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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.
At HP, there are a LOT of people leaving, as morale is at an all-time low. Those with marketable skills would rather leave on their own than get a dreaded "offer" to work at Ciber or Modis at 30% less pay, reduction in benefits, and a loss of seniority - and finding they can make more at a company willing to actually offer reasonable compensation increases on a regular basis.
There may be other companies, not as high profile as HP, where this is also occurring. Obviously, there are many companies "below average" (Kind of has to be that way), but the disparity is pretty high - when people start shopping around, they quickly realize they are underpaid, and the rest of the pieces start falling into place.
It can't go on forever... which is all the more reason those people confident in their ability to place at better companies are going now, rather than waiting.
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.
I see more and more people in IT leaving their jobs to work on something else.
People are fed up with low pay, crazy schedules, lots of pressure -often times for no reason!- and technology changing at Formula 1 speed (just take a look at the web: what was good and trendy 2 years ago is proscribed today).
To top that up, add off-shoring: today you are key, tomorrow your job is in India, Vietnam or who knows where. People do not like job insecurity.
What are they moving to? Everything else: law, gardening, plumbing, cake shops, teaching, whatever with a more relaxed schedule, people not discussing about hourly cost and difficult or impossible to offshore. Really.
They've finished training their H1-B replacements, after all.
#DeleteChrome
I have seen ads for jobs as desktop techs, asking for a masters degree in engineering.
Costco starts out at $20.00 an hour. Walmart truck drivers make $82K a year. I see ads for developers, asking for a degree, and five years experience, for $14 an hour. I see ads for interns that require five years experience.
Are you kidding? I got laid off from my tech job just before the government shutdown in October 2013 and I was out of work for eight months. Meanwhile, the CEO gave himself a 60% pay raise and bought a new yacht for having a lousy fiscal year. That didn't stop the company from hiring Indian workers to replace American workers.
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.
I sorta get your sentiment, but you didn't finish it. What exactly are they doing about it? Are they joining communes? Committing Sepuku? Otherwise there's 3 possibilities: a) they're starting their own businesses, unlikely in this economy. b) They're job hopping because that's the only way to move up in the world or c) they're having nervous breakdowns and/or being forced to quit/retire.
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Sometechcompany has contintuity and visibility. The Company writes policy, press releases, public relations statements, etc. So, year after year after year, The Company keeps reiterating how great they are, and how unappreciated they are.
The techs who have worked for The Company in the past and the present have no such outlet. Their reasons for leaving aren't publicized. Two, or six, or twenty people might know your real reasons for leaving, but none of it is publicized. Outside of your immediate freinds and associates, no one knows how shitty The Company has been treating you.
And, it is the job of HR to ensure that your reasons are twisted, perverted, and/or hidden from public view. Often enough, it would cost your freinds and associates their jobs to make any attempt to set the record straight.
So, when all is said and done, The Company just gets away with whatever the hell they please, and you have no recourse other than leaving.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Get off your high horse. I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering just after the Enron crisis unraveled and the dotcom boom went bust. Even though I spent each day applying for every technical role imaginable, I ended up working at Sears for a few dollars over minimum wage. That lasted almost six months until I took a job several states away from my home in Dallas. Many tech workers who are unexpectedly laid off face a unique challenge of being very good at one particular specialty. Even though they can be just as effective with a very different role, employers often seek out a candidate that exactly meets the job specification. So someone with four years experience designing 10kW power supplies will be deemed under qualified or an unfit match for a job requesting five years experience designing 2kw power supplies. A second candidate with ten years experience designing power supplies ranging from 1kW to 10kW would be deemed over qualified. The company then justifies recruiting a candidate from a third world country that will work for whichever wage keeps him employed and allowed to remain in the country. The fact that no one understands his emails, and he has to repeat what he says two or three times before anyone can make out what he's trying to say doesn't seem to matter.
We definitely should bring in talent from around the world, but often times in STEM fields the H-1B visa holders have a very narrow skill set and are expected to work extreme hours for low pay. But it gets the message across and keeps the rest of the STEM workers from demanding too much. Of course when today's technology is made obsolete the H-1B workers are sent home rather than retrained. But by then there are millions trained on the latest trend and they import replacements.
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.