Why are so many knowledge workers quitting?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I’ve always had a percentage of remote work, but with no in person work, events, travel, socialising, it’s just not enough to hold my attention and passion.
I’ve drifted into taking a year out of the industry and thoroughly enjoying stepping back for a while.
I’m mentally waiting for things to “return to normal” but feeling like I might be waiting for a long time.
I don't think I could ever work at a non-fully-remote company again. There are challenges, and you have to force yourself to socialize at all, but it's working for me. I always enjoyed working in the office (was never really bothered by noise, I can focus through it), but remote is much better. The time that you get back by not commuting and the ability to start work without being "fully ready" is great. (I have an incremental morning routine now, rather than rushing to shower, eat, caffeinate before sitting bored on a train for a half hour.)
Others like myself want to disappear into a dark room and code for hours on end.
>somewhere, at some stage
Well - why not on a video conference? And what stage(s) really require this? Most folks know what they are supposed to do / need to do to make things work - those that don't are in need of supervision / mentoring.
>people must get together to help you decide what to work on?
I misread this initially as "decide what you should work on" but I still think that there's not enough emphasis on the "we" part - in that really I see these decisions as being about co-ordination and helping everyone else out as much as anything else.
Others like myself want to disappear into a dark room and code for hours on end.
Is the antithesis of working out business requirements / design etc so you have something to code?
I find the coding part of my job is about 5-10% of the actual job, mostly, it's working out what needs to be done, how I might go about it, and how to manage complexity.
It's rare that can be all done without input from others. I don't think I'd get very far if I just coded in a dark room for hours on end.
We hear about how people are now working much faster due to remote. Which is not surprising. But it's not really clear if that will yield to things going much further.
The technical side of what needs to be done is something I solve alone. The business side is just told to me.
Others enjoy that part the most and treat the individual work as merely a necessary task.
Remote work has given me almost two more hours of life a day (that I'd otherwise spend commuting), it made me realize how sleep deprived I used to be, and substantially improved my health - through home cooking, being less stuck to the chair, and having more time for sports.
Additionally, it has greatly improved my career, since the advent of somewhat commonplace remote work means that I have access to jobs in areas where the pay is substantially better (up to 3x my current salary). If I end up quitting it will be either to capitalize on those new opportunities or to set in stone my ability to work remotely.
I get this sentiment, but I want to stress to people who feel this way that long commutes are not a problem with our work culture, they are a problem with our car culture.
Instead of retreating to our homes in the suburbs, people should be demanding more compact cities with expansive public transportation. Instead of losing our "second place", let's fight to get our "third place" back!
Usually the commute time is longer because of trips to the station + waiting for the vehicle to come. Even worse people typically all go to work at the same time and rush hours form. No breathing room. Usually never being able to sit. It is horrible always and even more so during pandemics. Having exclusive seats at the vehicle and preordained vehicles vetted by the company. That works but only large companies can afford this. Also public transit only works in large cities.
Compact cities with houses are good. The cities in Netherlands are a really good way to model every society in the world. Everything in your neighbourhood just a 5 minute bike ride away. Everything else should be done remotely if possible.
Doing the same commute by car has been a significant quality of life improvement - not least because I have a few square feet to myself while I'm in transit!
I don't know why 2 hours of public transport is better than 2 hours of commute by car? It's still time wasted.
But the idea of density is that everything is closer together, so transit time is less, and you have more modes of transportation available to you, reducing congestion. In the United States, most people don't have the option of a short commute or to live within walking/biking distance of work even if they wanted to.
I have a short cycle into work which is one of the highlights of my day and hate WFH.
Even with a commute, riding a bus or train is much less stressful than commuting by car. You can read a book, reply to emails, etc..
I’ve been to NYC, SF, Seattle… all that closeness (I called it cramped and stifling) was not something I would want to experience long term.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
Not Just Bikes has some good video of places in the Netherlands and elsewhere that come close to meeting the ideal. Take a look too at maps of small/medium towns in Germany or Japan compared to USA.
Let's hypothesize about a utopian city where a person's housing is, at a maximum, a quarter hour walk/bike from their job at Apple. The moment that person switches jobs to Google, however, they have to choose between moving or losing every benefit the utopian city layout has provided. Worse, their new commute would be explicitly working against the design of this hypothetical city.
Workforces should not be (and are not with suburbs) tightly integrated into where they work. This is something important to consider. You can't have the same density of employers that you have today if you're also packing in the other services (residential, markets, drug stores, laundrymats, etc).
Of course, I also don't think it would be a bad thing to stop building McMansions. Many consider Tokyo to be an extreme example of density, but even there it is quite common to find 80-160sqm detached houses. At half of Tokyo's density, people wouldn't even need to give up their yards.
I live and work in Paris proper, which is a very dense city. Transit sucks, my commute is around 45 minutes each way. Bonus points for when I have to take it in rush hour, with people pressed together and no air conditioning. Extra bonus points for the habitual breakdowns, meaning even more people per train.
Also, high density with "historic city" means very small apartments and very high prices. I really don't know how much better this is compared to US-style suburbia. Oh, we don't have clean air either, all the highways and city roads are congested, too.
Plus, I'd say European cities, in particular, aren't really "designed", seeing how they have to contend with historic centers they can't touch, etc.
But I think that, more importantly, we should try to avoid having to be all in the same spot if it's not necessary.
Yes, there are some advantages to scale, and some things are easier / cheaper to do when you have 1M people in the same space as opposed to spread far and wide. But this also produces other issues, such as stressed people because of all the noise (not just cars, but neighbors, etc.)
Instead of being forced to trek into cities, people should be demanding to be able to work from any other place.
Only that I now spend most of that extra time for more work & I'm behind 1.5 years on all my podcasts
Come on, I don't do those things in my free time, I'd much prefer more free time from working remotely than fake "free time" on the bus.
Now - at home in a make-shift lab and coding. I still talk to people but Zoom just isn't the same. Supply chain issues are giving me headaches and relying on transport and post to get my gear out to people is frustrating and time consuming in a way that throwing it in the ute and driving isn't.
I had high hopes we would basically be back to normal this year but Delta has killed that for the moment.
Also...
> Sleeping in a swag in the tray of my ute
Loved that. It''s so good it could be a line in a song. Nice writing!
You write beautifully.
Gosh what a terrible omission! Glad I added in that second line.
I was in lockdown and just worked, stayed home, slept a bit and worked out, probably lived a prison lifestyle.
I've moved out of the city and have taken up some more outdoor hobbies which has been good, but more importantly, I just stepped back, now working 4-8 hours a day max.
I saved some cash and I've decided that if I lose my job for taking it easy, then so be it. Funnily enough, I seem to be more productive now.
Another thing that I hear a lot is people complaining about a lack of work/life balance due to work from home and again here I feel the exact opposite. It has always felt really strange to me to confine work and the rest of my life into separate blocks of time and space. Going to an office, and spending an 8 hour block of time just on work, then going home and spending another 8 hour block on personal things before sleeping seems really unnatural and unhealthy to me.
With WfH I can blur the lines between them. When I’m stuck on something work related, I can just do some mindless chore around the house and that usually ets my mind unstuck. There is nothing more stressful than sitting at my desk in the office while beings stuck with nothing to do to take my mind off it for a while other than browsing the internet.
It just feels more natural and way less stressful to me to naturally flow from work to personal stuff and back.
That and just being able to do things in parallel was extremely valuable. Laundry could be run during the day. Same with the dishwasher. I could be around at 1 to put ribs in the oven for dinner. No more having to schlep down to the post office for missed deliveries.
It was quite fun while it lasted as I prefer to be able to blend everything I need to do into a single list.
Go for a walk? Talk to another colleague about the problem or present them with a related theoretical?
You don't have to be the sad lonely remote worker if that bothers you so much. Remote work has definitely HUGE advantages allowing people to find a much healthier work life balance and has undeniably a net positive effect in comparison to what we had before, but I agree, 100% remote and never stepping out of your house again and meeting other people is NOT healthy at all. Good news is, nobody forces you to live like this though. I have signed up for a co-working space where I live. WeWork offices are littered around the world. It costs only $199 or something like this to get a flexi hot desk where you can go to any WeWork in your country. I go into a co-working space at least once or twice a week. I sit next to other people who also work and we chat, socialise, we still play ping pong during our breaks and we stroll out to a pub afterwards. Most co-working spaces even organise weekly/monthly social events which makes it even easier to connect with other people.
If you feel isolated because of remote work, then it's not because of remote work, it's because of your own choice to not help yourself. It's like a child crying that their trousers are wet after repeatedly pissing themselves instead of going to the bathroom.
If a person misses social contact then there is a really really simple solution to that. Unless the OP is currently in prison they should get off their arse and step outside their home and just start meeting people and talk to people if that is what they want. It worked like this hundred of thousand of years ago and it still works the same way today.
That's why places where people freely socialize sell massive amounts of alcohol, alcohol reduces inhibitions and I imagine the stress level of interacting with someone for the first time.
Most life partners come from (frequently forced) proximity, same for best friends: kindergarten, school, university, workplace, etc.
Pontificating about what people should do doesn't help with what people have actually been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.
As it happens, I spent most of the year on the beach with zero regrets whatsoever.
Enjoy your WeWork.
You will see more variants of covid, more restrictions. If you go along with vaccinating and wearing health passes, you will be left alone for now. But you will have to continue to accept whatever they say. You no longer have any right to say no.
I'm not saying we never go back to normal, but I have my doubts about when that happens, and I am afraid it will take much much longer than expected.
It was "flatten the curve, and stay at home for a month". It was more than a year ago.
Then, it was "only if we had vaccine, things could go back to normal". Then we had vaccines, so we were told to take the vaccine, and once we have a reasonable ratio of vaccinated people, things will get better. In developed countries, basically everyone who wanted, could get a vaccine by now.
In the news we already hear about the bad outcomes with vaccinations and the variants, and there is also already chatter regarding the third "refresh" dose.
The writing is on the wall. This thing will take a long while.
A lot of the problem is that "reasonable ratio" and "everyone who wanted" are not the same number. The number I think of for reasonable ratio is 4 out of 5. Vaccination stalled well before that.
It will get only more difficult, in the early phases of the vaccine rollout, with patience and improved logistics, the ratio of vaccinated people improved rapidly. But what can they do next? Now comes the "stick", they will introduce more and more hurdles for the unvaccinated, but that takes time, causes resistance, and it will not increase the numbers fast enough.
All the while the variants are coming, and the existing vaccines do not show the same protection against the new variants, so there is a chance that the cycle will just continue with new variants, and new vaccines, new variants...
Yes, there will probably be some changes compared to life before Covid, but by and large normal activities such socializing, in developed countries, will be back to regular levels once we've vaccinated enough people. Which should be by mid-2022 at the latest.
Of course, if people refuse to be vaccinated, they're only prolonging this hell. Can't have both personal freedom and lack of personal responsibility, democracy doesn't work like that.
I'm convinced that a certain percentage of the population just doesn't give a crap about others. Hard to say the exact percentage, but something over 10% feels like a safe bet.
So, I am basically quite tired. I am kinda considering just taking a sabbatical year.
I still like the work, but the non-stop stress from corona, the non-stop news and the barely functioning society makes work a bit futile.
I've discovered the only thing I enjoyed to buy were books. And I need more time and quiet to read them.
Maybe it's a form of weird midlife crisis.
No matter how much you love something, you need the occasional break..I think that's just human nature.
I don't know how the breakdown of society makes itself felt for you, but if it's through news: take a sabbatical from news. The important stuff ("the sky is falling") will still reach you, but all the stuff that's not immediately relevant to you (i.e. everything not happening in a 30m radius around your home) isn't, and can't stress you out.
There is no 'safety net' anymore: many things are either closed or handling Corona. This is what I mean by breakdown of society.
I was expecting that I'd be dwelling deep with all of those side projects that I was craving to do on work days instead of solving semi to not-at-all exciting problems for a company. Found out that those were mostly escapistic fantasies to regain my creative mind under the time and stress pressures.
Now I enjoy living simply. I feel better mentally and physically. Interesting to see where this will go. Maybe I'll eat the hustle fruit some day and start grinding - this idea that dictated my adult life seems very alien for me now.
On topic though, I think that to the extent the New Yorker is describing the subset of technical work that many HN participants are engaged in, burn out was already a big problem pre-pandemic. So it's not a complete surprise for burnout to be on the rise during a such a global level catastrophe, even though many in tech have done well for themselves with steady high salary throughout the duration of the pandemic
I used to go to work with my dad and we'd bust out torches and welders and saws and compressors. Neither of my kids had anything beyond a passing interest in computers and my job (infosec) is completely invisible to them. There are definitely rewarding parts of the vocation and I'm still glad I'm in it, but visceral satisfaction can be difficult to find.
I don't know what this has to do with anything lol.
I also think that there will be some price to pay in terms of inflated pay packages and promotions people are getting these days. Some are warranted, some not.
While I've pay disequilibrium and imbalance before, never to this extent. When business cycle shifts and economy turns, the extent of layoff will be far greater.
Soo much this! There's always going to be boom and bust cycles. And you know you're going to get screwed in the 'bust' cycles. The only question is, will you take full advantage of the 'boom' cycles.
I'd like to take some time off and decompress. Travel a little, learn a few things and eventually work on my side projects but the world being closed is a big mental blocker as that doesn't permit free travel.
Waiting for the world to open up so that I can sell everything and buy a 1 way ticket to Bali. Don't see it happening anytime soon though.
Asia is fully closed. That's due to their culture. Latin America is fully open, due to the same reason. The Covid restrictions map is the new map of the world. Pick a green spot and go.
The famous shared culture of 3 billion people. /s
Not sure which countries you were looking at, but there are some where they do not have sufficient supplies of vaccines. That might be why they're closed to visitors.
While it's not related to COVID and remote work that much, not being able to spend the earned money on fun activities for sure put an extra question-mark in the "why am I doing this again?"
Wow. That last sentence really resonates.
In an achievement society, a subject is kinda like in a self-feedback loop. She/He are constantly reinventing their personality, profession, and beliefs. There is no solid self-image formed due to constant updates. He says this is largely because we live in an over-positivized world. Where there is no room for negativity and hence anything that is negative ceases to exist due to the way it is presented [4]. So, if your job is not working it is not anybody's problem but yours. So go do a masterclass in reactjs and stop being a philosopher. Then you do some personal branding, then hustle on twitter posting threads like "5 cool react plugins" or "Javascript or Typescript?". But we essentially tend to be stuck in that solitary, "I can do it". He says:
> “The modal verb that determines achievement society is not the Freudian Should, but Can”
Hence, we seem to be always in this Can state, without rest, even in our states of rest we are presenting our rest as images on social media to achieve. That philosophically is not rest. Modern human never rest. He is constantly producing. But, there is a kind of gratification crisis this leads to and one never achieves anything. He says :
> “Instead, the feeling of having achieved a goal never occurs. It is not that the narcissistic subject does not want to achieve closure. Rather, it is incapable of getting there.”
and eventually people get depressed due to this constant 'need of initiative'.
I am sorry, I explained it pretty bad. It seems written like an absolute thing but there are complications. Please do read the book (just 72 pages) and watch the documentary. It is not a supreme explanation but some bits kind a ring bell to be as I have been living in a kind of perpetual tiredness lately. Cheers and have a good day!
[1] https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25725
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNkDeUApreo
You've read the cliche reasons for doing this kind of thing many times before, and honestly I don't think this newyorker article is saying anything very different.
My additional, edgy, uncensored reason: I couldn't shake the feeling that I was picking up the check for everybody else. I was paying very high taxes to essentially finance crazy government overreach, only to later lose the value of what's remaining to inflation due to all the money printing.
But you just said that the job you had overpaid you anyway so I don't really understand your point here.
The Author says that like its a bad thing. My open office can shove it, not going back.
"After being in the industry for 15 years, I still do not have a good short answer for what environmental consultants do."
That quote alone says it all. These people are not satisfied because they don't have a real job, they have a bullshit job, and they know it.
The others are more of the same, you have a "coach" of the obvious that even him doesn't practice what he preaches and a member of "multiple projects and committees" that complains about wasting time all day talking with no focus or clear purpose.
They get pay to pretend to work all day by pushing papers, write endless jargon-ridden nonsense and, of course, attending endless meetings.
https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh...
"In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005."
[edit] Link to the paper discussed by the article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
Part of Graeber's argument, too, is that many of us are employed doing useful jobs in service of others who have useless jobs. Think of all the office staff, product designers, marketers, janitors, factory workers hired by Juicero, for instance. They all had meaningful jobs in service of a product that should never had existed.
I also don't think that Graeber's standard is unfair -- making a meaningful contribtion to the world is quite a low bar for something we spend our entire lives doing for 8hr/day.
Besides, a useless job may be done by an employee who is unable or unwilling to realize it -- "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it". It's really tough to find meaningful work that pays a living wage, so many of us try to find small amounts of meaning in the jobs that we have. It doesn't make our jobs any less useless, though.
It gets worse for Graeber's thesis. The next paragraph from the ones previously quoted:
"Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers."
So not only are his numbers pretty poor his thesis gets the numbers the wrong way around for those who feel their jobs are of little value.
Link to the paper :
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
As for janitors feeling like their jobs are meaningless and office workers feeling meaningful, I'd say that's a reflection of our culture. Universities are full of administrators with fancy titles who probably feel very important, but it's not clear their presence furthers the very important goal of education.
I'm aware of Graeber's work but haven't read it, so I'm sidestepping it and focusing on your comment here. So what is a meaningful contribution to the world? I've thought about that, and narrowed it down as best I can.
I have a simple list for defining meaningful work: 1) work that gives life-providing help to others (e.g., teachers or physical therapists); 2) working on problems of existence (e.g., medical research); 3) make art.
As I've outlined it, most of us are not doing meaningful work, myself included. Certainly, any criteria for meaningful work necessitates a bunch of not-meaningful work for support—"the office staff, product designers, marketers, janitors, factory workers," etc. you mentioned—but that comparatively low number of people actually doing meaningful work suggests (if my criteria are valid) it's a rather high bar.
I would still write code if not paid for it. I just wouldn’t write code for you. I am paid to use my code writing interests for your goals.
I have no interest in ever being a toilet paper salesman and would never try to hawk toilet paper in my free time. You need to pay me a lot to do that.
Sounds reasonable. My understanding is that Graeber's work concentrates on what Marx described as "alienation of labour", where people are sufficiently specialised that they don't draw satisfaction from their work any more. Some of these bullshit jobs are probably actually useful, but if it makes the worker feel like this then it still has the same ruinous effect on them, and to a point, society. In this case, feelings can trump facts.
As to the “back to basics” movement, I followed this path, bought myself a laughably cheap home (<€50k) in a laughably cheap country (<€20 tax per year), and while I no longer have access to some of the services I once had, I couldn’t be happier. I do what the hell I want to, whenever the hell I want to. Agency is worth anything.
Over the past year, I have been contacted by a stampede of acquaintances, friends, their friends and acquaintances, who all want to do what we’ve done. Most work in tech, in meaningful senior roles. Rural property prices have suddenly rocketed both here and in my country of origin.
Yeah, it’s mostly apocryphal, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, but I think people are just realising that they are miserable, and spending time doing crafts and outdoorsy stuff has made them realise that these things feed the soul.
I've been out of a job most of the pandemic and am now working at a marketing company that did just that.
We are required to be present in the office but people do everything (even HR issues) over Slack and e-mail. It's mindnumbingly dumb.