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Comment by ytinas | Hacker News Reader

This isn't surprising. Big companies see that their employees can't easily leave so they take advantage of it. Of course when the economy picks up people are going to leave, but this will be happening to lots of companies so they'll have plenty of available talent to replace their losses.

The company I'm at made a huge profit last year. Half as much as the year before, but still a massive profit. In my year end meeting the manager who gave me my embarrassingly awful bonus check told me "we're lucky to be getting anything with the year we've had"!! Of course the CEO didn't get hurt much. It was pretty interesting. I never see anyone in the office after 5pm since that day...

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Indeed, I'm sure many of us saw the same things happen when the dot com bubble popped.

There is a silver lining to stressors like this: it helps people see fair-weather employers for who they are.

The dissatisfaction is real but temporary. People hate their jobs because they feel trapped. As soon as the recession lifts, prospects for the old bonuses return, and they have more job options, most will stay instead of leaving as the article contends.

Having options to leave improves job satisfaction immensely.

I'm pretty sure the guys picking up work from their laid-off coworkers, pulling extra un-paid hours to cover it all and being denied bonuses/raises despite profitability are dissatisfied with something more than a feeling of being trapped.

As soon as the recession lifts, the fair-weather employers will be forced to correct those inequities - which is why those who stay, will stay.

You absolutely can not write off the objective ways people's working environments have changed and will change again, when you look at whether they leave or not.

I don't think nwatson wrote those off. He was probably referring to the fairly in-depth article, on HN some time ago, which discussed how "having options to leave" was a huge psychological factor for job satisfaction. I can't recall exactly how they supported that argument, but I think it was fairly convincing.

What nwatson is suggesting is that along with improvements in bonuses and working conditions, there will be the improvement of once again having options - which is itself a very significant boost to morale.

Yes, I had read that article recently, and it must have been from the HN reference. A quick google search doesn't bring up an obvious HN link or the original article, I wish I could find it.

edit: hmmm ... HN reader 'spokey' has found it, see [one of] his comments here.

Are employees really trapped? I changed jobs this year, and my company (a large, household-name-type-place) is continuing to hire a lot of developers. I think the team I'm on was about 2 people a year ago, now it's 10+.

Maybe people right out of college are having trouble finding jobs, but I think anyone with actual programming experience is in high demand right now. (Just like always...)

IT != programming

Programmers are in a very different boat, job-wise, especially programmers with some experience. Recessions don't hit us as hard.

Do you think the article considers programmers as IT workers? I think so. It's in the quote:

The folks at Apple Computer, I'm guessing right now, are feeling very purposeful at work

Sure Apple has an IT department, but I'll bet that quote isn't talking about Apple's internal systems that its IT department maintains. I've recently learned the hard way, that IT does not really mean programming as those who frequent HN think of it.

Programmers in IT, spend much of their time writing the necessary glue code that gets 2 or more other systems talking. Usually, at least one of those systems is a poorly-documented piece of vendorware. If your IT programming job includes the web, then add to that making things work in IE6. It's hell on earth.

Dunno. I have to deal with poorly-documented vendorware (and Windows, from time to time) and I have had to make websites that work in IE6. I would not count either as "hell on earth". It's just stuff that needs to be done, and people will pay a lot of money to have it done.

From my experience it takes about 3-5 times longer to get a job now vs. 2004.

In line with this, I recently have been trying to exit grad school. I applied with a large tech company (within the top Fortune 20), interviewed, and got an offer. The problem was that they offered 15K less than anyone else, and refused to negotiate. I feel like they took advantage of the economy and their name. I turned them down, but I can't help but wonder how satisified I wouldn't have been if I had taken that job.

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