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

You like our work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay us well and treat us well, and we won't keep job-hopping.

Re:You like our work?

[ShanghaiBill]

Pay us well and treat us well, and we won't keep job-hopping.

People tend to job-hop when pay is rising the fastest. It is during recessions that they hunker down and stay loyal.

Re:You like our work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much this.

Management and other small-minded folks like to blame employee dissatisfaction on anything but the real causes: mistreatment by management, mandatory unpaid OT, expectation of being on-call 24/7 and very few opportunities for promotion and advancement for tech workers who choose to stay at one company.

Re:You like our work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and it's during the boom times companies whine about "employee loyalty" and all that shit they destroyed. Yet during recessions, they can't do the layoffs fast enough.

Boo fucking hoo.

Re:You like our work?

[plopez]

Why not share you numbers? An efficient labor market cant operate without a good flow of information.

Re:You like our work?

[jellomizer]

Many companies fail to understand the cost of turnover. Normally when turnover happens it will cost 150% to replace an employee. Because of the time it will take them to settle in and get use to the process (The informal one, that isn't written down, such as avoid these departments, as their manager is a jerk, work around this director because he is useless). After about a full year of learning then someone usually comes truly productive in the institution. So that is a big cost to the organization to have people leave.

While employee salary is the biggest expense for an organization, it is also a vital key to its infrastructure, and it shouldn't be skimmed. Studies show if someone is getting paid more than they feel it is worth, they will work harder, if they feel they are getting paid less than they feel they are worth, they will not work as hard. The calculation for happy employees isn't hard.
Give them good pay: on par or better than your compensation.
Give them predictability: They will need to feel that their job is steady, and they can plan a life outside around it.
Give them opportunities to grow: Make sure they have a path towards promotion, ability to learn other things. A lot of businesses feel tuition reimbursement will just train people to be overqualified for their job. However if you can promote the person once they have the new education, they will stick around, and you will have someone in that higher position who knows the business with the latest skills.

Avoiding any one of these causes turn over.
Under par pay: You may get employees when they are desperate, or with a promise of the other two where they think they can work up really fast. But any thing that causes them to lose trust in the organization and they are out, as soon as they can.
Lack or predictability: This could just come from a volatile attitude, where you may be friendly one day, and yelling and screaming the next. Where your job in under pressure that YOU may be next on the layoff. Down times do happen, but you can make this more predictable letting people know who is getting canned, and why, allowing them time to prepare, and perhaps using your organizations resources to help them find new work. This can also mean unpredictable hours, granted all work isn't 9-5 but, having a good scheduled and shared out of office duties so people can live their life.
Lack of growth: As they continue on the job, the gain insight on what needs to be done, not allowing people to grow, in terms of rank, or getting choice jobs. Also the organization will have an overly simplify ranking structure.

maximum suckage

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

They see the writing on the walls

[Grand Facade]

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!

Re: And doing what?

[gweihir]

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.

"Big business" doesn't give a fuck.

[blind biker]

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.