Never hire job hoppers. Never. They make terrible employees.

You mean, the company that would cut you loose in about three seconds flat if you became unproductive?

Employment is an economic transaction. If you pay me, I will do high-quality, honest work for you. That's fair. If I don't produce, you can stop paying me. That's fair. But if you don't pay me well, or mistreat me, I'm going to leave. That's also fair.

If you can't keep your talent as an employer, that's your fault. Berating them for taking care of themselves is immature. Welcome to capitalism, you make money off them and they're free to take the best offer on the table.

As an employer, I prefer have people with many job experiences - so when they show up here they can tell they're respected and fairly compensated!

Am I wrong for choosing the path that brings me personal success at the cost of "company loyalty"? The depiction of an ideal employee painted by this author sounds a lot like the Japanese Salaryman - diligent and loyal to the company. Isn't that model considered totally broken? Company loyalty as a top priority comes at the cost of ineffectiveness and lower morale. It just doesn't seem right.

If your employees are being scalped away at salary+15, maybe you're not paying them enough. If your employees are working 12 months and switching jobs, maybe you don't offer enough internal growth. If your are rejecting applications of "job hoppers", maybe you're leaving major value on the table.

In Silicon Valley, it's an employee's market. The employer has to work to retain, support, and fairly compensate your employees. Otherwise, you shouldn't be surprised when they up and leave.

If you have had lots of employees leave your company during a recession, you’re 98% likely to be an ineffective employer.

Flakes lack accolades. They leave jobs at the sign of trouble, or they get fired. It really is that cut and dry.

On the other hand, you have individuals (like me, prior to striking out on my own) who consistently find jobs they excel at, and produce results. What any hiring manager, and any recruiter who is worth the salary they are paid should look for are results. Is the candidate simply listing job duties that they are expected to accomplish, or do they go into detail and educate you on the accomplishments and success they've experienced at each job?

There is a difference, and if you're unable to make that distinction, I won't be sending anyone to work for you because that indicates to me you're looking for grunts. Not team members.

mark zuckerberg talked about how he was happy creating a culture where great people should be able to come in, start being effective immediately, and move along after a year or so.

paul buckheit mentioned his reason for quitting google, it was basically, because you need to stir stuff up, he just went from a comfortable but awesome job to something completely different, a new challenge.

I couldnt help feel a bit depressed thinking about working for zappos for the rest of my life, no slight against zappos, they seem like an awesome company and I would love to have a chance to work there, just meant I could help felling depressed about working for any single company for the rest of my life.

It's not even an idealogical, but plain economical observation: take two companies. One is low-stress, slow, steady money. The other is a crazy fast, big money. Angels or VCs give you tons of cash, you can afford to pay top employees almost any amount of money, with any kind of crazy benefits you can think of (including those freshly baked blueberry muffins in the lobby, which nobody ever eats) but if you don't get that product out before your competitor, you lose it all.

Which company will be faster shedding an unproductive employee?

I can't count the amount of VC funded startups I've known to fire entire teams just because the product vision changed a bit. The main client is going to be an iPhone app instead of a web widget? Immediately fire with no notice or compensation all 5 "star" web developers who left permanent positions at Google, Amazon, Facebook etc to come and help your realize your dream.

I'm not even talking about non-productivity, incompetence, or engineering mistakes that would get you fired from a trail-blazing startup in about 5 minutes.

To expect "loyalty" under these kind of terms is sheer delusion. The only "loyal" employee you're going to get is someone entirely unfamiliar with the above realities - aka a clueless newbie on his first startup job.

There's not much point explaining how the notion of "job hopping" being an employee's "fault" is entirely baseless in this context. This is an important discussion, but so much beyond the grasp of this curious article, that purports to apply to the reality of startups while ignoring the elephant in that particular room.

People have been loyal, but they have been paid back with lay offs, either the company goes belly up, or people/projects get cut. Once it happens to you once, you don't do that mistake again. If you see the 'shitty times' ahead sign, some people will leave, and for good reason.

Want to keep them around? Give them an incentive to do so, more equity, more responsibility/better tittle, and promise higher pay when things get better.

But a lot of companies just don't do it, and expect blind obedience. Also they turn blind eye when shitty managers ruin teams, and take action only after half of the team has left already. First guys out of the door are always the good ones.

If a candidate tells you: 'I left company x, b/c my manager was a dickhead, and that I'd rather work somewhere for good people, then compromise my dignity and integrity just to make a manager look good', means that guy actually has a backbone. A weak person will bend and please his manager, even though what the manager is demanding might be damaging to the company on the long run (you see this often in tech. companies).

My experience as a Gen Y, when I started my first job (2002), as an intern, i saw 3 out of 8 team members get laid off. One guy had be there for 2 years, one 6 and one 14! That's a good lesson you get for life. A lot of people that started their careers between 99-2003 saw this first hand. Sorry, but loyalty goes so far.

Expect the average person to stay 1-4 years in one place, with the 3 year mark the good time to find a new job. Any more than that, then they probably have no ambition, unless they are moving really high up in the ranks.

That's because they're founders and CEO's. If you're hiring me, by definition I'm not the founder (but if I have lots of equity and am treated as an equal partner maybe we'll split the difference on that one). Are you hiring me to be CEO, then? If not, find a better example to compare me against.

That seemed to work for him. And I think Mark Suster has had success with his preferences in the opposite direction. So maybe this is an example of hiring to our biases that don't matter as much as we think.

The fact of the matter is that contemporary work culture is (for better or worse) progressing towards lower job security, and more job hopping is an inevitable consequence of this. When job security goes down in the economic community, the propensity for job hopping goes up--even when employee's jobs are not directly at risk. This is a natural and rational response to low job security.

Judging workers who have job hopped in the past can be unfair to those workers, especially when many companies are decreasing their own loyalty to their employees. Why shouldn't workers chase higher paychecks outside of their current companies, if those companies don't adequately value their worth? If an employer has not demonstrated a commitment to retaining its employees, it shouldn't expect any commitment in return.

That said, I do agree with the fundamental sentiment behind the article--that companies who are loyal to their employees should prefer employees that will be loyal to them in return.

No shit, Sherlock. Is the company going to be in it for me? Quid pro quo.

I can see the author's point that it is bad to hire job-hoppers at a startup. A startup probably needs people to stay around for their knowledge.

But this is such a terrible generalization. People leave for basically one reason - they will be happier doing something else. Why not make your company the place they will be happiest at rather than blaming those around you?

The author is upset because with "job-hoppers", employers do not have as much power as they once did. This advice is incredibly biased towards keeping the status-quo for the author's own selfish reasons.

That may be a little delusional (might be his MBA showing) in light of the recent reports of major hiring drives from the big names: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230462870457518...

* 1.5 years, left after the group was split in half and I was forced into full time testing (I enjoyed part time testing and the first year in that role was outstanding, the new position and team was not a good match).

* 1 year, taken over, got J2EE experience and worked with a great team, too bad the office was scheduled to be closed and that we were given no work to do.

* 6 months, layoff, worked with the full cutting edge J2EE JBoss (Seam) stack but was let go as one of the newest employees and the only one that didn't know C# (15% of IT laid off) when the budget was shifted.

* Short stint at a failed startup, learned some PHP

* New stint at a promising startup

Technically, with the take over, that's now 7 employers. I think the new job looks quite promising, and I don't regret any of those experiences, as I now have a lot of breadth.

I freely admit that I had to work to avoid appearing as a job hopper, and that hurt in the recently ended job hunt. I still think (hope?) that I've ended up at my best work place since that year learning J2EE.

*editted for clarity and inserting some more details in the first few minutes

Another friend truly does have a terrible manager. He's been with his company for 5 years and had consistently great performance reviews until he transferred locations. Six months later there's a position at a different location and they won't let him transfer and he's getting poor reviews with no suggestions for improvement. He's thinking about quitting and getting re-hired at the new location. This would result in a pay cut and loss of vacation time but he's willing to do it. He loves the company overall but his current management has made things very difficult for him. That's loyalty.

Then this guy gives examples of a bunch of founders who started immense companies and stuck with them. Of course founders are going to be loyal to their company. They're the founders.

Now for this example he gives: You start fighting with your co-founder whom you thought you understood. Your revenues are “just around the corner.” Your angel investors are nervous because the VCs aren’t moving that fast to fund your next round.

As an employee faced with that situation and with a better offer standing, which would you go with? The company you're not sure is going to be around because the founders are arguing and the capital is drying up or the one with money to pay you more? I'm not sure why he used that as an example.

The author of the post seems to expect a lot from people he describes as feeling entitled.

Heck, if you're not in it for the money, don't take equity, don't take a paycheck, and heck, don't even charge for your products or services. After all, desiring money is bad. Just stay home, eat popcorn and watch TV and -- hey wait a minute: all of that costs money!

This historical trend is continuing, the old forms are breaking down, and our little corner of society (the software startup world) is one edge of whatever is emerging to replace "jobs". It isn't clear yet what the next form is. But these angry arguments about who owes what to whom are symptoms of the churn of this process.

Personally I think it would be great if we eventually moved fully beyond the master-slave relationship. As someone with a strong aversion to both sides of that dichotomy I find it a little annoying to be part of a civilization based on it.

What I look for in a job is autonomy, great co-workers and interesting work. The moment any of these decline, I leave. Why should I stick on to a dead end job because someday some fellow like the author might not like my cv?

Do what makes sense to you at each decision point. If you are any good technically you will never have a shortage of job offers. If you are really good you'll be drowning in them.

The barrage of vitriolic and savage responses here is totally deserved, I can't get over the fact that people like this still exist.

Also think if you were in the software field in the mid/late 90's and you were NOT job hopping, in some sense, you were probably not being very smart. Because there was so much demand for our skills that you could almost always get more money by moving on. Once all the frothy demand died down, yes, it tended to become smarter to stay. But all of this -- all of it -- is just generalizations. People leave jobs for all sorts of reasons which do not or should not reflect badly on them. Family, sickness, education, career growth, moving to a better home or community, etc.

I think loyalty is more important at a startup than at a larger, more established business. But never EVER assume the business will be loyal to you, the employee. If you're lucky, they will, but don't assume that. The whole point of the business is to maximize profit for the owners, and the executive/managerial class sometimes really is just out for their own best interests, even if that means canning employees and/or shutting down entire lines of business that otherwise are staffed with good people doing good work. They look at the numbers, and may often "do what the numbers tell them." Likewise, an employee can analyze matters in the same way. It's fair.

I've reviewed hundreds of resumes, hired great people, and hired some not great people. Sometimes they leave because of you and your company, sometimes they don't. In my experience, a history of short employment can mean one of two things:

1. This candidate is extremely talented, independent, and a self-starter. Hire these people. Now. 2. This candidate leaves before he or she is truly accountable for the code they write.

2 is very dangerous. You don't want to hire an engineer who will write a subscription billing platform and quit the week after launch. It's often tough to determine the difference between 1 and 2, and it takes many pointed questions to figure it out.

What a delusional asshole. If anyone says they care more about a company (and in turn the success of the shareholders) over their own success, they're lying. Anyone who expects this is insane.

I am sorry but the author supports a very prejudged and one sided viewpoint. The converse of the above quoted statement is: employers who enact massive layoffs at the first sign of trouble. The dynamics of the American work force have changes, many companies are no longer loyal so many employees are no longer loyal.

I totally disagree with the filter. I don't want employees that aren't going to tough it out and quit mid-project either. That isn't what we are talking about though. We are talking about people that probably switched jobs for any number of reasons. Not hiring someone just because they switched jobs or independently consulted, that seems so arbitrary it is almost comical.

It really is a two way street. I worked at a place that had 98% employee retention for multiple years through the boom. Almost everyone there was heavily recruited and almost no one left. Even the people that were previously independent consultants and the ones that had job hopped. Why? It was a great place to work with above average compensation and awesome people to work with.

My point is that if you compensate people well and you provide a great place to work you don't have to filter for potential job hoppers. You are then free to filter for the important things like work ethic, aptitude, skill, and fitting in.

In my experience, people who have worked at various companies bring a more diverse set of experiences to the table. They know that there's more than one way to do something.

On the other hand, people who have stayed at one job for a long time (in a non-executive role) while everything around them was changing probably aren't as good as identifying opportunities or accepting change.

You're doing it wrong!

BTW I don't want to employee someone who doesn't want to be there. If he wants to leave, he's doing us both a favor.

It's important to explore why the candidate wasn't happy or had leave the company.

they hire a person, and then if they work like a slave for them...the most they'd see is a 5% raise if that. And in this economy, chances are the company won't even give the people a raise for years. And early on, in one's career, the experience you gain is valued way more than a 5% raise.

I'll give you an example of my friend. He came into his company and ended up with a $12K raise in salary. Pretty much was the top performer there. So the first year he got a 5% raise(max available, and only after 4 months on the job). Second year the market crashed. And the company pretty much slashed the work force. 50% of people were let go. Out of 30 people in his department, only 3 were left. No raises that year. The next year, no raises, more jobs slashed, the rest of his team was let go...and my friend ended up being the only person in the department(company has multiple divisions, so he was just transferred to another department). The next year the company turned around...but once again no raises.

So look at my friend...1. top performer...out of 30 people in his department, the only one who wasn't laid off. 2. more and more responsibilities, pretty much attached to his blackberry. Works nights, weekends from home too. 3. the ONLY person in the entire company who knows anything about 60% of the company's internal software..and no raises. And due to inflation....you can even say his salary was slashed, because it wasn't adjusted with inflation for multiple years.

Now why would anyone stick around with a company like that? Why wouldn't he move to another company for a 20-30% raise? In fact he wants to...but he can't because he is the only person working in his family, has kids and he figures, it's better the devil you know, so he is waiting for the market to turn around...+ he likes his commute.

Now let's say he sticks around for another year, and the next year the company decides to give everyone raises. Do you think the company will be fair, and will give people raises for the 3 years they stuck around supporting the company through the tough times w/o getting paid their fair market value? Or do you think they'll just give people 5%(if that) and maybe a $500 bonus?

Bottom line: Employees will stick with you through thick and thin as long as you pay them their fair share...noone likes changing jobs...noone likes the first 3 months on a new job when you don't know if they want to keep you, noone likes job hunting, noone likes interviewing.

If you don't, you shouldn't be surprised if they feel justified to look for a company that pays them what they are worth.

Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.

The "job hopper" stigma originally came into existence because people who did so would rise rapidly in salary through iterated negotiations; in times such as the late 1990s, it's possible to get to a very high salary level this way. Pursued inflexibly, it's a terrible strategy in the long term, because it makes you less likely to end up as someone's protege (rolling stone, no moss) and eventually compensation will reflect the resulting stagnation. But most "job hoppers" do not fall into this category; they change jobs not because they are trying to game the system, but because they realize they are wasting time.

If your career is not improving-- you're not learning, inadequately mentored, and no one is looking out for your advancement-- then you should change jobs as soon as you can do so with minimal harm to the company. (If you're in a small company, it might be right to stay on for a couple months, at least to train someone else.) Since most people are not and cannot be "protege", this means that it's good to shift around a few times until finding a fit.

Likewise, everyone has to do some grunt work and deal with some unpleasantness, and recognizing this is just being a mature person, but anyone who finds out his job is mostly or entirely grunt work, or work unrelated to his career (e.g. the programmer who gets put full-time on office tasks) is wasting time and should leave.

Sorry, but I have to say all this because I am sick and fucking tired of people ripping on my generation for not playing by someone else's shitty rules. Are the older people really so damn entitled as to not understand all this? And how can they expect loyalty to companies when layoffs happen all the time?

This man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.