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
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
Only if you are working at a good start up. Most places don't offer such good insurance package. In many cases parents are not covered.
Its true some people make it big working at start up. Most unfortunately don't.
Overall, I would advice if you are having non trivial life situations like old parents, unstable health care situations, or just can't afford to take risks, I would say just don't work at start ups.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
So their utility function has terms other than $. So define "successful", or define the utility function more objectively. It is very clear that yours vs theirs are quite different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> It isn't normal for it to be hard to get a job, what is hard is to get a better job than you have now since you worked hard to find that job.
That seems like a weirdly narrow perspective. Seems like it entirely depends on every aspect of circumstance, micro, and macro economic, as well as all facets of personal luck, industry, roll of the dice at birth. This is true of everything, not just the job search. Every one of my friends for example has a job and has no reason to think it's hard to get one, but they only know one guy in software, and my perspective for the last 8 years has been it's hard to find a job. Meanwhile, they're all lonely and desperate, struggle to form long term connections, and this is a sentiment shared by many on their 30s atm, but not me, it's normally easy. I'm sure when I get my next one, there's enough likelihood of meeting a few people who've been employed their whole life but haven't made any new close friends since school, to wit we'd reach a similar difference in perspective.
It's my impression though that it's nearly always been easier to get a better or different job than it is to get a job without one, which informs the general cliche, however factually true it is, that it's better to look for a new job while you have one.
My statement, "most dramatic rise in unemployment," means something different.
While the Great Depression saw a much higher peak unemployment rate, the rate of change in April 2020 was the fastest one-month increase in US history.
I actually interpreted the phrasing of "most dramatic rise in unemployment the U.S. had ever seen" exactly to mean "it was even worse than the great depression in some ways". It seems too peculiar of a thing to say otherwise, especially when the great depression is like the main thing anyone would think to compare it to.
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.
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.
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.
Eh, I took it as a buzzword to represent the mindset of ‘I pretend to work, they pretend to pay me’.
All of this is representative of, IMO, late stage - and nearly population wide - burnout due to an incredibly long ‘up and to the right’ period of economic growth coupled with high stress (from COVID) when it would otherwise be slowing down, and extreme emotional manipulation by those too afraid to look down and have it end. Which isn’t just from ‘the rich’, BTW. I’ve seen that manipulation from a portion of all segments of the population.
> Eh, I took it as a buzzword to represent the mindset of ‘I pretend to work, they pretend to pay me’.
That's the blame shifting GP was referring to. It actually means "doing only what you're paid to do" instead of the "work is family" unpaid overtime trend that had been becoming common.
Eh, many many times it’s ’doing only the work someone will fire you for if they notice you’re not doing it - and no one is paying attention’, which is often very different from doing the work one is nominally paid to do.
It’s a wide spectrum.
But yeah, folks stopped busting their ass to do stuff that wasn’t even in the job description - the horror.
I think that’s how a lot of workers took it, but it eventually morphed into a talking point by the wealthy too that left off the second part. I hate to say it but some of my family members were talking to quiet quitters with disgust. Zero mention of unfair pay. It echoed what I saw on CNBC and other media at the time.
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.
Thank you for sharing. I have tried not working for extensive periods of time, and I love it.
I have the time to work on various projects to not feel bored and useless, plus working out and going out. I do not gauge my worth based on "value" of my output, as it is very clear that the perceived value in our society makes no sense whatsoever. So I still feel productive doing random things I love.
It wasn't always like that for me though. Things improved a lot when I started fasting, took care of my diet and started working out.
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)
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.
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[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.
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.
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.
I'd argue that's a very good reason to have backup options. Remember that looking for a job does not commit you to leaving your current one unless you find something better.
The problem is that the job market is a market for lemons on both sides.
From the employee side, I have no way of knowing whether I've actually found something better. It could be that I've just found a company that interviews well or that got lucky enough to avoid putting foot in mouth long enough to get me out the door.
If I'm in a company that's good enough and am not sure I'll be able to land a job six months from now, it makes very little sense for me to even start looking because I know that any new job I find might be a lemon, even if it looks better during the interviews.
Market-for-lemons is sometimes a useful framing, but there's such a thing as taking it too far.
Markets, even markets for lemons, are frequently in non-equilibrium states. That can happen because actors have imperfect information, because underlying conditions have changed, because some actors are new to the market and haven't settled to equilibrium yet, because people have personal beliefs that override market-rational behavior, because market actors are simply bad at their jobs, or any number of other reasons. Far more information-perfect, rational, and optimized markets than hiring frequently show inefficient behavior in practice.
Yes, there are market pressures that tend to remove good candidates and good jobs from the market, and that incentivize both sides to pretend they're better than they are. But a tendency is only a tendency, and not a guarantee, and incentives can be missed or ignored or defied or failed in implementation. A bad company might be incentivized to lie to you, but they have to be self-aware that they suck (a trait terrible companies very frequently fail at) and capable of implementing the deception, among other things. And that means that your impressions when you speak to them do carry meaningful signal that should shift your beliefs about them.
A new job might be a lemon. But it also might not. You don't need to be certain that it isn't; you just need to be sure enough that the expected value of taking the new job, minus whatever risk discounting you're choosing to use, (minus the cost of searching for one), is greater than the expected value of staying in your current job.
> You don't need to be certain that it isn't; you just need to be sure enough that the expected value of taking the new job, minus whatever risk discounting you're choosing to use, (minus the cost of searching for one), is greater than the expected value of staying in your current job.
Agreed. And what I'm saying is that people aren't looking because the job interview process provides little enough information that the expected value of job hopping right now is very unlikely to exceed the expected value of staying put unless they're already in a bad situation. The time spent fielding phone screens and interviews isn't worth it if you already know that even a seemingly dream job wouldn't be worth the risk right now.
In another, more certain environment with lower risk of long-term unemployment the calculus is different, but right now sticking with the devil you know is for most of us the most rational move until the layoffs slow down.
The other thing I see is that people nearish retirement age and are comfortable, who might have cruised on for a few years, are pretty much going: now is probably the time. Maybe do some consulting though that's tight right now. So, maybe not optimal, but why stay in a non-ideal situation?
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.
Yea, I think much of the tech industry has really had it too cushy. The (internet) tech industry had 2 decades of nearly constant growth because it was a completely new thing to human civilization. But now it's all hitting maturity and the status quo is changing with it.
It's also why companies are desperate to sell AI as its currently the only visible avenue for further large growth to pump stocks.
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.
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.
When recruiters have ghosted me after an interview and then a follow up email from me, I have scolded them with something like, "Hey. I haven't heard from you in a few weeks. I am sure that you are busy, but so am I. I took the time to interview for your position. It is unprofessional and rude not to respond to my follow up."
They almost always respond with an apology, and then I'm sure black list me. I don't much care. I'd rather work with competent caring people. And maybe my scolding will help the next recruit.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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:
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).
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."
Email the mods suggesting a link to the original source, and if you feel that the submitted site should be penalised or banned, why. At hn@ycombinator.com
> “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.)
"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?
I think there has also been a massive shift in the game though. More young people are seeing work as a means to an end instead of a calling. Jobs don't define people like they used to.
So, trading your week days for money to do everything you want in the weekends is pretty okay now. Being a company (wo)man is sort of seen as being a class traitor?
Maybe that's just because I work with low income college students, though.
There was a period of time (80s-90s) that the American middle class was booming and thriving. Boomers with stable but unfulfilling jobs regretted not following their dreams, and the future looked bright, so they told their millenial kids to chase their passions and the money would follow.
Then a generation of millenials collectively got millions of degrees in liberal arts and humanities, but the degrees didn't have any class-signaling power or economic value the way a college degree in 1970 did, so instead of getting cushy careers they ended up in low-paid, low-status unfulfilling jobs, with debt from a useless degree.
Gen Z saw that happen and took a more practical view towards college, careers, etc.
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.
> you have 7 figures in stocks and 6 figures in savings anyway
I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious here. I’ve been in tech for almost twenty years and the only way I could have 7 figures in stocks is if I still lived at home and didn’t contribute anything to the budget. There is a whole world of people working in tech outside of Silicon Valley’s ridiculous compensation. Money is still a concern for the vast majority of us.
No one in my company has equity except the founder. On the off chance we actually get far enough for me to get equity I’ll be lucky to get $100k out of it.
I'm a game dev so no worries, I'm about as far from the minmax total comp bubble as you can get.
But yes, it was a purposeful use of extremes. Unless you rush to young retirement or are in that SV scene and move out, most people won't have the means to metaphorically move out to the pastures and become a farm hand.
But that is in fact an option for a few in tech. I recall some 20+ year googling choosing to leave and pick up comedy as a career.
"better" is very subjective and doing a lot of heavy lifting, my apologies. The easy snarky response is "move from US to EU". But it can be a personal choice to simply get out of the metropolitan areas in favor of a quieter area, or one with better transportation or less crime or friendlier communities.
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.
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.
For a single, childless person who wants to live a lower-middle class lifestyle in a low cost of living area, sure.
But if you want to live in a decent location, you're looking at needing at least a million just for a house. That leaves 1.5 to generate income, so at a 3% safe withdrawal rate that's $45k per year. After taxes that's now like $35k. And you're not getting health insurance from employer so budget $6k per year for premiums (and be ready to pay out up to $6k per year more if you end up in the hospital).
So in the end, you've got something like $20k-$29k per year to live on. That covers groceries, car maintenance/insurance/payments, upkeep on the house, phone, etc sufficiently for one person. But you're probably not joining your friends on their ski vacation or even going out for drinks with them too often.
And of course, the whole thing falls apart with a family. The average cost of health insurance for a family of 4 is $24,000 per year.
> not getting health insurance from employer so budget $6k per year
FYI when I took some time off, I had to pay ~$3500/month for health insurance for a family of three (and of course still pay deductibles and out of pocket costs).
Health care insurance in the US is unimaginably expensive.
The person is not even trapped. The person is worried about the prospects for the economy and they feel better security staying where they are then moving, a move they'd be completely free to make.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's definitely not 'perceived' abuses according to those in the know... it's been known within the AZ workforce for a while, but has been slowly leaking out into the national news articles. They're "literally violating US Labor Laws" (not my words, but hearsay would agree), but most are either too afraid or don't believe anything will be done.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Many more took huge risk in the past and lost everything.
sure, but when you have connections or your own finances in the millions, it's a lot harder to truly lose "everything" in the same way a missed rent check can actually cost some working class person their home. They will lose a lot but not be out on the streets per se.
Many of these people aren't dumb, they won't use their own money to finance this. It just better helps them get investor money to potentially mismanage.
>It strikes me as rather absurd to believe it was better in the past when capital was much harder to come by.
it was arguably better for people who had capital to begin with. Money begets money, that's always been true in every time and society.
for truly scrappy startups, it varies. You could truly innovate with 2-3 buddies out of your garage and make a multi-million dollar business, "self made". Fewer would be chosen, but the line would be lower as well.
There's more money flowing, but you also need so much more to get off the ground c. 2024. But you can reasonably chance it an self-publish. I don't think it's objectively better or worse, just different. I argue that if you do need money than it is in fact worse though.
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
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."
There's a difference between work fun and side project fun
The way I see it: work stuff can be "fun" during the 9-5 and it will actually be kind of enjoyable. I don't think that that's bad for the employer or the employee, sort of like a mutually beneficial relationship
For side projects, they can't just be plain fun but have to be interesting also. A project has to push the envelope in some way. And that's a way higher bar that imo shouldn't be conflated with work
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1 year I can stand up a system big enough that it would require 2 engineers to manage its ongoing maintenance, feature requests, bug fixes, 3rd party API updates, etc
More software requires more software engineers to maintain it, who then write more software, which then require more engineers to maintain it, on and on and on…
And you would've needed 4 engineers to build your in-house payment and fulfillment systems, except now you just pay Stripe and Shopify.
Oh, and 1 of those engineers is a "React engineer", who operates purely at the level of that framework, following boilerplate and documentation like a cook book, who would've otherwise been left out of the industry altogether but is now delivering as much value as someone who put in the work to understand JS, single-threaded UI, web browsers, network protocols...
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.”
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