Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Remember that about 3-4 years ago, we experienced the Great Migration. The percentage of tech workers who moved to new companies was very high compared with historical migration patterns. Interests rates were still very low, companies had been buoyed by pandemic-related assistance, and inflation hadn't yet set in, so the salaries that were being offered were very attractive.

In the years since, the incentives to leave one's current employer have decreased. Salaries have stagnated, there's been belt tightening and layoffs, the pool of applicants competing for the same jobs has become bigger, and a lot of folks who've gotten cushy benefits like permanent WFH arrangements would have to go back to the office if they changed jobs.

But that means that a lot of tech companies are experiencing lower than normal attrition, but there's still professional growth happening, and the only way the companies have been able to reward employees is through promotions. That has led to bloat at the management layer, which this year many companies have tried to address, either by letting managers go or sending them back into IC roles.

I predict that due to "tenure lock" (where a lot of people who moved in the Great Migration have the same tenure at their current company) we're likely to hit a watershed moment that leads to another Great Migration later in the decade.

The Great Migration wasn't as real as the headlines made it look, though. It was an artifact of time-shifting from the pandemic. Normal job switching didn't happen in 2020 and became pent-up demand in 2021. So the numbers looked high for a short duration, but it wasn't really any fundamental shift, just the same activity pushed into a shorter time period. Look at the total numbers from 2019-2024 and I bet it's about the same as any five-year period.

Correct, the pandemic led to pent-up demand, and the Great Migration was what happened when job switching became tenable again. But the effects of that pent-up demand are a larger than normal group of people who now have the same relative tenure at their new organizations, and demand is building up again, as more and more people who've been with their company for 3+ years are looking for a change, but can't find one in the current hiring climate. So I predict we'll see a similar wave of large-scale job hopping once conditions become more favorable.

With regards to wfh, I’m of the opinion that a large amount of why wfh is nice is because the office now sucks. I am an academic scientist but let me offer my perspective.

I have three appointments, one at a software company, one at the university as a research scientist, and one at a university I am visiting.

At the company we have an open office plan. Most people don’t have assigned desks and often time people are working with customers. However we have a core r&d group but because it’s all open office basically everyone does their own thing because it’s disrupting to talk. Therefore I go to the office when I want to have lunch with colleagues but that’s about it. Nobody much complains about this arrangement because most everyone is working at the customers and those in the office are not typically there every day. Also the company pays for home office setup so everyone is happy to work from home some days.

At the university I’m visiting everyone, professors included, are crammed into tiny offices that are shared. Nobody has their own office. Nobody is even allowed to have their own white board you must share it with office mates and it must be regulation size with is only one meter wide. I was even told that the white board should only be used in collaboration that if I was using it for myself I should better use paper at my desk. You are not allowed to move or rearrange the office in any way. There is an industrial coffee machine that logs which coffee you take and reports through its 5g enabled internal computer. So far this coffee remains free. The management often complains about how people are not allowed to work from home yet there is only shared meeting space which can only be used if it’s booked through the online system and often it’s all booked. Even though the building seems busy with people most prefer to work from home or a coffee shop.

At the university I am a research scientist at I have my own office. It has a couch and a giant white board for discussing projects with phds and postdocs. There’s room for my textbooks and I have lots of desk space. When I work there it seems as if I’m working at 10x speed compared to anywhere else because all my resources are right there. There is a nice espresso machine, there is a nice culture of lunches and there’s a research centre lunch space. Everyone in the Research centre seems to show up to work every day and often seem happy to be there. Is rare that people work from home and often times even if there is crunch time they simply close their office door.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is possible that people would like to work from an office if that office was a nice place to be. It’s also possible that work from home is a great solution for lots of people. But I think that a great many people experience an office space that is onerous. And so given the option they would prefer to never be there.

Just FYI, none of this is new - offices have been that way for most of the 21st century.

i too am a command line fan.

Pandemic WFH just gave us a break from the frog-in-the-pot gradual decline in the quality of working environment and reminded people (or introduced the younger generation) to a quieter, less distraction-filled work environment rather than the open-plan mess we'd devolved into

Yeah it’s kind of wild because if you watch the movie office space today, in some ways, you are like, what is the problem here? Haha. Quite sad actually.

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