> enables and incentivizes job hopping
I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.
I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.
Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.
In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.
I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...
Maybe we can fix the things that make workers uneasy in the first few years.
I don't know for a shortcut for this. It's simply experience, though I do find the more industries I work in and the more jobs I work, the more I can pattern match across that experience to make better decisions faster in a new job.
well yeah - unfamilliarity, to a certain degree. But its more than that. It's the slow process of gaining expertise. There are of course many transferable skills from one company to another. and there are some that are not. Knowing the relationships between all the bosses, who got passed over for promotion, who needs a certain type of project on their plate etc. Also knowing all the history of various prior initiatives, failed and successful, really helps you get stuff done. Most work in non-small enterprises needs building yes but also buy-in from others, which needs them to respect you, and for you to know what hoops to jump through and what to say to keep tham all happy.