Please Jobhop as much as Possible
angryasian.posterous.com
I started this rant over at help a startup out, but had more to rant about so its on my blog now. Basically a real world response to Calcanis and Suster
angryasian.posterous.com
I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, yet I wouldn't say that what we have today is bad either, I suppose they're just two equilibriums. The problem more likely lies in the transition from one to the other: employees that expect to be treated with loyalty and are summarily dumped with a few years left before retirement, or employers who invest a lot in employees and expect to see them stick around because of it.
This is pretty off topic, but I'm not particularly a fan of 'loyalty' to countries either. Most people happen to be born in a particular one; at least a company is something that you likely chose.
The chocolate maker Cadbury would be a good example of this.
/nostalgic for an earlier era I am to young to have known
Oh, and my current country of residence, Italy, is a very bureaucratic entity;-)
It's amazing how many people get a sense of superiority simply because they happened to be born in a certain spot. Think of how easy it is for politicians to exploit this feeling. How many wars started this way?
i've lived in two countries other than the one i grew up in.
I mean, what's a "foreign" country, anyway? Is it one different than the one you're raised in? Your parents were raised in? One that doesn't harbor the same culture as you? Where am I from? Is it the country I was born in? The country I grew up in? The country I formed my political beliefs in? That's three different answers, and there are more to choose from.
So, I don't buy this "loyalty" thing. Who am I supposed to be loyal to? Why? Why can't I be loyal to an altogether different country that I like more, but have never spent much time in?
This whole discussion is off track. Terminal values can't be rational or irrational, they just are.
I don't see the problem with being a job hopper except it sounds really hard to jump jobs once a year or more often considering it takes about half a year to get settled into a new job. Personally I've set myself a 5 year limit as max time to work at one company before moving. This is part of my not-form-lifelong-habits program. So even if I do have my dream job I force myself to leave after 5 years. Forced perspective is good for you, you should always try to push forward and you can't do that by sitting tight in a job.
I would be skeptical about hiring someone who switched jobs 6 times the last 5 years, but I'd be even more skeptical hiring someone at 30 with less than 5 jobs on their CV as that might suggest them being lazy sods who didn't have summer jobs etc.
If a company shows genuine respect, compassion and, indeed, loyalty to an employee, there's no reason they couldn't be shown the same in return - even if it's ultimately for the profit of the company (if said values are expressed, the profit of the company should also positively reflect on the profit of the employee).
Where do employers get the idea that a job contract is a soul contract? Unless you are offering significant profit sharing, why expect to be normal that people simply sacrifice themselves for the sake of your company? And seduce you into believing it's nothing more than your moral obligation?!? It's a moral harassment policy!
Want people to work overtime and not complain? Pay them fairly for that! Want people to stick with your company and not leave? Provide a good workplace and a deserving salary!
The only ones that should have unconditional loyalty to a company are the company owners!
Besides, wake up and realize that there is no longer such a thing as a carrier in a single company. At least where I live, you shouldn't expect and IT employee to stick around longer than 4 years, and most leave within 1-2 years.
Stop thinking you hire loyalty.
And employess, realize that your company won't be any more loyal to you when things get rough and they need to make cuts. In fact, when that time comes, they usually go for the fat paychecks of those that stuck around.
Why? They can just as well shut down the company, if they want, or sell it, or do whatever.
There are people who want loyalty and dedication above all else -- both from themselves and from their workers and employers. Then there are people who want challenge, risk, excitement, and travel.
From what I've seen, if you want to learn meta-tech (and not just tech in your neck of the woods) you need to get out among a bunch of different industries and job situations and start learning.
Or put a different way: as one of those people, I get approached all the time for full-time jobs. The conversation goes like this "We see that you have experience working in X, Y, and Z, and you have industry experience in A, B, and C. You also have been in G, H, and I job positions. We are desperate to have somebody with these experiences and skills, but all we find are people with a lot of experience in just one of these areas. Would you consider a full-time job?"
My reply is this: if I were the type of person to consider a full-time job, I would not be the type of person who had all those things you want. Full-time jobs are stability -- stable platform, stable work environment, stable job position, stable insurance, stable retirement. Things may start off chaotic (as in a startup) but the goal is to reach stability.
I've been parachuting into situations where the building is on fire and saving the baby. It's like startup work all year round -- and for dozens of different highly-rated companies. And by the way, the rates are great too.
Do that for a while. Learn what you like and what you don't. Then start looking for stability. Don't sell yourself out too soon in the name of loyalty and stability.
EDIT: And I know a lot of folks from those companies who only wanted stability and loyalty and ended up on the street after ten years with very little in the way of marketable skills. Don't fool yourself: IT is a risky and always-changing business. Stability and long-term jobs are an illusion.
And yes, I miss the code-monkey and hands-on PM work. That's why in my free time I still code as much as I can. And why I like hanging out on the net with you lug-heads so much (smile)
So now instead of the building being on fire, they have 50 teams that are taking 4 times longer than industry norms to deliver functionality. How do you fix that without shutting down the place, firing a lot of people, or causing more harm than good?
The thing you run into with this type of work is that everybody thinks they are unique, and they are, to some degree. But also there are a lot of similarities. For somebody without a big breadth of experience who is just reading a book and trying to apply it, it's not so clear what is unique about their situation and what isn't. So there's more to it than training. You have to have a lot of hands-on experience watching what works and what doesn't. Call it strategic technology management consulting.
Actually it's a much bigger fire, but the sense that you are delivering something of immediate value is lost. I've found that as you get better and better at delivering solutions, they give you fuzzier and fuzzier problems, many times with no clear deliverable. Moving from delivering stuff on-time and under-budget to fuzzy-world is not easy.
My job used to be the sharpest guy in the room. Now my job is to make a hundred other guys be the sharpest guy in the room. I don't light the light; I turn the brightness up 40%.
And there is no way you can be a full-timer at BigCorp for 20 years and do what I do.
Very insightful comment! I never thought of it that way.
Like Daniel, I have spent a lot of time both on my own and in enterprises. I've met lots of smart people in enterprise IT departments. They have tended to be very deep in one or two areas and very shallow (or absent) in most others.
I have always found it easy to accomplish a lot very quickly in an enterprise environment, not because I was smarter than anyone else, but because I had been around the block on my own so much more. But until today, I never realized why. Thank you, Daniel.
Playing the field with employers should be the standard mode of operation. This possibly benefits employers even more than employees. What is worse for an employer than an entrenched employee, who hates his job, doing the bare minimum to stay employed? Surely the answer isn't the guy who was super productive for a year and then moved on.
I've been that guy for my whole life, and not a single employee has tried to convince me to stay with better perks, none.
A couple of times I stayed and got not even enough to compensate for inflation, so fuck em, I moved on.
If you want better perks, every year you have to move on.
ps. But you have to be good, and I mean real good to play the diva card.
Immaterial. You never take the counter-offer.
An employer who refuses to reward you until you're at the point of looking elsewhere is not worth remaining at. Further, you'll wind up on the short-list of problem employees and in the event that they do need to reduce headcount you will be disproportionately likely to lose your job earlier, thus disadvantaging your next job search.
There's no upside to taking a counter-offer beyond immediate convenience.
It is not the counter-offer which counts, that in my book is too late. It is the end-of-year reward which should be AUTOMATICALLY adjusted per inflation plus at least a 5% increase if you overperformed. So I always expect a 10% incease WITHOUT asking for it, or else I'll move on.
On my side, I always overperform more than 10% so I deserve what I expect. The employer? not much, they don't care. They will never care. Their book forbids 10% increase for every employee.
Key point, not EVERY employee deserves 10% increase. Only overperformers. HR guys need to understand that and learn to differentiate and reward accordingly, which they don't. They are also collecting their winnings every month.
ps. I am not talking about food a la carte, or gym towels. I am talking about money and vacation time. Everything else is a welcomed addition to the perks.
1)There's no such thing as the perfect mate. Looking for perfection will make you dissatisfied with everyone you date. 2) A lot of what makes a relationship work or fail is how you treat each other, not who you're with. 3) "Playing the field" too much desensitizes you. Your memories with your mate are mingled and confused with memories of lots of others. You keep doing mental comparisons. You have fewer unique experiences together. It just seems less special. So look around, sure - but don't make a sport of it. Lasting love is way more satisfying than a lifetime of flings.
(Employment, of course, is totally different.)
There's no end to the amount of advice in the world when it comes to love and marriage. Some counterpoints:
Looking for perfection will make you dissatisfied with everyone you date.
Or, you will gain enough experience to realize when you've found the best one.
A lot of what makes a relationship work or fail is how you treat each other, not who you're with.
The way someone treats you is mostly a result of who they are.
"Playing the field" too much desensitizes you.
Maybe, but it is the best way to learn what personality traits you like and dislike.
Lasting love is way more satisfying than a lifetime of flings.
Your chances at finding lasting love are greatly increased if you search for and find the right person.
The first says that the right pair of people fit together, so if you aren't fitting, then you must not have found the right pair of people.
The second says that relationships are constructed. What you get out has more to do with what you put in than with who you are.
While there is an element of truth to both, everyone I know who is happily married subscribes more to the second theory than the first.
It doesn't mean it's actually useful advice for someone who wants to get ahead.
Clearly, some jobs teach you more than others...
My criticism has everything to do with his use of "career" where he should have said "skills" or "personal development" and his use of "years", when time spent has absolutely no objective relevance, as reinforced by your own comment: 1 year at firm A is not equivalent to 1 year at firm B.
So the implication that there's an objective salary advancement/year or career advancement/year rate is nonsense. It's detritus from the failed management schemes of an older era.
When I was younger I used to think that my boss just didn't get 'it' -- whatever 'it' was. As I hung in there I started to see that I had been sold a bill of goods in school.
You get paid for the job you do, not for the job you think you do.
When you are sure you are doing what you thought you were and still are not getting commensurate pay; that's when you leave.
I noticed most of the employees were there to float along with the tide and do enough to stay employed, while very few had aspirations of making changes and doing good things. After that I started "job hopping"- Starting with a contract gig, after 3 months of that went to a medium sized company, and have now ended up at a small company of 100 or so employees. With each subsequent jump I have increased my pay by 15-30%, and learned skills I would NEVER have picked up had I stayed at the "big company".
As mentioned in the article, jumping around from job to job made me realize what I wanted to get out of my employer. Most importantly, I have 20-30 new contacts that I feel I could tap into should I ever become unemployed. Most of the time its what you know and who you know...
It's a simple heuristic. If I can leave my employers in a good state, I go ahead and job hop. I stay until the project is done, and then I feel ok leaving or staying and take on the next project. Very often there is no next project lined up, so I am compelled to look around.
I think if you have a habit of abandoning jobs in the middle of projects, leaving your employers holding the bag, you are a flake and a risk to hire.
I am working on a project right now(in healthcare) that I thought I could finish in a year's time. After every meeting, I think to myself that I'd be lucky if I can finish it in a decade because of bureaucracy and incompetence. What then? I am not going to stay until the project is done, I am mortal after all!
My resume resembles Swiss cheese. I have a whole bunch of short-term jobs, and holes where I've taken off a year or more to pursue my own ideas (I'm "freelancing" during that time).
Fortunately I was able to get another job after the last break, but I didn't seem to be getting as many callbacks as I'm used to. This, coupled with my age, tells me I need to stay put for a while. And I hate that.
That said, I've been with my current employer for three years now, and I have no intention of leaving, thanks to their flexible work schedule.
On the other hand, where I live, one must switch job to get a better/increase pay. Yes, sad.
The last company I worked for went under, and when I was searching for a new job, I interviewed with the corporation Conn's (similar to BestBuy/Fry's). I met one well paid executive there who had worked there for the last 25 years. While well compensated, he looked beaten down, way older than he really was, and unhealthy.
The point of life is not dedication to one or multiple companies. That just sounds horrible to me.
When you realize that to most people "it's just a job" it makes more sense. Work should not be your life. All I ask of my job is that it pay me well and be pleasant. If there's more, that's icing on the cake, but I look beyond my time at work to find meaning in myself.
Why did they have six jobs before thirty? Who knows? May be they switched career orientation (I've started in operations and moved into software development, that required a "hop"), may be they didn't know what they were looking for, may be they had a family situation.
Likely, if they worked at a single company for ten years, that's irrelevant if they manage to have the desired level of competence and have the desired level of passion and curiosity.
Are they leaving companies since they were fired (rather than downsized or left voluntarily) or put on a performance plan? That's to be checked through their references. Are they hopping purely for increased compensation? Then just refuse to meet outlandish salary demands (out of proportion to their skill level).
It's true that a bad looking resume may not make it past an HR filter. However, I've been swamped by recruiters (agency and company HR) at all times even after my resume had shown I've only been a few months at my company. Furthermore, when you're over thirty you'll likely have a network of coworkers who will be able to refer you to jobs bypassing the HR filter.
Rather than worry about what a blogger thinks about you and your generation, worry about learning and increasing your competence level. Make multiple companies fight over you (because you have a rare talent and excel at it) instead of fighting to get into a company.
Fast forward 6 years, I quit my job, why? I started in tech support. I've worked night shifts, weekends, crazy schedules when someone was a on a leave or vacation. No compensation for it, crappy salary, little or no bonuses, night time work and weekend work was not paid according to the law in my country (no-one to complain about it, unfortunately). I kept working there because there was no better offer available, the team I worked in was made of great people, there was some promotion plans for me, and I had a loan to pay off. I got promoted. OK, so now I'm a sysadmin, better salary, but still no compensation for working over-time, doing half-month rotation on-call standby if something brakes (and it did), etc. Please mind that the better salary was not a good one, just better. Anyways, one of my fellow sysadmins gets called into active service (obligatory in my country), and I get stuck with constant on-call duty, same salary and again, little or no bonuses. This is where I start looking for options, and I after getting accepted at few other places, I decide to stay where I am, why? Better tech, more complicated work, challenging, etc. A year later I discover that no social service, pension plans and med-care payments were made by my company for me or other people for the last 5 or 6 years ( in my country, the company pays for it, and it isn't quite easy for you to check that on a monthly bases), and I get net income, so I actually don't care about my gross income. I raise hell, and after a few clashes with local and upper management I decide to get the hell out of there.
So, in the end, my two cents are: Loyalty, to the company, friends, team at work, family, girlfriends, etc. has to be something that is deserved on their part, not expected from day one. Dedication and commitment should not be confused with it.
Anyways, I'm now freelancing, and working towards my degree in soft. engineering.
I enjoyed programming more though, so gravitated towards that, and so glad I did. Most of the people I knew from my time in the support / admin trenches have similar stories to tell, apart from some exceptions doing large-scale work for Google, eBay, and telecoms.
On average I think programmers are compensated better, and generally enjoy a better work environment.
When you're seen as working in a cost center as sysadmin and network admin often is, you'll always have the spectre of downsizing/outsourcing hanging over you.
Just don't work permanently at a consultancy (ugh). If you must work permanently, do so for 2-3 year stints, and at product-focused places or places where software engineering isn't just doing crappy line of business apps.
But imagine you never stay more than 6 months! Potential employers may think "is it worth our time to train this person before he/she leaves? And is he/she too fickle to accomplish anything?"
We came of age while society fell apart. We're in our 20s and won't be able to own a house or have children until our mid-30s, due to the still-absurd housing costs, absent job security, and lack of a decent health care system.
The Boomers were born into an affluent, forward-looking society in which it was embarrassingly easy to advance. You could be a pot-smoking hippie dropout at Woodstock in '69 and a CEO by '75, whereas we have to start racking up internships (unpaid, in most industries) in high school. They inherited a society that would go forward and achieve great things so long as no one came along and fucked it up (as the Reaganites did). We inherited a giant, potentially intractable, mess.
There are many CEO out there that read or listen advises on how to make sure their company "lean, mean, and profitable" by laying off people or pushing them to work for more hours and pay less under whatever reason.
I'm not asking the leader of companies to pay younger generations more money, at least treat us decent, provide us with trainings (how many companies do give new grad/hire trainings these days?).
While I don't mind with below average pay (just not too much), I would hope a bit of compensation in the form of trainings, advancements, bonuses (bigger than 3-5%), etc.
My parents' Carter-era mortgage was for 15%+, mine signed last year (well before my mid-30s!) was for 5.5%.
The rest of my counterexperience is just anecdote, so I'll spare everyone the details and just ask:
Do you have even a single shred of evidence backing up your nostalgia for things you didn't actually experience?
I am certainly not saying that the 1960s and '70s were a perfect era. They were far from that. What I'm saying is that it wasn't nearly as difficult to advance. You had to seriously fuck up in order not to advance by default. College practically guaranteed a good job.
People who slacked off in college during the '60s entered boardrooms in the '70s and '80s. That sort of access and opportunity isn't handed out to our generation; far from it. We face stiffer competition for (except at the very top) less reward, at least economically speaking.
Of course they were, that's the point. That was the crappy economic situation that generation lived under; it was worse than today's, at least from a home-buying perspective.
And again, you still don't have any actual evidence for your other idyllic depictions.
It's bizarre that so many people have adopted the "rising house prices = good" mentality, since housing is something on which people naturally have a short position (a need). Renters are obviously short housing, single-home owners are theoretically neutral (they own housing equal to their need) but actually short as well, since they're paying real estate costs every time they shop. So 90+% of us are actually in a short position with regard to housing; our lives get better if real estate becomes cheaper. The important, high-value land is held by a few.
This is why it's odd to hear people rage against inflation or rising gas prices but cheer on housing bubbles. They have the perception that rising energy prices benefit "other people" but that they somehow are making money when real estate gets expensive-- and unless they own a lot of it, this isn't true.
In New York, housing is a source of widespread and ongoing misery. If you lose your job, you're truly fucked because rents can easily exceed $2000 for a studio. Many apartments lack basic first-world amenities in-building laundry and dishwasher because there is no need to include them when rents and prices are so ridiculously high. It's very difficult to save money here because a class of fucking parasites (most of whom don't even live in New York) are sucking everyone dry.
Land ownership is the justification for entrenched aristocracy and, in less-enlightened times, slavery. It always has been, and probably always will be. It's a concept that exists for a purpose that 90% of us would find distasteful. This is also why Americans have such a fetish for homeownership; throughout most of history, those who did not own land were at a social level comparable to slaves or serfs. What they don't realize is that if they take out mortgages on bad terms, they're assuming a speculative position while not gaining real ownership of the property.
I frankly think it's time for aggressive land reform, and I think private land ownership (with exceptions for small, single-house plots) needs to be retired as soon as we can build the infrastructure to replace it.
However the boomers are the ones that deregulated the shit out of the world, bankrupted the pension funds, built houses and luxuries on credit (they didn't invest much into infrastructure). They are also underqualified and sitting on many positions from which they are screwing their children (that's at least how it works in my country), while simultaneously taking it out on us - for supposedly being lazy and incompetent - to create families and build homes.
While we stand on streets - well educated and eager to take on challenges, but we're unable to because boomers don't allow us the privilege. And I mean quite literally - don't just whip around mortgage rates. I don't know about USA - but I'm certain that it's a lot harder and costlier to start and run a business in a lot of the world nowadays than 40 years ago.
As a tail-end Boomer, I don't see current 20-somethings as "lazy and incompetent", but I know that my peers and I discuss the fact that Gen-Y seems to be motivated by different things than we were. In the context of the original discussion about job-hopping, I don't have any problem accepting that members of Gen-Y have different attitudes toward tenure in a particular job. However, as I mentioned in comments for a related posting, the issue from the employer's perspective isn't really whether they agree with your values, but whether they perceive hiring you as a good investment.
The costs of hiring someone are such that most companies want to be able to rely on the individual to stay in the role for at least 2 or 3 years. Furthermore, your value to the company increases rapidly as you gain experience in their particular business - they don't want to see that value walk out the door. Other posters in this discussion have suggested that the answer is for companies to make the job more interesting/rewarding, so that people will stay. I don't disagree with that - creating an environment that attracts and retains the best people is a critical success factor for IT organizations that I've worked with. However, when making a decision to hire, the employer can only consider the candidate's past track record, not some possible future where either the company or the candidate change behaviour.
I think this discussion may really be two separate questions: (1) is it reasonable for companies to discriminate against perceived "job-hoppers" when hiring, and (2) should companies adjust their practices to retain good employees? My answer to both would be a qualified "yes", although from some of the comments it seems like there are some people who would not stay at a company for more than a year or two regardless of the company's retention practices.
I think that attitude's unusual. Most people would love to have conditions such that they can stay for 5-10 years at their next job, but are realistic enough to cut bait when the job isn't working out, from a career perspective.
I know that myself and most of my peers would love to be loyal to something, we are eager to learn... We love to work hard and play hard. We're willing to learn the ropes - but we have no intention of working for the same company for all our adult lives - because we have seen many cases on our own eyes how that kind of attitude is less then beneficial.
But as mentioned elsewhere our bullshit tolerance levels are low.
I agree with you that costs of loosing productive people who understand context of their work is expensive. I don't agree with you that businesses care (at least not the ones I saw myself). Well maybe they care - but not enough to actually invest anything or seriously commit to solving the issue for themselves.
It's all just talk - yes they'd like if people would stay longer, but they "can't afford" to actually improve living and working conditions for their workers.
Just mgmt business as usual - improving sales and market position is hard, cutting expenses is easy, leave a trail of broken businesses behind on your path to glory.