This is how a society shifts from one paradigm to another.
Not only is the old way unsustainable, it’s been seen as unfulfilling and empty as it always was.
Edit: a suffix
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Many don’t have that option. I’m in my late 30’s and have literally hit the point where I can do a little bit of that, for a short time, for the very first time in my life. Just now.
Sort of the core bit here is that the barest amount of additional public support given over COVID, combined with a reasonably good labor market before hand. Gave a lot more people a lot more runway to put their foot down.
No one is doing that.
If having the rug pulled out from under you will financially up end you. But leaving on your own terms won’t. Then you have your foot half out the door.
If you leave a job before you are fired, the gap in pay is much shorter. Even if you know the gap in employment is coming, you can plan and save for it.
I have been telling myself that for years. And it’s always done me dirty.
Yeah no. Most of the people in question are coming into this situation with extremely high levels of debt, tanked credit ratings, little savings.
The same things causing those traditional markers of adulthood and economic mobility to get delayed. Monthly expenses might be lower for those without kids. But just to pick one. Rent is typically more expensive than a mortgage payment for an identical space.
The story with millennials on down has never been that they have more disposable income and more runway because they don’t have cars, houses, and kids. It’s that they don’t have cars, houses, and kids because they have less income.
There’s been a bit more, and perhaps too much focus on, tech and white collar professionals who sort of popped over financially. And thus can afford to choose a lower paying job, or to check out for a couple months. But that is more of an outlier than the main thing that’s going on here.
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I also wonder how much this is “people deciding to retire.” I’m a software engineer that used to be a consultant. For the past five years before covid, I was working on three month to six month contracts (or even less in some cases) at well over 15 companies, many of a decent size.
Every single one of them shared the same constraint. The upper management was locked in and not leaving. The middle management was then locked in and not leaving. Which meant the sr and staff level engineers had nowhere to go.
Enter COVID…
Which, I take it made a lot of people’s lives change and people take stock of what they want to be doing with the time they have. Suddenly , a ton of upper and middle management jobs opened up, and everyone from high ranking software engineers who haven’t branched into management to middle managers started up shifting their lives. They did this either at their companies, or at different companies. All these people moving around. That freed up open positions for the middle and entry software engineers to get sr positions that in many cases they’d been waiting 5+ years for. I got poached by a client during this.
Everyone talks about the “Great Resignation” but there’s not a lot of talk about the great Hiring / SHuffling that has been going on. One of the people who worked full time at the Dairy Queen near my house , during their time off, and the fact that everything went remote in education, got her associates degree. A newly vacated software test position was filled by her, and now she’s using my company’s tuition reimbursement to go for a bachelor’s degree too. She also helped her former employees find grants and scholarships , and she told me she met plenty of other “minimum wage” workers in this process who are now filling the jobs opened by everyone else moving up or around.
So it’s not about “handouts”. In many cases, it’s people who saw a better life and jumped for it, because COVID has taught them if they don’t, they might never.
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Yup. We’ve gone from Annoying Slackers With Questionable Hair to Eminences Grise. Splendid.
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So we have a lot of data that shows the way to increase employee engagement, satisfaction and retention. Someone will make an AI CEO already!
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We’re also closing in on a million dead from COVID, directly. Apparently unvaccinated survivors of serious COVID die at shockingly high rates within the year. And who knows how many permanently disabled.
A good number of those people were likely already retired or straight up elderly. But impact is going to be concentrated in those long term middle managers and older employees more than in younger folks.
The old saw about redistributing those job duties to lower positions without added compensation or promotion.
There seems to be some shaking up of that. As employers get desperate, and at least goes programing and tech jobs. But in my recent job searchy hell space. A lot of employers are just having existing employees cover that work. Holding out on the assumption that once a vaccine comes out, once unemployment ends, once COVID goes away next month. They’ll be able to hire up in volume, cheaply.
I was actively told by a supervisor, repeatedly, last year that we just needed to hold on till one of these things happened. Because then our staffing issues would solve themselves. The guy regularly talked about opting not to hire people because they didn’t live close enough.
“We got 60 resumes this week, none of them even live close to the office”
As we were all running 2+ sales routes, delivering our own products. With no support or supervision because the managers were busy doing 4+ sales routes, delivering their own products etc. By fall they started laying people off. But they started with the highest performing employees. Cause they made the most. Though they prioritized keeping the managers.
The really stupid part is the company was already short staffed and having difficulty hiring before the Pandemic. Many industries already had serious labor shortages for years. Like we keep hearing about CDL drivers, they’ve been short for half a decade or more.
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When I was in the job market this past year, I actually looked at some listings for Amazon at the local facility. The IT position didn’t seem too bad, until I noticed the lines that very clearly indicated “IT support” apparently included working in the package warehouse. WTF?
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I’ve never really understood what it was, at least for me, that pushed me in that directly. But at some point I realized I’d be better off figuring out how to work for myself than to actually suffer through working for others. I think part of it came from watching my parents (my dad in particular) work long, hard hours for a company he hated. Part of it was listening to what people had to put up with offices, in terms of office politics. And, I think to a degree, I realized that I’d never be able to take orders from someone I didn’t respect (which seemed to be most of the managers I encountered who would expect things from us that were literally impossible).
2020 was the closest I’ve come to having an actual office job when I was a temporary contractor for a big tech company. It was pretty messy and I was grateful they didn’t renew the contract. That six months had a big enough impact on my mental well-being and didn’t add nearly enough money to the pot to be worth it.
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and i think many of them don’t see it improving. there’s just not much of a ladder from something like a service industry job, up and out to something better.
houses - even rent - is too expensive, so is college: and what fundamentally is going to change? so just pick the job you can stand, move sideways to the next job if the current situation isn’t panning out, repeat
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… and fire people who don’t drive an hour each way on personal time to attend a Management ego-booster.
Been there, know the signs.
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I think that’s because of the sponsorship thing. I’ve done some great work social activities—we once got split into two teams, taught to sail, and raced a pair of old, 70’ wooden schooners across the Chesapeake Bay.
But it seems these days companies don’t want to spend money on anything that isn’t “doing work.”
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I have to admit I admire their convictions but still mystified that they’d rather live on the streets than suck it up and deal with it - at least temporarily while they search for a new job. I never had that luxury of being able to walk away from a shitty job as I’ve always needed to provide for my family.
But that’s just it. We have no families and have never been able to buy homes so now that we’re at the same age that our first bosses were when they first fed us our taste of workplace bullshit we’re not putting up with it anymore.
My time spent homeless and not working was some of the happiest time of my life and that shit is fucked up.
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That’s how it is for many artists without any networking and business connections; starving isn’t an option.
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SpaceX seems to be ground zero for this crisis: 21% attrition rate during the study! A stampede for the exit.
In warfare the loss of 10% of a unit or more is considered crippling to the point of non-functional. 21% means a completely fucked up company culture.
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That could have been “desktop support” I worked IT in a company that shipped and found myself in the warehouse quite a bit. How do you think warehouses have wifi? Someone climbed up the the rafters and ziptied that sucker up there.
Knowing Amazon and how support jobs get straight shit on I wouldn’t be surprised if they sent people away to sort boxes and do inventory. I once had to lose an entire day to assembling furniture for another department because “COMPUTER desk”. Funny that when we got new furniture in the IT department we hired a company to put it together and didn’t find some way to get the maintenance or cleaning staff to do it sans budget expenses.
But that’s what it is to have a spineless coward as a boss. I wonder if he would have felt the same if the other department simply asked for thousands of dollars directly instead of burning an entire day of person hours… wait I should say man hours because for some reason the women in the department were exempt.
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They have no problems with handouts from the government in the form of destructive tax cuts, subsidies, no bid contracts, and favorable laws. They have problems with the government actually giving money back to people who actually pay the taxes.
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I’m going to paraphrase an economist I heard comment on this: “saying there’s a labor shortage is like saying you can’t find a 65-inch TV for $100, therefore there must be a TV shortage.”
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“toxic corporate culture” is redundant…
#TaxTheRich
#NeverVoteRepublican
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Yep. Been there, done that, still doing it! (We’re about to replace a 50 m HDMI cable and associated audio outputs in one of our conference rooms, with access to the cables through the ceiling in our lower level. I’m just going to be doing my best to not fall through the ceiling into the children’s department!)
I kind of wish I had saved the description, but I thought the same thing when I first glanced at the listing – nothing unusual about IT working in the warehouse, but on further investigation, it was clear that that was not what they meant, unless it’s just assumed if you’re in the building you’re likely to be tasked with warehouse work.
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