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Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

363 points by Hard_Space 5y ago

dhjhdskjsdjkds 5y ago
"Toxic culture is overstated" = "I've never sat down and had any serious work discussions with women in tech, but I think I know everything." Toxic culture in engineering is terrible. I've been in many different engineering and IT work environments for decades, and have seen a ton of women get picked on and bullied, both overtly and just subtly. Yeah it's not all women--some evolve shields, some become passive and numb, some double down on skill to get 1x the credit for 2x the effort--but it's definitely very real. I also think quitting has been driven by remote work. What happens if person A had remote work during the worst part of the pandemic, erratic petty tyrant boss A decides its time to "come back" or "go hybrid" even though it seems nonsensical to someone with broadband and a remotely accomodatable job--and then person B, who is spouse/friend/relative of person A, has a completely different situation where non-maladjusted boss B is like "yeah man, as long as you are getting your work done, I don't care where you do it." There is a strong desire to dump "MadMen" type boss A with prejudice. Not always, some people love getting out of the house to work, but for people who enjoyed pandemic remote work, to have to give it up for arbitrary reasoning based on the armchair organizational psychology theories of some dumb manager--those people are going to skate, and they should. It's like one the one side you have this vague meme of "in person team building" and on the other, real costs like: car wear and tear costs, gas costs, mass transit costs, parking costs, weather related time costs like scraping, increased accident risk from commute, lost work time during commute, different/specialized clothing needs and uncomfortable work clothing standards, prep/logistics time like packing/unpacking/undocking/docking, MBWA/wanderer interruptions and ad hoc "coworker therapist sessions" in the office, less comfortable and ergonomically genericized desks and peripherals, uncontrollable environmental noises and temperatures...all to do something that can be done over a wire. I'd sooner set an office building on fire than work out of it. I'm a genXer and I guess I get why boomers are like this but if you're my age or younger and you force people into an office, shame on your pathetic fake nerd soul.
H8crilA 5y ago
Aren't the same factors driving resignations always, not just during the so called Great Resignation?
- Hokusai 5y ago
  But people being at home and able to distance themselves of the situation makes them realize how bad it is. When you are in the middle of the chaos, the day to day survival, the oppressive environment, to see others suffering the same that you, makes it hard to realize the situation. The pandemic has allowed many people to step back and look at their jobs, and they did not like what they saw.
  - sn41 5y ago
    True... However, in academia where I work, there are not many options right now. Despite sinking nearly 20 years into this and enjoying my work, I'm having second thoughts due to the toxicity of my colleagues. Nice username, btw. I enjoy the prints of Mt. Fuji. Also had an opportunity to be on Mt. Fuji, partly inspired by his paintings.
Zenst 5y ago
Would be interesting in comparing the number of employee's indicating a wish to leave the company with the level of customer churn. My gut feeling is that there may well be a correlation there. As happy customers make a happy company and the company is more than any stock market or accountant realizes the value of the all employee's and not just the the board and PR faces. As customers interact with those employee's, whilst the financial markets interact with the figure-heads. Hence a difference in reality perspectives. But no hard data, just a gut feeling that there may well be more too this that is quantifiable, maybe even formulaic. Though not an easy data set to put together than it seems as not easy to find out a companies churn rate. Which may explain why it may just stay a gut feeling theory.
mateo1 5y ago
That is not real research. I'm disgusted that big names like mit stand behind buzzword-driven self-affirmative soft science bullshit publications like this.
- deleted 5y ago
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- dia80 5y ago
  Yes, but sometimes that's all you have to go on. Imagine you are a manger with high quit rates, what do you do? Say I've no idea what's causing this and won't until I see hard evidence, or, think about the article and wonder if any of these factors are affecting you and try to change them. Even if it's wrong it's a good onramp to thinking about your problems.
- tokai 5y ago
  Why are you surprised that management science is soft science? It seems like your view of MIT does not fit the breath of the research.
andrewflnr 5y ago
I've always guessed this was a major factor, though I still think too-low pay is a factor in a lot of cases, especially industries where pay tends to be anchored to minimum wage. However: (a) This is public social media data, I guess? That seems like a noisy channel. (b) Some of their suggestions are really dumb, and all miss the point in my view. If my boss is an ass, sponsoring a social event and expecting that to make things better is insulting. The real solution theoretically doesn't have to cost any money: managers just have to be better people. For such famously bottom-line-driven organizations as large companies, it's funny how that zero-cost solution is so unlikely to actually happen.
- csa 5y ago
  > The real solution theoretically doesn't have to cost any money: managers just have to be better people. For such famously bottom-line-driven organizations as large companies, it's funny how that zero-cost solution is so unlikely to actually happen. Actually changing management culture at a large organization is very expensive if it’s even possible. Very far from a zero-cost solution. I mean, it would be great if the entire management team just woke up and saw the light one day and became good managers, but this happens approximately never. Success is much more likely with a complete management overhaul. If that is possible, and it often isn’t, then it will be very expensive.
  - barrenko 5y ago
    Culture is incredibly sticky. If you're a startup with let's say 5 people, getting more people is like pouring cement on culture. It cannot be changed. The buck stops with the CEO.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    I know, that's why I said "theoretically". :)
- Robin_Message 5y ago
  Poor management practices, e.g. cancelling or changing shifts last minute, have real business value in terms of labour flexibility (for the employer), so in an employers' market, you can expect some businesses to take advantage of those practices to improve their bottom line. The underlying shift, as I see it, is a scarcity of labour, combined with a bullishness of employee attitudes, leading to those poor practices being penalised where previously they had to be tolerated.
foolfoolz 5y ago
> Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior I don’t really believe these reasons or at least they don’t match what i’ve seen. I can only speak for FAANG: I think this is more compensation based than anything else. In an effort to level the playing field FAANGS establish levels. Levels have salary ranges. Salary ranges mean top performers, the people who drive the culture of the entire org, can only be paid some amount more than bottom performers. By keeping these bands too tight the top performers can get better pay elsewhere and leave. When your first top performers are leaving each one hits hard. Once it’s regular the culture becomes different, this isn’t a place to stay and grow, it’s a place to be a launchpad for the next place. And without top pay you won’t attract top talent so when these great people leave you replace them with average people. This reinforces the beliefs. The other side of pay is current valuations are insane. Many startups are getting A, B and even D rounds with 300-500x (i’ve seen higher than 1000x) revenue to value ratios. Your FAANG may hope to 2x or 3x in stock value while these startups promise 20-30x returns. So you have to pay even more to beat the potential earnings they could get at a startup. My theory is not that all pay has to change to keep people, but as a FAANG you need to spend to keep and attract the best or you risk losing everyone. When you work somewhere and all the best people want to stay, or when you work somewhere and more good people join; it’s really hard to mess up that culture
- throw8932894 5y ago
  Top performers are like 5% of staff? They may have high attrition, but company wide it may be very low. And there is salary limit you may get as an employee. Most top performers will start they own business, and do the same job as independent consultants.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  I'll never understand the American thirst for money for the sake of it. If HN comments are to be believed, top performer at your average FAANG easily earn $500k per year. At that point, aren't you well past the point where more money brings more happiness, even in high cost-of-living places? What's the point? Why not find a job that's fun and fulfilling?
deleted 5y ago
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pcthrowaway 5y ago
> "This finding is consistent with a study of 28 Gap stores, in which employees at randomly-assigned locations received their work schedules two weeks in advance, and their managers were barred from canceling their shifts at the last minute. Employees in the control stores were subject to the usual scheduling practices." I don't even know what to say to this. The idea that big corp is intentionally fucking with their blue-collar workers who are likely to be living paycheck-to-paycheck, sleep deprived, or struggling to balance multiple jobs / school and job, just to study how it impacts employee retention, is baffling to me. This should be outright illegal (if it's not already).
- ratherbefuddled 5y ago
  It's worse than you think. The study was to _improve_ the scheduling in the stores in the study so that workers got a whole two weeks notice of their shifts. They merely left things as they were in the control stores.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  You misunderstand the study. GAP didn't start "fucking" with anyone's schedule. In the study, they stopped "fucking" with schedules. This is an improvement. They rolled out a policy that they thought would help workers to half the stores, monitored the impact, and saw that it good! This should be be applauded.
- secretsatan 5y ago
  Isn’t the experiment to make a big corp not fuck with employees as opposed to their usual practices?
  - shawabawa3 5y ago
    I think they underestimated how bad things are that they thought 2 weeks notice for shift schedules had to be worse
- fastball 5y ago
  How are they intentionally fucking with their employees? The control was the status quo and the test was something they expected to be an improvement. They could also just... keep the status quo. Would that be more moral in your eyes?
jokoon 5y ago
When you add covid, climate, the antiwork movement, lack of social progress, political drama, something has to break. There is high resentment towards capitalism and how it is being managed, and I'm not really surprised people are quitting like this, I don't even understand how can normal people hold all those jobs and deal with the stress etc. Personally I think advocating for a general strike would help "shuffle the cards" again. I really feel like 2008 "postponed" a political adjustment that should have happened but did not. It's really weird to be chronically unemployed and watch this "great resignation" phenomenon.
- somedude895 5y ago
  > covid, climate, the antiwork movement, lack of social progress, political drama > advocating for a general strike With such a broad spectrum of issues, what would a general strike even call for?
  - jokoon 5y ago
    Basic income. It seems to be a silver bullet to a lot of problems. Once you give a blank check, you can also remove a lot of administrative clutter designed to "control" and police the poor.
  - Wiseacre 5y ago
    Universal income, health care, and day care
99_00 5y ago
I think the 'Great Resignation' is fake news. When COVID hit people felt insecure so they stayed on jobs they would have otherwise quit. Look at any graph of resignations or quits, they dipped. We are seeing the pent up desire to quit hit the market. However, pent up desire to quit doesn't make as interesting a story. Writers and researchers can use the 'Great Resignation' narrative promote any agenda or attack any workplace philosophy they want. Then readers can argue about it endlessly. The fact that it's divorced from reality means the debate can't be resolved because the premise is flawed. Media companies and sites get an endless stream of engaging but useless content.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Look at any graph of resignations or quits, they dipped. The data there may be misrepresentative, as your local burger flipper or gas station is not likely to report people quitting jobs anywhere, and people moving off of businesses that were closed by lockdowns weren't reported consistently either. The ones hit hardest by the "great resignations" are these small-scale employers, who have barely survived two years worth of lockdowns and had to fight for both customers and employees with big-brand stores and franchise operations before that. For better or worse, the pandemic and its aftereffects will thoroughly disrupt local economies.
  - 99_00 5y ago
    If the data is misrepresentative, what evidence is there for the 'Great Resignation'?
- pjc50 5y ago
  > Look at any graph of resignations or quits https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/interactive-quits-level-by-year.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu... That looks like an increase to me? There was a dip for the first couple of months but the ongoing event has caused a more-than-substitution level of quits.
  - 99_00 5y ago
Areading314 5y ago
A huge problem with this industry is the inflexibility to pay current engineers LARGELY increasing comp each year. The thought is that there is a market rate for an engineer and that pay can increase with the market rate, but this is a fallacy. An engineer that has been at a largish company for 1 year is worth 20-30% more than the year they were hired because they have specific knowledge of the tech stack. Yet that engineer will likely be offered a 3-5% raise. An engineer with 3+ years might be worth 50%+ because they have developed the specific skills relevant to the job AND know the idiosyncacies about org politics and the nitty gritty parts of the codebase. Yet they will still only get a 10-15% raise. So that engineer moves on and accepts a 40% raise elsewhere. And thus we see the constant churn of highly talented engineers which is a huge drain on productivity for all involved.
- tharne 5y ago
  > So that engineer moves on and accepts a 40% raise elsewhere. The other thing you see is talented engineers moving into management even we they don't really want to, so that they can get paid what they're worth. In some cases this is even worse than then the engineer leaving the company because, in addition to losing a good engineer, you often also gain a lousy manager.
- magicroot75 5y ago
  The whole crux of this article is that compensation is incorrectly assumed to be the main driver of turnover.
- greatpostman 5y ago
  I think the theory is that in aggregate they save money since most people are too lazy to jump
- echelon 5y ago
  Speaking as the Devil's advocate, organizations want headcount to be fungible. If hiring and churn were huge issues for most companies, they would actively combat it. Instead, they've all mostly settled into the practice you see. Engineers typically do a 1-2 year tour of duty, vest, then bounce onto greener pastures. Steady state flux. In some senses, new talent also bring in new ideas and combat skeptical dispositions and organizational ossification. Engineering salaries are without a doubt one of the biggest expenses for organizations to deal with. Companies love that they can now hire remotely and pay adjusted cost of living. They'll hire as many workers in middle America as they can, and once enough of the workforce is concentrated outside of expensive cities, you'll see them stop hiring in SF and NY entirely. But it won't stop there. Startup capital is already beginning to shift to new opportunities in burgeoning emerging markets. Employment will eventually head there too, whether it's chasing after the new capital or simply finding more talent at better market prices. Covid and WFH opened up a world of possibility for talent sourcing and cost reduction. America doesn't have a monopoly on good engineers, just the expensive ones. I wouldn't be surprised that if in ten years, our salaries begin to dip below six figures. Inflation adjustments notwithstanding. Make your money now while the iron is still hot.
mschuster91 5y ago
What was the old saying? People don't flee jobs, they flee bad managers? You can run a fast-food franchise, a pub, a hotel or any other front-line enterprise with skill and enjoy extremely loyal employees (at the cost of your profit), or you can run it like a hell on earth by extracting all profit you reasonably can. For a long time, the latter was the standard model across the hospitality sector, especially as unionization and other forms of worker self-organization were never really present - now with covid haven thoroughly shaken everything up, employers are (finally) forced to up their offers. For a lot of them though, it might be way too late - good riddance.
- ragnot 5y ago
  A bad thing that I've realized about the latter scenario is that it is a vicious cycle. Here's what I mean: 1) You are a loyal employee who works hard and puts in the hours. You promise yourself that you will treat your reports well when you finally get a position of power. 2) You get screwed over by some higher up. You are devastated and everything you worked for is taken away. You vow never to let this happen to you again. 3) You claw your way back but you still hold on to what happened in point 2. You don't want to be a chump again so you take as much as you can (read: screw over others to get your own bonus). 4) Repeat ad infinitum
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    At that point, it might make sense for a coordinated effort at least between the Western countries to drastically limit if not outright ban bonus payments and other incentive-based forms of compensation, including stock options above a to-be-discussed limit. We have had three to five decades of de-regulation (depending on the country) and if there is one consistency that shows up everywhere is that as soon as you tie personal bonus payments of managers to their ability to mis-treat staff, they will fuck over their staff (and often enough, their company long-term) for their own short-term gains. Everyone suffers in the end, except "activist investors" pushing for short-term garbage optimizations before unloading the toxic company on clueless bag-holders.
- twic 5y ago
trabant00 5y ago
> failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion I have a very hard time believing this is the major driving factir in the "great resignation". Or maybe my Europe environment is completely different. But to me this sounds like another attempt to push certain political views and not at all to really discover what is going on.
- mypastself 5y ago
  The article is very vague on the methodology anyway, but the claim that this is the top factor seems genuinely suspect. Another factor is supposedly the failure to “recognize and reward strong performers“, which would seem to completely contradict the other claim.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  This "article" uses every possible 'intersectional' buzzword available. "toxic", "diversity", "equity", "inclusion". It's easy for me to dismiss its arguments, solely based on its lexicon... > But to me this sounds like another attempt to push certain political views and not at all to really discover what is going on. Of course that's what it is.
- serverholic 5y ago
  Companies now hire people to tell them they don't have enough black people on the team. The answer isn't more of this bullshit.
djohnston 5y ago
> Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior. Not that I don't believe this but I reallllly want to see the data and how they classify a company as promoting D&I Vs not.
tomohawk 5y ago
This is based on comments people are willing to put in Glass Door, so there will be obvious biases there. Publicly, people will make up a reason for leaving, and not state the real reason, or just not say anything. I know a number of people who are just DONE with with covid culture, and just want to get away from it. The only way they can do that in many cases is to just leave their job. Since they are trying to get away from covid culture, the last thing they're going to do is talk about it on a site like Glass Door.
- jacksonkmarley 5y ago
  > I know a number of people who are just DONE with with covid culture, and just want to get away from it. What do you mean? What is "covid culture", and how do you get away from it?
rkangel 5y ago
This article does accidentally capture one of the major corporate problems pretty well. The conclude from their data that Toxic Workplace Culture is the biggest cause of resignation, and then they immediately suggest 4 short term things to try that don't relate to culture at all. If you have a toxic workplace culture, the very first thing you should do is to start fixing your culture. This is very hard and not fast (as they acknowledge to be fair). One thing you can do though is to acknowledge it to your employees - "X, Y and Z is wrong and we're working to fix it". Nothing destroys morale more than employees being unhappy about a set of things and then management standing up and telling you there aren't any problems.
- chongli 5y ago
  A fish rots from the head down. The people in charge with the most power to solve workplace toxicity are in all likelihood the cause. If that is the case then the best advice is for people to resign and go elsewhere, just as people are doing according to the article.
  - odonnellryan 5y ago
    People are also human, and as employees we tend to expect management to be perfect.
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    A side effect of this is most jobs people find will be toxic, because those are the ones people are leaving and the ones with openings. I suppose that is already the case.
- insickness 5y ago
  Companies should pay more attention to which leaders are roundly hated since they can be the biggest contributor to toxic culture. At my company, we had a CIO who was hated by every member of the IT team. Attrition rates as well as glass door reviews reflected it. Yet they kept him there for years.
  - 5y ago
jessaustin 5y ago
The industries with the highest percentage of blue-collar workers are noted in light blue. This means the other industries with lower blue-collar percentages are noted in blue blue. This may be the dumbest graphic decision I've seen yet this year.
throwaway9952 5y ago
My company recently had a series of townhalls related to a re-org that included a few different open Q&A sessions. I'd estimate that 70-80% of the questions related to what the company was going to do to address current salaries, particularly vis-a-vis inflation. The questions were largely deflected (which is probably okay given the context) but there is very little urgency to do anything outside of the normal review cycle. Attrition is starting to get bad and I don't really see what harm there is in doing something off-cycle. There is effectively a black-swan event going on where you have record-high inflation coupled with low unemployment and a substantially more demand for workers than there is supply. The move to remote has also shifted the opportunities for tons of folks who lived outside of major urban hubs, allowing them opportunities that were never previously available to them. Why wouldn't such a rare event result in rare proactivity? I've changed jobs twice since the pandemic hit, resulting in about a 50% increase in compensation. I'm almost certain to change jobs again soon and will then be closer to doubling my salary from where I was in March 2020. In none of these job changes have I seen any serious plans by the companies to address salaries with a broad brush.
- magicroot75 5y ago
  It's a weird concept, but a company would rather hire a new person at 30% higher salary than give a current one a 25% raise.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  In none of these job changes have I seen any serious plans by the companies to address salaries with a broad brush. Because it's cheaper to do nothing and grit your teeth and hope that the employees don't revolt. What's really awful are the companies that proceed to do nothing while bragging that they had an excellent year revenue-wise. It's like they think employees don't actually pay attention to the company press releases and marketing drivel. If they brag about +20% revenue and your paycheck goes up +1.5%, expect a revolt.
  - hiq 5y ago
    What do you mean by revolt? As long as the attrition rate remains stable and not out of the ordinary, why should companies change this?
xiphias2 5y ago
There's nothing black swan in an inflationary environment that leads to hyperinflation, even if it's for a country with a reserve currency. Every empire hyperinflated itself in the past, people just ignore history and how returning to sound money is inevitable. The only black swan part is that now we have a better alternative to gold.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  What happened to the countries that hyperinflated? We're they able to get it under control historically?
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    Quite often people fled with gold to other places, as the countries confiscated gold from people. US was trusted to hold gold in the world wars, but of course Nixon renegged on the gold standard. Right now people are starting to hold Bitcoin, and it's much harder to take away from them (flying out with a billion dollars of Bitcoin is trivial, as metal detectors won't catch you), so I'm optimistic that the transition will be more peaceful. Also Bitcoin adoption in US is highe than in other countries.
    - throwaway9952 5y ago
      As inflation continues to grow, Bitcoin is down close to 40% from its highs. I'm not saying you're flat out wrong about potential benefits to holding Bitcoin but a lot of recent value has been washed out from people selling, not buying it.
      - xiphias2 5y ago
        Professional investors who look at the sharpe ratio (return compared to standard deviation), can see that its performance is far better than any other asset in the world. Generally in modern portfolio theory you can just decrease the asset in the portfolio if the volatility is too big for you (for example to just 2% of the portfolio). I'm 100% in, but for other people I generally suggest it to be 5% of their portfolio.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
trembonator 5y ago
imgabe 5y ago
> Workers are 3.8 times more likely to leave Tesla than Ford I wonder how much of this is culture and how much is that Tesla employees are more likely to have gotten rich off their stock compensation in the past 2 years.
- twic 5y ago
  Does this data include factory-floor employees? Do they get stock?
rob_c 5y ago
It's the inference that it sucks more to be a coder on average than asking "do you want fries with that?". I'm a little suspicious. It still looks closer to there is some great personal demand, or philosophical divide forming... A huge factor is also the options open to the individual, which for a talented person in a skilled sector tends to be much better than someone working as a burger flipper.
oxymoran 5y ago
“Not surprisingly, companies with a reputation for a healthy culture, including Southwest Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Enterprise Rent-A-Car” I find it hard to believe anything in the article when it notes that Enterprise has a reputation for healthy culture…it’s a bunch of former frat boys who think they are salespeople but are really just sleazy con artist. And the you have to wear a white shirt and tie whilst cleaning out and washing vehicles. Also pretty misogynistic atmosphere in some of the branches. Worst place I ever worked.
indymike 5y ago
This article is leaving out a factor that helping every company presented as being less affected by the great resignation: workforce age. Companies that have an older workforce generally have less turnover.
yob22 5y ago
iamtheworstdev 5y ago
this is tangential maybe - but some of these industries are dominated by unions and really skew the data. Airlines for instance. No one leaves an airline unless they're quite literally at wits end and willing to go start all over at the bottom of the pay scale somewhere else.
cjbgkagh 5y ago
Perhaps I’ve been unlucky but my experience at big tech has been marred by churn and burn culture - high pressure tactics to get the most work out of employees and discarding them when they inevitably burn out. Average tenure was 1-3 years. Amazon was particularly bad at this. The only modicum of power employees have is in quitting and now that they’re exercising it the employers are acting like their throats have been cut. Edit: a story I like to tell people about what it’s like to deal with Big Co. is that I solo built a $50Mp.a. profit data science artifact in my first year. They offered me the highest once off bonus on offer $30K stretched over 6 years, no promotion (those were used to keep US citizens). I said, give me the same bonus as my manager for for ‘managing’ my project ~$150K in one year or I’ll quit. They said no so I quit. The artifact was extremely difficult to build and written in Scala, it took a lot out of me, no one understood it after I left. They rewrote it in Java which made it even harder to understand. It atrophied over 5 years and now it doesn’t even work at all. I’m in contact with my former colleagues and keep offering to fix it for 7 figures, but no dice. They’ve now convinced themselves it is impossible to do. That’s how committed they are to maintaining the status quo.
- MathYouF 5y ago
  Slightly off topic, but could you go into a bit more detail on this artifact? I thought an artifact was something like a trained model, but you said it was "written" in Scala then Java, which makes me think I don't understand the meaning, and the word on Google has very broad definitions.
  - tellmemore9 5y ago
  - Centigonal 5y ago
    an engineering artifact is the tangible by-product of a software development process. It could be a piece of code, dataset, specification, etc. Basically a deliverable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_(software_development) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_(software_development...
  - 5y ago
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
One thing I don't get: don't people need money? Is there a huge wave of poverty and homelessness rolling in after the Great Resignation? I get IT workers may have earned so much that they will be OK for a while, but the article specifically mentions other jobs like food workers.
- sheepybloke 5y ago
  One thing that isn't being discussed is that people are leaving for hopefully better jobs, especially since there are a lot of jobs hiring. For example, leaving a food job for a better paying factory or technician job. Not a huge jump like in the tech world, but sometimes you just need a push to move to something new.
fallingfrog 5y ago
It may be that what we are seeing is an increasing realization that the interests of the boss or managerial layer are at odds with the interests of the ground level worker. People are starting to stand up for their own interests, which if you are the boss, is troubling, hence a lot of pearl clutching about how "nobody wants to work anymore". Writ large, I think people are also realizing that the interests of the CEO/political/ruling class are also wildly at odds with their own interests as well- although we seem to be very susceptible to being distracted by superficial culture wars bullshit and shiny things at the moment.
altabrams 5y ago
I agree a toxic culture is probably driving the great resignation. I don't believe it is lack of money. I do believe and have experienced toxic work relationships and environments. I've had a career as a software engineer -15+ years-, and then shifted to security. Developers reflect their environment and are largely toxic individuals or the object of toxic teams. There is a love/hate relationship with Execs and Tech pros, and the salaries they demand. Execs are looking to cut costs, Tech is looking for career advancement and longevity. Developers are caught between these two rocks. Then the fear of outsourcing for a lower cost workforce. It sucks. The best advice I can give is to enjoy your work and don't get hung up on a $$ track as your measure of success. The $$ will work out in the end, you need to find relationships of like minded folks and support each others careers, boost each others ratings. Provide excellent customer service - the customers being those business owners of your development projects. Look for at least a cost of living increase, ask what needs to happen to get a raise. It's harder than you think. You have to not just produce cheerfully, but provide breakthrough solutions. It's always been a fact in the US that you have to perform the advanced role for at least a year before your title and compensation reflects it. Cheers and good fortune~
- noasaservice 5y ago
  > I don't believe it is lack of money. We are definitely in a IT bubble. It is DEFINITELY about the money. We have dunkin donuts and plenty other places saying you can make "Up to $20/hr - including tips (but in 1/4 the font size)". Or person is paid $20/hr for the work of 2 humans, and the management says to do these roles too without extra compensation. Or you negotiate for 40h/week average, and management expects 50-60h/week. Or benefits are slashed. Or you get your 3% "raise" which is 1/2 inflation. > The best advice I can give is to enjoy your work and don't get hung up on a $$ track as your measure of success. Really? Ive heard management saying this kind of garbage before. I have better advice: get paid closer to your surplus value's worth. And then when you HAVE capital, you can decide how you want to live your life. And there really is no stability in our system, no matter how pretty things are. We employees/workers have low to no representation in companies. We don't see how the C-suite does stuff, and it's too late when they do. (All of this is primarily US focused, since we take caveat emptor to living and working and everything. It's sickening, but we have to play in this sham system until we can subvert it.)
bArray 5y ago
> We also analyzed the free text of more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, using the Natural Employee Language Understanding platform developed by CultureX, a company two of us (Donald and Charles) cofounded. People go to a complaints website to complain, don't be surprised if you find complaints. The fact that large numbers of people are moving jobs means that large numbers of people suddenly feel empowered to complain. It's not necessarily cause and effect. The word 'toxic' itself is not really well defined. It just means polluted or poisoned - it offers no incite as to what the unexpected addition is. If you crawl the reviews and find the word 'bad', is 'badness' a leading cause of employees leaving? How can 'badness' be addressed? The article then pushes their interpretation of what they believe toxicity to be. In my opinion, toxicity is not usually something that can be well defined, hence the use of the word. Generally though it appears to be the feeling that other colleagues make the day-to-day experience worse. This could be a boss that gives you a hard time all the time, colleagues that talk behind about each other in negative ways, the feeling that your colleagues are your opposition and not your allies, etc. It appears to be bad inter-colleague relationships. If you want to build up better inter-colleague relationships, the solution is not to introduce remote work where they simply avoid each other. Whilst initially it may work (less conflicts), it only serves to isolate staff and strengthen cliques. You need to build up morale, get them working together, have positive work-based experiences together, social events, etc. Go back to basics.
- magicroot75 5y ago
  The authors state that there will be a soon forthcoming article going into specifics of what makes a toxic culture.
pw262 5y ago
I work as a consultant at a company that has had their entire programming/system staff resign over the last year. Most of the replacement staff have now also resigned. The reason is toxic management. When people are facing life/death consequences from Covid it puts shit at work into perspective. Enough already!
momoneyfool 5y ago
I'm one of these people. I switched 2 jobs last year. I work as a public trust system engineer for a SaaS vendor. We served police, fire, ems training systems. The local job was paying $70k. Low, but the job was easy, management was good, people I worked with were pretty awesome. Management actually told us that they were looking at a VC firm. a year before doing it. Never heard of anyone doing that before. Again, the company had very low toxic behaviors. Stability also has a worth. The company got in bed with a VC. Worst choice ever. Then last year, the ownership was traded like a shiny pokemon card to another VC firm to add to another asset. Company culture flipped in an hour. Was announced on a Tuesday. I started interviewing the end of the week - I wanted to give it a chance to see if it was as bad as my initial gut reaction. And it was. While I'm looking elsewhere, my pay got cut. Glassdoor shows similar previous acquisition bullshittery. Whatever. I'm done here. I found a place. Similar role. Pay goes from 70k->120k. Sweet. Job looked interesting. I accept. And holy shit that place was toxic. "That's soo gay" was explained by my direct report as acceptable since he has 2 gay brothers <cringe>... on my 3rd day. Retard was casually thrown around, as was a whole lot of other stuff. Lest to say, that aint worth 120k. So I hang my shingle again. I eventually found a system engineering position that pays 150k (?!?). I quit 0 notice with a lengthy email explaining why (effectively social justice reasons). I'm now at the new role, and my salary jumped from 70k->150k in a span of a month. Good work is a balance of total compensation, good co-workers, good managers, and stability (of your position, the team, and the company). When even one of those go bad, that whole calculus gets turned upside down. And combined with no more pensions and companies who don't care too much about people, yea, the best decision I can make is "GTFO". (Yes I'm a millenial)
- tellmemore9 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kerneloftruth 5y ago
Retail is where the greatest churn is happening -- and it makes perfect sense. Between shutdowns, layoffs, having to enforce mask rules on customers, having to deal with customers, smash and grabs,... retail seems like one of the worst job experiences to have, and with shaky job stability.
- Cupertino95014 5y ago
  Personal data: a friend's daughter was heavily into fashion retailing, even to the point of getting a degree in it. I imagine she was a good salesperson, but I don't know that. Anyhow, she's now a buyer for some large company, obviously working away from customers. I'm not discounting your reasons at all, but you left out "buying clothes on the web." Once companies like Zappo's started making it easy to try things and return them if you change your mind, people's reluctance to buy online started evaporating. Now that driving to the mall sucks more than ever, staying home and buying on the Web becomes much more compelling.
tellmemore9 5y ago
[dead]
itsdrewmiller 5y ago
Their estimate of turnover by industry clearly has an average around 10%, but quit rates this year should mean that the average turnover is more like 30%. They limit themselves to the 500 biggest employers or whatever the Culture 500 is, but I sincerely doubt there is that big of a discrepancy in turnover between big companies and small.
HurdsTimesNear 5y ago
[flagged]
UIUC_06 5y ago
Wokeness alert! Did some censor insert this phrase after the rest of the article was written? "the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion" and yet there is no other mention of "diversity" anywhere in the article, and no surveyed person mentioned it.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  Well, one of the two cited references have diversity in their article several times. I don't know how to sift through the BLS reference. Is there any indication that sentence needs a citation more than other claims and assertions? Is there something about the idea that an overly homogenous workplace leads to (or attracts) people with less decency and politeness?
  - UIUC_06 5y ago
    Many other people have pointed this out as well. Generally the article follows the "summary - supporting details" format, which is pretty standard in papers like this. You are being extraordinarily generous to just let them slide on this one
deepsquirrelnet 5y ago
Another swing and miss. I don't think this is so hard. The pandemic is waking people to the reality of their own mortality. Suppose you're working a job in a big, highly dysfunctional organization. Most of us who have been there know that these jobs often pay well -- but in trade, you're selling your precious hours to execute a random series of essentially meaningless events (and under pressure to get it done). Now add a pandemic. You were probably already having a quiet existential crisis, feeling that the insanity of your work environment is no way to let your life pass by. You want your life to mean something, but it isn't fulfilling. Now, people you know are passing away much sooner than expected. Thoughts about the eventuality of your own death are really tipping the scales. Do you just bury your nose and keep going on? Or find out what else is out there?
- sheepybloke 5y ago
  I think that's why we've been seeing the most churn in retail and enterprise software. In my view, those two areas accentuate that feeling of meaningless event ands realizing that you want to do something more fulfilling. I know that's why I left my job and moved to a startup whose work is more fulfilling to me.
- KuhlMensch 5y ago
  This me.
irthomasthomas 5y ago
What I dont understand about The Quittening is where are these people going? Did they die, or retire, or change career, or went self employed? People don't just walk away from a 6 figure career and vanish. Where are they now?
- ngc248 5y ago
  I was wondering that too, i don't think the stimulus payments was this big right? Are they moving back with their parents?
- dntrkv 5y ago
  They’re getting new jobs. Quitting is at ATH and so is hiring. The proper name should be The Reshuffling.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah. It's possible that some people are retiring or semi-retiring a bit early. But, based on my Twitter feed, it's mostly people switching jobs within the tech industry. (And, yes, anecdotally it does seem to be happening more than the base rate.)
  - irthomasthomas 5y ago
    But then why are people saying that hiring is so difficult now? E.g. "I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437
    - ghaff 5y ago
      A few (non mutually exclusive) theories: - People are quitting with the intent of getting new jobs but they may not do so right away. - Hiring needs are up so even if you have a constant pool, hiring is harder. - With more remote work at many of the biggest (and best-paying) tech employers, it's harder for other tech companies to hire because geographical moats are being bridged in many cases.
toss1 5y ago
Toxic culture indeed! Saw a very interesting bit of a talk yesterday, using how Seal Team 6 selects the team - two axes, Performance and Trustworthiness, and a grid, High/Medium/Low for each axis. Obviously no one wants the lower left corner of low performance and low trust and everyone wants the High of both values. But it really turns out that you will NOT want even the best performer with low trustworthiness — a very average performer with high trust is a better choice. The problem in large organizations is that they have many methods and metrics to measure performance, and almost none to measure trustworthiness. I've for decades observed that large organizations seem to actively filter-in and select for sociopathic tendencies at the top; there are only a few, ad seemingly by happenstance, who I'd rate high on the trustworthiness and ethical scale. This talk made the mechanism immediately apparent -- all the selection is for performance, and there is little to no selection for trustworthiness. Fro trust, there's only a few rails that seem to resemble 'don't get caught breaking the law'. Of course, when high-performance/low-trustworthy individuals get to the top, they are not going to institute or support systems to select for high-trust. So, organizations will tend to ratchet in the sociopathic direction. And, sociopaths at the top can barely do anything but create a toxic culture. Now we see the results: MIT studies show results "consistent with a large body of evidence that pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover...In general, corporate culture is a much more reliable predictor of industry-adjusted attrition than how employees assess their compensation." This correlates with many other studies I've seen that people to not really leave bad pay, but bad management, and often in particular, bad managers. And now, the measurement of only performance and not trust has made toxic cultures endemic, and — surprise — nobody wants to work there.
sheepybloke 5y ago
There's a lot of talk of compensation here, but I do think it's more connected to toxic work culture. I left my job in March after my company aimed to lay off 25% of its workforce after the pandemic hit. It was hard, because while our revenues dropped substantially, we had just made huge profits the previous year. I understood the reasons why they wanted to cut, but it just felt reactionary and not forward looking, especially when we had a couple big projects on the way. Add in a couple of years of feeling like I wasn't getting recognized for my performance and the realization that I was probably going to be put into an overworked code monkey position, I decided it was time to move on. I think this is much more like what people are feeling now than just a thirst for more money.
- winrid 5y ago
  I recently joined a company that laid off a good portion of engineering during the pandemic. It's hard digging into issues because entire teams are gone and took the domain knowledge with them.
Kalanos 5y ago
I was originally interested in business because I thought it would be a meritocracy. It's just a ladder-climbing suck fest where whoever rocks the boat lest and kisses the most butt wins.
lmilcin 5y ago
Really? First rule of asking about why somebody left a job is that people tend to first make the decision and then rationalise it. They will tell a lot of interesting stories about toxic culture and whatnot where in fact the reason might be they wanted to get a raise but their boss did not think they deserved it. It would be interesting to see how many people actually admitted it. And reality is that most people that recently changed jobs of their own volition did this to a) keep working remotely and b) get better salary. Because they f-n can. Especially in software development I have seen drastic increase in salaries. You see the offers increase practically daily. What I thought was a very good salary, in the span of less than a year became bottom of the bottom of the ranges I am receiving. Most of companies are absolutely unwilling to increase salary for their employees. This is f-n stupid because people will find out at some point that their new colleagues with fraction of their experience have been hired for 2 or 3 times their salary. It has already been a standard that it is easier to get a better salary by changing jobs rather than trying to beg your company to move it by more than inflation. Now that people have gotten used to it they stopped feeling any remorse about it and actually expect to leave the company in a year or two when they can get better salary. Why beg your boss when you are almost certain you can earn more with your two additional years of experience? It is now socially acceptable to quit your job after a year or two and a lot of people no longer even considers actually trying to do a better job because their plan is to just change it. Why work your ass off when you are guaranteed a raise anyway? Hence the rise of "performative work" that has been described here some time ago. https://www.economist.com/business/2022/01/08/the-rise-of-performative-work https://www.economist.com/business/2022/01/08/the-rise-of-pe...
jshaqaw 5y ago
The great resignation is fascinating. Some people are trapped in jobs with toxic cultures because they really have obligations to meet and a lack of good alternatives. Lots of other people just think this is the case. A toxic manager with a certain kind of charisma (as many high level toxic managers ten to have)can project this fear into the susceptible and they use that power shamelessly. But this kind of fear projection seems to rely on actual physical proximity or at least spending lots of time in an environment that they not you control. It’s amazing how much less scary a jackass manager seems when you are working home in your sweatpants with some Louis Armstrong playing. Can only be good to defang these soul parasites a bit.

363 points by Hard_Space 5y ago

"Toxic culture is overstated" = "I've never sat down and had any serious work discussions with women in tech, but I think I know everything." Toxic culture in engineering is terrible. I've been in many different engineering and IT work environments for decades, and have seen a ton of women get picked on and bullied, both overtly and just subtly. Yeah it's not all women--some evolve shields, some become passive and numb, some double down on skill to get 1x the credit for 2x the effort--but it's definitely very real. I also think quitting has been driven by remote work. What happens if person A had remote work during the worst part of the pandemic, erratic petty tyrant boss A decides its time to "come back" or "go hybrid" even though it seems nonsensical to someone with broadband and a remotely accomodatable job--and then person B, who is spouse/friend/relative of person A, has a completely different situation where non-maladjusted boss B is like "yeah man, as long as you are getting your work done, I don't care where you do it." There is a strong desire to dump "MadMen" type boss A with prejudice. Not always, some people love getting out of the house to work, but for people who enjoyed pandemic remote work, to have to give it up for arbitrary reasoning based on the armchair organizational psychology theories of some dumb manager--those people are going to skate, and they should. It's like one the one side you have this vague meme of "in person team building" and on the other, real costs like: car wear and tear costs, gas costs, mass transit costs, parking costs, weather related time costs like scraping, increased accident risk from commute, lost work time during commute, different/specialized clothing needs and uncomfortable work clothing standards, prep/logistics time like packing/unpacking/undocking/docking, MBWA/wanderer interruptions and ad hoc "coworker therapist sessions" in the office, less comfortable and ergonomically genericized desks and peripherals, uncontrollable environmental noises and temperatures...all to do something that can be done over a wire. I'd sooner set an office building on fire than work out of it. I'm a genXer and I guess I get why boomers are like this but if you're my age or younger and you force people into an office, shame on your pathetic fake nerd soul.

H8crilA 5y ago

Aren't the same factors driving resignations always, not just during the so called Great Resignation?

Hokusai 5y ago
But people being at home and able to distance themselves of the situation makes them realize how bad it is. When you are in the middle of the chaos, the day to day survival, the oppressive environment, to see others suffering the same that you, makes it hard to realize the situation. The pandemic has allowed many people to step back and look at their jobs, and they did not like what they saw.
- sn41 5y ago
  True... However, in academia where I work, there are not many options right now. Despite sinking nearly 20 years into this and enjoying my work, I'm having second thoughts due to the toxicity of my colleagues. Nice username, btw. I enjoy the prints of Mt. Fuji. Also had an opportunity to be on Mt. Fuji, partly inspired by his paintings.

Zenst 5y ago

Would be interesting in comparing the number of employee's indicating a wish to leave the company with the level of customer churn. My gut feeling is that there may well be a correlation there. As happy customers make a happy company and the company is more than any stock market or accountant realizes the value of the all employee's and not just the the board and PR faces. As customers interact with those employee's, whilst the financial markets interact with the figure-heads. Hence a difference in reality perspectives. But no hard data, just a gut feeling that there may well be more too this that is quantifiable, maybe even formulaic. Though not an easy data set to put together than it seems as not easy to find out a companies churn rate. Which may explain why it may just stay a gut feeling theory.

mateo1 5y ago

That is not real research. I'm disgusted that big names like mit stand behind buzzword-driven self-affirmative soft science bullshit publications like this.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dia80 5y ago
Yes, but sometimes that's all you have to go on. Imagine you are a manger with high quit rates, what do you do? Say I've no idea what's causing this and won't until I see hard evidence, or, think about the article and wonder if any of these factors are affecting you and try to change them. Even if it's wrong it's a good onramp to thinking about your problems.
tokai 5y ago
Why are you surprised that management science is soft science? It seems like your view of MIT does not fit the breath of the research.

andrewflnr 5y ago

I've always guessed this was a major factor, though I still think too-low pay is a factor in a lot of cases, especially industries where pay tends to be anchored to minimum wage. However: (a) This is public social media data, I guess? That seems like a noisy channel. (b) Some of their suggestions are really dumb, and all miss the point in my view. If my boss is an ass, sponsoring a social event and expecting that to make things better is insulting. The real solution theoretically doesn't have to cost any money: managers just have to be better people. For such famously bottom-line-driven organizations as large companies, it's funny how that zero-cost solution is so unlikely to actually happen.

csa 5y ago
> The real solution theoretically doesn't have to cost any money: managers just have to be better people. For such famously bottom-line-driven organizations as large companies, it's funny how that zero-cost solution is so unlikely to actually happen. Actually changing management culture at a large organization is very expensive if it’s even possible. Very far from a zero-cost solution. I mean, it would be great if the entire management team just woke up and saw the light one day and became good managers, but this happens approximately never. Success is much more likely with a complete management overhaul. If that is possible, and it often isn’t, then it will be very expensive.
- barrenko 5y ago
  Culture is incredibly sticky. If you're a startup with let's say 5 people, getting more people is like pouring cement on culture. It cannot be changed. The buck stops with the CEO.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  I know, that's why I said "theoretically". :)
Robin_Message 5y ago
Poor management practices, e.g. cancelling or changing shifts last minute, have real business value in terms of labour flexibility (for the employer), so in an employers' market, you can expect some businesses to take advantage of those practices to improve their bottom line. The underlying shift, as I see it, is a scarcity of labour, combined with a bullishness of employee attitudes, leading to those poor practices being penalised where previously they had to be tolerated.

foolfoolz 5y ago

> Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior I don’t really believe these reasons or at least they don’t match what i’ve seen. I can only speak for FAANG: I think this is more compensation based than anything else. In an effort to level the playing field FAANGS establish levels. Levels have salary ranges. Salary ranges mean top performers, the people who drive the culture of the entire org, can only be paid some amount more than bottom performers. By keeping these bands too tight the top performers can get better pay elsewhere and leave. When your first top performers are leaving each one hits hard. Once it’s regular the culture becomes different, this isn’t a place to stay and grow, it’s a place to be a launchpad for the next place. And without top pay you won’t attract top talent so when these great people leave you replace them with average people. This reinforces the beliefs. The other side of pay is current valuations are insane. Many startups are getting A, B and even D rounds with 300-500x (i’ve seen higher than 1000x) revenue to value ratios. Your FAANG may hope to 2x or 3x in stock value while these startups promise 20-30x returns. So you have to pay even more to beat the potential earnings they could get at a startup. My theory is not that all pay has to change to keep people, but as a FAANG you need to spend to keep and attract the best or you risk losing everyone. When you work somewhere and all the best people want to stay, or when you work somewhere and more good people join; it’s really hard to mess up that culture

throw8932894 5y ago
Top performers are like 5% of staff? They may have high attrition, but company wide it may be very low. And there is salary limit you may get as an employee. Most top performers will start they own business, and do the same job as independent consultants.
skrebbel 5y ago
I'll never understand the American thirst for money for the sake of it. If HN comments are to be believed, top performer at your average FAANG easily earn $500k per year. At that point, aren't you well past the point where more money brings more happiness, even in high cost-of-living places? What's the point? Why not find a job that's fun and fulfilling?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pcthrowaway 5y ago

> "This finding is consistent with a study of 28 Gap stores, in which employees at randomly-assigned locations received their work schedules two weeks in advance, and their managers were barred from canceling their shifts at the last minute. Employees in the control stores were subject to the usual scheduling practices." I don't even know what to say to this. The idea that big corp is intentionally fucking with their blue-collar workers who are likely to be living paycheck-to-paycheck, sleep deprived, or struggling to balance multiple jobs / school and job, just to study how it impacts employee retention, is baffling to me. This should be outright illegal (if it's not already).

ratherbefuddled 5y ago
It's worse than you think. The study was to _improve_ the scheduling in the stores in the study so that workers got a whole two weeks notice of their shifts. They merely left things as they were in the control stores.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
You misunderstand the study. GAP didn't start "fucking" with anyone's schedule. In the study, they stopped "fucking" with schedules. This is an improvement. They rolled out a policy that they thought would help workers to half the stores, monitored the impact, and saw that it good! This should be be applauded.
secretsatan 5y ago
Isn’t the experiment to make a big corp not fuck with employees as opposed to their usual practices?
- shawabawa3 5y ago
  I think they underestimated how bad things are that they thought 2 weeks notice for shift schedules had to be worse
fastball 5y ago
How are they intentionally fucking with their employees? The control was the status quo and the test was something they expected to be an improvement. They could also just... keep the status quo. Would that be more moral in your eyes?

jokoon 5y ago

When you add covid, climate, the antiwork movement, lack of social progress, political drama, something has to break. There is high resentment towards capitalism and how it is being managed, and I'm not really surprised people are quitting like this, I don't even understand how can normal people hold all those jobs and deal with the stress etc. Personally I think advocating for a general strike would help "shuffle the cards" again. I really feel like 2008 "postponed" a political adjustment that should have happened but did not. It's really weird to be chronically unemployed and watch this "great resignation" phenomenon.

somedude895 5y ago
> covid, climate, the antiwork movement, lack of social progress, political drama > advocating for a general strike With such a broad spectrum of issues, what would a general strike even call for?
- jokoon 5y ago
  Basic income. It seems to be a silver bullet to a lot of problems. Once you give a blank check, you can also remove a lot of administrative clutter designed to "control" and police the poor.
- Wiseacre 5y ago
  Universal income, health care, and day care

99_00 5y ago

I think the 'Great Resignation' is fake news. When COVID hit people felt insecure so they stayed on jobs they would have otherwise quit. Look at any graph of resignations or quits, they dipped. We are seeing the pent up desire to quit hit the market. However, pent up desire to quit doesn't make as interesting a story. Writers and researchers can use the 'Great Resignation' narrative promote any agenda or attack any workplace philosophy they want. Then readers can argue about it endlessly. The fact that it's divorced from reality means the debate can't be resolved because the premise is flawed. Media companies and sites get an endless stream of engaging but useless content.

mschuster91 5y ago
> Look at any graph of resignations or quits, they dipped. The data there may be misrepresentative, as your local burger flipper or gas station is not likely to report people quitting jobs anywhere, and people moving off of businesses that were closed by lockdowns weren't reported consistently either. The ones hit hardest by the "great resignations" are these small-scale employers, who have barely survived two years worth of lockdowns and had to fight for both customers and employees with big-brand stores and franchise operations before that. For better or worse, the pandemic and its aftereffects will thoroughly disrupt local economies.
- 99_00 5y ago
  If the data is misrepresentative, what evidence is there for the 'Great Resignation'?
pjc50 5y ago
> Look at any graph of resignations or quits https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/interactive-quits-level-by-year.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu... That looks like an increase to me? There was a dip for the first couple of months but the ongoing event has caused a more-than-substitution level of quits.
- 99_00 5y ago

Areading314 5y ago

A huge problem with this industry is the inflexibility to pay current engineers LARGELY increasing comp each year. The thought is that there is a market rate for an engineer and that pay can increase with the market rate, but this is a fallacy. An engineer that has been at a largish company for 1 year is worth 20-30% more than the year they were hired because they have specific knowledge of the tech stack. Yet that engineer will likely be offered a 3-5% raise. An engineer with 3+ years might be worth 50%+ because they have developed the specific skills relevant to the job AND know the idiosyncacies about org politics and the nitty gritty parts of the codebase. Yet they will still only get a 10-15% raise. So that engineer moves on and accepts a 40% raise elsewhere. And thus we see the constant churn of highly talented engineers which is a huge drain on productivity for all involved.

tharne 5y ago
> So that engineer moves on and accepts a 40% raise elsewhere. The other thing you see is talented engineers moving into management even we they don't really want to, so that they can get paid what they're worth. In some cases this is even worse than then the engineer leaving the company because, in addition to losing a good engineer, you often also gain a lousy manager.
magicroot75 5y ago
The whole crux of this article is that compensation is incorrectly assumed to be the main driver of turnover.
greatpostman 5y ago
I think the theory is that in aggregate they save money since most people are too lazy to jump
echelon 5y ago
Speaking as the Devil's advocate, organizations want headcount to be fungible. If hiring and churn were huge issues for most companies, they would actively combat it. Instead, they've all mostly settled into the practice you see. Engineers typically do a 1-2 year tour of duty, vest, then bounce onto greener pastures. Steady state flux. In some senses, new talent also bring in new ideas and combat skeptical dispositions and organizational ossification. Engineering salaries are without a doubt one of the biggest expenses for organizations to deal with. Companies love that they can now hire remotely and pay adjusted cost of living. They'll hire as many workers in middle America as they can, and once enough of the workforce is concentrated outside of expensive cities, you'll see them stop hiring in SF and NY entirely. But it won't stop there. Startup capital is already beginning to shift to new opportunities in burgeoning emerging markets. Employment will eventually head there too, whether it's chasing after the new capital or simply finding more talent at better market prices. Covid and WFH opened up a world of possibility for talent sourcing and cost reduction. America doesn't have a monopoly on good engineers, just the expensive ones. I wouldn't be surprised that if in ten years, our salaries begin to dip below six figures. Inflation adjustments notwithstanding. Make your money now while the iron is still hot.

mschuster91 5y ago

What was the old saying? People don't flee jobs, they flee bad managers? You can run a fast-food franchise, a pub, a hotel or any other front-line enterprise with skill and enjoy extremely loyal employees (at the cost of your profit), or you can run it like a hell on earth by extracting all profit you reasonably can. For a long time, the latter was the standard model across the hospitality sector, especially as unionization and other forms of worker self-organization were never really present - now with covid haven thoroughly shaken everything up, employers are (finally) forced to up their offers. For a lot of them though, it might be way too late - good riddance.

ragnot 5y ago
A bad thing that I've realized about the latter scenario is that it is a vicious cycle. Here's what I mean: 1) You are a loyal employee who works hard and puts in the hours. You promise yourself that you will treat your reports well when you finally get a position of power. 2) You get screwed over by some higher up. You are devastated and everything you worked for is taken away. You vow never to let this happen to you again. 3) You claw your way back but you still hold on to what happened in point 2. You don't want to be a chump again so you take as much as you can (read: screw over others to get your own bonus). 4) Repeat ad infinitum
- mschuster91 5y ago
  At that point, it might make sense for a coordinated effort at least between the Western countries to drastically limit if not outright ban bonus payments and other incentive-based forms of compensation, including stock options above a to-be-discussed limit. We have had three to five decades of de-regulation (depending on the country) and if there is one consistency that shows up everywhere is that as soon as you tie personal bonus payments of managers to their ability to mis-treat staff, they will fuck over their staff (and often enough, their company long-term) for their own short-term gains. Everyone suffers in the end, except "activist investors" pushing for short-term garbage optimizations before unloading the toxic company on clueless bag-holders.
twic 5y ago

trabant00 5y ago

> failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion I have a very hard time believing this is the major driving factir in the "great resignation". Or maybe my Europe environment is completely different. But to me this sounds like another attempt to push certain political views and not at all to really discover what is going on.

mypastself 5y ago
The article is very vague on the methodology anyway, but the claim that this is the top factor seems genuinely suspect. Another factor is supposedly the failure to “recognize and reward strong performers“, which would seem to completely contradict the other claim.
throw_m239339 5y ago
This "article" uses every possible 'intersectional' buzzword available. "toxic", "diversity", "equity", "inclusion". It's easy for me to dismiss its arguments, solely based on its lexicon... > But to me this sounds like another attempt to push certain political views and not at all to really discover what is going on. Of course that's what it is.
serverholic 5y ago
Companies now hire people to tell them they don't have enough black people on the team. The answer isn't more of this bullshit.

djohnston 5y ago

tomohawk 5y ago

This is based on comments people are willing to put in Glass Door, so there will be obvious biases there. Publicly, people will make up a reason for leaving, and not state the real reason, or just not say anything. I know a number of people who are just DONE with with covid culture, and just want to get away from it. The only way they can do that in many cases is to just leave their job. Since they are trying to get away from covid culture, the last thing they're going to do is talk about it on a site like Glass Door.

jacksonkmarley 5y ago
> I know a number of people who are just DONE with with covid culture, and just want to get away from it. What do you mean? What is "covid culture", and how do you get away from it?

rkangel 5y ago

This article does accidentally capture one of the major corporate problems pretty well. The conclude from their data that Toxic Workplace Culture is the biggest cause of resignation, and then they immediately suggest 4 short term things to try that don't relate to culture at all. If you have a toxic workplace culture, the very first thing you should do is to start fixing your culture. This is very hard and not fast (as they acknowledge to be fair). One thing you can do though is to acknowledge it to your employees - "X, Y and Z is wrong and we're working to fix it". Nothing destroys morale more than employees being unhappy about a set of things and then management standing up and telling you there aren't any problems.

chongli 5y ago
A fish rots from the head down. The people in charge with the most power to solve workplace toxicity are in all likelihood the cause. If that is the case then the best advice is for people to resign and go elsewhere, just as people are doing according to the article.
- odonnellryan 5y ago
  People are also human, and as employees we tend to expect management to be perfect.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  A side effect of this is most jobs people find will be toxic, because those are the ones people are leaving and the ones with openings. I suppose that is already the case.
insickness 5y ago
Companies should pay more attention to which leaders are roundly hated since they can be the biggest contributor to toxic culture. At my company, we had a CIO who was hated by every member of the IT team. Attrition rates as well as glass door reviews reflected it. Yet they kept him there for years.
- 5y ago

jessaustin 5y ago

The industries with the highest percentage of blue-collar workers are noted in light blue. This means the other industries with lower blue-collar percentages are noted in blue blue. This may be the dumbest graphic decision I've seen yet this year.

throwaway9952 5y ago

My company recently had a series of townhalls related to a re-org that included a few different open Q&A sessions. I'd estimate that 70-80% of the questions related to what the company was going to do to address current salaries, particularly vis-a-vis inflation. The questions were largely deflected (which is probably okay given the context) but there is very little urgency to do anything outside of the normal review cycle. Attrition is starting to get bad and I don't really see what harm there is in doing something off-cycle. There is effectively a black-swan event going on where you have record-high inflation coupled with low unemployment and a substantially more demand for workers than there is supply. The move to remote has also shifted the opportunities for tons of folks who lived outside of major urban hubs, allowing them opportunities that were never previously available to them. Why wouldn't such a rare event result in rare proactivity? I've changed jobs twice since the pandemic hit, resulting in about a 50% increase in compensation. I'm almost certain to change jobs again soon and will then be closer to doubling my salary from where I was in March 2020. In none of these job changes have I seen any serious plans by the companies to address salaries with a broad brush.

magicroot75 5y ago
It's a weird concept, but a company would rather hire a new person at 30% higher salary than give a current one a 25% raise.
joezydeco 5y ago
In none of these job changes have I seen any serious plans by the companies to address salaries with a broad brush. Because it's cheaper to do nothing and grit your teeth and hope that the employees don't revolt. What's really awful are the companies that proceed to do nothing while bragging that they had an excellent year revenue-wise. It's like they think employees don't actually pay attention to the company press releases and marketing drivel. If they brag about +20% revenue and your paycheck goes up +1.5%, expect a revolt.
- hiq 5y ago
  What do you mean by revolt? As long as the attrition rate remains stable and not out of the ordinary, why should companies change this?

xiphias2 5y ago

There's nothing black swan in an inflationary environment that leads to hyperinflation, even if it's for a country with a reserve currency. Every empire hyperinflated itself in the past, people just ignore history and how returning to sound money is inevitable. The only black swan part is that now we have a better alternative to gold.

edmcnulty101 5y ago
What happened to the countries that hyperinflated? We're they able to get it under control historically?
- xiphias2 5y ago
  Quite often people fled with gold to other places, as the countries confiscated gold from people. US was trusted to hold gold in the world wars, but of course Nixon renegged on the gold standard. Right now people are starting to hold Bitcoin, and it's much harder to take away from them (flying out with a billion dollars of Bitcoin is trivial, as metal detectors won't catch you), so I'm optimistic that the transition will be more peaceful. Also Bitcoin adoption in US is highe than in other countries.
  - throwaway9952 5y ago
    As inflation continues to grow, Bitcoin is down close to 40% from its highs. I'm not saying you're flat out wrong about potential benefits to holding Bitcoin but a lot of recent value has been washed out from people selling, not buying it.
    - xiphias2 5y ago
      Professional investors who look at the sharpe ratio (return compared to standard deviation), can see that its performance is far better than any other asset in the world. Generally in modern portfolio theory you can just decrease the asset in the portfolio if the volatility is too big for you (for example to just 2% of the portfolio). I'm 100% in, but for other people I generally suggest it to be 5% of their portfolio.

deleted 5y ago

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trembonator 5y ago

imgabe 5y ago

> Workers are 3.8 times more likely to leave Tesla than Ford I wonder how much of this is culture and how much is that Tesla employees are more likely to have gotten rich off their stock compensation in the past 2 years.

twic 5y ago
Does this data include factory-floor employees? Do they get stock?

rob_c 5y ago

It's the inference that it sucks more to be a coder on average than asking "do you want fries with that?". I'm a little suspicious. It still looks closer to there is some great personal demand, or philosophical divide forming... A huge factor is also the options open to the individual, which for a talented person in a skilled sector tends to be much better than someone working as a burger flipper.

oxymoran 5y ago

“Not surprisingly, companies with a reputation for a healthy culture, including Southwest Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Enterprise Rent-A-Car” I find it hard to believe anything in the article when it notes that Enterprise has a reputation for healthy culture…it’s a bunch of former frat boys who think they are salespeople but are really just sleazy con artist. And the you have to wear a white shirt and tie whilst cleaning out and washing vehicles. Also pretty misogynistic atmosphere in some of the branches. Worst place I ever worked.

indymike 5y ago

This article is leaving out a factor that helping every company presented as being less affected by the great resignation: workforce age. Companies that have an older workforce generally have less turnover.

yob22 5y ago

iamtheworstdev 5y ago

this is tangential maybe - but some of these industries are dominated by unions and really skew the data. Airlines for instance. No one leaves an airline unless they're quite literally at wits end and willing to go start all over at the bottom of the pay scale somewhere else.

cjbgkagh 5y ago

Perhaps I’ve been unlucky but my experience at big tech has been marred by churn and burn culture - high pressure tactics to get the most work out of employees and discarding them when they inevitably burn out. Average tenure was 1-3 years. Amazon was particularly bad at this. The only modicum of power employees have is in quitting and now that they’re exercising it the employers are acting like their throats have been cut. Edit: a story I like to tell people about what it’s like to deal with Big Co. is that I solo built a $50Mp.a. profit data science artifact in my first year. They offered me the highest once off bonus on offer $30K stretched over 6 years, no promotion (those were used to keep US citizens). I said, give me the same bonus as my manager for for ‘managing’ my project ~$150K in one year or I’ll quit. They said no so I quit. The artifact was extremely difficult to build and written in Scala, it took a lot out of me, no one understood it after I left. They rewrote it in Java which made it even harder to understand. It atrophied over 5 years and now it doesn’t even work at all. I’m in contact with my former colleagues and keep offering to fix it for 7 figures, but no dice. They’ve now convinced themselves it is impossible to do. That’s how committed they are to maintaining the status quo.

MathYouF 5y ago
Slightly off topic, but could you go into a bit more detail on this artifact? I thought an artifact was something like a trained model, but you said it was "written" in Scala then Java, which makes me think I don't understand the meaning, and the word on Google has very broad definitions.
- tellmemore9 5y ago
- Centigonal 5y ago
  an engineering artifact is the tangible by-product of a software development process. It could be a piece of code, dataset, specification, etc. Basically a deliverable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_(software_development) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_(software_development...
- 5y ago

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

One thing I don't get: don't people need money? Is there a huge wave of poverty and homelessness rolling in after the Great Resignation? I get IT workers may have earned so much that they will be OK for a while, but the article specifically mentions other jobs like food workers.

sheepybloke 5y ago
One thing that isn't being discussed is that people are leaving for hopefully better jobs, especially since there are a lot of jobs hiring. For example, leaving a food job for a better paying factory or technician job. Not a huge jump like in the tech world, but sometimes you just need a push to move to something new.

fallingfrog 5y ago

It may be that what we are seeing is an increasing realization that the interests of the boss or managerial layer are at odds with the interests of the ground level worker. People are starting to stand up for their own interests, which if you are the boss, is troubling, hence a lot of pearl clutching about how "nobody wants to work anymore". Writ large, I think people are also realizing that the interests of the CEO/political/ruling class are also wildly at odds with their own interests as well- although we seem to be very susceptible to being distracted by superficial culture wars bullshit and shiny things at the moment.

altabrams 5y ago

I agree a toxic culture is probably driving the great resignation. I don't believe it is lack of money. I do believe and have experienced toxic work relationships and environments. I've had a career as a software engineer -15+ years-, and then shifted to security. Developers reflect their environment and are largely toxic individuals or the object of toxic teams. There is a love/hate relationship with Execs and Tech pros, and the salaries they demand. Execs are looking to cut costs, Tech is looking for career advancement and longevity. Developers are caught between these two rocks. Then the fear of outsourcing for a lower cost workforce. It sucks. The best advice I can give is to enjoy your work and don't get hung up on a $$ track as your measure of success. The $$ will work out in the end, you need to find relationships of like minded folks and support each others careers, boost each others ratings. Provide excellent customer service - the customers being those business owners of your development projects. Look for at least a cost of living increase, ask what needs to happen to get a raise. It's harder than you think. You have to not just produce cheerfully, but provide breakthrough solutions. It's always been a fact in the US that you have to perform the advanced role for at least a year before your title and compensation reflects it. Cheers and good fortune~

noasaservice 5y ago
> I don't believe it is lack of money. We are definitely in a IT bubble. It is DEFINITELY about the money. We have dunkin donuts and plenty other places saying you can make "Up to $20/hr - including tips (but in 1/4 the font size)". Or person is paid $20/hr for the work of 2 humans, and the management says to do these roles too without extra compensation. Or you negotiate for 40h/week average, and management expects 50-60h/week. Or benefits are slashed. Or you get your 3% "raise" which is 1/2 inflation. > The best advice I can give is to enjoy your work and don't get hung up on a $$ track as your measure of success. Really? Ive heard management saying this kind of garbage before. I have better advice: get paid closer to your surplus value's worth. And then when you HAVE capital, you can decide how you want to live your life. And there really is no stability in our system, no matter how pretty things are. We employees/workers have low to no representation in companies. We don't see how the C-suite does stuff, and it's too late when they do. (All of this is primarily US focused, since we take caveat emptor to living and working and everything. It's sickening, but we have to play in this sham system until we can subvert it.)

bArray 5y ago

> We also analyzed the free text of more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, using the Natural Employee Language Understanding platform developed by CultureX, a company two of us (Donald and Charles) cofounded. People go to a complaints website to complain, don't be surprised if you find complaints. The fact that large numbers of people are moving jobs means that large numbers of people suddenly feel empowered to complain. It's not necessarily cause and effect. The word 'toxic' itself is not really well defined. It just means polluted or poisoned - it offers no incite as to what the unexpected addition is. If you crawl the reviews and find the word 'bad', is 'badness' a leading cause of employees leaving? How can 'badness' be addressed? The article then pushes their interpretation of what they believe toxicity to be. In my opinion, toxicity is not usually something that can be well defined, hence the use of the word. Generally though it appears to be the feeling that other colleagues make the day-to-day experience worse. This could be a boss that gives you a hard time all the time, colleagues that talk behind about each other in negative ways, the feeling that your colleagues are your opposition and not your allies, etc. It appears to be bad inter-colleague relationships. If you want to build up better inter-colleague relationships, the solution is not to introduce remote work where they simply avoid each other. Whilst initially it may work (less conflicts), it only serves to isolate staff and strengthen cliques. You need to build up morale, get them working together, have positive work-based experiences together, social events, etc. Go back to basics.

magicroot75 5y ago
The authors state that there will be a soon forthcoming article going into specifics of what makes a toxic culture.

pw262 5y ago

I work as a consultant at a company that has had their entire programming/system staff resign over the last year. Most of the replacement staff have now also resigned. The reason is toxic management. When people are facing life/death consequences from Covid it puts shit at work into perspective. Enough already!

momoneyfool 5y ago

I'm one of these people. I switched 2 jobs last year. I work as a public trust system engineer for a SaaS vendor. We served police, fire, ems training systems. The local job was paying $70k. Low, but the job was easy, management was good, people I worked with were pretty awesome. Management actually told us that they were looking at a VC firm. a year before doing it. Never heard of anyone doing that before. Again, the company had very low toxic behaviors. Stability also has a worth. The company got in bed with a VC. Worst choice ever. Then last year, the ownership was traded like a shiny pokemon card to another VC firm to add to another asset. Company culture flipped in an hour. Was announced on a Tuesday. I started interviewing the end of the week - I wanted to give it a chance to see if it was as bad as my initial gut reaction. And it was. While I'm looking elsewhere, my pay got cut. Glassdoor shows similar previous acquisition bullshittery. Whatever. I'm done here. I found a place. Similar role. Pay goes from 70k->120k. Sweet. Job looked interesting. I accept. And holy shit that place was toxic. "That's soo gay" was explained by my direct report as acceptable since he has 2 gay brothers <cringe>... on my 3rd day. Retard was casually thrown around, as was a whole lot of other stuff. Lest to say, that aint worth 120k. So I hang my shingle again. I eventually found a system engineering position that pays 150k (?!?). I quit 0 notice with a lengthy email explaining why (effectively social justice reasons). I'm now at the new role, and my salary jumped from 70k->150k in a span of a month. Good work is a balance of total compensation, good co-workers, good managers, and stability (of your position, the team, and the company). When even one of those go bad, that whole calculus gets turned upside down. And combined with no more pensions and companies who don't care too much about people, yea, the best decision I can make is "GTFO". (Yes I'm a millenial)

tellmemore9 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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kerneloftruth 5y ago

Retail is where the greatest churn is happening -- and it makes perfect sense. Between shutdowns, layoffs, having to enforce mask rules on customers, having to deal with customers, smash and grabs,... retail seems like one of the worst job experiences to have, and with shaky job stability.

Cupertino95014 5y ago
Personal data: a friend's daughter was heavily into fashion retailing, even to the point of getting a degree in it. I imagine she was a good salesperson, but I don't know that. Anyhow, she's now a buyer for some large company, obviously working away from customers. I'm not discounting your reasons at all, but you left out "buying clothes on the web." Once companies like Zappo's started making it easy to try things and return them if you change your mind, people's reluctance to buy online started evaporating. Now that driving to the mall sucks more than ever, staying home and buying on the Web becomes much more compelling.

tellmemore9 5y ago

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itsdrewmiller 5y ago

Their estimate of turnover by industry clearly has an average around 10%, but quit rates this year should mean that the average turnover is more like 30%. They limit themselves to the 500 biggest employers or whatever the Culture 500 is, but I sincerely doubt there is that big of a discrepancy in turnover between big companies and small.

HurdsTimesNear 5y ago

[flagged]

UIUC_06 5y ago

Wokeness alert! Did some censor insert this phrase after the rest of the article was written? "the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion" and yet there is no other mention of "diversity" anywhere in the article, and no surveyed person mentioned it.

unethical_ban 5y ago
Well, one of the two cited references have diversity in their article several times. I don't know how to sift through the BLS reference. Is there any indication that sentence needs a citation more than other claims and assertions? Is there something about the idea that an overly homogenous workplace leads to (or attracts) people with less decency and politeness?
- UIUC_06 5y ago
  Many other people have pointed this out as well. Generally the article follows the "summary - supporting details" format, which is pretty standard in papers like this. You are being extraordinarily generous to just let them slide on this one

deepsquirrelnet 5y ago

Another swing and miss. I don't think this is so hard. The pandemic is waking people to the reality of their own mortality. Suppose you're working a job in a big, highly dysfunctional organization. Most of us who have been there know that these jobs often pay well -- but in trade, you're selling your precious hours to execute a random series of essentially meaningless events (and under pressure to get it done). Now add a pandemic. You were probably already having a quiet existential crisis, feeling that the insanity of your work environment is no way to let your life pass by. You want your life to mean something, but it isn't fulfilling. Now, people you know are passing away much sooner than expected. Thoughts about the eventuality of your own death are really tipping the scales. Do you just bury your nose and keep going on? Or find out what else is out there?

sheepybloke 5y ago
I think that's why we've been seeing the most churn in retail and enterprise software. In my view, those two areas accentuate that feeling of meaningless event ands realizing that you want to do something more fulfilling. I know that's why I left my job and moved to a startup whose work is more fulfilling to me.
KuhlMensch 5y ago
This me.

irthomasthomas 5y ago

What I dont understand about The Quittening is where are these people going? Did they die, or retire, or change career, or went self employed? People don't just walk away from a 6 figure career and vanish. Where are they now?

ngc248 5y ago
I was wondering that too, i don't think the stimulus payments was this big right? Are they moving back with their parents?
dntrkv 5y ago
They’re getting new jobs. Quitting is at ATH and so is hiring. The proper name should be The Reshuffling.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah. It's possible that some people are retiring or semi-retiring a bit early. But, based on my Twitter feed, it's mostly people switching jobs within the tech industry. (And, yes, anecdotally it does seem to be happening more than the base rate.)
- irthomasthomas 5y ago
  But then why are people saying that hiring is so difficult now? E.g. "I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437
  - ghaff 5y ago
    A few (non mutually exclusive) theories: - People are quitting with the intent of getting new jobs but they may not do so right away. - Hiring needs are up so even if you have a constant pool, hiring is harder. - With more remote work at many of the biggest (and best-paying) tech employers, it's harder for other tech companies to hire because geographical moats are being bridged in many cases.

toss1 5y ago

Toxic culture indeed! Saw a very interesting bit of a talk yesterday, using how Seal Team 6 selects the team - two axes, Performance and Trustworthiness, and a grid, High/Medium/Low for each axis. Obviously no one wants the lower left corner of low performance and low trust and everyone wants the High of both values. But it really turns out that you will NOT want even the best performer with low trustworthiness — a very average performer with high trust is a better choice. The problem in large organizations is that they have many methods and metrics to measure performance, and almost none to measure trustworthiness. I've for decades observed that large organizations seem to actively filter-in and select for sociopathic tendencies at the top; there are only a few, ad seemingly by happenstance, who I'd rate high on the trustworthiness and ethical scale. This talk made the mechanism immediately apparent -- all the selection is for performance, and there is little to no selection for trustworthiness. Fro trust, there's only a few rails that seem to resemble 'don't get caught breaking the law'. Of course, when high-performance/low-trustworthy individuals get to the top, they are not going to institute or support systems to select for high-trust. So, organizations will tend to ratchet in the sociopathic direction. And, sociopaths at the top can barely do anything but create a toxic culture. Now we see the results: MIT studies show results "consistent with a large body of evidence that pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover...In general, corporate culture is a much more reliable predictor of industry-adjusted attrition than how employees assess their compensation." This correlates with many other studies I've seen that people to not really leave bad pay, but bad management, and often in particular, bad managers. And now, the measurement of only performance and not trust has made toxic cultures endemic, and — surprise — nobody wants to work there.

sheepybloke 5y ago

There's a lot of talk of compensation here, but I do think it's more connected to toxic work culture. I left my job in March after my company aimed to lay off 25% of its workforce after the pandemic hit. It was hard, because while our revenues dropped substantially, we had just made huge profits the previous year. I understood the reasons why they wanted to cut, but it just felt reactionary and not forward looking, especially when we had a couple big projects on the way. Add in a couple of years of feeling like I wasn't getting recognized for my performance and the realization that I was probably going to be put into an overworked code monkey position, I decided it was time to move on. I think this is much more like what people are feeling now than just a thirst for more money.

winrid 5y ago
I recently joined a company that laid off a good portion of engineering during the pandemic. It's hard digging into issues because entire teams are gone and took the domain knowledge with them.

Kalanos 5y ago

I was originally interested in business because I thought it would be a meritocracy. It's just a ladder-climbing suck fest where whoever rocks the boat lest and kisses the most butt wins.

lmilcin 5y ago

Really? First rule of asking about why somebody left a job is that people tend to first make the decision and then rationalise it. They will tell a lot of interesting stories about toxic culture and whatnot where in fact the reason might be they wanted to get a raise but their boss did not think they deserved it. It would be interesting to see how many people actually admitted it. And reality is that most people that recently changed jobs of their own volition did this to a) keep working remotely and b) get better salary. Because they f-n can. Especially in software development I have seen drastic increase in salaries. You see the offers increase practically daily. What I thought was a very good salary, in the span of less than a year became bottom of the bottom of the ranges I am receiving. Most of companies are absolutely unwilling to increase salary for their employees. This is f-n stupid because people will find out at some point that their new colleagues with fraction of their experience have been hired for 2 or 3 times their salary. It has already been a standard that it is easier to get a better salary by changing jobs rather than trying to beg your company to move it by more than inflation. Now that people have gotten used to it they stopped feeling any remorse about it and actually expect to leave the company in a year or two when they can get better salary. Why beg your boss when you are almost certain you can earn more with your two additional years of experience? It is now socially acceptable to quit your job after a year or two and a lot of people no longer even considers actually trying to do a better job because their plan is to just change it. Why work your ass off when you are guaranteed a raise anyway? Hence the rise of "performative work" that has been described here some time ago. https://www.economist.com/business/2022/01/08/the-rise-of-performative-work https://www.economist.com/business/2022/01/08/the-rise-of-pe...

jshaqaw 5y ago

The great resignation is fascinating. Some people are trapped in jobs with toxic cultures because they really have obligations to meet and a lack of good alternatives. Lots of other people just think this is the case. A toxic manager with a certain kind of charisma (as many high level toxic managers ten to have)can project this fear into the susceptible and they use that power shamelessly. But this kind of fear projection seems to rely on actual physical proximity or at least spending lots of time in an environment that they not you control. It’s amazing how much less scary a jackass manager seems when you are working home in your sweatpants with some Louis Armstrong playing. Can only be good to defang these soul parasites a bit.