Ernest Ogbuanya spent pandemic works from home in Virginia, near Amazon’s HQ2, which supports the Amazon Web Services network. Work can be stressful – thousands of businesses rely on the Amazon cloud – but Ogbuanya likes to know work is important and he can do it without leaving home. Then Amazon announced that people would back to the office in January. That didn’t fly for Ogbuanya. So when a hiring manager approached from a completely remote job at OutSystems, he jumped at the chance and even took a pay cut. “Being able to work from home permanently is attractive to me,” he says.
Ogbuanya is not alone in rethinking his priorities for work. Many Americans have given up smoking their jobs over the past few months more than ever, many cited the job requirements as no longer worth the paycheck. For tech workers – who are already well-paid and in demand – this has led to a reshuffle in the industry. Tech workers are transitioning between jobs with new demands, including the ability to work remotely, more flexible working hours, and more time on meaningful tasks.
Kit Merker, COO of Nobl9, a software reliability platform, said: “When I talk to engineers, one of their priorities, aside from freedom and flexibility, is really about ways in which work can become important. . “It used to be about campus, perks, money. But if you’re sitting at home and you don’t have access to the kitchenette, the bartenders, the massages, what really separates one job from another? ”
Merker runs a Conference for engineers on site reliability, and said many people in that line of work have been exhausted by the need to keep platforms up and running during the pandemic. Companies that make products for remote work (Slack, Zoom), video streaming (Netflix) or delivery (Doordash, Amazon) all face higher demand, coupled with higher expectations from customers on the level of technology performance. Merker says some engineers are questioning whether the stress is worth it. “It gives people anger about existence,” he said. “Like, ‘I’m building software to get food delivered. That’s great, but man, it’s killing me. ‘”
Joseph B. Fuller, director of the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School, says: “You’ve had people say, ‘Now that I think about it, I’ve got a crap job. That’s one of the reasons he and other economists saw white-collar workers, including those in the tech industry, look for new jobs in the last year. Fuller calls this phenomenon the Great Rethink: It’s not a complete opt out of the workforce, but a re-evaluation of what tech workers can expect to get out of. their next job.
ONE poll from Citrix in September found that 35% of tech workers leaving their jobs attributed to burnout. In their new jobs, 40% of workers prioritize flexibility and another 41% seek benefits beyond financial security — including broader benefits perks.
For some people, happiness includes less time spent on hard work and fewer calls at night and on weekends. Zac Nickens, hiring manager at OutSystems, says hiring candidates frequently ask about how the team’s workload is divided. One advantage, he says, is that his team is distributed across three geographic regions: some in North America, some in Portugal, others in India and Malaysia. Working across multiple time zones “prevents us from having a standard rotation of ‘I’m calling day and night,'” he says. “We also share weekends between those teams, every 12 weeks someone gets called up on the weekend. That’s really appealing to engineers.”
OutSystems is also a remote-first company, which is an advantage in hiring engineers like Ogbuanya. While some tech companies have announced they will be returning to an in-office culture next year, many are finding their employees are used to working wherever they like. Deel, an international payroll and compliance startup, has seen a 20% increase in the number of its clients hiring abroad. Some, like Netflix, are expanding globally; others, like Coinbase, have embraced a “remote-first” office culture where employees can work from anywhere in the world. But others had to give in to the talent that wanted to leave the country. “We had some big companies come up to us and say, ‘My best engineer is going back to Croatia. Alex Bouaziz, Deel’s co-founder and CEO, says. “They have no choice.”
