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.
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.