Especially as many of these individuals are recent graduates so likely have student loans, won't have had any time to save, are on the other side of the country from any previous support networks etc.
There's also the potential, or at least perceived, resume / CV impact of quitting your first job after a short period.
The right answer might be "just leave", and clearly many people do just that. But for many they won't or think they can't - so companies cannot assume that just because people stick around that things are good.
So? You dont have to pay them back immediatly. I have walked away with neither credit or savings before. Thrown away stock and titles. There is never a good reason to let someone abuse you and hold you hostage from living a life you enjoy.
I swear this is like listening to people in abusive relationships with tunnel vision. "If we break up I will be poor!"
The world didn't end any of the times I have walked away. Little contract work and a few interviews can solve a wealth of financial problems in short order.
Well, good for you. People have mortgages, they have children, and so on. Life is not as neat and clean as HN likes to make it. People are not robots, and do not always make perfectly rational decisions. Sometimes the 'easier' decision to stay at a company where you have reasonable assurance of continued employment and stability. I put easier in quotes because I recognize the truth of what you say, but in general this ability to just flippantly change jobs is a rare thing. No one was doing that in 2001, and people remember. You can jump to a start up, the bankers or somebody makes a bad risk decision, the economy is in turmoil, and in 8 months you are in foreclosure and trying to figure out how to cloth and feed your kids. Meanwhile your mother is ailing and needs your help, and your wife's father is wandering into traffic due to the Alzheimers. Silly, weak humans, right? We HN readers are above all that. Nothing bad will ever happen to us, so just throw caution to the wind.
Quitting before having a new source of income is not something everyone can do. I do acknowledge this.
Most of the people I talk to in these situations however are not shopping around. Acting like they are trapped or a helpless victim. If someone is not happy at a job they owe it to themselves, in spite of any drama going on in their lives, to make time for interviews until they get the sucky job problem solved.
By no means blow off family in need etc, but making time to get into a happy work environment could mean less stress, enough or more money, and a much easier time dealing with the difficult parts of life one can't change.
The world didn't end any of the times I have walked away
Not for you, but it certainly does happen. If you look at it from the other way round, quite often when you find a middleclass person who's ended up homeless or an alcoholic or suicidal it started with losing their job.
Yes, it's an abusive employer/employee relationship. But there's never a bright line crossed between "ordinarily bad" and "abusive".
Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice.
It's also a choice to enter into highly leveraged options purchases on illiquid assets which require major lifestyle changes to walk away from (mortgage). Complaining that the mortgage inhibits lifestyle changes is no different than complaining "I dropped $800k short selling AMZN, now I need to make margin call".
Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice.
To follow a remark like that with one about people regretting losing $800k makes me wonder how many low paid people you know. There are a lot of people who can't afford to save, and it's not because they're overconsuming.
Although, admittedly, I doubt many of them are Amazon employees.
I was referring to the software developers working at Amazon (much like the article). I was comparing making mortgage payments on an $800k house to making margin calls on an $800k short sale.
To be fair, most of the low paid people I know could also save. This is pretty obvious to me by comparing the lifestyle of my Indian friends and my American friends. Somehow the Indians earn far less but manage to save massively (hint: they consume less).
The main exception might be Americans in the $0-20k/year of consumption category, since big chunks of their "income" are non-market income. But that kind of makes the question of whether to quit moot...
This requires that you have a good line of credit or savings that you can use to buy food, pay mortgage, etc. Most people don't have that.