The quitting economy
aeon.co
aeon.co
Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as paid masters' programs.
To make everyone better off, Hoffman suggests that we should introduce timeboxed contracts called "tours of duty" that explicitly state the true benefits for either party and the duration of the contract. I really am not a fan of misappropriation of military terms, but I guess it gets the point across.
For example, maybe a marketer wants to start a company, but an existing company needs a senior marketer to strategize and execute the plan for its next segment. The company could give the marketer opportunities to meet funding sources and receive education about company building, while the marketer can whole-heartedly deliver on agreed objectives for the time period of two years.
It's an idea that seems to straddle between W2 and 1099, as many of the "gig economy" jobs seem to do. Some further definition here may be welcome.
I'd have gladly stayed at my third job for much longer than the ~21 months I did had there been training, retirement, reasonable pay increases, and career development offered. The same for my forth job. Some number of jobs later and my current one is also my longest tenure to date. Not coincidentally I have had and continue to have a clear path of career development, non-trivial pay increases and bonuses that aren't tiny. I've given up on employer-provided proper retirement plans and education/training.
"Firm hopping" exists, in my opinion, precisely because companies tend to either not recognize the role they must play in supporting long term tenures or else simply don't value them enough to allocate resources to the support.
The fiction must be maintained at all costs that the employee was the perfect fit at hiring time; neither overqualified aka too expensive or underqualified aka the manager screwed up.
People change, companies change, the business changes. The person you needed when you hired him might not be the exact person you'll need in a year, but a good manager will first see if that person can grow into a new role instead of firing him and hiring someone else.
A better conversation would be: "In order to get raise X% you need to do A, B, and C. In order to get raise Y% you also need to do D and E. We will checkpoint 4 times per year on progress, and you'll know well in advance if you've made it." Where A-E are things the employee has direct control over, i.e. not dependent on things like overall team success or company stock price.
As a result, my salary history is well below average for my location and experience. Further, since I was paid less than my less experienced (and less capable) coworkers, my input was usually ignored and I was basically sidelined except when something went badly wrong and I spent much of my time cleaning up others' mistakes.
Keep an eye on those pay increases and the IEEE salary survey in your region.
Unfortunately, I think there's no way to escape the need to network. But, it's a learnable skill so you just have to put in the time and effort.
Couldn't agree more. The product design space is crowded with low end parties on both sides, and I've fruitlessly offered a percentage a few times for people to source mature, ready-to-pay clients.
There are solutions like upwork, and solutions like hired, but there doesn't seem to be an intermediate solution. Would be interested in what keeps more people from pursuing deals like this. 10% of a 50k contract is nothing to shake a stick at.
The company makes $30/hr on every hour billed. This covers taxes, etc as we also handle payroll and taxes for the freelancers but you could easily forgo this part. The person who brings in the client gets a 10% finders fee. We use this money to subscribe to lead generation services which deliver us hot leads and such.. RFP's, etc.
Anyone who contacts these leads and lands a client can earn the 10% finders fee.
Devs then take the rest as an hourly.. usually this means they're making between 90-120/hr depending on the contract. We specialize in Ruby, Elixir, ReactJS/React Native work.
(Up to some limit obviously, as a guy with 16 years experience is unlikely to get a 10% premium over a guy with 15 years of experience)
1.5% raise the first year, made a huge fuss the second year and asked for a large raise (because my numbers of were insane) and only managed a 4% raise (promotion included).
I've been at a new job for about a year and have worked hard as always, but the things I am doing are much, much harder to measure. It's much more difficult for me to actually prove how much value I am providing. However, it's looking like I will be getting a ~15% raise shortly.
If a company wants you to stick around, they'll be proactive and show it. At least that's what I've taken from this...and I don't want to be anywhere I'm not wanted.
Working "hard" only serves to let you feel good about yourself.
Often the talent on a team is not nearly as important as the talent's relationship to the strategic direction of the company.
Ostracise, or at least selectively ignore certain coworkers when called for to keep the "team spirit" alive. And so on and so forth. For being a loyal page, there might be some great reward. Funny thing is, I'm not even sure the incumbents would count it against you if the tables are turned. They know and respect a mercenary when they see one and will be happy to take you under their wing. But not if you jump faction too early, then you are just a traitor. Nobody loves a traitor.
Essentially by supporting that manager's political goals (to gain power within the organization), you receive rewards based not on skill or merit but as a result of your support.
In this system, people in a relationship are either 'patrons' or 'clients', and it is expected that patrons will help clients within their power and in return clients will support their patrons advancement, either through advancing their ends directly or undermining competitors.
All of these things are wasteful distractions, but then, that's politics.
Problem: My team's new manager had no part in the decision of putting me on that project, couldn't override the time that I was required to spend supporting it, but also couldn't use me as flexibly as her other developers. So I was first at the chopping block when the company decided to have a round of layoffs. I was providing value to the company as a whole, but not helping my manager in her own job.
Hard work: Check.
Delivering results: Check.
Delivering value to my manager: Nope.
Result: Looking for a new job.
Short of going into management or doing a complete career change, it seems you can get stuck later in life.
It's especially true when you look at contribution vs reward for a skilled senior / principal engineer. If you take away the "steady paycheck" aspect of salaried employment, you can get 2x to 3x the reward for some percentage increase in total effort.
I've stayed beyond what pay would incentivize at almost every company I've worked at because I liked the culture/coworkers/etc., but workplaces are fragile ecosystems, and culture/coworkers/etc. can drastically change with surprising speed.
They also know that they are now 'lucky' enough the market is cold, and you'll be trapped with them for the next 5+ years out of fear.
If companies want their talent to stick around, a bonus structure would go along way, especially since a quick job move can get a person $10k bump.
And I've heard that, with the Wall Street approach, your bonus is the lion's share of your income for the year. If true, I don't know if I'd like to go to that, given the propensity for letting people go in this field.
I think this only applies at companies not using RSUs. Since I think you get taxed immediately (no capital gains) with RSUs.
I knew a guy at a fund who told me he hated the place, but he was locked in for the next 5 years due to several million being deferred. No motivation at all, the guy sounded very jaded.
Then there is the startup model. Where you're given stock of varying grades.
Stock always felt like a gamble. Give me enough for bills + saving, then treat the stock as a bonus. Not core compensation.
If I stayed at a place a few extra years in anticipation of an IPO, this would have me seeing red.
With wall street bonuses, as long as you perform well, you get rewarded for it. Its a much more "meritocratic" system, there are cases when a hedge fund will lose money overall but individuals within the fund still get large bonuses because the areas they were responsible for did well.
Higher education is a great place to work.
That seems like it would be incredibly difficult to match up needs, considering how hard employers say it is to fill jobs and how hard many people find it to land a job. There's already serious matching issues with a relatively simple system for hiring.
A company wonders why their development team is performing and they decide they don't have hotshots, or need more "hotshots" they can recruit from whatever company they think is a good place they can poach from. Communicating to the team that if you want to grow or be promoted, switch jobs. So a lot of money is spent and chaos created to get the results that a solid, if not brilliant or terribly experienced team, could accomplish.
I also structured my year so I did two contracts. Allocating about 10 months then took two months off. I would like to be loyal to a company. But have found the "lying through their teeth" to be apt. I tried full time again. But the end result is I regressed my career by about five years. If it weren't for the health insurance I don't really see a point to full time. It's all project based, deliver something and move on.
"As of January 2016, the typical U.S. worker had been in their current job for 4.2 years, up from 3.5 years in 1983, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
There has been a significant slowdown in the speed at which people are changing jobs.
Younger people today are also not showing any indication of switching jobs more frequently than in the past:
"Millennial workers are as likely to stay with their current employers as members of Generation X were when they were young adults back in 2000, according to a report released this week by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think-tank based in Washington, D.C. Roughly 63% of millennial had been with their employer 13 months or more as of last years, versus 60% of Generation-Xers in 2000. Additionally, a fifth of millennials have been with their company for five years or longer, again in line with Generation X."
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2012/12/27/how-l...
[2] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/young-americans-stay-in-job...
This is not an unavoidable trend and is not global. Japan's work market isn't exactly like this. Germany's Mittelstands are eating the world precisely by buckling this trend. Northern Italy (around Milan) has an artisan industry that thrives on skilled artisans working for small cottage industries, etc.
If you want workers skilled in a very niche and crucial technology then you desperately need to invent strategies to avoid this. This is particularly true to technologies that rely in manual work or manipulating precision machines such as mechanics, clothing, specialty food (e.g: fine cheeses and wines), etc.
A better discussion are the side effects of becoming an economy that lost manufacturing skills, such as Silicon Valley and Great Britain.
It's explicitly an article about the microeconomic impact of neoliberalism, so discusses places where that holds particular sway such as, as you mention, USA and U.K.
You are correct that it is less appropriate to a place such as Germany where Ordoliberalismus is a more popular model. But the article doesn't pretend to discuss this.
computers count in your list of precision machines, right?
If your skill is MS-Office then you're not niche and you're easy to replace.
If your skill is Maya, Autocad or Oracle then you are a little harder to replace and you can see more stable jobs.
Maybe not Oracle, but most gigs related to Maya were shipped off to Canada yeas ago.
Did you miss the opening sentence where the author states:
"In the early 1990s, career advice in the United States changed."
So yes the article is specifically talking about the US economy and not the global economy.
>"Germany's Mittelstands are eating the world precisely by buckling this trend."
The article is also referring specifically to publicly traded companies. I think that's pretty clear when the author states:
"In general, to keep stock prices high ..."
Germany's Mittelstands are largely family-owned companies, they are also not part of the US economy, ditto for some artisans in Northern Italy.
It's the 2nd time in two days I made the recommendation, but throwing Ronald Coase into the Neoliberal canon would help a lot. He was a "chicago school" academic from the same intellectual family, so it shouldn't be too much of a culture shock.
He wan't like "progressives" in the "evidence based" sense but he also objected to first principles theory like Friedman. Instead, he tried to find persistent phenomenon and theorized about why they exist.There was always a link to the real world.
Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever.
IRL, labour markets are obviously very different than most other markets. It's inflexible. People stay in jobs a long time and most employers actively try to lower their average turnover. Why?
If flexibility is so wonderfully efficient, why do almost all companies have such a big inflexible workforce? Why is the market for labour so different in practice than the market for oral hygiene products and services.
Why isn't Wall street staffed by day labourers or SV products built by quarterly contractors? You have to look past pure theory to answer these questions. I think you probably have to look beyond economics, or at least to its fringes (like behavioral economics).
Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever.
Both the employee (search costs, hours in the day) and employer (job training, search costs, process knowledge) incur far greater transaction costs than you see in commodity markets. Business models that lower transaction costs (e.g. "gig economy" middlemen) tend to lead to the emergence of highly flexible labor markets. This currently only applies to jobs that don't require a high level of nontransferrable knowledge, because nobody has yet invented an "I know Kung-Fu" machine that can transplant a company's 5 year marketing strategy into the head of a day-laborer CMO.
None of this requires going outside pretty basic economic theory.
Edit: I just realized this sounds like I'm explaining Coase theorem to the person who cited Coase. It's not for you, it's for others reading your comment. I'm disagreeing with your conclusion, not your premises.
But more importantly: the overall inability in current culture to have "not working" as a legitimate and survivable labor position (for the majority of the labor force, at least) also threatens the liquidity of the labor market. Employers may fire at will, certainly, but as a laborer you can much more rarely quit at will without threatening your establishment in the labor market (Americans often question holes in resumes and may see them as moral failings), and your possible (even short-term) survival (health care, shelter, food).
Of course. And I'm surprised that the post you're replying to didn't come out and say that, since he brought Ron Coase into the conversation. I mean, for Coase, the effect on markets of non-trivial transaction costs was really the core of his work, at least as I understand it.
That's definitely a very Ronald Coasian answer! We should start that lobby to get Ronald Coase accepted into neoliberalism or novoliberalism or whatever comes next.
I purposely didn't give the answer because I think there are possibly other explanations besides transaction costs and regulation (probably the more friedman-esque go-to). The reason I like his papers a lot is because of his questions. He has a Darwinian sort of approach. Why does the moth have such a strange beak. Lets look for the matching orchid.
I think (don't know, speculation) labour markets are special in other ways, not just high transaction costs. A company is a society. People have loyalties and identity tied into it. We are a social animal in very fundamental ways. Our psyche handles the intricate nuances of human cooperation by default. Things happen in a team of people that know each-other, like each other or just think of themselves as part of a group that I think are fundamental to this question. I don't think transaction costs sums it up. I suspect group-oriented work plays a bigger role. Also employer-specific skillsets, though that probably can be lumped into transaction costs.
Incidentally, I feel that "basic economic theory" tends to acknowledge transaction costs mostly as a caveat to basic models: "assuming no/low transaction costs," more often that actually accounting for it. I think this is also true for "economist hat" thinking. Coase complained about this a lot. Coase theorem is (at least to me) taught as a theory about bargaining and contracts solving problems like externalities. For Coase, the caveat was the "theorem." In the absence of transactions costs blah blah pareto optimals. externalities... He thought it was obvious that the pareto efficiency doesn't actually happen in reality, externalities continue. Therefore transaction costs must be high.
To me, this is the big difference between Friedman and Coase. Friedman's a pure theory guy. The main opposition to this view today is a theory-less econometrics/evidence based "wonkish" analysis. Coase is a middle ground. Theories make predictions. In some cases they are good. In cases where they're not, we need theoretical expansion. Neoliberals tend to reach for "distortion" as an explanation far too often, and selectively IMO.
(we're really in the weeds here, sorry)
But, economics bleeds into political science readily. Marx was an economist. Hayek (mentioned in the article) is most famous for political pamphleteering, but he was certainly an economist too. Both he and Friedman got the nobel prize for their economics.
Neoliberalism is very much an economics-politics hybrid movement.
First, neither Hayek nor Friedman were well known for contributions to labor market research. Hayek was well known for his critiques of central planning while Friedman was famous for his contributions to monetary theory. But my point is that these guys aren't "labor market economists", so taking an issue with them over labor market issues would be barking up the wrong tree.
Plus, I don't see why "pure theory" should push anyone anywhere: constraints on model-building are actually quite weak. On the other hand, labor market models haven't become more like consumer goods market models over the years. If anything, the opposite has happened: labor markets are unique among other markets because of stuff like human capital, efficiency wages, signalling, gift exchange, searching costs, internal labor markets, non-cognitive abilities, poaching externalities, hedonic benefits of work, etc. This list isn't exhaustive.
There are very fair and well-documented economic reasons why present day firms might want to put more money into their employees than a 19th century landowner hiring day-laborers during harvest would. Firms benefit from having (and keeping!) a skilled and well-motivated labor force, and so they act accordingly. Trying to look "beyond" economics if you haven't heard of any of those is just looking past it.
Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment http://journal.apee.org/index.php?title=Spring2008_2
Hayek and Friedman? Not so much.
About one of the points of the post, companies often chose the fashionable tools of the year because of buzzwording, ease of recruiting and because they build the CVs of managers too. Would you manage either a bunch of VB or Elixir developers today? So I'm working on Python and Elixir now, plus a Ruby pet project waiting for less busy times.
I fail to see how that's a bad thing. I've never quite understood this notion of tying your fate, your welfare and your livelihood to a single company.
By not thinking of yourself as the CEO of Me Inc. you ultimately become a commodity for employers to do with as they please. At the very least there will be a power differential where the employer will always gain the upper hand in negotiations.
Seeing and marketing yourself as a service provider in a market economy instead will allow you to focus on creating value in lieu of trading time for money. This can be beneficial to both parties. This whole idea of using 'time spent' as a surrogate measure for 'value created' is a large contributing factor to waste in modern economies.
I don't think it's safe to assume that the big company will take care of you forever but it's equally disastrous that the metrics of value have become so one sided.
I fail to see how that's a bad thing.
For example, economic downturns will cause faster rises in unemployment, leading to faster drops in consumer spending.
And employers are going to see lower returns from investing in training - meaning colleges might need even more focus on applied skills.
Hell, it might even limit the complexity of projects our society is capable of delivering - we might be less able to successfully deliver projects that take longer than a year or two.
I guess that's somewhat true. But I feel that for companies handling more complex topics (not just the new 'AI deep learning on big data with hadoop on rails in the cloud' startup), experts are hired with the understanding that both the work is interesting and it would be a long-term project with long-term benefits.
This is all, of course, without counting academia as possibly the ultimate example of long-term hiring with high-risk, high-reward returns.
Sometimes dev don't add anything at all and just go for more money because of change in condition. JS or mobile app dev is a great example. Nothing changed; they just became more demanded. Meanwhile, you can't match someones salary to the market every day of the week, so they leave.
From the employer side London is brutal.
(i've also gotten the impression that there's not the same level of cultural esteem for engineers and scientists and such in England, and that this might have something to do with it. also could be wrong or outdated.)
(Which is probably why more people are turning to contracting in London.)
That being said, I moved to Europe and am pretty happy with where I'm at. It helped that my first job was with a company that had SF and Dublin offices, and I knew what the rate in SF was.
It's public sector and Ireland, but here's an example of a job paying €28k in Dublin that would be triple that in the states. Note the use of docx...
http://www.museum.ie/NationalMuseumIreland/media/Corporate-I...
Unlike the US, I don't believe there is much of a perception of a "STEM shortage", which may be a contributing factor. Programmers are just not seen as particularly hard to find, at least no more than any other skilled profession. Especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain, which brought in a lot of highly skilled STEM folks into the common market.
There is this myth, which uses an example of a handful of lucky "tech" people like Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg who got rich and famous. In fact, none of them were/are programmers (though Zuckerberg _can_ hack around a bit)
A few numbers to refute your point about programmers being among the highest paid professions:
- doctors $400K-$800K
- lawyers - starting salary $160K[2], can go into millions, if you make it as a partner
- MBAs - even lowly "marketing managers" - often glorified secretaries - can make $150K or more
- chemical engineers - at least comparable with SW
- pharmacists
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/business/dealbook/welcome...
Bill Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembly, he was more of a programmer than the majority of professional programmers today.
in the US $120k is a reasonable (mid-range) salary for a new college graduate in Silicon Valley, Seattle, or New York at one of the big 5 tech firms. It's comparable at financial institutions.
probably $60-$70k for a more "blue-collar" programming job at a lower-profile company, or in a lower cost-of-living area.
10 years of experience vs. 1 year 10 times is still an issue and should affect the price of an employee, but it can be difficult to asses.
The company will hire you for as little as they can. Which is logical for the company. Often there is a range but the employee will not know it unless they insist on asking for what they perceive they are worth.
Lately I have seen a trend where people wont even ask the salary until they have interviewed because they don't want to appear rude. I just don't get it. You should provide your salary expectations prior to reaching the interview stage otherwise you are potentially wasting your time.
This cuts both ways too. If a candidate asks the salary before the interview, many companies will perceive the candidate as not caring about the work, and being "only in it for the money".
And if a candidate doesn't wait until the interview to discuss money, they have very little to justify the average market-rate wage they're trying to convince the company to pay them.
This is just my opinion though and is in no way a road map for others.
The only reason to show that I care about the work and take potentially less salary is if I think the economy is going to take a turn for the worse and I need a job for 3-10 years to ride out the storm. In which case I have to take a lower salary, but at least I have a job. Remember, I can't know how much the company is able/willing to afford.
And just to clarify, not caring about the work doesn't mean doing a terrible job. It means giving them what I'm paid for, but I'm not going to go the extra mile for them (overtime) because there's no incentive to do so.
The owners, the shareholders, are "only in it for the money". It makes sense therefore that all other participants interacting with the company are also. Promulgating a behavior standard under the guise of propriety that doesn't align with the owners' position is shipping out an externality to everyone at the table who follows that standard, benefiting only the shareholders.
I'm not a fan of this approach to business myself, but that's the cards we've all been dealt, and until the system is changed, we learn how to play by the right rule book.
My reason for not leading with salary is basically that I'm going to be asking them for the high end of what I hope I've accurately ascertained to be their range, and I'd rather the first impression I leave them with be "we have to get that guy" rather than "is he really worth what he's asking"?
Yes, it costs some time I suppose, but I find there are very few activities one can engage in that are more lucrative per hour than correctly doing a job hunt. I can eat the time if need be.
For example over a few years and 3 jobs, I found that $120k was about the max for senior devs in my city and tech stack. When interviewing I would lead with "is 120k in the range for this position?". And getting that could sometimes be a stretch. When I found a company offering 10-15% above that, I took it. I knew they were desperate, and the work would probably suck (and I was right) but no overtime and lot's of vacation make up for it (for now).
It does not have to be a detailed initial conversation, something as simple as "what is the salary range for this position, due to my current responsibilities and level I am looking for something in the range of x to y. Is that realistic?" HR will give you a yes or no, you say thank you and decide where to go from there.
I once asked an internal recruiter the salary (as to not waste each other's time) and he returned a tirade of abuse about me not clearly being a good fit if money is my only focus. The guy organises a few meetups as well, fair to say I'll avoid anything he touches at all costs.
Edit: if you publish/ let me know the the range, I'm happy to interview.
I know this logic is common, but I'm not at all sure it's true. Hiring at the minimum you can is a major source of turnover, at least in high-turnover industries like software. If someone is work 50k-70k and you offer them 50k, there's a real risk that they'll get a recruiter calling in 8 months talking about 70k. Hiring is expensive, both directly (several months salary in costs?) and indirectly (repeated ramp-up periods and a loss of institutional knowledge), which makes this into a serious false economy.
I've seen several companies get themselves into real trouble by striking too many 'good' salary deals. They ended up serving as springboards for people who didn't yet know their own value, and losing all their hires within a year or two. Well, almost all - the ones who stuck around were often the less-capable hires they'd overvalued in the first place!
In the US at least, my experience has been that most employers would rather let a good dev walk than raise his/her salary to match the going market rate, even if said dev has copious amounts of domain knowledge, works well with the team, regularly receives positive feedback on performance reviews, and consistently ships high-quality code.
This is sad to me, but I also think employees are right to vote with their feet and seek jobs elsewhere in such circumstances. Maybe the high turnover will raise some red flags and cause the employer to implement changes. If not, then these employees are smart to leave what I think will prove to be a sinking ship in the long run.
It's up to individual managers to stick their necks out, and they most likely won't. They are told to reduce costs and they do. Middle managers are trying to hold on for dear life, their future prospects are much worse than a developer in high demand.
My experience is working at small, great companies that get acquired and the acquiring company usually wrecks everything.
But hey, if you need justification to not stay at a company, there it is. Unfortunately for me, I'm just about capped. Contracting or building a company is the only way up from here on. Having survived the dot.bomb, I can tell you both have a lot of risk that needs to be calculated.
Actually trying to move into more of a consulting role going forward, but there is such a demand for contractors IMO it could be shortening the availability of good developers in London.
The word "market" assumes that each party can walk away from the deal.
But if you are the sole bread-winner and jobless, you are not in a position to walk away.
Can we please have a conversation without the snark? Thank you.
> Apparently there are many people willing to work for that money.
I understand that they probably do find workers willing to work that wage. But what I'm stating is: they can have much more, a thriving hub of tech innovation much like SV, if they were to pay more, and attract talent from around the world, like SV does today. That talent and ecosystem would probably help them a lot more overall.
If you are interested, The Economist had a cover story on this a couple of years ago, explaining it much better than I ever could.
Or maybe if the company has done something amazing like pay for all your college / masters tuition...
Employers have been extracting maximum value out of employees with little investment in those employees in return. It's no wonder high turn over is so common place.
In addition, it is shocking how often companies don't promote from within, but offer higher level jobs to outsiders "experts".
Then you have the situation where your company just isn't growing. They can't afford to give you raises or have positions you can move into. Again, for growth you have to move on.
Like many others said, the biggest reason employees don't stick around is that the current corporate culture views employees as expendable resources they would rather not have to have. Shareholders come first, at all costs - even to the internal health of the company.
Does anyone else feel this way?
If you can sell an employer on the benefits of diverse experience, it can reap wonders.
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/
Just reading through the content gives a good feel for common issues and solutions.
I've worked in a few different industries myself, and I feel it gives me a broader view of things. Regardless, most of the engineering orgs I've been in have a heavy NIH mentality. They don't really care what you did at other companies. I've often been met with resistance when I suggest techniques or particular stacks that I've used successfully at other companies. So your experience is often dismissed and it can create a good deal of frustration.
I do have friends outside of engineering that have used this to their benefit. One friend had a good amount of experience with merging multinational orgs from an HR (benefits, compliance, etc) perspective. He was hired by Facebook for this exact reason and got a handsome raise and more substantial benefits.
A broad experience might be good for soft skills/procedures, but I have yet to experience that in engineering.
In fact, during job interviews - if i feel questions are hinting at having/not having enough experience in a specific vertical/industry - i start bringing up the fact that before I jumped into induxtry X i had little experience, but then learned fast and became an expert...so hopping into your industry Z - sir or madam - is a straightforward process for me to learn it, and then succeed at it for you. 9 out of 10 times, there is a subtle visible body language that they like that perspective; and of course agree with that rationale. Of course 1 out of 10 times, that hiring manager doesn't see that, and of course my ability to adapt to a totally new industry matters little, they usually assume you should have been born into the industry...but in that case, i likely wouldn't want to work for someone like that (who might lack vision) anyway. ;-)
But it never works out that way. It's painfully simple -- you get what you pay for.
I seem to have missed when it became common. Further, it seems identical to what we called neoconservative back in the 1990s: free market economics, very limited government, Hayak, etc.
Is William F. Buckley a neolibral? Ronald Reagan?
Neoconservatism is foreign policy school which embodies a particular attitude toward the use of US military and diplomatic power. It incorporates and aims to spread basically neoliberal economic principles and systems, but it's not the same thing as neoliberalism in the same way that support for Soviet-style Communism as an economic system and support for the Soviet Union vigorously using its military and diplomatic power to spread Soviet-style Communism globally are distinct views.
I've never quit from a customer project. And oddly, I've worked for very few customer for years and years. Controlling and understanding the entire cash-flow really helped.
My other IT friends did job-hop while young but as they settled down, they started staying longer. After 30 it's basically smooth sailing.
So, I don't see a quitting economy. It's phase in young adults.
My last gig was a startup, and it's my last startup. I'm at an enterprise now that pays a bit less than double what I made at my last gig, no more than 40 hours a week, no on call, and they treat their employees very well.
I think that the economic system assumes constant growth, and doesn't have a way to deal with the sustainable consumption rates that we are now trying to adjust to.
There were benefits to this way of working, of course: one could more-or-less just turn up, do one's job and life would go on. But it didn't give one as many opportunities to excel.
Our modern way is more dynamic and can be just as or even more secure, provided one has the discipline to save, invest & insure.
How can you suggest this? When adjusted for inflation, wages have remained constant or decreased in purchasing power, unless you happen to be in the top 5% of earners[0].
>Advancement could be very slow
As opposed to today's "non-existent"? The article we're discussing is all about how people hop jobs precisely because internal advancement is becoming a rare thing.
[0]:https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/dat...
The sad part is our current lead is bad, really bad. He won't be moved or dismissed either. So despite leading several successful projects, I'll be stuck at senior. So, fuck it, I'm moving on.
Do that all you like, but the second you get a debilitating illness, that goes out the window.
You could still be fired "for cause" but that almost never happened. The employee would almost have to commit a crime to be terminated early.
Of course you could always quit during the term if you wanted, but that meant you would have to pay back the signing bonus received when the contract was signed :)
I really did not mind this structure, but it seems like it's confined to specific industries and outside of those almost no one does it. For example, I've never seen a software dev job with this sort of structure.
It was a good read, and a reminder that we are all subservient to the Shareholders (directly or indirectly). The companies of the previous generation had 3 pillars that needed to be strong: Sense of Customer, Employee Satisfaction, Shareholder support. All the attention is now shifted in winning Shareholder support.
I wish we could abandon this cargo cult mentality that shareholders are the utmost important stakeholders of a company. It's already been discussed that maximizing shareholder value is meaningless: https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-false-premise-of-the-shareholder...
They don't actually, see:
Consider first Friedman’s erroneous belief that shareholders “own” corporations. Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights.
http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... [pdf]
>The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders.
But this is relatively easy! Instead of top level management being rewarded for stock price only, they should also be rewarded for other metrics, like customer satisfaction or how much they lowered the spread between median and mean wages. Hell, we could even allow it to be determined only by share price, but only the share price on a long time horizon, no sales within five years.
We should question if this is the system we want to continue to perpetuate, or on the flip side do we want more regulations and restructuring of our market economy? The question is not "More or less market?" but rather "What kind of market?"
I don't think we should abandon shareholder profit completely (after all, companies do need to make money in order to stay in business). However, I do think the philosophy needs to be balanced with other aims like investment in employees, giving back to the community, environmental stewardship, and thinking about the long-term future of the company.
Importantly, these things shouldn't be after-thoughts - they should be cornerstones of the corporate philosophy.
It's not accidental that the tie between share price and executive comp came into being.
The challenge with this approach is share price is a highly lossy metric. By the time it all rolls up into the share price, you've lost a pile of other information. And a whole hell of a lot can hide under that lost information.
Example. IBM long ago sold off their PC hardware division and low-end servers. Those divisions' low profitability was dragging down the overall profitability metrics when the total numbers bubbled up the reporting. Selling off those assets gave a cash boost, and the shareholders were especially happy when the overall profitability numbers weren't getting held back by those laggard divisions. Big win!
Now for the rest of the story. This comes from what I saw at the ground level, from speaking with many IBM sales people at the time. After the sale, extremely good, higher-end sales reps saw the front-end of their pipelines collapse. By getting rid of those "low-value" divisions, many of these reps no longer had a built-in excuse to frequently see many different accounts.
Clients had no problem frequently seeing reps for these "low-value" products. The higher-end reps lots of times tagged along and found opportunities to help solve the client's pain points with higher-end solutions by simply being in the discussions, because these low-end products, in volume, interfaced with higher-end infrastructure all the time.
Without this channel of contacting clients, these higher-end reps were reduced to cold-calling and bringing in hordes of inside sales staff to bring the cold-calling volume up to the point where they could get back to their original sales volumes. The low-profit products were making IBM a profit, just not enough, but what the shareholders really should have seen was those products were a sales and marketing channel where the clients paid for the sales and marketing to reach them. Now IBM is spending cash it can't really afford on brute-forcing that channel, which clients hate.
I see this kind of "rest of the story" game played out in many different companies under many different guises, and the destruction of company value is pretty intense when it happens.
Whether that means every person is their own business or we try some other type of union to give workers more leverage when negotiating or we crowd-fund the resources to start a competitor to shitty company A and have all the workers walk down to a new building and start company B with 95% of the same people but better deals all-around.
Lots of ideas, very few potential solutions. I don't think the wealthy are ever going to change the game to make it easier for us plebs, so we've gotta figure out a way to play the game and beat them at it.