I cruised past the 40 year mark last year in the high tech industry. It’s been a ride with ups and downs for sure. The recession of the early 1980s. The dot com boom of the 1990s. The recession of the early 2000s. Times have been good and times have been lean.

I had the good fortune of getting steered into role as a DevOps engineer for the twilight of my career. Good in the sense that it’s a job title that is in high demand. I haven’t felt this much job security in a long time.

For about 36 of those 40 years, corporations have had the upper hand in employment. All are at-will employers, but suffice it to say most corporations have a cattle mindset when it comes to headcount. Attrition hardly ever mattered much. Everyone is easily replaceable. Oh, you’re leaving? Best of luck to you.

There have been 2 exceptions to this. During the dot com boom I saw engineers leave for startups at shocking rates. Tektronix during the 1990s was a great place to work, but people were being woo’d away with signing bonuses and salary increases to the tune of about 5 a week. That was the first time I ever saw management and HR have to huddle up and try to figure out what to do about attrition. “We have to stop this.”

I remember thinking how great it was that employees finally had the upper hand. We get to decide what might be fun things to get involved with and they have to listen. The corporation has motivation to treat us well lest we might up and leave. They HAVE to be nice to us.

For years I toiled at Boeing as an Flight Controls Engineer, which you’d think would be in pretty high demand but actually not. The skillset wasn’t that transferable. Boeing was the definition of how corporations treat employees like cattle. By the very nature of the beast, any corporation that boasts 8 layers of management can’t help itself but make the poor souls at the bottom of the rung feel pretty inconsequential.

Okay now add to that environment an economic slowdown in aerospace complete with layoffs and the company really has the upper hand. If you want to complain about something, you have to talk with your feet. That’s your only option – get another gig. Even then they shrug off the loss like yesterday’s newspaper.

Enter the 2010s and the Amazon Cloud. That was the beginning of another turning point that put supply and demand back in favor of the little guy. Suddenly cloud certification became a big ticket to a higher paying job and if you were good you could even be a little choosy about which opportunities to get involved with. The bonus money started to look really healthy. If you’re fortunate enough to work for a profitable company, the incentives are nothing to sneeze at.

At the start of the 2020s, even with the pandemic, DevOps engineers have had the upper hand for a while. I’ve seen a raft of departures lately from people who worked at companies with rock solid careers in place. They are getting enticed away with offers for higher compensation and better work. Management is starting to get nervous again. If this keeps up another round of HR meetings will take place to try and figure out how to stop the bleeding.

In some cases, nothing less than a management epiphany will reverse their fortunes. Case in point is jobs that included on-call. On-call comes with the dreaded requirement of being chained to your house for a week or more at a time. For those of us who do it, it blows. One thing that would make the requirement a little more palatable is if companies would compensate for it — and I mean really compensate for it, not a token $50 a day for the inconvenience of having to be at the ready 24/7. I proposed this to a mid level manager at a previous employer and he wasn’t having any of it. “I want people who love what they are doing and passionate about it.” Translation: Willing to work for free. To be fair, some companies have figured this out and have gotten creative about ways to compensate or otherwise comp the time for the inconvenience it causes. But not everyone gets it yet, and those that don’t will suffer higher attrition, at least in this market. Next year could be a whole different ball game.

It’s Econ 101, really. Supply and Demand. It would have been nicer if more than 4 years out of those 40 had been tilted towards the little guy, but as they say, “first world problem.”