According to last week’s New York Times article, there are a ton of workers at Amazon’s headquarters who are feeling – to put it lightly – overworked. However, the article did not specifically explore the lives of employees who are Amazon’s backbone: tech workers.
And, there’s mounting evidence that tech workers are even more unhappy at work than other white collar workers.
Last week, TINYpulse released a report evaluating the state of tech worker happiness and engagement compared to workers in other industries. The results were shocking, revealing deep unhappiness and disengagement.
There’s a perception that tech workers have it all. They earn more than most workers, with entry-level salaries for developers just shy of $100,000 per year, according to Glassdoor. They also have better job prospects, with the U.S. Department of Labor projecting employment in tech-related jobs to grow 22 percent by 2022.
Plus, tech workers are, literally, creating the future. Without them, we wouldn’t have driver-less cars, on-demand movies, smartphones or websites – or website apps for your smartphone.
Compare tech jobs to dying roles like newspaper reporter (average income $36,000, negative job growth outlook) or lumberjack (average salary $34,000, plus danger of dismemberment-by-chainsaw), and there appears to be nothing for tech workers to complain about.
But tech workers suffer, too. TINYpulse looked at over 5,000 survey responses from tech workers, everyone from engineers to developers to infrastructure specialists, to evaluate how they feel about a range of work issues. Here’s how tech workers stack up to other workers*:
| TECH WORKERS | ALL WORKERS | |
| Do you see opportunity for professional growth? (Y/N) | 36% | 50% |
| Has a supervisor recognized your work recently? (Y/N) | 69% | 75% |
| Can you recite your company’s mission and values? (Y/N) | 28% | 43% |
| Do you have high-quality relationships with coworkers? (Scale 1-10) | 47% | 56% |
| Are you very happy at work? (Scale 1-10) | 19% | 22% |
What does this mean for employers? Nothing good. Workers with lower levels of happiness and engagement tend to churn quickly. Replacing specialized tech workers is costly and time-consuming – and that’s doom for companies that need to innovate constantly.
*TINYpulse compared survey responses from tech workers to responses from workers in non-tech jobs, ranging from teachers to plumbers.