I guess everyone is learning their own lessons during this period of tumult in the world, a lot of people are quitting their jobs and moving on to better things. You're seeing it everywhere, my favorite radio host Molly Wood even, no one is safe. Now that I think about it, Marketplace has had multiple resignation in the past year.
It's noticeable in the public sphere, but in the private sector too, especially among software developers and other technology workers, everyone is jumping ship. I updated my resume just so I could see what's going on and I immediately understood; they are throwing tons of money 💰 around out there, and everyone is hiring. If your dream job is out there, now is the time to get it. I talked to Facebook, Amazon, The New York Times Food Section (probably my favorite), and some others. What I found was that even though all these roles would offer more money none of them would offer the amount of power, control, and autonomy that I'm afforded in my current role, and that means a lot to me.
Working at the National Center for Missing Children, a place with a mission and a hard problem, is kind of a dream job for me even though it doesn't give me access to the resources that I would have at other organizations, and I end up weighing that against every other position out there and I find most of them to be lacking. I talked to a recruiter from Zillow (He didn't say 'Zillow' but he could only possibly be describing Zillow) the other day and he said their salary range was from 150k-250k which is 🍌👖 (banana-pants) money but at the end of the day, what would I actually be doing with my life? I hate the idea of making some obnoxiously rich people even richer using technology when there are so many other more important problems to solve.
I had no idea how much working on a valuable problem was worth to me before the pandemic and the great resignation, I learned that I have a really great job. My team is all hand-picked by me, we work on an interesting technology stack: .NET/Java, MySql/MongoDb, Angular/Bootstrap, and it's all latest greatest (at least as much as our tiny team can afford to keep up). We operate like other advanced teams, we use build and test automation for continuous integration, and we're working towards continuous delivery, but we're not quite there yet. All in all, I can't complain.
I've also noticed that very few of my co-workers have quit (so far), I haven't had any of my direct reports or team members leave, which I think says a lot. Nothing is set in stone though, for sure I will still leave for the right opportunity:
A job at a climate focused technology company (non-profit preferably) that's committed to saving the planet from burning as soon as possible. I would do that job, but they would have to pay more than I'm making now, and it would have to be 100% remote.