Why Senior Developers Are Leading the Great Resignation Movement

Photo by Ali Kazal on Unsplash

The Great Resignation Movement is turning the US job market upside down.

Around 4 million employees left their jobs in July 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This should be surprising, especially in an aftermath of the pandemic, where the economy of the entire world is in shambles.

What is more surprising is that programmers are leading this movement.

According to data, 3.6% more healthcare professionals quit their jobs. This is understandable, considering the health risks and stress associated with the handling of pandemics.

However, in the tech industry, the rise in resignations stood at 4.5%.

While there is no data for developers outside the US, developers globally are quite in the negotiation mode about remote and other job conditions with their employers.

This, despite the fact that among all other professions struck by pandemic, programmers had it the easiest: They got to be fully remote. This not only gave them the comfort of home + family but also brought down their monthly survival budgets by opening up relocation opportunities.

Why?

The tipping point came far earlier:

Any booming industry can have employee turnover problems. However, turnover simply means that one company’s loss can be another company’s gain. During my 2 decades of software career, I witnessed high employee turnover only 2 times:

• During 2002–2007, soon after the dot-com bust, Google rose as the prominent search engine. This was indeed the pivotal timeframe with minimal or no regulations around tech. WordPress, YouTube, Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, StackOverflow — all of them became the information engine of the planet.
• Soon after the Lehman Brother’s crisis of 2008 (in the decade following 2010), the FAAMG 1st rung (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google) solidified their positions. Cloud became mainstream. Agile became the defacto industry standard. The idea of Lean Startup began to define great profitable software. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Netflix, and Slack created…