Who Is Driving the Great Resignation? | Hacker News Reader

Who Is Driving the Great Resignation?

hbr.org

63 pointsrbanffy118 comments

My own personal data point is that, with COVID, some tech companies are embracing remote work and suddenly I can enter a much wider and higher paid job market without having to relocate.

Companies that aim to get butts back in the office are going to have a huge brain drain.

The opposite effect could be in play here too: remote employees feel less connected to their team and are more willing to quit.

Anecdotally, I've seen 4 people leave for career advancement versus 1 that left due to wanting to be in the office.

Theres a peer pressure factor.

While i was personally relieved to be back in office. I have also seen a few colleagues able to jump to more lucrative deals without uprooting their lives, which i find a bit intriguing. Im happy where I am at, but I have done a lot of good work (basically recycled our entire infra and migrated to a WFH culture) and havent seen a raise in 3-4 years..

So it has me thinking of putting feelers out when i otherwise probably wouldnt. Doesnt help that I was snubbed for a role that I was ASKED to apply for by one of the hiring comittee members and didnt even get an interview internally. So I know where I stand.

If you’re not getting a cost of living raise each year, you’re effectively being paid less … as you become more experienced.

Oh yeah completely agree. And its frustrating. I built a team from a group that had seem near 100% turnover over the previous 3 years. I have gotten at least 1-2 of them promotions.

I transitioned them to more of a "devops" style roles, pushing hard on Automation, documentation, removing silos and cut a lot of their big time suck things like refreshing non-prod environments down from 1 week to around 45 minutes. Even in the lead up to the pandemic, we saw a WFH demand coming, recognized we lacked the VPN capacity to do so and used FOSS tools to spin up mutliple new VPNs to handle a couple different security boundaries in a matter of hours to allow many to work from home.

We have rebuilt a lot of the "bones" of our infrastructure from day 1, mostly in our virtualization stack and DB's etc. And most of my team had gained some trust in my decision making. Externally we generally get really solid remarks in our ability to support staff/products and our resposniveness.

On the one hand I kind of know why i was snubbed for the job. Im younger (in my 30's) and it was a higher level role. And i have spent the core of my early career moving every 3-4 years as trends change to allow me to rebuild new things rather than "tending sheep" which im sure some saw as more a flight risk in a position where the previous holder was there for 30 years. It also came at a cost as I floated from more virtualization/storage roles to networking and then security centric leaving me more of a "master of none" in the eyes of many.

That notion is a large part of what has kept me here. Im relatively happy and i do feel I probably need to have a few more years of "stability" under my belt. But at what cost. I dont live in a tech center like the bay area, nor do i have any desire to. But that brings its own cultural differences.

The pandemic seems to have changed much of that. I would now be able to stay where I'm happy, in a relatively small town that lacks a "major" tech sector but possibly see a larger bump in compensation and get some more challenging or fulfilling roles offered. My current company, including my boss, seems to think I am here for the long term...I just am not so sure myself.

Again this is totally anecdotal, but I can totally see why others would be thinking the same way.

Feeling disconnected from the team because you're all remote doesn't necessarily mean you want to be in the office.

I think it's more like... you aren't as loyal to the team and company and so make career moves for personal or professional reasons that you might have delayed otherwise.

Heh this is actually a pretty good thing.

The fact that I hadn't seen my coworkers in a year made it easier to switch. No denying that. Loved my previous workplace, great people, great work. They went above and beyond in all matters. Would probably not have risked a move in normal circumstances.

Just a personal anecdote, I feel way closer to my current coworkers (who I've only met in person twice) than at my first job where I simply didn't have much in common with any of my coworkers. If you really click then you can get along online, but if you work with someone in-person, there's no escape if you don't like them.

One slight variation on remote: last year we learned which companies are loyal to, and value, employees. Plenty of companies released people preemptively, simply to make a couple of quarters look good.

If the relationship is going to be that minimally frangible, people will hesitate to relocate to a company town at great impact to their family, only to repeat every time a shadow crosses some book.

Remote people can have some defensive stability.

> If the relationship is going to be that minimally frangible, people will hesitate to relocate to a company town at great impact to their family, only to repeat every time a shadow crosses some book.

Most tech jobs are not in single-company towns, they are in tech hubs, which have a large number of alternative employers.

There are large companies in small towns with need for tech workers. If you move to Columbus, Georgia to work for Aflac's IT department (which is quite large) and then lose that job, you're going to have a difficult time finding something equivalent nearby. There are other local employers with IT needs but nothing on the scale of Aflac. At that point, you probably have to pick up your family and move closer to Atlanta to find similar work and compensation.

That is correct, and it is correct that remote people have a moat against this sort of mercenary behaviour by their employers.

This moat is a lot less relevant if you are relocating to an industry hub, though. If you are having a hard time getting a new job in Seattle, San Francisco, or NYC, it's probably because the entire industry is contracting, and remote won't save you.

Is this technically true? Is there data on this? Just speaking for myself as a resident of Ohio, there are plenty of tech jobs between Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland. Not as many as in the tech hubs, but there are forty-seven states that aren't California, New York, or Washington.

I imagine it also depend a lot on what you want to do. If you're equally happy working on whatever as long as you get to code then there are lots of jobs available all over the country/world. If you have a specific niche or specialty and want to stay within your sub field, or you want to work in a job lets you be more research focused, then being in the right hub is much more vital.

There are, indeed, forty-seven states that aren't California, New York, or Washington, but California's economy alone is bigger than the economies of the 25 smallest states (plus DC) combined.

Tech has the additional factor of companies using their billions of dollars sitting around unproductively to entrap their companies.

Some of the cloud companies acquire talent to keep their customers trapped. I have colleagues who are system administrators and are getting $500k comp as individual contributors, way in excess of their value. One bank junior vp type guy got a 3x pay increase, because he knew where the bodies were buried for a major cloud implementation.

I read it as "huge butt drain" since you talked a about butts in chairs. :)

Google just bought a pretty expensive office though..

I would go insane if I had to stay home all day everyday.

I don't advocate for full office neither, a hybrid model like 3 days home 2 days office, or whatever combination of this I think is the way to go.

Also, a lot of people forget that the World is not comprised of just office workers. There are jobs that simply can't be done from home.

I love how asking people why they are leaving is not on the list. Instead it's gathering metrics and data. If you treat people like numbers, that's sort of the explaination right there. Anything to avoid actually building a working relationship.

Asking why they leave is risky. You might learn things you don't want to learn.

Standard advice is to be falsely positive in exit interviews. The internet is awash with guides to not burning bridges etc.

This 100%.

Sorry but I'm probably not going to tell you all the reasons I'm leaving or the issues I see with the company. I have no intention of coming back but I won't burn the bridge on my way out or sour any chance of a good referral down the line. Also companies are notoriously bad at hearing anything negative (no matter how true) about themselves. I'm leaving, so I have no interest in getting into a fight/argument or being gaslit on my way out.

I mentioned this in a sister thread as well, but I totally agree. A lot of companies really do not want to hear criticism, no matter how much they say they do.

On an individual level, I've had managers that I genuinely do trust, and with them I probably would give honest feedback, but sadly none of those managers have ever actually conducted my official "exit interview".

At my company, the bridge auto-ignites behind you. They blacklist you. They also won't provide referenced nor allow manager to give you one.

I suspect that may not be legal?

Which part and why?

Yikes, run!

Nowhere for me to run.

I want honest feedback from the exit interview- it's the only way we can improve as a team you leaving, and the way you performed and conducted yourself while working on the team has a far higher weighting for me than what you say to HR on the way out.

Not saying this happening to you :) but it's too late for you or that person.

Meaning that person most likely has been suggesting fixes/complaining (to you 1-1) about 'X' which you have control or 'Y' which you do not.

If it's 'X' (you can control), then it's your fault for not stepping up and fixing it. Expecting someone to summarize everything they've been saying to you for a year (just read your 1-1 notes) is not cool.

If it's Y, then there's nothing you can do or say, to convince the person to stay.

It's mostly correct IMHO, that people leave companies because of managers and their inability to listen or write notes in their 1-1.

Yep my dad drilled that one into me. Every exit interview I have done is the same exact script. I really was not looking I am quite happy here but this was to good of opportunity to turn down.

Just to hammer this home, at my last job, I was planning to transition out slowly, wrap up projects, document, etc. I gave some actionable feedback when they asked why I was leaving in the meeting to discuss that transition.

I think it was along the lines of “you now have 2 engineers and 8 people managing those engineers. It seems you have a retention problem and are management heavy. You also have some great engineers you promoted to management who likely have something to do with the bad retention. Maybe they should start coding again.”

I was fired on the spot. Gave me a month to leetcode grind, so I can’t complain.

It is. And this answer is why I alluded to exit interviews. Understanding the structural reasons why this standard advice exists is the first step in a line of questioning that leads to some uncomfortable conclusions for HR and businesses, but on the same turn that makes it precisely why it should be investigated.

My first tech job I quit and was rather blunt when explaining to my boss what I thought of him and the job. Less than 2 years later I found myself sitting opposite the same boss in a job interview at a different company.

You need both. It's important to see the forest through the trees, but it's also helpful to not run into the tree right in front of you.

Someone on YouTube made an interesting point that what we’re seeing is people quitting jobs they would have left much earlier, but couldn’t because of the pandemic. Basically a lot of people deferred quitting in 2020 and now the 2020 batch is quitting with the 2021 batch.

Yes, the article you're commenting on already makes that point :)

    It’s also possible that many of these mid-level employees may have delayed transitioning out of their roles due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, meaning that the boost we’ve seen over the last several months could be the result of more than a year’s worth of pent-up resignations.

I gradually dropped out a few years ago. I worked my way up in tech, wearing many different hats, for about 20 years, to a three-page resume and being able to find a six-figure job at the drop of a hat.

But the trade-off was not getting enough sleep, and feeling like my life's energy was being directed to making the world worse, not better. My work amounted to improving the efficiency of profit-making of the business, and getting a small piece of it to keep. I worked in finance supporting applications to facilitate MBS. I worked in advertising agencies to facilitate the sales of harmful products like petroleum and sugar water. All in all, my conscience was not clean.

Then there was the stress of arbitrary deadlines. And the constant disappointment of shipping something written haphazardly and then retired after a couple of years, replaced by another pile of crap.

It was a great learning experience. I think of it as university, where you also do a whole bunch of useless and pointless busywork in order to learn the skills. But eventually, it was time to go and move on.

I live primarily fregan lifestyle now, meaning I avoid using money as much as possible, for both ethical and practical reasons. I am generally able to sleep as much as I want, meditate as much as I want, and refactor my code as much as I want. I am almost never in a rush, and I feel much calmer and happier.

Was there any industries that you cared about and could apply tech to? That's usually a good way to go about it, instead of chasing money/profits.

For example: Clean energy, a non profit, etc.

I worked for a non-profit, and it was largely the same, minus the chasing profits part. The salary was lower, and perhaps the negative impact was smaller, but I did not feel a positive impact at all. It still felt like I was largely feeding and validating the same processes.

I don't know about others, but I just don't feel like I am designed for living the same schedule day in, day out, week in, week out, year in, year out, until I look back on it and wonder, where did all the time go?

And you know what, that feeling has gone away for me. I don't remember the last time I felt that "time is slipping away" feeling. In fact, I often feel the opposite: Things which happened just a day or two ago feel like several weeks have passed, and time has stretched out.

Interesting. I work in an area that I really enjoy (movies) as I consume the end product, and feels like I'm doing something to improve people's life. Of course there's many issues with the industry and whatnot, but still feels like my contributions are net positive to the world.

I'm OK with living on the same schedule and with routine, my work hours and days are super flexible so it isn't something that has been an issue.

Do you own your home?

As someone who just started looking, here is personal reasons:

* Major layoffs early in COVID meant more work for everyone not laid off

* Being run to death to implement new must-have features to keep the business going with the new COVID restrictions (different businesses saw this in their own ways - needing curbside pickup interfaces being a common one)

* Getting further into COVID, starting to hear how great business is doing with massive unforeseen profits - but not seeing any of those profits in my paycheck

* Not able to get approval to get back up to pre-covid staffing levels means everyone is continuing to be overworked

I haven't seen an exodus from my company, but there must be a larger one - as I've had a huge pipeline of new candidates lately that is great.

Others have mentioned a few things you can do and they seem to match with what my company has done:

1. Review salaries, pay more fast, retain who you have, there's a razor's edge and although money isn't everything it will definitely help in the very near term while you figure out other retention approaches.

2. Go fully remote. A lot of people want to be in offices, but very few will actually go given the option _right now_ - our office is empty, even when it's optionally allowed open. Pay consistent salaries. Let someone else figure out that regional salary stuff when the dust settles.

Another thing that seems important, but may just be a trend at my company: get specific with career development.

People joining your company now want to know how you will care for them long term. A large reason in my opinion for the exits is that folks are not willing to accept a company treating them like a contractor perpetually. They want to be invested in, see concrete growth and advancement. This is harder to do at small startups, but it's important for people to feel safe/stable during a weird criss.

Leaders are driving the Great Resignation.

My wife's employer not only expected people to return to the office 100%, but they moved their headquarters outside of the city center to a cheap property near an airport since WFH began.

Then they announced a couple weeks ago that there was mandatory return-to-office orders for mid-October, and I overheard on the Zoom call from one of their execs "I really should be seeing more smiles over this news".

In the past month they have lost half of their workforce.

It's absolutely bonkers that some employers don't realize that they have to respect and accomodate their employees. The pandemic is teaching the most heartless of leaders an important lesson on the reciprocal nature of humanity right now.

I have hired over a dozen people so far this year, and interviewed a substantial multiple of that.

About half of interviewees, when asked what they are looking for in a new position, answer some variant of: my current/old job wants us to come back to the office full-time.

Of course it's hard to say how permanent this all will be, what things will be like in a decade. But for now, requiring on-site work is a significant disadvantage in hiring and retention.

The focus in the article on mid-career people was interesting.

I wonder how many of those people are (finally?) realizing that hoping for advancement in the same company is the slow path for most people, and that taking your skills and experience somewhere else in a hot market is - all other things being equal - often a better option for your own career growth.

All things are not equal of course, so I'm sure it's more complex than that..

But anecdotally I know several mid-career people who have changed jobs in the last year in part because they had never bothered to look at what they could actually get with their skills and experience, and were shocked to find out they were seriously undervalued and underpaid at the job they had been at for many years.

I guess it depends on how you define "mid-career". If you assume people generally work from, say, 20 years old to 70 years old, mid-career would be about 45. As a 45-year old in tech, I can emphatically say, the days of switching jobs for a 10+% comp bump are long, long in my past. I remember my first job change was from $45K to $60k, an incredible +33%, but each subsequent hop has been significantly less, until my most recent job change which was around +0.5%. Most of us will reach a plateau, and I'd argue by mid-career (again, assuming in your 40s), you're finished hopping for advancement salary-wise.

EDIT because I can't reply: Got it--busted for not reading the article! Considering 30 year olds "mid career" makes me feel pretty old!

I meant "mid-career" as defined in the article. I thought that would be obvious, my apologies.

They defined it as 30-45.

I hear you! Same here, I'm also in my mid-40s and was thinking "huh, I guess I'm old now"... :-)

If you are a tech company and want to retain your workers I think there are two things you can do:

1) Make sure you are paying your workers close to what they could get just by switching to the same role at a different company.

2) Make sure that you offer permanent remote roles.

Just from my anecdotal experience in tech, most of the people who have left companies recently have left for one of these two reasons: either they were getting a big bump in compensation, or else the old company did not allow permanent remote work.

The marketing world is currently a game of musical chairs with buyers and sellers switching sides or people making lateral jumps to different clients or agencies.

The cost of switching is lower with remote work - fewer social bonds with coworkers, fewer fringe benefits to consider (travel, fancy office, expense/entertainment accounts), no change in commute.

People are willing to try the same job in a new company for the shot at an easier to climb corporate ladder because the only cost to switching is swapping one company-owned laptop and phone for another.

A few weeks ago I searched for "pandemic related to increased reports of mid-life crisis" but couldn't find anything. This data could back up my theory in that the increase in resignations seems to be mid-career folks.

They dance around that a lot of this is simply about salaries.

Is it? Is there information that indicates that?

At least in tech, most of the people I know who have stopped working recently are quitting because they don't feel like it anymore. We're all making plenty of money, enough to take time off, and the work sucks, especially when it's remote, so why keep doing it?

Because it is fun, even better when it is remote. Plus the gobs of money you mentioned. There is plenty of cool tech work out there. If you think it sucks then yeah that is a good reason to quit

I can only speak for myself. I left a role a few months ago that I enjoyed and was good at because I felt it was career-limiting. I'm a data scientist by profession, but I wasn't actually doing any data science; I was more of a technical resource. I wrote Python and R packages for interacting with company resources, using cloud storage, handling fiscal dates, etc, and consulted on moving teams to Azure from our on-prem infrastructure. It was great, but it seemed that I was shedding the human capital that would further my career in data science in favor of being a quasi-engineer (higher paid but less skilled).

I dunno. I realized it was a mistake to leave soon after I did. The company I worked for had great benefits, great work-life balance, and -- importantly -- other opportunities I could have transitioned into if I wanted. And the pay potential is only a bit worse. So I ditched the new job and I start back at my former employer on Monday, funnily enough.

I guess all this is to say that there's not one answer to why people are leaving -- we all have our individual reasons. It isn't just about salary, as some comments here indicate, but it's not just about remote work either.

I didn't go to Harvard but I can tell you why myself and people I know resigned in tech - money. And time, but time is also money.

I wonder in tech if this is also down to the rocketing stock market valuations and how this is factoring into companies creating enticing total comp packages. Works if markets keep moving up.

It is trickle-down inflation: too much capital chasing too few companies chasing too little labor, also chasing too few goods (asset inflation, wage inflation, consumer goods inflation).

Step one: figure out who is leaving.

Step two: "Ask yourself which factors could be driving higher resignation rates?"

Step three: Fix it.

And somebody said the Harvard Business Review was worthless.

A lot of management consulting is exactly that - the answer is simple when you look at it this way, but they need to back it up. That's why they quantify it and don't just say "fix it".

They studies thousands of companies to come up with the above - you could make it up on the spot but that study gives them way more credence. It's like when science is done on something we consider obvious - it's still valuable to have the data.

THey also guide on examples of what sorts of things to look into. Most companies have serious noise to signal ratios with their data - this tells people what data to actually look at.

“Study” is a big word. Typically it’s gather facts to provide the answer you are being paid to provide.

A hypotheses that isn't wildly discussed: Maybe some people hold off their career decision for the better part of 2020. After all, "safe" seemed reasonable choice back then. Now, the wave is coming and people start switching jobs.

Quite simple actually: Needed more money, wasn't approached by my company for a customary salary increase negociation in a timely manner, looked for another job.

I like the people, but timing is everything in life, unfortunately.

That was more or less me: I liked the place were I worked, shit I opened the office and created the team in my country, it was "my baby". However, after COVID hit, a lot of people in my team started leaving for higher paid jobs (like double the salary) and way better benefits (including working from anywhere).

Meanwhile, my boss who "did not believe in remote work" was adamant that we had to go back to the office, even after we had had 2 different COVID outbreaks.

Eventually I got an amazing offer for 2x the salary, amazing benefits and working from anywhere (also more technical and no people managing). It was a no brainer to me.

You know what else mid-career employees tend to have?

Children.

Constantly changing return dates is stressful for parents; you can't buy/build/sell a house that fast. Especially if kids have now gotten to run around in the burbs in a nice detached house away from the Bay Area. If the key decision makers aligned return-to-office with the school year and said "we will not ask you to return until an August where The Vaccines are widely available for kids" then I think you'd have a lot less attrition in that group.

I wondered about this a lot.

There's lots of "people are resigning, they don't want to work for $15 an hour" articles that to me combined labor related ideas that I'm not sure are that related.

To me this article at least asks a lot of valid questions / possibilities.

>It’s also possible that many of these mid-level employees may have delayed transitioning out of their roles due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic

That and other ideas there seem valid and interesting. Unfortunately the article doesn't provide a lot of answers.

Is there any actual granular data for this that I’m missing? How many of these resignations are actually moves to another position vs quitting entirely? What’s the breakdown by industry? The high-level early/mid/late career stats provided aren’t particularly illuminating.

More money.

Sacre bleu! This is Hacker News!

I'm surprised I hadn't seen this in the list, but my money is on Response to Second-Wave Crisis.

In the first wave of COVID-19, we saw which companies could handle the work-from-home crisis and which did poorly. Ultimately, though, a lot of people didn't feel like they could move jobs because suddenly they needed job security as well.

In the current wave of COVID-19, at least in the US, we saw the same crisis management play out, but now the market has adjusted to remote work. The idea of going through an entirely remote interview process didn't seem as foreign after a year of Zoom meetings. People were more willing to look, and with vaccination more willing to explore.

Potentially as well, a lot of folk might just want something new. Novel experiences are lower right now because of safety measures, so the idea of staring at a screen with different problems is a little more exciting.

People are getting fuck you cash from stocks, housing, crypto. What's the point in working for a few thousand dollars every other week when your portfolio swings double that every day.

People, on average, lose money trading crypto. This is just a simple mathematical property of the crypto market.

On paper, it looks like a lot of people made a lot of money. But in actual money, on average, you will lose.

You've got it exactly backwards, just look at the market cap change over time: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

In a bull market, anyone can make money with just about any bet.

The "market cap" is fiction. It doesn't exist. It's a nonsensical number.

What is real is actual money going into and out of markets. And there, on average, people will lose money because no more money is going out than is coming in, and the markets and miners will take their cut as well.

> This is just a simple mathematical property of the crypto market.

What? I don't doubt that people on average lose money but I don't know of anything fundamental about crypto markets that makes it a mathematical property...

Cryptocurrency trading is, because of market fees and mining fees, a negative-sum game. That means that on average, you will lose money if you play.

Unless you are a miner or run an exchange, of course.

Help me out here. I know nothing about cryptocurrency, but as something in limited supply that is exchanged for money it seems that on average people could earn money as long as the price keeps rising.

Say there are four people in the crypto market. Joe buys crypto for $50, sells it to Steve for $75, who sells it to Sarah for $100, who sells it to Dale for $125, who holds it. Three people have earned $25 each (minus fees) while one is either even or has lost $125, depending on how you look at it (maybe he's happy holding his crypto permanently). This looks like on average people have earned money.

I'm not saying that this reflects how real cryptocurrency markets work, but it seems at least nominally possible that most people have earned money.

You already stated it yourself: He has lost $125, until he sells. That is an average negative.

Money in: $50+$75+$100+$125

Money out: $50+$75+$100-3*fees

You can continue this chain indefinitely, and the missing final term will get smaller and smaller in relation to the total. The limit of (money out - money in) / transactions goes to simply minus the average cost of the fees. So, a net negative.

>He has lost $125, until he sells

Everyone who owns an asset is not selling it at this exact moment, so it is worth nothing and there is a 100% loss according to you?

This is a possible definition of "loss", but I think it's clearly non-standard, and not useful. You can't just pretend that's what other people mean when they talk about losses.

Read the rest of the comment, please. This has no effect on the outcome of the calculation if the trading continues over a longer time.

He has "lost" $125 but gained the crypto, which might be worth more than $125 if the market goes up.

I was responding to the proposition that people will, on average, lose money trading crypto. I guess it depends on what you're averaging over, but I took it to mean people, not money, and in that interpretation people could on average earn money.

The average of the sum of money gained or lost by each individual person is negative.

Whether a larger number of people gain any amount money than those that lose any amount of money is less easy to analyse, but, given that a person can only lose 100% of their money (not taking into account massively unwise loans people might take out, for simplicity) but some people do gain much more than 100%, it is likely that average person has lost or will lose money.

> given that a person can only lose 100% of their money [...] but some people do gain much more than 100%, it is likely that average person has lost or will lose money.

But with a long enough time horizon and generally rising prices, we can make the probability of any one person losing money as close as we want to zero. For a given unit of crypto only the last person in its chain of buyers loses money, left holding it when prices finally drop.

That is not something that happens in reality.

I mean in that sense so is the normal stock market....

It is not. Dividends, stock buybacks and the value of voting rights change the situation. Trading some stocks might still be a negative-sum game, but not all. However, all cryptocurrencies are.

Alphabet Inc. Class C stock has no voting rights and has never paid a dividend. On average buyers of this stock still made money, because the stock price kept going up. The last person to hold it owns a valuable asset that is generating a lot of cash, so they are also doing well and probably won't have any trouble selling it for a profit.

Btw there are cryptocurrencies who pay out staking rewards.

Even if a cryptocurrency pays out staking rewards, you still have a negative-sum game, because all of those rewards come from other people buying in.

Well, it is.

The only way money enters the crypto market is by people buying it, and it leaves both by people selling and by intermediaries taxing transactions. So, on an average, people must lose money.

That's obviously wrong if the price keeps going up like it has.

Not at all. The state of the market does not affect this in any way whatsoever. The only thing that changes when the price changes is who wins and who loses. But on average, you always lose, this is an inescapable fact.

If there are two people, and one bitcoin in the world, and one person buys the bitcoin for $1 and sells it to the other person for $2, who has lost money?

Up to now, the second person is $2 short.

That seems to privilege dollars as more "real" than crypto in some way.

Or is the point that between quotes in an illiquid market, everything is worthless?

Both of these are true, but not necessary for the argument. "One bitcoin in the world traded once" is an extreme edge case where the normally negligible factors dominate the calculation.

Consider instead that there is one bitcoin, that one hundred people sell to each other in a long chain, for varying prices, playing a small fee each time. If you add up the cash inflow and outflows, you will get a net negative per person equal to the average fee paid.

>If you add up the cash inflow and outflows, you will get a net negative per person equal to the average fee paid

If no theft was involved, then you can't have a net negative number for total cash flows, can you? The fees went somewhere.

There are two things that exist outside the regular trading:

First, exchanges skim a fee off the top of every transaction. That removes some money from the analysis, causing a negative sum.

Second, miners are a special case: They do not deposit any money, they only withdraw it using freshly minted coins. Thus they too skim off some of the value in the market, and also cause the sum of the regular trades to be negative.

They are $2 short but own one bitcoin that might be worth $50,000 to someone else.

If I buy a car for $20,000 I'm $20,000 short but I also own a car.

And when that person does buy it for $50000, we are in the exact same situation, but now the missing money is $50000 rather than $2.

There is no such thing as a continuous market.

Everything, even stocks that are being traded at a high frequency, has moments when it is not being traded.

If continuous markets were somehow realized, then moments when value is "missing" per your definition could be rare.

But instead, there are infinite non-trading moments between each pair of trades, so "nearly all" of the time your definition says an asset is worthless. That just seems like a useless, inappropriate definition from a practical perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_set

It isn't about averages of a single person. If we're talking about 500 people (for example), if 220 win big on Crypto, that's 220 people with "f*ck you" money. Even if the other 280 lose money and the average is "loss" that doesn't stop the others from leaving a job.

You don't get 220 people with fuck you money and 280 that lose. You can only lose 100%, so you will need many, many more people to lose money for even a single fuck-you-money person.

You are much more likely to get one person with fuck you money and 499 losing most of their money.

And when you sum up all their money before and after, they will have less money after.

On average people have made tons of money. The earlier involved the better. If the market is growing you will see values increase.

Incorrect. On average, people have lost money, and this will continue to be the case forever, no matter how the market evolves.

Welcome to how pyramid schemes work. The money gained is when you pull out and other people buy in

Yes, bitcoin is functionally exactly like a pyramid scheme, even if it may not intentionally be run as one.

Who? Stupid managers with a desire for control. Want to keep your workers and even get better ones? Raise the f*ing salaries.

At some point where is this money coming from?

"the top 1% wage grew 138% since 1979, while wages for the bottom 90% grew 15%"

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Could also be that more and more people are child free, which makes them less reliant on a job.

Small anecdotes if it helps anyone.

- a lot of (most?) people are really stressed out by the pandemic, and suffering from some kind of mental health crisis or discomfort. This can push someone to finally resign a borderline job, or switch careers if they were struggling already with burnout. I also know several friends who had marriages blow up during this time that otherwise would have kept going indefinitely, and that often leads to rethinking many other life decisions.

- the constant ‘work from home’ has also allowed many people flexibility to pursue side projects, invest in other parts of their lives, and try things they otherwise wouldn’t because of the lack of flexibility. This opens up new lines of thinking other than ‘keep turning the crank at this specific job as hard as I can’

- stock market valuations have skyrocketed. For folks with large stock portfolios, many went from ‘doing ok, maybe retire in 5-10 years if I keep doing this’ to ‘fuck you money’ in the space of a year and a half.

- for everyone else, there is a severe crunch of staffing in many companies, and some are willing to pay people based on that, leading to shaking up a stagnant wage pool in many markets. Many of the stagnant wage pools were at companies that were already not very good at showing caring and empathy for their workers, or outright abusive. A lot of people are switching because of one or more of these factors, and enjoying massive raises and better working conditions because of it.

- as more folks resign and/or switch, and when it actually works out well for them, others notice and are more willing to do the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com