It would be easier to identify these places if it was the best and the brightest that left. Those with confidence and/or the financial stability to not worry about it can leave. There are plenty of very good and very bright people that don't fall into those categories for one reason or another (young, external factors making it risky to leave, etc).
The problem is also that the best and the brightest aren't wearing always truthful signs on their head marking them as such. There is the bad manager spean "disgruntled former employee" to try to absolve themselves and try to discredit anything they may say.
If it was that obvious then we wouldn't even have interviews.
If you work in tech and you're very bright, it's trivial to see the signs of a bad workplace and be unable to find work elsewhere. I do not believe anyone would choose to stay if they were very talented, because it should have been obvious there were problems and it should have been easy to leave.
Everybody I know in tech that's any good has no problem finding a new job on short notice, including people with less than one year of experience.
That doesn't change the fact that in the current job market they can trivially find a new job. That may not be true in the future but there's no reason not to take advantage of it now.
You sound like you have no more than a handful of years of professional (i.e., taxed paid FT) work experience (if any).
As you get older, jobs aren’t as interchangeable.
Consider at least:
- compensation
- scope
- niche fields
- culture
- work life balance, family policies
- location
- golden handcuffs
- network
I can (and have) found new high paying (at least they were for me at the time) jobs within 1-2 weeks of deciding to look to jump and signing an offer. But as I’ve grown older, that doesn’t fly anymore. If I’m taking a new role, I require certain compensation levels, and that comes with certain output/WLB expectations, which means I need to find it interesting, and my family needs to be ok with the value proposition.
All of those things narrow the search space down quite a bit. Then as you’re more and more senior, and if you can command a large compensation package, it’s usually no longer a 1-2 week ordeal (after initial phone interviews, I had 10 interview sessions over 3 weeks for my current role).
You’re also no longer being interviewed by random engineers and PMs, but higher ups with busier schedules that means it’s no longer a concise 4-5 hour thing.
You might eventually hit a stage in your career where as a candidate, you get to pick a panel for you to interview for a second on-site. These things take time to coordinate and schedule.
I've got about a decade of experience. I still find it relatively trivial to switch jobs. Maybe that'll change as I get older, but so far it hasn't been an issue even when dealing with FAANG. Maybe I'm just lucky.
I think it's pretty obvious I'm referring to SV companies (if not then my apologies), since we're talking about an SV company on HN. Obviously the job market is different in other parts of the world, the same way finance is better compensated in New York.
If you think this is wild, just move to SV and it'll become your new normal.
