The headline and the anecdote in the opening paragraph of the article are somewhat misleading. The statistics about millions of people resigning aren’t from people choosing to leave the workforce or take sabbaticals.
It’s mostly people who are simply changing jobs due to the booming economy creating new opportunities and hiring pressure. Millions sounds like a big number, but in a country with hundreds of millions of people it’s only a couple percent of the workforce. Even during normal times, a million or more people resign according to these statistics, again mostly to change jobs.
To put it in perspective: The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, which is consistent with a booming economy. That means only about an additional 1% of workers are choosing to change jobs each month, which isn’t exactly the upheaval this article makes it sound like.
1. Even though the economy may be booming, that doesn't have to mean job changes aren't also driven by re-evaluation of priorities. The two may be complementary.
2. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. People that I would not have expected to leave - "heart of the team" kinds of people. This is after 4-5 devs (in a department of ~60) already made the choice to leave for other opportunities in the past few months.
Some relevant details: large SV-based SaaS with excellent financials, regarded as a good place to work, etc.
I also am noticing this around me.
Years ago I did the startup thing for 5 years, grinding really hard for someone else (mainly investors) to make a ton of money. Burned myself out, quit with no plans, and ended up consulting as a freelance dev from then on. Realized I'm much happier with this arrangement, with the ability to take months off and travel if I want. I could make more money at a large corporation, or if I didn't take so much time off, but honestly I'm much happier.
That's all to say, today I have two separate coffee dates with engineers at my client's company, both wanting to ask me about how they can do the same thing as me. One is a senior engineer that leads a department. The other is a very talented engineer. These are not the only people that have approached me wanting to setup time to talk about the same thing. This is at an SF based company that seems to really respect their engineer's time, provides high salaries, interesting work, etc.
I get the sense that at least for this niche of highly skilled, highly paid, in demand roles people are wanting to trade for more free time in their lives. I totally don't blame them, as it's what I found myself moving to 7 or so years ago.
Currently interviewing with several recruiters. One will definitely give me a higher salary than I can expect from my company, if they ever decided to give raises again (this year's annual review came and went and other than having me fill out a self-eval four months ago and hearing nothing since).
I even kept quiet in meetings for upcoming projects recently where I was told by other people in the company "You better not leave, we need you for this!" Not my problem they don't have "Hit by a Bus" redundancy in place.
It's also 50% more workers, if I'm reading that right, which seems like it's potentially a big swing/change.
It's important to remember that everyone also had a one year traumatic experience. Physically confined for a year with the threat or reality of unpredictable agonizing death to you or loved ones in the middle of an absolutely insane US political situation is going to take a toll on people.
There's this media narrative that the past year gave everyone this beautiful moment of clarity about how to live their lives. There is some truth to that. But it's also true that it's given people a whole shit load of psychological damage to work through and I wouldn't be certain that all of these people making radical life changes are 100% in their right minds.
I think we're going to see a lot of lifestyle churn over the next few years as people deal with what they went through but any one who claims that the current rapid velocity of any particular pendulum is somehow a straight linear projection is lying to themselves. I look forward to articles a year from now about this "unexpected movement" of people going back to in-office jobs, or working longer hours at shit jobs because they burned through all of their savings, or just wanting more financial stability.
I don't think we can make many reliable extrapolations today based on the aggregate behavior of a huge number of psychologically traumatized people, while the trauma is still not even over. Articles like this read to me like someone during the Blitz seeing victory gardens and confidently predicting that after WII every Londoner is going to become a farmer.
I'm not saying that things will return to any pre-COVID state, just that after the shock we've been through, the entire interconnected spring-mass system of our lives has in no way settled down into a stable state yet. Shit is still chaotic.
> My thesis is that if I focus on enjoying the journey, everything else will follow.
I wrote:
> I don't have a single big project in mind for my sabbatical... I do have a single overarching theme, however: joie de vivre. Everything that I do, even the mundane stuff (especially the mundane stuff), I'm going to focus on enjoying it fully. How you do anything is how you do everything, as the Buddhists say. I have come to believe that the person who can enjoy whatever they're doing and make that joy contagious will actually end up accomplishing the most. Yet even if I don't accomplish anything, I'll still be joyful, so what would it matter anyways?
Before I'm barraged with "what about people in the service industry!?" I do confess, I'm not sure what the argument would be - indeed, some people are perhaps only working part time at those positions, perhaps maybe around that 15 hour figure. But for those who work full time in the service industry, I guess I'm not sure what there leverage could be - raising the minimum wage perhaps? But that argument is age old and I've heard pros and cons both for and against. Also, in a country like the US where are social programs are far behind most of places like the EU for example, it's especially hard to argue or expect anything to actually become a reality for some of those service jobs. I guess only time will tell.
Not sure we're duped by the 40 hr / week idea so much as we're slaves to our desire for consumer goods. That and housing is very expensive now which means more work to pay for it.
The few things that people buy with debt then rises in value. There is also no interest in building more housing because that would result in lower single family home property values.
You have to consider that it's the bank that is paying for the house. As the owner you only pay the mortgage, whose monthly payments are limited by how much people can afford in the first place.
Property value is the biggest component of home prices in many desirable areas. Increasing current low-density home building won't change that, but increasing density would help with affordability. Problem is that many in the US still have low density housing as their housing goal.
As a current status quo most jobs which would accept 15 hour weeks and more employees are lower valued and lower productivity ones. More retirement hobby jobs as a model than even something to sustain a spartan lifestyle. Higher paying and higher productivity jobs tend to be scarcer.
As we subconsciously blend anecdata from HN into our mental models, remember that we self-selecting to visit here commenting are already extreme outliers.
Weight our in(group)sights accordingly.
Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds.
We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings.
I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.
2. Those peers and their companies usually have had remote work forced upon them. See what it's like in a less traumatic time when people can work out of cafes and public spaces, maskless.
Mainly: my co-workers who have been at the company longer than I weren't very helpful with onboarding me! We're a little company, so documentation of a bunch of our software is non-existent and the specialized hardware setup we have has a lot of quirks I had to slowly teach myself the last year. I'd hit lots of problems that'd take 5 seconds of their time to diagnose and fix and I'd end up stuck for over an hour while waiting for them to answer a Slack message - or they'd randomly drop offline.
So there I am, working in my bedroom in a new job wondering if I'm a needy little snowflake not digging hard enough or whether the people I work with are just unhelpful because... reasons (still haven't met them in-person since my pre-pandemic interview). After a year I think it really is the latter, but it made me grumpy my early months here.
That could be a possible source of resentment from newer, younger employees. Set us up for success!
I still prefer working from home, but I did commute to the office for a happy hour recently. It was nice to randomly get coffee with the CTO in the morning and hang out with new friends in the evening - none of the "unhelpful" people showed up! :P
My office is in Manhattan. It's been my observation that few people that work in Manhattan actually live in Manhattan. Nearly everyone I know of dreads having to go back to the office, and one of the primary reasons is because of the nightmare commute into the island of Manhattan via the various clogged up chokepoints.
I mean, we've been through major lockdowns/curfews/personal freedom restrictions, lots of people got sick, lots of people died, most non digital entertainment ceased to exist, most sports couldn't be practiced...
imho you can't pin point "remote work" as the main cause of why people felt miserable in the last few months
Now I also happen to not like alcohol or smoking which really reduces my chances of meeting someone my age to 0, because I don't go out to parties and such. Not that it was even possible during COVID-19.
I'm happy that I at least have supportive parents, siblings and family. But I think there are a lot of young people in my situation and many of them only have parasocial relationships, for example with Twitch streamers and YouTubers.
Homeoffice has been hard with all the distractions home has to offer and I really do miss eating lunch with coworkers. I'm going to start studying at university this fall so I'm optimistic that I might make some friends there.
They probably are feeling a lot like you.
1) If you don’t have kids (socializing with other parents).
2) Don’t go to church/synagogue/etc (church attendance in decline)
3) Do not live where you grew up. (People chase opportunities in other cities.)
4) Aren’t in school any more.
Neighbor friends are also possible, but it can take many years for people to become comfortable enough to be friends, and due to #3, there’s often not enough time for that to happen before people move.
Half my friends are from work and half are parents. They’re not super shallow friendships but also not soul-level deep, either. Deep friendships were left behind from college days.
1) Look at your hobbies 2) Find people who share those hobbies
Plenty of opportunities exist whether through meetup, BumbleBFF, local postings in cafes/on lamp posts, etc. (this is true of cities, remote destinations may be more difficult but thats the tradeoff of living around less people I suppose)
If you can't find groups for your hobbies, try starting them! Doesn't have to be a permanent leadership role, but if you get the ball rolling others will likely come and BOOM you've found potential friends.
If you don't have hobbies, look into volunteer groups. Rewarding and often extremely kind people who will value what you bring to the table.
Hope this helps!
Changed jobs to negotiate a permanent remote situation and am not going back.
I think it’s fine for some people to want to be on office, but think that a lot of work in the tech area should have the option of remote - and frankly would be better remote first with in-office allowances instead of vice versa.
As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults.
In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-...
I'm excited to go back to work in-person. Working with my colleagues gives me a great deal of joy throughout the day.
Some of us have been stuck in single rooms with no family or social contact for over a year.
Exercise groups - Illegal meeting up with other people - Illegal dating - Illegal going outside without a valid reason - Illegal
Former friends with established families and large properties with gardens berate you for complaining, as its selfish, "people are dying!", but they travel for holidays, take their kids to stay with their parents so they can have a weekend getting drunk in their garden, etc that sort of thing. Not friends anymore.
Also most people who I considered friends before, it turns out are just acquaintances. People I've known for 10-15 years who it turns out don't care about my wellbeing, just see me as a guy they did activity X with, went to events with, etc. A whole lot of that. Also lots of people do not like the fact that I questioned the rationale for the lockdown measures, questioned the data ( as in wanted to know what the actual data was), etc. They did not like it AT ALL.
Now restrictions might be lifting in the future, I am faced with the situation of being without a social circle. A social life of nothing. The only people I speak to are my colleagues, and that's how it's been for quite some time. Again I emphasize that it has been illegal to even try to change that, and socially taboo enough to question this and say that this is making me miserable as fuck that any existing friends have abandoned me, lots of blocked contacts on whatsapp (there's this impression amongst many that questioning the lockdowns, asking for data, saying this is not good you personally makes me a republican conspiracy theorist nutcase, etc).
How do I rebuild a new life when my ability to trust other people is lower than I ever thought it could be?
I have no family to lean on for support.
As far as I am concerned I might as well be a secret Jew in 1944 Berlin for the level of trust I have for other people now.
>As far as I am concerned I might as well be a secret Jew in 1944 Berlin for the level of trust I have for other people now.
Holy persecution complex, batman!
Millions were dying and being asked to wear a mask, social distance and wash your hands was too much of a sacrifice for you? You may want to take a hard look at yourself.
Still have the kids though :) so cant really go grab coffee that early. I am sure most of the problem is me not figuring it out but I am pretty much at a loss, I work remotely, have younger kids that I have to take to school and pickup, feed etc. Finish work at like 6 then kids until 9. So weekdays are out. Then weekends seems like there is always something to do or I am just exhausted and feel bad abandoning my wife and kids to go do something.
I know I am the cause of my own issues, just not sure of the solution.
No pointless work "morale events"; no wasting hours a day on commute; ability to do something useful while a build is building, like putting in a load of laundry instead of just reading HN while waiting; and spending a lot more time with my GF as she is also WFHing.
I suspect you are speaking only about people who are unable/unwilling to put effort into the "life" part of "work-life balance" and thus depend on the "work" part to give them what "life" gives to all others: companionship/friendship/fun/purpose
There are exceptions like kids and chronic health issues but most people could save a lot more money if they wanted.
I say this without judgment, people just have different priorities. I recognize my advantages, but I have more savings than most people in my family, despite probably having the lowest lifetime income.
Someone who graduated in 2005 will often have a completely different experience from someone who graduated in 2008 or 2009. People who haven't had to look for a job since the '80s are especially befuddled to learn "ask for the manager" leads to "there's an online application kiosk by the door, go there." Usually along with "we don't have any openings, but we keep it on file for 6 months!"
Another thread on HN helpfully has examples of people refusing to go along with it. I don't think they're representative.
This sounds impossible, unless maybe you’re not counting all spending as “ordinary costs”?
If you look at all the categories that are "non-ordinary" because most people spend no money on them, they are pretty obviously lifestyle flexes. For example, if you blow your entire paycheck on a bar tab, that is not classified as an ordinary expense because most people don't do that.
Subtract the median ordinary expense from the median income, you are left with more than $12,000 per year as a surplus. This is called "discretionary income", money you can spend on fun, hobbies, or -- relevant to this thread -- savings. If we restricted it even further to ordinary and essential spending, the income level that no longer generates any surplus is in the region of 15th percentile IIRC. That is still 20 million households in the US with no ability to save but that isn't the experience of the vast majority of households.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve publishes surprisingly detailed statics of what people spend money on and how income surpluses are used.
In America (and much of the world) this is the ultimate special circumstance. The idea of being able to consistently save significant amounts of money for YEARS is foreign to billions of people.
Imagine having all the time in the world, just thinking about everything. Your whole life.
What would you do?
What I see are bored young males hanging out and getting in fights, not a whole generation of people learning cuneiform in their newfound free time.
The Value Adding Class will have privilege thrust upon them in the form of paying for those young males to hang out and get in fights.
Ive had the dubious honor of knowing more than one kid who was never going to have to work a single day in life owing to who their parents and grandparents were. They tend to end up chemical addicted for the most part.
Idle hands do the devils work.
If anything existing basic income experiments have revealed the opposite:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/stockton-ca-gave-residents...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-05/what-did-...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/richmond-califo...
Giving a small number of people an amount of money below what they'd need to actually survive, with them knowing perfectly well it won't last forever has effectively zero in common with UBI. Give an entire contained population of people enough money that they can have all their basic needs met just with that money, and guarantee them it will continue for the rest of their lives, and I'd bet quite a lot that the results would be drastically different.
Also, not a big deal since you also provided two reasonable links, but many people will see that you linked motherjones and likely discount your comment entirely. It's on the same tier as OANN and breitbart.
By your own measure, basic arithmetic has roughly the same insight into the impact of UBI on society. As is judgement and diversity of life experience. As you say, empiricism on its own is nothing.
Fwiw, I don't mind working at all, but in an ideal world, my work would be varied and my hours would be of my choosing. Sure, you can get that if you freelance, but most corporate jobs want 8h/d 40h/w, at least, and is that how anyone wants to spend their time on earth?
Realistic UBI proposals wouldn’t exactly provide a comfortable wage. They’d provide just enough to get by on the basics, if that. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful, but it does mean that it won’t be an attractive alternative to work for anyone who isn’t comfortable staying poor forever.
UBI would still be a safety net, not an attractive alternative to working. The idea that UBI would enable people to become free of work and follow their dreams for free has been greatly exaggerated. It’s just not possible to tax enough to pay everyone high UBI wages. Safety net wages, maybe, but it won’t be a fun living situation to depend entirely on UBI.
I think creating a significant class of people with reduced buying power in the US will actually lower prices here, as at least some companies decide they don’t want to miss out on that portion of the market just to soak the rest of the Americans for even more money.
Of course that’s expressing a lot of faith in capitalism so it’s entirely possible, even likely, that it would somehow make the entire situation even worse.
Sorry for my honesty, I have no filter.
The paycheck is pretty much all that is getting me out of bed in the morning, even if at this point I can't say I really need it anymore.
I mean also maybe not, but I find it hard to devote time to things I know I am interested in because I work 9-5, 5 days a week. I spend time with my partner of an evening and have housework and exercise to take care of and after all that it feels like there is very little time and like I don't have a lot of energy to learn new skills or pursue hobbies, so what I end up doing is the things I know I like but that are not draining. Ultimately I spend a lot of time reading or playing video games or goofing off on reddit.
Even taking a week or two off isn't necessarily a good indicator, because you won't say, go and buy a bunch of paints and an easel and go "right I'm finally going to get stuck into painting" when you only have two weeks off and know you won't have time for it once they are up
People absolutely fall in and out of interest in different types of activities. This is especially true of people who really jump into things with both feet.
It reminds me of this meme: https://i.imgur.com/dRvwSsI.jpg
Now I agree about needing some variety, so I would probably get a PlayStation too.
Like this: https://viewfinderfox.com/first-post-vaccination-excursion-i...
But all the time.
Most people are probably low in talent and motivation (because lacking talent is demotivating).
There’s always an option. It might entail a more extensive change and change is hard, that’s for sure.
In my opinion, burnout is a problem only faced by people who can afford to do so. I am not saying everyone doesn't face burnout, they probably do, but not everyone can afford to take a sabbatical, dip into savings, indulge in a hobby etc. There are many people who don't earn as much as a silicon valley engineer, have low savings to dip into, and perhaps even have/inherit debt - Making rent and being able to afford essentials takes priority to dealing with burnout in such situations.
Taking a year off is definitely not the norm
If you want to live a un-average life, you need to have un-average priorities and sacrifice. Few on HN should be living paycheck to paycheck.
Check out Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover for a starting model. And yes, you'll have to sacrifice now to benefit later.
But you have to understand that consumerism is pushed down our throats from all around starting at a very young age. Dave Ramsay doesn't just come into your consciousness like advertising does, and unless one is close to someone who is very anti consumerism and advertising you will likely be subjected to an onslaught of messages aimed at your subconscious that you are completely ill-equipped to fight.
I think many people in these comments are speaking on behalf of the general population who does not have the luxury of taking a year off.
This comment of yours drips with privilege.
Edit: I was introduced to dave Ramsay's work in my 20s by a close friend who was wealthy and had businesses and homes. He volunteered with some organizations to provide financial literacy classes. I was lucky to have been given that reference.
When you fly, the emergency briefing tells you to put on your own mask before helping others. In lifeguard training, you're taught to keep yourself afloat before the victim.
If you don't have your own finances in order, your opinion on others' finances is just noise and about as valuable.
Not necessarily. It's called empathy. And your lifeguard story makes no sense.
This is also biblical - take the splitter out of your own eye before you take the splinter out of another's eye (paraphrasing).
You (and everyone else) really do own your financial life. There can be curveballs-- a catastrophic illness, for example-- but for the vast majority of people, having money or not is really a series of personal decisions made over a lifetime.
> Most people pay $100+/month for cable, eat out multiple times per week, have thousands of credit card debt, and an unexpected $400 bill would ravage them.
There's also a cohort that might not earn a lot but is financially responsible, frugal and makes modest gains towards big goals e.g. education for kids, home ownership which can take almost a life time. There's a big spectrum from being poor due to being financially irresponsible and being lucky enough to be in their 20s, debt free and paying off a mortgage instead of rent (with help for college, down payment etc from family to have a healthy head start). Not everyone who doesn't have the means is in such a place because they are lazy or is financially irresponsible. Simply stating that most people are a certain way without evidence is just disingenuous and judgemental, perhaps exposes a bias more than anything.
Congrats. That's awesome and it's what we should strive for. Sacrificing sucks but doing it now so we have to do less of it later (or later generations have to do less) is powerful. Your parents setting that example for you - and you passing it down - is exceptionally valuable too. I grew up in similar financial circumstances without learning those lessons until much much later.
> There's also a cohort that might...
Yes, there are cohorts in all circumstances. That's why I said "most" and not "all."
I know plenty of people with no cable, no Internet other than their phone, living paycheck to paycheck... This idea that poor people just need to stop wasting their money is propaganda used to justify starvation wages
It creates a simple fairy tale that financial success or failure rests solely on the individual.
It allows people to ignore wage stagnation, inflation, rising costs of critical goods and services, rising inequality, and fundament structural inequities with society.
Here's a more in-depth academic paper that provides data beyond unsourced colloquialisms if you're interested.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol82/iss4/8...
"65% of Americans are still paying for cable TV."
"According to cable cord-cutting subscribers statistics for 2018, the average viewer in the US can save up to $104 per month by taking the plunge."
Ref: https://techjury.net/blog/cable-tv-subscribers-statistics/
"According to Zagat, if you are like the average American, you go out for lunch and dinner 4.9 times each week."
Ref: https://us1035.iheart.com/featured/sarah/content/2018-01-09-...
Average credit card debt in 2020: $5315
Ref: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/consumer-credit-...
What are the demographics by age, geography for the people paying for cable tv, going out for dinners 5 times a week and that have $5k of credit card debt. You seem to be assuming they are all the same people, and you are assuming that correlation is causation.
Besides, even I indulge -
The link you shared about cord cutting statistics, if you read through the link, its making the point that cutting the cord was on the rise and in 2018 increased by 32.8% compared to 2017. In 2018 alone 33M people canceled their TV subscription. Seems like your data suggests people are increasingly doing what you want them to do, cutting the cord and saving money.
The link about people going out for lunch and dinner, it actually doesn't have any data in it. It appears to be a blog by a private citizen.
The link you shared about credit card debt, well that actually says that average credit card debt reduced by 14% from 2019 to 2020, while the avg fico across all generations increased. Seems like another trend that you wanted people to do. Surprisingly it also says that while avg credit card debt reduced from 2019 to 2020, student loan debt increased the highest of any debt category, by 9%.
Should I be concluding that people have been cutting the cord and saving money on cable tv, reducing credit card debt and investing in education? Or are we just cherry picking statistics to support a belief without really looking at the data.
I have a strange feeling that your sources are as poor as your ideas.
It allows people to ignore that their choices are by far the biggest factor in what happens in their lives, and instead allows them blame society and take no responsibility.
Looking at the comments here, it seems like people cherry pick anecdotes or statistics to support their beliefs about the distribution.
People can make good/bad choices but the amount and types of choices a person even has available to them, is very dependent on pre-existing family success/wealth.
Jeff Bezo's kids will have more choices/opportunities than a middle class kid who will have more choices/opportunities than a poor kid.
Starving Syrian Refugess have very minimal choices or opportunities.
So your average middle class or poor person has some choices but is much more at the mercy of their ENVIRONMENT than Jeff Bezo's kids who can bend the environment to their will with money.
Your heels seem pretty dug into your belief's so there's a good chance I'm wasting my time by talking to you but whatever.
That’s not common, though.
Really though, the solution is to change jobs. Despite how it looks from HN comments, there are plenty of companies out there with good work life balance.
Painting this as a false dichotomy between staying in burnout-inducing jobs or dropping everything to become jobless isn’t helpful. There’s an entire spectrum of options that should be explored to change a burnout-inducing situation.
What a powerful question and distillation of what society is facing. I will think about this.
When I saw what the pandemic was doing to nearly every professional office worker, I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in. Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.