If that is something you have done or are considering doing in the near future, why?
I left for other reasons as well, but it really shone a light on how management thought of ICs. Managers: proactively reward your ICs, don't wait until they're halfway out the door. I would honestly take a less aggressive adjustment in comp if it was done proactively, rather than waiting until I'm fed up and on my way out.
The biggest différance is my 7-year-old will learn, while companies will continue to make the same mistakes.
I don't hint because it's too confusing. I try to very politely offer options, where one option is me looking for another opportunity. It's not as though it's a secret to either party that's always an option.
I have been in this situation in the past and it's always the right move to walk if they won't come to the table when you ask politely.
My position exactly.
I won't be leaving my company, but I will be transitioning to a more defined role in a different department. Didn't sit too well with my current manager. He told me that I couldn't just leave like that. I offered him a 80/20 arrangement, and he didn't like it either.
I'll be transitioning anyway. It's just a bit bizarre that a manager would potentially alienate someone who seems to be indispensable for the operation.
When I hire engineers I give them as close to the top dollar as I can and if that’s not enough there’s nothing else I can do. It’s not fun when they walk, but at least I know there was nothing else I could do.
Good for you!
This is something I always tell junior engineers who are looking for ways to negotiate for something (usually pay and/or promotions). Although it's very effective, negotiation by throwing a competing offer on the bosses desk usually starts a fire-drill up the management chain which gets you noticed in a not-so-positive way. It also leaves a lot of bad feelings all around.
I recently finished a leadership class and the primary focus was on treating employees as people / human. This perspective makes it possible to make decisions that make for happy employees which, in turn, makes for more productive employees.
Employers that focus solely on cost are missing the forest for the trees; it's extremely short sighted.
I now work for a DAO in which decisions are made by "the community" (those with tokens have voting power). Not having a traditional leadership structure has been so liberating. Everything is fully transparent.
Agreed. That's like trying to take your money back once you see a river card that doesn't help you in poker.
Just doesn't work like that. Negotiate in good faith or accept the potential consequences.
Plus what you said specifically happened to my mother. Her employer knows that my mother is one of the best she has as an employee. My mother asked her employer for a higher salary, she refused, but after my mother said that she will be looking for other jobs because the work is too much for too little, she immediately was willing to negotiate a higher price.
Playing chicken by drawing hard lines in the sand is not negotiating - they were actually willing to budge, you were not.
Again, it's entirely your prerogative, just understand that this is not going to lead to optimal outcomes.
Finally, you mentioned something like '4 day work week' - in most situations today, it's completely off the table. If it's common in your company and you fit the policy, then sure, you can ask.
But if '4 day work week' is not policy at your company, then what you are really asking if for the company to change it's policy and open it up to everyone.
I'm sure you concede that you're not the only one possibly deserving such a flexible opportunity.
So your demand extends much broader than just yourself, and the consequences of giving this flex to one person, would mean an immediate negotiation with large numbers of other employees, which can be disruptive.
Of course, maybe they should have the policy, but it's definitely reasonable that they don't as well.
And finally, this assumes that they didn't have such a policy in place.
Consider what would have happened were you to have contemplated a counter offer from the company. There's probably an outcome in there that's pretty good for both sides, an when that happens it's a broader win for everyone.
Not that it would be likely to happen, but you could also have doubled down. Now you'll need a 3 day work week and an additional 10% pay bump. There is some potential value in keeping emotion and irrelevant sentiment (like "trust") out of the equation.
As a freelancer, this is a pretty standard scenario where you need to have somewhere to go when you tell an old (even cherished) client about your latest price rise. If the current employer needs extra time to think it over, even by a bluff call, it's nothing personal to me.
Not that I am a hardened business person, far from it - I just have a blasted view that there are no real friendships in business that trump the 'bottom line'. If I had had a different experience in my working life, I would have welcomed it! Contracts exist because trust in business is too risky a strategy.
I took this job with a pay cut so that I can do more coding as my previous experience was mostly support.
But after two years I haven't done that much coding.
Currently I wear too many hats too, and very little experience in any one them.
Sure, everyone wants to work in a good working environment, but I think the idea that "nobody left because of the money" is finally being put to bed.
The fact is that corporations and VCs have always realized that business is primarily just about the money, and their ability to get people to work for their "passion" has resulted in people getting underpaid. I'm always especially amused when people are expected to have "passion" when they're working at like a bank or an insurance company.
You work to make money. There are plenty of opportunities for hobbies and volunteering for passions. I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy what you do at work, but don't lose sight of why someone is paying you to do it.
An easy one here is the commute disappearing. People realizing they were giving away an hour or two or three that they aren't getting back that all of a sudden they did have back. Starts putting the perspective of your time writ large front and center.
Both those scenarios boil down to balance and people being skewed too far one way or the other.
Instead, at least in JavaScript land, it is only about tools. Automation be damned, because that means writing original code, god forbid. Thus we just do the same mistakes over and over like a mistake factory. Instead of doing any amount of self reflection we look for better tools. Rinse/repeat.
I have found quitting my job to work somewhere else means me risking what I have currently for something substantially less mature for more money and crappier benefits.
I still write code but now its just for me to support my generative art. I still hear stories from my former team; not missing the nightmare at all.
I might still decide to work on something but very not primarily software. Maybe I'll teach, work on something more manual or do volunteer work.
Thankfully my wife doesn't read HN.
Honestly, probably should have done it sooner if you could have.
As a 30-something, most of my peers are not planning to work past 60, and most are planning to retire in their 50s. Unfortunately that seems to be a privilege of a certain level of job income and not all of my peers will be so lucky.
Curious - was this a new(ish) phenomenon, or was this something that you experienced throughout your career and decided it wasn't worth it anymore?
They may get more money if they change jobs. But they start looking because they're unhappy. So when somebody asked for more money, he'd start by asking what was bothering them.
The poll makes it pretty obvious that compensation is the biggest reason folks leave, and it's the thinking of the old generation who doesn't know how to retain talent (they do, but they keep throwing pizza parties / sending out merch instead). It's a real "it can't be helped" mentality around retention.
There's definitely a ratio of job satisfaction / money where more money won't cancel out a toxic work environment (there's no reasonable amount of money that would persuade me to work for certain companies or return to certain jobs) -- but generally, I'm in it for the money. That's why it's a job and not a hobby. I got a mortgage, a family, and retirement to think about. I generally write off my work hours as an investment in those things.
If I start a salary conversation with my manager about more money and they rejoin with "what's bothering you?" that's not gonna go well. Now I want more money and you're being dismissive about it.
I run my personal finances like a business. Whenever companies say "we're a family" or "we don't want someone only focused on money" I hear "we only hire morons". I an cognizant of cashflow, taxes, I'm very heavily invested and I take all of it very, very seriously in terms of structure, diversification, opportunity, tax efficiency, profits. Like any business should! Income is my biggest revenue stream and therefore the most important factor for my success a/k/a the success of my business (which is me). If I leave I'm leaving for money.
My relationship with my employer is a business one. I don't understand why managers / HR think it's some kind of therapy one. Your manager wants to talk about feelings? I don't write contracts for fun and friendship, they are for business and employment is a business relationship. I have an actual life that I am living and this business relationship is about money it is absolutely not my whole life and I'm more than happy to take my skills elsewhere for more.
I cannot fathom someone getting so wrapped up in their job as their identity that they literally pay money to the company to do it (by staying in a lower-paying position) but I guess it can happen, e.g. people go work for Apple which notoriously underpays as well as being kind of a poor work environment, but people still flock to them due to brand reputation. I don't have feelings about the companies I work for. I have strong feelings about the code I write, I strive for highest possible quality given the constraints. But who I am is the person who writes that kind of code, not who I write it for.
But, the honest answer to your boss's question: what bothers me is trading my time for money. My comp doubled. I can now afford to stop working in 3-5 years instead of 10+ years. I think this attitude has become much more common in the last 5-10 years.
Now, I kinda liked my job and team - but TBH it wasn't the most amazing role ever - let's say it was 7.5/10. If all things were equal or the difference was insignificant I would have stayed probably. I wonder how much I would need to love my job to have stayed regardless of having such a higher offer.
Maybe $80k -> $100k isn't a primary motivator, but $80k -> $300k is more of a "retire earlier" type of motivator.
If I can leave my job right now and make 30% more than my current salary for doing the same work as my current company is only giving out 3%-4% a year max pay increases than I am a fool for staying.
It's nice to think an employees's world revolves around office culture. Until Bright Horizons hand you that $4500 childcare bill (food not included, of course)
I could move to a lower COL city. But said job decided not to approve anyone moving to a remote location, we have to be ready for that return to office riiight around the corner
I love my current job, but there will come a time when they are no longer willing to increase my pay above inflation (I suspect this year will be a test), and when that happens, I'll leave.
Money is the only reason I'm here. Shockingly, I can keep myself occupied and amused without scrum, a non-technical manager, or Jira tickets.
After all, why not? It's not like you have to take a day or two off to potentially fly out for the on-site these days. It's been years since I played the interview game, so I need to keep my skills sharp. And if I get a better offer at a company I'd like to work for, why not take it? If the offer's not better, I can politely decline.
Maybe people do start looking because they're unhappy, but it seems like a cop-out to say "nobody left because of money", if the reason for the unhappiness is that they're not making enough money.
Ironically, it was one of the best jobs I ever had, but you can't actually pay for your newborn's healthcare with job satisfaction.
But when my pay is good, I am much more likely to push through the bullshit and get back to the good stuff. When the pay is bad, I start thinking about touching up the resume and sending it around.
The corollary is that if I know I’m severely underpaid, I’ll probably be out the door within a year even if I am mostly content with the job. I’m 7 years into my career and this corollary has proven correct for 3 job changes now.
Correct phrasing: "Nobody leaves because of their paycheck."
Money disparity among coworkers absolutely can lead to dissatisfaction with the employer. Bad culture of annual raises can lead to dissatisfaction. Money disparity with competitors can lead to dissatisfaction with the employer.
So, yes, people aren't leaving because they're getting a paycheck, but that's too pedantic, even for me, because it obfuscates the issue so much people misunderstand it and then misquote it.
Well, I also really wanted to write Elixir professionally, and now I am! :) So it's not 100% true that it was all about the money.
* Employee is happy (enough)
* Recruiter reaches out saying "we'll pay you your_current_comp * 2"
* Employee thinks "hmmm that seems **ing crazy, I wonder what's going on"
* Checks resources like levels.fyi or their network and realizes that they could _theoretically_ make (current_comp * 1.5), and probably pretty easily make (current_comp * 1.5)
* This leads to bitterness in some cases, or frank discussions of how to get paid more in others
I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing fwiw but it requires employers to anticipate comp issues as benchmarks change.
Do engineers leave for 10% raises? Probably rarely. But for 50%-100% raises? That seems like a damn good reason to leave.
So money is very very important.
Most of the time things start from there and then the unhappiness snowballs to other areas of life
Sure, after a point, it's not about the money.
Perhaps some people start looking because they're unhappy and then learn they're underpaid but I personally know many people that started looking because of money—not the other way around.
If people are quitting successive jobs for incremental pay raises, it probably means they hate things other than their salary, but don't believe those things are going to improve.
The immediate thing that caused me to start looking for a new job, most recently, was that I had a performance review / bonus conversation that went poorly (for me). It's a little hard to distinguish whether the thing that made me unhappy was getting the feedback of "We don't value the things you want to do with your career" or getting the feedback of "and, therefore, we will dock your pay." (In fairness to them, it's not clear the things I wanted to do with my career were in fact valuable to them.)
However, once I started looking, I discovered I was being seriously underpaid, and I really should have already been looking for new jobs. There's just a bootstrapping problem here - you don't know your market value until you start getting offers, and you have to start looking in order to start getting offers.
With new norms about talking about pay (this very website is a good spot, for software engineers) and sites like levels.fyi, I suspect I would have come to this conclusion a little earlier, on the basis of money. It's hard to estimate your market value but you now have a better idea of what the ballpark is.
(I suppose the other option is to continually be "looking," whether or not you have an active desire to leave. I know some people do that. But I personally find that exhausting.)
Job hopping is the new default for engineers, most people after a few years in the industry realise their value goes up every once and then and that they can leverage that to get a salary bump.
I just left a job that I loved for a big raise. I have a policy of seriously considering applying for similar jobs that offer salaries well above mine. Turns out, I love this job too, but I get more money.
I agree in principle, though. Looking and applying for jobs is stressful. Attending interviews even more so plus it will cost you holiday. People aren't just doing this speculatively just in case they can get a better offer elsewhere. People only go through this if they are thoroughly unhappy in their current position, for whatever reason.
And yeah every time you get sad or suffering at your job you get the reflex to want to be compensated for the pain. Or you can even think of sabotaging the place a bit.
I actually left a fake job paid very well because of the toxicity.
lack of money
Maybe your old boss never worked for minimum wage.
I think get what you can get while you can get it and sock away as much as you can.
I still loved (and was/am capable of) doing the work, but having gone another few rounds of "Leetcode interview process" in the past few months, and having realized that I've reached the end of my willingness to tolerate what seems to be near-pervasive "Agile cargo-cult ceremony" (and everywhere, "Agile is whatever we decide it is") and (less pervasive but still frequently encountered) technically clueless headline-chasing (micro-)management in the presence of increasing active monitoring/collection of (remote) employee activity metrics and pervasive exhortations (mapped to KPIs) to "deliver innovation!" and "do it together!". Why run the Leetcode gauntlet (which seems to closely resemble Final Exams Week from my Uni days, with the same intense cramming prerequisite) only to land in a team/management circumstance of uncertain quality (bail out and do it again?)?
Likewise I've realized that maintaining my W2 income via FTE at my age and position would mostly serve to raise my tax bracket and preclude me from taking minimally taxed withdrawals from my IRA starting in a few months (these have to be taken sometime, and the less taxation, the better).
The process of "letting go" of my working career and adopting a true retirement mindset has taken me at least the past 4 months (I might not be done with it yet), because I do really love and have excelled at the hands-on work (and being self-taught and very motivated to stay abreast of much of what is changing for the better in SW Dev, I've been operating in long-term independent self-study mode for my entire career, turning this background process off is proving challenging).
When I told my boss about this, he said the usual friendly words about I need to do what I must and that he was relieved the problem was found. I nearly exploded when I read that and told him that high blood pressure is the symptom, the cause is my workplace. Got no good answer to that. I spoke to someone more senior than me and it seems hopeless to resolve this without leaving, so that's what I'm going to do. Leave, and start my own company.
I can't work for someone who lacks empathy and is dangerous to my life.
Icing on the cake: my company drastically changed our benefits this year such that our medical copays are double and our deductibles are far higher, so I am effectively taking a cut. Our team was also promised a retention bonus if we remain with the company during the recent re-compete but none of us have seen said bonus for nearly 8 months now and management explains it away as being due to the fact that we’re on a “bridge” contract.
The reason is simple: I am not employable.
I mean that in a good way.
I hate being an employee. I hate having to go by the rules that other people make up even though I strongly disagree with. I hate being in an industry that does not share my engineering values.
So to that end, I voted "company culture" on this pool.
More importantly, I want to create things of value.
All the jobs I've worked so far have been bullshit jobs. The thing I'm paid to make ultimately does not provide any real value to society - sometimes it provides negative value.
And, I want to set an example to my children: don't be an employee, and don't strive to be one.
As a manager of a large team, COVID definitely made the last couple of years hard. If not for productivity, then certainly for team cohesion. It's like the famous Milgram experiment; it's just easier for people to behave in unsympathetic ways when everyone else is just a face on a screen. I also noticed that (IMHO) the 'wrong' people kind of took over the attention of the org. In person, the pillars of the org were the desk locations of the strongest engineers and mangers that helped guide the team. In this new world, the pillars of the team because the people who were the most social on Slack, creating channels and commenting everywhere. Maybe I'm getting old, but it felt like a bad culture shift.
So, I answered 'company culture' but it's really a mix of a lot of things--my framework is always 'what am I going to get out doing this job for the next few years'. If answer isn't something really important, I'm out.
I think some managers never learnt to correctly judge workload and responsibilities. They we're rewarding those with minor responsibilities for achieving goals and harshly punishing those with huge responsibilities for minor misses.
This inability to judge workload and responsibilities was previously hidden by people's presence in the office giving bad managers a proxy but now the flaws in that management style are being exposed in the most extreme way. Entire teams are disbanding since as soon as one member of an overworked and under-rewarded team leaves the problem for that team is exacerbated.
I think COVID exacerbated winners and losers. The gaps between companies offering opportunity and stale companies is growing. People won’t stay at a company that rewards 2 years of heads down pandemic work with “Due to current conditions, we can’t fund bonuses. Raises will be less than inflation, and we can only promote people when their boss leaves.”
My new job is fully remote, has very interesting work, and my compensation almost doubled.
I have already referred 4 of my previous colleagues to my current company.
The market's been extremely hot the past 10 years. Anyone making a good tech salary and investing has done extremely well. I have enough to never work again. I didn't want to leave my team, but at some point your portfolio fluctuates every day by more than your salary and you have to ask yourself what's the point?
I was so checked out at the end, I bombed a big project and was totally stressed over it the entire time. After that, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision while doing a post-mortem with my boss to resign (probably would have been fired anyways).
Haven't worked since May 2021. Worked on my own project for several months, but the burn out is real and I can't seem to get back to a spot where I am 'excited' about anything let alone coding, even for myself. It has definitely taken its toll on my wife and family, and I have started to look for work again although I know this just leads back to burn out feeling and feeling of failure, which I realize I was struggling with before I resigned.
I haven't been able to complete projects - personal, work, home, coding , non-coding - for a long time now and am struggling to figure out why and how to overcome (at this moment I am procrastinating putting up baseboards in our ALMOST finished basement with reading and replying to HN).
In the end, although it was in essence a selfish move that spans many of the options in the poll, I think I quit my job because mentally I needed a break from what I was doing and really don't want to do it for anyone else ever again. The biggest problem with this is that i waited too long to do this and now i can't find the motivation/drive/will/self-dicsipline to even do it for myself now due to extreme burn out.
All of these issues are interesting to dive into. The first one will lead with the society accelerating the switch to a highly digital life (think metaverse). A lot of the existing business infrastructure will go out of business when that happens, and a lot of the new infrastructure will be built to support the new lifestyle. My guess is that this will benefit the FAANG + unicorns and will hurt the SMBs.
The second one I find difficult to wrap my head around. I had no idea that someone working as a waiter has enough savings to just quit their job without moving back in with their parents - it certainly was not true for me back in the day. Perhaps that's what people are doing - moving in with their parents for the benefit of not exposing themselves to health risks? Fair enough if that's what's happening, but somehow I doubt it. The other option is that everyone just switched from one type of a low-skill career to another with less exposure (eg: hospitality to remote customer support) - except that everyone is running their call centers at low capacity these days, so what gives?
The last one is the strangest of them all. Where is the money for those extra wages coming from? Surely, there are a verticals here and there with fat margins that can easily pay more and remain profitable, but the efficient market theory would make you believe that this wouldn't be possible across all industries. And yet, the results of this survey indicate that compensation is the main driver for most people on HN. My only explanation is that the HN audience is primarily in the digital space, which as a whole has benefited from the pandemic and can pay more.
I moved to the UK for a pretty awesome job. These last few years have led me to re-evaluate my priorities, and I'm moving back home to be closer to family and old friends.
Many of my international colleagues (especially European) have made similar decisions.
Anyway, before this thing goes live, I see a few managers printing out pages of Excel sheets and arranging them on a conference table to validate the model with literally pencil and paper. They didn't know what a percentile was until I explained it.
I handed in my notice the Monday following that weekend. Sometimes, if you're not trusted to do a good job, it's not worth trying.
- spent 3y at prev job, which is typical interval where 1) learning starts to plateau, and you realize all the unchangeable constraints that block you from delivering things you'd like to deliver; 2) you are in company long enough that you're the reference point for dozens of things and people keep pinging you all the time; and you somehow end up in a box that you can't get out of; at the same time getting recognition/promotion is hard if you're in a large group of folks with similar level of exp and company is not growing
- salary-wise, recent market move has been bonkers, and getting a bump at $prev_job being even a slice of the current market rates was unimaginable.
- there definitely is a FOMO when you see all the new technologies that everyone seemingly embraces while your company does not (TypeScript! Github Actions! Cloudflare workers! and what not), and you start thinking you'll become unemployable soon
- trying to check out a slightly different kind of organization and under a different business model and different scale
- remote: due to covid everyone's been remote and will be for a while, but it was only semi-reflected in the prev company's way of working and it was not clear what will be the way forward; shifting to proper full remote / async gives me some kind of stability in how to think about work and life for a while, and makes it possible to move far away from the office if I decide it's worth it
The other element is salary. My salary just wasn't keeping up with inflation and I've benefited greatly by moving on.
I've tried to give it a chance and thinking, "Oh, it's just different to my last place".
My new place is very heavy on the time metrics, which I think is the reason for me not feeling it.
I'd worked on smaller tickets for a couple of sprints, and then this sprint was happy that they gave me a bigger ticket to sink my teeth into. However, as soon as they assigned it me, I was told this is 'sprint goal' ticket and it really needed to be finished. I was like, "I would love to take the ticket as I'll get to grips with things a lot faster working on this stuff but it's important to get done then maybe I'm not the best bet".
So I talk to senior, get ideas on implementation and go ahead. Everything takes longer as I like to know what I'm working with. I get it working, but start to hit issues that make it feel like I'm not going about it correctly. Get told to do it another way, so did that but as I just dived into it due to time pressure, got a bit stuck and asked the senior for assistance. He's always busy so didn't get back to me, and when I logged on this morning, he'd linked a branch where he'd basically done all the work for me.
I appreciated his help, thanked him and wrote some more tests for the branch and did the testing. It did make me feel like a complete failure though..
Worst thing is, his code was so obvious that I'm kicking myself for not slowing down and thinking about it but the time pressure was getting to me I guess.
Well, long text but did feel good to write that down :) Focus on improving for the future.
I wasn't and didn't have in prospect a way to get the compensation in accordance to my supposed worth to any of the companies I worked for. So then I asked myself where is that money going? What am I enabling by being locked out of that much cashflow?
Following up on that direction of inquiry got me answers that I could not, physically endure. I will never be able to trust the judgement of others come before me they way I used to. The game I inherited was nihilistic to a degree incommensurate with the crowdedness imposed by growth.
Those come after, that game will not inherit. Their landscape is cynical and disjointed from the reality of people around them, aimless in it's idealism. It is possibly the right way for them to be, to survive or even thrive. For about 4% of them. Same as the nihilistic system was benefitting about 4% of us back in my time. Probably was the same back when it all ran on slave labour.
I got to understand Thiels' "competition is for losers" quip. 96% are flushed out, so this must be what the system is for. Selection, not improvement or enrichment.
But I sure know I won't be participating. You can't "change the system", it can only die to a more cynical system. I've seen it happen and I'm not playing any more.
I will not be voting. I will be doing.
My children will not go to your schools. I will be teaching.
I will not listen to a doctor that never leaves his office and is paid for my being sick.
I am too old for this shit.
My current job, given who our customers are (the code does something a little more serious than advertising), should be a lot more intense than it is. At present we're just half-assing everything and cashing the checks. Sure it's easy, the pay is industry median, and the benefits are above average. That's not why I got an engineering degree though. What example does that set for my future kid? Bust your ass to get a STEM degree so you too can find a mediocre job with a sandbagged contract to comfortably mooch off of using a tiny fraction of your talent? I can't even really justify it from a "looking after my family" standpoint, because while the income comfortably pays the bills it certainly isn't going to pay my kids' future college tuition and buy us a good house. If I'm going to turn into a jaded clock puncher there are much more lucrative clocks I should be punching.
I'm not so naive as to expect zero bullshit and engineering purity, money is ultimately the game at any private corporation. But we could be making the same money and doing a lot more. Issue is there's no business incentive to do that, and no way for me to provide said incentive in the short or even medium term. Even if I went management there's no single position I could target that would make a difference below the Executive level, and the longer I work here the more I see how that's by design.
What with a kid on the way I'm staying put for the next 6 months at least. Don't want to be changing insurance during the wife's pregnancy and she'll obviously need some stability after the fact. But after that I'm looking for a job that's 50% bullshit instead of 90%. If I can say one thing for this job, it gives me a stable platform so I can be picky about my next position :)
Industries being affected differently, working arragements changing, and a big one being that during the pandemic many people were afraid to resign during a time of crisis and held on to jobs that they normally would have gotten rid of sooner.
Then of course you have the resulting inflation and price mismatches in the job markets and it's often easier to switch jobs than to negotiate higher salaries.
I don't think your poll options really allow you to capture the big picture.
I had been working in a game development role, developing gameplay features. The position I moved to is developing service infrastructure for the game developers.
For a bit of history, my software career started at this company developing tools for the customer support department (I actually originally worked in customer support and my development promotion came about because I was developing tools for myself and my teammates). That went on for a number of years and I enjoyed it. I also did a bit of anti-cheating work, which I pushed for, so that was a good time too. Then I was placed onto this game feature role without any say in the matter.
I knew even before this change occurred that I don't care about commercial game development. I have plenty of amateur game development experience, but it's not something I have any interest in doing all day every day, especially when the motivation is commercial rather than artistic, and especially especially when higher-level decision makers relentlessly interfere. What I care about to the extent I can happily do it on a daily basis is making tools that make those around me more effective, pretty much regardless of what they're doing, because that makes the people around me happier.
So when I was asked if I was interested in this role, although I negotiated terms a little bit, basically I realized I had no actual leverage because just the work itself was such an appealing change to me. Incidentally I did get a substantial raise, but I'd made up my mind before that was even presented.
I also had some minor frustrations with the team I left, but I honestly think the team itself was on a promising trajectory, just the larger game development organization they were in (and my new team is outside of) was not. So I suppose in the "People don't quit jobs, they quit managers" frame, I quit the senior leadership of the game.
Because fuck you thats why. I’m not dying so some douchebag can have a second yacht. I’m happy to let the entire system burn to the ground.
- All the coworkers who I was more friendly with left the team/company and now I've been feeling completely detached from the team.
- the stock run-up has provided me with a (false?) sense of more financial independence.
- a handful of life crisis with a dash of imposter syndrome. Zero idea what I want to be doing with my life but being stuck as low level IC for a long time is hurting my already depleted ego - can't seem to avoid the pitfall of comparing myself to others.
All in all, just feels like I need a break and that it's probably time for some changes.
The worst part, is also the part that enables this, it is a 100% remote position. Having multiple small children at home can be a challenge (even there is a sitter), as well as spouse that mostly works from home.
but the culture has changed. we can't land the best and the brightest anymore. our tech stack is antiquated and arguably the company's biggest risk. we work long hours, and it somehow was able to get worse during this pandemic. the new mgmt has made comp allocations to the trading side of the business an after thought; a cost cut. little to no innovation or investment is flowing to this side. and they want us back in our seats, back on the trading floor, two feet from our overworked and diseased co-workers as soon as it's politically viable.
above all i (and many of my colleagues) have been promised for several of these years that compensation and work/life would improve. That "the firm's performance was soft" or "the division didn't get the allocation expected" or "this year was a challenging environment" but always "next year is looking much better." they've traded on their name. it used to mean something to be hired and work for goldman sachs. that means so much less now. they've made a point to say that compensation will be good this year, but, whatever it is, it won't be enough. it's not the money; at least, not all of it. i feel i've been fooled for many of my 12 years into thinking things will change. we've now been through a pandemic. we've watched out friends and families get sick or die, and the lockdowns and time at home have finally changed our perspectives on what really matters.
so, next week, i am going to take whatever it is they give me, and kindly submit my resignation. i'll be taking time to be with my friends and family, some of whom are terminally ill, and to plot my next move. i look forward to enjoying my work, respecting my managers and colleagues again, but it will be when i am ready. maybe a month from now, maybe a year.
One item missing above is “People”. The people you work with directly on a day to day basis, including of course your own leadership make a huge impact in your work satisfaction.
But while the compensation bump is nice, the thing that got me seeking was the company itself. After an acquisition by VMWare, I watched it deteriorate over a year or two. To make anything happen, you had to basically go into "hero mode" working tons of hours, etc. And then you'd see pretty incompetent managers, the kind that treat engineers like cogs, continue to get promoted. Oh, and add no real clear direction on the products themselves.
So I guess that's "company culture"? I think there's a lot of people in this bucket, where "too much stupid at the current place" plus "lots of opportunity" means it's time to look around.
This is assuming I don't even try to adjust my spending, push come to shove. I can probably last up to a year without a job.
I remain employed because frankly otherwise I'd be bored.
Once COVID gets under control, I think I'm going to probably live in another country for at least 3 months.
I'll never work in an office again - 100% remote or bust.
I resigned in December with no new job lined up. I got tired of crying before my biweekly '1 on 1' meetings with her. It's crazy because before she came, I was doing great. Our previous manager was excellent. She was run off by a toxic co-worker in my department who was the most experienced (He would make her life a living hell through small bits of periodic sabotage).
This was my first job out of college (Information Security Analyst). The work I was doing was extremely tedious and didn't require any skill whatsoever - It was basically data entry & sending emails. I understand that the newbies have to earn their stripes, but I was approaching 2 years with this company, and I felt like I was crippling myself as each day passed. Shouldn't I have been performing risk assessments and reviews, and LEARNING? I have to grow so I can support the company, right?
The rest of my team (with more seniority) were working on projects with a lot of depth. Meanwhile, I'm sending emails to people for 30 hours per week (access reviews performed manually by sending hand crafted AD group reports for a company with 3,000 employees...). My technical skills (Networking, Linux/UNIX, Cybersecurity) were starting to atrophy due to lack of use. The company I worked at payed EXTREMELY WELL, but I looked to the future and didn't like the idea of being handcuffed to this one company due to my lack of growth.
I also believe one of my co-workers was trying to sabotage my work. He would feed me bad information (at critical moments) which would completely derail my project down the line eventually (despite him specializing in his role for 20 years) - I sometimes wonder if he was threatened by me (or maybe I'm just full of myself?).
Either way, it was a great experience for a while. But then it was awful.
I started at that project as a freelancer, but the client had a hard rule that they couldn't hire freelancers for more than two years (because the tax service might consider them employees instead), and after two years I wasn't ready to leave, so I became an employee. I knew I had to take a pay cut for that, but the pay cut turned out to be much, much larger tan I expected. That simply made it a temporary thing. I don't regret continuing that project for another year, and I did try to negotiate better salary that might allow me to stay longer, but when that turned out to be impossible, I left.
I'm freelancing again.
For me, I've always looked at the exchange of time for money. The problem with that is that you can't exchange money for time, only time for money.
Realizing this, I set work to 0. There seems to be a step function at 40 hours - the "full time job", but I haven't heard of many people that are successful in traditional software engineering jobs with a 20 hour work week, aside from perhaps those that work for themselves and have their project in "maintenance".
I took 4 months off and will be starting a new job in a couple weeks at a company that appears to be well-run and staffed with smart people. Also for significantly more money, but that's just icing.
The paid is slightly below market for a remote position (EU startup hiring in 3rd World Country, although I have a Master Degree in Computer Science), and I am sure I could get a better paid job. But I am not sure if I want to be 8 hours in front of the computer working. Right now, the boredom (which is awful most the time) allows me to do my own things / hobbies / etc, those days that I find something new, exciting, etc. If next Monday I want to read a book about Play Statino architecture, I know I will be able (except something bad happens in Production). But I don't find anything interesting, I will probably spend the day looking at Hacker News, Reddit, newspapers, etc.
I don't know what to do. I am not sure if I want to look for a new job that will make me hate Mondays (right now, most of the days are the same to me - weekends are different because my girlfriend / friends are available for plans), but at the same time, I don't want to waste my best years without taking advantage of my skills...
By promoting the idea that employees are going to resign, it forces employers to quickly get into "recruitment mode" - as we all know, recruitment takes time (and money). Better be prepared!
Since there is now an abundance of job adverts, and hype, employees who previously were _not_ thinking about changing roles are now considering it.
Employees get higher wages and the recruitment industry gets a boost.
Similarly for the labor market, employees taking their experience and recapitalizing into other roles with better benefits and pay.
What you see is effectively a greater polarization between those who do well and those who don’t. See amazons de facto policy of give the top tier best benefits, raised and comp and to hell with the rest.
So where do things end up? Well, the rich get richer. Ultimately everyone moves up since there’s such a demand for (houses|labor). However as we see with first time home buyers, it gets harder, those who are paying more end up demanding more.
Furthermore there is a never ending supply of labor which is why companies like Amazon are not taking this as seriously as you’d expect. There will always be H1b de facto slavery which creates a large inventory pool. However the “housing” is effectively top tier employees which command top dollar.
Ultimately I don’t think the system changes except for the best of the best. Because as always it is very supply constrained.
So I chose compensation, but company culture and life balance are part of that too. There was a reorg about a year ago, and not long after that people have been complaining about how much workload there is, and how we're not given the tools etc. to deal with it. I gave polite responses to recruiters prior to December, in December I had my first phone call with an inside recruiter in 2 1/2 years. The other night I was programming at 10PM to make a deadline the next day and fired off two applications, maybe just because it made me feel better (although the positions looked good).
It's not just workload, if my workload was refactoring and learning the technology deeper I might not mind the hours, but it is a lot of meetings with multiple teams and a lot of bureaucratic stuff.
The workload/culture just increases or decreases the timeline somewhat. I am socking away enough money a month, I know the team and the stack and have the institutional knowledge (almost everyone on the team joined later). I would also prefer to spend a few months reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs to practicing Leetcode. But crazy workload and culture stuff speeds up my timeline - I am switching from SICP to Leetcode, and am more apt to interview at places "before I am ready". But if work calms down more I might push the timeline out more.
Company culture as the #2 answer seems to add weight to this...
To be clear, there's no better way to value your employees than pay them well. But I think people's motivations here are driven by more than just $$$.
Some of the attrition was deferred because they would have left in 2020, but decided to wait.
1. More money, companies are throwing money at engineers
2. Companies are having trouble hiring and it's getting easier to get a job
3. Inflation concerns, need more money
4. Most jobs suck (I work at 4 companies now and have worked at 30 companies in my 10 year career)
5. Retiring early, read reason 4. Working for a company sucks.I've now gone to a basketcase of a smaller company, in a player/coach role - and I'm happier than I've been in a long time.
It wasn't for the money - I took a pay cut. I have more problems than I had at my last role - the key thing for me is I have the latitude again to solve problems.
Whether it's pure technology or people, either way it's a system engineering issue - and the more "fun" the problem - the more fun I've found I have solving it.
The problem is I'm underpaid, but the real problem is all the old garbage swirling around companies that don't respond to their management, but do expect those reporting to them to fall in line.
I could do incredible things if I wasn't treated like an underskilled know-nothing and given the authority to manage a lot more (finance, people, strategy etc). My skip just happens to be a company lifer who was coddled by previous executive leadership, so he thinks he doesn't need to change ever.
Additionally, there was a lot of surveys and manufactured consent internally. It was all so silly.
It was about year 3 and I needed to leave or I'd get pigeonholed there forever, so I just took the first appealing job offer that I scored and bounced. Decent raise but the new environment has made my resume massively more appealing (using very in-demand tech, managed to get a fast title bump, I lead a small team now, etc).
At one point, this might have been a hard decision, but COVID and a child on the way feel like we've had an extra nudge in this direction. The labor market is so tight and my specialty is in enough demand that I feel like I could jump back into my field in another few years if it makes sense for us.
If companies want experienced SWEs like me, you need to offer very part time positions. My maximum commitment is 3 days/week.
For 6 months my managers told me "things will get better when the team starts to get comfortable." But at the same time they'd constantly critique the shoddiness of the work and not provide help. This left me to train and execute all at once. After that 6 months it was becoming clear that the attitude of management was going to put me in really tough positions. And it was unclear if and when my team would get to a level of competence where they were confident and able to execute the job on their own.
I think there's still a bit of robber baron culture in SE Asian companies. People who get away with firing pregnant women instead of giving maternity leave, docking pay for some arbitrary reason like not punching in. Because there's no early stage investors here, a lot of tech companies are founded by industrial robber barons, but the same techniques that worked for factories don't work when it's an employee's market.
At a lot of companies I've worked at, I'm also surprised how much the company owners don't care about it. About 80% of employees treat work as "just something to pay the bills", but the ratio is the same for employers.
I did enjoy wearing many hats and carrying a lot of responsibility for a while, but the pay wasn't worth the stress. I'd like to revisit working at a startup again some day, maybe after I've reached more of my professional goals and bring more value to a company than just code.
Also our new company culture (we were acquired) is one of using a lot of contractor resources to quickly build something, and throw it over the wall to our permanent staff, its just not healthy for the team long term.
I favor iterative approaches that are tightly coupled to customer feedback. Compared to our current rapid build outs with long feedback cycles.
I was working 60+ hours a week and on call three nights a week at a consulting firm doing engineering. My manager told me I was doing a phenomenal job and the entire year-end review cycle agreed - I scored higher than 95% of my peers and told I was "invaluable" to my team. Most of that was less because of my engineering skills and more because I was just pouring my life into this job.
Then, I got a 2% raise (yes, 2.0%, about $100/month). meaning I was still paid less than everyone who had just been hired. Many of those new hires weren't even engineers! I quit pretty fast for an 80% raise.
I was laid off about a month ago (2 weeks before Christmas; "non-performance business-related decision"), but I was job searching anyway. Why? Because nobody freakin' listened, and my position wasn't taken seriously. Call it strategy misalignment, bad culture, whatever.
After joining, I learned they had 4 CIOs within 3 years. As a mid/sr. level engineer, I was teaching senior management about my position while also learning about it myself. I still don't know how many they laid off during the annual review period, but it was at least several to a couple dozen.
I'm done. I know now why so many retire early to farms, baking, wood working, homesteading, etc. Corporate can have their BS.
Don't interpret this survey as "Most people's primary reason for leaving is compensation", because the survey does not ask this ;)
Wife has commented many times on the change in my personality, as I'm not ending most days furious and miserable.
Guess that's "Company Culture" for purposes of the poll.
To be honest, as soon as I realised that I was mentally checked out, the writing was on the wall. Neither a pay rise or a promotion would have kept me there for much longer because I would still have been carrying the legacy around with me.
There was no counter offer when I resigned. I suppose I'm grateful that we skipped the bullshit there.
I decided to open my own company just because there is a horrendous management culture in the North America.
Last company I had worked about three years ago had a really bad management culture where managers were total talentless pricks. Now, that might be okay if compensation was crazy high but company also had below average industry wages.
I also figured out that you can pay people really low wages so long as you act decent towards them. I don’t have real employees at the moment but I got some contractors. I pay them insanely low wages, but I frequently praise them and thank for their work. So far I got really good results with this arrangement.
Another reason - job is too easy and undemanding or there just isn't that much to do. I could have coasted and collected a paycheck (I did for a little bit) but I just knew that it's bad for me to stay there long term. I imagine this is some people's dream job though.
And more money of course is a factor. I once left a job that I really enjoyed doing for one that I suspected wouldn't be that great just because I could more than double my salary (it's not that impressive, I was just severely underpaid at the first job).
A buddy had approached me a year or so prior to quitting with an idea and we developed and won an SBIR grant from NASA which ran the second half of 2021. The results weren't quite strong enough for commercialization, in my opinion. So I will be on the market in a month after more studying.
I'll be starting a new job at the end of the month. Salary is over 2x my current pay, and if you include equity the total compensation will be 3.5x my current pay. I will have to relocate (which I wanted to do anyway), but I can't fathom why anyone _wouldn't_ be looking right now given the state of the job market.
I'm sad that it took a pandemic to take stock in my life, and I certainly don't think the family members I've lost were worth anything I may gain, but I'm glad to be where I'm at helping to push us ever forward.
The truth is, I have enough money in crypto to live off for a long time If I wanted to, but I do want a job where I can be effective and build another company up as I have done many times; though I am feeling increasingly like ageism is becoming my enemy (although I transitioned to management years ago, which I felt would protect me)
We'll see what happens, I definitely don't want to go back to an office like my former job was trying to force me to.
Why stay until the ship sinks? How many rounds of lay-offs have to occur before you start polishing up the resume? For me, one. Or even before layoffs, if there's an acquisition is in the works, boom, I am outta there (unless management specifically says I am not impacted). 8 jobs in 22 years, 1+2+4+1+2+2+2+8, of these 8 only 3 still exist or are recognizable as part of another company (including the one I am still at).
Or "Company ethics".
I quit and moved to the opposite side of the country for a change of pace at the end of 2019 then took a Help Desk job at a fraction of the pay. Unfortunately I was laid off from the new Help Desk job just a few months later as the pandemic closed down smaller retail shops.
Despite my decade of experience and constantly applying to remote positions throughout 2020-2021 I literally received 1 interview but declined their offer because of too many red flags during the interview conversation (remote work not actually remote, duties well outside my experience, major deadlines within the 1st week which made it seem like they were just looking for a scapegoat to blame some major management failures on).
I was unemployed and without income for nearly 2 years with the exception of a few months and a few hundred bucks from the Help Desk job until my life was literally saved by better-late-than-never Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. I used the money from that PUA to move my family back across the country.
Reconnecting with an old co-worker from the previous corporate job gave me a lead on an actual fully-remote position with a different local company and I started working for them just last month. My new salary is a 40% cut from what I was making in 2019 but the work-life balance actually exists and I am not being forced to wear "all the hats all the time."
I see (toxic) company culture, work/life balance, and flexibility all as major factors in my journey to where I am now but holy-fuck have I had a difficult few years to get here.
I moved to a much smaller company and so far the code and people are much more approachable and i also got a 25% salary boost which brought me well over the baseline for where I live.
But people generally leave when the company stops being fun for you . I doubled my income at a job I enjoy after leaving another company and joining a startup and doing some freelancing in crypto / hyperledger software prototyping. I also lucked out since I was hired in 2019 and I paid all of my credit card debt and my investments made my net worth increase to $200k.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-Amazon-rates-employees-z3...
Management must shoehorn their reports into these percentages.
Even if you have a team of high performers, HR expects someone to be graded as LE, which means likely put on a PIP and at risk for termination.
It's frankly disgusting to treat people this way.
A lot of people here are saying that compensation isn't that important, but you clearly haven't had your income increase 4 times when you're already 14 years in your career.
I doubled my salary, got to work from home and got to work on a really interesting project. This last year has been really good for me!
2. Company culture
Now happily self-employed :)
1. Wife is retiring at same time. Physically beating on her (commercial kitchen). 2. Was recruited by HW company. Hiring mgr quit without notice, so I spent 3 months looking for stuff to do. No KPIs, feedback or direction. 3. Thanks to covid, we haven't gone out for 18+ months. Saved 85% of salary, so we can have pretty cheap ObamaCare coverage next year by living off savings.
Employers, we'll only take so much.
I'll be gone within 6 weeks.
I am grateful that it was relatively easy to find new fulfilling work. This seems like a good time to look for a job.
The same-discipline engineers across the org don't talk to each other anymore. And I feel like I'm the only manager who is attempting to improve this over last 6 months. I'm just tired of the stress. I need to go be an IC for a little bit.
edit: I don't know why I'm getting downvoted, but I can guarantee you I'm not the only one.
I expect it's a story not too uncommon at this point.
I think in general it's a re-evaluation of this matrix and how it compares with the role in hand. The pandemic put a lot of pressure on most and I think this naturally leads to looking at greener pastures.
Apparently I left just before they started laying people off...
Any attempt to convince them to give us time to improve our code is perpetually on the back burner.
Change is good.
- present job is an unsustainable ~60+/ hours week, new jobs should be 45/50
- new job has higher salary, and better equity package, and company is at an earlier stage with greater prospect for the future and better industry
[1] It'll probably end up being 8-9 months
I gradually came to the realization that I'd rather be a pauper and writing software as an art/passion than making six figures writing whatever kind of software I got paid to write.
I chose "other" in this poll.
There's a lot of pressure to make more now days because of big student loans, skyrocketing housing prices, inflation
It feels like you need to switch jobs just to keep up now days
I worked at an MSP and we were remote for a year. Then when Covid started to pull back a bit they forced us all back to the office. To work remotely. From the office. Took me about 2 months to find a remote job with an extra $30k compensation.
It was hard because the people were amazing. Really the nicest people I have ever worked with.
But in the end, I don't regret it.
I love people, and I love the people I work with.
But 40 hours a week is too much for me to be around other people.
I’d much prefer a comfortable salary and working 3 days per week than more salary than I need and working 5 days a week, and I definitely want to keep those extra days to work on my own interests.
Demand is high, so workers can have higher expectations. Everyone is moving up or moving out.
When the pandemic first hit there was a resolve: "We will chip in and all do extra and help the company get through this." That works for awhile, like how crunch works on a short term basis, but only if it is short term. However, when months turn to years and people find themselves doing their job and the job of their colleagues who left for higher pay over a year ago and the company that they put so much into when the company was in need now seems content to not rehire or promote it causes frustration, burnout, and eventually even more more turnover.
So, yes, pay. But also what that pay represents. A company, especially a corporation in a capitalist society only speaks one language and that is the language of money. If the company underpays an employee based on their market value what that company is signaling is that they do not respect the employee.
I wanted to make a bigger impact on the world.
I am broke so this is risky for me
Return to company I left 15 years ago because they didn't use a particular software I'm in love with (Houdini). Now they do AND I can work remote. I'm in!
Teaching is not a dynamic career, at least not for me, the one full time CS teacher at the small school I was at. There’s a little more data to it though: based on the attitudes of a large enough minority of staff and majority of leadership, it wasn’t a career where one could take risks and reap rewards. Not with the amount of social capital I brought to the role, at least.
I had hoped that as a CS teacher with a huge amount of industry background I would be able to make an impact outside of my classes. The quality of the school’s IT meant that, with the right leadership, the IT team should have been crying for out something new. They certainly had the funding for it — external funding from a high net worth parent — but the will to do something novel and interesting just wasn’t there. In the end I was kept at arms length from any of the new hotness projects, which themselves were very staid and notable only in that they made enormous spends on high value equipment rather than doing anything valuable with people — the staff and pupils.
One or two individuals attached to those projects should hopefully still be able to make an impact, despite the lethargy of the old guard wanting their thumbs in the pie and their unending ability to extinguish any dynamism.
(Procurement of new hardware, for example, had to be signed off on by IT. They were the blockers to one very cool new piece of hardware but they weren’t incentivised to do anything other than get everyone to agree they were the gatekeepers. They weren’t incentivised to open the actual gates at any kind of speed.)
I’m much happier back in industry. The true joy of tech is that the business’s primary asset is the codebase, the diffs to the codebase, and the engineers driving them. We can gather around the machine and tangibly make it better through generating intellectual property using our keyboards.
With teaching, the main way of making any kind of progress like that was in the classroom. By its very nature, that is lonely work. You teach solo. You mark solo. There’s no collaboration at all with peers and 80% of the job ends up being behaviour management rather than content creation and delivery.
Interestingly, the most peer collaboration I did as a teacher — which as I said, wasn’t very much — was very much about behaviour management of the kids. That part was cool, but it’s nothing compared to churning out diffs and, moreover, collaborating with other devs to encourage and develop them to churn out their own impactful diffs.
When I put it like that, I guess I’m still a teacher but now I get paid 10x for doing it with young adults instead of old kids. (By which I mean both the high school pupils and the handful of childishly petty staff who sullied my experience.)