realize how important those aspects are to me.

I once had a shift work job with a lot of overtime. The money was great, but I had an opportunity for a M-F nine-to-five for $20k less per year. I was at a crossroad and asked myself at the time "If someone right now told me I could be at home with my family every night and every weekend for the rest of my career but it cost me $20k/yr, would I pay it?" That helped me make that decision much easier, and now I reversed that same idea. Essentially, I sat down and thought "if I were to lose [great management|no work over 40hrs|remote without geographic restriction|great colleagues and no drama] would I be willing to pay $n to have it back?" It's too easy to forget what our goals were prior to achievement.

binary1322• 2 years ago

Sometimes I get the sense that these places offer a lot to compensate for a hellish work culture.

kamaal2• 2 years ago

>"Why would anyone turn down a 30% pay raise"

One of my friends here in Bangalore took a offer on those lines from a start up, around COVID. He realised instantly these things are for people with a life that is problem free, disease free, responsibilities free linear progression.

Soon enough his parents had to be hospitalised for big surgeries and he realised the start up comp had a near 0 health insurance cover. A decade's worth savings wiped clean in one go.

It took a while even for me to get to this realisation, if you have a good going, things are stable, office culture is good and friendly, and you have a comp that is better overalls. You are likely to do well in such a place on the longer run than jumping 10 places and realising the comp at a lot of places is just straight up fraud. They just cut things in one place and add some where else. In many cases the comp is bloated with big numbers but with a dozen ifs and buts(often company/team linked variable pay etc).

Eventually you could say that making rapid changes to a process doesn't necessarily add to bigger gains. You see this in the stock markets as well. Profit is inversely proportional to the quantity of trades you execute. Big gains come from stability and sticking to one winning formula for long. Same with health, relationships and jobs. Do more of that one thing that works. Don't try to do many such things that could work or mostly fail.

unmole• 2 years ago

I completely agree with your larger point. However:

start up comp had a near 0 health insurance cover. A decade's worth savings wiped clean in one go

A typical employer provided health insurance probably wouldn't have made a difference here. The sum insured generally tops out around 10 lakhs.

SirMaster2• 2 years ago

For whatever reason, what you have come to learn was how I always felt from the start. I would rather make less in a job that I find all the aspects of it enjoyable.

Relaxed and comfortable environment, flexibility, great co-workers and great boss that I both like, company treats me well, no stress, etc.

I don't find I need all that much money to live comfortably and buy and do what I want. (computers/gaming, home theater, backpacking, skiing, scuba diving, pickleball, travel in general). And on top of those things I still manage to put away about half my income into retirement investments.

silverquiet• 2 years ago

From that I assume no partner and certainly no children, which is everything to a lot of people. I'm similar, but a life of marginal disability has made things harder for me, and meant health insurance is direly important. I'm pretty happy to have found a place that is lower stress (can't imagine a job that pays and has no stress) as well.

OptionOfT2• 2 years ago

As someone who has been left of couple of months ago, I really feel this. There is very low movement in companies, and this makes it hard to find a new place.

I hope to find something soon, but to be honest, unless people start hiring again in larger volumes, it's hard to get into the larger companies. They let go of a lot of people before, and rather hire those again then someone new. After all, those people are known quantities, I'm not.

Shameless plug: contact me if you need a Senior Software Engineer. Rust, and a whole other bunch of languages.

HaZeust2• 2 years ago

If your resume reflects your attitude of "Rust, and a whole other bunch of languages", I might have found your problem.

OptionOfT2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

keyle8• 2 years ago

When people started to coin the term "silent quitting", it was a tell-tale sign of what was to come: a screwed up economy with positive unemployment rate.

The measurements and metrics of the Keynesian economy need to evolve, they're about the same nonsense for the last 50 years. They have no consideration for the modern days, open economies, globalisation, remote work, isolation, depressive open offices and meaningless work.

Meanwhile we're still looking at the same job figures as a primary indicator of doom and gloom.

There is no measurement for innovation, happiness, self-worth or satisfaction; if they had one, it would show that it plummeted to never seen levels of despair. Job figures don't show how the economy relies on how much we can screw people over with things they can't get away from ("moats"), while being stuck in jobs they never wanted to do in their right minds ("career").

It all started with mortgages if you ask me. It never became about how much you could afford a house, but how much a third-party thought they could get out of you to afford a house - they inflated the prices of. The idea that we buy these extremely expensive "permit to live here", paying for the rest of your life is mental.

theappsecguy• 2 years ago

Not sure what silent quitting had to do with the unemployment rate increase?

This is mostly a result of utter incompetence and irresponsible spending during the pandemic. Economy got pumped with cheap money and there was always going to be a day when the gravy ends. Doesn’t help that tech over hired and poured funding in just about anything.

I’m calling it right now, AI will see the same crash within a few years.

keyle8• 2 years ago

I wrote "positive unemployment rate". I meant that it's overall positive numbers even though it's complete doom and gloom on the market.

see the 5Y chart https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate

meroes2• 2 years ago

Quiet quitting was a way to blame worsening economy on younger generations, or just to take a swipe at them, that's the extent of the relationship AFAICT.

With you on the AI crash.

neom• 2 years ago

Your last point about mortgages is interesting. It's probably highly dependent on the type of society you want? On one hand, why should I not be able to use my land as a financial instrument, it's my land, if I want to bet the land price will go up for whatever reason, and someone wants to offer a tool to enable that, some folks would say that should be just fine. On the other land, once a relative level of systemic sophistication has been reached, that system in that appreciated land will become inaccessible to certain groups of people. Some folks will find this unfair. (just some thought, not really opinions)

abhis3798• 2 years ago

Extend this and you get benefits of capitalism vs downsides of unchecked capitalism.

jokoon5• 2 years ago

I like being unemployed.

But on the other hand, I cannot socialize without a job.

I have embraced the antiwork mentality, but it needs to be said that it doesn't solve everything.

I still want to get a job just so I can get up in the morning and have a routine and see people and feel included.

I would say antiwork is the expression of mental illness through politics or vice versa. It's not going to get solved soon.

4gotunameagain2• 2 years ago

I'm very curious, why can you not socialise without a job ?

For me it is quite the opposite, my entire social life is very separated from work, and I tend to compartmentalise and not hang out with colleagues after work.

I think it's just something about flipping the page in the middle of the day, letting go and relaxing.

outside1234• 2 years ago

Just like the execs wanted…

charlie05• 2 years ago

I'm stuck in place because getting a new job is really hard, or so I hear.

fzeroracer• 2 years ago

It's not just the prospects of finding a new job that sucks, it's also that no one can actually afford to start a business. The continual draining of wealth from the lower and middle classes has had a severe effect on the lower and middle class's ability to compete.

The only way to actually start a business with some potential degree of success involves being a suck-up to massively wealthy individuals so you can onboard an angel investor for your product. This also generally means gimmicks that appeal to the rich and wealthy. A great example is smart kitchen appliance whose goal is to do something worse than what's already on the market so that they can corner people with dark patterns and subscriptions.

windex• 2 years ago

Not just that, I am tired of wanting to actually work than kowtowing to office rituals like drive to work in rush hour traffic to only then get on teams calls in the open. I am also hearing horror stories of new workplaces being completely obstinate about hierarchy and weird HR rule keeping. In short, many workplaces now have "ritualistic work" rather than actual tasks to complete. These aren't small names either. I am guessing that top level executives actually have no work other than aggregate from below and look busy. Looking busy needs minions.

debacle• 2 years ago

The very first sentence is "...who are having an increasingly tough time landing a new gig as hiring slows and job boards run dry."

So is the cause and effect backwards?

randerson• 2 years ago

This is a great time for engineers who saved their money during the good times to get together and start a startup. The easy money will come back eventually, and you'll have an MVP to pitch to investors at worst, and a bootstrapped and profitable business at best.

binary1322• 2 years ago

the easy money will come back eventually

or we see the end of the petrodollar as the global kingpin

so maybe not

jmyeet• 2 years ago

The 2010s was a boom time in tech. Total compensation ("TC"), particularly for engineers, went way up. Employers didn't like this. They're not above colluding either. They did it with the Steve Jobs anti-poaching deal too.

Businesses made accomodations during the pandemic to stay open. Remote work really took off. Also, TC continued to rise.

But then some companies failed and the door opened to what I called Permanent Layoff Culture. Most companies end up laying off 5% of their staff every year. This is really an extension of Corporate America's "up or out" culture. The likes of Jack Welch extolled the "virtues" of firing the bottom 5-10% every year.

If you believe the companies, this is necessary. They over-hired. If so, there was a decade of "over-hiring". Why was it fine then?

Market conditions changed such that with a wink and a nod companies could effectively collude on lyaoffs to suppress wages. The goal in cutting staff is to spread their work to the remaining employees (ie free labor) and to stop people getting raises (ie reduce labor costs).

It's really no different to how one food company will raise their prices and every other one will follow suit. There's no direct collusion. That's price manipulation and it's illegal. It's price leadership. What's the difference? Price leadership is legal. There's just no agreement in a smoke-filled room.

Workers afraid to quit? Mission accomplished. They won't be asking for raises.

philip1209• 2 years ago

I’ve heard from some friends at major tech companies that their stock grants are not being renewed as they vest. This is leaving them with sometimes >50% effective pay cuts. And, many are choosing to stay put because they don’t think they have other options.

bravetraveler• 2 years ago

Only the scared ones, I left/found new. It worked out and I'm so burned out I rub people the wrong way.

Workers are stuck in place because everyone is too afraid of a recession to quit

Related Stories