The new headache for bosses: Employees aren't quitting

I would add that this creates the problem, which I think most tech companies have forgotten about: if you try to attrition out staff and the market is competitive, you'll only attrition out your best employees.

Last place I was at everyone was starting to get really frustrated with the way management was handling projects and all but one person on my team wanted to quit. The problem is that the talent on the team was largely so-so. I was the only one that found work and left, but that only served to further decrease the morale of the remaining members who felt both more trapped and now without coworkers they liked. Across the org I noticed pretty much every other team started to experience similar issues.

One life lesson I learned the hard way is that even if you're stuck in the most toxic workplace imaginable, never quit your job (unless you have an offer elsewhere).

Fight back. Make them fire you. Don't start smearing shit on the walls or watching porn during meetings, just do the job so poorly that keeping you there is an expensive headache.

I once worked for two scammers and generally try to be a good employee. Yet the workplace abuse became intolerable (wage skimming) and eventually I'd had enough, so I left without having anything else lined up.

Big mistake. The recession hit, it took me a year to find another position, and the entire time I was ineligible for unemployment because I voluntarily left. If I had just said fuck you, put my feet on my desk and printed copies of random documents found on network shares all day, I could have been freed up to find a better position on their dime.

Layoffs invite unemployment claims, which increases their insurance premiums. "Waaah, people aren't quitting" is a bunch of whining execs wanting to reduce headcount without the PR or financial consequence of continued layoffs.

Lest we continue to wonder what the real reason behind the mandatory RTO and other recent policies designed to make working intolerable or unfeasible.

Next up will be pointless bureaucracy, time-tracking, bean-counting and other inane traditionally-punitive measures employees will struggle to keep up with...the insanity of which makes people jump ship like rats fleeing the Titanic.

> jobs are more competitive than 5 years ago

Yeah it’s this.

As an assclown that recently quit without something lined up because “don’t worry honey, I’m a rock star” I’m definitely finding it harder to find a position >= last salary, similar roles this time strong. In fact salaries overall seem like of down lately (for like staff/architect/senior roles).

Guess these companies better stop spending so much on avocado toast and fancy coffees. It's hard times for everyone but I'm sure they'll manage somehow.

WSJ can’t help but write hit pieces, I think they are paid for.

Firstly workers should be grateful to waste hours of time commuting to office jobs and shouldn’t be allowed remote jobs, then the next meme is “silent quitting”, the current meme is “workers aren’t quitting enough (sub text: bosses are running out of ways to instil misery and stress)”

    After the uprising of the 17th of June
    The Secretary of the Writers Union
    Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
    Stating that the people
    Had forfeited the confidence of the government
    And could win it back only
    By increased work quotas.

    Would it not be easier
    In that case for the government
    To dissolve the people
    And elect another?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung

Bingo! You will not get fired unless you literally are adding negative value. If you're doing work that adds value you'll be around until the next rif at least

I'm seeing old co-workers on linkedin that got caught up in this, they switched during the pandemic, some to positions and salaries I assume were inflated from knowing them previously. Once the layoffs hit they started looking for jobs with the same title/salary and there's was nothing.

I'm one of those who didn't switch, I thought I was making a mistake, now? New hires are coming in and being offered a little more than pre-pandemic pay. Below what I'm making now for the same position.

Well, the headaches are pretty minor:

Bosses who want to cut headcount without layoffs can do so by just not replacing people who quit - if nobody's quitting, that's not possible.

Things like training schemes might have been sized on the assumption you'll have >100 open positions in a year's time, when these 100 trainees finish the scheme. Firing them instead is not good for anyone involved.

Bored star employees can't move teams if other teams don't have open spaces.

And some people think constant employee movement stops teams becoming 'stagnant' as job hoppers sometimes bring in experience, ideas and methods from outside.

There are two main reasons:

First, and probably the largest motivator, is that if you fire someone without cause they will typically be able to collect on unemployment insurance which would increase the employers premiums each month.

Second, nobody likes to fire people especially if they haven't done anything wrong. Also, layoffs like this hurt the moralle of the remaining workers which could turn into too much turnover.

Having someone quit is usually preferable to increasing costs and hurting moralle, but that will not stop businesses from doing what they feel the need to do.

Only in "at will" states, and usually then, only when your company is small enough (like <50 employees). And even then, you still have to be careful to not give a reason. If you give any hint of a reason, the employee can sue for it.

It's a headache at a population level. Given a 10,000+ company, they will have plans for X% retiring, Y% leaving, Z% college hires to replace them. Most HR departments I have worked with track "regrettable turnover" - how many high performers are we losing.

Plausible deniability. Laying off people sends a signal to the market that failing to hire does not.

Answer is media companies need clicks to earn money, so they pump out garbage articles proposing nonsense premises to increase likelihood of people clicking on it.

To be fair, it does feel like a lot of the quotes in the article are also kind of looking at this through a joking "first-world problems" angle. But that doesn't mean it's any less comical to read an article where bosses now complain that their employees are too loyal.

Even written in a joking manner, it's kind of galling after being told for years that the problem with young workers is that they job hopped and nobody liked that to now see the WSJ ask, "why aren't you hopping jobs more?" It's just so transparent that no matter what the workers do, it's going to be treated as wrong. The WSJ doesn't actually want any specific behavior from workers, it wants something to complain about.

My theory is that this type of propaganda has always been around. What happened was that before the pandemic people were conditioned to keep their heads down and pretend everything is great. Dissent was a pipe dream. With the shock of the pandemic now the "drones" are no longer playing nice which leads to the overlords turning the propaganda machine to 11 and the absurdity of shit pieces like this from wsj or hbr

The great resignation was actually the great reshuffling where people just exploited the heck out of the market to get better paid jobs. Now they are surprised that people don't want to give up those higher paid jobs and return to shit pay?

It's shocking! Shocking I tell you!