In many ways it s a boom like no other. Tech workers in Santa Clara County are seeing their wages grow more than twice as fast as the wages of all employees in the region. The surge in tech hiring has made Santa Clara County the strongest job market in the nation, and the San Francisco-San Mateo area the fifth strongest.
Yet not all is well in the tech sector, according to a new study that details widespread unhappiness among technology employees.
The employee survey site Tiny Pulse found five major areas of discontent on the part of tech workers.
An unhappy work experience, feeling trapped, thankless work, a disconnect with the company, poor relationships with co-workers, were the areas of greatest dissatisfaction that tech workers cited in the survey of employees.
This is the information age, the survey noted. This means that some of the most valuable employees in any workforce or region are information technology workers.
We need tech employees to be invested and inspired at work, to have a workplace that fosters employee engagement and sparks the creativity they need to develop our technologies, according to a blog on the Tiny Pulse site. Unfortunately, they re telling us the exact opposite is true.
Seattle-based Tiny Pulse surveyed 5,000 tech workers, including software engineers, developers, and anyone involved in the tech infrastructure at the workplace, and compared their assessment of their employment situation with the analysis provided by people working in non-tech areas such as marketing and finance.
It was clear that there s a significant disparity between the two groups, with tech employees falling behind on several areas of job satisfaction, Tiny Pulse reported.
Among the key findings: only 19 percent of the tech workers surveyed said they were happy on the job; just 36 percent of tech workers say they see a clear promotion and career path, compared with 50 percent for non-tech employees; only 17 percent of tech workers say they feel valued at work; only 28 percent of tech workers know their company s vision, compared with 43 percent for non-tech employees; just 47 percent of tech workers say they have a good relationship with their co-workers, compared with 56 percent for non-tech employees.
Perhaps proving that money is far from everything, wages for technology workers in Santa Clara County are 6.5 percent higher than a year, whereas wages for all workers in the South Bay area up 2.7 percent.
And Santa Clara County is the national leader in employment growth, with a 5.5 percent more total jobs compared to a year ago, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of major metro areas in the United States.
What s more, the South Bay has a huge lead over the No. 2 region, Tacoma-Lakewood in Washington state, up 4.7 percent. The Salt Lake City region was No. 3, up 4.4 percent, the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford area of Florida was up 4.3 percent, and the San Francisco-San Mateo region had a 4.2 percent gain in job growth during the year.
The roadblocks are holding information technology employees back from doing their best work, Tiny Pulse reported.
These problems could have broad implications for the nation s economy overall.
This isn t just bad news for the tech industry, it hurts everyone whose work relies on their innovation, Tiny Pulse said.
Silicon Valley tech workplace. Photo credit: BANG staff
