Employees quit their bosses not the company.
I quit to go to a new company, but I would have gladly kept my boss. Actually that's happened to me a couple times.
In my first job post university, after about two years, the moment I realized "I don't belong here" was when a coworker in the 80% underground open plan office stood up and asked in a loud voice to be heard by everybody "Does anybody need a few project hours for billing? I've got some hours left in my project that you can have." My boss responded "Yes! I'll take whatever hours you can spare for myself and for [Noseshine (me)]". We had to have a billable customer project for each and every hour of our time at work.
My boss was great, the "system" sucked.
The product had a hideous installation process involving hundreds of manual edits to settings in IIS and configuration files. I was deliberately told not to try to improve that via scripting, because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation.
Each project was... a lot of hand-customization, and usually took 8-12 hours, and we did a few dozen per year (IIRC) and that number was growing. But each one was... a pain.
I spent some time putting a lot of configurable stuff in a a config file, and some runtime checking of the configs, and dynamic behaviour, and... we had something that would make setup of the form and most 'custom' requests down to about 1-2 hours max.
I wasn't filling out my timesheet, and someone said "you have to put what project you were working on"... so I filled in 42 hours (over 2 weeks - part time here and there) for "project X" and... holy crap I got a verbal beating. We're going to lose this client - we're overbilling, we're gouging, etc.
I tried to very little avail to demonstrate that... we can keep charging 12 hours ($2500? IIRC) for the pages in future, but now they'll only take an hour or so. Apparently I was talking to the wrong people because they thought I was advocating fraud, and I probably almost got fired over that. My code was erased, everything was put back the way it was, they 'ate' the overage to the client (read... I just had 42 less billable hours for 2 weeks) and ... I was sort of 'demoted'.
Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it.
He probably didn't know about that situation, but he should have been aware of the billable hours culture and the problems that was causing.
Wow...
I'll just stick my toe in the water... At what point are we as an industry going to call that fraud?
If boss (really boss^n, for any n) makes them miserable, if just make more places relatively attractive. But there are always people quitting from good work places.
Sometimes, an undeniably amazing opportunity falls into the lap of someone who is overall quite happy at their present job, and they quit that job. But that's a fairly rare case.
Is that true? I don't know of any studies but I give a new company like a year before I start looking for something better. Now I've been in the same position for 6 years but I've been looking for something "better" the entire time and actually turned in my notice twice but ended up staying. No offense to any employer but they have never shown loyalty to me. I'm not giving it to them.