February 4, 2022 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Great Developer Resignation
February 4, 2022 at 12:42 pm
I've joined the Great Resignation. To be honest, I wish I had done so 3 years ago. For me the COVID situation and having to work remotely highlighted something I should have spotted a long time ago.
Why do we stay with a particular company when we could just as easily get a job elsewhere? If not for pay and benefits then it is because the company culture and values are compatible with our culture and values. The people around us and above us are the culture.
It's like a home isn't a place, it's where you are with the people you love. They say you don't leave a job, you leave a manager. I know what they mean by that but I'd say that you don't leave a job you leave a culture and that culture comes from the top. I thought and continue to think the world of my now ex-manager.
When you work remotely you lose what I would term distractions from the culture
What you are left with is the bare bones of what the culture has become and suddenly those bones look very bare indeed. Positively osteoporotic.
The truth is that any relationship changes over time. Both parties evolve and sadly sometimes they evolve in incompatible directions. One day you wake up and realise that you've been incompatible for quite some time and now it is time to move on.
February 4, 2022 at 1:49 pm
Thank you, Steve, for this thoughtful editorial
Rod
February 4, 2022 at 1:50 pm
I just switched jobs a couple months ago. I went from one of the big fortune 500 companies to a smaller manufacturer. The move was 100% about culture. I really liked my previous manager, but the company Values made it very hard to work for them. Many companies have gotten very political recently, and I hope they start to realize those decisions affect more than just the customers.
I'm also hybrid remote now (2 days in the office, 3 from home), which feels like a good balance for having in-person interaction with coworkers but not needing to spend the time in traffic every day.
February 4, 2022 at 2:07 pm
I switched jobs late last year, almost entirely because of the attitude towards the development team embedded in the culture at my previous job. I was one of the last of my team to hand their notice in, including my manager, I don't know what the company did after I left but it certainly looked like they were going to end up with a team of expensive short-term contractors as a result of their refusal to invest time, money, or effort in improving the working conditions for developers.
February 4, 2022 at 2:23 pm
When I got my first programming job things in IT ( we called it Data Processing then ) were just taking off and there were many positions available. The easiest way to increase your salary was to keep learning new skills that were saleable and then move on to another position instead of working to get salary increases. There were so many open positions that this could most often be accomplished without the need to relocate.
Then things evolved into finding the right fit in a position and a geographic location that is good not only for yourself but also for a spouse who may also have a career, and for a family. I never did actually get to the geographic location I desired while working so had to depend on negotiating income and benefits to allow me to satisfy that desire.
And then along with the spouse and family considerations such as educational opportunities, retirement and health desires become huge factors in deciding to leave a position and move on to another.
For good or bad, I can't really say that ties to a single employer were ever much of a factor in any position. Seems that it was always pretty much a situation of "this is what I can and will do for you in exchange for the salary and benefits offered to me and my family". I guess that I had broad enough goals for the future of myself, my spouse, and my family that the 'career', even though I loved what I did, took a back seat to those things.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
February 4, 2022 at 2:53 pm
I suspect that most resignations are people switching jobs, and the primary motivation is the opportunity of remote work. Historically, and this applies especially to IT, there are those who live in the suburbs and spend more than an hour commuting downtown each day, and then there are those who live downtown where they are physically close to the office but spending way more on housing and other expenses than they would prefer. The pandemic and companies opening up to remote work has flipped this upside down.
I also suspect there are opportunistic companies who know that their liberal work from home policy gives them bargaining power over their more buttoned down competitors, and they are leveraging the situation to target high value talent.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
February 4, 2022 at 2:54 pm
I've joined the Great Resignation. To be honest, I wish I had done so 3 years ago. For me the COVID situation and having to work remotely highlighted something I should have spotted a long time ago...
Congrats and hope the new gig is great. Hope to see you at Bits or somewhere else this year.
February 4, 2022 at 2:55 pm
I just switched jobs a couple months ago. I went from one of the big fortune 500 companies to a smaller manufacturer. The move was 100% about culture. I really liked my previous manager, but the company Values made it very hard to work for them. Many companies have gotten very political recently, and I hope they start to realize those decisions affect more than just the customers.
I'm also hybrid remote now (2 days in the office, 3 from home), which feels like a good balance for having in-person interaction with coworkers but not needing to spend the time in traffic every day.
Good for you, and I agree. Culture matters to me, and now to a lot of others. 2/3 sounds good. I'm looking forward to when I get to an office again.
February 4, 2022 at 3:04 pm
I signed up just to comment here. I have been working in this company for 17 years but have been thinking of making a switch. A lot of factors are influencing my decision. The company split last year, my boss made a ton of money selling off one of the profitable divisions of the company. However I did not see a single dime from the sale, despite contributing to the growth of that division. There has been a serious shift in company culture, too much meddling from the management(read boss). We are a product development company but the development seems to be driven by what Sales wants, without any consideration from the dev team. Also the company does not seem to care about what my goals are and is happy to force a responsibility upon me that I don't quite enjoy. Lately, the company has invested in forming a team that I cant seem to get along with. As these are new guys, they don't seem to value my experience and expertise in the job, and that also seems to be affecting me negatively.
The only thing that has me hesitating is my personal relationship with my boss. He gave me my first job out of college and while I think my 17 years of service has more than repaid that, I still feel a sense of guilt.
I have started reaching out to my peers in the field, in the hopes of finding something more suitable, but not having done a job search in a while has me going back to basics.
February 4, 2022 at 3:31 pm
The only thing that has me hesitating is my personal relationship with my boss. He gave me my first job out of college and while I think my 17 years of service has more than repaid that, I still feel a sense of guilt.
I have started reaching out to my peers in the field, in the hopes of finding something more suitable, but not having done a job search in a while has me going back to basics.
Best of luck, and if you need some advice, please reach out to others. I completely understand the guilt, but my advice would be to not let that hold you back. OK to appreciate their help to you in the past while you realize you've grown into someone new and need to move on.
February 4, 2022 at 6:09 pm
We had significant layoffs, and the remaining employees took 20% pay cuts and a loss of company match for the 401k's at the start of Covid. That was all given back to us.
There was a significant exodus of tech talent. In the past three years, we lost 8 senior people almost immediately, and another 6 medium-senior folks since then. In other groups, we lost 15 people who were poached by competitors.
The higher powers woke up. They actually put some thought into why folks left, and took some good steps to keep the remaining folks here and happy.
Michael L John
If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
To properly post on a forum:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/
February 4, 2022 at 6:14 pm
We had significant layoffs, and the remaining employees took 20% pay cuts and a loss of company match for the 401k's at the start of Covid. That was all given back to us.
There was a significant exodus of tech talent. In the past three years, we lost 8 senior people almost immediately, and another 6 medium-senior folks since then. In other groups, we lost 15 people who were poached by competitors.
The higher powers woke up. They actually put some thought into why folks left, and took some good steps to keep the remaining folks here and happy.
Glad to hear that. Plenty of management will just blame employees and not examine themselves. A few places here in Denver I'd never work for, and that have constant open positions.
February 4, 2022 at 6:25 pm
A few places here in Denver I'd never work for, and that have constant open positions.
Same here in Pittsburgh. The headhunters call weekly for open positions at the same places, over and over. There is one that posts a DBA job every 3-5 months. Everyone they hire runs kicking and screaming out of there.
Michael L John
If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
To properly post on a forum:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/
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