• Your particular specialty/talents/expertise are in demand by a particularly troubled sector/industry/demographic. Like, mainframe specialists get used to losing a lot of their coworkers to heart attacks, cancer, and retirement. Specialists in the technologies for bioinformatics get to deal with the occupational culture of the bio sciences (vertiginous and exploitative, IME). COBOL programmers have to deal with bankers.
At one point, I realized I had to drop an obscure and largely obsolete technology off my resume, because the gigs it landed me were, almost definitionally, at the sort of "we hate to pay for the IT department" organizations clinging fiercely to such outdated tech. Places where there would never, ever be any budget for anything IT needed (which is why I was coming in as a temp), and the eternal solution was just that the same people would do more work on ever more outdated hardware.
• Your source of job leads is somehow filtering for desperate/troubled teams. Like, if you're getting all your pointers from this one guy you know who knows someone at every possible company, but the way he knows these people is that he's an Agony Aunt whom people come to complain to, so if he hears of an open position, it's because it was in the context of someone in a troubled group.
Or if you have a headhunter, maybe he has an in with Bain or a similar organization which invests in or buys up other companies, and then squeezes them for profits – whether downsizing or reorging management – destabilizing them? So that you are repeatedly sent into organizations which are undergoing turmoil and upheaval.
• It's just industry standard? Like, maybe this is just what's happening everywhere? I dunno.
ETA: an observation: it's striking to me that you describe a lot of people around you leaving positions, but mostly don't mention why, and gave no account of why you didn't know. That seems like hugely significant information. Like, did people get poached by higher-paying orgs, or did they flee bad situations? Is it that you didn't know? If you didn't know, was it that you didn't seek the information out, or couldn't figure out how to get it? Did you realize it was important information to try to get?
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Date: 2021-01-08 08:41 am (UTC)• Your particular specialty/talents/expertise are in demand by a particularly troubled sector/industry/demographic. Like, mainframe specialists get used to losing a lot of their coworkers to heart attacks, cancer, and retirement. Specialists in the technologies for bioinformatics get to deal with the occupational culture of the bio sciences (vertiginous and exploitative, IME). COBOL programmers have to deal with bankers.
At one point, I realized I had to drop an obscure and largely obsolete technology off my resume, because the gigs it landed me were, almost definitionally, at the sort of "we hate to pay for the IT department" organizations clinging fiercely to such outdated tech. Places where there would never, ever be any budget for anything IT needed (which is why I was coming in as a temp), and the eternal solution was just that the same people would do more work on ever more outdated hardware.
• Your source of job leads is somehow filtering for desperate/troubled teams. Like, if you're getting all your pointers from this one guy you know who knows someone at every possible company, but the way he knows these people is that he's an Agony Aunt whom people come to complain to, so if he hears of an open position, it's because it was in the context of someone in a troubled group.
Or if you have a headhunter, maybe he has an in with Bain or a similar organization which invests in or buys up other companies, and then squeezes them for profits – whether downsizing or reorging management – destabilizing them? So that you are repeatedly sent into organizations which are undergoing turmoil and upheaval.
• It's just industry standard? Like, maybe this is just what's happening everywhere? I dunno.
ETA: an observation: it's striking to me that you describe a lot of people around you leaving positions, but mostly don't mention why, and gave no account of why you didn't know. That seems like hugely significant information. Like, did people get poached by higher-paying orgs, or did they flee bad situations? Is it that you didn't know? If you didn't know, was it that you didn't seek the information out, or couldn't figure out how to get it? Did you realize it was important information to try to get?