📥 Your Weekly Career Digest #5

💸 The State of Startup Compensation 2022

Interesting report by Carta with insights from tech startups.

Key trends:

• Remote hiring soars: In 2019, about 35% of new hires were based in a different state than the primary company headquarters. So far this year, that number has ballooned up to 62%.

• Geo-adjusting is the norm: The vast majority of companies (84%) take employee location into account when deciding on compensation packages.

• Engineering is a key hire: Engineering accounts for nearly half of payroll spend in companies valued between $1 and 10 million.

• Terminations rise: Across all of Carta’s platform, involuntary terminations made up 29% of departures in May 2022 (the rest were employees leaving their jobs by choice). That’s nearly double the 15% termination share recorded in August of 2021.

Key Charts:

More in the full article here.

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🔙 The Great Resignation Could turn into the Great Employee Return

In the latest article by CNBC, a recent survey of more than 15,000 job seekers by job-search platform Joblist shows that 26% of workers who quit regret their decision. Among the reasons why:

• Finding a new job has been more difficult than expected (40%)

• They miss their former colleagues (22%)

• The new job is not what they hoped for (17%)

• Their former job was better than they realized (16%)

• There's bad culture and management at their new company (9%)

Now, if we were to leave out for a moment the 40% of people who quit without having another job (which is a much more drastic move, meaning they were severely stressed or unsatisfied - what surprises me, is how big ‘missing their colleagues’ and ‘not what they hoped for’ (and its variations, they all signal the same problem) make up; a whopping 60%. 

I would expect dissatisfaction when joining new jobs to have been quit high, but in this case it seems that the major driver of the resignation has been the need for change, and this may have pushed some to look for alternative short term solutions more than in ‘normal’ times.

I see this as being connected with one of the previous articles, where we saw 'lack of career advancement’ as the #1 reason driving people to quit: employees are looking for change, progress - and they’re not finding it.

⏱The Future of work isn’t just remote; it’s part-time

We talked about work becoming personalized. But could one way to solve the above problem to be part-time work too?

Ernie Park, whose ‘Part-Time tech’ newsletter I suggest you give a spin - just posted an interesting article where he argues that people are moving towards part-time work, possibly starting to work for DAOs, Liquid Super Teams , side-hustles or consulting.

Having written about ‘Fractional Work’ and the dynamics driving some key paradigm shifts - I completely see this happening; the main issue is that is mostly from the point of view of privileged tech-workers who have high salaries and have saved up or can afford doing so (you can always move from employed, full-time monogamous work to fractional work but not do it part-time) but I think there’s a lot to explore here.

🤝 Remote work and Degree-less careers will require more networking

Last, I want to leave a short insight and more of an open-ended question.

As remote work and degree-less careers will become the new normal, we need to think of what side-effects this will bring in the long-run, especially for new generations. One of these, is definitely Networking.

Is building a network and making friends at work going to become more difficult in the future? Or is it going to be easier if we start working in more contribution-based, flexible kinds of organizations?

I’d love to know what you think / how you are approaching this (given I did write also ‘A Guide to make Networking work for you' 😌