Job-hopping heats up: 65% of U.S. workers are looking for a new job
fortune.com
fortune.com
The media tried to portray a lot of pandemic trends as one-way changes to our society and economies, but so far I’ve been surprised at how quickly everything has been snapping back to pre-pandemic normalcy after the temporary disruptions work their way through the systems. This goes for everything from lumber prices to work from home policies. Everything feels slightly altered, but trending back to pre-pandemic norms.
I expect to pay slightly more for lumber and have slightly more work from home options, but it hasn’t been the sea change of forever elevated prices and everyone working from home forever like it was portrayed months ago. I suspect this job-hopping trend will likewise calm down once things re-establish equilibrium.
The quit rate is up because it's as if workers had all agreed not to quit when the covid situation was more unknown (like what we're walking into.) If you had a nice, safe work-from-home gig that you hated, during a time of disease, risking the job was not smart until you started to see how covid was going to work itself out. Once you've gotten a good idea of that, 1) you've been working for a job you would have long quit if covid hadn't happened, and/or 2) you're working at a job that you kept because it kept you safely at home, but is now demanding that you come back into the office. The benefit of working from home (against the risk of working outside the home) has a compensation value.
We're reentering covid uncertainty, and I imagine that we'll react in the same way, only less so (because we're a little smarter.)
That said, my totally anecdotal impression is that there's more than average moving around.
I'm a quant trader, so I've got a foot in tech and a foot in finance. Both are heaving at the moment, recruiters calling all the time, salaries much higher than just a few months ago.
I'm not sure what it looks like at the entry level end, but for experienced hires it's busy. I speak to a lot of recruiters, and they're having vintage years most of them, eg hitting billing targets in Q2 for the whole year.
One job I passed on took a friend on my recommendation. Another few are in the pipeline at other firms. I can't remember a time when so many people I know were moving jobs.
I expect I'll die at my current job.
As the sibling said, you can post in the HN who's hiring and who's looking to get hired threads.
At least a good enough job that there's no way I can easily cut into their market share or take some of their clients without significant outside funding.
Still, at this point I'm almost willing to just try it and off myself when it doesn't work out and I'm broke. Looking at job ads right now is incredibly depressing.
In my limited sampling, Stripe and VMWare stand out as big companies you've probably heard of where the coding challenge felt closer to "help us verify you've been writing software professionally for a while" and further from "prove you could still pass an advanced undergraduate exam on data structures and algorithms". I'm sure both those co.s are large enough that your experience may vary, but it made me hopeful that our long dark winter of perpetually drilling intermediate to advanced algorithms coursework is ending.
Remote also allows you to interview a lot, so if there's some hiring process that's not for you, no big deal.
DS& (common) A isn't a problem at its core (as least as far as I am concerned - I'm comfortable that I am able to pick the right one given the scenario, describe why, etc.), but where it becomes a problem for me is when I'm inevitably asked to reproduce some esoteric (for example) binary tree or graph algorithm on the spot, in 30 minutes, with no errors.
I tried to search the sites that aggregate roles that specifically do not use them, but your options become really thin when you filter for remote. I’ve already been ATS screened out of some of the better looking companies in that category.
When I was at university a lot of people studied hard for somewhat bullshit exams that had little relevance to the work they we’re expecting to be doing for the rest of their lives. And people paid the university for the privilege of getting to take those exams. The purpose of this studying was achieving good grades and the value of these grades was an increased expected value for lifetime earnings. But this value is probably lower than naively looking at statistics would suggest: ambitious, hardworking, or clever students were more likely to do well in exams and those people would likely do well later in life too even if they had food poisoning and failed their exams.
In comparison, it seems to me that job interviewing costs a lot less than getting a degree and the payoff is potentially larger, more direct, and more immediate. It seems that the pain of studying and practicing bullshit leetcode questions is outweighed by the benefit of, say, a 50% pay rise or equivalent quality of life improvement, and I don’t think a moral stance against leetcode is strong enough to justify turning down such opportunities.
But maybe you feel more strongly about this moral position than me. Or maybe you are one of those competent people who can’t do well at this sort of interview even with studying and practice. Certainly such people exist.
To lend some credence to the former (the morals) - I have succeeded at leetcode hazefests in the past. I've worked at two mega-cap tech companies, and the last time I seriously interviewed (half a decade ago...) I was successful at multiple companies (all of which took each and every interview session from a page of leetcode, or if I was really "lucky", CtCI)
So I expect if I could get over the depression (not likely) I could probably prepare and maybe even succeed. But even then I don't think it's something I'm willing to give on, even though the rewards for myself would likely be substantial.
(Similarly, I also refuse to interview candidates at my current employer, as they insist on the same thing)
My thought is: If this is how these companies treat people they actually want to hire, I wonder how they treat people after they're hired?
Thank you for your service! I'm not the smartest person I know (though I'm fairly smart) but grinding leetcode is not beneath me. It was really hard with the burnout, and the many years since taking the DS&A class in university, but solving that class of problems is satisfying; the way solving puzzles, or a Rubik's cube is - once you get the hang of it.
Smart people not bending the knee to Leetcode meant less competition for me when I was doing my interviewing rounds a few months ago. I managed to double my compensation. Hell, I'd do it all over again in exchange for the cheapest Tesla, or $40k once-off, but I now get to earn ridiculous amounts of money for years to come.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
> Do you have any recommendations how long to prep for a leetcode style interview?
This entirely depends on your starting level on Data Structures & Algorithms, and how much time you can set aside per week, but be warned though: it is a grind - I had to give up other hobbies for 6 close to 2 months (I'm not very smart, and I wasn't aiming for the most challenging tier of interviewers, YMMV). Once you've done enough questions (dozens or low hundreds), you start to recognize patterns and get a hunches for avenues to explore when solving.
I'd recommend "Cracking the Coding Interview" book, leetcode and/or hackerrank for practice as well as searching for YouTube for specific algorithms/structures that you find challenging - I struggled a bit with dynamic programming at first (speaking of which, know the class of questions your target companies ask so you don't waste effort). You can monitor your progress by timing yourself on how long it will take you to complete "easy" or "medium" (depending on competitiveness of company you're shooting for, you can time 1 easy + 1 medium, or 2 mediums, or 1 hard + 1 medium within about 50 minutes).
I was a bit fortunate, I actually applied to be a derivatives trader out of uni. Which I did, but I ended up in a hedge fund, which was a type of firm I'd never heard of until the day I started working in one. I started reading a LOT of stuff about it.
The mid-2000s were a bit of a golden age for hedge funds, and investors were just throwing money at them. I went to a lot of investment meetings where I wondered what on earth we'd said that was so attractive.
At one point my boss in a derivs fund told me there was too much money, and that we needed to find something to do with it. By this time I'd read a bit about automated trading, and I figured some sort of strategy utilizing computers to trade would be the thing to do. So the boss decided to have me hire quants and devs to do this, and I've been in that area since. Pretty unique position to be honest, most people don't do it this way, and they don't get to just hire a team while in their mid 20s. Good learnings though.
Busy doesn't mean hiring, it just means they are sending candidates continuously (to fail).
The reality is that high finance is extremely competitive. The positions are few. The candidates are many.
My experience is that trading firms can easily sift through ten qualified candidates to make one hire. They complain about how difficult it is to hire, but they fail to acknowledge the endless stream of qualified candidates they rejected.
P.S. Entry level is a slaughterhouse. Could be hundreds of candidates, who all come from top schools and pass dynamic programming exercises.
Sure it looks like a cheap PR thing but this definitely is a symptom of heated market for employees.
[1] https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/this-ind...
The nice thing about the external recruiters I talk to is they are all up front about total comp, and their own comp depends on the new employee's comp, so they know...
Crypto firms are in a massive hiring frenzy. Few hundred k salary (usd 250 to 500), nearly 1m in tokens for a manager role. But of course you gotta decide what those tokens really are worth, whether you actually believe in the project, and whether you care for crypto at all.
For traditional startups the range depends a lot on the stage they're at. There seem to be quite a few who think they can get a CTO for usd130k plus a few percent equity. I'm not sure what quality you'd get for that but I guess at the next funding round you'd get a bump, and of you end up in a hyper growth startup you're golden.
Finance, as a senior IC who can code you're maybe looking at 200k salary and perhaps half that bonus. That's assuming you don't get a cut of the profits. There are of course some shops where they'd pay way more than that, maybe double. There seem to be a few small name firms that pay similar to Jane Street.
Naturally if you find a seat with a cut of the book, that can shoot up. Ordinary cut is a range as well, anything from 10 to 35% has been touted. TC would depend on how much capital you get allocated and how well you do with it. Somewhere like millennium has a reputation for paying well while things are good, then cutting the team on a pretty tight stop loss (like 3%) in a month. Funnily enough the recruiter told me they were trying to lose that reputation, so maybe it changed. But they're definitely doing things to attract people, eg they are supposedly very relaxed about paying a salary for a year while you develop the strategy.
I see many people trying to spin this as a unilateral win for workers, but the subtext is that many of them are afraid that they have no choice but to seek higher wages just to keep up with their expenses.
My rent alone went up something like 20%. Look at gas. Or wood. Or food. It's like watching money slowly disappear. Here's hoping it really is transitory.
Your example is certainly atypical. BLS says rent is up 1.9% YOY.
> Look at gas
Mostly correct, up 42% YOY.
> Or wood
Can't find the BLS stats for this, probably because the amount of lumber the median household buys is approximately zero.
> Or food
BLS says it's up 2.6% YOY. Are you sure something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic isn't messing with your perception?
New York-Newark-Jersey City: down 0.2% YOY
Los Angeles area: up 0.8% YOY
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin: up 2.9% YOY
all figures from https://www.bls.gov/regions/subjects/consumer-price-indexes....
By wealthy, I mean top 10-15% of salaries, not any of the definitions that people in the top 10-15% of salaries cook up to make themselves seem working class.
As for wood, I agree not everyone is out buying lumber. But that affects lots of things. Have you priced out a shed, fixing a deck, or new run of fence? It also apparently affects furniture and such to some degree. New home builders near me were putting huge 'lumber' addendums on their previous pricing.
Food is a little trickier. Grocery just 'feels' more expensive, but admittedly, I don't have any data to back that up. I can certainly cede that point.
So rents in large metros are going down and rents in small areas are going up.
How is that only "mostly" correct?
That is high, many companies were still 3-5% in 2021, hard to predict what 2022 will look like but I am not expecting much in as many companies seem to not understand that is happening in the market...
And you speak as if everyone lives paycheck to paycheck. Tech workers definitely don’t
You speak like your personal experience is everybody's. Comes off as pretty arrogant.
The parent comment paints the picture that everyone is experiencing financial hardship owing to worldwide cost of living surge (when did that happen?) and that people look for a new job as soon at cost of living increases as if that is how career decisions are often made (solely to keep up with inflation)
Any CEO that complains about losing talent, but then locks the total salaries budget at no more than 3-5% year over year growth is not serious about talent retention...
Average salary in San-Francisco for developers: $175.036
Average salary in Germany for developers: 61.176 Euro
That's 2.5 times more than in Germany. Please also note that many products like gas, electricity, laptops, smartphones are cheaper in the US, despite much higher salaries.
The business culture of the SF tech scene demands long hours and intensity that most Europeans cannot imagine, having not lived in the environment.
American wages come with sacrifice.
And there are actually plenty of crappy jobs with overtime in Germany too. Lower pay does not always mean less expectations.
You can work as hard as you feel like, charging generous hourly rates.
Just don't be surprised when big corp decides to consolidate external contractors into more well known contracting companies, delivering from Eastern Europe or Asia.
Because the overall market skews towards lower salaries, even multinationals and the few local tech companies that exist there can pay less in Berlin.
Pay is also generally higher in the US, though usually not to this extent.
US SWEs have it much better than Germans across the whole country, there's no need to deny that. Berlin is also a bit of a bubble.
Fist, SF salaries are high as is cost of living. Perhaps compare to Dallas. Or even Toronto.
Then there's social insurance aka pension. A SE in the US I'd assume to have healthcare (caveat - as long as in employment). An in terms of private investment such as stocks, the German stock market is quite different from the US one in terms of composition (as companies raising funds tend to use different means) hence future asset-liability matching. And a fair bit harder to do your own company (and VC funding) in Germany due to 'esoteric' tax requirements for companies (including but not limited to needing to pay tax in advance).
Some peoples value other things than money so it is a bit silly to just talk about $$$. What about housing costs, commute, healthcare, quality of life, etc of the _general_ population (and not only developers)?
Money isn't everything in life, and depending on the case it doesn't even buy health.
From a quick search, electricity in Germany seems cheaper than in California.
And then there's vacations, work-life balance, health care, education.
Raw salary figures don't tell the story.
I'm paying close to $30K in health care costs, that's assuming nothing out of the ordinary. If something bad happens it can be in the millions, bankrupting entire life savings.
If I'm lucky I can squeeze in one week of vacation a year (that's what silicon valley "unlimited vacation" means). Meanwhile I have family in Austria taking 6-8 weeks of vacation every year.
But finding a place with European levels of vacation? Impossible. I'd give anything to work 25% of my hours for 25% of the pay, but such jobs don't exist.
And US healthcare problems of course can't be changed by changing jobs (I've had the exact same Blue Shield PPO plan across 7 employers in the previous decade+).
My entire career I've been "looking" for a new job. I only change jobs once every 4+ years, but I'm always looking in case a better opportunity comes up and to help me level set and make sure my current job is a good one. Almost all of the time when I see an interesting job I do nothing, sometimes I ask some questions. Once a year or so it turns into an informal "info call" and maybe once every two years or so an actual interview might happen.
But it doesn't mean anything until I actually switch jobs. In almost every case, even when I get to the interview stage, I confirm for myself that my current job is better and do nothing.
If you're sitting out there at around 1 or 2 years at the same place, definitely consider it. There is the risk you end up somewhere worse, but just hop again after a few months. Invariably you'll be asked about it in your next interview, but be honest and describe the last position as misrepresented to you and a waste of your skills and you'll be fine.
Some jobs need about 1 year to learn the environment or job enough to even be effective.
You should absolutely be changing roles every 2-4 years though either via internal promotion at a larger org, or changing to other organizations
We live in interesting times.
I don't know about broken systems and all that though. I think a lot of people are just rethinking things, they feel in a rut with the pandemic, they can interview without traveling, etc.
ADDED: There are also people that don't like what their employer's return to office (or not) plans look like.
That’s quite a leap. These people aren’t quitting their jobs and exiting the workforce.
They’re looking for other jobs that might have incrementally better pay. This is a combined result of inflationary pressures, a booming economy, and a lot of people who have been removed from the workforce for a variety of reasons (COVID, enhanced and extended unemployment, needing to stay home and care for kids).
I don’t think there’s much evidence that this is some overarching societal shift or rising up of the working class. It’s just standard, expected behavior in low unemployment, high inflation environments. The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, for now at least. The situation will change again when the supply and demand shifts in the other direction.
Then there’s remote/wfh workers. With more companies adopting wfh and some high profile companies not wanting to adopt it, the right incentives are created to job hop. The vacancies created have to be filled and the spiral starts.
In both these instances, breaking the inertia is enough to disrupt this fragile balance that companies were exploiting to keep wages and salaries down. When the line breaks (a few companies caving), the entire defence that “this is what market pays” comes crumbling down.
You’ve got it backwards. The concept of “market rate” is at the core of why this is happening in the first place. Market rate is going up, which is driving these changes.
Market rate isn’t a myth that business owners use to suppress wages. It’s literally just the rate that the market will bear for a given type of labor. Supply and demand of labor and jobs shifts this point around like any other supply/demand curve.
labor force participation rate is still down. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28215646
>based on data from eight countries, is that employment in the rich world is 3% below its pre-pandemic high
Right, but we’re talking about the people who are job hopping (the context of this article) for higher salaries.
The people who haven’t rejoined the workforce yet would be forced to do so if the inflationary trend continues.
The economy was given a massive dose of Radiation and is currently in the walking Ghost phase....
it is not "booming" it is a false rebound propped up by money printer go brrrr and when reality sets in 2008 is going to look like a beach vacation...
When banks purchase these assets, cash is handed to entities selling these assets. Since there's A LOT of money to be loaned, banks are bidding against each other on such assets and to hand out loans asap.
This is causing inflation. And yes, it's only hidden because you are rich. Ask someone making $30k a year how they are feeling about the "minor" inflation
The other leader in CPI is from cars, which also have a supply-side bottleneck unrelated to government bailouts. Supply chain issues in other areas are also contributing to price increases.
I'm not saying that government money isn't having any impact, but if you look at where the price increases dominate, there are reasons that explain price increases much more fully.
The Money Printing inflation is coming. The inflation from money printing today is almost all in Stock market right now as people took a lot of the money and either saved it (which institutions then invested it) , or invested it, This can be seen in the Money supply charts...
Watch though, as the supply chain issues get resolved over the next 12-24 months, people will start spending that Printed money, then you will see a second more sustained wave of inflation...
That's literally exactly what the government did.
With location no longer constraining either recruiters or job seekers, everybody's got more options now, and the increased competition is working to the employee's favor.
In a comment above, PragmaticPulp wrote "I’ve been surprised at how quickly everything has been snapping back to pre-pandemic normalcy after the temporary disruptions".
That's what I see too. But it's also clear that the government pushed trillions of dollars of stimulus into the economy, some of which went straight to the workers, and this leaves many workers, especially the poorest workers, with more leverage than they've had in decades.
The era 1932-1968 is sometimes broadly referred to as the New Deal era, a period of progressive reform. We don't have a name for the era 1968-2008, but it was an era when there was an emphasis on limiting government, cutting taxes, opening borders, catering to corporate needs -- a bundle of policies that some people call "neoliberal". For the sake of argument, let's call that the neoliberal era.
Since 2008 the old neoliberal consensus has been falling apart. Trump ran as a populist, Biden was elected promising progressive policies, Trump and Biden collectively pushed through several trillion dollars of stimulus. Biden has put in place a $300-a-month cash payment for each child a family has.
So I'd argue, if there has been a change that feels permanent, it is a political change. If we're moving into an era where the government pushes money directly to individual workers, then we're moving into an era when workers are going to have more leverage than they've had since the end of the post war boom, back in 1973.
You can ask for benefits such as permanent wfh, vacation before starting, extra stock, signing bonuses.
You could even tell them upfront that you will not do a take home, if you don't want to. Or if they have to have a take home, ask for compensation or to reduce one coding round.
I know programmers in the US and 300k remote jobs aren't falling from the sky.
They sort of are. I guess you're right you might not stumble upon it accidentally but a fairly average programmer can get 300k remote if they have 3-4 years of experience and seek it out. FB, Twitter, Dropbox, Stripe and Instacart (plus probably a number of others) will all pay this much or more for remote.
I could get a lot of teeth pulled privately for $300,000 USD a year.
EDIT: Actually in NZ you have to get that done privately anyway
Just curious. Everyone talks about wages going up, but no one says what those wages are supposed to be.
That said, I do think it's generally easier to find a job when you already have one. That also puts you in a stronger negotiation position (although getting multiple competing offer could be a way to mitigate the latter).
Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of hiring going on the at the moment. I sit on a hiring committee at a FAANG and things have been very busy, though this could also be due to lots of committee members being on vacation.
Plus I can guarantee the home cooked meal is going to be awesome, whereas the eating out is a gamble, I have no idea what financial constraints the restaurant is under and what corners they are cutting.
So that is where you are getting that number, which isn't reflected in any actual data from the BLS.
I currently am burning all ~12 weeks of my accumulated vacation days as a "leave of absence" as I look for another job as a pure software engineer. I do software in my day job but we don't keep up with the software industry trends like Docker etc. so I'm having to learn that on top of grinding Leetcode.
Yeah this is the thing that kills me. I have limited energy. Do I waste it all leetcoding or trying to learn the tools that jobs are asking for.
If that makes you feel any better, they are at less risk now than before pandemics. For children under 5, COVID is less dangerous than flu, and thanks to COVID changes in travel and behavior patterns, flu is pretty much nonexistent. If you weren’t worrying about your children getting flu, you shouldn’t worry much about them getting COVID. Hope that makes you feel better.
I don’t think people realize how much fear and anger there is under the surface. People don’t move their families for fun, they do so for opportunity.
The New York City vaccine mandate alone is massive. There’s no medical exemption and impacts employees and consumers alike.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/restaurants-gyms-suing-y...
I won’t comment on effectiveness or anything else, but a lot of people aren’t vaccinated. It’s not worth it and many people will leave.
Even before the vaccine stuff, one of the big factors in my change of job was all the protesting and politics and extremism. It's pretty easy to just keep your head down and go through the motions, and I expect that's what most do. But given the choice, I'd rather "bring my whole self to work" which includes holding and discussing opinions in a non- fanatical manner and not being forced to, as you say, signal my alignment with non-work related groupthink.
For example, I don't use drugs but I would not work somewhere that subjected me to a drug test. It's no different than being vaccinated but not agreeing to share that information with my work or anyone else that asks. The first opinion seems acceptable for now, the second gets me called an anti-vaxxer