5 years ago I hit a burnout point and took a year off work. It was a huge perspective shift. I realized that my day-to-day of a rushed commute to work, a stressful and distracting office, thimble-deep coworker relationships and a life completely orientated around doing the above was an insane waste of my short time on Planet Earth. I reoriented my life around family, remote work, flexibility and balance. My quality of life has hugely improved and there is no turning back the clock.
When I saw what the pandemic was doing to nearly every professional office worker, I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in. Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.
> I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in
The headline and the anecdote in the opening paragraph of the article are somewhat misleading. The statistics about millions of people resigning aren’t from people choosing to leave the workforce or take sabbaticals.
It’s mostly people who are simply changing jobs due to the booming economy creating new opportunities and hiring pressure. Millions sounds like a big number, but in a country with hundreds of millions of people it’s only a couple percent of the workforce. Even during normal times, a million or more people resign according to these statistics, again mostly to change jobs.
To put it in perspective: The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, which is consistent with a booming economy. That means only about an additional 1% of workers are choosing to change jobs each month, which isn’t exactly the upheaval this article makes it sound like.
1. Even though the economy may be booming, that doesn't have to mean job changes aren't also driven by re-evaluation of priorities. The two may be complementary.
2. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. People that I would not have expected to leave - "heart of the team" kinds of people. This is after 4-5 devs (in a department of ~60) already made the choice to leave for other opportunities in the past few months.
Some relevant details: large SV-based SaaS with excellent financials, regarded as a good place to work, etc.
> I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles.
I also am noticing this around me.
Years ago I did the startup thing for 5 years, grinding really hard for someone else (mainly investors) to make a ton of money. Burned myself out, quit with no plans, and ended up consulting as a freelance dev from then on. Realized I'm much happier with this arrangement, with the ability to take months off and travel if I want. I could make more money at a large corporation, or if I didn't take so much time off, but honestly I'm much happier.
That's all to say, today I have two separate coffee dates with engineers at my client's company, both wanting to ask me about how they can do the same thing as me. One is a senior engineer that leads a department. The other is a very talented engineer. These are not the only people that have approached me wanting to setup time to talk about the same thing. This is at an SF based company that seems to really respect their engineer's time, provides high salaries, interesting work, etc.
I get the sense that at least for this niche of highly skilled, highly paid, in demand roles people are wanting to trade for more free time in their lives. I totally don't blame them, as it's what I found myself moving to 7 or so years ago.
I really enjoy a few spoons worth of programming per day. If it was a bucket I'd be fine with it. The labor market is like a swimming pool worth of beer that you have to drink before it goes stale.
I think well paid workers may even leave in higher numbers, I am thinking of quiting myself after having a horrific year working almost nonstop with my Wife also working as well. Couple that with a child being forced inside and its been a complete nightmare. 2021 has been even more stressful as the company is piling new projects and initiatives ever higher. I may quit by summers end and I expect an avalanche of resignations as well as burnout reaches epic proportions.
Yep, suddenly all the projects are back but not the hiring to go with them, and I was already stressed and doing multiple former employees' jobs and underpaid in a hot developer market, so...why should I stick around any longer?
Currently interviewing with several recruiters. One will definitely give me a higher salary than I can expect from my company, if they ever decided to give raises again (this year's annual review came and went and other than having me fill out a self-eval four months ago and hearing nothing since).
I even kept quiet in meetings for upcoming projects recently where I was told by other people in the company "You better not leave, we need you for this!" Not my problem they don't have "Hit by a Bus" redundancy in place.
> The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, ... That means only about an additional 1% of workers ...
It's also 50% more workers, if I'm reading that right, which seems like it's potentially a big swing/change.
Similar to recent treatment of the housing boom in the media. People couldn’t afford homes before the pandemic so it’s unlikely they can now. The current market frenzy is what you expect with people moving. It’s not an increase in wealth of housing supply. It’s also heavily driven by speculation from large institutions who are capitalizing on restricted housing supply and rapid inflation. What it is not is some new era where everyone can now afford to buy a home or quit work for a year.
> Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no.
It's important to remember that everyone also had a one year traumatic experience. Physically confined for a year with the threat or reality of unpredictable agonizing death to you or loved ones in the middle of an absolutely insane US political situation is going to take a toll on people.
There's this media narrative that the past year gave everyone this beautiful moment of clarity about how to live their lives. There is some truth to that. But it's also true that it's given people a whole shit load of psychological damage to work through and I wouldn't be certain that all of these people making radical life changes are 100% in their right minds.
I think we're going to see a lot of lifestyle churn over the next few years as people deal with what they went through but any one who claims that the current rapid velocity of any particular pendulum is somehow a straight linear projection is lying to themselves. I look forward to articles a year from now about this "unexpected movement" of people going back to in-office jobs, or working longer hours at shit jobs because they burned through all of their savings, or just wanting more financial stability.
I don't think we can make many reliable extrapolations today based on the aggregate behavior of a huge number of psychologically traumatized people, while the trauma is still not even over. Articles like this read to me like someone during the Blitz seeing victory gardens and confidently predicting that after WII every Londoner is going to become a farmer.
I'm not saying that things will return to any pre-COVID state, just that after the shock we've been through, the entire interconnected spring-mass system of our lives has in no way settled down into a stable state yet. Shit is still chaotic.
Right, I'm from a small town myself and moved to a big city. Small towns are very convenient but life is more about having a convenient commute, easy parking and a big back yard.
I had the same experience [0]. The tunnel vision from work is so strong, that you forget about what's really important. Now, the office feels like a past life - I do not miss the commute, unnecessary meetings or facade of comradery. Ideally I don't have ever to go back to work, but even if I do the perspective shift has made sure I'll do it in a more balanced way next time.
I wrote a similar blog post [1] about why I'm taking a sabbatical and it's really fascinating to compare motivations.
> My thesis is that if I focus on enjoying the journey, everything else will follow.
I wrote:
> I don't have a single big project in mind for my sabbatical... I do have a single overarching theme, however: joie de vivre. Everything that I do, even the mundane stuff (especially the mundane stuff), I'm going to focus on enjoying it fully. How you do anything is how you do everything, as the Buddhists say. I have come to believe that the person who can enjoy whatever they're doing and make that joy contagious will actually end up accomplishing the most. Yet even if I don't accomplish anything, I'll still be joyful, so what would it matter anyways?
Hearing stuff like this a lot recently, I always think about the often repeated vision that Keynes had, saying that we (his grandchildren) would be working 15 hour work weeks. I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea.
Before I'm barraged with "what about people in the service industry!?" I do confess, I'm not sure what the argument would be - indeed, some people are perhaps only working part time at those positions, perhaps maybe around that 15 hour figure. But for those who work full time in the service industry, I guess I'm not sure what there leverage could be - raising the minimum wage perhaps? But that argument is age old and I've heard pros and cons both for and against. Also, in a country like the US where are social programs are far behind most of places like the EU for example, it's especially hard to argue or expect anything to actually become a reality for some of those service jobs. I guess only time will tell.
> I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea.
Not sure we're duped by the 40 hr / week idea so much as we're slaves to our desire for consumer goods. That and housing is very expensive now which means more work to pay for it.
The issue is that pay hasn't kept up with productivity. As things become more efficient employers are having to pay far less for the same amount of work.
It has in tech - in fact I’d wager approximately 100% of productivity gains since the 80s have been in the tech sector which in turn has probably captured nearly all of those gains for itself.
Job hour and insurance lack of fungibility also make it hard even if you were willing to accept lesser pay it would be harder to find an employer who accepts it. Self-employment doesn't lend itself to fixed smooth workweeks and leaves one uninsulated from all of the demands of running a business.
People stopped borrowing money. Either because they became old or the financial crisis made them risk averse. This drops interest rates.
The few things that people buy with debt then rises in value. There is also no interest in building more housing because that would result in lower single family home property values.
You have to consider that it's the bank that is paying for the house. As the owner you only pay the mortgage, whose monthly payments are limited by how much people can afford in the first place.
There is interest in building housing by home builders, but it's at the expensive end of the market, not the much more affordable housing that we need.
Property value is the biggest component of home prices in many desirable areas. Increasing current low-density home building won't change that, but increasing density would help with affordability. Problem is that many in the US still have low density housing as their housing goal.
The 15 hour work week prediction seems to have been an oversimplification unfortunately. Just the introduction of varied scarcity of labor and scalability (you try getting enough doctors for them to work 15 hours a week), let alone lack of "baton passability" of tasks between people. On a personal level an obstacle is the labor market's demands for those who want uncommon arrangements.
As a current status quo most jobs which would accept 15 hour weeks and more employees are lower valued and lower productivity ones. More retirement hobby jobs as a model than even something to sustain a spartan lifestyle. Higher paying and higher productivity jobs tend to be scarcer.
As we subconsciously blend anecdata from HN into our mental models, remember that we self-selecting to visit here commenting are already extreme outliers.
And also anecdotally, every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience, and is yearning to get back to the office - most for a full 5 days a week.
Anecdotally - I'm 30(just), I'm leading a team of people under 30, and everyone is saying that they cannot imagine ever working in the office again. Our company announced they will expect people to come in for at least 2 days a week from September and we're extremely unhhappy about it. If I get an offer for full remote from someone I can't say I won't be tempted.
I'm quite definitely under 30, and I just quit in order to stay remote. I'm so much more relaxed, and I can spend actual quality time with my wife and friends. I'm not sure why anyone would want to go back.
I'll wager a guess that a lot of those other "under 30" cases were people living with 3 other jerk roommates who used to just come home to sleep but now had to put up with each other for a whole year.
Yeah I suspect the real connection are people who look to depend on the office culture to provide a key part of their social interaction. In some cases that will track with age, but not always.
Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds.
We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings.
I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.
1. Depends if the large companies who have committed to indefinite remote work will stay true to that policy. Then you'll still have a great deal of remote positions.
2. Those peers and their companies usually have had remote work forced upon them. See what it's like in a less traumatic time when people can work out of cafes and public spaces, maskless.
My own anecdote tracks. Never thought about the age correlation but most of my team are early 30s and younger. That group has been very negative about the remote experience. I'm much older and while I didn't like it at first, I'm in the camp of people who don't ever want to go back to an office. The people who are in between age-wise are a bit of a mix.
Possible reason from my own anecdata: I joined a new company in a new industry in the middle of the pandemic. I definitely prefer working remotely (I'm just past 30), but as a new hire I felt some disadvantages.
Mainly: my co-workers who have been at the company longer than I weren't very helpful with onboarding me! We're a little company, so documentation of a bunch of our software is non-existent and the specialized hardware setup we have has a lot of quirks I had to slowly teach myself the last year. I'd hit lots of problems that'd take 5 seconds of their time to diagnose and fix and I'd end up stuck for over an hour while waiting for them to answer a Slack message - or they'd randomly drop offline.
So there I am, working in my bedroom in a new job wondering if I'm a needy little snowflake not digging hard enough or whether the people I work with are just unhelpful because... reasons (still haven't met them in-person since my pre-pandemic interview). After a year I think it really is the latter, but it made me grumpy my early months here.
That could be a possible source of resentment from newer, younger employees. Set us up for success!
I still prefer working from home, but I did commute to the office for a happy hour recently. It was nice to randomly get coffee with the CTO in the morning and hang out with new friends in the evening - none of the "unhelpful" people showed up! :P
That is a tribal knowledge problem and is a sign of a core problem a the company. As it persists as the company grows it will be a detriment to anyone coming on board. Couple that with an unwillingness to help others and that is not a company to stay at long term, it is a warning sign.
I think it may be stressful to feel that unless you're in the office being noticed, you have to create a lot of little things to do which are visible on-line. Especially if you are new and don't have a long well-known history of being reliable and self-motivated.
I wonder if there are regional issues at play too.
My office is in Manhattan. It's been my observation that few people that work in Manhattan actually live in Manhattan. Nearly everyone I know of dreads having to go back to the office, and one of the primary reasons is because of the nightmare commute into the island of Manhattan via the various clogged up chokepoints.
> every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience
I mean, we've been through major lockdowns/curfews/personal freedom restrictions, lots of people got sick, lots of people died, most non digital entertainment ceased to exist, most sports couldn't be practiced...
imho you can't pin point "remote work" as the main cause of why people felt miserable in the last few months
Yeah. I've been 100% remote for several years - and while I personally love it overall I know it's not for everyone - but I really can't emphasize enough that pandemic remote work is not normal remote work.
As someone in their 20s without social media, I have exactly 0 friends. I live in a central European country and everyone around me has a friend group that originated during their childhood; they have childhood friends. I do not, mainly because throughout my time in school I switched schools a whole lot for various reasons. Over the years I've also grown quite insecure about it and anxious.
Now I also happen to not like alcohol or smoking which really reduces my chances of meeting someone my age to 0, because I don't go out to parties and such. Not that it was even possible during COVID-19.
I'm happy that I at least have supportive parents, siblings and family. But I think there are a lot of young people in my situation and many of them only have parasocial relationships, for example with Twitch streamers and YouTubers.
Homeoffice has been hard with all the distractions home has to offer and I really do miss eating lunch with coworkers. I'm going to start studying at university this fall so I'm optimistic that I might make some friends there.
Maybe try reaching out to some coworkers and see if they'll meet you for lunch somewhere in between. I have one I meet every week, and one I meet once a month or so, and another who I meet up with but not for lunch, just a 10 minute chat or so.
I don't smoke or drink. You can still go play billiards, work out at a gym, find a pull up bar in public, join a bicycle group ride, skateboard, join a yoga class, hang out at a maker space, go to a car meetup, go off road driving, go camping or hiking in a national park, go to concerts, start muay thai or bjj, etc. I meet a ton of people without alcohol.
You're right.. I suppose I am also a very shy person. But for starters, I joined a soccer club. And hopefully soon I'll get over my anxiety of going to the gym, I've been wanting to go for some time.
I am in the same camp, though, drinking doesn't exactly expand the options that much, just so you know. The real problem is our generation doesn't really seem to have many places to actually meet and make friends with others our own age. It is either some club (not exactly conducive to long term friendship building) or online in some way. If you don't make lasting friendships during college, many of us 20-somethings are kind of screwed unless we bust our asses trying to join communities outside of work. I've been thinking about volunteer work for instance.
It’s hard to make friends as an adult. Especially:
1) If you don’t have kids (socializing with other parents).
2) Don’t go to church/synagogue/etc (church attendance in decline)
3) Do not live where you grew up. (People chase opportunities in other cities.)
4) Aren’t in school any more.
Neighbor friends are also possible, but it can take many years for people to become comfortable enough to be friends, and due to #3, there’s often not enough time for that to happen before people move.
Half my friends are from work and half are parents. They’re not super shallow friendships but also not soul-level deep, either. Deep friendships were left behind from college days.
I've been seeing this sentiment shared recently and what I always suggest is to
1) Look at your hobbies
2) Find people who share those hobbies
Plenty of opportunities exist whether through meetup, BumbleBFF, local postings in cafes/on lamp posts, etc. (this is true of cities, remote destinations may be more difficult but thats the tradeoff of living around less people I suppose)
If you can't find groups for your hobbies, try starting them! Doesn't have to be a permanent leadership role, but if you get the ball rolling others will likely come and BOOM you've found potential friends.
If you don't have hobbies, look into volunteer groups. Rewarding and often extremely kind people who will value what you bring to the table.
With covid remote, I finally started exercising more regularly and attending meetings for local hiking groups and a maker group that I had been putting off for ages. And I think my productivity at work increased because of it.
Changed jobs to negotiate a permanent remote situation and am not going back.
I think it’s fine for some people to want to be on office, but think that a lot of work in the tech area should have the option of remote - and frankly would be better remote first with in-office allowances instead of vice versa.
I find this perspective interesting. I'm 36, have no kids, don't go to church, don't live anywhere near where I grew up or my biological family, and haven't been in school for a very long time but have no shortage of friends or even deep friendships. I think culture is a huge reason. I live in close-in Portland, Oregon and I think the main thing we all have in common is that we all enjoy going to see live music and DJs together. Urban living and music can have a huge ability to replace everything on that list. In fact, my partner and I will be throwing a vaccinated-only music festival this summer and we have about 100 people invited, the vast majority personal friends and only a handful have kids. However, I think working in tech helps. Most of my old friends who never made the jump from the service industry into tech by going to code school or something like that had to move away because the city got too expensive. In short, music + tech + urban makes finding and keeping friends easy, at least in Portland.
Contemporary architecture doesn't help. In 70's developments houses have front porches, but sometime in the 90's they turned houses around, and now everyone sits on their back deck or their games room in their cardboard palace. You don't encounter people any more when you are walking the dog.
As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults.
In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels.
Some of us have been stuck in single rooms with no family or social contact for over a year.
Exercise groups - Illegal
meeting up with other people - Illegal
dating - Illegal
going outside without a valid reason - Illegal
Former friends with established families and large properties with gardens berate you for complaining, as its selfish, "people are dying!", but they travel for holidays,
take their kids to stay with their parents so they can have a weekend getting drunk in their garden, etc that sort of thing.
Not friends anymore.
Also most people who I considered friends before, it turns out are just acquaintances. People I've known for 10-15 years who it turns out don't care about my wellbeing, just see me as a guy they did activity X with, went to events with, etc. A whole lot of that.
Also lots of people do not like the fact that I questioned the rationale for the lockdown measures, questioned the data ( as in wanted to know what the actual data was), etc. They did not like it AT ALL.
Now restrictions might be lifting in the future, I am faced with the situation of being without a social circle. A social life of nothing. The only people I speak to are my colleagues, and that's how it's been for quite some time. Again I emphasize that it has been illegal to even try to change that, and socially taboo enough to question this and say that this is making me miserable as fuck that any existing friends have abandoned me, lots of blocked contacts on whatsapp (there's this impression amongst many that questioning the lockdowns, asking for data, saying this is not good you personally makes me a republican conspiracy theorist nutcase, etc).
How do I rebuild a new life when my ability to trust other people is lower than I ever thought it could be?
I have no family to lean on for support.
As far as I am concerned I might as well be a secret Jew in 1944 Berlin for the level of trust I have for other people now.
>Also lots of people do not like the fact that I questioned the rationale for the lockdown measures, questioned the data ( as in wanted to know what the actual data was), etc. They did not like it AT ALL.
>As far as I am concerned I might as well be a secret Jew in 1944 Berlin for the level of trust I have for other people now.
Holy persecution complex, batman!
Millions were dying and being asked to wear a mask, social distance and wash your hands was too much of a sacrifice for you? You may want to take a hard look at yourself.
I don't think its right to downplay another persons suffering. We are social creatures and many people were put into situations that both actually isolated them while revealing the shallowness of their suposed support networks all at once. That's more or less what this person is explaining / venting about and it. I don't know if you've ever been isolated and / or lonely, but once you are you realize it is not a state we are built to withstand.
social distance means different things to different people based on where they are and their situation. For OP social distance seems to have meant spending all of their time completely alone in their home as leaving it was actually illegal. In addition they found out that none of the people they considered friends really cared enough to even reach out and see how they were doing. That can be quite a slap in the proverbial face and it is jarring to discover you are alone in the world.
I am in my early 40's with 0 friends.
Had them earlier in life and once I had kids I just could not figure out how to balance kids, work and friends. Now I have no idea how to make new ones.
appreciate the tip, assuming you mean at a coffee shop or something similar?
Still have the kids though :) so cant really go grab coffee that early. I am sure most of the problem is me not figuring it out but I am pretty much at a loss, I work remotely, have younger kids that I have to take to school and pickup, feed etc. Finish work at like 6 then kids until 9. So weekdays are out. Then weekends seems like there is always something to do or I am just exhausted and feel bad abandoning my wife and kids to go do something.
I know I am the cause of my own issues, just not sure of the solution.
I also feel bad abandoning my wife and vice versa but I realized recently its still important to find space for that. After some mutual encouragement we've begun taking turns here and there watching the kids, purely for the other person to make plans and go out. Of course, it doesn't help making friends necessarily, but having that habbit does provide the space for it when the opportunities arise.
This is because a lot of them have social lives that revolve around the workplace, usually because they're still at their first or second place of employment and they don't have kids. When work leads to evening dinners and bar runs, it's a vital part of the social experience. When you work with a bunch of seasoned developers in their 30s and 40s, you find that they have taken ownership of their social lives and their priorities after hours often do not include you.
Any comment like this is immediately hit with a flood of "well I love working from home". I'm under 30 and absolutely miserable working from home. The lack of any social interaction with my coworkers combined with a personal lack of a social network outside of work has left me lonely and isolated. On a positive note the lockdown has pushed me to begin exercising, start eating healthier, stop drinking, and start learning a second language in prep for a long sabbatical abroad.
You kidding? I loved this pandemic so much, i want to marry it and have children with it!
No pointless work "morale events"; no wasting hours a day on commute; ability to do something useful while a build is building, like putting in a load of laundry instead of just reading HN while waiting; and spending a lot more time with my GF as she is also WFHing.
I suspect you are speaking only about people who are unable/unwilling to put effort into the "life" part of "work-life balance" and thus depend on the "work" part to give them what "life" gives to all others: companionship/friendship/fun/purpose
Commutes: heat, stress, grey, pavement, dirt and chemicals, danger, frustration, noise; all things that come to mind with commutes. Never again, I hope.
I had no special circumstances, I just made a choice to put years of savings to work for myself immediately instead of in the uncertain future. I sold everything and lived simply. Not everyone could do it, but many could who think they can't.
Being able to save, especially for years, is a special circumstance. At least in the US where wages have been flat for quite a while even as cost of living skyrocketed.
I don’t want to sound like a know it all, but I managed to save a lot of money living in a big city in a grad student stipend, which is about $25k. It can be done. I spent very little biking, cooking from home, buying used, having roommates, not drinking, not buying much.
There are exceptions like kids and chronic health issues but most people could save a lot more money if they wanted.
I say this without judgment, people just have different priorities. I recognize my advantages, but I have more savings than most people in my family, despite probably having the lowest lifetime income.
This really needs a time frame. $25k in a big city means different things depending on era. The curves of wage growth, cost of living, and wealth disparity didn't start to diverge so wildly until the 2000s. This took a lot of people by surprise and people whose experiences diverge by era aren't always aware of how quickly things changed for other people.
Someone who graduated in 2005 will often have a completely different experience from someone who graduated in 2008 or 2009. People who haven't had to look for a job since the '80s are especially befuddled to learn "ask for the manager" leads to "there's an online application kiosk by the door, go there." Usually along with "we don't have any openings, but we keep it on file for 6 months!"
Per the US government (BLS), the median household has the ability to save about $1,000 per month without changing how much they spend on ordinary costs of living. So not everyone can but most people can if they choose to. Of course, Americans are notoriously poor savers, which is the bigger culprit.
There is a 21 trillion dollar economy built largely on companies fighting over that $1000 with lies and manipulation from people who devote careers to outsmarting people.
Another thread on HN helpfully has examples of people refusing to go along with it. I don't think they're representative.
This is a term of art. An "ordinary expense" are categories of expenses required to live a decent average life, as evidenced by the fact that most people actually spend money on them. This includes housing, transportation, clothes, food, healthcare, utilities, taxes, etc. It makes no judgement on how the money is spent in ordinary categories e.g. buying a BMW is an ordinary expense because it is transportation. It isn't prescriptive and it includes pretty much everything you would expect. Ordinary expenses include a lot of luxury and non-essential spending.
If you look at all the categories that are "non-ordinary" because most people spend no money on them, they are pretty obviously lifestyle flexes. For example, if you blow your entire paycheck on a bar tab, that is not classified as an ordinary expense because most people don't do that.
Subtract the median ordinary expense from the median income, you are left with more than $12,000 per year as a surplus. This is called "discretionary income", money you can spend on fun, hobbies, or -- relevant to this thread -- savings. If we restricted it even further to ordinary and essential spending, the income level that no longer generates any surplus is in the region of 15th percentile IIRC. That is still 20 million households in the US with no ability to save but that isn't the experience of the vast majority of households.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve publishes surprisingly detailed statics of what people spend money on and how income surpluses are used.
It does require discipline and sacrifice, and it's harder or easier depending on circumstance, but it is always possible. You may not be able to save very much, but even a small amount can get you through some situations that would otherwise have cost you more, in interest or lost time at work or whatever. Those small solutions add up over time, so that you're always better off with saving, than without.
In America (and much of the world) this is the ultimate special circumstance. The idea of being able to consistently save significant amounts of money for YEARS is foreign to billions of people.
Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what, and even its worst places - its prison cells - compare favorably to the finest hotels of other countries. You have so many options you feel constantly overwhelmed, stressing about making bad choices because everything your primitive heart could ever desire is not merely available, but plentiful and cheap. And it'll recruit you if you're not careful. Money fails to motivate when you have enough of it regardless. Life wants meaning.
Imagine having all the time in the world, just thinking about everything. Your whole life.
"Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what, and even its worst places - its prison cells - compare favorably to the finest hotels of other countries."
What I see are bored young males hanging out and getting in fights, not a whole generation of people learning cuneiform in their newfound free time.
Absolutely. There is no free lunch. UBI comes on the backs of the value adding class of society. Some people actually LIKE to work, hard as it is for some to believe.
The Value Adding Class will have privilege thrust upon them in the form of paying for those young males to hang out and get in fights.
Ive had the dubious honor of knowing more than one kid who was never going to have to work a single day in life owing to who their parents and grandparents were. They tend to end up chemical addicted for the most part.
Those experiments are worse than useless for predicting what would actually happen in a "true UBI" environment. I say "worse than useless" as opposed to just "useless" since they make people think they have some insight into what a UBI world would look like, but they really don't.
Giving a small number of people an amount of money below what they'd need to actually survive, with them knowing perfectly well it won't last forever has effectively zero in common with UBI. Give an entire contained population of people enough money that they can have all their basic needs met just with that money, and guarantee them it will continue for the rest of their lives, and I'd bet quite a lot that the results would be drastically different.
Also, not a big deal since you also provided two reasonable links, but many people will see that you linked motherjones and likely discount your comment entirely. It's on the same tier as OANN and breitbart.
Nah, empiricism is not bad. And attacking a single link in one isolated post that took me two minutes to search up links for hardly discredits an entire field of interest. Thanks for the concern though but this is hardly a thesis.
Sure whatever, but the rest of my post is more pertinent. These experiments have no value. Measuring the wavelength of the color of the sky is empirical and offers roughly the same insight into the impact of UBI on society. Empiricism on its own is nothing.
Okay, then sounds like the only way to know whether UBI is good or not is to go ahead with it and try it out. Good to know you fundamentally disagree with the ancestral post that claimed that it would empower idleness and drug addiction, like a puritan decrying alcohol, or dancing.
Yes, that would be the only way, but basic arithmetic yields the conclusion that it is not possible at present, even ignoring the political impossibility of it. And no, I very much agree with the ancestral post. I think it would empower a significant amount of addiction and other lazy and wasteful behavior. Which doesn't necessarily mean it would be a net negative for the world on the whole, but to deny that that would happen is to be disconnected from reality. I frankly don't trust the judgement or diversity of life experience of anyone who doesn't recognize that.
Any form of welfare or public benefit can be abused, obviously. But to claim that it would lead to significantly detrimental and widespread abuse is a serious criticism that requires serious study and analysis to back up. Without it, both your post and the ancestral post are simply posting polemics based on your own specific subjective viewpoint.
By your own measure, basic arithmetic has roughly the same insight into the impact of UBI on society. As is judgement and diversity of life experience. As you say, empiricism on its own is nothing.
I've not seen any serious proposals to implement ubi before automation has substantially increased unemployment. In that case, not only are people idle, but also desperate.
Fwiw, I don't mind working at all, but in an ideal world, my work would be varied and my hours would be of my choosing. Sure, you can get that if you freelance, but most corporate jobs want 8h/d 40h/w, at least, and is that how anyone wants to spend their time on earth?
Interesting. Perhaps we are kind of already at that point? Isn't that what video games like MMORPGs or Fortnite are for? Where the bored young males get to accomplish great adventures , build and show off their skills for status, compete and crush their enemies, and fulfill a sense of accomplishment.. all virtually?
> Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what
Realistic UBI proposals wouldn’t exactly provide a comfortable wage. They’d provide just enough to get by on the basics, if that. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful, but it does mean that it won’t be an attractive alternative to work for anyone who isn’t comfortable staying poor forever.
UBI would still be a safety net, not an attractive alternative to working. The idea that UBI would enable people to become free of work and follow their dreams for free has been greatly exaggerated. It’s just not possible to tax enough to pay everyone high UBI wages. Safety net wages, maybe, but it won’t be a fun living situation to depend entirely on UBI.
Personally I think that even if UBI wouldn’t provide a living wage in today’s economy, that it will fundamentally change market dynamics in interesting ways. Companies constantly adjust prices up in the US because of increased buying power, aka “they can afford to give us more profit”. There’s an entire industry of cheap smartphones that don’t release in the US, only in India, China, and third world countries, and they’re plenty profitable, but they deliberately only release even more profitable models in the US.
I think creating a significant class of people with reduced buying power in the US will actually lower prices here, as at least some companies decide they don’t want to miss out on that portion of the market just to soak the rest of the Americans for even more money.
Of course that’s expressing a lot of faith in capitalism so it’s entirely possible, even likely, that it would somehow make the entire situation even worse.
I really wonder dude, I really wonder. The older I get the harder I find to be excited by shit. I do believe that if I was in the iPhone team I would've been like "another f-ing phone, why should I care?".
The paycheck is pretty much all that is getting me out of bed in the morning, even if at this point I can't say I really need it anymore.
Part of that might be that you lack the time or energy to properly explore new things though, and that lack of time or energy probably has something to do with getting that pay check.
I mean also maybe not, but I find it hard to devote time to things I know I am interested in because I work 9-5, 5 days a week. I spend time with my partner of an evening and have housework and exercise to take care of and after all that it feels like there is very little time and like I don't have a lot of energy to learn new skills or pursue hobbies, so what I end up doing is the things I know I like but that are not draining. Ultimately I spend a lot of time reading or playing video games or goofing off on reddit.
Even taking a week or two off isn't necessarily a good indicator, because you won't say, go and buy a bunch of paints and an easel and go "right I'm finally going to get stuck into painting" when you only have two weeks off and know you won't have time for it once they are up
>maybe its not normal to not get excited by stuff you used to like
People absolutely fall in and out of interest in different types of activities. This is especially true of people who really jump into things with both feet.
That gets boring pretty damn quickly. You'd feel sick of yourself in a couple of weeks.
Humans surprisingly want to feel meaningful. Tickling your pleasure neurons for day after day just doesn't feel good, it doesn't make you happy. Pleasure != happiness.
It indeed is a luxury to be able to take a year off at will. Big reason I can think of is financials.
In my opinion, burnout is a problem only faced by people who can afford to do so. I am not saying everyone doesn't face burnout, they probably do, but not everyone can afford to take a sabbatical, dip into savings, indulge in a hobby etc. There are many people who don't earn as much as a silicon valley engineer, have low savings to dip into, and perhaps even have/inherit debt - Making rent and being able to afford essentials takes priority to dealing with burnout in such situations.
Most people pay $100+/month for cable, eat out multiple times per week, have thousands of credit card debt, and an unexpected $400 bill would ravage them.
If you want to live a un-average life, you need to have un-average priorities and sacrifice. Few on HN should be living paycheck to paycheck.
Check out Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover for a starting model. And yes, you'll have to sacrifice now to benefit later.
I totally recommend everyone read Dave Ramsay's work to understand how to approach money. It was an eye opener for me.
But you have to understand that consumerism is pushed down our throats from all around starting at a very young age. Dave Ramsay doesn't just come into your consciousness like advertising does, and unless one is close to someone who is very anti consumerism and advertising you will likely be subjected to an onslaught of messages aimed at your subconscious that you are completely ill-equipped to fight.
I think many people in these comments are speaking on behalf of the general population who does not have the luxury of taking a year off.
This comment of yours drips with privilege.
Edit: I was introduced to dave Ramsay's work in my 20s by a close friend who was wealthy and had businesses and homes. He volunteered with some organizations to provide financial literacy classes. I was lucky to have been given that reference.
While many here are commenting on the abstract general population, most are speaking about themselves with variations of "must be nice!"
When you fly, the emergency briefing tells you to put on your own mask before helping others. In lifeguard training, you're taught to keep yourself afloat before the victim.
If you don't have your own finances in order, your opinion on others' finances is just noise and about as valuable.
A drowning victim will instinctively push the rescuer under the water, so the rescuer must have a secure flotation device. It was (probably still is) taught to pull the rescue-e to land by having the victim facing away with your arm around their neck and under the armpit facing away. This is to keep them from drowning you.
This is also biblical - take the splitter out of your own eye before you take the splinter out of another's eye (paraphrasing).
Better than Dave Ramsey, check out Bogleheads.org.
You (and everyone else) really do own your financial life. There can be curveballs-- a catastrophic illness, for example-- but for the vast majority of people, having money or not is really a series of personal decisions made over a lifetime.
Can speak for myself, I don't live paycheck to paycheck now but I grew up in a household with a lot less money than I make now in comparison - Involved lot of sacrifices and accumulating modest savings over a lifetime to help the next generation to live a bit better and make fewer such sacrifices.
> Most people pay $100+/month for cable, eat out multiple times per week, have thousands of credit card debt, and an unexpected $400 bill would ravage them.
There's also a cohort that might not earn a lot but is financially responsible, frugal and makes modest gains towards big goals e.g. education for kids, home ownership which can take almost a life time.
There's a big spectrum from being poor due to being financially irresponsible and being lucky enough to be in their 20s, debt free and paying off a mortgage instead of rent (with help for college, down payment etc from family to have a healthy head start). Not everyone who doesn't have the means is in such a place because they are lazy or is financially irresponsible. Simply stating that most people are a certain way without evidence is just disingenuous and judgemental, perhaps exposes a bias more than anything.
> Involved lot of sacrifices and accumulating modest savings over a lifetime to help the next generation to live a bit better and make fewer such sacrifices.
Congrats. That's awesome and it's what we should strive for. Sacrificing sucks but doing it now so we have to do less of it later (or later generations have to do less) is powerful. Your parents setting that example for you - and you passing it down - is exceptionally valuable too. I grew up in similar financial circumstances without learning those lessons until much much later.
> There's also a cohort that might...
Yes, there are cohorts in all circumstances. That's why I said "most" and not "all."
Do you actually know anyone like this, or are you basing this off of what cable news personalities say?
I know plenty of people with no cable, no Internet other than their phone, living paycheck to paycheck... This idea that poor people just need to stop wasting their money is propaganda used to justify starvation wages
It creates a simple fairy tale that financial success or failure rests solely on the individual.
It allows people to ignore wage stagnation, inflation, rising costs of critical goods and services, rising inequality, and fundament structural inequities with society.
Here's a more in-depth academic paper that provides data beyond unsourced colloquialisms if you're interested.
Even if we assume these websites to be accurate, The data and conclusions are wildly speculative and ask more questions than answer. This isn't remotely evidence for your claim.
What are the demographics by age, geography for the people paying for cable tv, going out for dinners 5 times a week and that have $5k of credit card debt. You seem to be assuming they are all the same people, and you are assuming that correlation is causation.
Besides, even I indulge -
The link you shared about cord cutting statistics, if you read through the link, its making the point that cutting the cord was on the rise and in 2018 increased by 32.8% compared to 2017. In 2018 alone 33M people canceled their TV subscription. Seems like your data suggests people are increasingly doing what you want them to do, cutting the cord and saving money.
The link about people going out for lunch and dinner, it actually doesn't have any data in it. It appears to be a blog by a private citizen.
The link you shared about credit card debt, well that actually says that average credit card debt reduced by 14% from 2019 to 2020, while the avg fico across all generations increased. Seems like another trend that you wanted people to do. Surprisingly it also says that while avg credit card debt reduced from 2019 to 2020, student loan debt increased the highest of any debt category, by 9%.
Should I be concluding that people have been cutting the cord and saving money on cable tv, reducing credit card debt and investing in education? Or are we just cherry picking statistics to support a belief without really looking at the data.
And this is the myth of "The Man is keeping me down".
It allows people to ignore that their choices are by far the biggest factor in what happens in their lives, and instead allows them blame society and take no responsibility.
There's a spectrum between the extremes of "over consumption" and "the man is keeping me down". And in the middle there's also "simply playing the hand you're dealt".
Looking at the comments here, it seems like people cherry pick anecdotes or statistics to support their beliefs about the distribution.
People can make good/bad choices but the amount and types of choices a person even has available to them, is very dependent on pre-existing family success/wealth.
Jeff Bezo's kids will have more choices/opportunities than a middle class kid who will have more choices/opportunities than a poor kid.
Starving Syrian Refugess have very minimal choices or opportunities.
So your average middle class or poor person has some choices but is much more at the mercy of their ENVIRONMENT than Jeff Bezo's kids who can bend the environment to their will with money.
Your heels seem pretty dug into your belief's so there's a good chance I'm wasting my time by talking to you but whatever.
If you’re young, have no children, and don’t mind picking up and moving and giving up local connections, sure.
That’s not common, though.
Really though, the solution is to change jobs. Despite how it looks from HN comments, there are plenty of companies out there with good work life balance.
Painting this as a false dichotomy between staying in burnout-inducing jobs or dropping everything to become jobless isn’t helpful. There’s an entire spectrum of options that should be explored to change a burnout-inducing situation.
I found this working for state government. Trying to put my skills to use helping taxpayers get what they deserve in usable government websites. There is a lot of "feel good" there...feels like it did back in 96-97.
Similar story. I left tech for about 5 months back in early Spring to refocus after delivery of a huge project (contract). Now looking at re-entering with a product/company I actually want to contribute to.
The first guy in the article is a dev. There's never been a better time to find work as a dev. Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before. On top of it all, if your firm wants people back in the office soon, now is the time to do loads of remote interviews so that you can keep being remote.
I was interviewing recently and almost everyone is at least partly remote, with a huge number of 100% remote. Even people that I know don't like the idea are bending and giving two or three days remote.
On the restaurant-type work, I'd say a bunch of people have been given a breather from the treadmill, and they're using it to look around. I see this as mostly positive, but it does suggest that a lot of people are completely swamped, working all the time, spending everything. The little bit of credit they got from the pandemic payment has unlocked a great reckoning with the labor market. Previously if you didn't like your job, you were screwed. Somehow find time to interview/upskill, or somehow jump the gap with your savings.
> Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before.
I may be naive, but I guess this office-work-exodus would result to improvements in office spaces in general to attract devs (or other employees in tech). This would also make it easier for people who are looking to move to the US to find office jobs, since the competition is less fierce. Am I off mark here and too naive?
Cubes done right are fine. I had "office cubes" with 6ft tall walls and ~40sq ft of space, and they were awesome. Plenty of space to stretch out, room for a bookshelf and a chair for visitors, a computer desk and a writing desk.
Noise could be a little much, but people were generally polite and quiet.
My next job was literally a desk in the middle of the floor. All the prime employees had desks that went along the edge of the wall, forming a horseshoe and, when they ran out of room, they started putting desks in the center. So i was basically working on a stage in front of 40 people. It was awful, but I never slacked off! (well, i went for walks a lot)
I miss office cubes. Last 2 jobs where in an open office. Also while I haven't disliked my bosses, the last 3 I've been seated less than 15 feet from them. Covid work from home was a pretty nice break, and we're going hybrid from now on.
The largest groups that live in my metros downtown core are, swaths of poor people who's crime ridden neighborhoods have yet to gentrify, the insanely wealthy who gentrified the best of the dilapidated old homes, and young hipsters who live in condos.
For the most part (in my area), the only reason companies have moved downtown is because the city has given them sweetheart deals to be there. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of workers commute into the downtown area, because it's not a desirable place to live.
I think this is vastly dependent on the state and the "downtown." Where I live, Boston, it's mostly the upper classes that live in and around the city. All the poor people have been nearly priced out to the suburbs or even other states (New Hampshire or Rhode Island).
Of course there are wealthy cities and suburbs, but if you want a walkable commute within reason, <15 minutes, you pay a premium.
I like working in an office, I just don't like that it takes me 40 minutes to get there. In a better world I could live _in_ that downtown core, a short walk or bike ride away from work.
Most people would be happier in offices with a door. Managers have decided that THEIR work is the only work that requires privacy and quiet.
Employees often equate their own job satisfaction by the differences between how their managers treat themselves versus how they treat the people under them. When you have your own office with a door and a white board and have a company card to expense your meals while your devs are working with their headphones on because of the noise level in their cubicles, you're going to have a problem.
I have no issue with that tbh as long as conditions are bearable (team room, flexible timing etc). I do prefer a good office+colleagues over a good home office tbh.
That premium for me is going to be higher than they imagine.
Among my coworkers I have an average commute time, and I loose 10-12 hours a week driving to and from work. I figure if I was being paid at my normal rate they'd need to pay me between 25-45%[1] more money just to come in.
[1]- Used to be that workers weren't exempt from overtime pay. At time and a half, 12 extra hours over 40 would be the equivalent of 18 hours. That is 45% of a normal 40 hour work week. (10 hours at non-overtime pay is 25% of the work week)
First part wrong. Doesn't make any sense to try to improve an office to attract devs when so many devs are leaving the office. Office space improvements would be expensive right now due to various factors: labor shortage, materials inflation, etc. Plus the cheaper move is to snap up fancier existing office spaces since offices are in lower demand now, thus the price of existing ones will have decreased.
Second part you have a point. This is the best time to move to the US on an H1B. If you're an int'l student, this is the time to look for that office job that will hold you till a green card.
I'm in the UK too. But also remote means you can get a job "based" anywhere. Check out some US firms for instance, many are hiring and are happy with euro time zones.
The US companies are hiring, just like everybody else.
Multi-nationals now seem to post most jobs as “remote” which means global. A smaller number is “US-remote”. Usually this is not for tax reasons but for business or security reasons if dealing with the US government.
Hiring remotely is easy for these companies as they usually have a subsidiary already in country.
But even if not, there are now agencies that take care if things like taxation etc. I believe remote.com might be the one most known but it is certainly not the only one.
Very much reflects my experience. I am with a US tech now and they are very conducive to hiring Brits. They know on the whole we hold a lot of quality engineers, there are no language barriers , very little cultural differences at all.
It's a bit of coup out to jump on the British where somehow everything negative that happens is due to Brexit.
As counter anecdata, I am in the Netherlands and I am (now, as much as before) receiving calls for job opportunities from UK based recruiters. They are for the majority concentrated around London, Oxbridge, Bristol, Manchester. Depending on where GP is based in the UK, the landscape and opportunities can be quite different.
Irrespective of the politics and bitter emotions, London's VC funding scene is arguably the closest we have in Europe to SV/Seattle/NY and it will continue to play a role in making the UK relevant in the tech scene.
The person you replied to wrote that all their clients "relocated any technical work they had in the UK to Poland or the Baltics". That's not politics and bitter emotions, that's sharing their own anecdotal data.
Of course, one could criticize generalizing based on that one data point, but that's a different thing altogether.
Saying that Brexit is the cause of something based on one's experience with clients, expressed in a way that suggests that it did not positively or negatively affect themselves in any way, does not strike me as particularly bitter, but suit yourself.
First, nothing about "y'all have to thank" suggests that they consider the person they are responding to responsible for Brexit, which is a requirement for it to imply that they are putting some sort of blame on the person (or the collective group they represent).
But let's for the sake of it accept that "it's your own fault" is what was meant by it anyway. That still doesn't imply bitterness.
If parents explains to their child not to run with scissors because they might hurt themselves, the child does so anyway and ends up hurting themselves, and one of the parents says in-between consoling their child "but do you see how you only have yourself to blame for it, if you decided to do this anyway after we warned you this would happen?", then that might not be the most considerate timing for sharing a harsh truth, but there's nothing bitter about the statement.
Why remove large groups of skilled engineers in your businesses domain and have to retrain again, because of a political change. I can understand a company with a manufacturing base doing this (due to import / export regulations changing), but this makes no sense in software.
I'm one of these. I'm an allrounder software dev in his late fourties, "lured" into a non-software middle management position by the promise of money and stability a few years ago.
In practice, the money has never materialized because our sector took a big hit and much of that promise was tied to incentives based on the company's success. I can't really blame anyone for this, but that's strike one as far as job satisfaction goes.
Second strike, I love writing code, and I don't get to do that a lot anymore. I'm listing these "pre-existing conditions" because I believe it's common for us quitters to have other areas of dissatisfaction that hadn't been enough to drive us over the edge by themselves.
Third strike, while my company does not support WFH after Covid, I did get to experience at least a partial WFH program, and it was absolutely wonderful. There's a problem though: I would absolutely like to continue working from home, but I also want to work on my own projects, on my own terms, on my own schedule. A traditional full time job is not compatible with that.
So I put in my notice for the end of this year, to allow current company projects to come to a conclusion and/or hand them off. I want to stress that for a man in my age group, with no significant savings or other safety net, this is extremely scary. It's just that this Angst is outweighed by the thought of staying on the treadmill hoping for an eventual reward that may never come and seeing the little time I have left drain away.
"...for a man in my age group, with no significant savings or other safety net, this is extremely scary"
I'm sorry you are in this situation. I applaud your self-awareness, and suspect you have enough skills and discipline to turn this around in the next few years. You may never get to the point of having millions tucked away for retirement, but do hope you can get to a point where you do have 'significant savings'. I'd measure that by your measure of 'extremely scary'.
My wife and I have no kids, so 'saving' has been somewhat easier 'by default' than some of our peers. That said, it's not automatic, and I know plenty of folks who are high earners who will manage to spend it all without 'significant savings' to speak of.
Thank you! Don't have too much pity though, I'm doing okay. I live in the EU, no spouse, no kids, no commitments really. Not planning ahead is 100% my fault, but it's not an existential problem (yet). It's just time to finally stop spending everything as it comes in.
It's kind of obnoxious to even admit this, but I always assumed I'd be a successful person at some point down the line. This was of course utterly ridiculous and led to some really bad decisions. It was exploitable by other people, too. My work made a few people rich, and while I was always compensated for my time, I never got a proportional cut from the outcomes. But it wasn't a bad life, and there is still some fuel in the tank :)
Oh... EU... your 'social safety net' is ... stronger than ours in the US. I am nervous/scared about the future, and I have about 3-4 years of expenses in savings (not counting investments and retirement accounts). But I'm still somewhat 'nervous/scared'.
There is no single EU when it comes to topics like these, some parts are much better than others. But no place will ever save you from really bad financial mistakes or tons of small ones.
But you won't ever starve or have no place to sleep and your health will generally be taken care of, albeit not always in best way possible (ie dental care).
> But you won't ever starve or have no place to sleep and your health will generally be taken care of
Which are things I concerned myself with early on. I probably won't ever have to be homeless, but... health stuff - knowing that if I stop paying for 'insurance', regardless of how much I've paid in over... decades... I'll be denied things - that's still troubling.
This article opens with a person experiencing burnout and choosing to leave a job where he needed to commute 1.5 hours per day, but the story isn’t really about people quitting work or leaving the workforce.
The majority of people resigning their jobs are simply changing jobs, and the article doesn’t provide any evidence that people are changing to remote work in large numbers.
The biggest driver of the increase in job changes is simply the booming economy. We poured stimulus money into the economy at unprecedented rates and this has created economic booms at every level. Companies are scrambling to hire and wages reflect this, so people are taking the opportunity to switch up their careers and collect a pay bump.
Most of the business world appears to be snapping back to business as normal at a rapid rate, but with a booming economy pouring fuel on the fire. The media has been pushing narratives that COVID changes everything and that we’re entering a whole new world, but aside from companies adding a little more flexibility it seems most are eager to simply return to business as usual.
On the ground, I’m not seeing a massive shift toward remote work like I keep reading about in these articles. Yes, there are somewhat more remote jobs, but companies are largely eager to return to in-office work. Even many employees I know are eager to get back to the office because remote isn’t for everyone.
Remember the housing market boom right before the bubble popped they propped it up with stimulus money everybody was like oh wow this is great houses are such a low price...... You're basically talking about the same thing there
No. I do remember people being like, 'holy shit, houses are getting so expensive' in the years leading up to the bubble popping. And knowing a few people stuck in their houses after real estate agents convinced them to buy at way more than market value.
What stimulus are you talking about? Mortgage rates were laughably high by today's standards. Maybe the $600 bush tax cut? I remember some first time home-buyers programs, but those were largely in response to 2008.
I have often worked remotely for years, but...I'm a contractor/consultant, and a programmer. I am unemployed several months out of the year, typically, and I am always intentionally short-to-medium term where I work.
I fear that many of the people demanding remote work now, will be surprised when (not if) the first layoffs come, and they find out that the person who's in the office every day is more awkward to fire than the remote person. Me, I'm always temporary, so I know this and am ok with it. I fear many of the people looking for remote work now think it will be just like office work, except they get to work at home. It's not. It's a much more tenuous relationship with your employer, and you have to always assume (e.g. in your budget) that you can/will lose your paycheck with little or no notice. If you're ok with that kind of perpetual instability, great, but I'm not sure most of the people looking for remote work now are aware of this tradeoff.
This is admirable but the truth is that these jobs will not disappear, they will simply be outsourced abroad. There’s swaths of competent people abroad that are happy to take your (overpaid) place and the major shift to remote work tools has made it all the easier to blend in your team even if they’re working from another country. On top of this, foreign workers usually get paid 1/3 of the American salary, so the employers are extra incentivized to outsource these jobs.
We'll have to see how that works out in the aggregate.
Here in the US, we pretty much outsourced our manufacturing to China.
This has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure.
A number of folks made a lot of money on this, but a much larger number of folks have really taken it in the shorts. Arguably, a lot of the troubles we've had, over the last decade, have found a root cause in this.
It's no secret. Pretty much everyone knows this, but the will to do something about it is weak.
It's been my experience, that when the pain gets great enough, the change will come. That's not always a good thing. Change like that, more often resembles an amputation, as opposed to a disinfectant swab and some stitches.
This narrative is largely false. Both because nothing was "outsourced" and because american manufacturing is at an all time high.
Automation ended the vast majority of high-labour manufacturing. What was left was only economical to do without automation at extremely low labour costs.
In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation.
Yes and no. It depends on what is being manufactured. We manufacture big, expensive things. I have friends that run Garment District companies, and they are pretty much a Bellwether for this kind of thing.
> In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation.
I agree. It will be slower than Japan and Korea, because China has a much larger population of poor folks that will work 996, but, one day, we will see a very different China.
It will be a consumer powerhouse. If you think America is a consumeristic society, just wait until China becomes mostly middle-class. There's a reason why so many corporations are abasing themselves so much for entry into the Chinese market.
I’m wondering about that too but for another reason - the aging population. There are article in Asian about “China getting old before it gets rich”.
Basically the small group of younger workers are going to have their wealth siphoned off to support the much larger older population who doesn’t have financial means to support themselves. Not a big deal when it’s 5 workers to one retired. Huge deal when it’s 2 to 1.
The expectation is that will stall growth for decades. China will be richer, but stuck in a lower income range until they come out the other side.
I think there's something here about how dense countries are. I believe most of the reason the US looks higher is the extremely low density and correspondingly high transportation/communication/etc. costs.
This doesn't look at the potential causes for high energy use. The geographical and infrastructural conditions of the US don't necessarily apply elsewhere.
China is hitting a demographic wall, so the changes will happen much faster than many expect. 996 is more of a tech worker thing, not lower skilled manufacturing labor.
>his has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure.
Is this true? I am under the impression that the US still has loads of high end manufacturing, it's just the low end stuff that no longer exists and even then it's partially due to automation
Exactly. High end has higher margins, and a simpler distribution chain.
It isn't worth it to do the small stuff here, but the small stuff is a really big deal. There are many American households that have nothing made in the USA. China knows this quite well.
The software field expanded so much that there is a massive need for both in-house developers for tech firms and outsourcing for traditional businesses with legacy systems like banks, insurance etc.
In my experience, outsourced code is almost always harder to maintain and I haven't seen example of successful outsourcing of ongoing code maintenance.
I'm sure there's a lot of variance, but I don't think "outsourced everything" will be practical for most software businesses that place importance on quality of service.
Outsourcing can be great for developing a green-field new initiative, but at some point the in house folks are going to need to learn the new codebase so they can fix bugs, scale, and keep the lights on.
Outsourcing is not exclusive to India. What if they outsource to Italy? Spain? Ukraine? Greece? Hell even Germany.
All of those places have salaries that are a fraction of the typical US salary. US salaries are incredibly ridiculous on the global stage. And all of those places with actually good developers
The first counterargument that comes to my mind is timezones. I was on a team distributed across San Francisco, New York, London, Munich, Australia, Tokyo. Not being able to schedule a meeting time that works for everyone was a neverending source of friction and frustration. In other words while I don't disagree that there is a lot more work that can be outsourced, perhaps we will reach the limit earlier than you expect.
One growing trend in the US is outsourcing to South America. Lots of great value developers down there in the same timezone.
The second issue that still comes up is communication and culture. Successful cross cultural communication requires more clarity in messaging and tasks. It can work and can work well and deliver good quality at great prices, but the obvious savings are partially offset by the higher communication and management costs. Sometimes more than fully offset.
There are tons of competent developers in Central and South America in time zones close to the US. The language/accent barriers as well as cultural differences are much less than say India IMHO. On average the folks I’ve worked with haven’t been as good as US staff, but I bet the gap could close quickly.
Doesn't matter. I'm not sure what time it is in India, the Philippines, or the Czech Republic, but the support teams answer the phone between 8am and 5pm our time.
I’m on a slack channel with other startup founders and just this week I was seeing chatter about how asking rates for Eastern EU devs were skyrocketing lately
The answer is bigger than the question. Almost everyone in the West is overpaid because Western Society reaps the benefits of an underpaid working class on another continent. Out of sight, out of mind.
I think it's less that some people are overpaid and more that some goods are too cheap (mostly the goods that the West has stopped producing in favor of outsourcing to underpaid working class on another continent).
Yeah, the offshoring boom is over. Everyone is bringing those roles back to the US. The communication, cultural and skill gaps are too great and costs aren’t that much lower anymore. Anyone who has worked on virtual teams will back up how much less productive things are when having to juggle time zones even between the east and west coast of the US, much less different countries without overlapping work hours.
Nobody wants to offshore to India anymore because the business culture at the big body shops is totally unethical by western standards and there’s just an expectation of getting swindled on QoS; so people only ship low-value jobs like customer service over there. And even those are moving to South America for time zone reasons (and the business culture more closely aligns with the US).
From reading the article it seems like the job areas getting hit the hardest would be low level hospitality jobs and on-site jobs with little to no remote opportunity. I imagine those would be the hardest positions to outsource. People quitting their job at McDonalds are in more danger of losing their job to a high school dropout than a foreign agent.
China in 2000 and China in 2021 is like night and day in terms of standard of living, education etc. Just because it didn't work back then doesn't mean it wont work today.
The massive outsourcing experiment failure had nothing to do with standard of living or education. It was the combination of timezones and cultural differences.
Turns out cultural differences around work, communication, etc between the US and India/China are pretty massive. I seriously doubt that these went away in 2 decades.
Also, your argument around standard of living and education would actually be more proof that outsourcing would not work. It is no longer as financially beneficial.
That being said, you're also right, past failure doesn't mean that it can't ever be successful in the future.
You absolutely do not save anything by outsourcing from the US to France. And cultural differences are there too. That was probably the worst possible example in the EU :-)
That being said, yes there are other options. Eastern Europe is more and more popular for outsourcing, so is South America. Honestly, I'm maybe dead wrong but when I compare the mentality two decades ago (ie let's minimize cost by any means, who cares who writes the code? it's just code) and today, I truly see an equivalent to the "not invented here" syndrome.
For a start, salary and cost to employer are not the same thing.
A $100k salary in the US also means the employer is paying $7650 in payroll taxes, typically some amount of money for health insurance ($0-$30k depending on the employer), maybe paying for office space, etc, etc.
A €40k salary in France means the employer is paying (if I read https://www.activpayroll.com/global-insights/france at "Social Security in France" correctly) somewhere around €21k in payroll taxes, plus whatever other benefits/administrative/etc expenses they have. I assumed the "family allowance contribution" of 3-5% is paid by employee, not employer, but I'm not sure.
That's assuming that €40k is the gross wage and not the "wage after employee side of payroll taxes". I don't know what the French custom is here in terms of what the salary numbers mean.
Anyway, the employer cost of just that €40k salary plus the obvious payroll taxes is $73k or so (with the payroll taxes and current exchange rate). Obviously still smaller than the $108k for US salary plus payroll, but not as much smaller as it seems at first glance.
Also note that in the US it's normal to work longer hours for more weeks for that money than it is in France for the French salary, though the effect is actually not too great if the US job is mostly 40 hrs/week, 2-3 weeks vacation, etc.
It's really hard to outsource middle management and executive roles, which are the next step for most dev roles. So the outsourcing effect has lots of limitations.
I welcome outsourcing though. I do quality work and know what it's worth and can advocate for myself. Any foreign worker who can do the same is welcome.
On a tangential note, it really feels like we continue to live in a historic time. Maybe it's a completely personal experience but it just seems like so many basic societal assumptions are getting meaningfully challenged or brought into focus. The pandemic panic and subsequent lockdowns focused our relationships with other humans. The racism protests also. The "inner temple" of the US empire getting breached/"violated" focused thought around the existing global political order. Remote work and these supposed waves of resignations focusing thought around capitalism (as mentioned in other comments I'm on a 1-year sabbatical as of this month [1] and know a few people doing or considering the same so I definitely think there is possible truth to the story). All of these things have been bubbling for a long time, no doubt, but the focus on each one seems more intense lately.
A decade is too big of a window. It's tough to pick one decade over another but I do think I could pick one year out of every decade over the others. To put my thought another way, if you think of society as a system, you've got a short period where the rules are being changed, and then we let the system run its course for multiple years. Eventually there are some gross inefficiencies that become too big to ignore and we have another short period where the rules are changed again, and so on.
You know, that's a great discussion to have at another time.
Is it growing exponentially? Personally, I'd say that changes at the margin are becoming smaller. I think that the difference between 1940-1980 is much greater than 1980-2020.
As an aside, it's funny how static music has been for years. There are numerous bands that sound like they would have been reasonably successful in 1970 (and visa versa). 1920 vs 1970 is a whole 'nother issue.
Agree and it's hard to find cohesive takes which stitch together all these events in a way that make sense, i.e. the analysis includes enough tech-awareness to believe it.
The only stuff I've found which felt in the ballpark of spot-on were:
1) https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-great-weirding
This was a fascinating series of essays that generally walks through why, after "Harambe" in 2016 or whenever, things seemed to have gone off the rails towards something new.
2) Cypherpunk movement's source docs. If I could bold, underline, and highlight this, I would. I have never read any group of literature/essays, especially with publishing dates in the 1990s, that more felt like a post-mortem on the 2014->2021 craziness than cypherpunk docs. I had actually wondered for a while where this core movement went, but the quick answer I've come to is cryptocurrency/e2e messaging projects absorbed a lot of it, and then the the writing often took a turn for the crazy/non-PC in the final 10 yards. But, they so accurately diagnose the growth of virtual communities and their pseudo-governmental influence, digital economy developments and all the second order effects, and so on and so on. If you're looking for people who really saw what was coming, this is the group. One of the good reads: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~wex/panoptic-paper.html
Ahhh premiocre! I read and then forgot about this term that describes "a lot of stuff." I owe you huge internet bucks my friend, this has been at the tip of my tongue for months.
The first thing I said when the $600/week unemployment started rolling out was that people were going to realize how little they were being paid to work, and here we are. It's almost like they didn't know any better.
I'm sure the landscape is different for people already set in their careers or making some decent money, but everyone making minimum wage got to see how little $10/hr actually is.
Where I live, the $300 from the federal gov’t continues until early September but the $300 from the state ends this month, I could be wrong but I assume it’s going to differ moderately from state to state.
At any rate, a lot of people I know that quit have already found or started looking for a different job. Most people aren’t looking to keep living off the system so much as they are looking to find a job that doesn’t pay them _and_ treat them like dirt. Social services companies around here are literally offering $1000+ referrals because they can’t keep group homes staffed or run any community interactions. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that it’s not just about the handouts, it’s about people realizing how atrocious their working conditions were and not wanting to put up with it anymore.
I quit my job because my company wanted us to go back to the office 3 days a week. Funny thing is, my last day ended up being two days before my fifth anniversary at the old place. Longest job I ever stayed at, and I'd still be there if upper management didn't decide they valued keeping us where we can be monitored and controlled 24/7 over our actual mental health.
I found a new position that pays way more than my old one and is fully remote. I was even told by the recruiter that I could be a digital nomad and travel wherever, bring my company laptop with me, work during the day, and explore whatever city I'm in at night.
Not having to commute during the pandemic has done wonders for my mental health, and I simply can't go back to working in an office. If I couldn't find an all-remote position, I would've just quit my job, broken my lease, moved back in with my mom, and lived like a bum in her spare room.
Funny thing is, my boss actually fought for us. He knew most of us were going to quit if we had to go back, so he fought like hell with upper management and HR to negotiate an exception for the team. The day I got my offer at the new place was the day he told us he got an exception where we'd be allowed to work from home most of the time (except for monthly one-on-ones and biweekly meetings with an internal customer). I still took the offer though (and I've already started the new job), because a) it pays so much more than the old job, b) I have a senior title now, c) fully remote 100% of the time plus being able to be a digital nomad is better than having to go in for certain meetings and not being allowed to leave the metro area, and d) I was told that, at the old company, if any of our performance was found to be insufficient we could be pulled back into the office as a punishment at any time, which just screams "trap" to me.
Isn’t it funny how employers want to play these games where they offer you 20% of what you’re asking for when you can go out and get so much more? It’s like they’re daring you to quit. Then they complain they can’t find talent. Same as it ever was.
Inflation of specific asset prices is also playing into this. Money is losing its value. Try buying a house with a regular wage nowadays. Politicians, central banks and economic experts are sleeping at the helm.
Cheap wants, expensive needs. This is our economy now.
"I love my iPhone, but I worry about health insurance." as I've heard it put here on HN.
Ironically, the Soviet system fell from opposite. Expensive wants, cheap needs. Everyone saw the West getting cheaper and cheaper consumer goods and central planning failed to keep up.
Once Perestroika liberalized their economy, they had distribution issues, sure.
But before then, housing, food, clothing all were cheap and available. The food was simple, the apartments small and the clothing dull, but it was all there and for very little cost.
But they liberalized their economy in order to compete on the consumer goods boom in the West. That desire for consumer goods had a big role in destabilizing the system.
And today, the converse desire for cheap staples and necessities in the face of intense asset inflation may be destabilizing our current system.
I suggest talking to some people who actually lived through the pre-perestroika era in the USSR.
Yes, there was generally clothing in stores. Whether there was clothing in your size (no matter what size you were; pretty much all normal sizes tended to be hard to find in practice) was a big gamble on any given day.
When you say "apartments were small"; I just want to make sure we understand that we're talking about things like a family of 4 living in a 16 sq meter room plus shared access to a small kitchen (this is personal experience here).
And note that if we're talking about smaller towns or villages the situation was different yet again: more living space, but running water might be a real problem. Heck, consistent hot water was a problem even in reasonably large cities.
The 80s brought their own set of problems, but it was not all rosy before that, by a long stretch. Saying "it was all there" elides the fact that what was there was quite poor quality, especially compared to what was available even just across the border in Romania, much less Western Europe or the US.
I'm not sure this is true in the US. There were multiple stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits. A lot of central bank money ended up in the hands of regular people. This is something that should have happened a lot sooner than 2020-2021.
Land values going up is how the system is rigged. That has nothing to do with your money.
I wonder how this might affect political measures. For decades, the measurements governments have used for themselves have mostly been economical. How's GDP? How's average income? How's productivity? And look at how my policies improved all of those numbers! You'd best re-elect me.
What will politicians do when the people whose votes they want care less and less about those things? In a perfect world, they might start selling themselves on measures that matter which aren't about how much money someone made.
A small cultural shift in the west away from economics as the religion of the masses would be, in my mind, a silver lining to this whole, awful pandemic.
I think society has to invent new kinds of work* or introduce UBI. There's too many people toiling away in low wage jobs which will never escape and will have to work until 68.
You would have thought that a job that nobody wants to do would pay more than one that is cushy.
* Getting rid of manufacturing has gotten rid of a huge amount of jobs that provided stability to our economies. Now all our economies are service economies. We can't all be shopkeepers. What are people meant to do with their lives?
Life is more important than work. I'd like to see labour have more leverage over capital.
I think a suspicion is that UBI could help transition the market from being intimately dependent upon positive growth to stasis. Though I also have to question whether that's needed when there's so much inequality. Definitely, equality would bring more energy and resource use...then there's the developing parts of the world.
It's a new world. We'll have to see what rises from the ashes.
I think that a lot of the stressors were there, before COVID, but the pandemic was the straw that broke the camel's back.
As an older software engineer, I find the statement that "everyone wants devs" to be fairly amusing. I'm rather grateful that I don't need to work for a living. Instead, I'm working for free. I'm glad to have the tools that are available these days, and the means to afford them.
We have minimum wage, but I’m not working for anyone else. I am partnering with a small startup team, writing software for nonprofits.
It has always been my dream to work for free.
I am fairly good at what I do; largely because I love doing it. I consider it a craft, not just a vocation.
If no one is interested in paying me for my work, I’ll do it anyway; except on my terms; and that makes all the difference.
In fact, I love doing it so much, I don’t really want to go back to working for others.
It’s kind of too bad. I would have been happy to work for a lot less than most, as my retirement was assured some time ago, but that’s all water under the bridge.
That's what I'm working towards. Build enough of a nest so that I can spend the rest of my life just contributing to open source software / passion projects.
I'm hoping I'm done by my early 40s (mid thirties ATM). I have a target amount that should afford me a relatively well off life just off interest. The moment I hit that number I'm stepping off the treadmill.
Interesting shift but it’s probably confined to the US. It seems the US has been toughest on its lowest paid workers. Many if not most other western countries already have extensive welfare programs, with the benefits and ailments that it brings. This means many low-paid jobs simply don’t exist, e.g. bellhop, elevator operators, etc, and that any work requiring employees is much more expensive. The question is, can the US rein it in again? I think so, sadly.
I am on a 1 year sabbatical as of the start of this month. I wrote a "prologue" [1] summarizing my motivations, fears, and plans and I plan on posting an "epilogue" at the end to compare my expectations with the actual outcome.
Good luck, and I hope it goes well. I started a similar journey in February and am loving it so far, although I didn't have a set time period and am juuust starting to pick up little bits of work to ease back into things. I know experience can be hard to generalize, but for what it's worth some top things that seemed to work well for me were
1) Don't feel bad taking the first few weeks as complete 'off' time. The side project ideas can wait a bit while you relax :)
2) It's really fun working on 'inconsequential' things, especially if previously you were doing important/urgent stuff a lot. Things don't have to be monetize-able, useful or inspiring especially when you're on a break!
Again, good luck :)
There is no doubt that the pandemic has been a huge mental shock (and hopefully it will trigger overall more sustainable and meaningful behaviors). But sketching how the post-pandemic work landscape would look like seems extremely premature. People currently underappreciate the impact of government support at all levels. The sense of calm and control (or the absence of panic if you wish) is the result of an unprecedented intervention (which among others has demolished the brain-damaged neoliberal narrative).
Yet only after the government support gets withdrawn will we see how the diverse actors in the private economy sectors restore their eternal "games". To be continued...
had governments not bailed out unconditionally a big chunk of the economy many business sectors would have collapsed. This would have triggered a run on the financial system like no one in recorded history.
maybe we should have left "creative destruction" to play out. after all a pandemic is a known business risk.
I might be misunderstanding some sarcasm from someone, but isn't government intervention and support during a time of crisis pretty firmly in the neoliberal playbook?
From where I'm standing it's... pretty much everyone else who rails against large scale bailouts. The libertarian crowd is more on the "see where the chips fall" side of things while the more left-leaning/progressive groups didn't appreciate govt money going to businesses instead of to workers directly.
But the bailing out hasn’t really changed anyone’s mind about capitalism. The fun part of capitalism in America is that people think individually they are owed stuff from the government but collectively should have no intervention.
I am glad the pandemic has been a wake up call for so many people about the value of their time and how different things could be if they cut out pointless meetings and long commutes that they don’t even get paid for.
For many of us it's actually been a wake up call about how important it is to be physically present with coworkers and a realization of how much the office actually does offer in terms of productivity and morale boost.
I know this is a very unpopular opinion here on HN threads about this situation. And all power to the people who love remote work.
But out of all the engineers I know personally and of all the people on my team and most of the other Googlers I've talked to off record personally in the last months... I'd say about 85%, 90% of them are eager for return to office.
So let's not assume homogeneity of opinion. Remote work is not for everyone. It may not even be the preference for the majority of us.
How much of that is because of productivity, how much is for social (i.e. non-task-oriented) interaction, and how much is getting away from the place where you also have to do your own cooking and cleaning and possibly deal with kids? I'm guessing productivity is the least of these reasons, for most FAANGers. After all, they self-selected to be in such environments.
Nah, not me ... I didn't self-select for that. I came from an acquisition, I never applied to Google... I just... arrived here. Hotel California style.
As someone who's practically spent all of their life, and whose best friends have all been, online, I never thought I'd agree with this, and I'm sad that I do.
>how important it is to be physically present with coworkers and a realization of how much the office actually does offer in terms of productivity and morale boost.
This depends on your home situation, but with mine I wouldn't say the office is more productive. But the frequency and richness of interactions you have with coworkers in person is a world apart from being remote.
I think that’s your personal bubble. Of all the google res I know, none of them want to go back to the office, and that’s probably just my bubble too.
Personally I work at Apple, so I’m not getting the choice, but I am close to my vacation cap, so I’ll be “forced” to take a day off every fortnight; you can bet that I’ll be using an “in-office” day for that, so I’ll be working 5 days of every 10 in the office.
Well, I'm not in the Bay Area, I work out of Google Waterloo. So your experience might just be saying something about how crappy it is working in an office in the Valley.
I've personally never much enjoyed my trips to the Googleplex. :-) I like my own office much more.
I spent the last few years doing remote work, before COVID. I don't want to waste any more years of my life staring into a rectangle. If I go back to programming it's sure as hell going to be onsite.
It's all fun and games at first. "Look, I can work from home in my underpants!" Then after a while you realize you're just sitting there alone in your underpants.
It’s a bit presumptuous to assume everyone has a soul sucking commute. Most of my jobs I’ve had a 10 minute commute.
I’ve decided to take a longer commute now (30ish minutes) but it’s not a big deal because it’s in a place where I was going many times a week anyway and had to do the commute then too. Also, it’s going to be hybrid now and isn’t 5-days/week probably.
I think you, like many of us are tired of computers but reluctant to admit it after all these years of forcing the smiles. Time to switch to an entirely different and active? career.
I'm currently living in a country with an healthy approach on work/life balance, seeing the appalling situation in the us always made me defiant to move there. I hope this awakening on the issue will be picked up by politics and will lead to better regulation.
I was into FIRE movement until I realized that i cannot retire until I am about 60 (42 now). A big meh moment. Thus new goal is that in about 5yrs to be able to work max 3 days per week, remote or not (though highly biased towards remote). Even if that means switching careers Product to Dev (re)learning, etc, I'd be fine with it. + Frugal living, of course, i did all the grind + material accumulations, as result of hard work + career advaces in tech + wife in marcom. I find it that 3 days work vs 4 days for life is a good balance (self time, raising kids, travel, the whole set). The big economy sistem should support in general more flexible methods of earning a living.
Im a senior dev in the US and my company just said we have to come back full time in the office. This is even after we've had record revenue months.
I would be totally fine with hybrid, but they said they investigated that and decided against it (don't know why). I'm looking around at my alternatives, but the pay is just not there for both hybrid and remote. So I dont know where all this demand is, unless it's the same demand that's always there when they won't pay people anything. I may end up taking a pay cut just to do hybrid/remote which is really sad, but my well being may be worth it.
I have already began the switch to a mostly remote delivery of my services as a software contractor before Covid hit, and so the pandemic only sealed the deal.
I am not going back.
Most of the teams I have worked with that required on-site presence didn't have the culture I'd be comfortable with anymore: too many meetings, open plan office space with ridiculously cheap and uncomfortable chairs and no standing desks (or only for permanent employees and not us dirty contractors). Most importantly, once COVID hit, it turned out none of that office stuff mattered for productivity anyway.
Europe was lagging behind in terms of remote work but one of the few positives of 'ro was the evening out of the playing field. And, once offices open, whether or not the contracts still offer remote work will be a great filter for potential clients.
I am just not sure that being remote automatically solves the work-life balance problem. I know I am prone to spending the entire day at my computer and it's something I have to work on.
I keep waiting for one of these stories where the journalist writes, "We tried contacting a labor economist for their take on this trend, but they all quit." Or even better, "Editor's note: we assigned this story on people quitting dead end jobs to our journalist, but he quit before he finished it."
Millions of people are quitting their current jobs to take better jobs!
(But that is a very different narrative). Damn you NPR.
From their text:
>” So when his employer began calling people back to the office part time, he balked at the 45-minute commute. He started looking for a job with better remote work options and quickly landed multiple offers.”
Exactly, it's just the evolution of work based on changes of the working environment, mindset and needs. In the past we had only manual labour, then the (bad) machines came along and we had factories/industries, then the (bad) computers came along and we have remote working...and so on...
Ye. Articles like these are so numbingly boring disappointments when you dig into the numbers and it is just a bit of noise in a longer trend that are presented as a big sudden change. Sure, the pandemic gave a interesting spike in the graph, but is not like 20% quit their jobs now all of a sudden, but more like back to the extrapolation of the pre pandemic trend.
Yeah I think it's a major transition for both employees and employers to figure out where to go from here. I suspect the best thing for people looking for new work is to find something that matches your values. As a startup founder, I started Earth Wallet around these core values - Creating a Better Planet, Innovating & Evolving, and Trust & Respect.
If anyone believes in these values, we offer a flexible, remote-friendly lifestyle, with two meetups a year at cool places like Bali, Greece, Costa Rica, Barbados, and adding new ones as time goes on! So if you're a developer looking for a new way of working in the decentralization space, feel free to reach me at developers@earthwallet.io!
>As a startup founder, I started Earth Wallet around these core values - Creating a Better Planet, Innovating & Evolving, and Trust & Respect.
This is such a tired line. It's like reading, "So and so company who just got caught doing shady shit really takes shady shit seriously and we intend to fully investigate the matter. We fully respect so and so and this and that."
I'm not saying you are doing shady shit, but it reads as the same phony stuff as any PR drone has been regurgitating for the last 40 years.
So not to single you out, but I've been seeing a lot of pitches from recruiters recently, and after a few interviews where afterwards the recruiter circles back and clarifies "so by remote-friendly we mean they will let you work from home maybe once or twice a week, instead of never, is that okay?", or "it's remote...but only until labor day" (what all companies have deemed 'post-covid' apparently). So I'm quickly learning to avoid jobs that advertise themselves as 'remote-friendly'.
If you're 100% remote or 'remote except a couple of optional team building events' or 'remote except come into the office once every month or two', I would be very specific and say so, and not just say 'remote-friendly' or 'remote-flexible' (even just saying 'remote' is starting to be suspicious), because those terms seem to have morphed into a signal that the opposite is true.
Also, if your company was remote before the pandemic, you should also say that, because that gives me reason to believe it will stay that way, instead of being another bait-and-switch "we're 100% remote!...for a few more months".
Most couples take a second job to increase their standard of living, but now millions were forced by the pandemic to reduce their standard of living, and many are now saying "Wait, this reduction in my standard of living is really an improvement in my standard of living." That's especially true when some phase-shift decision was made, like taking in roommates to one's apartment, or moving back in with one's parents, suddenly one's expenses are much lower, and one can think more carefully about what kind of work one is willing to take.
These workers need to form a "software engineering association" that will push busy bodies in legislatures to change laws. Otherwise that "I quit" is a kid's tantrum who refuses to eat oatmeal today.
Clickbait stub article. You aren't "quitting" by laterally moving from one slave job for an employer into another one remotely. Now, you're just enslaved in your own home! I've been working remotely for nearly 2 years now and work FAR more lately from home than the office. Quitting, the way that all these articles are making it sound would be changing your way of life. Quitting an office dev job to start working for another employer with deadlines and the same dev work from home really isn't quitting and it's just moving laterally into the same job.
You know, I was just at Walmart, where they only had one cashier. I heard a group of people complain about how "no one wanted to work anymore" not one of them moved to the self-checkout line when a bunch of them opened up.
Those people probably wanted to pay with cash. Walmart self-checkouts[0] switched to electronic payment only[1] when the national coin crisis hit in June 2020[2].
I was at a restaurant that was short staffed and everyone was waiting for tables to be cleaned. People made similar comments about 'how no one wants to work' but noone grabbed a tray and started bussing tables.
30 years ago I realized the same thing and stop being a slave too but the federal government is making it increasingly harder and harder to own your own business every time I turn around some entity with an alphabet name once a huge portion of money like the EPA
When I saw what the pandemic was doing to nearly every professional office worker, I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in. Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.