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Businesses The Almighty Buck Technology

The Quitting Economy (aeon.co) 235

From an essay on Aeon magazing: [...] The CEO of Me, Inc is a job-quitter for a good reason -- the business world has come to realize that market value is the best measure of value. As a consequence, a career means a string of jobs at different companies. So workers respond in kind, thinking about how to shape their career in a world where you can expect so little from employers. In a society where market rules rule, the only way for an employee to know her value is to look for another job and, if she finds one, usually to quit. If you are a white-collar worker, it is simply rational to view yourself first and foremost as a job quitter -- someone who takes a job for a certain amount of time when the best outcome is that you quit for another job (and the worst is that you get laid off). So how does work change when everyone is trying to become a quitter? First of all, in the society of perpetual job searches, different criteria make a job good or not. Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion. Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company. Your job might be a space to learn skills that you can use in the future. Or, it might be a job with a company that has a good-enough reputation that other companies are keen to hire away its employees. On the other hand, it isn't as good a job if everything you learn there is too specific to that company, if you aren't learning easily transferrable skills. It isn't a good job if it enmeshes you in local regulatory schemes and keeps you tied to a particular location. And it isn't a good job if you have to work such long hours that you never have time to look for the next job. In short, a job becomes a good job if it will lead to another job, likely with another company or organisation. You start choosing a job for how good it will be for you to quit it.
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The Quitting Economy

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  • Not that different (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ranton ( 36917 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:48PM (#54886103)

    Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion.
    Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company

    So what your saying is: Good jobs are now ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss,co-workers, and that prepares you for your next job either at your current employer or future employer.

    This doesn't seem much different to me. Workers are simply taking more responsibility for their career development instead of just taking for granted that their company is doing it for them. Sounds like an all together better situation to me.

    • by msauve ( 701917 )
      Your summary is much better.
      • Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by s.petry ( 762400 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:27PM (#54886499)

        The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees. Hence, the logical step of employees no longer being loyal to companies.

        Where I disagree with TFA is in the suggestion that you don't want certain types of experience, and he rattles off quite a bit. Much of which I would say is good experience and can look good on a resume as long as you were successful in that job.

        • Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ranton ( 36917 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:33PM (#54886567)

          The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees.

          The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that we are no longer in a post-war economy with little global competition. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 40 years ago. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 10 years ago. I have seen many companies which cut their workforce 20+% during the recession, but ultimately found out they had too much bloat and never did rehire to previous levels when business picked up. It took a while for companies to realize how wasteful they were being with our country's human capital in the post-war era, and a more mobile workforce is one of the results.

          • Re: Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Cryacin ( 657549 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:46PM (#54886699)
            Mandatory reading for modern corporate employment. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/200... [ribbonfarm.com]
          • Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @05:59PM (#54887217)

            Except, there's a lot of institutional knowledge that is lost in cases like this. Raise your hand if you've ever been at a job and a conversation includes comments along the lines of how only one person knew how to do a particular task, and they're no longer with the company for whatever reason. I'm betting pretty much everyone reading this post will be raising their hand. I lost count of how many times I was in a meeting where some variation on that statement was made, not to mention the times I overheard others saying similar things.

            I was recently forced out of my job because a coworker who was better politically connected within the company wanted it. With my leaving, so goes a LOT of institutional knowledge. I knew which engineers were responsible for what product lines, I knew each of the engineers and their individual quirks, along with most of the other major players in the process from a design concept to the finished product, so if things got jammed up somewhere, I knew who to talk to about getting it moving again. My "replacement" is content to just let things sit until someone comes to her, which might be all well and good from a moral high horse vantage point, but she never seemed to make the connection that having products to sell means the company makes money, and the company making money means she has a job. The company is in a highly regulated industry, so there were times when if we didn't make some change within a couple days, we couldn't sell that product in the entire EU, for example.

            This "quitting economy" also leads to a lot of wasted money training people. Most jobs it takes at least 6 months for you to get up to speed on things. Most people stick around 1-2 years, so by the time you, as an employer, are finally starting to break even on your investment, the person's probably already thinking about moving on to their next job. So then you have to waste all that time and money interviewing new applicants, hiring someone, and waiting 6+ months for them to get up to speed, knowing that they too probably already have one foot out the door. It's this never ending treadmill, where you're lucky if you can keep your head above water.

            Don't even get me started on how the people who are left behind usually end up doing their job, plus your job when you leave, and that becomes the new normal. So they burn out a lot faster, make more mistakes, and are generally less productive because they're being pulled in so many different directions at once.

            • Don't even get me started on how the people who are left behind usually end up doing their job, plus your job when you leave, and that becomes the new normal.

              Given the topic at hand, they do have a potential solution ...

          • Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by sjames ( 1099 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @06:05PM (#54887239) Homepage Journal

            And yet, in the past retailers could afford to be closed 52 Sundays a year plus all major and minor holidays and still prosper. Today they're so screwed up they can't even manage to be closed on Thanksgiving without (apparently, according to them) going down in flames.

            The rest is just corporations discarding human values and squeezing more out of everyone while paying less.

            • Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)

              by barrywalker ( 1855110 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @07:02PM (#54887577)
              Right. The never-ending race to the bottom.

              You're all just human resources to be used, abused and shitcanned when you no longer add value. Either keep your skills up-to-date and grow some balls or be perpetually treated like shit. Your choice.
        • Re:Meh... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @05:47PM (#54887149)

          The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees.

          Average job tenure has gone UP over the last 30 years. Your belief in the "Good ole' days" of loyal companies and grateful employees is false nostalgia. The Golden Age of lifetime employment is a myth. It didn't happen.

        • and nothing could be further from the truth. The company has a _lot_ more power. You can't, for example, control public policy to increase your job opportunities except in the most indirect way at the ballot box. Companies OTOH do this regularly. I read stories on /. every week about new initiatives to get more kids into programming. They manipulate supply, we just hope for the best...
    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:36PM (#54886595)
      people are social animals. Stagnant wages mean people aren't changing jobs (and moving, don't forget the moving) to get ahead, they're doing it to keep up. Meanwhile social ties are breaking down as a result of all this moving around. As an added bonus it makes Unionization (and it's best buddy Collective Bargaining) damn near impossible.

      Like the 'Sharing' economy the 'Quitting' economy isn't a win for workers. It's a bug, not a feature.
    • by MangoCats ( 2757129 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @07:59PM (#54887925)

      The problem comes when you work in an industry with low job density, meaning that you have to uproot and relocate to a new city to hop jobs. With specialized degrees and specialized fields of employment, this is very common today, and these specialized employees are getting the turnover treatment just the same as the HR staff, IT staff and other fungible crew.

      The pay is better when you're specialized, but not good enough to handle a cross-country move every 3 years. I've done 3 city-hops in my career, strangely enough, the one prompted by a company shutdown and period of no work was paid for by the company I moved to, the two that I did by choice were largely and completely out of pocket. The time the company compensated my move, the compensation was worth about 4 months of gross pay. Even stranger, one company I was working at was acquired by a bigger company, and it worked out that I didn't have to move as a result of the acquisition, though the rest of the acquired crew did, the acquiring company paid me again about a 4 month "retention bonus" to stay with them for at least a year, so, in a sense, they compensated me for a move I didn't have to make.

      So much of who hires you is luck and timing, especially in a specialized field, it's fantasy to think you have much control over the process.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Thursday July 27, 2017 @12:07AM (#54888871) Homepage

      Nope, only a psychopath would think high job turnover is desirable. You have employment costs, not just advertising but hiring and replacing bad staff. A person with high job turnover should immediately be flagged, they are very likely to be an extremely bad employment investment, cost of hiring, cost of training and lost employer acclimatisation, which affects other employees as well. A transient employment market means, zero loyalty, basically employees selling your company expertise to their next employer and as an employer making no effort to retain them means spreading you proprietary corporate advantage all over the place. The more employees you put through your business, the more likely you are to pick up a transitory psychopath, who can absolutely ruin a company in short order (create chaos amongst staff, take credit for other people's work, blame other people for their mistakes and plot and scheme to steal everything they can).

      For millennia, people were smart enough to know employer employee loyalty produces real benefits. Now that the psychopaths have taken over, everything is a lie, whilst the psychopaths try to cheat as much as they possible can, this quarters profits and golden parachute, taking down company after company.

      • by ranton ( 36917 ) on Thursday July 27, 2017 @08:24AM (#54890453)

        Nope, only a psychopath would think high job turnover is desirable.

        Depends on what you consider high turnover. For me an employee who averages around 2.5 years per company is no risk at all. Many people here when discussing job-hoppers are referring to people with an average tenure of under one year, and I do agree they are a significantly risky hire.

        For millennia, people were smart enough to know employer employee loyalty produces real benefits.

        I doubt you would want to look at employer practices a millennia ago and try to use them today. If you are truly suggesting that you aren't worth replying to, but I'm assuming you were just using hyperbole.

        But no one is saying employee loyalty programs are useless. But these loyalty programs better be focused on helping the employees instead of just manipulating them to stay or else they are far less effective today than 50 years ago. Employees who are consistently given opportunities for career advancement and who are paid for their intrinsic knowledge (which means above market rate) are very unlikely to leave regardless of their past history.

        It isn't really that hard to do as an employer. Just make sure each manager reviews their retention strategy for each direct report on at least a quarterly basis, and reviews this with their boss on at least a yearly basis. Employee retention is one of the most important responsibilities of management even though most of them ignore this role. If you are thinking long and hard about how you are offering better opportunities to each employee than they could get elsewhere, you deserve to lose them.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:51PM (#54886143)

    "As a consequence, a career means a string of jobs at different companies."

    And all the failing companies have a large percentage of freshly hired people, who need training, mentoring, learning on the job before being able to do some useful work, but before that time comes, they are off to the next job.

    While the tech companies who dodge taxes have the money to offer free massages and ludicrous wages and other benefits additional to non-compete agreements.

    • It's amazing how little value companies assign to domain (industry) knowledge in IT workers. I often look back at the apps/systems/designs I've done when a newbie at a given org, and laugh at how naive I was about the domain, and thus how clunky the results were.

      PHB's are dazzled by the newfangled UI/UX the newbies often bring in, functionality and maintainability be damned; for those fall on somebody else. The shiny red ball wins the monkeys' attention.

    • [...] but before that time comes, they are off to the next job.

      Sometimes not even that long.

      I interviewed for a job up in the bay area--I'm in Southern California but I thought it would be interesting. I didn't get it--I was told by the headhunter I was working through that they found someone else. About two weeks later, I got a call from the headhunter to tell me that they were back being interested because the person they hired quit on the first day to go somewhere else.

      My attitude was that if the person quit the first day, it probably wasn't a great place to work.

  • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:52PM (#54886155) Homepage Journal
    I quit one job after another and now I earn $50k doing IT in Silicon Valley. It works!
  • by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:54PM (#54886181)
    is when you already have one
    • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      This is definitely true. I got hit a couple of times with layoffs before and around the dot-com bust, and it was a desperate scramble trying to find the next thing, and filling the gaps with whatever lousy thing I could get, alternating between unemployed and underemployed for quite a while. In later years I've only moved on a couple of times, but did so of my own volition, and in both cases not only felt a lot more relaxed about the situation, but was also able to more clearly make it a step up.

  • This has been the case for the past 20 years.
  • BS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:55PM (#54886211)
    To me the quitting economy seems to be all about narcissists and bullshitters. The job interview is not about who has the most skill, it is about who can talk themselves up the best.
    • If that's all the interview is, then the company doing the interview sucks at it and deserves what they get. If you're going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive developers or software professionals, you'd think it would be a good idea to spend some effort on the process designed to help you choose those individuals to ensure that it's effective.
    • This is written by a startup 'CEO' so what do you expect? Narcissists and bullshitters are their poster children.

      Serial quitters are usually the ones with little actual skills who just lie through their teeth to get a good looking position for their CV, then proceed to screw it up terribly due to incompetence, then try and flee before the shit hits the fan.
      It usually takes a while for that to catch up with people, and you can get away with it for a while in a bubble economy.
      But once things turn down in thei

      • Re: BS (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        A lot of people quit because they're treated like shit. If companies fix that, they'll hold onto people better.

        There's little reason for me to deal with corporate BS and micromanagement if I can make slightly less doing a much simpler task. I won't work more than 40 hours a week, and it's none of my employer's business what I do in my spare time.

        I'd love to work for a place where I can build my skills and get a work/life balance. I'll invest in my employer as much as they invest in me. The sad fact is emplo

    • Same as it ever was... except now every time I get a new job I get a 20k raise.

  • by redmid17 ( 1217076 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:58PM (#54886235)
    This article could also be called: "Paging Captain Obvious"

    Companies seem have learned to not promote internally or give raises when raises are probably overdue, either via merit or that particular job market nice salary rising overall. That's not every company but even companies that paid me well hemmed and hawed when it came to promotions AND salary increase. It's usually just simpler to leave.
    • Any company which will not do hikes unless someone gets a competing job offer is one where HR and COmp are not doing their job. Its their job to study the competitive market and have a number ready for what a person's market value is and then raise it to 15% less than Market. Noone leaves for less than 15%. If HR is not providing this number to the reporting manager they are not doing their job. Rather they are depending on the HR of other companies to come up with a suitable comp for their own employees an

  • The key to transforming yourself -- Robert Greene, Author of 48 Laws of Power at TEDxBrixton

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • system analyst
    senior developer
    senior developer /team lead/ senior developer
    developer
    developer
    developer
    R&D lab tech (chem industry)
    pilot plant tech(chem industry)
    plant worker(chem.)
    plant worker (chem)
    landscaper
    pizza delivery
    pet store
    amusement park cook/operator
  • by Headw1nd ( 829599 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:19PM (#54886435)
    One thing that has accelerated this trend is the lack of upward mobility many workers find within their company. There is no bonus for being an internal candidate, and in some cases it seems to be a stigma (In one case I know of, a state agency requires extra paperwork if an internal candidate is selected for an open position, to prove they were better qualified). In these cases it's risky to wait years for a possible opening for advancement, better to search around as soon as you feel you are qualified.
  • If you flit from job to job, you can only do that so many times before hiring managers and employees at the companies you're interviewing at catch on. It's a big red flag, and a good reason to trash a resume without ever inviting that person to an interview. We have no interest in putting a lot of training time and ramp-up time for someone uninterested in staying, so that's an easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

    These days you also can't call former employers to figure out if someone was fired. U

    • Whenever a recruiter or hiring manager asks why I don't want a "permanent" job, I ask them why they're hiring a contractor and not a "permanent" employee. I can't get a "permanent" job if all I'm being offered is contract jobs.
    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      When you get hired away with better offers numerous times, how do the hiring managers view that?

    • by Shados ( 741919 )

      If you quit every 6 months, yeah. Every 1.5 to 2 years? No one cares (depends on the industry, obviously, but in tech and related? Nope). Even the occasional "Well, that didn't work out" 2 month sting or the couple of "Meh, I wanted better" 10-12 months won't have anyone bat their eyes at you.

    • ... you better show an interest in giving people 10% or better raises annually... or you're gonna be surrounded by noobs in short order.

  • If you're an IT support contractor, you're thinking about your next job the moment you show up for Day 1 at your new job. When I did a six week contract at Sony, I had job interviews on the cellphone while in the men restroom (mostly in front of the mirror but sometimes at the urinal), as that was the only private spot I could find. For a few weeks, I had an phone interview every day. I had a new job lined up as soon as I finished the contract.
  • I guess instead taking that internal job that doubled my salary with another division of my company that I now have 10 years with and 6 weeks paid time off was a mistake. I should have just quit and found a much less paying job with another company since that's "what you do now".
  • Here's my story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GerryGilmore ( 663905 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:47PM (#54886711)
    I started with Data General in January of 1977. Entry-level depot-tech repairing CPU boards by gate-ganging on an extender board. Within a year, I was taken on by Field Service because of my roaring success at the depot. Sure enough, I was quickly being sent to the worst on-going systems problems that no one else could seem to fix around the Southeast and got rave reviews. Each year, my manager would give me "the maximum raise allowed by company policy." About 3%. Aside from the jump in going to Field Service from the depot, that was it. One of our resellers decided to start up his own FS operation and asked me how much I was making at DG, so I told him and he laughed and said "Gerry, you're being robbed. I'll start you at double what you're making now.". OK, says I. When I handed my manager my resignation letter, he was shocked and wanted to know why I was leaving, so I told him about the offer to double my salary. He said: "Oh - no problem. We'll match that! You don't have to leave." To which I replied: "No dice! DG deliberately kept me working for MUCH less than I was worth and NOW they're willing to step up only because I got a better offer? Screw that! DG could have treated me right and I would never be tempted to even listen to another offer. What happens 2, 3, 5 years from now? Do I need to lie to another company to get an offer letter to wave in your face to pay me right? No - y'all don't really care about me so I don't care about you."
    • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      Yeah, it's a shame when it works that way.

      I had the unusual experience of a boss who polled my salary versus others at the university, and finagled a raise from the department because I was below average for that position. I'm not sure it fully got me up to average, but it was at least a few thousand, and it was a completely unprompted action in the middle of the year, between my regularly scheduled reviews and raises, so it was definitely appreciated. I'm not sure if being a university environment made tha

    • I started with Data General in January of 1977. . . . Each year, my manager would give me "the maximum raise allowed by company policy." About 3%. "

      3% is roughly the average inflation rate (which I think was even higher in the late 1970's), meaning that your "raises" were actually "pay reductions". They didn't even keep up with inflation.

      I had a similar situation at The Aerospace Corporation . One year, I was told that my raise was 3.5%. I asked when the cost-of-living Increase (COLI) kicked-in. "This is it," the boss says. I noted that I had recently looked at the Government Accounting Office's Consumer Price Index (GAO CPI), which translates ba

  • I put in a 30-year career with my local Waterworks, which became a joint water/sewer utility about halfway through that (and we adapted well; very different pipes, but still, pipes...)

    Continuity is huge in some industries. I dealt with some property issues that were decades old; frequently I was able to find somebody who was there at the time, or had been briefed 15 years ago by a guy leaving after 35 years who told them to watch out for that issue that came up in the 70s and remains a ticking time-bomb.

    It

  • Having only read the /. summary, this sounds like an excellent and cogent article. My one push back would be that there do still exist companies that hire employees for the "long haul". I have friends who've been working at IBM for the past 15 years.
    • It's certainly his choice. But there can be a significant difference in salary for someone who worked at a few difference places over 10-15 years and someone who joined a big company out of school and stayed there.

      • Sure. But the article (at least the summary) seems to be saying that you're guaranteed to get the axe these days because all companies are inherently disloyal and will fire you at the drop of a hat. Things may have moved that direction relative to 30-40 years ago, but it's not uniformly true of every employer. Some employers allow for people to be "lifers".
    • Working at IBM is not a bad thing. IBM will be around for another 15 years....unlike the gazillion startups that may offer good pay if you work 80 hours a week without a day off ever.
  • Not sure I agree with the article but it does remind me of a large company I worked for. I was looking to switch positions within the same company, the new position paid significantly more but company policy for a lateral move was that your salary stayed the same. So in order to actually make forward salary progress you had to quit.
  • to the fact that slashdot is owned by Dice, which only profits when people are constantly looking for work.
  • This is just a reflection of how selfish and uncaring society has become. Not only have we moved to where a job is the end-all of a person's existence, where we frown upon those who don't want to play the game, and where often financially it's necessary to spend your life at work at the expense of relationships with your family, we're also where neither the workers nor the job matter to anyone. It's just a shitty 'earn money while looking to earn more money' environment. And stupid people are still going t
  • That's why companies who want to retain people need incentives. A good internal career path goes without saying, as well as the training and fair salary reviews which go with it. Things like stock options and bonuses also do well, especially if these build up with time. The best incentive of all is now almost impossible to find, the final salary pension scheme based on years of employment.
  • The grass is not always greener on the other side and this constant job hopping is a clear sign that folks lack commitment and stamina. As soon as there is a sign of trouble they just give up, quit, and run away. Of course there are reasons to quit, I have done it, but in my professional career spanning 20 years I worked for three companies.The first one I was at for over 6 years and only left after significant restructuring took place essentially eliminating all projects and the entire location soon after
  • I know it's trendy for the Millenial crowd to jump from employer to employer, but I still think finding a decent employer who doesn't treat you like crap is the way to go. Once you find one of those, and some people never do, hang onto it because the grass isn't always greener. I think there's value in sticking with something for a longer period, and at the same time you can wind up in a rut. Maybe it's because I'm 42 and have a family, but I would definitely like to see a little more loyalty on _both_ side

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