The Great Resignation pt 2 is coming

I mean I hope you're right but the part I absolutely don't think will happen is employers trying to retain talent. As far as I can tell that's just not what they do.

I’ve actually found that this dissatisfaction coupled with a slow economy puts the power in the employer’s hands. You have a smaller amount of open jobs and an increased number of applicants because a large portion of employed people are applying. These people aren’t going to just quit for unemployment. They’re only quitting if they get something else. In essence, lower supply of open jobs and increased supply of applicants means companies can be choosy.

Until job openings increase by a fair bit and/or people become somewhat satisfied with their jobs, it will be an employer’s market.

I have a feeling a lot of employers would love for some dev resignations right now. I heard one of our managers say the other day that our extended teams haven’t had a single person quit in 2 years. They’ve already cut bottom performers to get leaner, and I am sure they’d happily say bye to some people who leave voluntarily right now.

The market just isn’t good, so nobody is moving.

Can't quit if there is nowhere to go

They got their short-term profits with the layoffs, and now they get the failures from the tech debt, loss of organizational knowledge, and the total collapse of motivation and productivity.

I work in big tech and the levels of burnout, disengagement and low morale have reached unprecedented peaks. Yes, people are looking for ways out but this is not like 2021/22. Back then you were job hopping to get better perks in terms of compensation, work life balance, respect and flexibility. Today you can job hop but you still find the same shitty hectic environment. I feel people just don’t want to be in tech anymore, what lured people in tech in the first place vanished in favour of politics and BS. You can still make some decent money, but now it’s just an investment banking type of career.

In short yes, big resignations are building up but this isn’t going to be anywhere similar to 2021/22.

I like my job, or at least I used to. Remote work, doing what I’m good at, and not overburdened.

However, it’s pretty clear that the Covid years were great for my company, and the aftermath isn’t what they expected. They, for some reason, expected growth to continue at the same rate, instead it’s declining back to where the growth should have been.

It’s pretty clear looking at their data that the Covid years were the outlier. Now business is as if Covid never happened. It’s not like they’re doing “bad”. They’re just not “growing”, and if you’re not growing you’re dying apparently. Managers across the board are pushing the panic button. They cut 401k match, they cancelled bonuses they promised, and a slew of other cuts.

Now a high up head d-bag believes we should just buy our software instead building our own stuff. They think it will save money, but I’m sure they have no clue what they’re signing up for.

None of these people are even slightly technical. They supposedly floated the idea of only having contractors for developers, and only hiring people as they need jobs done.

So now my job is on the chopping block next year after they finally finish migrating everything. If it even happens that fast. I’m not going to stick around to get a layoff email. I’ll be long gone before then.

Quit to go where, working retail? LOL. Ain't no jobs worth quitting for! I'd love to quit my job for a pay raise and job title increase but that ain't happening.

why am I looking for a job?

shit ton of debt, need high pay

I write code for fun/enjoy making things but I don't enjoy corporate software dev so I do it until I can get out (invest)

Yes, this is coming, but not this year.
Literally noone in my team of 30 engineers has resigned during the past 12 months. We have a lot of issues and bullshit. We also used to have large attrition around 2022. The job market is really that bad right now.

Simon Sinek touched on similar. He said what you're seeing are Gen Z are watching their millennial parents get laid off for no reason of their own at a higher frequency than we've ever seen, especially in tech as tech continued to grow in the late 90s and 2000s and all the way now to the 2020s.

So Gen Z are entering the job force incredibly jaded - They already know employers dont give a shit about them. So you have Millennials who have been getting punched in the dick and already lost trust and are constantly looking out for themselves, and Gen Z witnessed it and therefore are constantly looking out for themselves and dont have trust.

No one is trusting their employer. Employees are now viewing it as transactional, the same way Employers did that all along. People have been awoken to that reality.

It's going to be much rare to see employees stay past 4 years at the same company unless you landed in a dream spot with low stress and high pay with low turnover.

Hell, Amazon structures their stock compensation so that most of it is year 3 and 4, as they know how many people leave in the first two years.

In the golden market of 2021, companies were desperate to hire net-new positions.

So when there was an abundance of openings, it became super easy to job search, get a position, and then quit, which in turn created even more demand at those companies hiring for net-new positions and now needing to backfill on top of that.

"The Great Resignation" is a fancy sounding title that misses a key concept. "The Great Find a New Job Easily and then Resign" would be more accurate.

That period didn't start purely from people leaving their jobs. That contributed creating a snowball effect, sure, but the root cause was a huge demand for hiring net-new roles. It wasn't created from a bunch of people resigning. It was created from market conditions and companies over-hiring. The resignation bit resulted from that.

The problem with "The Great Resgnation Part 2" is that there isn't rampant over-hiring for net-new roles. People in their current rules may not be happy, I'm not disputing that, I was that myself over the past few months, but there's no rampant over-hiring.

The snowball isn't going to even start rolling without that. People being dissatisfied with their jobs might try looking for a new job, but in the vast majority of cases they won't leave without anything lined up. So there's no uncontrolled over-hiring combined with desperate backfilling going.

So.... again, "The Great Resignation Part 2" might not be a great term for this either. Maybe "The Great Dissastisfaction but Still Hold Down Our Job Cause We're Not Stupid Enough to Leave Before Lining Someting Else Up Which Takes Longer for Us Than It Takes for an Employer to Replace Us Since Nobody's Over-hiring Right Now."

It doesn't roll off the tongue, but it's a better description of what's happening.

This article is just finance bros trying to cope with the fed not dropping rates.

Bros the only way this gets better at this point is if we unionize. CS jobs are comodifying and employers are well coordinated withe eachother (which should be illegal but lol if you think that matters). Every other productive employment under the sun has worked this way ever since capitalism was a thing, we aren't going to be different. Unionize or suffer.

Yes, I wish the market loosens up... I personally know of very smart folks at my company who are unhappy because our style of work and company goals don't suit their skills but they can't leave because of the tight market

This is just more labor dynamics propaganda to support whatever policies they're cooking up to ram right down our throats.

It's absolute nonsense. People are terrified right now to even accept a new offer due to Last in, First out policies amid sweeping waves after waves of layoffs.

The "great resignation part 1" was mostly empty narrative building that was then immediately followed by the layoffs apocalypse part 1.

This can only mean that even more layoffs are right around the corner.

Moronic article. There's no where for people to go to lmao.

The only reason there was a great resignation was because it was a worker's market. We have the exact opposite of that now.

How come every post in this sub always feels so out of touch with reality? Like what job to get when you resign and compete with a zillion of new grads? This is not 2020 market yet some people are just so delusional.

I know guys who complain for years and guess what I still see them everyday.

Are you looking for a job and why?

Yes. Because I got laid off in October last year. Though I'm going back to school to get an MCS while building a 3D graphics dev portfolio

I think this will happen again in the next 5 years or so but right now and probably for the next few years it’s an employer market.

I feel trapped because there are no other jobs.

I'm looking, but there are maybe 1-3 positions available per day for me to apply to. Most I get an insta rejection.

Yeah I am because of hard deadlines, expectations of 0 errors and blame culture.

A *lot* of outsourcing going on right now. It has not worked well in the past but they are learning from their mistakes and reducing dependencies on international collaboration, e.g. entire subteams based remotely now.

Will it work this time? No idea, but which way the pendulum swings depends on the answer.

Add AI into the mix too: in theory it makes people more efficient so you need fewer employees, but ones that understand how to use AI. An amped up stackoverflow and google search. I am not so sure this part will work as well as they think, but again we shall see.

I don’t think voluntary resignations will start trending unless tech layoffs abate. People would rather tolerate a shitty job than have no job.

You need to have jobs available for people to quit. There's shortage of jobs right now so I really doubt this is going to happen

Resigned yesterday without a job lined up for this reason, felt trapped and bottled up for too long without support.

Not sure what i'll do, logic dictates I'll have to find another job, but I can hardly bear the thought.

I quit a job recently where the CEO and HR manager met with me to tell me that I needed to do two full time jobs. I would be a manager/project planner during the work day. Then at night and weekends I would go home and work on all the stuff that had been planned.

I would have quiet quit but the HR director barged into my office the next day to "help me with my scheduling", I told them I was not feeling well then went home and just sent in my resignation. I figured if they were that dead set it was not worth the amount of games I'd have to commit to for a few more weeks of pay.

They ended up paying me for 3 months to sit at home while they found a replacement (whom quit a month after they hired them lol). I told them I would stay on payroll for emergencies but I would never be back in the office again unless I decided I needed to be there to complete a task. They also tried to screw me out of my last paycheck by trying to get me to admit I didn't work the last 2 weeks but I only would reply with the deal was on I'm on payroll till X date with a copy of the email approving that arrangement.

No, there’s bills being proposed right now to make it easier to directly hire cheaper labor from abroad. Blue collar cheap labor is already here with record immigration.

This almost sounds like labor porn. The pendulum always swings back hard to the employers b/c it's designed that way. The fed sends the bat signal by raising rates to put a halt to inflation aka employees starting to approach making what they are actually worth. Then the pendulum starts to swing back the other way but slowly. It went that way in '01 and '08.

Absolutely. I just quit a director gig at MSFT last week. Morale is low, but the current conditions mean people aren’t looking as intently and the market is saturated with talent.

Openings at all levels have reduced. 18 Months ago I’d get half a dozen or more pings for M2+ roles. Now it’s far more scarce and the loops are competitive.

I'm employed, but I've been looking for another job for almost two years now. I've worked on many interesting things over my career, but although my title is currently "Principal Software Engineer", I don't write software. Instead, I'm paid to do things anyone could do, such as "Paste these items from Spreadsheet 'A' to Spreadsheet 'B'" or "Create JIRA bug tickets for various teams and ask them to fix their bugs." Or, "Push these buttons to manually upload the build." While I'm grateful to have a job, I'm bored to tears and just feel like there has to be a job out there where I can work on interesting software projects AND get paid. My theory is that interesting work is inversely proportional to pay.

U from wallstreetbets or recent highschool grad?

I’m quitting soon and I can’t wait. Burnt out after about 15 years in corporate.

Burnt out and want to quit for vacation

Current employer didn’t try to counter offer or anything when I resigned, just said they were happy for me. My company is notorious for off shoring though

I managed to get a job, and for me, this being my first software engineering role and having only been in it for two years, I will be hanging onto it for dear life for the next 3 to 5 years minimum. After that it may be time to start looking around, but currently for me the experience is more valuable than looking at hopping jobs at the moment.

Let me take there job then. The alternate is so much worse 💀

Yes currently looking for a new job because I am wildly underpaid.

The reason why that number is so high is that people can't find better jobs. Just because people want new jobs doesn't mean they magically appear.

The cracks are starting to show at my company already, we've had several people bail, and we're not that bad of a place.

This is a joke. The power is and always has been in the hands of the employers.

You don’t have to fix tech debt if you change job! <taps side of head>

OP, keep dreaming. ZIRP isn't coming back, might want to adjust to The New Normal and gain the skills that set you apart from others.

I believe this. Every single dev I know as well as engineering managers are looking to get out from where they are at. No one is happy about the lowest raises in their career this year, even though companies are making money hand over fist. I don’t know how the market will accommodate that though. Everyone is waiting for the market to get better, but if everyone hits the market at the same time, isn’t that just the same as now? Maybe worse since a lot of the people struggling to find something right now are recent grads. What happens to them once all the senior devs waiting for a better market actually start looking.

Where will one go ? Isn’t it same everywhere ? Burn out is real yes, but every forest is on fire and there is no east entry

I disagree. Full time employment is in the toilet. Quits are trending down and will continue as the labor market continues to weaken

This is funny because apparently the UK just got out of recession today according to the news lol.

Looks like we are looking at the perpetual cycle of mass hiring and mass layoffs.

Only good job opportunities in that case would be for recruiters.

i am 49 and close to retiring. instead of retiring, i am remote and basically just stopped working. better to get fired.

I got an attractive contract offer that I turned into a raise at my current job. I would have left if it wasn't a 6 month contract with hiring on afterward "possible".

In my case, I valued freedom and stability over increased pay and title. The possibility of having to look for a job in this barren market is too risky IMO.

Most of them won't get another job this time. Hiring has slowed down drastically since the first great resignation.

Once the next wave of startups come thru, people will start jumping ship. This happens every time the tech world slows down. The current faangs came about after the dotcom bubble bursted. Cloud based startups and apps exploded post housing crisis. We don’t know yet, but the next wave of tech will probably come out post pandemic in a year or 3. Is it AI? Maybe, maybe not.

I just quit, job market is coming back, but still really difficult for entry level folks.

Respectfully, what are you smoking? This could not be further from reality.

Vacasa literally just laid off 20% of their workforce TODAY. I have had dozens of highly qualified tech friends navigating multiple layoff cycles over the past 2 years. There are fewer and fewer decent paying jobs available, and employers are trying to offer candidatea laughable wages. With the housing crisis, cost of living and inflation, everyone I know is clinging to their jobs for dear life.

Are you a corporate market researcher trying to rage bait us into confirming how safe leadrrship is in continuing to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of a smaller workforce so they can return ever-growing profits for shareholders?

Until those at the top are deemed directly responsible for cyberattacks, etc. I don't see much changing. Cheap and low quality absolutely works if you have a captive customer base.

I think a lot of employers are hoping for attrition.

If a second great resignation is coming, it will be because companies have laid off all the people they could lay off and now the pressure from wall Street will remain to keep growing profits - which means revenue growth.

Not yet. But I think what's going to happen when the economy approves, is the lack of loyalty will increase tenfold.

The past decade or so you've seen companies giving out so many freebies (food, daycare, etc.). Only for you to get laid off.

Like for me, I no longer care about stocks or whatever. I only care about what I can get in the short term and as soon as that goes away, I'm out.