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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.
Pay us well and treat us well, and we won't keep job-hopping.
More people are clueing into the fact that working conditions suck, that sh*t always rolls downhill when it comes to missed deadlines or ever changing specs, and that it's not worth it. Ageism and the up or out mentality, where there are too few jobs to move up to, doesn't help.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
When all of their cow-orkers speak Hindi..
What is big business going to do when the short term payoff HB-1 workers go home and take their new found knowledge with them?
They will cry crocodile tears about how the offshore engineers are beating them at their own game.
They will need more government subsidies and tax breaks to survive!
Rick B.
Problem is that the minimum wage can actually work against all of us if the wage isn't properly adjusted for inflation. Otherwise a minimum wage eventually leaves a full time worker living in poverty and requiring medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance just to get by. It sets an artificial baseline that employers will try to aim for. So if semi-skilled workers get minimum wage, skilled workers get minimum wage plus a bag of peanuts. An artificially low minimum wage drags down wages for all workers except those that assign their own compensation - those executives that sit on each other's boards of directors and, like monkeys grooming each other, mutually decide to keep increasing each others pay regardless of whether the company is profitable or failing. Meanwhile shareholders have been conditioned to expect returns that fall below inflation (when they aren't negative), and workers have grown accustomed to just trying to keep whatever job they have rather than believing they deserve a reasonable share of the profits they produce. The collective fear of the workers makes sure that those few who may have the audacity to make demands can easily be replaced by a more agreeable and subservient employee.
When the minimum wage is a living wage, every worker can have confidence confronting employers about working hours, working conditions, or even ask for more pay, knowing that a worst case scenario is they have to get a job elsewhere that pays a wage that they can manage to live with. Workers higher up on the pay scale can afford to take chances with their careers knowing that in the short term they can always fall back to a lower paying job if their plans don't work out. It's ultimately better for the economy as a whole. Satisfied workers are more productive and less likely to leave, even if the short term cost to employers is to pay more. But as all employers would be paying the same they wouldn't be going out of business from paying better wages.
That is just called solid engineering. Most companies would benefit a lot from it, but it is a long-term effect that the current crop of MBA idiots-savant "managers" do not understand.
Incidentally, I know one bank large enough that you would have recognized the name that recently nearly died because they did away with that redundancy to reduce cost. They were very lucky the incident happened on a Friday or they would be gone by now. A large competitor had the same problem a few days later(same network services supplier) and they only had a 30 minutes outage because they have a fully redundant infrastructure.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
CxO's who run "big business" have only one allegiance, and that's their own profit, nothing else. They don't give a shit about firing thousands, tens of thousands of engineers (Carly Fiorina), the state of the US tech industry, the US as a country or its people... they only care about their own bonuses and then fuck the hell off once the company is screwed. Or the country is screwed.
Please read up about corporate psychopaths. "Snakes in suits" is a good book.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.