According to a recent survey of 1,800 professionals and senior managers in the United Kingdom by software business Ivanti, tech workers are among those who are most inclined to leave their jobs.
The survey found that IT workers are 1.4 times more likely to ‘silent resign’ than employees in other fields. This is the practice of taking a step back from work to the point that you occasionally accomplish the bare minimum while looking into alternative career paths.
Large-scale tech layoffs are still occurring, though not on the same scale as they were at the start of 2023. For your information, statistics show that this year, over 222,000 tech workers lost their jobs.
Walkouts Might Soon Follow Layoffs
It’s unclear exactly why there will likely be a large exodus of IT workers. Some people might look for a job with more security because they don’t want to live in a situation where they might suffer from the upcoming round of layoffs.
Others are finding it difficult to keep up with the rising expectations as the workforce gets smaller. According to the Ivanti study, over three-quarters (73%) of IT and computer security professionals reported higher workloads, with many of them also reporting burnout.
The fact that four out of five people (84%) said they would like to continue working remotely at least occasionally is another evidence towards this trend. Many businesses have since come out in favour of working from home, going back on their early promises made during the pandemic.
Employees at Google Cloud and Amazon have both expressed dissatisfaction with their respective companies’ revised return-to-office requirements so far this year. Both companies have desk-sharing policies that require employees to work in the office two days per week on alternate days with a coworker.
The study comes at a time when Amazon’s CEO has been asking his staff to come to the office at least three days a week.
Andy Jassy made the statement in an internal meeting in August 2023 where he reportedly expressed his reservation about some of the employees not turning up to the office three days a week, despite that now being Amazon’s official policy.
He said, “It’s past the time to disagree and commit. If you can’t disagree and commit … it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week.”
Jassy’s statement holds significance as in March 2023, Amazon stated about making an additional 9,000 employees redundant, on top of the 18,000 roles it had announced it has been cutting since January. Amazon employs 1.5 million people worldwide.
However, Jassy’s “past the time to disagree” comment comes amid the internal opposition in Amazon against the tougher stance on working from home. Almost 30,000 company staffers signed an internal petition against the return-to-office mandate in May 2023, which read, “Amazon’s top-down, one-size-fits-all RTO [return-to-office] mandate undermines the diverse, accessible future that we want to be a part of.”
Amazon employees also participated in a worldwide walkout to protest the company’s slow progress on climate goals and the return-to-office mandate.
In August 2023, reports surfaced about Amazon workers in the United States being tracked and penalised for not spending sufficient time in the company’s offices.
Amazon had instructed its corporate employees to return to the office three times a week from May 2023, in a reversal from its previous policies that allowed individual teams to decide whether colleagues needed to come into the office or not.
Other tech firms are also cracking down on working from home, including the video call company Zoom, which ironically benefitted immensely from the COVID lockdown-related shift in work culture. The US firm has now asked its staff to come in twice a week, although the policy applies to people living within 50 miles of the office.
Google too has asked its employees to report to the office at least three days a week. Other tech giants like Meta, X and Disney are making reporting to the office a must now.