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And Rands mentions this in the article. There's a weighted list of criteria you keep in the back of your head (am I fairly compensated? Is the company stable?) and you constantly reevaluate them.

Rands lists the major ones, but there can be dozens of others. I personally call them "red flags" and once I see enough, it's resume time. I've tuned my own threshold pretty well and walked away from some perfectly good jobs and companies, only to see them implode in my rear-view mirror a year or two later.

My current employer, who has treated me well to date, just went back on a promise not to move the factory to Mexico. At the announcement they promised not to relocate Engineering. I updated my resume over the holiday break.

And Rands mentions this in the article. There's a weighted list of criteria you keep in the back of your head

No, he doesn't. The full list from him includes:

  Am I happy with my job?
  Do I like my manager? My team?
  Is this project I’m working on fulfilling?
  Am I learning?
  Am I respected?
  Am I growing?
  Do I feel fairly compensated?
  Is this company/team going anywhere?
  Do I believe in the vision?
  Do I trust the leaders?

People can answer "YES!" to all of those questions and still leave the job. I've left jobs I was happy at. All sorts of happy people do it all the time. The foundation of the author's essay is flawed.

So, elaborate for us. What was your personal criteria or event that wasn't in the list above but made you decide to prepare to leave?

I think the thing about life is that its complexity can't be reduced to a list of criteria.

Sure it can. That list will just be different for different people.

Different for different people, different for different points in time for the same people (e.g. when parenting arrives)... Modeling life is hard. :)

And that's the author's point. He's not trying to declare the official list of criteria, but just point out that, subconsciously, you do have one. And one small change to one value in the decision matrix might be the tipping point to entertain job offers.

The sooner you become consciously aware of it, the better.

Nah, you'd expect Life to be at least Turing-complete.

Parent obviously meant a list of specific criteria applied to everybody.

Not to mention that your answer implies that people only do things because of some list of personal criteria -- e.g. that they always take conscious and/or rational decisions.

Just the fact that you've been at a given company for a while might be enough of a reason. Even if everything is going well you might want to find out how life looks somewhere else; you can usually come back if it turns out worse, so why not?

Having a voice and starting something new in the world, instead of being a replaceable tiny nail in a mansion built by someone else.

Humans are quite irrational creatures, aren't they?

There are many rational reasons to leave a loved job too. For most people, their job is not their life, and nor it should be.

I totally agree. I answered yes to all of the above at my last company and left about 9 months ago to start my own company with some former colleagues from way back when in an unrelated market. I had risen quickly, felt very listened to, loved my team, and believed in my superiors. At the end of the day, as much as my last company was the happiest I've ever been at any job, the chance to have my own company outweighed all of the above.

I agree entrepreneurial drive is something Rands didn't account for. For some of us, it's just an innate, inevitable part of our being.

Accounting for it doesn't really add anything. If you have that drive your shields were never really up so trying to prevent the "shields down" moment is simply not possible.

In fairness, your answer to: Is this project I’m working on fulfilling? should have been no it is not fulfilling enough. It does not fulfill your desire to own your own company.

Yeah, the list is fundamentally flawed. Too many outside-of-work things [e.g. Spouse job moves] can cause you to leave as well.

The thing is, those are only most of the reasons that are directly related to the job itself. Perfectly understandable, considering the goal is to tell managers how to retain employees. But anyone in that position should also be aware that any employee's real list includes a bunch of things that have nothing to do with anything that happens at the company they work at. The "Shields Down" moments may include things like:

Wanting to move to a different area for any number of life reasons

Wanting to change to a different career entirely

Need to take time off to deal with a new child, a sick relative, etc.

Finding an opportunity for something you can't offer them, like a chance to start their own company

And about a hundred other things that I couldn't imagine.

But I think reasons that are directly related to the job are the only things that belong in this list. If your "shields down" moment is caused by some factor that is external to the job it's really outside of your manager's control.

His job as a manager doesn't really include making sure your children don't get sick, or convincing you that California weather isn't that nice, or that you don't really want to have the life goal of starting your own company. I'd saying restricting the list to questions that a manager could have an impact on is more valuable than a more generic list that encapsulates everything.

"I want to live in a different city" is a management challenge that belonga on the list. Managers have some measure of control over where they allow employees to work.

I disagree because this list is meant to be intrinsic to evaluating your current job vs. some other semi-comparable job.

Conditions leading to a shields down moment for someone switching to job that might be preventable by management is pretty well contained by this list. It doesn't account for life goals or circumstances that drive you in a truly different career path.

What about "Does my compensation cover my basic needs?", followed shortly by "Does my compensation provide me any meaningful life planning?"

Being fairly compensated and being adequately compensated are two different things. Sometimes you have to pay more than what is "fair" to keep people. Fair is tied to market forces, forces that assume people can/will move between jobs. To stop people from falling prey to market forces and leaving you need to pay them above the going rate, beyond fair.

An extreme example of this is where the fair/market rate is zero, or even below zero. People like interns on film/tv productions are paid nothing, sometimes for years. There are even examples of people paying for the opportunity to work without pay. If you want such people to remain loyal you have to pay them something, which would be more than the fair/market rate of nothing.

For an example of negative market rates in the medical field, see http://thetab.com/uk/uclan/2015/10/04/is-uclan-elitist-1193

"There has also recently been criticism of work experience placements in a private hospital being sold for £500 per week, which would help students improve their applications to study medicine at university."

If you're willing to pay someone more money to retain their marketable skils then that price is 'fair', by the definition of 'free market' anyway.

A market/fair rate requires a market, something bigger than a single employer. If a market rate exists, it must be possible to pay someone above/below that rate. If the fair rate is always whatever someone is paid, the concepts of fair or market rates looses all meaning.

My understanding is that in a perfectly efficient free market, yes, everyone would be paid 'fair market rate' for their particular skills.

But such markets are only approximated in practice, and the interesting part of Economics is studying the effects of how actual markets differ from being perfectly free and efficient.

One interesting thing about watching companies implode in the rear view mirror is that often one person leaving is enough to start a chain reaction.

In one example in my career, a big employer was trying to change its culture, and set up a group to change its practices. Hired a lot of good, pretty expensive people. And it all worked well for a while, until one person decided that grass was greener somewhere else. Losing a teammate led to another, then another. The people that left had new employers, and happily recommended them. Others that were happy before were less happy with enough good coworkers gone, as management did nothing to special to keep them. In 6 months, everyone in that change initiative, and a lot of other employees they had contact with, were all gone. They ended up having to outsource everything said department was doing, because too much of the knowledge and expertise had left.

So beware when people leave, because coworkers leaving can a very common trigger for shields to go down.

This is how DEC feuled Google, and Microsoft feuled Amazon, and Google fueled Facebook.

I think the order was DEC fueled Microsoft, Msft fueled Google and Amazon in Seattle at least, Google fueled Facebook.

Having a coworker depart definitely makes you readjust your matrix.

It's weighted by whether the coworker was good or not, which makes you wonder if he knows something you don't. THAT'S when you start sniffing around and discovering other things that say yeah, he was right and it's time to bail.

I don't think the article assumes people enter a job intending to stay there for life. Rather, it assumes thst people will stay at a job so long as it meets their criteria for happy employment. The article makes a subtle point, which is that an employee will treat those criteria as absolute or fixed quantities until something -- an action, a slight, a struggle, or some other demoralizing event -- causes him to consciously reevaluate his criteria. At that point, the criteria become relative -- that is to say, relative measures of the current job vis-a-vis any perceived alternatives.

The only implicit assumption in the author's thesis is that people value stability and are generally content with the status quo until it is challenged. I'm not sure this applies to all people, though I'm willing to consider the possibility that it applies to most. And if not most, then certainly many.

All of that said, your point about changing life goals is a great one. People definitely leave jobs for reasons beyond those articulated in this article. Rands' thesis is not completely encapsulating. But it doesn't need to be complete in order to be compelling. So long as what he's saying provides a decent, rough framework for managers and leaders to keep in mind -- which I'm interpreting as his intent here -- then it's still valuable.

If I'm insanely fortunate I will have 100 reasonably healthy years on this planet. Spending 3-4% of my life at any one company is a lot if you ask me, no matter how much I like it there. The bottom line for a lot of people on HN is that they don't have to if they don't want to. And like you say, most companies are not SpaceX. While you can certainly still grow and crush it after 2-3 years, chances are that you can grow and crush it that much more if you uproot and start over somewhere else.

> While you can certainly still grow and crush it after 2-3 years, chances are that you can grow and crush it that much more if you uproot and start over somewhere else.

Or have to begin at the bottom somewhere else. In other words: give up what you reached at the first company when you go somewhere else.

Without judging it one way or the other, there is a certain mentality among many in tech (especially Silicon Valley) that jumping full-time jobs every 2 or 3 years is just how things are done. By contrast, in most situations, a resume with 10 different jobs on it tends to set all sorts of alarm bells off. It's partly a function of startups, which frequently fail. But it's not just that.

Well, a resume with 10 jobs on it is just a badly designed resume. Who cares where you worked 20 years ago? Drop in the three positions you feel are most relevant to this application, not everything you ever worked on.

This makes a fair bit of sense, but how does it fit with employers poised to jump on any career gap (which I guess you could say is a warning sign in itself -- but seems to be common)

One thought would be to do it like academics do with "selected publications" and have a section called "selected experience" or "relevant experience".

What I've done in the past though is simply mkae the older stuff increasingly terse to the point where the really old stuff is just the dates, company and title.

Do you want to work somewhere who thnga that your non-work 10 years ago is more important than your recent work?

If you're getting a clear demotion when you switch jobs, there's a problem.

Why is there a problem then?

I used to value working at a "SpaceX" company much more in my 20s, but these days I'm grumpier and more selfish. Now I prioritize happy with job, good pay, work-life balance, short commute even if it's just some website. I figure if I have those things right now, there is no reason to leave.

I think with a large, diverse (in terms of jobs possible to do) company that's possible. Someplace like Google, you could move teams every few years and learn new skills, do interesting work. (Assuming you enjoyed working for Google).

Conversely, if I had a job that paid well enough I knew I could retire healthy and happy, and in the meantime I didn't actively dislike it, I could tolerate a little monotony.

Unfortunately, most jobs couple monotony with long hours and think money will make up for it. This becomes a viscous cycle - the few hours you have to yourself are not a state where you are prepared to go out and learn new concepts, so you get locked into moving up the career ladder to get higher pay, rather than switching careers.

where does it imply that?

To me this is an attempt to look past the BS of generic reasons given while quitting. What happened a year prior to lead to that moment? Regardless if it's 1 or 20 years into the employment.

If what you said was the absolute case nobody would quit unless they were going to a job that is more meaningful to them in relation to their life goals, which happens to a degree but I believe is sill in a minority. Reality is much less idealistic and the 10 smaller reasons listed in the post can absolutely lead to shields down.

Even if you're at SpaceX you may treat it as "paying the dues" or apprenticeship period of your life until you can go off and have more impact somewhere else.

Wouldn't that almost by definition make then unhappy? If your job isn't helping your fulfill your life goals then at some point it seems like that conflict would make you unhappy.

That said, there are 3 companies I've worked at I would have stayed at 2-3x as long if I'd been happier at them where in this particular instance happiness = having more fun at work and building stronger/closer relationships with my co-workers.

nobody (should?) looks for satisfaction at work. that's the marketing human resources and PR feed you so you spend more time at work.

work is a means to sustenance. you help someone make a lot of money (either exploring space or showing ads in a plagiarized fart app) for a paycheck and then you use that money to sponsor your life style.

work is not supposed to be a hobby.

I had a job that was incredibly fulfilling for about three years. The remaining five years became less and less fun, leading me to move on after more than eight years with the company. Saying that "nobody looks for satisfaction at work" is an over-generalization. I worked with others who also loved being there. It might be rare, but it happens.

Err depends on what sort of job you need to look at what level you are on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

A job working at MacDonald's is not the same as say Dactor or Vet.

I used to believe that when I was younger; a little experience cured me successfully :). It's not that it isn't possible to have a job that also is your hobby and your passion - it's just extremely difficult to find one. That is, unless you're really accepting and easy to please, or young and still in crush with programming. I've seen quite a lot of the latter types among young developers. Sadly, I've entered workforce long past my crush period, so you couldn't make me satisfied with life by offering to pay for making a random website in currently hot framework.

The most realistic shot at really working on what you love is to start your own business, but even then you often have to pivot to something less interesting to you, and either way, in time you're likely to end up doing mostly administrative work.

So yeah, I ended up assuming that work will not be my hobby, and it's up to me to maximize its profit while minimizing time spent on it.

starting your business is already on the area i like least: dealing with clients.

impossible to start my dream job, and i already tried twice