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Workers quit at historic clip

3.87 million workers quit their jobs in June, which is close to the record, set in April, of 3.99 million.
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A mass exodus is happening. People are leaving their current jobs for new jobs with better pay and benefits.

I have even seen it where I work. Half my team has left this summer. One of the biggest reasons is compensation. Underpaid for what they do.

Despite a bunch of job openings becoming available, there are no roles I can move into to get better compensation. They are choosing to back fill all vacancies with junior developers / lower salaries. So any open position would be a paycut.

Compensation is an issue for me and if I find a job with better compensation I would jump in a heartbeat. It's a necessity for me as I can't get by on my currently salary alone. I must find freelance work just to make end meat. There haven't been any cost of living adjustments since early 2018 at my company. For the last 4 years they have had an outside company looking at pay bands after a company survey showed employees were displeased by compensation. In June, when they completed the study for my title, I learned that I was paid below the pay band. And they had to adjust my salary by 2k to bring me to the lowest level of the payband. The pay band has 15k in it's range. But with cost of living adjustments not a thing at my company currently and promotions the only way to get a pay bump, there is no way for me to see a pay increase without being promoted to a senior developer. Which would be more than a 15k pay bump. and as of right now, we only have 2 senior developers. All the rest of them were laid off when covid hit because they make to much money. And even they were paid below industry standard but all we hear from our clients is "we are to expensive" and we keep losing work to overseas contractors.
 
We have heard about how the pandemic has created a reset of wages. Companies are seeing job shortages and raising wages to attract talent. Especially for the service industry seeing higher wages today.

But these gains in wages unfortunately have been completely erased by inflation. Inflation is at a 13 year high and is outpacing wage growth accord to a report I just saw on CNN.

Inequality and poverty only continues to grow.
 
My wife is in HR and is having extraordinary difficulties with recruiting people for highly paid, specialized engineering jobs right now. It's not just that they're having trouble getting people to accept offers -- the candidate pool itself seems to have simply evaporated. She knows there are qualified people out there, but they appear to have removed themselves from the workforce entirely, creating resource scarcity among the remaining prospects. There's a lot of pressure on her right now to find people who apparently don't want to be found. Very strange.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
My wife is in HR and is having extraordinary difficulties with recruiting people for highly paid, specialized engineering jobs right now. It's not just that they're having trouble getting people to accept offers -- the candidate pool itself seems to have simply evaporated. She knows there are qualified people out there, but they appear to have removed themselves from the workforce entirely, creating resource scarcity among the remaining prospects. There's a lot of pressure on her right now to find people who apparently don't want to be found. Very strange.
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There is a lot of this when it comes to highly skilled specialized jobs.

A lot of it has to do with not enough people choosing these career paths today. The job market was over saturated a generation ago and people choose or landed in different career paths with better prospects of landing a job. Now much of that work force is retiring out. The pandemic helped with that push. So it may take another generation to saturate the talent pool again.

With highly paid, specialized jobs the workforce was largely filled up / saturated by the time millenials came around. While there were some job openings and people coming out of school for these positions. The last 20 years or so has seen nearly as many new positions created as people would be retiring eventually. A bit of an unbalance.

It's hard to sustain a highly paid, specialized workforce if the talent pool large shifts every couple generations with low turnover in between. When the jobs dry up the people seeking that career path dry up.
 
When things get tough, people go to ground. It happened in 2008 with the housing crash: people feel unsure about their immediate future and they look for stable jobs, even if they pay less. I've started getting headhunters calling, offering 6 and 12 month contract gigs for decent money. Not like, fuck you money or "quit your life for a year and move to california" money, but decent.

Google is still in the fuck-around stage Pay cut: Google employees who work from home could lose money
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presumably they will hit the find-out stage if they actually implement it widespread. Meanwhile their execs are relocating to New Zealand.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
My wife is in HR and is having extraordinary difficulties with recruiting people for highly paid, specialized engineering jobs right now. It's not just that they're having trouble getting people to accept offers -- the candidate pool itself seems to have simply evaporated. She knows there are qualified people out there, but they appear to have removed themselves from the workforce entirely, creating resource scarcity among the remaining prospects. There's a lot of pressure on her right now to find people who apparently don't want to be found. Very strange.
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Might a lesser influx of engineers from other countries a reason. Pandemic probably shut down some of that
 
yukbon said:
When things get tough, people go to ground. It happened in 2008 with the housing crash: people feel unsure about their immediate future and they look for stable jobs, even if they pay less. I've started getting headhunters calling, offering 6 and 12 month contract gigs for decent money. Not like, fuck you money or "quit your life for a year and move to california" money, but decent.

Google is still in the fuck-around stage Pay cut: Google employees who work from home could lose money
View attachment 108287

presumably they will hit the find-out stage if they actually implement it widespread. Meanwhile their execs are relocating to New Zealand.
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We were just talking about this at work. A coworker of mine has a cousin who works out of Google's San Francisco office. And of course with the cost of rent in San Francisco, can't afford to live in the city itself. So he has a 90+ minute commute into the city. Sometimes as long as 3 hours if traffic is bad. His life was just work and commute so he decided to work remotely. And just ended up recently with a substantial pay cut because he is not considered to be a "San Francisco" salaried worker any longer. He lives outside of "the prime area".
 
Indymisanthrope said:
My wife is in HR and is having extraordinary difficulties with recruiting people for highly paid, specialized engineering jobs right now. It's not just that they're having trouble getting people to accept offers -- the candidate pool itself seems to have simply evaporated. She knows there are qualified people out there, but they appear to have removed themselves from the workforce entirely, creating resource scarcity among the remaining prospects. There's a lot of pressure on her right now to find people who apparently don't want to be found. Very strange.
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We've had data analyst positions that haven't been filled for over a year.
I didn't think about @Jan's point, but he's right. And there's evidence in graduate school numbers that also suggests that we aren't getting the influx of international students that universities regularly rely on for income (about 30% of all grad students are foreign). There's been a mass exodus of older workers and I can tell you now that I've been overloaded with work because we have open positions. I know several people who have looked for work elsewhere because they got stuck with extra workload.

Just like these manufacturing systems that got leaned down to nothing, a lot of optimization has been done around how many people we need to complete work. Some manager somewhere at the top, hoping for a dividend bump, decided that whatever org only needs X amount of people. Sure the people will have greater workloads and the work life balance is completely off. My parents were boomers and my dad was basically chained to his desk. I don't see myself that way with my current company. I think what I'm trying to say here is that I watched my parents work very hard and do great work, and I still saw them get laid off. I think that current workers don't feel all that attached to a company because very few companies are attached to their workers. Maybe if employers started considering humans as true capital, they wouldn't be in this problem.

RenegadeMonster said:
There is a lot of this when it comes to highly skilled specialized jobs.

A lot of it has to do with not enough people choosing these career paths today. The job market was over saturated a generation ago and people choose or landed in different career paths with better prospects of landing a job. Now much of that work force is retiring out. The pandemic helped with that push. So it may take another generation to saturate the talent pool again.

With highly paid, specialized jobs the workforce was largely filled up / saturated by the time millenials came around. While there were some job openings and people coming out of school for these positions. The last 20 years or so has seen nearly as many new positions created as people would be retiring eventually. A bit of an unbalance.

It's hard to sustain a highly paid, specialized workforce if the talent pool large shifts every couple generations with low turnover in between. When the jobs dry up the people seeking that career path dry up.
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The reason many people don't choose these career paths are because they do not pay enough compared to how much debt you will be in once you graduate with a specialized degree. The reason there are not enough engineers, doctors, fill in the blank, is because college is too expensive for most people and the salary they could get in these fields might have a tough time paying back student loan debt. This wasn't kids opting out of specialized fields, this was a direct result of our public schools in poorer areas not being able to get kids on a path to college. Instead of a kid saying, "I want to be an engineer. I need to go to college." We are telling the kids who's families can afford college that they HAVE to go to college to be successful. So regardless of what they want to be, they feel then NEED college, but no one just falls into engineering, or computer science, or physics. We have basically given a poorer kid who wants to do this work a very narrow path to college--that usually involves a lot of debt.
 
nolalady said:
We've had data analyst positions that haven't been filled for over a year.
I didn't think about @Jan's point, but he's right. And there's evidence in graduate school numbers that also suggests that we aren't getting the influx of international students that universities regularly rely on for income (about 30% of all grad students are foreign). There's been a mass exodus of older workers and I can tell you now that I've been overloaded with work because we have open positions. I know several people who have looked for work elsewhere because they got stuck with extra workload.
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I wonder if other countries that have easier routes to advanced degrees are having the same problem? 🤷‍♂️
 
Marjorie Taylor Greene is suspended from Twitter for 7 days, Rand Paul is suspended from YouTube for 7 days.

Got to love that our elected officials are putting out dangerous misinformation and inciting their base to the point they warrant temporary bans.

And of course, the GOP wants to take action against the social media companies and are angered by their actions.
 
nolalady said:
We've had data analyst positions that haven't been filled for over a year.
I didn't think about @Jan's point, but he's right. And there's evidence in graduate school numbers that also suggests that we aren't getting the influx of international students that universities regularly rely on for income (about 30% of all grad students are foreign). There's been a mass exodus of older workers and I can tell you now that I've been overloaded with work because we have open positions. I know several people who have looked for work elsewhere because they got stuck with extra workload.
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Meanwhile, the dangling prospect of a major infrastructure bill means there is a potential boom in the near term for civil/environmental engineering projects. Work in that sector is not about to dry up.
 
The Texas State Senate today passed the voter suppression bill. It's passage was a vote down party lines and included a 15 hour filibuster that went all through last night.

SB1 is not law yet though. The Texas Senate just voted to approve the bill without the house first approving it. Democrats in the house of representatives in Texas have vacated the state to DC to prevent its passage. Though it's almost guaranteed that it will eventually pass.

Republican Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes, the bill’s sponsor, has repeatedly said SB1 would make it “easier to vote, harder to cheat.”
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Easier to vote my ass. All it does is restrict votes and make it easier for election officials to throw out votes
 
RenegadeMonster said:
The Texas State Senate today passed the voter suppression bill. It's passage was a vote down party lines and included a 15 hour filibuster that went all through last night.

SB1 is not law yet though. The Texas Senate just voted to approve the bill without the house first approving it. Democrats in the house of representatives in Texas have vacated the state to DC to prevent its passage. Though it's almost guaranteed that it will eventually pass.



Easier to vote my ass. All it does is restrict votes and make it easier for election officials to throw out votes
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It's easier to vote, from his perspective, as he no longer really has to worry about it as much. It's not as much of a burden on his mind whether or not his party will win or not, since they rigged the hell out of it.
 
Following the discussion of Google cutting wages to workers who go remote online and through discussions at work certainly has been interesting.

It's not just Google. Many other companies are now doing this. Mine included.

People have mixed feelings about this, and their feelings are very generational.

For example, Boomers are most likely to be on the side that it doesn't make any sense for a company to pay a "San Francisco" salary if the employee works remotely and has moved to "Lake Tahoe".

There argument is that shareholders have been companies justify and defend why they are located in a high cost of living area. While it is good for companies as the talent pool is best for staffing levels, it is widely hated by shareholders who would like to see reductions in salaries and rent to turn higher profits. With more people working remotely these days it's harder for companies to justify.

For the last hundred years or so businesses priorities have been with the shareholders over their employees.

It doesn't make sense for a company to keep a "San Francisco" salary for a worker that chooses to work remotely when they could just higher a remote worker from Detroit and pay them two thirds as much or less. Especially with the pressure coming from shareholders and it high salaries being harder to justify. The perceived value of an employee to the company is diminished if they are working remotely.

The companies are doing the responsible thing for their shareholders, and that is looking at the metrics for what a salary should be for where a person is living if they are working remotely. That includes looking at prevailing wages and cost of living of the area and setting salary accordingly.

But people have mixed feelings about this. Is it right for a company to cut an established salary? Should existing employees salaries be cut when the company can recruit new full time employees as fully remote and give them salaries higher than a "San Francisco" salary if they are having trouble filling the position? Especially when the employee still lives within commuting distance. Not to mention the company has cost savings in terms of requiring less office space, lower utilities and what not with more employees working from home.

Others are like most employees would gladly take the pay cut to not have to commute 90+ minutes each way to work everyday.

One issue with prevailing wages is a lot of places where people are working remotely from do not have competition. The competition is in the cities. So if there is no competition to compare wages too, the prevailing wage is set at the lowest level. So people living in the suburbs and more rural areas are getting fucked. The numbers companies have for cost of living of areas are also outdated. Much of the data dates back to 2018 or a couple years older. So for the example, someone moving from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, the cost of living companies are basing salaries off of is way off. In 2020 Lake Tahoe saw 4 digit percentage increases in the cost of living as people left the cities when working remotely became an option. Surges like this in the cost of living have not been accounted for when setting salary.

In many cases, peoples cost of living is the same. They just have a house now instead of an apartment. Yet they are seeing as much as a third of their salary being taken away. So in many cases, after pay cuts, the cost of living is more expensive now compared to their salaries than it was previously.

When it comes to Millennials. They think that these pay cuts are complete bull shit. They are also more likely to jump ship and move between companies to get that higher salary than eat the pay cut.

Working remotely is more widely available in the tech industry than others. But the tech industry has been notorious for collusion for keeping wages down. This includes Google, Apple and several other large names where they were caught in collusion of keeping wages low and not poaching from each other. Two seperate class action lawsuits took place back in around 2008 for this collusion and anti poaching. The practice of keeping wages low is still a strong trend in the industry. So it's no surprise they are taking advantage of remote work to lower wages.


Another trend is companies are setting policies on the states you can work remotely in. They are finding that payroll is more expensive having to deal with tax code from multiple different states. So they are trying to limit what states they offer remote work from and crack down on "digital nomads". They have to pay taxes and follow tax codes of wherever you are working from. So they are making policies such as you can only work remotely from the state listed on your permanent address with HR.
 
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