Aug 20, 2021
The "Great Resignation" in Big Tech - Better Jobs, More Money
There seems to be a worker shortage. And many businesses are finding that, frankly, people involved in technology are resigning; they're calling it a great resignation of workers. We have a lot of problems as business people, filling jobs nowadays.
[Automated transcript]
[00:00:20] And one of the things I've thought about doing is maybe even starting a course for people who want to figure out if this whole cybersecurity thing is right for them. I think that might make a lot of sense for some people. And there are some of you listeners. I know, because I've talked to you who have gone out and.
[00:00:40] Gotten into, is that a word who have changed careers into the cybersecurity realm? So does it make sense for you? I don't know. Do you think it would make sense for me to offer something? A cybersecurity course to give you guys the basics and help you understand it and see if it might be good for you.
[00:01:00] Only, you know that, and if you're interested, make sure you drop me a note just to me, M E Craig peterson.com, and let me know what you think. Still, the big tech is suffering from this great resignation of workers and workers in the technology field right now. So it's a good time to leave. Now, this isn't the same as many workers who, for instance, were in the restaurant business for many years, were in food service.
[00:01:31] You make money. Maybe you don't make money. Who knows those. And, of course, those jobs pretty much disappeared during the lockup. Big tech, it's different from big tech. Most of these people, most of us, frankly, retained our jobs. We were still able to work, still able to do the stuff we'd always been doing. Still, we were doing it from home, and many employees looked at the situation and said, I am not going to leave.
[00:02:05] Because I don't know if I'll be able to get a new job. Does that make sense to you? So we have a bit of pent-up demand in the tech field of people who maybe didn't like the boss, didn't really like what they were doing but kept the job because at least it was a job. It paid some bills. And from the bottom-line standpoint, it didn't make sense to.
[00:02:29] Now we see something else going on; people are leaving like crazy Facebook here. There's a quote in an article in MarketWatch. Lost this guy named Raymond Andres. Who's now the chief technology officer at the air table. Now I've used air table before I was a client of theirs for a while. It's really something.
[00:02:52] If you need to do some essential project management or have a process for doing something. That needs to be tracked, and maybe something handed over to another person when it meets a particular stage. Check it out, air table.com online. Still, he left Facebook, and he said there's been a burst of activity of people leaving.
[00:03:15] If anything. The lockdown delayed decisions. And that's exactly what I was saying. I've been saying that for a very long time, but there's another factor involved when it comes to technology. And that is the funding, which is just amazing. You might remember a couple of years ago we had this. Brakes on IPO's on initial public offerings.
[00:03:40] These tech companies just were not going to go public at all. And because of that, many angel investors and venture capitalists said, forget about it. I'm not going to go ahead and make any sort of investment. So that is when many of these small companies just failed, and of course, incomes the lockdown, and even more of them died.
[00:04:03] But now. But the investors are a spinner spending a lot of money so far this year. There have been 84 initial public offerings in the US alone. Isn't that amazing? 50 plus billion dollars in IPO's. Now that's up from about 38 billion. Last year. So there's obviously money in the IPO world. So that gets the venture capitalists interested.
[00:04:36] So VC money is also at record highs. This year's track is to be the best year yet. According to PitchBook through June. This year 2021, $150 billion has been raised among about 7,000 deals. Now that's ahead of last year's record, a total of $164 billion for the year. So we're looking at some significant money going in.
[00:05:10] And we have many people leaving from Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple, maybe your company as well, who are saying, wow there's some real opportunity now I could get in on the ground floor. The VC money is a record high, so I can take at least some salary enough to make it heck I haven't had to pay rent for a year.
[00:05:33] So I can afford to do that, to try and. Something with some of my friends, and that's precisely what they're doing. Robert half, a company I've had on my show before Robert half international, did a survey. They found that about one-third of the almost 3000 information technology professionals.
[00:05:57] They surveyed said they planned to look for a new job in the next few months. They're also saying Robert half is that while employers posted more than 365,000 job openings in June alone, they're not getting filled; that's, by the way, the highest monthly. In about since September 2019, according to CompTIA, which is an industry trade group.
[00:06:25] I'm a member of that. My company is a member of comp Tia as well. So there are a lot of things happening that are really driving people to startups. And there's a lot of advantages to that. So here's another guy. This is an engineering manager who left Facebook last year. And he quickly returned.
[00:06:46] He said working at a startup, you have much more connection with employees, and things moved faster. So tiger graph, by the way, also hired ex-Googlers. And they're increasing the workforce this year too, about 300 from 90. So think about what they're doing. So that's not, yeah, technically, it's probably still a startup, but it's 300 employees.
[00:07:10] That's not us. That is a lot of employees, and they've got a lot of money behind them. Here's another guy. And she's saying, I thought I would be a lifer at Amazon. But this was a tremendous opportunity. I can have a far more significant impact and more influence on the company's trajectory, which quite frankly was harder at Amazon.
[00:07:33] And we're seeing more and more of particularly the younger employees looking at that. Her name's Anna fag fabric. Sorry about the names butchering here, but she's now at freshly. Officer. So many people are saying in this survey from Robert half international that having a chance to impact a smaller company was a significant reason for leaving.
[00:08:01] And that's after years of massive growth at big tech companies. So again, IBM in the 1970s. They were the ruler; they were the king. It was impossible. If you work for IBM, man, they're going to be around forever. And, of course, they still are. And they have excellent products, especially the Z series mainframe, but they're not the company they were.
[00:08:24] And I think we now are seeing. The next step in these big high-tech, but is no longer being the companies that they were innovation is going to leave with these employees, and they're going to really be hurt and hurt quite a bit. All right. So coming up, we're going to talk, of course, more about some of the more critical tech stuff you've got to. If you haven't already get on my email list, I'll send you a couple of special reports that we.
[00:08:54] As well as, of course, every week, one or two newsletters, not sales documents, newsletters, Craig peterson.com.