- Not investing in people enough (e.g. training)
- Prefer outside candidates to internal promotions
- Not willing to give significant raises, but willing to hire new people at a higher salary
All those actions end up rewarding job-hoppers, even if it's probably not the intended goals behind this employers' behaviour.
I don't know of any employers who would admit to deliberately rewarding job-hopping outside the company[1], but I suspect that's out of concern for potential negative consequences of admitting to the practice, not because they don't do it intentionally.
Hiring skilled job-hoppers often makes a lot of sense. They bring in knowledge and experience of things that worked (or didn't) in other organizations. It can be a great way to avoid getting stuck in local maximums, and avoid repeating mistakes others have already made.
[1] At least one previous employer deliberately rewarded job-hopping between roles internally, because it gave people a much wider base of knowledge and promoted empathy between people in different parts of the company.
Understandable. A counter would be that you can't expect to retain someone who's really good if this is your habit, but the counter to that would be that you can make it up if you're really cultivating a culture of hiring high quality job-hoppers.
It's the difference between taking one extended-release medication or taking a new pill every hour for the same effect. With the ER, if you get a dud, you're in trouble all day. With short-lived medication, duds can be a big problem in the short term but overall you can still be getting better.
I’ve seen teams get screwed over by someone parachuting in to deliver v1 with shiny new tech and getting a pat on the back ($$) for a job well done. Fast forward 6-12 months and you realize the new tech debt is as bad or worse as the old tech debt.
That said, stagnation and sticking with Blub can also bring its own set of issues.
Fast forward 12 months and we have a terrible, complex, non-scalable, system, which should have just been a really simple REST service but instead we just have another point of failure.
Oh, and they quit so have no idea that their designs were trash.
They also bring in a lot of change for change sake because they don't know the current systems.
Another factor is the recruiting teams are assessed on conversion, how many passed phone screens, on sites, and offer accepts etc, but not on the performance of those employees after they join. So recruiters just spam anyone they think will have a remote chance of passing some stage of the interview process.
There have to be consequences to hiring a bad hire for the recruiting team and they have to be severe enough to make recruiting risk averse.
But this will never be the case if the organization is in growth mode where everything manager is trying to get as much headcount and hiring as fast as possible.
That's just what will happen in companies that value skills more. If other companies value loyalty more, then their employee profile will look different.
Most of us do better work around good, familiar colleagues (once we find them) than at the place with the biggest TCO budget, and many of us prefer to work somewhere that invites our best work more than one that let us buy the fancier trim line on our already-luxury car.
The cultural distinction isn't "valuing skill" vs "valuing loyalty" - it's a worldview of radical individualism vs interdependent pragmatism.
No it doesn't. This is about companies needing to hire a skill and valuing it more than your current employer values it. Companies don't hire people who are already performing well in their environment, because they're a new hire.
> Most of us do better work
I'm not talking about this. I'm saying, say, a web developer working for a scaleup with a global customer base is going to be worth paying more for than a web developer working for a company with a customer base of up to 1000 businesses.
> many of us prefer to work somewhere that invites our best work
This also irrelevant - I'm not saying what people should choose; I'm saying that moving for a raise is you finding somewhere that values your skills more right now.
> it's a worldview of radical individualism vs interdependent pragmatism
This is just silly biased phrasing. It's not about individualism at all. It's about hiring. Unless you think hiring individuals is radical individualism, and only complete teams should be hired, like the NFL.
This sounds like the Peter principle.
Not really a good sell to have CVs with long list of employers.
Don't techbro employers also deliberately reward people to job-hop to them, from where the person is currently, by knowingly providing a big pay bump over the person's current place?
The “no” part comes from understanding what’s happening. And what’s happening is that for every year you work there, the pay for the level you are at increases across all of them.
However, you wouldn’t be getting those increases (you would still get some, just not as significant). Talking about averages, it means that the person who got hired for the same level as you at the same company 3 years later would get paid noticeably more than you currently are (unless share prices skyrocketed, but we are talking about current compensation, not future or past; if shares tanked since you started, the new employee gets an even better deal).
Assuming no promotions or anything like that in the meantime (e.g., you are at your terminal level already or you just need more time for a promotion), you are SOL. It was almost comical at times. The mid-level dev i was working with was getting paid not that significantly more than me (an entry level dev at the time), and was only doing a little bit better mostly due to his old shares (or whatever was left of it, as he was diversifying heavily and selling the stock on vest and dumping it into etfs, so he missed out on his massive chest of old shares going 5x). He had been with the company for 6-7 years at that point. Every dev hired at his level at the time i was working with him would get paid about 50% more than him in total comp.
So yeah, the other employers would pay him more if he switched, but they aren’t “rewarding” him for job-hopping, it’s more like his current employer just not paying him as much as they would for a new hire at his level, because they are betting on the fact that he would just stay due to inertia or whatever other reasons. And guess what, they were right, as he is still there and the company saved a lot of money on him and others in a similar situation.
That’s where the good old boomerang trick of leaving, working for a bit elsewhere, and then coming back comes from. You get your salary “adjusted” twice, and then you come back.
Note: this usually only applies reliably up to senior level (aka the terminal level for the vast majority). Once you go higher or into management-type positions, things stop being this simple and work out rather differently.