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The Great Resignation

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We’re living through the tail end, maybe?, of the Great Resignation, so we dig into how that might impact software engineering careers while Allen is very somber, Joe’s years are … different, and Michael pronounces each hump.

The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode180.

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What is “the great resignation”?

  • The Great Resignation is an ongoing economic trend where a lot of people started quitting their jobs in 2021 and peaked at 3% unemployment (up roughly 50% from the pre-COVID unemployment average).
  • Primarily, but not exclusively, in the US, but also trended in Europe, China, India, Australia as well.
  • Some interesting factors:
    • High worker demand and labor shortages.
    • High unemployment.
    • Employees between 30 and 45 years old have had the greatest increase in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021.
    • Resignation rates actually dropped for people in their 20s.
    • Tech and healthcare led the trend, 4.5% for US, 3.6% for healthcare.
    • Reasons cited included stagnant wages and working conditions.

Why is this a big deal?

  • Hiring is expensive! Think of thinks like referral fees, recruiter’s percentage, takes a while for people to become productive, onboarding, etc.
  • What does this mean for working conditions? More remote, better compensation, more flexibility, etc.?
  • Why do people change jobs?
    • Promotion,
    • Work life balance,
    • Compensation,
    • Flexibility,
    • Leaving a bad environment, and/or
    • Better company

What can you gain?

  • Salary bands, FAANG vs local vs remote vs startup
  • The “TC” (total compensation) Trap
    • Restricted Stock Units vs Options
  • Top paying companies, by level (levels.fyi)
  • Comparing levels across orgs (levels.fyi)

About those levels

  • Senior engineers are senior developers who may specialize in a specific area, oversee projects, and manage junior developers.
  • Principal Engineer is a highly experienced engineer who oversees a variety of projects from start to finish.
  • Staff engineer is a senior, individual contributor role in a software engineering organization. There is no “one” kind of staff engineer and many fall into one of four archetypes: Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, and Right Hand. (staffeng.com)
  • Is there a hiring level cap? What does that mean?

What can you lose?

  • The people,
  • The grass isn’t always greener,
  • Seniority (don’t be the “At X we …” person), and/or
  • Comfort

Resources we Like

  • Great Resignation (Wikipedia)
  • The Great Resignation: Data and analysis show it’s not as great as screaming headlines suggest (NevadaCurrent.com)
  • The Great Resignation is here. What does that mean for developers? (stackoverflow.blog)
  • Who Is Driving the Great Resignation? (hbr.org)
  • What Do Software Developers Want Out of Their Next Job? (insights.dice.com)
  • How the Government Measures Unemployment (bls.gov)
  • Salary comparisons (levels.fyi)

Tip of the Week

  • Did you know you can expand or collapse all the files in a pull request on GitHub? Press Alt + Click on any file chevron in the pull request to collapse or expand them all! (github.blog)
  • Kotlin code for using Google Cloud! (cloud.google.com)
  • Thanks to Dave Follett for sharing How to securely erase your hard drive or SSD! (pcworld.com)
  • Thanks to Fuzzy Muffin for sharing Nvchad, a nice face for Neovim (Nvim) that adds some nice features, like directory access and tabs. (nvchad.github.io)
  • How do you merge two Git repositories? (Stack Overflow)
  • Use git-sizer to get various statistics about your repository. (GitHub)
  • How to find/identify large commits in git history? (Stack Overflow)
  • Then forget about BFG and filter-branch, git filter-repo is the way to remove large files from your Git repo (GitHub)
  • Use --shallow-exclude to exclude commits found in the supplied ref in either (or both) your git clone (git-scm.com) or git fetch operations. (git-scm.com)
  • Limit your git push operation “up to” a commit by using the format git push <remote name> <commit ID>:refs/heads/<branch name>. (If the <branch name> already exists on the <remote name>, you can leave off the refs/heads/ portion. (git-scm.com)

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