A survey by Stack Overflow shows that both young and long-standing developers are increasingly thinking about changing employers.
Whether they are newcomers to the field or seasoned veterans within the developer community, a substantial proportion of developers, as revealed in a survey condu...
you're meant to move jobs every few years, you can keep employees a few years longer with stock incentives or yearly raises but if there's no financial advantage to staying, why would I? Like if it's better in every single way to move, why stay?
For the first time in my career I'm actually not in this position. Found an employer that's an ex engineer and just "gets it". Good compensation, good benefits, and invests in all of our understanding and careers. Sucks seeing all the people just let go so I'm surprised this survey has this result.
Maybe it was conducted before this season of let gos.
Looks like the survey was done this month (Oct 2023).
The recent let goes have been strongly over-publicized in a desperate effort to keep software developer salaries down.
The actual change in the unemployment rate of software developers was a fraction of a percentage.
It's easily the biggest shift in the employment rate of developers we've seen in at least a decade. But it also did almost nothing to relieve the actual backlog of unmet demand for developers.
"But why do we hear so many stories of developers having trouble finding jobs?"
I'm glad you asked. (Steps up in soap box.)
Because for the first time in forever the shitty employers who can't keep their developers feel like they have negotiating power, and they love the feeling, and are making a big show of it. Those assholes are posting the majority of the current available jobs, because folks like me don't need to hire right now.
I don't need to hire right now, because I give my team a pay bump when the developer market rate guess up. It went up this year. I bumped their pay to match. They still work for me. Who could possibly have predicted that would work? Everyone could have, except somehow asshat-mc-always-hiring.
Most of the employers gloatingly turning down less-than-ideal candidates are going to completely miss this opportunity to hire at all, and will go back to paying 3x consulting rates to smaller firms that charge them $300.00 per hour worked. And rightly so. They suck and deserve to pay extra for sucking.
Source: I often get to charge these clowns an arm and a leg simply because I can, and they cannot, recruit and retain developer talent. I do try to mentor them on the topic, because I simply don't have the time to find and charge them all the glorious money they deserve to get charged. But I'm only one person, and I can only write so many huge invoices to huge assholes.
My mentoring attempts aside, I have job security because the majority of them don't actually want to get any less stupid about the whole thing.
Curious how you're finding clients you can charge an arm and a leg. We sometimes get those, but mostly we get startups who are like "Our last consultants made a mess and we only have twelve thousand dollars left. Can you save us? We'll be putting a bunch of pressure on you because we're broke and desperate, and we're also super suspicious because we think the last guys ripped us off." I'm in a space where I'd prefer assholes who pay (and who I can fire if they're too dickish) over anxious founders on tight budgets.
I'm in the same position finally! I actually left for a few months a year ago to chase a stupidly good offer, but ended up hating the culture and company. They welcomed me back with open arms after earnest well wishes for my journey when I left.
The contrast to so many tech jobs I've had is amazing, it really does show how a focus on the employees impacts quality of life. Everyone here is invested in making our team successful and it shows in the quality of work. It's interesting how not having to worry about politics or wondering how to cover your ass lets you focus on the product.
Being open to new opportunities and being dissatisfied with you job are different things. I've mainly meant that these statistics are biased. Hypothesis is that people not interested in doing their work hang out on SO instead, as a result a lot of people hanging out on SO are "considering a career move".