Much time and more ink has been spent by a large number of “journalists” (*snorts*) on the rather hot topic of the “Great Resignation”. For those of you who, like me, aren’t exactly “up” with what the Cool Kids talk about in the playground these days, this is the catchphrase used to describe how “significant numbers” of people are walking away from office jobs for prestigious employers.

There is some debate amongst market watchers as to whether the problem is real or not. From my point of view, it seems to be yet another mostly overblown story. However, there does appear to be some kernel of truth to it.

Since I’m a maths geek by nature and training, let’s look at some numbers.

The MAFF of the Great Resignation

In America, at least, the numbers indicate that there is definitely something going on:

• 2.9 percent — the share of the nation’s workforce that quit in August
• 4.8 percent — the U.S. unemployment rate in September, a pandemic low
• 10.4 million — unfilled U.S. jobs (Labor Department)
• 51 percent — business owners who said the have jobs openings they can’t fill (National Federation of Independent Business)
• 48 percent — the share of America’s working population actively looking for a job or watching for opportunities (Gallup, July)
• 61.6 percent — labor participation rate in September, versus 63.3 percent in February 2020
• 4.3 million — jobs that have vanished with the pandemic-era drop in labor participation

However, the problem here is that America under the Fake President has a severely distorted labour market. Red states have tight labour markets. Texas, South Dakota, Tennessee, Florida, and others, have adopted strongly pro-business, pro-freedom policies that do not result in endless lockdowns, mask mandates, and clot-shot requirements.

The Blue states, on the other hand, have adopted all of that idiocy, and then some, which is why the number of Americans fleeing retarded Blue states for less-retarded Red ones has hit record highs. (And, in the process, they are turning those former Red states purple – which is a pretty strong argument, in my view, for banning Clownipornians from ever emigrating from the shithole that used to be Clownipornia, unless they forswear their right to vote for 20 years.)

So it is difficult to get a proper picture just by looking at the USA.

The View From Across the Pond

If you look at the market in PommieBastardLande, the situation is actually worse (or better, depending on your point of view) over there:

2021 saw a huge rise in the number of workers leaving their jobs. In the UK, 19 million workers handed in their notice between March and July 2021, leaving more than 10 million job vacancies. These statistics are reflected across the globe, with 4 million US workers quitting in the month of July alone.

And this ‘Great Resignation’ shows no sign of abating any time soon. A survey of more than 6,000 employees by recruitment firm Randstad UK in September 2021 reported that 69 per cent of workers felt confident to move on to a new role in the coming months with nearly a quarter actively planning a move within three.

However, the response of many organisations to this employee crisis may bear little fruit. A recent survey of 160 HR leaders found that 52 per cent were intending to increase pay and benefits to attract and retain talent. But, when speaking to more than 1,000 employees who have moved jobs in the last months, only 29 per cent received a pay rise in their new role; 23 per cent were paid the same; and 13 per cent actually took a pay cut to move jobs. Indeed, when asked why they quit, only 19 per cent stated insufficient benefits. 

Certainly, there does seem to be a strong hiring push across a number of industries in the UK. Companies appear to be short of talent and manpower – yes, that’s sexist, but it’s also accurate, so get over it – and are, in some cases, desperate to hire people.

However, employers would do well to remember one thing, and remember is well:

They deserve EVERYTHING that they are going through right now, especially the big companies that hire people and use ’em like beans.

Employers Don’t Walk Their Talk

Here are some basic, hard truths about how most employers treat their employees. This isn’t just at large companies, of course – plenty of SME employers are guilty of these exact same practices. But I have experience working for two of the biggest banks in the world, for nearly 10 years, and I can say with a great deal of confidence that once you start working for a company with over 500 employees, everything that follows applies pretty much universally.

1. They ALL Spout the Same Bullshit

How many times have you heard, either from a company’s HR department (*gags*), or from the corporate suits sent out on recruiting drives to meet impressionable young idiots who don’t know any better, that “our people are our most important resource”?

That is pure nonsense. In many (not all) companies, employees are their single biggest cost. And that is to be expected. But that also means that, when the time comes to cut costs, this is always the FIRST place where the penny-pinchers in Accounting will go to find “cost savings”.

If they don’t cut employees, they will always cut into the things that actually matter to employee success – specifically, R&D, training and development courses, and basic creature comforts in and around the office. This is a weird paradox, but the evidence on the subject is clear – if you cut deeply into human capital, your company WILL NOT RECOVER QUICKLY.

Why? It’s not that hard to figure out, actually. When you slash workforces and budgets, you inevitably end up cutting a great many loyal, hardworking people with deep knowledge of the company and its processes. You therefore end up losing huge amounts of knowledge and experience locked up in people’s heads. And you CANNOT replace that easily.

2. Loyalty Goes Only One Way

I have been through three layoffs, one failed project, one failed internship, and at least three HUNDRED failed job applications, in the past 13 years. And all of that pain and misery has taught me very clearly that corporations only care about the bottom line – not about you.

This is just a fact in the modern day. Your company is not loyal to you, but it expects loyalty from you. The Scamdemic proved this beyond any shadow of a doubt:

Throughout the pandemic, workers were treated significantly worse by the government than their employers were. Companies had nearly half a trillion dollars of Paycheck Protection Program funds forgiven while stimulus checks for households were restricted based on income. And corporate America did little to help their employees fill the financial gaps left by the government’s piecemeal aid.

Workers are taught to “climb the corporate ladder” and to stay with a company for at least a year to prove that they’re not flaky job-hoppers. We’re taught as kids that loyalty to a company is good and that we’ll be rewarded for our hard work with bonuses, promotions, and perks. But when the pandemic hit, what did employers do? Four percent of employers dropped an insurance benefit within a few months, and despite getting PPP loans, many still laid off workers.

Read the full article that I linked, it’s well worth the time. Employers will look out for themselves, and their shareholders, FIRST, and you LAST. That is just the way of it – and, if you are honest with yourself, you will admit that, if positions were reversed, you would probably behave the same way.

Perhaps, though, after you read through this article, you might change your ways.

3. You Have ZERO Room for Error

When I started out at my third job at Big Bad Globobank #2, within 3 months, I had to take on the jobs of 3 other people. Due to layoffs and hiring freezes, managers simply couldn’t give me any decent support. And I had traders on my arse constantly, demanding that their trades be captured and P&L be delivered in timely fashion.

It was a brutal, painful, miserable time. And I was getting very little support from above my boss’s level – he did the best that he could to help, but his hands were tied. And this all happened in an environment of continued layoffs.

So I changed my corporate IM status to a riff on that old Japanese WWII sub commander’s line. You know the one – “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.

It took people a couple of months to notice, but when someone did, HR jumped straight down my throat, and claimed – hysterically – that I was threatening people and a potential danger to my co-workers.

Initially, I laughed at them and thought that they were morons. But, in order to keep my job, and my status in the country at the time, I had to issue a grovelling apology. And it did NOTHING to help me in the long run – a permanent black mark went into my employee file, and I lost out on thoroughly deserved promotions for the next 2 years.

Make ONE mistake, and the HR department will force you onto your knees with the threat of losing your job. That’s the reality of corporate life. And that is because…

4. Corporate Types are Cowards

The Randian vision of the bold, risk-taking, Alpha-male CEO is an utter myth. The reality is that most corporate CEOs – and other C-suite officers – got to that position by being uncontroversial “company men”. They never took real risks. They did what the company told them. And they did everything possible to go in the direction that the wind is blowing.

The one thing that they cannot stand, is criticism from the rich and the powerful. They don’t want scrutiny or attention – they just want to get on with “business”.

We saw one of the most brazen examples of corporate cuckery from Mat Best and Evan Hafer, the leaders of Black Rifle Coffee Company, during the Saga of the Hero Kyle Rittenhouse. Mat and Evan initially backed The Hero Kyle Rittenhouse – but the moment that real scrutiny descended upon them, they cucked and ran. They did everything possible to suck us in, pretending that they support a strong and free conservative nation. And they lied.

The reality is that most corporate types crave (((media)))))))) attention and approval. They don’t really respect their own customers, until and unless those customers start hitting them where it hurts – their profits. And they don’t want to do anything to upset the rich and the powerful, because they aspire to be like them.

Given these harsh realities, this means that…

5. Hard Work Has Little Correlation With Success

I grew up with the mantra that, if you work hard, you get good things. And, at least when I was in school, that did apply. It was true. When I studied, I got good grades – and when I slacked off, I did badly. There was thus a clear link between work and reward.

But corporate life is completely different, and it took me nearly 12 years of repeated mistakes and failures to realise it.

That doesn’t mean that I stopped working hard – I’m stubborn and stupid, and fundamentally, I take pride in doing a good job when people are paying me for something. These are good and admirable qualities that my father taught me, and his father taught him.

In the corporate world, though, those good qualities do not have much to do with how well you perform in the workplace.

I have seen LITERAL IDIOTS get promoted and receive pay raises, while the people who did the actual work, get shafted. (I got the shaft, repeatedly, for YEARS.) Every one of you undoubtedly has similar stories, plural, to tell.

You might ask yourself – how, exactly, do such idiots keep getting hired? Well, that’s because…

6. HR is Full of Incompetent Morons

Working in HR really is like cleaning toilets – you just catch shit all the time. And, let’s be honest, it doesn’t take a lot of skill to clean toilets – though I firmly believe that your average toilet cleaner has more intelligence, decency, integrity, and honour than virtually any HR type.

If you have ever had the deep misfortune to interact with anyone from HR, you know that most of them (there ARE exceptions) are in HR because they are totally useless at anything else. HR is where you put the dimmest bulbs, the stupidest and most unqualified people. Unfortunately, this is ALSO where the least-qualified, yet most-political, people can always enter a company. HR performance is extremely difficult to measure – how, exactly, do you quantify hiring success, or payroll delivery consistency? After all, most of HR’s functions these days can be completely automated and outsourced.

And yet, HR wields extraordinary power within most companies, despite the total lack of accomplishment of most of the people in that department. If you piss off ANYONE in the company, HR gets involved, and has the power to terminate your employment on the spot.

Why is that? Recall what I said above – most corporate types are COWARDS. Most managers don’t have the balls or the decency, or the ability, to confront problems within their own teams and divisions. They outsource these problems instead, by reporting people to HR.

This gives HR inordinate power without commensurate responsibility. The simplest solution would be to fire 80-90% of all personnel within HR, outsource critical functions like payroll, and force line managers to take responsibility for their own teams. There are now billion-dollar startups that run, quite well, without HR departments. So there are encouraging signs that things are changing, at least with respect to HR incompetence ruining corporations.

But none of this changes the core reality of modren office work, which is that…

7. Most Office Jobs Don’t Need Face-to-Face Collaboration

The Great Scamdemic showed conclusively that modern technology allows most white-collar jobs to be done remotely. It’s just that simple. You don’t need to be in the office all the time to be effective. I have run multiple projects without interacting in person with my teams, for over a year. It’s really not that hard. And, to be honest, for a cranky, grumpy deep introvert like me, not having to meet people and listen to their inane nonsense all day long, is a huge benefit.

That does not mean that ALL jobs can be done remotely – the very idea is idiotic. We NEED truck drivers, factory workers, sailors, dockworkers, policemen, firefighters, plumbers, electricians, shelf-stockers, and so on and so forth.

The very least of those men – and they are overwhelmingly men – has contributed VASTLY more to society than I ever have, and probably more than I ever will.

I deeply respect such men, because they are better men than me. I can do whatever I do using Zoom, Skype, Teams, or WebEx, on a laptop. But I can’t do what they can do. So I don’t look down upon them.

I DO look down on people who say that you need to be in the office to collaborate and work with people. That’s nonsense. Very few white-collar professions really require a lot of hardware and software – capital markets trading is one of those. Beyond that, you just don’t need to be in the office to do most jobs these days. So why bother?

The Truth About Corporate Success

This might seem an odd tangent, but it is important. Now, pay close attention, my friend, because I am about to reveal to you the single biggest secret of corporate success. This is something that many people (including dumbasses like me) pay HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS to go to business school to learn. I’m giving it to you FOR FREE.

Are you ready?

Really?

OK, here goes:

Corporate strategy and corporate design must always and everywhere be perfectly aligned. If they are not, the firm will FAIL.

This makes complete intuitive sense, if you think about it. As a professor I know loves to say, “Strategy is like a jigsaw puzzle – every piece must fit together PERFECTLY with all of the others”.

From this law come several useful corollaries;

• When the external environment changes to the point where the corporate strategy no longer aligns against it, the firm’s design will fail;
• The time for a firm to update its design and strategy, is IMMEDIATELY after the top management team recognises that there is a problem;
• The longer that a firm delays its reorganisation, the harder it will be to turn things around;
• By the time a firm is near failure, it is very nearly too late, and turning it around has a success rate of perhaps 10% at most;
• Finally, if firms continue to operate in the same stupid ways, doing the same stupid things, the market will shift fundamentally and irreversibly, and they will be caught short;

The Scamdemic exposed, very clearly, just how badly designed most firms really are, especially with respect to their alignment between employees and the overall managerial strategies of most firms.

THIS IS WHY SO MANY EMPLOYEES ARE LEAVING – because their personal strategies do not align with the firm’s strategies, and therefore the firm’s design does not match what employees want.

Firms have responded, so far, by trying to blame employees, or entice them back with incentives. It’s not working. The bland mask has been ripped off the faces of most corporate managers, and we now see the chaos, incompetence, and cavalier disregard for employee well-being beneath it all.

Conclusion – Badly Designed Employers Deserve to Fail

The Great Resignation is happening because employees can see, for themselves, what they are really worth these days. They have tasted freedom, in the most paradoxical way, during the Great Scamdemic and the ensuing lockdowns, and they like what they see. People have been able to explore a life beyond just work, and that is very much to the good.

In the process, they have learned that working with other people genuinely SUCKS.

The reality is that most teams are staffed by mediocre people who don’t have very good ideas and don’t work hard. The hard work doesn’t get done by “teams” – it gets done by one or two people with real vision, skill, and ability, who do the really hard work, tell people what to do, and put everything together.

Put another way: “the secret to success in this shop is to find the one or two people who are not complete incompetents, and work them to death”. That’s the reality of corporate life.

Employers should not be surprised that their people are leaving. Instead, they should be surprised that it took them so bloody long to pull the trigger.

How do employers fix this problem? It is not easy, but how about we start with one simple principle:

STOP TREATING YOUR PEOPLE LIKE DISPOSABLE COGS IN DEPRECIATING MACHINES.

Invest in them. Train them. Understand that layoffs are metaphorical murders of human souls. Give them ownership over their own projects and make them feel like they are genuinely valued for their talents, rather than just what they contribute.

By that same token – ruthlessly weed out the idiots, the incompetents, the malingerers, the gossips, and especially the SJWs. Promote based on merit (which is actually very hard to do, in practice, and any manager who says otherwise is lying, because merit is often genuinely difficult to measure in some occupations).

Critically – leave your smart and competent people ALONE, and let them get on with the job. Don’t burden them down with a bunch of stupid shit that stops them from doing their jobs – but rein them in, gently at first and increasingly firmly with each subsequent infraction – when they step out of line and do or say something dumb.

Finally, and most importantly, treat your employees like you want to be treated. Treat them like HUMAN BEINGS, not irritating inconveniences.