Are you part of the Great Resignation, if so what's your story?

My partner and I are both sick and tired of feeling like our purpose in life is to make rich people richer, and we reached the age where we realized there is no glory in corporate life, only a endless hamster wheel.

So we quit our jobs, sold our house, and bought a sailboat that we are working on making fully independent with solar and a watermaker. We still need money though. In the short term we have a cash buffer, in the long term we are hoping to do two things, optimize our cost of living and increase the revenue of the side business. If we are unable to balance the needle within three years, we will start taking on freelance assignments.

Absolutely. I worked more or less happily at a company for nearly 15 years and had hit a comfortable spot where pay was good enough, responsibility was okay, but there was a soft ceiling above me in terms of progression. I had come to terms with it and thought "meh, this is fine, I'll semi-coast 10 years to retirement".

The pandemic opened up the possibility of remote work for a company overseas in a completely different field. I chewed on it for nearly six months but ended up taking the jump. My previous employer was totally shocked, even going so far as to offer an on the spot promotion (during my resignation phone call) they had been dangling for about a year. Now I'm earning more and stretching myself again -- it was 100% the right call, although a bit less stable.

This would have never happened without the pandemic both creating the possibility of change (remote work) and the flash point of stress over a year or two that made me wonder about something different.

I've had a few close friends quit and essentially retire at the age of 30, and it's only possible because they have wealthy families who gave them early inheritances - it's really quite amazing how rich some people are.

I hear all these stories about people quitting like that, but how are they paying/how did they think they would pay the bills? I'm very curious.

I'm not sure there's much of a phenomenon begging for explanation. As the article itself says, this is a more of a great reshuffling than people just deciding not to work any more and mysteriously managing to not go broke. US labor force participation was 63.4% immediately before the pandemic shut down and it's 62.1% right now. That isn't a drastic difference and roughly in line with long-term downward trends. Whatever excess drop that truly represents is likely explained by some combination of excess deaths, early retirements, and second income-earners that didn't really "need" to work but either did so anyway because it was sufficiently worth it or they had nothing else worth doing, and they changed their minds.

You're not going to find out the exact breakdown with a self-selected sample of a few hundred Hacker News readers.

As for an explanation of why churn rates went up so much (that is, people are quitting jobs at a much higher rate even if they largely are not completely leaving the workforce), that seems pretty easily explained by the move to remote work. I'm not meeting your criteria here because I didn't change industries, but as soon as it became possible to work for a Silicon Valley software company paying much higher rates than any local company without being required to relocate, I absolutely did that. Labor has far more options now that they aren't limited to only working for companies with an office within commuting distance.

I only know 2 people that have actually opted out of working and for both of them, they are married and made that change for childcare. Personally I took an opportunity to upgrade my title & pay and so have a lot of people in my LinkedIn.

The rhetoric in tech has been that you need to change jobs every few years to keep a competitive pay because companies will reward your complacency with uncompetitive raises. To me it just seems like a lot more people are buying into that now than previously.

It did. But recently, with Russian aggression, inflation and looming crisis, I've become the part of The Great Coming Back.

Yes, the pandemic motivated me to take an earlier retirement that switched into part time work, and perhaps a career change.

Wife and I had worked toward FIRE for a while. In 2021 it became financial viable. We have been transient in North America and Europe since October 2021. Our plan was to never work again, but some friends convinced me to take a contract job that is ~25 hours a week.

My motivations for leaving: New manager due to re-org, company's goals changed, non-necessity of work for survival, identity issues around career, pressure from family because I wasn't happy. All those motivations lead to suicidal thoughts. I have always done ux, design, and front end development. I think I am going to start a more traditional computer science education path because I find it enjoyable and could be fun for a second career.

It's mostly the Great Reshuffling.

People figure out that they don't have to accept crappy working conditions and the COLA raises they got are not covering the inflation. Some quit figuring that they'll take a break.

Employers had to offer better pay/work conditions to attract new people. People that left told everyone. People that stayed figured out they were paid peanuts compared to the newbs. Welcome positive feedback loop.

I definitely reshuffled rather than resigned, but once I realized remote work was going to be my future, I quit my job for one with substantially better pay and benefits. I almost doubled my salary in the space of about a year (between new position + promotion after six months).

I was probably going to leave my previous employer eventually, but it would have taken longer and been contingent on many other things.

I was on a (unofficial but agreed upon w leadership) sabbatical at the end of 2019/start of 2020 and was no longer there for me when I returned. I took a new role with a 40k pay cut so I could pay the bills. I resigned near the end-ish of Covid when I was able to find employment back on a more accurate career path (50k raise).

Not really a career change. But I got a job that allowed me to permanently work remotely. My increase in pay allowed me to “retire my wife” so she could pursue her passions and we decided to rent out our house, sell our cars, and be “digital nomads” staying in hotels across the US and flying everywhere while I work.

Close, but I decided I'd stick it out and try to keep the job. It took me __so__fucking__ long to replace the one I lost at the start of the pandemic, that I just can't risk or want to go through that again yet. Otherwise, I absolutely value free time over marginal gains, if I was rebuilding from zero.

Retired at 61 after 30+ years.

Got pension, had "enough" pension, had "enough" of working and decide it was the time.

Feel quite sorry for my younger colleagues going to agile stand-up meetings that add to workplace strictures more than they create "fun energy".

I'm likely counted as one of them, though it wasn't by choice, it was Long Covid.

At this point I can do about 4 stints of 15 minutes of physical labor per day, if I'm careful about it. I'm 1/12 as useful as I used to be, which is barely enough to avoid ending up in a nursing home bed.

i changed careers and leveraged it into a business.

Pandemic hit, I had been working at an online education company as a senior engineer. New CEO begins to implement dark patterns- launches “free” degree programs to “help those impacted by the pandemic” that starts charging you after first free month, but at same time makes it impossible to cancel your subscription through website, even sets up a whole call center system to shuttle people into. Become incredibly demotivated by how our company misled struggling young people into a difficult situation. Do my best to pitch new ideas and sort of remedy the situation but am left with a terrible taste in my mouth.

Get shingles from stress, working insane hours as I am now working from home, no work/life separation. Company had absolute insane micro service architecture, to the point of being a parody. Fires every other week, people jumping on at all hours to dive into why service X caused service Y and Z to fail. Hundreds of services owned by just handful of teams means your days are filled with meetings discussing impact of plans on other services, just so far from being agile, juniors all the way up to your best engineers are caught up in bureaucracy.

Then my mother gets highly aggressive brain cancer, I’m going to her doctor appointments with her, trying to help figure out her options. Work no longer matters, I can’t even pretend to care. We discover she will die within months, ask company for family medical leave, they give me three months, but she is still alive after this time so I quit. We go on a road trip together, it is nice but also she is seeing her limitations, lack of balance, failing eye sight, it’s sort of dawning on her that the end is near. She got medication to end her life and dies in her living room with her three children and her brother and her husband there.

I break my arm badly, need surgery, no longer have medical coverage, over 10k dollars spent on cobra + deductibles. Would have been in worse place if cobra wasn’t still available. After watching my mother concerned about thousand dollar brain scans with insurance and my own issues now have small glimpse into insane inequity in medical system within the states.

My partner quits her job and we travel across the United States for 3 months for relief and in search of cheaper land to maybe build a farm. The US is beautiful but nowhere is really that special compared to where we are from (our biggest take away is more how similar everywhere is). We travel to Europe for 3 months, visit her family and come back. Travel back across the states to the west coast with goals of starting a company and getting a house.

Want to work part time but cannot get a loan without salaried position. Starting back where I left off again, entertaining offer for much smaller startup hoping to start with better work-life separation and exercising every day, staying active and taking regular breaks. Life is overwhelming but exciting and we look forward to having a stable home and income again.