Why Mark Suster is wrong about not hiring job hoppers
pauldix.net
pauldix.net
What's interesting in this debate is that Mark's own experience isn't where he puts his mouth. He spent the first 8 years of his career at Accenture (which screams failed attempt at making partner -- sorry to be harsh), but drastically changed occupations every two years inside the firm (switching from IT to strategy, changing countries etc.).
I really like reading Mark, so I'm afraid of overbearing my point. But his inital blog post sounded like shamelessly getting his cake and eating it too.
He felt that such frequent career changes were the best way to prepare himself to lead a startup someday -- why would the same trait magically become a liability in others? Optimizing against this very behavior in job selection signals a quite detrimental two-tiered mindset -- himself at the helm, and employees who are there to take orders.
This is to some extent the reality of capitalism, but it isn't admirable leadership, nor a good way to generate innovation, and certainly not the best way to inspire people to stick on a sinking ship while the rats drown away. As the OP said - money can't buy you love... :)
Contrast this with Yelp, Aardvark and the second-generation breed of entrepreneurs coming out of the PayPal and Google mafias.
Finding people with an earnest, project-oriented mentality is hard. A lot of people believe or want to believe they are project-oriented, but are really case-workers, and vice-versa. A good portion of people aren't project- or task- oriented, they're people-oriented and will conform to a project- or case-oriented environment to the extent that it fosters good inter-personal relations.
A small fraction of people are entirely self-oriented: they'll do whatever is necessary to build their self-esteem and satisfy their will to power. They're cancers. One is enough to destroy the team. Filtering-out these bad seeds is the hardest and most important skill a hiring manager (or potential recruit) can develop. Mr. Suster's post isn't particularly helpful in identifying these most toxic individuals: they bind tightly to their hosts and stick through the disease they create, gaining greater responsibilities and better titles.
For the younger generations, after watching their parents work 20+ years at the same organization and receive a cheap watch, they have no illusions about who will be providing the loyalty and who will be receiving it.
Or worse, a pink slip.
Even not firing people in recession times, providing four monitors or free massages and lunches are not loyalty if they make workers more productive or attract better talent. It would be loyalty only when these actions cost the company much more than they benefit it, as a gift to the employees out of sheer good will.
Why? Because by job hopping, you'll find the company willing to pay the most for your current skills, but you'll forgo promotions that would allow you access to even higher-paying jobs.
As an entrepreneur there is one benefit that ranks above all others. Stability and a big paycheck definitely aren't it. It's a sense of ownership. It's a sense of owning your own destiny. I've talked to a bunch of other entrepreneurs and they share that feeling.
If you ask job hoppers why they left some of their jobs the story will be the opposite. They left because they weren't given enough ownership. They weren't included in vital decision making processes. When you have the ability to improve your workplace, you have no reason to hop jobs.
Most jobs don't actually give their employees this chance. They're filled with bureaucracy and ridiculous power struggles. That's exactly the opposite of the startup and entrepreneurship experience.
This really resonated with me. The most frustrating jobs for me, the ones that ended in me leaping for my life or being defenestrated, were the ones where I was under extreme pressure to deliver, but the schedule and spec were subject to capricious, unpredictable shifts out of my control. The ones where I had little say in the composition of my team or the methods we used to deliver results.
Ultimately, accountability for the outcome without the authority to manage the effort is about as frustrating as life can get.
Unless I took a signing bonus, both the employer and myself put a lot of effort into bringing me on board. I don't remember getting a cheque for all the interviews I've gone to.
Suster can go ahead and self select for stayers, this is capitalism after all, but he is going to lose out at the margin. Someone can actually get a ton of work done in two years and really and the 10 year employees I've met are rarely rockstars in their field.
I'm wondering if anyone ("rockstars", presumably) demanded that job interviews be treated as temp consulting gigs that need to be paid for.
I don't understand why more places don't pay for interviews; it seems to make a lot of sense all around; I mean, this idea that a recruit will sacrifice the better part of a day to each potential employer speaks to a larger power imbalance between the two than I think exists, at least at the higher end.
Anything else just seems so ineficient and risky at least when it comes to programmers. Think long term.
Your follow piece is very helpful.
> " If I’m looking at a stack of resumes and have to quickly whittle them down I usually eliminate resumes where people switched too many times and didn’t have a single place that they stayed for 3+ years "
Is a lot more reasonable than the original title (when I see it with people), especially when applied to those ten or fifteen years into their current career (edit: originally I said "30+", but then I realized age is an illegal question and that there may be people who switched careers at a later age e.g., by going back to college for a CS degree at 25).
> Again, this is totally fine. I recommend to people that you put on your resume the reason that you changed jobs.
It would make sense to do this for 6 month stints, but not for 18-36 month ones. One reason is that this question is already asked on most employment applications. It can be confirmed through a reference check (I am still surprised when companies don't do this prior to making an offer). Having reasons stated all over the resume can be perceived as excuses and as bad mouthing (in public, given that the resume is read by many and may be publicly posted) former employers (e.g., if one put down "insufficient challenge" or "inadequate compensation").
When hiring engineers, resume screening should be done by engineers (or at worst, engineering PMs). I know they will hate it, but remind them that they will hate working with bozos a lot more.
I can find a lot better heuristics: do they just list keywords, are there obviously technically inaccurate things, are descriptions full of "wank words" vs. concrete, measurable, achievements. Asking candidates to submit an answer to a _simple_ randomly chosen question along with the resume (e.g., "in C what's wrong with this code: int* foo (void) { int n = 3; return &n; }", posting puzzles (like Facebook does) or doing a "fizz buzz" test over Etherpad are much simpler filters.
If there are red flags on the resume (and I agree that lack of 3+ year stays ten years after the person has graduated college is a red flag), the place to address them is either right before an in-person interview (after a phone screen) or right after (before making an offer). It's the role of the hiring manager, team technical lead and company HR to do this.
As an engineer conducting an interview or a phone screen, I already have a tough issue on my hand: give a binary answer after only forty five minutes with the person; time spent asking about their life's story (other than asking them about specific projects) is better spent finding information that will help me tell me whether they're technical and cultural (in terms of their ability to communicate, passion for software engineering/computer science, etc...) fit for the position or not.
But the startup world is simply not a "stable" place, for either party. There's always a tradeoff; my most stable/non-hopping friends work for the government doing fairly mind-numbing things. Those aren't the employees your startup is looking for.
If you as an employer are any good - you will have the best people wanting to join you and if you are not , then well , it is going to be a revolving door.
The best people will always have more offers on the table.
They have a broken recruitment process.
It's definitely the fastest way to increase one's income, and you can't blame people for doing that. My first job was doing technical support (first full, then part-time) at $8.50/hr, and the subsequent 5 job changes were simply progressions to a very modest mid-level IT salary in the $50-$70k range. I don't think that's ridiculous.
As a hiring manager, I would not hire someone who has been job hopping for the same position. Think of it as a twist on the Peter Principle.
My jobs were all in different subspecialisations of technology, but there is a certain identifiable sameness that unites all of them, and especially unites the first three (ISP and SMB-oriented IT consulting work) with the last three (VoIP & TDM telecommunications).
I thought that Mark's post was valuable in understanding the perspective of some hiring managers or investors since inevitably a few of those people will be looking at my resume. But I was not convinced that Mark's hiring filter was the correct approach to hiring. As an entrepreneur you're the underdog and need to find ways to do more with less. If all the big name companies are afraid of job hoppers, then you should be looking even harder at job hoppers. Your best chance at finding that diamond-in-the-rough employee is to take a closer look at the applicants that were never really evaluated at other companies because they were "caught by the filter."
Looking just at my employment history at face-value, you could determine (taking the article's definition of dedication and commitment) that I was not truly dedicated to the long-term success of the companies I've been involved in.
The real story, of course, is that there's a lot more beneath the surface. Instead of blowing me off, ask me about the extent of my dedication to each company. I'm absolutely convinced that I've sacrificed, failed, and subsequently learned more in 5 years of "hopping" than the majority of "dedicated" employees who spend the same amount of time in a single job.
This is a point that I think most (especially first time) founders would do well to keep in mind when thinking about loyalty or even overall commitment of employees.
As an employee with 1% or less of the company in options and a normal if not below market salary, I simply don't have the upside incentive to go "above and beyond." Combined with the situation of responsibility (handling outages and other emergencies) without authority (advice on major infrastructure changes ignored or delayed), my loyalty or commitment haven't been earned.
The thing is, when you are a startup, you /don't need/ people who want to stick around for 5 years. In 5 years, you will be much bigger, or dead. Either way, the employees you need 5 years from now will be /completely different/ from the employees you need now.
As a startup, you want ambitious people; the sort who hop from job to job to increase their salary and to get more interesting projects. You want someone who is relatively bright but inexperienced who really wants to gain experience. There are people who require constant change, and those people do really, really well at startups, and not so well at large corporations. Often, those people are willing to work for less money in exchange for letting them work in things they are not qualified to work on, and nearly always those people are willing to trade away stability, which is important, because as a startup, you can't offer stability.
There is an interesting treatise called "Exit, Voce and Loyalty" by A.Hirschman that talks about the reasons for withdrawal from a relationship, be it employer-employee, or state-citizen interaction. I think Paul's reasons for 'job hopping' fit into the Exit camp, withdrawing due to either inability to change things or unwillingness to confront the system in a free market with plenty of exit options.
highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organizat...
The thing not mentioned in either posting - what about guys like me that take/prefer contract work? When you are an indie developer trying to go your own way you inevetible take a lot of of short-term contract work to keep yourself floating.
Probably why I'm so startup oriented. Of my fulltime jobs most are startups. Just prefer if i'm going to commit then I'd rather comit to a company I can have the greatest impact at and where the risks/rewards are highest. I'm 'built' for startups, just how my psyche works.
A developer who has changed jobs every year could be a bozo themselves, or they could be a star talent who hasn't been lucky enough to find an equally valuable employer. If it's loyalty you want, find one of the latter and give them a good working experience. They will be very very grateful.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Tur...
He writes about how IT turnover is a good thing, and suggests that job hoppers are likely to be more talented. Interesting stuff.
(Also, I tried posting this on the linked article instead of here, but it kept rejecting my post, even when I took out the link. No idea what's going on there.)
Disrespect them (low pay, no pay raises, no down time, 80 hour weeks all the time, uncertain/unstable company, etc) and they will leave.
Also, I was really arguing against Mark using it as a filter for ruling out resumes. I just don't think it works in either the positive or negative case. As with most everything in life the answer is more nuanced. If you rule out an entire category of potential employees, you're just limiting yourself.
It also means that you have to now treat programmers as the "talent" and not the "workers". Think movie star not factory worker and you'll do a lot better. It may seem retarded, but if you want smart creative people to work for you then treat them like smart creative people. Not like a rivet puncher at a factory.
How to do this depends on the particular kind of work being done, but generally speaking you want maintainable code with lots of tests, and records of the valuable knowledge gained in the process.
It's not easy to get this out of most developers, particularly if you are not a developer yourself. If you ignore it, chances are very good it's not being done at all.
This strikes me as putting the onus on the company to ensure that knowledge isn't monopolized (as a previous commentor suggests) and, perhaps more importantly, to ensure retention of key people.
One way is to provide ownership, perhaps in the case of a startup, literally, of the company and its outcome.
In effect, this is the difference between another (likely unequal share) co-founder and merely an employee. Even if such a co-founder moves on, there's a strong enough incentive not just to "walk out" and leave the company without access to that knowledge.
If you're looking only for people who can put themselves in that position, then I'd bet you'd find a good number of them to be job-hoppers.
disclaimer I'm a Job hopper ;)
EDIT: You mention specifically start-ups. Ok. There, however, there is reward presumably commensurate with the risk a participant takes. Also, the work is probably more challenging and interesting. I hold that neither particularly apply to other sectors, speaking generally.
>As the old saying goes: money can't buy you love, but it can buy you prostitutes
Working at a job right now that has several in-house dogs wandering around the office all day, it makes me wonder if they have 401k packages and non-disclosure agreements or not.
Even the basics -- employers expect two weeks after you resign to help transition your responsibilities -- are asymmetric: how many employers would give you an extra two weeks of wages if they fired you to help tide you over until the next job?
Consider, as an example, the Mahalo stuff that started this. Jason's employee was given the opportunity to use his web dev skills on a much higher profile site and to work on a big open source toolkit (I assume he was referring to YUI or similar). Jason could either have wished his employee the best as said employee tried to take his career to the next stage, or provided him with some similar opportunity to convince him to stay, or... advocated for a system in which employees have difficulty switching jobs in order to keep the employee in an inferior position solely for the benefit of Jason. This is what Marc wants.
Note that in Marc's article, there was nothing about retaining employees by creating such an awesome environment that they don't want to leave. Oh, and btw? Here's a protip. If a dev in the valley making $100-$150 leaves for a $10K/year raise? It isn't the money. It's the boss. I claim that except for exceptional cases, salary is a 2nd or 3rd tier consideration for most great employees.
So, does Marc's advocacy of keeping employees by urging employers to systematically discriminate against people that switch jobs to find their best place that make him an asshole? In my book, yes.
ps -- protip #2? One way to discourage people from saying their boss sucked was to discourage it, ala Marc. The other way is to not be a shit boss. Again, Marc chooses the first path.
Sometimes people say stuff they don't necessarily mean 100% and before they know it they have already hit publish (And Google caches fast). For Mark, this is the first time I saw such a comment from him. So I am not going to hold it against him. I cannot say the same about Jason.
On the asymmetry of loyalty, it's just basic economic incentives. An individual has to be much more concerned about what their former employer says about them than a company does about what a single former employee says. It may not be perfectly 'fair,' but that's just the way the world works.