Job Market Improving?

It's a ridiculously small sample set to draw any conclusions from, but that certainly won't stop me.

I'm now observing what appears to be a second wave of resignations underway at my previous place of employment, making me wonder if the previously-frozen job situation is finally thawing once again. The first wave, as I wrote about in More Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Year 2: Easier Said Than Done), featured a significant blast of "I quit!"s last summer and fall (including my own). I took that as a sign that I wasn't alone in my dour evaluation of the workplace that had kept me gainfully employed for more than 7 years up to that point.

Then as the economy headed off the cliff toward the end of the 3rd quarter of 2008, things quieted down on that front for several months. I was fairly certain that the late-2008 and early-2009 reduction in turnover was a result of the recession and not reflective of any successful addressing of the issues within those walls, but it's always hard to tell from the outside. I hoped for the best, but feared for the worst.

Now that the resignation letters are once again flowing into HR with some regularity, I'm a little more confident that my assessment was right. However, as bad as that result is for the organization (and as telling as it is that nothing seems to be getting done about it), this development would seem to provide a good indication that an overall improvement in the health of the job market has come about. And that's a very good thing, on a much larger scale. It's just sad that a once-great place to produce software has now seen more than 20% of its work force depart in the span of a little over a year.