The average Silicon Valley engineer is compensated roughly $200,000 (roughly Rs. 1.2 crores) a year, and gets to work in offices with perks like daily catered lunch, on-site yoga, and life coaching.
Still, for many people, particularly if you are a woman or underrepresented minority, these aren't fun places to work. Take hard-charging Uber[1], which has seen a slew of executives flee the company after a female employee detailed a horrific saga of harassment and discrimination in February. Or Ellen Pao, who sued her former employer, the male-dominated venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, after alleging that she was denied promotion because of her gender and cut out of business dinners because male colleagues felt that having women there would "kill the buzz." Or tech giants Oracle and Google[2], which were recently sued by the Department of Labor for systematically underpaying female and minority workers.
A new study of turnover in the tech sector goes beyond these isolated incidents and lawsuits and takes a stab at a persistent question: How widespread are these problems?
The study, by the Oakland, California-based non-profit Kapor Center for Social Impact and Harris Poll, asked a nationally-representative sample of 2,000 adults who had voluntarily left a tech job in the last three years why they chose to abandon their cushy workplaces. Were they enticed by a better opportunity? Did they decide to take time off to care for children? Did they desire a shorter commute?
The answers the "tech leavers" gave were eyebrow-raising in that they suggest the extent to which feelings of mistreatment drive people to leave even the most elite jobs. They also show the way the same workplace can be a vastly different experience depending on a person's background.
Overwhelmingly,...