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.
Not that different (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Given the topic at hand, they do have a potential solution ...
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
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.
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Informative)
Out of curiosity, I googled it and found this: https://www.ebri.org/pdf/notes... [ebri.org] . Apparently the job tenure for men decreased, but job tenure for women increased by more (presumably due to fewer women quitting to become homemakers). It's clear from the data that lifetime jobs were not the norm for anyone 30 years ago, though. In 1983 men averaged 5.9 years and in 2013 they averaged 5.5 years, only a few months difference.
Re:Meh... (Score:4, Insightful)
You say that like company and employee are equal (Score:2)
It's massively different (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the 'Sharing' economy the 'Quitting' economy isn't a win for workers. It's a bug, not a feature.
Probably UBI (Score:2)
Re:Not that different (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not that different (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not that different (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Those people weren't thought to have "paid their dues and played the waiting game of "dead man's shoes" where they waited for someone above them to retire or get promoted. These were the good companies.
You think a situation where employees stay in a position they have outgrown simply because one out of millions of companies don't have an ideal role for them is a good thing? I strongly disagree, and I am very glad this is less common in today's workforce.
Mobile employees is similar to having high market liquidity in the stock market. High speed trading may have its drawbacks, similar to moving companies every few months, but overall high liquidity is a good thing. Enabling more mobile employees utilizes ou
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I don't think it was a good idea. I'm just quoting from many articles and books I've read (The Peter Principle). If you look at some of the movies from the 1960's, (Flubber), you'll see the sentiment being experienced back then "my ideas are being put on the back burner". Today, that person would contact some venture capitalists, and set up their own startup company.
I also remember the days of "Please wait 28 days for postage and packing" when you ordered something by telephone or by mail order.
From persona
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In the past ...
When? What year?
They would have an inhouse magazine with jobs section, and even homes for sale from other employees.
Can you name a single real company that did this?
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British Telecom in the UK. Originally part of the civil service as the post office, but they were privatized. Back in the 1980's, they still kept their "employee magazine".
http://www.alivewithideas.com/... [alivewithideas.com]
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Stauffer Chemical and IBM Think magazine https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/his... [ibm.com]
Indeed (Score:3)
"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.
Domain knowledge underrated [Re:Indeed] (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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[...] 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.
Worked for me (Score:5, Funny)
the best time to look for a job (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Where have you been? (Score:2)
BS (Score:5, Interesting)
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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)
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
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Same as it ever was... except now every time I get a new job I get a 20k raise.
Magazing, nice! (Score:3)
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.
Fire the HR department (Score:2)
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
On the topic of 'good jobs' (Score:2)
The key to transforming yourself -- Robert Greene, Author of 48 Laws of Power at TEDxBrixton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
who doesn't (Score:2)
senior developer
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
Lack of internal career paths (Score:5, Insightful)
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Soooo, you feel it is her duty to shuffle off to the corner and die, leaving room for the next generation?
What about when you are a healthy 68 year old with skills and experience to contribute? Should you chuck all that and go on the Kavorkian diet?
I hope there still room for me when I get there. Half way to the end of the race, I've come to admire most of the 'senior' workers around me. Sometimes they do hilariously odd things--just like the young'uns around me, but they all have something to contribute
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Cables across walkways would be consider a Health and Safety violation no matter what the age of the employees.
Ideally, they would be routed out of the way, but sometimes if they company is too cheap to do that, they'll put a protector or a rug over them so they aren't so much of a trip hazard.
You can only quit so many times (Score:2)
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
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When you get hired away with better offers numerous times, how do the hiring managers view that?
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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.
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... you better show an interest in giving people 10% or better raises annually... or you're gonna be surrounded by noobs in short order.
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Referring to your employees or potential employees as "wheat and chaff"
I'm not referring to the people as wheat and chaff, just the resumes. Which ones should be saved for a more careful look.
Been there, done that... (Score:2)
Silly me (Score:2)
Re: Silly me (Score:2)
Here's my story (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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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
Do not apply to every industry (Score:2)
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
bravo (Score:2)
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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.
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Well certainly not malcontents who are white and male. But that's just general of malcontents.
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Company Policy on lateral moves (Score:2)
not at all related (Score:2)
Another step down the shithole (Score:2)
That's why companies who want to retain people (Score:2)
Lousy advice! (Score:2)
Don't assume all lifers are "lifers." (Score:2)
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
Re:Not my experience (Score:5, Insightful)
People keep saying this but it's not my experience. I don't really know anyone who has this experience, actually. I've done engineering work for decades and I just ignore all this stuff and pretend it doesn't exist, and I find that it doesn't. We have 10, 15, 20 year anniversaries here all the time. ASIC designers that are as old as dirt, software guys that have seen it all, etc. etc. Sure there are business cycles like always, but the gloom and doom seems to be limited in scope as near as I can tell. /shrug
This is similar to why they say a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job. In general, people in your situation are hardest by layoffs. Everything is well and good in the past X number of recessions you weathered without issue, but all of a sudden you hit the workplace with questionably marketable skills. That certainly isn't the case for everyone, but most people in your situation are in a very risky spot.
Ultimately it is all about risk tolerance. Someone who put 100% of their retirement savings in Amazon over the past 20 years may not see the need to diversify his portfolio. Someone who had 100% of their retirement savings in Enron might understand it better. Someone who worked at one company with non-transferable skills but made it to retirement age without a layoff is like someone who put their full 401k in company stock. It might work out, but it often doesn't.
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I'm feeling that now.
nearly 20 years at my prior employer and I'm now 41 and "the new guy" I've got a year under my belt here now and as such feel decently good about my prospects moving forward... but, yeah, that first month on the market after the two decades in my little caged tower was scary as fuck.
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Financial planning and employment are really different topics though. In an ideal world, there would be a better baseline than just salary to figure out how long it will take you to find a new job.
As for the financial side, fully agree-- people/households should hopefully have at least three different sources of income and preferably 4-5. Main job, hobby income, rental income, investment income are good starters... with a plan for what you do when one source disappears.
Nor mine (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably how it works in trendy places like the Bay Area, where tech salaries have been astronomical in recent years because of crazy VC money and the occasional unicorn, and where half the 25-year-olds earning those salaries don't even realise that almost nowhere else in the world pays at anywhere near that level or costs anywhere near that much to live.
Here in the UK, for example, if you're working as a tech employee and outside of a few quite specific niches or commission-based roles, you'll probably reach a salary ceiling within the first 5-10 years of your career, and you'll need a bigger shift than just finding a new job to get much of a raise after that.
You also have to be careful because while your 25-year-old self might think job-hopping is great for your career, your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. People say this doesn't happen as much as it used to, and with more job-hopping and short-term positions I'm sure that's true, but it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.
With that VC-driven boom looking more shaky by the day, if I were a younger programmer or online marketer or whatever today, I'd be a bit careful about job-hopping too much. You can afford to be picky in boom times, and at that age you might never have experienced anything else, but ask anyone who was around in the dot-bomb era how fast that can change.
Re:Nor mine (Score:4, Insightful)
your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. [...] it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.
If the employers really cared for their staff and supported long-term careers, they wouldn't care if the employee was previously a job hopper. They would be providing such a great work environment, pay, etc. that the employees wouldn't want to hop any more.
What you probably meant was employers who enjoy taking advantage of comfortable risk-adverse staff, and in that case I agree they wouldn't want a job hopping employee.
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It's never as simple as that, though, is it? Employers take a risk on hiring anyone and employees take a risk on moving, because usually neither party has enough information at the time of making and accepting a job offer to know if they're doing the right thing. However, particularly for employees, the grass often looks greener on the other side. Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to
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Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to commercially sensitive information, and so on.
While I concede they are technically a greater risk, it is slight and finding quality employees is rare enough I couldn't imagine this would be an legitimate issue in almost any hiring decisions. It is much bigger risk to put a sub-optimal person in the role than it is they might leave in 3 years instead of 20. IMHO that is.
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It's not the ones who are there for three years that would bother me. That's a reasonable length of time to make a useful contribution in almost any job.
It's the ones who have done 5 different jobs in the last three years that I'm talking about when I refer to job-hoppers. Someone who is just going to come along, train up one way or another at an employer's expense, but never reach the point of really being productive for that employer is just a time and money sink, and the employer is almost certainly bett
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While I concede they are technically a greater risk, it is slight and finding quality employees is rare enough I couldn't imagine this would be an legitimate issue in almost any hiring decisions. It is much bigger risk to put a sub-optimal person in the role than it is they might leave in 3 years instead of 20. IMHO that is.
It depends on the pattern. A new job every two or three years along with upward moves is fine, a new one every year and some laterals over 5 years goes straight into the trash.
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My bottom of pile is less than two years, middle pile might be 4 jobs in 8-10 years. The chances of a positive return on investment diminish as you go down.
We have very high retention though-- about 10% turnover is high for us. Recruiting a person is on average 35% of salary, training in the first year is 30-120%, and overhead on all of that is 60%. With gross margins around 60%, we see break-even around 16-38 months. If someone at 16 months break-even sticks around for 24 months, we just barely cover the e
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Sometimes you are forced to job hop. Not because you want to but because your project has been completed, management has decided "whoever knows the most will become the maintenance engineer". With that rule, everyone starts jumping ship after finding themselves "Room 101'ed". They're not fired, but they don't get any work to do either. Maybe a customer wants "the most qualified graduate" to work on a specific part of their project, but you were interviewed for another role.
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This is certainly true, and of course anyone can be unlucky if something really unexpected happens to their employer not long after they join. One short term gig does not make a pattern, and if someone has had a short term job and has a plausible reason for leaving so soon, I'm not going to hold that against them. If they've had five short term jobs in a row, on the other hand, then they're probably never going to get the chance to explain to me why.
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They're not fired, but they don't get any work to do either.
Which is a bad thing exactly how?
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Once you hit 45 you're fucked no matter what. Better be banking as much cash as possible along the way.
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That's certainly not true in my industry (software, web stuff, and so on).
But the rules of the game can change by that time in a techie's career, and you do have to play by the new rules if you want to keep winning.
Re:Truth (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Truth (Score:2)
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That was a good one, worked as a temp for an unholy witch - she was nice to half the crew and completely mental on the other half. One day her boss directed me to defy her, so that moved me from her good list to her bad list. Thing was, weeks earlier, I had gone above and beyond my job description to give her a computer tool that made her life much easier, and it was a hidden effect because the tool was handling a big ramp-up in her work load, allowing the temps to do it themselves. On my way out the doo
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Indeed. Churn is good. Job hopping employees bring good ideas and new perspectives. Unhappy employees can quit and go where they have more value. Jurisdictions like California that have laws to encourage job mobility tend to have higher productivity and higher incomes.
Nitpick: According to your NPR link, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in NJ. He did not. Gas filament light bulbs existed before Edison was born. I think they were referring to the electric incandescent light bulb ... but Thomas E
Re:Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
lol It takes at least a year to begin to be competent in a new environment, another 3-4 to actually know which way the wind blows. With each employee who leaves the house knowledge gaps grow and grow. Sure, lots of change, most of it to solve problems you don't have with newer and buggier solutions while the legacy solutions nobody knows about occupy that server that everyone is afraid to admit they don't know the purpose of and which still does two or three things magically... a little churn later nobody will even know those get done at all. As fewer and fewer people have ever narrower understanding of your org all the while it still growing you'll eventually become crippled to the point where nobody can effect any sort of change because nobody knows enough about the environment and your bloated inefficient organization will be replaced by a startup.
Or, you could toss out agism and actually retain competent employees who already know your organization and grew with that infrastructure and the startup can be crushed under your weight and momentum.
Re:Truth (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes two years total to be "found out" as a fraud and terminated. It also takes about those same two years for good employees to excel. Exceptional people in either extreme are faster.
For me, when I see people that jump jobs every 18-24 months, I see people I don't want to waste my energy on; people spending 4+ years on a job are more interesting. Industries vary, but constant job hopping is a turn off.
If you are really good, after ~10 years you should likely be self-employed.
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For example, anyone with a brain expects an enterprise architect level resource to be capable of stepping into the role of a sys admin, coder, network admin, dba, rack and stack, professional services, analyst, etc with the same 1-2yrs
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With an agenda in pocket, you can observe almost anything and write a story about how your observations back up your agenda.
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If people are leaving after 3 months, then yeah, that's too temporal, and things are goalless, and it's bad. But the average time at a company for young people is more like 3 years. In my experience, people generally get up to speed in around 6 months, which still leaves plenty of time to get stuff done.
There's a balance to be had here. One thing that I've noticed about a lot of people who've been at companies for a long time (7+ years) is that they've been a little too heavily indoctrinated into the compan
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I have known at least 8 people in my industry (engineering) to put in 20+ years with a company and still have the skills to restart and be effective or innovative. Maybe a little too much energy goes into the politics, especially the last few years-- but on average most do well for it and live happy lives. Personally, I have a 4-5 year cycle, and it is hard for me to re-invent my job to make being in my 12th year in my own business interesting.
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Recent technology advancements and social changes have made workers more interchangeable. On-boarding is quicker. Less institutional-specific knowledge is needed. There are fewer reasons in more job situations to keep people on for long careers.
During most of my IT projects one of our primary goals is identifying institutional knowledge and putting it in a workflow and/or training materials. Few things are worse than only a handful of people knowing how a company handles something or why it is handled that way. Institutional knowledge held by individual employees is one of the worst enemies of scalability, maintainability, and extensibility.
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Because of that, all of the guys like myself that have been here for over fifteen years can't take any time off. A payroll run is something you simply can't delay. It must run. Since I started here in 2000, I haven't taken more than two days off a year. Some of my coworkers haven't even taken that much time off. Of course, the junior people that have no clue often get an entire contiguous week off.
I can remember three meetings in the past six months where I point blank asked a coworker who was describing some workflow if s/he was ever allowed to even take a vacation because of how frequent and manual some process is. Each time that comment was met with a depressed smile.
You're right that it limits "scalability, maintainability, and extensibility," but how do you fix that when you have a system that is so complicated and has so many different layers and technologies?
I certainly cannot claim to know how to fix your particular problem, but I have fixed similar problems in the past (including my current company). My approach is as simple to say as it is difficult to implement: start small and keep b
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