The Rise of Revenge Quitting in Tech: When Employees Stop Going Quietly

The Continuous Improvement Delusion Beliefs Are More Important to Us Than...

The Rise of Revenge Quitting in Tech: When Employees Stop Going Quietly

The era of suffering in silence is over. As we move through 2025, a new workplace phenomenon is taking centre stage: revenge quitting—or as some call it, ‘unquiet quitting’. This dramatic shift represents employees who are no longer content to silently disengage from their roles. Instead, they’re making bold, vocal exits that leave employers with egg on their faces and entire teams disrupted.

For tech businesses, this trend hits particularly hard. Workers in the marketing and advertising, IT and tech, and media and entertainment fields are most likely to revenge-quit, with 11% of IT professionals planning their revenge exits this year. The implications extend far beyond a single resignation—they signal a fundamental breakdown in the employer-employee relationship that tech leaders can no longer ignore.

Personal Experience

I loved Sun Microsystems (USA). I hated Sun Microsystems (UK).

Working out of Sun Microsystems’ Farnborough UK office whilst reporting into the USA, I experienced the worst of both worlds. I was surrounded daily by British management wankers who embodied everything wrong with corporate bureaucracy and pomposity and ego. Meanwhile, I dealt with US managers who, whilst not necessarily more competent, were at least positive, supportive and forward-looking.

The contrast was maddening. A can-do attitude and willingness to try things from across the Atlantic. Rigid hierarchy, negativity, and political games right outside my office door (literally).

Having direct experience with a positive Sun management culture made the local dysfunction unbearable. My final ‘revenge quitting’ act? Signing off with a quote from Adolf Hitler: ‘My patience is now at an end!’

This wasn’t quiet quitting—this was revenge quitting in its purest form.

Note: Happy to share the back story if anyone can be bothered to ask.

From Silent Suffering to Loud Departures

The contrast between quiet quitting and revenge quitting couldn’t be more stark. Where quiet quitting involved employees doing the bare minimum whilst mentally checking out, revenge quitting is about making a statement. Revenge quitting is all about leaving loudly, deliberately and with purpose instead of quietly disengaging or passively browsing job listings.

Some 4% of full-time employees are planning to revenge quit this year, with most having given the idea some thought for the past 13 months. Even more concerning for tech employers, hybrid workers are the most likely to make the move, with 7% planning to revenge quit in 2025—a demographic that represents a significant portion of the tech workforce.

The timing isn’t coincidental. Picture a talented software developer walking out right before a critical product launch, or a senior engineer announcing their departure via a company-wide Slack message that details exactly why they’re leaving. These aren’t impulsive decisions—they’re calculated moves designed to maximise impact and send a clear message to leadership. The beauty of revenge quitting is that making management look foolish and incompetent isn’t actually that difficult—the dysfunction was already there for anyone paying attention. The revenge quitter simply provides the dramatic spotlight that invites everyone else to see what they’ve been dealing with all along.

The Perfect Storm: What’s Driving Tech Workers to the Breaking Point

The statistics tell a sobering story about employee satisfaction in 2025. Research found 93% of full-time employees were frustrated with their current role, with the reasons mirroring those driving revenge quitting decisions.

Financial Frustration: 48% cited low salary and lack of raises as their primary concern. In an industry known for competitive compensation, the fact that nearly half of tech workers feel underpaid speaks to a significant disconnect between employer perceptions and employee expectations. The very term ‘compensation’ reveals what money really pays for—the sacrifice of time, autonomy, dealing with office politics, stress, and all the other costs that come with employment.

Feeling Undervalued: 34% said they were feeling undervalued. This is particularly damaging in tech, where individual contributors often work on highly specialised, complex projects that require significant expertise and dedication.

Stagnant Career Growth: 33% saw no prospects of career growth. For an industry that traditionally prided itself on rapid advancement opportunities, this represents a fundamental shift that’s pushing talent towards the exits.

Management Failures: 27% said poor management was a frustration, 24% cited a lack of work-life balance, and 22% complained of limited time off.

The tech industry’s recent pivot back to return-to-office mandates has only accelerated these tensions. According to a Blind survey (Teamblind, 2024), 73% of Amazon workers are thinking about leaving because of the policy and 80% of them claim they know coworkers who feel the same. Amazon’s situation exemplifies how many employees view such mandates as strict and tone-deaf decisions that disregard workplace realities.

The High Cost of Dramatic Exits

When employees revenge quit, the immediate disruption is just the beginning. The ripple effects can devastate tech teams and projects in ways that quiet quitting never could.

Project Disruption: Unlike quiet quitters who gradually reduce their contributions, revenge quitters often leave immediately, taking critical knowledge and ongoing work with them. In tech environments where individual expertise can be irreplaceable, a single dramatic departure can derail entire initiatives.

Team Morale: Having to replace an employee on short notice forces companies to launch emergency hiring processes, often without adequate resources. The visible nature of revenge quitting also sends a message to remaining team members about the state of the organisation.

Knowledge Loss: Tech workers often possess specialised knowledge about systems, codebases, and client relationships. When they leave abruptly, that institutional knowledge walks out the door, potentially causing long-term operational challenges.

Client and Business Defection: In tech, relationships are everything. When revenge quitters leave, they often take clients, contracts, and business opportunities with them. A disgruntled account manager might redirect lucrative deals to their new employer, or a key engineer might convince clients to follow them to a competitor. Even more damaging, many revenge quitters become independent contractors or launch their own startups, directly competing with their former employer whilst leveraging the very relationships and knowledge they built on company time. The financial impact can be devastating and long-lasting.

Recruitment Challenges: The pressure to fill positions quickly often leads to poor hiring decisions, resulting in yet another hiring round much sooner than anticipated. In today’s competitive tech job market, rushed hiring decisions frequently result in poor cultural fits or skill mismatches.

A Leadership Reckoning

Revenge quitting may feel new, but it’s just a modern symptom of an age-old problem: leadership that’s out of touch with what its people need. The phenomenon forces tech leaders to confront uncomfortable truths about their management practices and organisational culture.

The Visibility Problem: When someone revenge quits, it’s often the first time their absence is fully felt. They’re only visible when they leave. Their disengagement went unaddressed. Their concerns went unheard. This suggests that many tech companies lack effective systems for spotting when people are getting fed up.

Feedback Failures: Only one in four employees strongly agrees that they receive valuable feedback from colleagues (Gallup, 2023). In tech environments where continuous learning and improvement are essential, this communication breakdown is particularly damaging.

Generational Dynamics: Younger workers, especially Gen Z and Millennials, are also playing a big role in revenge quitting. They’re less willing to put up with old-fashioned rules or work environments that clash with their values. Tech companies that fail to adapt their management approaches to these differences risk losing their emerging talent.

What Successful Companies Do Differently

The solution to revenge quitting isn’t to focus on the dramatic exits themselves, but to fix the underlying problems that create them. Some tech companies have found ways to avoid driving people to the breaking point.

Beyond the Paycheck: Whilst 48% of frustrated employees cite salary issues, successful tech companies recognise this isn’t really about money—it’s about respect, recognition, and fairness. When employees complain about pay, they’re often expressing deeper frustrations: feeling undervalued by management, watching less capable colleagues get promoted, seeing their contributions ignored whilst others get credit, or being stuck with incompetent teammates who make their jobs harder. They want to work with skilled, collaborative peers in environments where good work gets recognised and rewarded appropriately. Companies that address only the dollar amount miss the point entirely. Successful companies focus on transparent promotion criteria, equitable treatment, public recognition of achievements, hiring competent people, fostering collaborative working relationships, and ensuring that compensation decisions reflect actual performance and value. Above all, successful tech companies consider the needs of their employees (Cf. the Antimatter Principle)..

Meaningful Work Over Training Programmes: Companies with low turnover focus on giving people interesting, challenging work rather than generic training programmes. Tech workers don’t want to sit through leadership seminars—they want to solve real problems, work on projects that matter, and have the autonomy to do their jobs without constant micromanagement. They want their expertise respected and the freedom to contribute meaningfully rather than being stuck in bureaucratic processes. People stay when they feel intellectually engaged and can see the impact of their work.

Less Management, Not Better Management: Companies that avoid revenge quitting recognise that the problem isn’t bad managers—it’s too many managers. Instead of training more people in ‘leadership skills’, successful companies flatten hierarchies and get management layers out of people’s way. Tech workers don’t want to be ‘engaged’ and ‘motivated’ by managers; they want autonomy to do their work, opportunities to develop mastery in areas they care about, and purpose in what they’re building. These three intrinsic motivators—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—matter far more than any corporate HR programme (Pink, 2009). The whole ’employee engagement’ industry is mostly just HR departments creating busywork to justify their existence whilst completely missing what actually matters to people who do real work. People stay when they can solve meaningful problems without having to navigate management bureaucracy or participate in engagement theatre.

Flexible Work Arrangements: Remote and hybrid options remain top priorities for job seekers evaluating employers. Global recruitment data shows most professionals, especially in tech, marketing, and finance, actively filter jobs for remote or hybrid roles. Companies maintaining rigid return-to-office policies find themselves at a significant disadvantage when trying to hire good people.

Collaborative Problem-Solving: Tech workers stay committed when they’re treated as partners in building something worthwhile rather than resources to be managed. Successful companies don’t create artificial divisions between ‘management’ and ’employees’—instead, everyone works together towards shared goals. As Henry Mintzberg put it: ‘If you want good work, give people a good job to do’ (Mintzberg, 2009). Vineet Nayar’s ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ philosophy recognises that when people feel genuinely valued as collaborators, they naturally invest in collective success (Nayar, 2010). The adversarial ‘us vs them’ dynamic that plagues most companies is entirely self-inflicted. When employees sense they’re being manipulated or managed rather than trusted to contribute meaningfully, resentment builds until it explodes into revenge quitting. Employees can sense exactly where they rank in the corporate priority system—and when they realise they’re at the bottom whilst being expected to care deeply about profits and customer satisfaction, resentment builds until it explodes into revenge quitting.

The Broader Implications for Tech

Revenge quitting represents more than just a workplace trend—it signals a fundamental shift in the power dynamics between employers and employees in the tech sector. Workers aren’t just putting up with bad jobs anymore; they’re rejecting them loudly.

Talent Market Dynamics: With the number of applications being received for a singular job advertisement increasing by 119% year-on-year since 2024, the job market is brutal. Yet revenge quitters are still willing to bail dramatically. This highlights just how frustrated these workers have become—they’d rather face unemployment than continue dealing with toxic work environments. When people are willing to quit loudly even in the teeth of a recession, it signals that workplace dysfunction has reached truly unbearable levels.

Specific Industry Problems: Even industries like cryptocurrency, which once seemed exciting, are seeing people lose interest. Many workers in the industry feel let down by broken promises and poor leadership, but above all by the growing realisation of the fundamental vacuity of cryptocurrencies themselves. Similar disillusionment affects quants and others working in financial centres, building high-frequency trading algorithms and complex derivatives that create no real value. Tech sectors that overpromised during boom periods may be particularly vulnerable to revenge quitting as employees feel betrayed by unmet expectations—especially when they discover they’ve been dedicating their skills to fundamentally hollow purposes. That kind of disillusionment cuts much deeper than typical workplace frustrations and absolutely drives people to dramatic, angry exits that no amount of better management or workplace perks can prevent.

Looking Forward: The New Employment Contract

As we progress through 2025, tech companies discover that revenge quitting puts senior leadership in an arduous position as they scramble to figure out why their best people are walking out dramatically. The old model of expecting employee loyalty regardless of treatment has become obsolete.

Proactive Engagement: Rather than waiting for dramatic exits, successful tech leaders develop systems for identifying and addressing employee concerns before they reach the breaking point. This includes regular one-on-ones, employee surveys, increased autonomy, and open channels for feedback.

Transparent Communication: Companies that avoid drama find that listening goes a long way, as does filtering down information from above effectively. Tech employees want to understand business decisions that affect them and have their voices heard in changes.

Mutual Investment: The emerging employment contract in tech is built on mutual investment—companies investing in employee growth and wellbeing, whilst employees contribute their skills and dedication to collective success.

The rise of revenge quitting in tech isn’t just a trend to weather—it’s a wake-up call. Companies that adapt by creating genuinely supportive environments where people can do good work thrive. Those that don’t find themselves dealing with more than just individual dramatic exits; they face an exodus that fundamentally disrupts their ability to compete when good people are scarce.

The choice is yours: evolve or watch your best talent walk LOUDLY out the door.

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