It’s worth noting that job-hopping was temporarily reduced during early parts of the pandemic. No one really knew where this was going, so companies were hesitant to hire and employees were hesitant to leave a job they trusted to be around (if they could). There’s a natural rebound happening as companies feel safe to hire and employees feel safe to try new jobs. This is exacerbated by the way it’s all happening at once. Going to be interesting to see how and when it settles out.
The media tried to portray a lot of pandemic trends as one-way changes to our society and economies, but so far I’ve been surprised at how quickly everything has been snapping back to pre-pandemic normalcy after the temporary disruptions work their way through the systems. This goes for everything from lumber prices to work from home policies. Everything feels slightly altered, but trending back to pre-pandemic norms.
I expect to pay slightly more for lumber and have slightly more work from home options, but it hasn’t been the sea change of forever elevated prices and everyone working from home forever like it was portrayed months ago. I suspect this job-hopping trend will likewise calm down once things re-establish equilibrium.
I think a lot of the pandemic changes were brought about because of uncertainty, and if every actor took the careful route at the same time, it prevented losses e.g. if everybody stopped producing lumber, the margin on lumber would rise; when the risk was over the margin would gradually drop as more producers came back online. The rise in non-wage labor costs certainly helped - shifting the same lumber production from covid to after covid was going to be cheaper.
The quit rate is up because it's as if workers had all agreed not to quit when the covid situation was more unknown (like what we're walking into.) If you had a nice, safe work-from-home gig that you hated, during a time of disease, risking the job was not smart until you started to see how covid was going to work itself out. Once you've gotten a good idea of that, 1) you've been working for a job you would have long quit if covid hadn't happened, and/or 2) you're working at a job that you kept because it kept you safely at home, but is now demanding that you come back into the office. The benefit of working from home (against the risk of working outside the home) has a compensation value.
We're reentering covid uncertainty, and I imagine that we'll react in the same way, only less so (because we're a little smarter.)
I didn't see a "normal" rate in the survey but I'd note that looking, whether casually or otherwise, is a lot different from actually moving to a new company.
That said, my totally anecdotal impression is that there's more than average moving around.
I might as well repeat it. Now is a great time to be looking for a new job.
I'm a quant trader, so I've got a foot in tech and a foot in finance. Both are heaving at the moment, recruiters calling all the time, salaries much higher than just a few months ago.
I'm not sure what it looks like at the entry level end, but for experienced hires it's busy. I speak to a lot of recruiters, and they're having vintage years most of them, eg hitting billing targets in Q2 for the whole year.
One job I passed on took a friend on my recommendation. Another few are in the pipeline at other firms. I can't remember a time when so many people I know were moving jobs.
I'd love nothing more than to go out and get a new job, but I swore years ago to never again participate in leetcode hazing interviews, and every recruiter I've spoken to (15+ in the past few months) has described exactly that as the interview process.
I did a job search this year and I think while everyone made me do some amount of coding challenge, some were much more "leetcode-y" than others.
In my limited sampling, Stripe and VMWare stand out as big companies you've probably heard of where the coding challenge felt closer to "help us verify you've been writing software professionally for a while" and further from "prove you could still pass an advanced undergraduate exam on data structures and algorithms". I'm sure both those co.s are large enough that your experience may vary, but it made me hopeful that our long dark winter of perpetually drilling intermediate to advanced algorithms coursework is ending.
I knew leetcode style interviews were popular, but I had no idea quite how prevalent they were. Almost any job I wanted to apply to seemed to use them in some capacity.
I tried to search the sites that aggregate roles that specifically do not use them, but your options become really thin when you filter for remote. I’ve already been ATS screened out of some of the better looking companies in that category.
> I swore years ago to never again participate in leetcode hazing interviews
Thank you for your service! I'm not the smartest person I know (though I'm fairly smart) but grinding leetcode is not beneath me. It was really hard with the burnout, and the many years since taking the DS&A class in university, but solving that class of problems is satisfying; the way solving puzzles, or a Rubik's cube is - once you get the hang of it.
Smart people not bending the knee to Leetcode meant less competition for me when I was doing my interviewing rounds a few months ago. I managed to double my compensation. Hell, I'd do it all over again in exchange for the cheapest Tesla, or $40k once-off, but I now get to earn ridiculous amounts of money for years to come.
https://levels.fyi has a good baseline data on compensation data, as it generally varies by seniority of the role.
> Do you have any recommendations how long to prep for a leetcode style interview?
This entirely depends on your starting level on Data Structures & Algorithms, and how much time you can set aside per week, but be warned though: it is a grind - I had to give up other hobbies for 6 close to 2 months (I'm not very smart, and I wasn't aiming for the most challenging tier of interviewers, YMMV). Once you've done enough questions (dozens or low hundreds), you start to recognize patterns and get a hunches for avenues to explore when solving.
I'd recommend "Cracking the Coding Interview" book, leetcode and/or hackerrank for practice as well as searching for YouTube for specific algorithms/structures that you find challenging - I struggled a bit with dynamic programming at first (speaking of which, know the class of questions your target companies ask so you don't waste effort). You can monitor your progress by timing yourself on how long it will take you to complete "easy" or "medium" (depending on competitiveness of company you're shooting for, you can time 1 easy + 1 medium, or 2 mediums, or 1 hard + 1 medium within about 50 minutes).
I agree leetcode interviews are pretty stupid, and there are plenty of skilled professionals who suck at that sort of interview (even if they are quite good at finding good hires it can be silly for most companies to use them as candidates who do well will likely have many competing offers from other leetcode interviewers.)
When I was at university a lot of people studied hard for somewhat bullshit exams that had little relevance to the work they we’re expecting to be doing for the rest of their lives. And people paid the university for the privilege of getting to take those exams. The purpose of this studying was achieving good grades and the value of these grades was an increased expected value for lifetime earnings. But this value is probably lower than naively looking at statistics would suggest: ambitious, hardworking, or clever students were more likely to do well in exams and those people would likely do well later in life too even if they had food poisoning and failed their exams.
In comparison, it seems to me that job interviewing costs a lot less than getting a degree and the payoff is potentially larger, more direct, and more immediate. It seems that the pain of studying and practicing bullshit leetcode questions is outweighed by the benefit of, say, a 50% pay rise or equivalent quality of life improvement, and I don’t think a moral stance against leetcode is strong enough to justify turning down such opportunities.
But maybe you feel more strongly about this moral position than me. Or maybe you are one of those competent people who can’t do well at this sort of interview even with studying and practice. Certainly such people exist.
For myself it's a combination of morals as well as the fact that I've simply become so depressed due to my current place of work that I don't think I have the capability to engage in the prep work, never mind that particular type of interview itself.
To lend some credence to the former (the morals) - I have succeeded at leetcode hazefests in the past. I've worked at two mega-cap tech companies, and the last time I seriously interviewed (half a decade ago...) I was successful at multiple companies (all of which took each and every interview session from a page of leetcode, or if I was really "lucky", CtCI)
So I expect if I could get over the depression (not likely) I could probably prepare and maybe even succeed. But even then I don't think it's something I'm willing to give on, even though the rewards for myself would likely be substantial.
(Similarly, I also refuse to interview candidates at my current employer, as they insist on the same thing)
During an interview process with Goldman Sachs, I was told I would be given a Leetcode interview to 'assess my abilities.' I asked them if this was the usual process for experienced engineers, they said yes. I declined the rest of the interview process. At the time I worked at a major well-known tech company with 5-year tenure.
My thought is: If this is how these companies treat people they actually want to hire, I wonder how they treat people after they're hired?
It's funny, where everyone else seems to have the problem of "ideas are a dime a dozen, but time to execute is scarce", I just have zero ideas. My only true passion in the world of software development is gaming (the one area where I, like everyone else, have lots of ideas), and, well, being an independent game developer is an even worse crap-shoot than lining up for leetcode interviews! (I won't argue that it's not a self-defeating attitude to have in regards to considering indie game development, but the numbers certainly don't lie here)
No, it's a very realistic attitude to have about being an indie game developer. The market is flooded and unless you have a really good idea, can make a really good game, and can promote the living fuck out of it you're going to have a hard time.
Still, at this point I'm almost willing to just try it and off myself when it doesn't work out and I'm broke. Looking at job ads right now is incredibly depressing.
I'm in the same place as you, and I've been trying to figure out if there's some intersection between games and my current web dev specific skills that's both a safer route than traditional indie dev, and somewhat less tapped out. I have a couple ideas, not really sure if they're good though.
Heh, I have some that I think are commercializable, then I go online and look for companies that are doing similar things, and lo and behold, there are already several competitors who are doing a pretty good job.
At least a good enough job that there's no way I can easily cut into their market share or take some of their clients without significant outside funding.
There's nothing new under the sun. Almost all ideas will have already been done by somebody else. And if nobody has even tried it, then it's possible it's not a good idea.
2/2 places I interviewed at in the past month asked me for a take home assignment, one of which would skip it if I had any open source code to show them. I have 3 more in the pipeline and I doubt more than one will require leetcoding.
As the sibling said, you can post in the HN who's hiring and who's looking to get hired threads.
Are you OK with code challenges? Workatastartup (from YC) is a nice option if you haven't tried, also who's hiring/wants to be hired monthly threads here are pure gold on ROI/leads ratio. Post there
I suppose I probably should at least just start some interviews and then decline at the point that they start leetcoding-proper (even if that's during the actual interview itself).
DS& (common) A isn't a problem at its core (as least as far as I am concerned - I'm comfortable that I am able to pick the right one given the scenario, describe why, etc.), but where it becomes a problem for me is when I'm inevitably asked to reproduce some esoteric (for example) binary tree or graph algorithm on the spot, in 30 minutes, with no errors.
I was once asked to write a (bayesian) spam filter, when neither my cv nor the job posting had any mention of spam or anything adjacent. Then the "bar raiser" mocked me.
>>> I'm not sure what it looks like at the entry level end, but for experienced hires it's busy.
Busy doesn't mean hiring, it just means they are sending candidates continuously (to fail).
The reality is that high finance is extremely competitive. The positions are few. The candidates are many.
My experience is that trading firms can easily sift through ten qualified candidates to make one hire. They complain about how difficult it is to hire, but they fail to acknowledge the endless stream of qualified candidates they rejected.
P.S. Entry level is a slaughterhouse. Could be hundreds of candidates, who all come from top schools and pass dynamic programming exercises.
I'm pretty sure I could get a $25k-$75k bump if I were to hop jobs right now, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Partly because I've only been at my current place for about a year, and the place for that only 6 months. It's just so exhausting going through that whole process, and then taking months to get familiar with the team and codebase.
I'm in a similar boat. For me though, it's not so much that I want to avoid the effort involved in the switch as that you need to spend time in a role in order to have significant impact, and that my longer-term success is likely going to be more dependent on whether I'm able to point to a record of consistently making significant contributions than it is in my maximizing my salary for the next year.
Funnily enough a few people have written to me about that.
I was a bit fortunate, I actually applied to be a derivatives trader out of uni. Which I did, but I ended up in a hedge fund, which was a type of firm I'd never heard of until the day I started working in one. I started reading a LOT of stuff about it.
The mid-2000s were a bit of a golden age for hedge funds, and investors were just throwing money at them. I went to a lot of investment meetings where I wondered what on earth we'd said that was so attractive.
At one point my boss in a derivs fund told me there was too much money, and that we needed to find something to do with it. By this time I'd read a bit about automated trading, and I figured some sort of strategy utilizing computers to trade would be the thing to do. So the boss decided to have me hire quants and devs to do this, and I've been in that area since. Pretty unique position to be honest, most people don't do it this way, and they don't get to just hire a team while in their mid 20s. Good learnings though.
I keep debating quant trading, but there are limited options in the Bay Area (I only know of Voleon), and my FAANG RSUs have done really well in the past few years. A quant firm could probably match my take-home pay, but there's risk with changing jobs.
If you don’t mind me asking, what might the total compensation for some of the roles the recruiters have been contacting you and other experienced hires for?
Varies a lot, depending on what the role is. I've got a broader range of potential roles than most people, who are in a single silo eg backend Dev or QA.
The nice thing about the external recruiters I talk to is they are all up front about total comp, and their own comp depends on the new employee's comp, so they know...
Crypto firms are in a massive hiring frenzy. Few hundred k salary (usd 250 to 500), nearly 1m in tokens for a manager role. But of course you gotta decide what those tokens really are worth, whether you actually believe in the project, and whether you care for crypto at all.
For traditional startups the range depends a lot on the stage they're at. There seem to be quite a few who think they can get a CTO for usd130k plus a few percent equity. I'm not sure what quality you'd get for that but I guess at the next funding round you'd get a bump, and of you end up in a hyper growth startup you're golden.
Finance, as a senior IC who can code you're maybe looking at 200k salary and perhaps half that bonus. That's assuming you don't get a cut of the profits. There are of course some shops where they'd pay way more than that, maybe double. There seem to be a few small name firms that pay similar to Jane Street.
Naturally if you find a seat with a cut of the book, that can shoot up. Ordinary cut is a range as well, anything from 10 to 35% has been touted. TC would depend on how much capital you get allocated and how well you do with it. Somewhere like millennium has a reputation for paying well while things are good, then cutting the team on a pretty tight stop loss (like 3%) in a month. Funnily enough the recruiter told me they were trying to lose that reputation, so maybe it changed. But they're definitely doing things to attract people, eg they are supposedly very relaxed about paying a salary for a year while you develop the strategy.
Thank you for your response, these discussions have certainly given me some food for thought.
Those are some very compelling salaries.
I currently work for a SaaS company (started in YC) and make about $260k TC. I live in San Diego and have some pretty excellent work life balance (I surf or kayak everyday, walk my two dogs a lot, am full remote+async). I also own a condo and spend about 1-2 months a year in Hawaii or traveling elsewhere.
While I’m good about not always viewing the grass as greener elsewhere, the current market makes me think if I should look for a new job. I’m a backend dev with about 5 years of experience
I'd imagine it mostly has to do with the giant COL increase over the last 12 to 18 months. Employers typically don't just hand out 20% raises, so everyone is out looking for more money.
Related, pay has gone up for many roles as companies get desperate to hire and many companies have a logical flaw in how they value current employees. They won’t raise current employees wages to meet the new price they would pay for someone new so they lose them and pay that price anyway to the next person (then complain about attrition).
Any CEO that complains about losing talent, but then locks the total salaries budget at no more than 3-5% year over year growth is not serious about talent retention...
Inflation, or even fear of inflation, is going to be a big factor.
I see many people trying to spin this as a unilateral win for workers, but the subtext is that many of them are afraid that they have no choice but to seek higher wages just to keep up with their expenses.
Agreed. One friend of mine, who makes plenty, decided to go job searching because raises this year for that company maxed out at 10%. It might sound petty in normal times, but costs for a lot of people have gone up by a lot more than 10% in the last year.
My rent alone went up something like 20%. Look at gas. Or wood. Or food. It's like watching money slowly disappear. Here's hoping it really is transitory.
Housing in my area of the US is booming. Understandably, that means in others, it's doing the opposite, so it probably washes out.
As for wood, I agree not everyone is out buying lumber. But that affects lots of things. Have you priced out a shed, fixing a deck, or new run of fence? It also apparently affects furniture and such to some degree.
New home builders near me were putting huge 'lumber' addendums on their previous pricing.
Food is a little trickier. Grocery just 'feels' more expensive, but admittedly, I don't have any data to back that up. I can certainly cede that point.
Lumber was up a lot last year, but now here (PNW) it’s cheaper than pre-pandemic prices. 2x4x8 were $3.70 at Home Depot last week, which is rather cheap.
We are planning on moving and have done decent bit of research. In Fremont, rents have fallen, while smaller areas the rents are going up. In our apartment complex there are numerous empty apartments and a 2BR is 2100$. That's from 2400$ approx one year ago. We are looking at Reno and folks there say a similar 2BR house has gone up from 1200 to 1500. Now we are wondering if the savings is worth the lack of opportunity!!!
So rents in large metros are going down and rents in small areas are going up.
I think it's more like rents for wealthy people went up, because wealthy people took no income hit during covid. So not only did rents continue to rise as usual for them, but they lost competition at the low end from the less wealthy spending beyond their means. I'd expect to see rents bifurcate. Without the huge stimulus, I'd have expected asset prices to have raced up, too, as the stock market failed.
By wealthy, I mean top 10-15% of salaries, not any of the definitions that people in the top 10-15% of salaries cook up to make themselves seem working class.
I think person you're replying to has it backwards. The big metros are where people are leaving. Look at rent and housing prices in any mid size city. Take Knoxville, or Orlando, or Louisville, or KC.
That is high, many companies were still 3-5% in 2021, hard to predict what 2022 will look like but I am not expecting much in as many companies seem to not understand that is happening in the market...
i only need my personal exeprience to demonstrate (not prove) that everybody isn't the same, which is exactly what you're saying
The parent comment paints the picture that everyone is experiencing financial hardship owing to worldwide cost of living surge (when did that happen?) and that people look for a new job as soon at cost of living increases as if that is how career decisions are often made (solely to keep up with inflation)
Americans got it right. Germans are, on the other hand, happy to work for a penny as you can see from the numbers below:
Average salary in San-Francisco for developers: $175.036
Average salary in Germany for developers: 61.176 Euro
That's 2.5 times more than in Germany. Please also note that many products like gas, electricity, laptops, smartphones are cheaper in the US, despite much higher salaries.
The average German developer works for some non-software low-margin company where he only has limited impact on the business and is treated like a cost center, while the average SF developer works on tech projects with huge margins where he can have a huge impact on the product and is a valued employee.
Because the overall market skews towards lower salaries, even multinationals and the few local tech companies that exist there can pay less in Berlin.
Pay is also generally higher in the US, though usually not to this extent.
Hah, that sounds like a lie you tell yourself. As if Germans are unable to work long hours and with intensity. But doing so will not increase the salary you get anyways. It _is_ dictated by the local market.
Working hard like that isn't really rewarded working for software in Germany, which is why people don't do it as much. If you work hard as a lawyer in Germany, you might make partner or something, which is why lawyers are prepared to do a lot of hours. If you work hard in software, you just get more work.
And there are actually plenty of crappy jobs with overtime in Germany too. Lower pay does not always mean less expectations.
Anyone that wants to slave themselves in Germany is able to do so by going freelancing.
You can work as hard as you feel like, charging generous hourly rates.
Just don't be surprised when big corp decides to consolidate external contractors into more well known contracting companies, delivering from Eastern Europe or Asia.
Comparing just to SF is a bit misguided. By the same reasoning, what is your reaction if I told you the average software developer makes $120 in Zurich?
Zurich is not Germany. It's Switzerland, a different country. And many Germans move to Switzerland, because salaries there are higher and taxes are ~2 times lower.
Well, I rather have my 30 day vacations, union, healthcare, when I leave the office I leave the office (will be available again on the following day), extra hours or weekends means actually being paid for them.
Money isn't everything in life, and depending on the case it doesn't even buy health.
The country-wide median for SWEs in the US is about 110k$ AFAIK, the median household income in the US is 1.3 times that of Germany, which with an average German salary SWE salary of 46k€=53k$ (I know, should use the median here, but I couldn't find data on that) would predict an average US salary of 68k$.
US SWEs have it much better than Germans across the whole country, there's no need to deny that. Berlin is also a bit of a bubble.
> That's 2.5 times more than in Germany. Please also note that many products like gas, electricity, laptops, smartphones are cheaper in the US, despite much higher salaries.
From a quick search, electricity in Germany seems cheaper than in California.
And then there's vacations, work-life balance, health care, education.
Raw salary figures don't tell the story.
I'm paying close to $30K in health care costs, that's assuming nothing out of the ordinary. If something bad happens it can be in the millions, bankrupting entire life savings.
If I'm lucky I can squeeze in one week of vacation a year (that's what silicon valley "unlimited vacation" means). Meanwhile I have family in Austria taking 6-8 weeks of vacation every year.
The market is hot (in the US) measured by salaries, as noted upthread. It's easy to make tons of money.
But finding a place with European levels of vacation? Impossible. I'd give anything to work 25% of my hours for 25% of the pay, but such jobs don't exist.
And US healthcare problems of course can't be changed by changing jobs (I've had the exact same Blue Shield PPO plan across 7 employers in the previous decade+).
Fist, SF salaries are high as is cost of living. Perhaps compare to Dallas. Or even Toronto.
Then there's social insurance aka pension. A SE in the US I'd assume to have healthcare (caveat - as long as in employment). An in terms of private investment such as stocks, the German stock market is quite different from the US one in terms of composition (as companies raising funds tend to use different means) hence future asset-liability matching. And a fair bit harder to do your own company (and VC funding) in Germany due to 'esoteric' tax requirements for companies (including but not limited to needing to pay tax in advance).
SF is located on fault, with mega wildfires and mega drought for decades to come... At least the photo of the empty reservoir will be taken with a cheap Chinese-made smartphone, good stuff!
Some peoples value other things than money so it is a bit silly to just talk about $$$. What about housing costs, commute, healthcare, quality of life, etc of the _general_ population (and not only developers)?
Looking is very different than actually changing jobs. That number is probably low. I'd guess 90%+ are looking. That doesn't mean they are doing anything about it.
My entire career I've been "looking" for a new job. I only change jobs once every 4+ years, but I'm always looking in case a better opportunity comes up and to help me level set and make sure my current job is a good one. Almost all of the time when I see an interesting job I do nothing, sometimes I ask some questions. Once a year or so it turns into an informal "info call" and maybe once every two years or so an actual interview might happen.
But it doesn't mean anything until I actually switch jobs. In almost every case, even when I get to the interview stage, I confirm for myself that my current job is better and do nothing.
I've been job hopping my entire career. It is by far the most effective way to getting a giant bump in salary and benefits.
If you're sitting out there at around 1 or 2 years at the same place, definitely consider it. There is the risk you end up somewhere worse, but just hop again after a few months. Invariably you'll be asked about it in your next interview, but be honest and describe the last position as misrepresented to you and a waste of your skills and you'll be fine.
Just to provide a counterpoint, my career in what would reasonably be considered "tech" (I worked elsewhere in an engineering job for a few years) has mostly been three stints of about 10 years each. Not a developer but in adjacent areas. And have done fine. Maybe haven't optimized but that's OK.
I hear this from time to time. But does it apply universally to all companies, including FAANG's? If you are at a FAANG and can't move to another FAANG then is there any chance of getting even a bump in salary?
Yes but it's harder, I wouldn't say "universally to all companies" (e.g. wal-mart is always going to pay wal-mart wages to devs) but many smaller tech companies recognize they have to pay top wages to attract experience hires in a lot of fields.
I have a hard time believing this is true, but if it is, the implication are profound. Apparently, the mishandling of the pandemic in the US has broken the system that kept the workers oppressed, and firmly under the thumb of the donor class.
> Apparently, the mishandling of the pandemic in the US has broken the system that kept the workers oppressed, and firmly under the thumb of the donor class.
That’s quite a leap. These people aren’t quitting their jobs and exiting the workforce.
They’re looking for other jobs that might have incrementally better pay. This is a combined result of inflationary pressures, a booming economy, and a lot of people who have been removed from the workforce for a variety of reasons (COVID, enhanced and extended unemployment, needing to stay home and care for kids).
I don’t think there’s much evidence that this is some overarching societal shift or rising up of the working class. It’s just standard, expected behavior in low unemployment, high inflation environments. The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, for now at least. The situation will change again when the supply and demand shifts in the other direction.
The unemployment benefits were better than what a lot of service workers were getting paid and so people didn’t want to return. Meanwhile economy was reopening and employers needed workers- the same people who laid them off. Forced unemployment means the inertia is broken. That and the clarity to rethink a clear career path definitely affected more than quite a few
Then there’s remote/wfh workers. With more companies adopting wfh and some high profile companies not wanting to adopt it, the right incentives are created to job hop. The vacancies created have to be filled and the spiral starts.
In both these instances, breaking the inertia is enough to disrupt this fragile balance that companies were exploiting to keep wages and salaries down. When the line breaks (a few companies caving), the entire defence that “this is what market pays” comes crumbling down.
I'm setting up to hire right now but a few weeks ago the HR "compensation analyst" would only approve a lower salary range. Skip to a few days ago when I got final approval for the position and HR calls me up to say they think the salary range is too low because they have had problems filling jobs, "would you consider raising the salary range." So I did-- back to what I originally requested.
> In both these instances, breaking the inertia is enough to disrupt this fragile balance that companies were exploiting to keep wages and salaries down. When the line breaks (a few companies caving), the entire defence that “this is what market pays” comes crumbling down.
You’ve got it backwards. The concept of “market rate” is at the core of why this is happening in the first place. Market rate is going up, which is driving these changes.
Market rate isn’t a myth that business owners use to suppress wages. It’s literally just the rate that the market will bear for a given type of labor. Supply and demand of labor and jobs shifts this point around like any other supply/demand curve.
"Market rate" can and will be low because it's not in the interest of any one company to increase the wages - even if that means the wages are exploitative. Same goes for child labor, off-shoring jobs, environmental damage, ...etc. It's this external factor - pandemic driven layoffs and benefits - that's driving the change.
Actually supply and demand usually rules Pandemic or no pandemic. E.g., : 1) if you want better workers and skilled worker supply is limited, you pay more than the other guy, so wages go up. 2) As wages go up more people are motivated to get trained in that skill. Eventually more workers available and supply of workers goes up. If demand stays the same, wages go down as employers don't have to pay as much to fill positions. 3) Less motivation to get trained in that skill so less workers. Repeat 1.
Not quite: At least in the US, CPI increases are lead by gasoline, which drives up the cost of everything else. And fuels prices are up due quite a bit because demand has increased as society reopened while a whole bunch of oil producers went bankrupt when society shutdown and no one was going anywhere.
The other leader in CPI is from cars, which also have a supply-side bottleneck unrelated to government bailouts. Supply chain issues in other areas are also contributing to price increases.
I'm not saying that government money isn't having any impact, but if you look at where the price increases dominate, there are reasons that explain price increases much more fully.
The inflation we see today is supply chain issues...
The Money Printing inflation is coming. The inflation from money printing today is almost all in Stock market right now as people took a lot of the money and either saved it (which institutions then invested it) , or invested it, This can be seen in the Money supply charts...
Watch though, as the supply chain issues get resolved over the next 12-24 months, people will start spending that Printed money, then you will see a second more sustained wave of inflation...
The additional reserve dollars allow banks to offer more loans at lower interest rates and buy other assets (mbs) that they normally wouldn't buy.
When banks purchase these assets, cash is handed to entities selling these assets. Since there's A LOT of money to be loaned, banks are bidding against each other on such assets and to hand out loans asap.
This is causing inflation. And yes, it's only hidden because you are rich. Ask someone making $30k a year how they are feeling about the "minor" inflation
For this reason, arguably it is the treasury that truly creates money these days, especially with a great excess of reserves. And there has certainly been plenty of “treasury printing” in the last year.
The survey source seems pretty credible and I've certainly seen a lob of job changing among people I know.
I don't know about broken systems and all that though. I think a lot of people are just rethinking things, they feel in a rut with the pandemic, they can interview without traveling, etc.
ADDED: There are also people that don't like what their employer's return to office (or not) plans look like.
Prior to the pandemic the economy had spent an unusually large amount of time between recessions. There is every reason to expect that the beginning of the pandemic was the start of a very large correction which is still in progress.
The stock market once existed to match capital with investments, now it has degenerated to a graph of rich people's feelings. Mostly, it's a legal Ponzi scheme.
That's exactly what the Paycheck Protection Program did. It lent money to businesses that kept their staff employed. Eventually most of the loans were forgiven.
My hypothesis is that this is mostly about so many people going remote.
With location no longer constraining either recruiters or job seekers, everybody's got more options now, and the increased competition is working to the employee's favor.
There is clearly some bounce back happening, but is it permanent? If we sense there has been some permanent change, we should try to be precise about exactly what that change is. I'm going to suggest that those who say the culture has changed the economy might be reversing cause and effect.
In a comment above, PragmaticPulp wrote "I’ve been surprised at how quickly everything has been snapping back to pre-pandemic normalcy after the temporary disruptions".
That's what I see too. But it's also clear that the government pushed trillions of dollars of stimulus into the economy, some of which went straight to the workers, and this leaves many workers, especially the poorest workers, with more leverage than they've had in decades.
The era 1932-1968 is sometimes broadly referred to as the New Deal era, a period of progressive reform. We don't have a name for the era 1968-2008, but it was an era when there was an emphasis on limiting government, cutting taxes, opening borders, catering to corporate needs -- a bundle of policies that some people call "neoliberal". For the sake of argument, let's call that the neoliberal era.
Since 2008 the old neoliberal consensus has been falling apart. Trump ran as a populist, Biden was elected promising progressive policies, Trump and Biden collectively pushed through several trillion dollars of stimulus. Biden has put in place a $300-a-month cash payment for each child a family has.
So I'd argue, if there has been a change that feels permanent, it is a political change. If we're moving into an era where the government pushes money directly to individual workers, then we're moving into an era when workers are going to have more leverage than they've had since the end of the post war boom, back in 1973.
Use this time to switch folks. Get that $300k job NOW.
You can ask for benefits such as permanent wfh, vacation before starting, extra stock, signing bonuses.
You could even tell them upfront that you will not do a take home, if you don't want to. Or if they have to have a take home, ask for compensation or to reduce one coding round.
They sort of are. I guess you're right you might not stumble upon it accidentally but a fairly average programmer can get 300k remote if they have 3-4 years of experience and seek it out. FB, Twitter, Dropbox, Stripe and Instacart (plus probably a number of others) will all pay this much or more for remote.
Eh, 300k for 3-4 years is a bit on the high end, but it’s possible. It also heavily depends on the region you’re based in. I know that FB decreases comp by >10% for lower cost of living regions.
Trying to get $100 USD an hour for contract work in local companies is like pulling teeth. I've yet to manage it and will probably just sop bothering with any company based here.
I could get a lot of teeth pulled privately for $300,000 USD a year.
EDIT: Actually in NZ you have to get that done privately anyway
Does anyone know what we should be asking for? Say as a C# developer in Chicago? Mostly MVC focused but expert at nothing. Never really having the opportunity to do the same exact thing over and over. And one that isn’t very great at complex stored procs. You know, the hard stuff.
Just curious. Everyone talks about wages going up, but no one says what those wages are supposed to be.
What does it say to Faang recruiters if I were to quit my current job that I've been in for 8 years (different roles same large manufacturing company), take a 3-6 month break, try other things(business, entrepreneurship, reading/courses) and then leetcode/apply after other approaches have failed? Does it impact my hireability a lot at that point?
I wouldn't expect the gap itself to be a major issue.
That said, I do think it's generally easier to find a job when you already have one. That also puts you in a stronger negotiation position (although getting multiple competing offer could be a way to mitigate the latter).
Anecdotally, there seems to be a lot of hiring going on the at the moment. I sit on a hiring committee at a FAANG and things have been very busy, though this could also be due to lots of committee members being on vacation.
Many people are working jobs they don't like, and only took because the pandemic limited their choices. It's the great re-shuffling as people get back to their ideal roles.
Yes, I do not bother eating out much since the pandemic, because while I can still afford it, it just feels like too much compared to the inconvenience of cooking at home.
Plus I can guarantee the home cooked meal is going to be awesome, whereas the eating out is a gamble, I have no idea what financial constraints the restaurant is under and what corners they are cutting.
That number is so absolutely ridiculous that it deserves explicit sourcing. The article sources promotional material from a consulting firm that networks C-level execs, but this time they deigned to address others: "We also polled 1,007 full-time and part-time US-based employees between August 2 and August 3, 2021. We included the perspective of these employees in this report."
So that is where you are getting that number, which isn't reflected in any actual data from the BLS.
I've held basically the same job since graduating almost a decade ago, but the pandemic has done it for me. I'm paid well, treated well, and work on interesting things, but it's fundamentally an on-site job where I interact with a lot of people, most of whom are blue collar and from high risk Covid communities. I have 2 children under 5 and so even with a vaccine I'm putting them at risk every day I go into work.
I currently am burning all ~12 weeks of my accumulated vacation days as a "leave of absence" as I look for another job as a pure software engineer. I do software in my day job but we don't keep up with the software industry trends like Docker etc. so I'm having to learn that on top of grinding Leetcode.
> I have 2 children under 5 and so even with a vaccine I'm putting them at risk every day I go into work.
If that makes you feel any better, they are at less risk now than before pandemics. For children under 5, COVID is less dangerous than flu, and thanks to COVID changes in travel and behavior patterns, flu is pretty much nonexistent. If you weren’t worrying about your children getting flu, you shouldn’t worry much about them getting COVID. Hope that makes you feel better.
I personally know 20-30 people looking for new jobs due to the vaccine and masking mandates. At least 3-4 families I spoke with around my home in Illinois are leaving Illinois out of concern (in various levels of moving). It’s why I bought land and started a farm earlier this year.
I don’t think people realize how much fear and anger there is under the surface. People don’t move their families for fun, they do so for opportunity.
The New York City vaccine mandate alone is massive. There’s no medical exemption and impacts employees and consumers alike.
I'm moving out of IL for this reason. I'll be working fully remote from a farm for the rest of my life. Not interested in participating in this totalitarian, political virtue-signaling.
Overall, I believe the average workplace (in tech) is much more into only tolerating the "correct" viewpoint than previously. There are lots of examples beyond vaccines, even if having health choices and subsequent proof of them forced on you seems like the most extreme.
Even before the vaccine stuff, one of the big factors in my change of job was all the protesting and politics and extremism. It's pretty easy to just keep your head down and go through the motions, and I expect that's what most do. But given the choice, I'd rather "bring my whole self to work" which includes holding and discussing opinions in a non- fanatical manner and not being forced to, as you say, signal my alignment with non-work related groupthink.
For example, I don't use drugs but I would not work somewhere that subjected me to a drug test. It's no different than being vaccinated but not agreeing to share that information with my work or anyone else that asks. The first opinion seems acceptable for now, the second gets me called an anti-vaxxer
The media tried to portray a lot of pandemic trends as one-way changes to our society and economies, but so far I’ve been surprised at how quickly everything has been snapping back to pre-pandemic normalcy after the temporary disruptions work their way through the systems. This goes for everything from lumber prices to work from home policies. Everything feels slightly altered, but trending back to pre-pandemic norms.
I expect to pay slightly more for lumber and have slightly more work from home options, but it hasn’t been the sea change of forever elevated prices and everyone working from home forever like it was portrayed months ago. I suspect this job-hopping trend will likewise calm down once things re-establish equilibrium.