More Tech, STEM Workers Voluntarily Quitting Their Jobs (dice.com)

Nerval's Lobster writes: New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests that more tech professionals are voluntarily quitting their jobs. In August, some 507,000 people in Professional and Business Services (which encompasses tech and STEM positions) quit their positions, up from 493,000 in July. It's also a significant increase over August 2014, when 456,000 professionals quit. Voluntary quits could be taken as a sign of a good economy (Dice link), hinting that people feel confident enough about the market to jump to a new position (likely with better pay and benefits), if not strike out on their own as an independent. For tech pros, things are particularly rosy at the moment; according to the BLS, the national unemployment rate among tech pros has hovered at under 3 percent for the past year, although not all segments have equally benefitted from that trend: Programmers, for example, saw their unemployment rate dip precipitously between the first and second quarters of this year, even as joblessness among Web developers, computer support specialists, and network and systems engineers ticked upwards during the same period. If there's one tech segment that hasn't enjoyed economic buoyancy, it's manufacturing, which has suffered from layoffs and steady declines in open positions over the past several quarters.

Comments

Well, of COURSE they're quitting their jobs

[93 Escort Wagon]

They've finished training their H1-B replacements, after all.

Re:Well, of COURSE they're quitting their jobs

[__aaclcg7560]

I did a PC refresh job where an Indian engineer had 40+ half-empty coffee cups with slime mold on the surface of each one inside his cube. My boss told me not to replace that PC. The engineer got fired and a hazmat team went over that portion of the building.

An interesting question to ask would be...

[zkiwi34]

What are the reasons for the quit? Are they going politely because:

a) A stash of cash as gratuity is being offered
b) There's no point fighting, and they think going politely increases their chances for a new position
c) They are actually going to new/better/better paid jobs
d) Giving up on that type of career

Re:Don't forget

[pixelpusher220]

"The Company keeps reiterating how great they are"

you have no idea. The year my company was named to 100 best to work for...they reprinted every god damned piece of letterhead, envelope, notepad...anything with our logo on it now had the 100 best to work for logo.

the funny thing was apparently that was illegal and within a month we got cease and desist from whoever grants 100 best to work for. Now we had zero paper for anything we could use and corporate wasn't buying yet another company wide paper buy...yeah they do anything to claim how great they are