Actual resignations are up slightly, but the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated. It’s higher than normal turnover, but the stories are written in ways to suggest that companies everywhere are gutted by employees leaving in bulk. I feel like “great resignation” was deliberately chosen to mislead people into thinking people are just walking out of their jobs, which conjures images of a minor revolution.
Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies. It’s likely that the worst of the worst companies are seeing a significant net loss of employees, but for most it just means turnover is up a tick.
The problem is compounded because the “great resignation” is a narrative that people really, really want to believe. Every time I brought up the actual data on HN, it’s met with anecdotes about somebody whose friend of friend’s company lost all of their employees or something. These anecdotes seem to be the fuel keeping the narrative going far beyond what the data supports.
I suspect a lot of people were afraid to move on to new opportunities for a while due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Once enough confidence was restored, the job hopping we'd expect to play out over the course of a couple of years all happened in a few months.
My own experience is that during the first year of the pandemic I was just cooling my heels in a stable position. Later, the prime factor for me moving on was the whole return to office narrative. I've embraced fully remote and now demand it.
As such, I found a new job in Q4 and moved on, for a 25% pay increase as well.
I feel like for me, the boredom of COVID made online education about 10x more appealing, and with the articles about WGU popping up, I decided to finally finish my bachelors.
[1] I made sure they were ok with me doing a half-time PhD before I joined.
I spent a not-insignificant amount of time emailing professors (roughly two professors per state) across the US asking if they had part-time PhDs. Most didn't respond to me, the ones that did gave me a polite "no".
I then look up "online part time PhDs" and found basically two places that offer a doctorate online, which was Purdue and University of York (England). I inquired about Purdue, and it seemed more managerial than technical, which I wasn't interested in.
I find a program that seems interesting at University of York and ask them if they have any openings for a remote part time PhD. They responded back with basically "well not if you want funding." I then replied with "What if I fund myself?" Two professors working together decided to give me a shot, so they asked me to write a research proposal, which I did. I guess it was good enough, because when I emailed them back, instead of saying "thanks but no thanks", they gave me tips on how to refine it. After a few months of back-and-forth working on the proposal (and finishing my undergrad), we got the proposal into a state we were happy with.
After that, I just applied on their online portal and managed to get an intake interview. The intake interview was basically "<x> is involved with this PhD. Are you OK with that?" or "What if you encounter <y>?" I guess I did well enough because I got an offer the next week. I start in April.
----
Sorry for the life story, but I figured you might be able to be able to save yourself a few steps.
There are two major difficulties and one major advantage over the full-time version. The advantage is that you can work, so students aren't dependent on external funding or an ever-shortening runway of their own funds. This isn't a small thing. On the other side, though, it doubles the length of an already lengthy process (do people really want to be spending 7-10 years of all of their spare time unpaid and lonely?) and increases the chance the the candidate will drop out (in that they keep an alternative on-hand, rather than burning their employment bridges to do it full-time). Given how hard the PhD process can be, simply saying 'sod that' is always a temptation.
Anyway, it'll depend on the supervisor and the university. Some have policies against it, others are happy to consider.
But I bet everyone who hated their job before, and then suffered through who knows what god awful shit during the pandemic, starting looking as soon as they felt it was more safe.
It's framed this way as click-bait. Of course people click on stories about quitting work because they dream of doing that themselves.
yep that's me. I wanted to quit over a year ago but I kept putting it off due to pandemic circumstances.
but now that everyone sees omicron is a wet fart and things are going back to normal, I put in my notice yesterday.
With service workers, resistance to paying what it takes has a compounding effect, because being short-staffed forces people to pick up the slack for missing coworkers, and they end up burning out and quitting, or leaving for another job where the wages are better and the stress is lower.
Bernie Sanders ran 2 presidential campaigns and got a lot of airtime for worker power. And layoffs screw people over for short-term gain and then incur more costs when staffing up again. It is an embarrassing place to be in so businesses jump on the narrative of a great resignation.
Taking this view that nothing is going on at a macroscopic scale is like standing in the Himalayas and shouting "but the Earth is really smooth, almost spherical." While at a macroscopic scale you'd be very correct (technically oblate spheriod), the mountains and valleys localized around you are very real challenges you need to navigate. That's important if you never travel outside the Himilayas, maybe not if you're circumnavigating the Earth (just, avoid it, you know). Not everywhere is Kansas and if you ignore very real localized phenomena that may be unavoidable, you're going to have problems navigating if your specific scale can't compensate for it.
Official numbers are up ~50% between Nov 2020 and Nov 2021. IMO official numbers dramatically increased as vaccine mandates occurred and under reported.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm
Nov 2020 -> Nov 2021; percent change by region:
Northeast 1.8% -> 2.5%
South 2.8% -> 3.5%
Midwest 2.3% -> 3.1%
West 2.0% -> 2.8%
By dramatically increased you mean went from 1.8% during a pandemic when people were afraid to move around to 2.5% as things eased, well in line with historical levels.
I think the OP is much more accurate with the statement "the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated".
In fact, if you look back more than the year you picked, you'll see there was a huge drop, and the current blip is most likely those people feeling some relief from the pandemic. The rates are no where near out of line historically.
Here's historical data graphed for all 4 regions you listed.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00MWQUR
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00SOQUR
And it's not a very big amount. If the rate lasts a long time let me know. Most likely, as should be clear from the graphs, there is very little out of the ordinary happening.
I suspect both are up higher than they were in 2019.
Most of the examples they cite are restaurants.
Yes, I think this is driven by corporate friendly mainstream media to mostly drum up for support for more corporate welfare while simultaneously painting Americans as lazy and undeserving of welfare themselves.
There's a lot going on:
- Boomers, a huge part of the workforce, are beginning to retire, and they aren't coming back
- The US is near full employment [0]. As such, workers have more power. They can "resign" and go somewhere else relatively easily, or they don't have to take poor jobs
- If a business closes right now due to lack of workers, the owner might make the claim that Americans are just lazy & don't want to work, and corporate friendly media might push that idea. However, remember, we're at a time when we're approaching full employment. The business likely wasn't attractive to workers. So is it really the (lack of) workers' fault? Or was the business just poorly run? It's hard to admit that, and easy to blame others. It's OK for businesses to fail, though. Most do.
I think it's really a matter of perspective. If you're used to having a lot of workers (some of whom don't have the luxury of looking for a good job and need to take any job they can get, just to qualify for stuff like food assistance) fighting each other for the same job, so you're able to pay them less, this is a bad situation. If you're a worker who now has many employers vying for your talents, it's a good situation, but you rarely see that story being told in the corporate media.
0 - https://www.axios.com/jerome-powell-full-employment-27be7355...
I think you are overindexing on the corporate-media outlet connection and ignoring how simple it is for a journalist to write a trend piece from personal anecdotes. All it takes is three friends of a journalist to resign before said journalist feels like this is a 'nationwide trend'.
Link to the article for the subscribers: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/evidence-for...
- 2011 changes the entire meaning of your post.
>Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies.
I don't think this is a valid assumption. I know a lot of people shifting from dual income families to one parent staying at home with the kids. Even more wanting to go from full time to part time positions.
The local regional/ trauma 2 hospital had (admittedly) lost more than 50% of nurses in a year, (unofficially) replaced fewer than half of those, and that was before any of the vaccine mandates were announced or deadlines set.
Vaccine politics have silenced them since then, but work shifts that were already understaffed at the start of covid with 1 MD, 2-3 mid-levels, and 6-8 nurses are still regularly making due with as little as 1 MD and 2 nurses.
Obviously nurses are a special case given... the state of things over the past 2 years. But those numbers are just absurd, even as an outlier.
I think assuming any sort of (near) net-zero shift in staffing is going to be wrong, be it within a particular office, business, profession, industry, or geographic area.
I have three contracts that drive the bulk of my revenue right now. I have a few different titles, but for simplicity, let's say Sr DevOps. As a matter of course, my oldest clients have my loyalty, but my highest bidder has my attention - work needs to be done on a Saturday night? For my oldest client, I'll do it. Conflicting deadlines come in? I'll try and take the hit (work extra hours), but the priority? The highest payer with the least micro managerial leadership.
You pay me for my experience, or you pay me to attend your meeting while someone else pays me for my experience to actually do something. It's ok, I'll wait, I charge by the hour either way, and if your meeting is useless enough, I can charge you both!
My wife is possibly taking a leave to care for her father ... she's thinking a lot about if she wants to go back. If she wasn't taking a leave that first step / time might not be there to decide to do something else.
There's this, but let's not forget that the S&P 500 is up about 40% relative to its pre-pandemic peak, so retirement accounts have been growing really fast. Staying home suddenly became an option for many.
There were already concerns about boomer retirements. Add a pandemic most dangerous to older people, lack of concern for worker safety, and massive increases in retirement accounts, and you have a lot of people that can and do stay home.
While in the past an employee may have tolerated below market wages in exchange for the stability (safety) provided by staying still, inflation and its effects have forced their hand. Food, gas, childcare, housing, transportation, etc... have all increased to the point that they've had to make bolder decisions. And that includes looking for better jobs (wages, benefits, work/life balance).
The narrative is directionally correct. The issue is that the media (including NPR) has done everything they can think of to exaggerate it as much as possible. Once you look at the actual numbers it’s not the sea change we’ve been hearing about everywhere.
The data is being omitted because the omission leaves more room for imaginations to run with the headlines.
Ehh, that's debatable and much harder to prove either way.
For years before the pandemic there have been complaints from every industry about companies trimming down teams/workforces to the smallest possible size. People were doing the jobs of 2 or 3 people were a common issue that was brought up, if anyone was sick the employer demanded you come to work anyway. And that's when things were good. Now add a large portion of employees being sick at any one time and suddenly the work machine is being driven over capacity and much like an overloaded TCP/IP network, congestion collapse occurs. Even a small change in the most productive employees moving jobs could lead to large disruptions inside of a business.
Anecdotally this is something I witnessed. We had pretty low rates of employee attrition during the pandemic, but the employees that did leave were some of the most influential.
Looking at just the NPR article. The data is NOT "being omitted". As far as I can tell they've backed up all of their assertions in the article and are not exaggerating anything and the claims made seem reasonable.
If you want "pure data" there's plenty of sources out there, albeit with little-to-none in the way of interpretation. Those of us who aren't experts in labor economics actually need a bit of context and interpretation.
Having said that I'm also not writing a news article so I think the standard for not having data is a bit different. I don't expect any random person on HN to source everything ... like I would a news article.
It has the issues of small sample size and cherry-picking (i.e. the researchers tranched companies by industry and had a model of "toxic culture" that could be disagreed with if one cared to make the case), but the overall turn-head-and-squint takeaway is the pandemic forced a lot of workers to ask the question "Am I willing to risk death for the assholes I work with?" and for a lot of employees, the answer was "no." Places where the answer was not "no" had higher retention (both across industries and within industries).
What they do after that is an open question... Some choose another company, some choose another non-career avenue if it is available to them. But the point is the pandemic forced a perspective shift that hadn't happened before.
Very personal opinion ahead (and not tailored to this specific topic): that's most journalism for you. They're not here to "inform the citizen" as a noble mission. Most of the things the press publishes are greatly exaggerated and dramatic to evoke different emotions to the reader which are closely tied to an agenda. The fix is IMHO easy: stop consuming such media once you find such disparities instead of reading again and again about the same and other topics, because they'll most likely lie/exaggerate in everything else and at the end, you'll be happier and better informed by not filling your memory with bs.
Edit: typo with->which
Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions.
(yeah, yeah, there are economic incentives to do so - but there are also economic incentives to make shoddy, low-quality products and cheat your customers in other realms, and yet it's still wrong)
This is a positive development. The problem is when motives are concealed, as in "objective" journalism.
Of course, as the NPR article points out, people are really just scrambling to find higher-paying jobs, because of rising costs for goods and services.
U-3 is the figure most commonly reported. U-4,5,6 start to add in various groups of under-employed or discouraged workers. All of those figures are approaching pre-COVID levels and approaching the lows we saw in 2000. We also see U-6 closer to U-3 now than at many points in previous years (as the economy crashes, U-6 tends to get further away from U-3 as workers are forced into part-time or underemployment situations).
There are still some issues around childcare that need to be worked out, which is probably the biggest source of the gap between U-3 and U-6 right now. But this is still one of the hottest labor markets in most of our lives.
If anything is keeping people out of the work force, it’s childcare issues, not anti-work.
Anti-work only actually comes into play in boomers who retired during the pandemic! Everyone else is effectively working if they can.
This is just a pure labor shortage - driven by demographic shifts that were years in the making and just now accelerated and by childcare shortages that are nearly fully state-driven
Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader.
The idea that amid a pandemic and such that there are a variety of reasons seems backed up by the data, although I admit that's what I'm inclined to believe / seen.