Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping
thebalancecareers.com
thebalancecareers.com
Who are they supposed to be loyal to? Certainly not their employer, who is squeezing every cent of labor value from their work. I'd understand this attitude if companies took care of their people or if the person was part of a worker's coop.
Also, anecdotally, job hopping has been incredibly lucrative for me. My first hop, from Boeing to Amazon literally doubled my income. I highly encourage devs to get out there and see what they are worth, especially if they are happy at their current place. Get an offer in hand and negotiate hard. Who knows, maybe you'll land an amazing bump.
Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits because people are just that desperate to get a job that whittles down ye olde student loan and has a health plan with a 10k deductible.
If job hopping is a viable strategy (which it certainly is in some sectors), then that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this. That’s not to say that every company out there is actually going to figure out the source of their staff retention problems, but the fact that those problems exist for employers is really the only way such conditions will improve.
Also for the lower end jobs there is an infinite supply of people when the current lot eventually burns out.
It (at least to some extent) negates your assertion that employers can get away with it. Employee churn is literally employers failing to get away with it. If a bad employer cares about employee churn, then it’s something they’ll have to address eventually by solving the problems they’ve created that led to employee churn in the first place.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they will though. Having contracted/consulted for a lot of companies, I’ve come to the conclusion that most companies are bad at most things, and that a company really only needs to be good at a select few things to be viable in the market. But if there’s competition for labor (which there is in a lot of software engineering sectors), then failing at employee retention will put them at a competitive disadvantage, and companies that succeed at it at a competitive advantage.
I disagree. There are plenty of jobs which are basically about qualified warm bodies. It doesn't matter who is doing it, it will get done. Even in high tech there are plenty of jobs like this. Not all companies have a heavily customized set of libraries. Most use off the shelf fairly famous things. It costs less to hire someone new and let them ramp up than to give someone a raise.
For starters, your typical software engineer hire will cost you more than the value they provide for at least their first six months. If they stay for less than 18 months, then you’ll never get a return on that investment. Realistically you need them to stay longer.
Secondly, even if your just a vanilla web dev shop, using the most basic set of frameworks available, if the average tenure of your staff is too low, then the quality of your product/service will massively suffer.
Ask anybody who’s had the analyze this in a management position (like I have for instance, many times). To make this work (and I have seen it work), you need an incredibly atypical set of circumstances. For starters, you need to be in a position where quality absolutely does not matter at all. This sounds ridiculous but there are some cases where this can be true (for some period of time at least, but maybe you don’t care about it lasting forever...). Companies that have built themselves an unassailable position in the procurement pipelines of government or large enterprise can exploit such dynamics, on a limited term basis, for example. Secondly, you need to have eliminated any quality control in your recruitment pipeline. Naturally, this will result in hiring a lot of very low quality labor, but as above, maybe that’s fine. Finally, you need to have completely eliminated any onboarding or training. You need people to turn up to work, and almost immediately start producing low quality work.
Such companies do actually exist, but they are very, very uncommon. If you happen to find yourself working for one, though you may be underpaid and treated poorly, you can at least know that your employer is likely extracting very little value from you at all, regardless of how personally talented you might be.
Quality of product does not appear on quaterly result and is not taken into account when deciding bonuses. Obviously companies don't care about it.
The only times I have seen companies care about churn is when :
- constant departures started impacting customers delivery scheduldes leading to financial penalties
- costs of hiring started to grate.
Nah, they are ok with big turnover. Typically, they believe that everyone who left was bad employee in some way.
?? What if the company saves a lot of money, and only lose a tiny percentage of employees every year?
I think it's pretty safe to say that most salaried employees will just keep trucking along happily so long as their bills are paid and they don't feel horribly oppressed or stressed out.
If there's a mandatory 5 minute daily meeting at 10 AM and free dinner at 7 PM, it's pretty easy to get everyone to put in 9 hours a day along with the occasional hour of e-mail at home or chunk of crunch time.
So long as everybody gets a 2-4% raise every year and feels like there's another job title to strive for, they'll just keep falling farther and farther behind the market rate.
Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. Assertive workers hop jobs when the situation demands it, less assertive ones suffer.
Pay and hours worked is really only one part of the equation, but this is pretty much right. Complaining won’t do anything to solve retention problems though.
> Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it.
This really depends on your definition of “getting away with it”. If continuing to perpetuate the problems that cause it, at great expense to the business is “getting away with it”, then I guess your right. You could “get away with” never going to work again, if you were prepared to accept the costs of being destitute for the rest of your life. However I think you’ll find there’s a large number of companies that have been forced to improve their practices in order to remain competitive. Anecdotally speaking, it’s why I personally won’t get out of bed for less than 4 figures after tax per day, and why I’d be incredibly reluctant to work in an office that didn’t provide me with free food, coffee and other drinks.
I would also add "free Red Bull, breakfast buffets, Friday Beer Time" and other "Freebies" DO NOT count to me as benefits. So many of the startups I've interviewed for try and lure you in with all these additional "benefits". No, ten cases of free Red Bull will not pay my rent.
These companies routinely low ball really good developers with these freebies thinking it makes up for paying them slave wages; expecting them to work 50-60 hour work weeks and burn out like clockwork every 18 months.
It's sad so many people I know just grab that carrot and don't realize they could be at a Fortune 500 company making triple what they're making at a startup who claims its harder to get hired at their company than to get accepted at Harvard.
(Not sure if this needs explaining, but if company provides all kinds of free drinks, it could be generosity, but if the choice is suspiciously limited to stimulants... you will probably need them.)
> Also, anecdotally, job hopping has been incredibly lucrative for me.
It seems both sides are simply maximizing their value here.
Why can't we both profit? If I buy a product from you, you make money from it. And while I lose money (because I gave it to you) I probably increase something else - happiness, if it's for my hobby, or the ability to make more profit, if it's for my job.
With that analogy in mind, consider a test pilot, who wants to push the edge of experimental aircraft. There's no way for anyone except a Howard Hughes to do that without being employed. So sure, the test pilot's employer might make money (if it's a profit-making company and not a hobby or government project), but in exchange the pilot gets to fulfill something highly desired, which otherwise cannot be done.
Another problem I have with that interpretation is that some jobs are synergistic, such that you cannot look to pairwise relationships to understand the economics.
There aren't that many successful solo bass players. If I were a bass player, I'm much more likely to make money as part of a band than working on my own. So my relative profit is greater by being in a band, even if I don't make my full share of income to the band.
The third problem (or the first one re-visited) is that it focuses on the traditional employer/employee relationship. If I'm a gig-worker, brought in as a third-party contractor, I'm not an employee. Nominally, my clients buy my time, so I'm the one to profit. But yet they expect to many more money from the work I do for them.
Which means any exchange must be un-equal, which makes it a pretty useless interpretation.
This is a basic understanding of how the world works. It is clearly impossible for an employee to be making more than they bring money into the business. Otherwise the business wouldn't exist.
> Marx's exploitation theory is one of the major elements analyzed in Marxian economics and some social theorists consider it to be a cornerstone in Marxist thought. ...
> Exploiters appropriate another's surplus labour, which is the amount of labour exceeding what is necessary for the reproduction of a worker's labour power and basic living conditions. ...
> Once capitalists are able to pay the worker less than the value produced by their labour, surplus labour forms and this results in the capitalists' profits. This is what Marx meant by "surplus value", which he saw as "an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist".[9] This profit is used to pay for overhead and personal consumption by the capitalist, but was most importantly used to accelerate growth and thus promote a greater system of exploitation.
When I read your original comment I was reminded of the presentations of the Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff, eg, from https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/understanding-marxism-u... :
> The heart of Wolff’s argument centers on what Marx called “surplus labor,” which is what employers appropriate above what they pay for wages. After further deducting raw materials, machinery and the like used in the production process, what’s left is the employer’s profit.
> Wolff maintains that the fact that productive workers are not compensated for the full amount and worth of their labor constitutes “exploitation.”
I think it's understandable why I saw them as being similar.
Is the main difference between you and Marxian thought that you don't consider the difference to be "exploitation"?
You wrote: "It is clearly impossible for an employee to be making more than they bring money into the business. Otherwise the business wouldn't exist."
The Wikipedia page gives some criticisms to that Marixan view, which also hold for your statement: "They suggest that Marx should have allowed for two things; namely, permit a fair profit on the risk of capital investment and allow for the efforts of management be paid their due. "
Also, I think it's possible to be both synergistic and exploitative.
To themselves. The best advice I ever received was from my dad. And it was 6 months into my first job. I wanted to hop and there came the advice 'investments matter more than income, and you need stability to borrow money for the big ticket ones'. I hopped anyway because like your case I was looking at doubling my income.
But the next two ones I've gone slow and with stability built up good investment assets.
The advice is true. Inflation can eat whatever you earn, so investments are where the magic is.
1. I genuinely enjoy both the work environment and enjoy what I'm working on. (pretty low chance of this happening)
2. I can no longer get a significant [idk, ~20%+]increase in income. (I still have a loooong way to go)
3. My life changes in a way where much more stability is required or ideal.
I know someone who was making $65k one year ago, and is now making six figures. They're a talented and capable dev, but so are many of you. And this was the midwest.
My own salary bumped from $35k to $75k during my early career after getting a job at a different gamedev studio. Before that, I was paid $20k for around three years, then $35k for a year.
($20k was good money in the midwest, especially when you're young and have no bills. It all went straight into the bank. I'm wistful for those times...)
You are almost certainly underestimating your market value. The only way to determine your market value is to go out onto the market. Go search! Best case, you find a better job. Worst case, you stay at yours. Middle case, you can use a job offer to leverage a raise.
But there IS a ceiling. At some point your salary flatlines as you become very expensive.
There isn't one. It's all about what you can contribute to the company's bottom line. It's very unusual, but not impossible to get $1m.
You just gotta be able to show the company how much money they can make by hiring you. For example, can you make their server farm 1% more efficient? That's worth a great deal of money.
Of course not, because it isn't his skills making that happen.
The added value of a software engineer is much higher than the value added by a clerk. That's why software engineers get paid much more. Supply and demand will force a company to pay more for a person that creates $100 in value than a person that creates $10 in value.
If the claim from the beginning had been 'career advice: specialize your tech skills to the point where you can present such a unique proposition that you can command a share of your value add as salary, and also make sure that that specialization is something that brings a high value add', then of course I would have agreed. But saying that the average joe schmoe web developer is in a position to negotiate based on their value add is simply not true. I mean, don't take my word for it - just look at what the salaries for run of the mill software engineers are. (someone is going to bring up big five salaries and claim SE's are paid 1/2 mill - yeah no, those are not 'average')
It is true from a simple gedanken experiment. Suppose I pay you $10 and you produce $100 in value. My competitor notices this and offers you $20 and entices you away, making $80 on $20 invested. His competitor notices, and offers you $30 to make $70. Rinse, repeat. Your pay will stabilize at $100 minus the opportunity cost of the money, which around 15%.
This scenario relies on the players all being greedy and completely self-interested.
The scenario of someone hiring you for $10 and you producing $100 is highly unstable and unlikely to last very long.
Only if you are unaware of the competition, which is highly unlikely if you have such skills. Lots of companies have server farms they'd love to shave 1% off of.
It's like if you're a movie director that has a track record of making hit movies. Your compensation goes way, way up. Same if you're an athlete that brings the fans in (usually by winning).
There's no ceiling on what a movie director makes or an athlete.
Some are unique enough to get that $1m compensation. I don't know what John Carmack's compensation is, but I bet it's north of $1m. And he'd be darn well worth it. Ditto for Linus Torvalds.
Also your network and online databases and discussions. Some info is public, some info is more available if you can find a private professional community.
If you want to email me I can calculate what to ask for based on my research and experience working with a wide range of engineers.
I know these numbers are tiny for many people on HN, but bear with me.
It truly does pay to just try. Why not find out? I've probably worked for far less than I was worth for the majority of my career. The day I became a developer I was titled as a graphic designer (I was a designer who could code), and I kept that title and salary for 2 years. That really set the tone for me, I think. I was making $32.5K/year building honest to gosh web applications.
Ironically I decided to do my own thing once I realized I was undervaluing myself. Probably not wise, but I've wanted to for so long and I never did because I figured I didn't have the skills.
The data are based on 'how long have you been with your current employer?', which of course underestimates the time you will actually stay with that employer (it's unlikely today is your last day).
Imagine a world in which every employee stays at each job for exactly 2 years, and the distribution of work anniversaries is evenly distributed. If you ask each person how long they've been in their current job, the median answer would be 1 year.
I'd love to ask a different question of each respondent: "how many new employers have you had in the last 3 years?"
If my answer is "2", you have no idea if it's almost 1, or almost 3, which is a huge span.
I think a better question would be "how long did you stay with your previous employer".
The potential huge span for an individual answer won't affect the usefulness of the median.
Your question is interesting but would pollute any summary statistic with too much old and irrelevant data. Imagine someone who has had two employers: the first for 2 years, and the second for 45 years.
I also think it’s obviously good for everybody involved. For employees it means improving your salary and working conditions. For employers, it’s a good thing in a couple of ways at least. A retention strategy that’s actually done right will naturally increase productivity (though there’s certainly more to it than beer, food and video games). It’s also much better for an employer to have an unhappy or dissatisfied employee leave. The upfront costs are more apparent, but an employee who wants to leave but can’t find another job will cost you way more in the long run. Their productivity will plummet and their unhappiness or dissatisfaction will become contagious.
This says good things about the industry's collective ability in evaluating job-seekers. A breath of fresh air amidst the weekly thinkpieces on how hiring is broken.
They had jobs already, so how bad could they really have been?
Otherwise in general I just always try to think about the underlying logic of the code I’m writing. If it feels hacky, overly complex or fragile, it probably is, and I probably need to take another look at the problem I’m trying to solve and consider whether I’m approaching it correctly, using the correct tools, or even whether I’m even using the tools correctly.
Software developers fall along a spectrum between "caring intensely about quality" and "only caring that their ticket/assignment gets done, with very little regard to quality".
These are the kind of people he or she is talking about.
This can manifest in a lot of ways. Lack of effort in creating names, adding to the "messiness" of the codebase in various ways, not coordinating or communicating with team members to do things in a consistent way. In general, being content with "quick and easy" fixes that take less work but cost everyone in the long run.
People will notice where you sit on this spectrum.
I don't know what domain you'll be working in, what company, even what _kind_ of company. But if you soak in the need to have a high bar of quality, you will be able to find the resources that pertain to your language/tools/domain/etc in order to make high quality software. It just takes time.
I could rattle off topics to study from the top of my head, e.g.:
- SOLID principles of OOP
- Learn the benefit of immutable data
- Normal forms of relational databases
But the best thing is to get lots of experience. With different projects, different languages, different programming paradigms, OOP vs FP. Good books/articles/tutorials help the most when you're applying them to a real work context. If you constantly seek out wisdom about how to do things better as you do real work, you won't be the type of person your OP was referring to. :-)
EDIT: You can take a quick skim through the FAANG VPE's on LinkedIn. Most were:
1) Promoted internally to VPE vs hired in at that level
2) At the company for a significant amount of time.
I got a <10% raise after much haggling at one company and a 50% raise by switching companies into a lower-stress position. Maybe it's better at companies with a defined career ladder, but it's not worth it to stay elsewhere.
Then something similar happened again a couple of years ago.. The top local software companies in Japan were offended when I told them I'd been making 180k USD/year but would be willing to settle for ~140k USD to work for them. Anything over 120k was just unthinkable, and even that was a stretch in their minds. I didn't have much luck explaining that Silicon Valley firms are just going to roll in and eat their lunch if they don't hire people like me. It was better for my long-term savings to work 1-2 years in Silicon Valley, then hang around and be a jobless bum in Tokyo for 1-2 years than to work full time in Tokyo for 2-4 years.
Moral of the story: Go where the money is
It’s very difficult to find the same comp package elsewhere. I basically need to be invited to similar jobs.
FWIW, in many countries, these are standard features of any employment contract. The US has unusually weak statutory protections for workers.
When I hear or talk about the idea that people change jobs more frequently now, I definitely include people who started working then, and I don’t think a decade is sufficient time to see a trend in tenure. I’d be more interested in a comparison between the 00s/10s and the 60s/70s/80s (ish).
Stratifying by age would probably be more informative than simply comparing the median tenure in two different years as well.
It was a widely held belief that you needed to move jobs every year or two, because in-house wage increases weren't following the market demand.
Personally, I despise "millennial" characterizations like 'lazy' and 'self-entitled'. All they've done is file off the slurs toward Gen X kids and re-used them for the next wave of young people.
Oh, scratch that - Gen X and hippies. And beatniks. (Shout out to Maynard G. Krebs!)
Why, it's like old people forget what it was like when they were young.
He spent a decade at one company then left for another company where he worked for 30 years and topped out at a VP making 200-something a year in a low cost of living area.
No college degree, not very substantial critical thinking skills, and not a good “people person.”
When interviewing for his replacement, they wouldn’t consider anyone without an MBA.
When I compare with my non-tech friends in other parts of the country, I have one friend who has been at the same job for 13 years, and one who has been at his job for 10 years. I have never held a job for longer than 4.5 years, and my shortest was 1 year.
Before SV I lived in Denver and any job tenure less than 2 years was a huge red flag, and even less than 3 would raise an eye brow.
If you've got 15-20 years of experience and you've never stayed somewhere more than 12-18 months, it's a very different scenario than someone with 5-6 years, even in SV.
Or would I get bonus points for wanting to stick with the company X?
If their goal is to hire someone for a specific position and they hope that person stays in that same role long term, maybe not so much. Companies are generally happy to just have you stick around, though - if you are moving within the company, you should in theory still be providing value to the company, and potentially even more value, if the moves are upwards.