The great resignation is coming?
dailymirror.co.za
dailymirror.co.za
Working as a bartender or cook at a restaurant? Doubt we will see a mass resignation. Unless people decide they are tired of shit treatment.
Working in IT or some similar position at a modern company? I bet we would see a larger number of people quitting. Why go back into the office? Why commute? Why do anything like that when COVID has shown that remote work is a viable option. Any company that cannot accept the new fact that workers want to be able to work remotely is going to struggle to find talent.
I suspect that there will be a large split here. My company reopened offices for any volunteers who were interested.
You couldn’t have meetings in person. You couldn’t have lunch with people. But plenty of people still went in anyway.
That's great for some people, but looking at everyone else, I'd imagine there's a split between people who _only_ have meaningful social interactions at work and people who just happen to _enjoy_ it.
Best to leave work as purely economic, and satisfy as many emotional requirements as is feasible in other places.
IT workers who live in regions where they couldn’t have worked remote previous to COVID simply because no IT company would hire someone remote from $country to do this sort of work, and who had to instead settle for local, low-paying jobs, will be back to being stuck in the same rut as soon as their local employer stops offering remote.
Something is stewing out there, and I expect to see some road bumps when covid is over.
And that may well change rapidly as both the active job search condition for unemployment returns and the temporary federal boost is withdrawn by states or expires.
Sure, there may be a cluster of elite workers taking a pause resulting in some short-term disruption, but most will probably return to work in fairly short order, some after trying entrepreneurial endeavours or other alternatives to traditional work.
This is purely anecdotal, but I changed jobs last year from one tech company to another, and in general on the teams I worked with both at the old and new companies it felt like there was if anything a slightly larger number of people changing jobs vs a normal year. From my social networks I can also recall seeing quite a few friends and tech folks I follow get new jobs.
In other words I really don't see any impending event here. There has been no reason for the past year that someone who wanted to change jobs wouldn't have already done so. I did a full interview process and joined a new company without ever leaving my house or meeting anybody in person, so the pandemic certainly didn't limit job changes in tech in the same way it limited travel and events.
However (again, anecdotal) I think people are fairly uneasy about having to hit the job market right now. At least where I live, there's a feeling of worry about the housing market specifically, and many people I've talked to want to sit pat and see.
At least one has an offer (not sure if it's been taken), and another sounds like she's going to have an offer soon.
I'm sure there are people who like working from home, but I think that that number may be smaller than you think.
To be outside again. To breathe outside again. To be among human beings again. Sit next to them. Talk to them in person. To not have to look at Zoom windows everyday again.
To have an extremely clear “arrived at work, left work” boundaries again. Not just from employer’s side, but from my side as well.
To have a place called home again, that’s not my office as well.
But hey that’s just me.
Are we due for a correction down or was the 15-20% overnight housing cost jump a correction of house prices being too low (yes, absurd but I’m serious). A perfect storm of Millennials finally buying homes with low interest rates (?). COVID just jump started it.
Who knows. Either way:
- Huge amount of people fleeing to suburbs regretting their new commute times is likely.
- Huge amount of people who can’t carry their new housing bill and find remote work like planned.
Seems inevitable. Either way, I think housing cost will be one of the best indicators if remote is here to stay or not.
I didn't pay an absurd amount of money for my house because the market was super hot and I had to outbid everyone in a bidding war (though I did have to do that).
I paid an absurd amount because with interest rates so low, it was cheaper than renting in term of monthly payment + maintenance.
I'd obviously be willing to go as high as my current rent, and probably a bit higher (to be allowed to do whatever I want with it), and that just came up to the price I paid.
The only thing blocking you, financially, is the down payment. The lower the interest rate, the higher the down payment will be for the same monthly payment. That's the problem.
To live in the house, if you can afford 1500/month (including insurance, HoA, maintenance), it doesn't matter if the house is worth 100k, 300k, 600k, 1 million...if the math adds up to 1500/month, you'll buy it. Interest rates go down, house value go up. Simple as that.
Now if you add all the other factors, like how home ownership becomes a potentially profitable investment, alongside society's pressure that "it's what you're supposed to do", and of course prices will skyrocket, shortage or not.
In turn, it raises rent prices, which makes the math above work out even more, and it's a self reinforcing cycle.
Think of houses like bonds that pay a coupon (rent). If risk free rate goes down, the coupon is worth more in comparison so house price goes up.
The only downside is that when you buy a house that is cheap with a high interest rate you can benefit from refinancing if the rate goes down (and deduct your mortgage interest, which used to be significant tax savings). When you buy an expensive house at a low rate, you get no such benefit (although if inflation does pick up, the fact that you are implicitly short the borrowed dollars might still work in your favor).
The other side of cash flow is income, and I'd be very interested to see if income has kept under this analysis too...
I have few friends that are in a saving vicious cycle, high rent and cost of living eat up saving so that they save little. This makes them resigned and depressed - so the spend money on stuff to make them happy.
Having 25 yr old tell you that they will be able to afford a down-payment in 20 years is a telling sign.
Factors like:
- Can you rent the type of property you want
- For houses in particular, are you willing to put work in
- How mobile do you want to be
- How important is it to customize the property to how you want it
etc.
The catch is, I get to live in it. I made it awesome. I put a ton of money on the kitchen, the bathroom, etc to make it something I'll never be able to rent (without paying 9-10k/month anyway, and I can't afford that). I was able to do all that while still coming up only SLIGHTLY below renting + investing the extra.
There's a certain emotional value to buying a house that the math can't capture. Even JUST with the financial math, it's pretty close (and sometimes an amazing investment, in the right market). But once you tack on the emotional value, it shits all over the alternative (for people who want a home to call their own).
I can't think of any other purchase where you can get something you really want, AND have that thing be a mediocre or better investment at the same time. I can't live inside of my S&P500 position.
Bay Area housing prices tend to appreciate at that rate or faster, and you can acheive much more leverage with better downside risk protection buying housing, since California is a non-recourse state. Plus, it replaces a rental expense you would otherwise have, which a stock market investment doesn’t: you can’t live in an ETF.
Risk is higher, too, so its not all upside.
Risk is priced in to both asset classes. Nothing is set in stone.
Yes there are maintenance items if you own and need to set aside money for those things.
On the other hand, I chose to manage my own taxes instead of having the lender escrow it for me, so I get to see them separately. It helps putting things in perspective.
It's the rare market where rents are set according to how much it costs to provide the rental, as that would be a market that is oversupplied, and most governments work hard to prevent that from happening. In supply-constrained markets, rents are set by what the market can pay, not based on how much property taxes are or interest rates for mortgages or maintenance costs.
My taxes are about 25-30% of my mortgage payment (after a massive residential exemption, too), and if you have a slightly more expensive than average home in a low cost area (so things like school taxes will be higher to raise a similar amount of money per child), it can get reaaaaally expensive.
Already in the high demand areas of the country, the land that a house sits on is appreciating at a rate faster than a lot of full-time wages.
There's a massive bubble in land prices that's happened due to suppressing building across entire regions, via downzonings decades ago.
At some point housing has to return to acting like a piggy bank, rather than an asset that rises in value in excess of productive economic activity.
30% of someone making minimum wage isn't the same thing as 30% of someone making 500k/year.
I'm fairly well off. If housing took 70% of my after-tax income, I'd still be able to live reasonably well (and would have one hell of a badass home to go with it).
My food, my phone, my electricity bill, my insurance, my transportation, they cost me the same as they cost someone else living in the same city making 1/4th of the money. Since real estate is wealth storage at worse and an investment at best, I can pour everything else I make it into it. It's not particularly optimal, but I -can- do it if I so choose.
The end result is that money available for housing goes up in a curve as you go up the income bracket. People below the threshold get screwed.
I honestly don't know any of my peers to be without work, ever.
The mothers are taking less than a year off work per child and then they are back to work too. I think dual income families are another reason house prices have skyrocketed, get two YUPPIE 'DINKS' saving for their downpayment and 1% interest rates and yeah they can afford to bid up the price of a house.
Carpenters are getting $75/hr CAD around here in house construction, and a plumber is $125/hr, so per my grand parent commment people are also simply earning a lot of money so they can afford a $5k monthly payment.
edit: grammar
If prices are set by the maximum that people can pay, rather than what the costs are to provide housing, then there's an easy solution: allow more housing to be built.
Nearly everybody can afford to pay for the costs of providing housing: the maintenance, the amortized cost of construction over the lifetime of the house.
What people can't afford to pay for are the increases in land prices due to the housing shortage. This sets up a two class system: those that own the land and see benefit from appreciating land prices, and continue to have the flexibility to move and own land becuase they bought early, and the unlanded, who are doomed to pay ever increasing land costs in their monthly rents, with all the benefit going to landlords and homeowners who reap the land rents.
It's a gigantic unproductive transfer of wealth from those with less to those with more. In addition to the human misery and poverty that this causes among working people, this also greatly increases inequality, which further reduced economic output of society.
And there's a simple solution to it all: allow people to pay to build housing rather than forcing them to bid up limited supply and pass off their stored labor to idle land owners.
However, the homeowners who benefit from this system are the ones with the political power to keep their rentierism enforced by law...
Add that right now there's a timber shortage (insurance costs are spiking recently for that reason), and it's probably not helping.
The land value is the most actionable problem, but it doesn't solve everything.
Local small players, boutique mills if you will, can't even buy logs because the lots of logs that are put up for sale are so big only container-ship scale buyers are in the game.
I am 100% against exporting whole logs, we have lost so many jobs in the mills and supporting the mills.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the reason boutique mills can't buy logs as easily is because there are contractual agreements with larger suppliers. That isn't really anything new in any industry... guess you need the government to step in to prevent that.
Check out this website: https://www.cheapoldhouses.com/ there are many houses on there for not much money but they are obviously not in desirable locations. Some need some repairs but that is just time & materials not buying expensive land. So there is lots of cheap land and cheap houses.
Increasing density by tearing down some single family homes and replacing with townhomes is probably a workable compromise - now there are three dwellings where before there was 1, and everybody still gets a garage and a yard, but each of those townhomes will still be priced up to what the market will bear because there will not be an infinite supply of them.
In my town of 20,000 about 1000 dwellings are coming online significantly increasing the supply - potentially increasing the populatiog by 2000-4000 people, (up to 20%!) but they were all snapped up for $800-900k and now there is only one available for $1.2M.
People want to live in desirable places, and will pay more to do so. Nice places are always going to be expensive.
If you don't have a house you can hack the system by moving to a place with cheap dwellings and making it desirable, which is a normal pattern: Artists and musicians move to cheap neighborhood, it becomes cool & desirable
This was always the intent of very lower interest rates, so I think the question for all the crystal ball prognosticators out there is will interest rates eventually rise and change the math, or are savers the suckers because inflation will erode their wealth? I have to believe that we can have low, steady prices OR free cash, but the current situation of both can't last. What do you think?
No resignation for me anytime soon.
It's a pretty tricky situation, everybody knows that the market is overvalued but as long as supply is this constrained and prices remain high buyers are left with very few options.
If the interests go up to something reasonable again (5-10% or so) there will be a lot of people in trouble but it won't immediately lead to a price drop unless investors move away from the buy side. This is especially true for apartments which are going for crazy rates because investors buy them up as fast as they hit the market. A typical property is for sale less than two weeks, and usually on the day it goes up for sale there is already a waiting list.
https://www.thelocal.se/20160324/sweden-limits-mortgage-loan...
1. return to office
2. increase in interest rates due to inflation
3. effects from lifting eviction bans, rolling back unemployment covid provisions ect.
4. Biden govt encouraging more house building.
However, as we have seen in many densely populated cities the amount of red tape in development is absurd and probably results in an incredibly diluted impact
This is /before/ any additional stimulus (monetized by the Fed).
Additionally, the personal savings rate is also at an all time high [4] - and net worth of individuals has increased by >$12Tr (>50% of US GDP).
In one year...
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2
There are more trends at play in the housing market above and beyond office workers moving to or from WFH.
It only takes a minority of bad actors to ruin a good thing for everybody.
When you look at real estate prices and everything else in last decade and a half here, you’d be forced to think real estate has been living in an entirely different dimension all this while. It just doesn’t make sense. I’m talking about urban India of course.
This past year, if you've been working at a US tech company it's been easy to save enough money to just quit for a little while, and the fact that people haven't been able to buy things like childcare or vacations means they may really feel the need to.
Also, the enrollment period is extended through August last I checked due to COVID. So, basically you can just purchase your own after leaving, if you want.
Or you can go COBRA, but that's hella expensive.
Well, it's expensive, in many cases, because you're paying for an unsubsidized high-end company plan.
I've also seen some retirements. Which is par for the course naturally. On the other hand, it's not out of the realm of possibility to imagine people deciding to stick it out for another year when there's nothing to do anyway but figuring that right about now is as good a time as any if they were near to pulling the trigger anyway.
https://arxiv.link/https://dailymirror.co.za/2021/05/11/the-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-10/quit-your...
I'm looking forward to shaking off the old routine that I felt I had for the last few years. I got too complacent IMO, far too comfortable doing the same-old-same-old.
The housing market was still too competitive to buy, though. Houses 100 miles out from Seattle were selling for six figures over asking price back in March! Couldn’t get an offer accepted anywhere because there was always another buyer who had full cash.
> Consider going back for at least a week or two. Think of it as a test of your hypothesis. Humans tend to be really bad at predicting how they’ll actually feel.
This is really bad advice for a lot of people. Especially tech people.
1. Currently you're working from home, and almost all the other companies you'd consider working at are also home. This means you don't need to take unexplained time off work to go into the city for an interview -- you're at home, your interviews are remote, and most companies have been willing to work with people to interview outside business hours, since everyone's home anyway. This is the time to look, not only because you have time and aren't commuting and coming home exhausted, but because companies are being more flexible with remote. Instead of fighting with your current company for a flexible remote policy, while you're stuck back in the office, you can work out a full or hybrid remote arrangement with a new company, as part of the terms of starting there.
2. At least for tech employees, this is a sellers' market, and you're the seller. Tech unemployment is around 1.2%. No matter what you're currently making, someone is going to be willing to pay you more to do it there. I've watched medium sized tech companies streamline their byzantine interview processes because they couldn't interview people faster than they were hired elsewhere. If you have good tech chops, it has never been easier to find a job quickly, and never easier to set your own terms and salary. The big tech companies are still being stodgy, and the small silicon valley tech startups still want to pretend they're big tech companies, but if you get your resume in front of a recruiter, they have small and medium sized businesses lining up to hire literally anyone they can.
So if you're in tech, which is probably why you read Hacker News, this is not good advice. If your company isn't giving you real plans for coming back that you're comfortable with, throw your resume out there and watch companies fight to have you. They will work with you on those plans, and you're in a better position than you think you are for those discussions. Everyone's laughing at fast food places putting up signs saying "No one wants to work anymore" because people realized they didn't have to. We're a few months from some tech companies being in the same spot.
What are you basing this on?
This of course isn't universal. If you apply to the flashy postings on WeWorkRemotely where companies have high profile CEOs making dozens of blog posts about revolutionizing their industry, those positions are getting hundreds of applications, and they can take their pick.
But if you find a posting on a job site posted by a recruiter, and apply, you will get phone calls from several other recruiters at that agency, struggling quite hard to find candidates for small and medium size companies having trouble placing people. And they are having a lot of trouble placing people right now. Get yourself into recruiter databases, set yourself as open to work on LinkedIn, and the requests just pour in.
Edit: loading now--Okay, I'm not sure I buy much of this article. Most people need some kind of job to survive. So while there might be more turnover than usual in the marketplace, I don't foresee a bunch of people independently deciding to become homeless over "culture" at work.
This is not the first time I've seen this prediction.
I spent over 30 years, saving at around 40%, so I had a pretty decent amount ready for early retirement. I was able to sink a decent chunk into a couple of small corporations, while still having plenty to retire, but at a fairly humble level (that 40% meant no Teslas or in-ground pools).
By "pushed," I mean that when I started looking for work, I was treated quite barbarously. Some, by corporations, but mostly by headhunters. It was made quite clear, that I was not welcome in today's tech field.
So I had to swallow my pride, and just deal with the fact that no one wants to play with me, and I found some folks that would be happy to take what I have to offer for free. They are getting some pretty top-shelf work. I'm no slouch.
Best decision I ever made. The last couple of years have been some of the happiest of my life.
I also live pretty humbly. A lot of HN folks would not approve.
Most middle class and lower run a very tight money in=money out and can’t afford to be without work for more than a few weeks and certainly won’t resign without something else already lined up.
Can you quit if you want to continue living a lifestyle higher than the majority of Americans? No, but that's a tradeoff you're choosing.
IMO, whether remote work is here to stay depends on two questions: 1) Where are employees more productive 2) How much of a pay cut are employees willing to take to work from home?
The answer to the first question is pretty clear to me. We will be more productive in the office, on average. Primarily bc it’s human nature to exert the least effort possible to obtain resources, and so over time, employees will find more ways to slack from home while looking productive. Though there are exceptions, companies will base their decisions on the average productivity of each potential policy.
While working from home, those interruptions are dropped to 0. Any questions must come from some form of slack/email/etc that can all be ignored until I'm ready to look at them.
[0]https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
When I was in the office, most developers had headphones on when working and you wouldn't interrupt them at that time.
I definitely agree that if you're in the kind of role where you can turn off notifications and just put your head down and work, this has probably been a very productive year.
Why should remote employees take a pay cut at all? After all their employer is saving a great deal of money on office space.
I never believed it to begin with. Seemed like a way to try to prop up confidence in markets, rather than hard science. Afaik, all organizations are horrible at measuring productivity.
Also the pandemic where 600k people died in the US alone might put a damper on things.
And yeah, I'm sure the pandemic had am impact on the effectiveness of remote work. But I'm disputing the aforementioned "mountain of evidence" which I so far haven't been able to view from my vantage point.
The pandemic did give strong evidence that it was at least close, which was somewhat surprising to me, due in part the difficulties of formalizing previously ad-hoc communication patterns and in shared whiteboarding.
And it may be worth noting a couple other things:
- A fair number of people didn't have a great working situation at home whether in terms of the lack of a good work area or childcare/teaching on the side
- Under normal circumstances, it's not 100% virtual versus in-office. Distributed teams routinely get together for on-sites/off-sites which can provide a lot of the collaboration and team-building that people are lamenting the loss of with remote
There are complaints/observations of this dating back to at least the 1950s (see the wasteful faux-activity pretending-to-be-busy office work described in Revolutionary Road, for instance—it could have been written today, except there'd be more email, and it doesn't read as one bit exaggerated) so it's not like modern office workers are wildly less industrious than their predecessors from The Greatest Generation or the Baby Boomers or whatever. Office work under a modern corporation or other bureaucracy is just largely BS, evidently by nature.
So there may be about the same work getting done, but possibly way less "work".
I can go for a springtime walk on the trails five minutes from my new place since I moved out of the Toronto downtown core. I couldn't have gotten out of my building inside of 15 minutes let alone to a wooded trail where I was living before.
I can also take a five minute break and play some guitar and clear my head rather than going to the cafeteria to buy overpriced coffee or just clicking around on nonsense online. And lunch is way cheaper, and less time-consuming.
It's really nice.
That said, I've never been one for so many of the pretences we entertain socially. There's an immense amount of overhead in managing those mores.
Edit: supporting data: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/study-produ...
I'm no less a slacker than anyone else but I had deadlines to meet. Being at home meant I could largely exclude interruptions, pace around talking to myself to figure things out, and crank out code, which I enjoyed anyway. And if I also had to work days at the office, it gave me more room to slack off there, where it was harder to concentrate.
Anecdotally for myself I can't imagine why I would ever return to an office unless it was a couple blocks from where I live. Even then I'd want a private office with a door, a couch, and a nice garden to sit in outside when I need some time to decompress and think.
I get the same amount of work done with far less stress working from home. No commute, no random noise, no people tapping me on the shoulder, fewer meetings, no small talk and awkward social situations.
I get more sleep and less stress. At least in my field, software development (and knowledge work in general), those two factors have the greatest impact on "productivity." [0] [1]
This is really going to vary by job description. I'm not sure what the "overall" facts may be, so perhaps you're still right. For certain though, some jobs are much more productive remotely.
Wh ... why? What about not coming into an office means that I should be paid less? A lot of companies have reduced their in-office capacity in the last year+, presumably slashing costs.
This seems to pivot on the archaic idea that if you're not in the office you're goofing off or something. I remember feeling that myself when I first worked with remote people a decade ago but at this point we should all kind of understand that work is work.
Sometimes there are quality of life decisions that come to play. Not sure cut in pay from current job is what's at hand. If I am currently employeed at a job that requires >=1 hour commute each way, has added stress from management inadequacies, etc, but then a job opportunity presents itself that is closer to home (or even WFH) for less pay, a conversation about what that cut in pay would entail long term is definitely worth having in my head. Those 2 hours back from the stress of commuting is huge. New job might mean worse management, or it could be better. Grass isn't always greener.
I have to disagree. True, "doesn't provide meaning" isn't actionable to the company, but it's no less so than graduate school. And if it forces your manager to think about meaning in their own life, all the better. I'm really not a fan of this "keep everything strictly professional" idea. I think it's dying out slowly, and good thing: putting humanity back in work is exactly what we need, both for ourselves and ultimately the planet.
Right now perfect storm in HCOL areas eg
- Cheap money from banks - not uncommon to see $2m+ loans to tech salaries
- Low inventory - people aren't moving, especially older people, with pandemic uncertainty
- Record increase in savings + equities values increasing
- Huge increased cost in rennovation materials / building materials limiting new supply
What's impetus for that to normalize?
Construction jobs will naturally come to an end, and I take that opportunity to take some time off and travel in between gigs. I've also done it on jobs that lasted multiple years but had shut down periods (like a project in Alaska that couldn't proceed during the winter). While my work/life balance may not be entirely healthy during the work periods...okay, it really isn't at all, I can get all the R&R I want between stretches of work.
I'll admit and fully own up to having a good amount of privilege that allows me to do this. I've got experience in a niche side of the construction industry, clearances, checks and licenses to go with it, and the project/contract oriented nature of heavy construction in general means that gaps in the resume are usually glossed over. On top of that, I have ins with the good-old-boys club to the point that, generally, I'm not actually looking for work, I get called up. I do think I know my side of the business, am good at it, and put in hard work, and that is why I continue to get calls.
Case in point, my current gig. I was fresh off the plane from 4 weeks in New Zealand, just starting to unpack, when I got called up. I wasn't planning on looking for work for a while longer, but when called I didn't want to endanger that networking relationship by passing on it.
In short, my plan would be to travel for a decent period of time, and begin to put out feelers for work as that winds down. I've never been to Greece1, and summer is coming...in fact I was just talking to my dad and he saw round trip tickets to Istanbul for ridiculously low prices.
1Pandemic allowing, of course.
Life is too short to spend it all whiling away at work. You must find time for yourself, for your family, for your mental health. Slow down, smell the roses, all that. There is just too much world to explore, in my opinion. It seems to me that the pandemic and lockdowns have caused more people to come to that realization. I'm actually seeing a lot of turnover in the engineering and management staff at my current project, which I think might be related.
Articles like this highlight the very plausible idea that the post-Covid reawakening will include a lot of "Wanna hire me?" conversations. Perhaps even over meals with someone's expense account picking up the tab.
But as other posters say, a lot of that may be momentary flirtation. Plenty of exploring; not so much movement.
There's more to it than that. From the article: "an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University..."
No data. No analysis.
"...who’s studied the exits of hundreds of workers."
I don't assume that companies that prefer remote work are "better": it can be a cynical cost-cutting measure that causes more misery (due to communication problems, loneliness, externalization of costs like computers and broadband access, discrimination, off-hours demands etc.) than going to the office like in the old days.