The Quitting Economy (aeon.co)

From an essay on Aeon magazing: [...] The CEO of Me, Inc is a job-quitter for a good reason -- the business world has come to realize that market value is the best measure of value. As a consequence, a career means a string of jobs at different companies. So workers respond in kind, thinking about how to shape their career in a world where you can expect so little from employers. In a society where market rules rule, the only way for an employee to know her value is to look for another job and, if she finds one, usually to quit. If you are a white-collar worker, it is simply rational to view yourself first and foremost as a job quitter -- someone who takes a job for a certain amount of time when the best outcome is that you quit for another job (and the worst is that you get laid off). So how does work change when everyone is trying to become a quitter? First of all, in the society of perpetual job searches, different criteria make a job good or not. Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion. Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company. Your job might be a space to learn skills that you can use in the future. Or, it might be a job with a company that has a good-enough reputation that other companies are keen to hire away its employees. On the other hand, it isn't as good a job if everything you learn there is too specific to that company, if you aren't learning easily transferrable skills. It isn't a good job if it enmeshes you in local regulatory schemes and keeps you tied to a particular location. And it isn't a good job if you have to work such long hours that you never have time to look for the next job. In short, a job becomes a good job if it will lead to another job, likely with another company or organisation. You start choosing a job for how good it will be for you to quit it.

Comments

Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

If things are that temporal, then things are goalless.

If there's are goalless, then why not just be communist.

If it's all just a game, why not just say that the US is gaminist and have fair play.

If it's more complicated than that, what the fuck are good people supposed to do?

Re:Truth

[memojuez]

NPR's All Things Considered produced a story that drew a correlation between IT People jumping from Job to Job in Silicon Valley as the catalyst for the California Companies to become the leading Tech Center -versus- the stifling of raw talent by strict anti-competitive laws in New Jersey.

Re: Truth

[Cryacin]

New bucket list item Dear morons, I quit...

Re:Truth

[afgam28]

If people are leaving after 3 months, then yeah, that's too temporal, and things are goalless, and it's bad. But the average time at a company for young people is more like 3 years. In my experience, people generally get up to speed in around 6 months, which still leaves plenty of time to get stuff done.

There's a balance to be had here. One thing that I've noticed about a lot of people who've been at companies for a long time (7+ years) is that they've been a little too heavily indoctrinated into the company's traditional ways of thinking. It can be good for a company's culture to get some external influence.

But more importantly, from an individual point of view, it's good to be a well-rounded person, and it's hard to do that when you're a lifer.

Re:Truth

[ShanghaiBill]

Indeed. Churn is good. Job hopping employees bring good ideas and new perspectives. Unhappy employees can quit and go where they have more value. Jurisdictions like California that have laws to encourage job mobility tend to have higher productivity and higher incomes.

Nitpick: According to your NPR link, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in NJ. He did not. Gas filament light bulbs existed before Edison was born. I think they were referring to the electric incandescent light bulb ... but Thomas Edison didn't invent that either.

Re: Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Start our own good companies that treat people right with meaningful goals.

Re:Truth

[MangoCats]

With an agenda in pocket, you can observe almost anything and write a story about how your observations back up your agenda.

Re: Truth

[MangoCats]

That was a good one, worked as a temp for an unholy witch - she was nice to half the crew and completely mental on the other half. One day her boss directed me to defy her, so that moved me from her good list to her bad list. Thing was, weeks earlier, I had gone above and beyond my job description to give her a computer tool that made her life much easier, and it was a hidden effect because the tool was handling a big ramp-up in her work load, allowing the temps to do it themselves. On my way out the door, I managed to take my tool with me - I didn't ever want to work as a temp again anyway, and never have - she went so over the top with the agency they said they couldn't place me again, though they did somewhat reluctantly pay me for time served. I like to think I caused her 28 year old donut and coffee living self to have a mini-stroke that day.

Re:Truth

[shaitand]

"Indeed. Churn is good. Job hopping employees bring good ideas and new perspectives."

lol It takes at least a year to begin to be competent in a new environment, another 3-4 to actually know which way the wind blows. With each employee who leaves the house knowledge gaps grow and grow. Sure, lots of change, most of it to solve problems you don't have with newer and buggier solutions while the legacy solutions nobody knows about occupy that server that everyone is afraid to admit they don't know the purpose of and which still does two or three things magically... a little churn later nobody will even know those get done at all. As fewer and fewer people have ever narrower understanding of your org all the while it still growing you'll eventually become crippled to the point where nobody can effect any sort of change because nobody knows enough about the environment and your bloated inefficient organization will be replaced by a startup.

Or, you could toss out agism and actually retain competent employees who already know your organization and grew with that infrastructure and the startup can be crushed under your weight and momentum.

Re:Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

3 years is on the short side to show a sustained contribution to anything. On the other hand, working somewhere for 7 years doesn't mean you are some kind of weird man-child who must take their culture from the company in which they are embedded.

Neither have anything to do with being well-rounded.

I think you are projecting a weak-willed personality.

Re:Truth

[aaarrrgggh]

It takes two years total to be "found out" as a fraud and terminated. It also takes about those same two years for good employees to excel. Exceptional people in either extreme are faster.

For me, when I see people that jump jobs every 18-24 months, I see people I don't want to waste my energy on; people spending 4+ years on a job are more interesting. Industries vary, but constant job hopping is a turn off.

If you are really good, after ~10 years you should likely be self-employed.

Re:Truth

[aaarrrgggh]

I have known at least 8 people in my industry (engineering) to put in 20+ years with a company and still have the skills to restart and be effective or innovative. Maybe a little too much energy goes into the politics, especially the last few years-- but on average most do well for it and live happy lives. Personally, I have a 4-5 year cycle, and it is hard for me to re-invent my job to make being in my 12th year in my own business interesting.

Re: Truth

[pnutjam]

+1 would enjoy schadenfreude again.

Re:Truth

[iTrawl]

Work for a creative agency. It will take you a about a year, a year and a half, to become competent in about 10 fields. The next job will be a piece of cake and you should have enough technology under your belt that the next few jobs should still be within reach even if you go on "mental holiday" after leaving the agency. May even consider contracting once your post-agency job relaxed you enough.

Re:Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

It often takes several years for a bad decision to come back and bite you in the ass. Without that experience in the medium- or long-term consequences of your decision making, you tend to make the same mistakes over and over, and never form a strategic horizon. We see that frequently in job hoppers.

Re:Truth

[jbengt]

For me, when I see people that jump jobs every 18-24 months, I see people I don't want to waste my energy on

Exactly. We recently hired a guy that had several jobs in on his resume that lasted less than three years each, in spite of the office manager recommending to the boss to hire someone else, instead. We let him go after about 6 months. He was neither competent for the job we hired him for, nor was he interested in trying to become competent. If he had shown a willingness to learn or even just a capacity to care about what he did on the job, we would have kept him, as we need someone in the role he was hired for.

Re:Truth

[jbengt]

One thing that I've noticed about a lot of people who've been at companies for a long time (7+ years) is that they've been a little too heavily indoctrinated into the company's traditional ways of thinking.

I've essentially had 3 jobs in 37 years, and I've never been indoctrinated into the company's way of doing things, except perhaps in the first couple of years at the beginning of my first job, when that short experience was all I knew about the job. It would be a pretty small person to be unable to think for themselves about the work just because they've been with the same company for the last 7 years.

Re:Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

...people spending 4+ years on a job are more interesting.

Because you know that they'll hang around for 4+ years without expecting more than a lower-than-inflation "cost of living" raise. I too find chumps interesting when I'm looking to profit at somebody else's expense.

Re:Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not all like that. At my current job I've gotten 5% every year (except for one year where I got a promotion and 17%). It's why I'm still at the same place 10 years later.

Re:Truth

[shaitand]

I guess that depends on your idea of competent. That only really works at the beginning of your career when there are a lot of gaps to fill. More advanced tiers with mandatory experience require someone to have that level of "competence" in multiple disciplines as a baseline.

For example, anyone with a brain expects an enterprise architect level resource to be capable of stepping into the role of a sys admin, coder, network admin, dba, rack and stack, professional services, analyst, etc with the same 1-2yrs to refresh and learn the tools fingerprint of their org that someone they would hire into those roles would take. The architect is expected not just to have reached that proficiency but to have stepped into a few of those roles in a dedicated capacity. You just can't navigate well without understanding all the pieces and having had a chance to see where the various flavors of decisions lead several years down the road.

Of course, there are no shortage of people who can learn what is needed to do a job and do just that well enough to keep a seat, especially at enterprise scale. Those people can pack on years while their brains rot and just look good on paper anywhere but where you are (although you likely do have a lot of house specific knowledge that has fallen through documentation cracks pilled up in your head). Good resources aren't like that, good resources are people who have ripped apart, reverse engineered, and owned to a master level every trade you call them a jack of before moving on. Do that for 10-15yrs and anyone sane should be dying to hire you well into six figures for pretty much anything technical even if you haven't touched most of the toolset they've implemented.

Re:Truth

[shaitand]

Exactly, and a company which embraces hopping is far more likely to even have people around who know the why and what of the bad decisions biting them in the ass.

Triggered over anti-Trans aggression!!!

[CajunArson]

In a society where market rules rule, the only way for an employee to know her value is to look for another job and, if she finds one, usually to quit.

That article author expressed aggressive anti-trans hatred in that statement by using the patriarchal cis-gendered racial slur "she".

Slashdot has clearly become a brainwashed alt-right Trump propaganda machine and its editors should be shot in the name of tolerance.

#VirtuSignallingBitches

Re: Triggered over anti-Trans aggression!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I could fucking +10

Re: Triggered over anti-Trans aggression!!!

[KGIII]

You kid, but I've seen similar complaints - though they appear to have coined a bit of a phrase for it. It goes a bit like, 'assuming my gender,' with varied tenses. Gender assumption appears to be a bad thing.

I'm not actually sure why people have that much energy for outrage. I just can't put my head into a place where I'd get outraged so easily and often. When you seek umbrage, you find it.

Not that different

[ranton]

Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion.
Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company

So what your saying is: Good jobs are now ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss,co-workers, and that prepares you for your next job either at your current employer or future employer.

This doesn't seem much different to me. Workers are simply taking more responsibility for their career development instead of just taking for granted that their company is doing it for them. Sounds like an all together better situation to me.

Re:Not that different

[msauve]

Your summary is much better.

Re:Not that different

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past, the one established company would give you a choice of career paths. They would have an inhouse magazine with jobs section, and even homes for sale from other employees. Training courses could be applied for. As a technician you could take programming courses, become a software engineer, move up to become a research engineer, inhouse consultant or team leader. Or move into something likes sales, marketing, technical writing. They used to look down at people who had been promoted "diagonally", who had got promotions simply from changing companies. Those people weren't thought to have "paid their dues and played the waiting game of "dead man's shoes" where they waited for someone above them to retire or get promoted. These were the good companies.

Some companies like startups will just hire you to get a particular project done, then give you the promotion that they decide or lay you off.

Sometimes, the only way to get a pay rise, promotion, or more interesting work is to change companies.

Re:Not that different

[Anonymous Coward]

What is different is that after another decade of this, "institutional knowledge" will cease to exist and the companies of the future will be crewed by highly intelligent, highly skilled morons.

Re:Not that different

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed. most of my employees want more than what the company can give after a number of years. either stay or be accepting, or more on and find more..

$15/hr, $18-$24/hr... what's the rational pay scale for an employee?? for me, some just grow beyond the company's needs. no remorse. just life.

for me, i look at my social security statement and realize, downsizing to reality at 62 is better than keeping up with the jones's.. no point. futile.

just be happy, stay healthy, be a life long learner and get paid nicely for what you do, .... no drama... have a backbone.. be kind... be firm and fair..

caiou!! where are my travel miles??? hehe... i need a vacation...

Re:Not that different

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is the case at all.

Workers are responding to a comany's treatment of them by acting accordingly. If a company doesn't know how to value career progression, and other employee-valued aspects of operation, then employees can only get one thing out of a company - money. And if the only way then to make more money is to move from one company to another, then this is a reasonable strategy.

Because this then drives the value of an employee based on where they have been and how they have moved between companies, then other companies who do want to create comfortable "stops" for employees on the way will experience employee drain since the one thing they can't keep up with is salaries, so ultimately, there is no place for such companies in this economy.

Further, a valuable employee will likely be followed by a companies clients, since they company's customers value the output of individuals, not the corporation. Meanwhile companies focus on HR strategies like "Cookie Cutter Positions" where they want exactly the same skill set that has left without ever questioning why the role that was vacated has those particular skills in the first place, only to find it gets harder and harder to match up a narrow set of skills with so many paths to achieving career progression - many of which don't necessarily reside within a single discipline.

The end result is that good skills and loyal employees are difficult for them to find, and very quickly, company reputation suffers, followed soon after by falling profits.

I doubt companies like this situation very much, but they were the ones who started it.

Re:Not that different

[ranton]

Those people weren't thought to have "paid their dues and played the waiting game of "dead man's shoes" where they waited for someone above them to retire or get promoted. These were the good companies.

You think a situation where employees stay in a position they have outgrown simply because one out of millions of companies don't have an ideal role for them is a good thing? I strongly disagree, and I am very glad this is less common in today's workforce.

Mobile employees is similar to having high market liquidity in the stock market. High speed trading may have its drawbacks, similar to moving companies every few months, but overall high liquidity is a good thing. Enabling more mobile employees utilizes our economy's human capital with greater efficiency, with both employees and employers benefiting.

I do value an internal promotion greater than a "diagonal" one, but not necessarily if I see it took a decade to get it.

Re: Not that different

[Anonymous Coward]

no, they will crash and burn and be replaced with more loyal companies. The best companies already prioritize employees, so this 2000 mindset is already outdated.

Re:Not that different

[mikael]

I don't think it was a good idea. I'm just quoting from many articles and books I've read (The Peter Principle). If you look at some of the movies from the 1960's, (Flubber), you'll see the sentiment being experienced back then "my ideas are being put on the back burner". Today, that person would contact some venture capitalists, and set up their own startup company.

I also remember the days of "Please wait 28 days for postage and packing" when you ordered something by telephone or by mail order.

From personal experience I've been forced to make career path changes because the local government instructed our company to "have a fresh talent initiative from abroad and not to promote anyone any further". That company imploded.

Re:Not that different

[ShanghaiBill]

In the past ...

When? What year?

They would have an inhouse magazine with jobs section, and even homes for sale from other employees.

Can you name a single real company that did this?

Re:Not that different

[mikael]

British Telecom in the UK. Originally part of the civil service as the post office, but they were privatized. Back in the 1980's, they still kept their "employee magazine".

http://www.alivewithideas.com/...

Re:Not that different

[MangoCats]

The problem comes when you work in an industry with low job density, meaning that you have to uproot and relocate to a new city to hop jobs. With specialized degrees and specialized fields of employment, this is very common today, and these specialized employees are getting the turnover treatment just the same as the HR staff, IT staff and other fungible crew.

The pay is better when you're specialized, but not good enough to handle a cross-country move every 3 years. I've done 3 city-hops in my career, strangely enough, the one prompted by a company shutdown and period of no work was paid for by the company I moved to, the two that I did by choice were largely and completely out of pocket. The time the company compensated my move, the compensation was worth about 4 months of gross pay. Even stranger, one company I was working at was acquired by a bigger company, and it worked out that I didn't have to move as a result of the acquisition, though the rest of the acquired crew did, the acquiring company paid me again about a 4 month "retention bonus" to stay with them for at least a year, so, in a sense, they compensated me for a move I didn't have to make.

So much of who hires you is luck and timing, especially in a specialized field, it's fantasy to think you have much control over the process.

Re:Not that different

[Anonymous Coward]

As per Gervais Principle, you are looser :D

Re:Not that different

[plopez]

Stauffer Chemical and IBM Think magazine https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/his...

Re:Not that different

[rtb61]

Nope, only a psychopath would think high job turnover is desirable. You have employment costs, not just advertising but hiring and replacing bad staff. A person with high job turnover should immediately be flagged, they are very likely to be an extremely bad employment investment, cost of hiring, cost of training and lost employer acclimatisation, which affects other employees as well. A transient employment market means, zero loyalty, basically employees selling your company expertise to their next employer and as an employer making no effort to retain them means spreading you proprietary corporate advantage all over the place. The more employees you put through your business, the more likely you are to pick up a transitory psychopath, who can absolutely ruin a company in short order (create chaos amongst staff, take credit for other people's work, blame other people for their mistakes and plot and scheme to steal everything they can).

For millennia, people were smart enough to know employer employee loyalty produces real benefits. Now that the psychopaths have taken over, everything is a lie, whilst the psychopaths try to cheat as much as they possible can, this quarters profits and golden parachute, taking down company after company.

Re:Not that different

[ranton]

Nope, only a psychopath would think high job turnover is desirable.

Depends on what you consider high turnover. For me an employee who averages around 2.5 years per company is no risk at all. Many people here when discussing job-hoppers are referring to people with an average tenure of under one year, and I do agree they are a significantly risky hire.

For millennia, people were smart enough to know employer employee loyalty produces real benefits.

I doubt you would want to look at employer practices a millennia ago and try to use them today. If you are truly suggesting that you aren't worth replying to, but I'm assuming you were just using hyperbole.

But no one is saying employee loyalty programs are useless. But these loyalty programs better be focused on helping the employees instead of just manipulating them to stay or else they are far less effective today than 50 years ago. Employees who are consistently given opportunities for career advancement and who are paid for their intrinsic knowledge (which means above market rate) are very unlikely to leave regardless of their past history.

It isn't really that hard to do as an employer. Just make sure each manager reviews their retention strategy for each direct report on at least a quarterly basis, and reviews this with their boss on at least a yearly basis. Employee retention is one of the most important responsibilities of management even though most of them ignore this role. If you are thinking long and hard about how you are offering better opportunities to each employee than they could get elsewhere, you deserve to lose them.

Re:Not that different

[painandgreed]

Nope, only a psychopath would think high job turnover is desirable.

I have unfortunately worked for several of those psychopaths in several industries. I worked for one that actually took pride that they had to hire and train ten new people a week so that the few that were still there at the end of that week could replace the others that had left that week. This in a business with maybe 100 employees total, and the main reason people left was the abuse from the employer. Others were just bad managers and trying to self delude themselves that their current position was desirable.

Re:Not that different

[jbengt]

For me an employee who averages around 2.5 years per company is no risk at all.

Maybe for someone only 5 years out of school. But for someone with 15 or 20 years of experience, you better think long and hard about why they switched jobs so often before hiring them.

Re:Not that different

[ranton]

Maybe for someone only 5 years out of school. But for someone with 15 or 20 years of experience, you better think long and hard about why they switched jobs so often before hiring them.

I was thinking of someone with more like 10 years of experience when I mentioned an average tenure of 2.5 years, but for someone with 20 years I would say the number doesn't go up much. Maybe 2.75 average tenure. This is of course an average, which after 20 years in the workforce could easily be brought down by a couple of opportunities that didn't pan out (leading to in exit in a year or so). If I see a 20 year career which is made up of 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6 years at 7 different companies I would not look unfavorably at that if they show progression throughout their career.

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have been first but I was busy looking for a new job.

Not my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

People keep saying this but it's not my experience. I don't really know anyone who has this experience, actually. I've done engineering work for decades and I just ignore all this stuff and pretend it doesn't exist, and I find that it doesn't. We have 10, 15, 20 year anniversaries here all the time. ASIC designers that are as old as dirt, software guys that have seen it all, etc. etc. Sure there are business cycles like always, but the gloom and doom seems to be limited in scope as near as I can tell. /shrug

Re:Not my experience

[ranton]

People keep saying this but it's not my experience. I don't really know anyone who has this experience, actually. I've done engineering work for decades and I just ignore all this stuff and pretend it doesn't exist, and I find that it doesn't. We have 10, 15, 20 year anniversaries here all the time. ASIC designers that are as old as dirt, software guys that have seen it all, etc. etc. Sure there are business cycles like always, but the gloom and doom seems to be limited in scope as near as I can tell. /shrug

This is similar to why they say a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job. In general, people in your situation are hardest by layoffs. Everything is well and good in the past X number of recessions you weathered without issue, but all of a sudden you hit the workplace with questionably marketable skills. That certainly isn't the case for everyone, but most people in your situation are in a very risky spot.

Ultimately it is all about risk tolerance. Someone who put 100% of their retirement savings in Amazon over the past 20 years may not see the need to diversify his portfolio. Someone who had 100% of their retirement savings in Enron might understand it better. Someone who worked at one company with non-transferable skills but made it to retirement age without a layoff is like someone who put their full 401k in company stock. It might work out, but it often doesn't.

Re:Not my experience

[networkBoy]

I'm feeling that now.
nearly 20 years at my prior employer and I'm now 41 and "the new guy" I've got a year under my belt here now and as such feel decently good about my prospects moving forward... but, yeah, that first month on the market after the two decades in my little caged tower was scary as fuck.

Re:Not my experience

[aaarrrgggh]

Financial planning and employment are really different topics though. In an ideal world, there would be a better baseline than just salary to figure out how long it will take you to find a new job.

As for the financial side, fully agree-- people/households should hopefully have at least three different sources of income and preferably 4-5. Main job, hobby income, rental income, investment income are good starters... with a plan for what you do when one source disappears.

Re:Not my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, "let them eat cake." You may as well have just told people to take a multi-million dollar interest-free loan from a family member to get started...

Indeed

[nospam007]

"As a consequence, a career means a string of jobs at different companies."

And all the failing companies have a large percentage of freshly hired people, who need training, mentoring, learning on the job before being able to do some useful work, but before that time comes, they are off to the next job.

While the tech companies who dodge taxes have the money to offer free massages and ludicrous wages and other benefits additional to non-compete agreements.

Re:Indeed

[R3d M3rcury]

[...] but before that time comes, they are off to the next job.

Sometimes not even that long.

I interviewed for a job up in the bay area--I'm in Southern California but I thought it would be interesting. I didn't get it--I was told by the headhunter I was working through that they found someone else. About two weeks later, I got a call from the headhunter to tell me that they were back being interested because the person they hired quit on the first day to go somewhere else.

My attitude was that if the person quit the first day, it probably wasn't a great place to work. And since I was going to have to move, I decided that this wasn't a good idea.

Think about why you stay at a job at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason you stay at one job is that you have institutional-specific knowledge of that organization. Some of it technical, some of it social, some of it practical.

The company wants to retain you because the cost of on-boarding people is significant- That is there is ramp-up time to becoming fully productive and it.

Recent technology advancements and social changes have made workers more interchangeable. On-boarding is quicker. Less institutional-specific knowledge is needed. There are fewer reasons in more job situations to keep people on for long careers.

Silicon Valley and and the manufacturing districts in China go further to suggest that people frequently changing jobs brings an enormous benefit as ideas are shared and knowledge cross-pollinates.

Governments and companies should really look in to encouraging easy job mobility.

Re:Think about why you stay at a job at all.

[ranton]

Recent technology advancements and social changes have made workers more interchangeable. On-boarding is quicker. Less institutional-specific knowledge is needed. There are fewer reasons in more job situations to keep people on for long careers.

During most of my IT projects one of our primary goals is identifying institutional knowledge and putting it in a workflow and/or training materials. Few things are worse than only a handful of people knowing how a company handles something or why it is handled that way. Institutional knowledge held by individual employees is one of the worst enemies of scalability, maintainability, and extensibility.

Re:Think about why you stay at a job at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

> only a handful of people knowing how a company handles something or why it is handled that way.

You just described where I work. We have a COBOL payroll app with code that much of it is over thirty years old. The RESTful interface to it is done with an ancient version of JBoss running a Java .war app that no one here really understands. The COBOL code calls a Windows C++ app that is nearly twenty years old that contains all of the local tax rules. On top of that is a ten year-old .NET WCF app that provides easier to use API for third-parties and our own front-ends to call. There is no one person that understands even half of the stack. For example, just fixing a start date for a certain type of deduction recently took us more than two man-years to fix because of all of the communication. I took notes of the process thinking I could write a book about it, but I realized the Mythical Man Month was already published over forty years ago.

Because of that, all of the guys like myself that have been here for over fifteen years can't take any time off. A payroll run is something you simply can't delay. It must run. Since I started here in 2000, I haven't taken more than two days off a year. Some of my coworkers haven't even taken that much time off. Of course, the junior people that have no clue often get an entire contiguous week off.

You're right that it limits "scalability, maintainability, and extensibility," but how do you fix that when you have a system that is so complicated and has so many different layers and technologies?

Re: Think about why you stay at a job at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do that too. I pushed for time to document, streamline and automate various kludges. They said "no" to budgeting for that time, every time.

So when I pushed for a raise repeatedly and was told "Sorry, we can't afford it right now" each time, I let them know i would not be staying. I got a hundred percent raise while they bring in someone else.

They still don't budget time for any documentation and haven't hired anyone else. It's ludicrous, but it's working for me now.

gave notice and got

Re:Think about why you stay at a job at all.

[ranton]

Because of that, all of the guys like myself that have been here for over fifteen years can't take any time off. A payroll run is something you simply can't delay. It must run. Since I started here in 2000, I haven't taken more than two days off a year. Some of my coworkers haven't even taken that much time off. Of course, the junior people that have no clue often get an entire contiguous week off.

I can remember three meetings in the past six months where I point blank asked a coworker who was describing some workflow if s/he was ever allowed to even take a vacation because of how frequent and manual some process is. Each time that comment was met with a depressed smile.

You're right that it limits "scalability, maintainability, and extensibility," but how do you fix that when you have a system that is so complicated and has so many different layers and technologies?

I certainly cannot claim to know how to fix your particular problem, but I have fixed similar problems in the past (including my current company). My approach is as simple to say as it is difficult to implement: start small and keep building upon your successes. I am currently part of a roughly five year road map to fully transform a jumbled mess of in house applications developed over 15 years into a coherent application suite (just starting year 3). The overall approach right now is to treat our integration layer as the core of our system architecture. New projects abstract themselves away from existing applications, and we pick a couple subsystems to replace each year. Every once in a while we get lucky with an immediate project which will make the company a lot of money, so we get a budget infusion which can be used for some refactoring along with solving their specific problem.

The trick is we have a CTO who is investing in this transformation. Maybe not quite enough investment for my taste, but enough that we are making significant progress. And each year we are able to grab a little more money from various departmental budgets to tackle their problems since they have seen / heard of what we did for other departments. Just last week I had a hallway conversation with a VP after a meeting which ended with him setting up time to write a proposal to hire two more developers using his budget so we can extend our new web portal to include his department. We focus on IT projects like this which bring in more revenue as opposed to cutting costs (in most cases), because that seems to get the VPs the most excited.

The part most IT workers I have known end up missing is finding a way to promote transformational change with immediate return on investment of each project. No one cares or understands what technical debt is (sadly). But every time you can identify a project which will save / make money in the short term, add some time for refactoring into that project because the budget probably won't be as scrutinized. Don't tell anyone about it, just do it. It may sound unscrupulous but if you don't play the game you certainly cannot complain that you aren't winning at it.

But once again, your situation like everyone else's is unique and I have no idea what specific challenges you face. Good luck.

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

When can we expect some new editors?

Re:So?

[Tablizer]

When can we expect some new editors?

The new editors won't remember old articles and post dupes, causing you to complain about the new editors, admit it.

Worked for me

[110010001000]

I quit one job after another and now I earn $50k doing IT in Silicon Valley. It works!

Re:Worked for me

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like you need to quit a few more times

Re:Worked for me

[Anonymous Coward]

yep - as IT employee... $50k->$75k->$95k-$105k- then be your own boss... -> $150k->$180k->$250k - infinity...

Re:Worked for me

[wyHunter]

I think this is what is known as sarcasm.

Re:Worked for me

[Anonymous Coward]

... creimer?

The Quitting Economy

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's just like dating.

the best time to look for a job

[turkeydance]

is when you already have one

Re:the best time to look for a job

[Quirkz]

This is definitely true. I got hit a couple of times with layoffs before and around the dot-com bust, and it was a desperate scramble trying to find the next thing, and filling the gaps with whatever lousy thing I could get, alternating between unemployed and underemployed for quite a while. In later years I've only moved on a couple of times, but did so of my own volition, and in both cases not only felt a lot more relaxed about the situation, but was also able to more clearly make it a step up.

Where have you been?

[Sperbels]

This has been the case for the past 20 years.

BS

[fluffernutter]

To me the quitting economy seems to be all about narcissists and bullshitters. The job interview is not about who has the most skill, it is about who can talk themselves up the best.

Re:BS

[alvinrod]

If that's all the interview is, then the company doing the interview sucks at it and deserves what they get. If you're going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive developers or software professionals, you'd think it would be a good idea to spend some effort on the process designed to help you choose those individuals to ensure that it's effective.

Re:BS

[thesupraman]

This is written by a startup 'CEO' so what do you expect? Narcissists and bullshitters are their poster children.

Serial quitters are usually the ones with little actual skills who just lie through their teeth to get a good looking position for their CV, then proceed to screw it up terribly due to incompetence, then try and flee before the shit hits the fan.
It usually takes a while for that to catch up with people, and you can get away with it for a while in a bubble economy.
But once things turn down in their economy, they tend to end up in big trouble. Who would have guessed.

Re: BS

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people quit because they're treated like shit. If companies fix that, they'll hold onto people better.

There's little reason for me to deal with corporate BS and micromanagement if I can make slightly less doing a much simpler task. I won't work more than 40 hours a week, and it's none of my employer's business what I do in my spare time.

I'd love to work for a place where I can build my skills and get a work/life balance. I'll invest in my employer as much as they invest in me. The sad fact is employers want top skills with shit pay, shit benefits, and shit treatment.

Re:BS

[AmazingRuss]

Same as it ever was... except now every time I get a new job I get a 20k raise.

Re: BS

[Anonymous Coward]

>There's little reason for me to deal with corporate BS and micromanagement if I can make slightly less doing a much simpler task. I won't work more than 40 hours a week, and it's none of my employer's business what I do in my spare time.

Exactly. This whole pseudo-scrum 80 h/wk micromanagement business just makes me leave. I mean there's not exactly a shortage of work and I can just work at another place that gives me free reign. So why would I voluntarily put myself through excessive stress?

>I'd love to work for a place where I can build my skills and get a work/life balance.

I do, it's great. Weird when I actually have a *life* to go to. Some previous jobs were so stressful I didn't have much of a life. Why do it at all, then?

> The sad fact is employers want top skills with shit pay, shit benefits, and shit treatment.

Some. Reality usually catches up with these bad employers - they go out of business. Real talent is NOT cheap, especially in a seller's market.

Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

The devil I know is preferable to the one I don't.

Magazing, nice!

[redmid17]

This article could also be called: "Paging Captain Obvious"

Companies seem have learned to not promote internally or give raises when raises are probably overdue, either via merit or that particular job market nice salary rising overall. That's not every company but even companies that paid me well hemmed and hawed when it came to promotions AND salary increase. It's usually just simpler to leave.

Re:Magazing, nice!

[Tablizer]

article could also be called: "Paging Captain Obvious"

Captain Obvious changed jobs; he's now Captain Reminder.

Re:Magazing, nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha, best answer right there.

Re:Magazing, nice!

[sheph]

This is because of how executives look at pay. They figure if you're not leaving you're happy with what you have, or at least not frustrated enough to leave. They only start to take notice when people leave and they can't hire anyone at their pay rate. That's the point at which they start to consider increasing pay.

2 thousand years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Jesus is looking for a job before crucifixion.

Nor mine

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's probably how it works in trendy places like the Bay Area, where tech salaries have been astronomical in recent years because of crazy VC money and the occasional unicorn, and where half the 25-year-olds earning those salaries don't even realise that almost nowhere else in the world pays at anywhere near that level or costs anywhere near that much to live.

Here in the UK, for example, if you're working as a tech employee and outside of a few quite specific niches or commission-based roles, you'll probably reach a salary ceiling within the first 5-10 years of your career, and you'll need a bigger shift than just finding a new job to get much of a raise after that.

You also have to be careful because while your 25-year-old self might think job-hopping is great for your career, your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. People say this doesn't happen as much as it used to, and with more job-hopping and short-term positions I'm sure that's true, but it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.

With that VC-driven boom looking more shaky by the day, if I were a younger programmer or online marketer or whatever today, I'd be a bit careful about job-hopping too much. You can afford to be picky in boom times, and at that age you might never have experienced anything else, but ask anyone who was around in the dot-bomb era how fast that can change.

Re:Nor mine

[ranton]

your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile. [...] it's definitely still a factor, particularly for the kinds of employers who actually do try to take care of their staff and support long-term careers.

If the employers really cared for their staff and supported long-term careers, they wouldn't care if the employee was previously a job hopper. They would be providing such a great work environment, pay, etc. that the employees wouldn't want to hop any more.

What you probably meant was employers who enjoy taking advantage of comfortable risk-adverse staff, and in that case I agree they wouldn't want a job hopping employee.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's never as simple as that, though, is it? Employers take a risk on hiring anyone and employees take a risk on moving, because usually neither party has enough information at the time of making and accepting a job offer to know if they're doing the right thing. However, particularly for employees, the grass often looks greener on the other side. Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to commercially sensitive information, and so on.

Re:Nor mine

[ranton]

Someone who habitually crosses the road just to find out if it really is will be a much bigger risk in terms in investing in their training, giving them access to commercially sensitive information, and so on.

While I concede they are technically a greater risk, it is slight and finding quality employees is rare enough I couldn't imagine this would be an legitimate issue in almost any hiring decisions. It is much bigger risk to put a sub-optimal person in the role than it is they might leave in 3 years instead of 20. IMHO that is.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's not the ones who are there for three years that would bother me. That's a reasonable length of time to make a useful contribution in almost any job.

It's the ones who have done 5 different jobs in the last three years that I'm talking about when I refer to job-hoppers. Someone who is just going to come along, train up one way or another at an employer's expense, but never reach the point of really being productive for that employer is just a time and money sink, and the employer is almost certainly better off never hiring them at all.

Re:Nor mine

[mikael]

Sometimes you are forced to job hop. Not because you want to but because your project has been completed, management has decided "whoever knows the most will become the maintenance engineer". With that rule, everyone starts jumping ship after finding themselves "Room 101'ed". They're not fired, but they don't get any work to do either. Maybe a customer wants "the most qualified graduate" to work on a specific part of their project, but you were interviewed for another role.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Coward]

I already put job-hoppers on the bottom of the pile.I'm not going to waste my time bringing in someone new and mentoring them if they're just planning to leave in 12 months. It's not worth my time and effort.

As for myself, I've been with the same company for going on 15 years.

Re: Nor mine

[Anonymous Coward]

If you fear hiring a bad employee, you are terrible at hiring. If you can't assess minimally acceptable tech skills from an informal interview in under a minute, you are asking the wrong questions. If you can't get high confidence on your specific needs in under five, you shouldn't be hiring, you should instead offer a 3x+ rate daily contact to assess candidates.

I've recommended against hires many times, and never been wrong when they were hired anyway. I've also recommended for hiring of dubious quality candidates with the provision that they were acceptable as meat puppets incapable of acting effectively when independent in novel situations.

The best candidates accepted offers from other organizations as our offer were too low. Why am i still there? 100% telework which let's me travel the globe on a never ending working vacation.

Re:Nor mine

[AmazingRuss]

Once you hit 45 you're fucked no matter what. Better be banking as much cash as possible along the way.

Re:Nor mine

[Registered Coward v2]

Another issue is employees will invest much less in training since another employee can simply hire them away and avoid the training costs and offer a higher salary as well As a result, if job hopping becomes the norm employees will need to recoup training costs much quicker through lower salaries, agreements to repay costs if they leave early, etc. Job hopping to get ahead sounds good until you find out TINSTAAFL. Sure, people with skills in high demand can do it but for most workers it won't be a workplace reality.

Re:Nor mine

[Registered Coward v2]

While I concede they are technically a greater risk, it is slight and finding quality employees is rare enough I couldn't imagine this would be an legitimate issue in almost any hiring decisions. It is much bigger risk to put a sub-optimal person in the role than it is they might leave in 3 years instead of 20. IMHO that is.

It depends on the pattern. A new job every two or three years along with upward moves is fine, a new one every year and some laterals over 5 years goes straight into the trash.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This is certainly true, and of course anyone can be unlucky if something really unexpected happens to their employer not long after they join. One short term gig does not make a pattern, and if someone has had a short term job and has a plausible reason for leaving so soon, I'm not going to hold that against them. If they've had five short term jobs in a row, on the other hand, then they're probably never going to get the chance to explain to me why.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That's certainly not true in my industry (software, web stuff, and so on).

But the rules of the game can change by that time in a techie's career, and you do have to play by the new rules if you want to keep winning.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Coward]

You also have to be careful because while your 25-year-old self might think job-hopping is great for your career, your 45-year-old self is one day going to be looking at CVs and put the job-hoppers straight to the bottom of the pile.

Agree with parent. I interview+train all new members to my department. For my current job role - whether bringing in a new or experienced hire:
- It will take a minimum of 6 months to train you.
- It will take a minimum of 12 months until you are self-sufficient.
- It will take a minimum of 24 months until you start contributing back to the business in a significant way.

If I see on your resume you've jumped every 18-24 months you will not get a call for an interview. You will be too risky to hire as you will likely jump again before you have an opportunity to actually be an asset to the company and earn your pay.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Coward]

1) I hope that shuts up the "I feel better at 45 than at 25" idiots.
2) Only true if you look 45. Big soft belly, moobs, wrinkles, bald pate with gray fringe, and beaten demeanor.

Re:Nor mine

[plopez]

They're not fired, but they don't get any work to do either.

Which is a bad thing exactly how?

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Coward]

I see that you are in EU. I remember when i was there, and guys like you dreamed of the old times when slavery was legal, and democracy was exotic word...Keep swimming, it's not a fish.

Re:Nor mine

[TheRaven64]

For most skilled positions, the first 6-12 months is spent acquiring relevant knowledge to the particular workflow that the hiring company uses. Employees don't reach their maximum productivity after that. If someone has never stayed at a job for more than 18 months, then the prospective employer doesn't have much evidence that they ever will reach that peak. Are they hopping jobs because they're so amazing that they're always head-hunted, or are they always switching jobs because they're given the benefit of the doubt in the first year because they're still learning the ropes and they're encouraged to go elsewhere once their employer discovers that they're actually incapable of learning?

Re:Nor mine

[TheRaven64]

I've seen a couple of companies address this by effectively charging for training, but with the proviso that they'll pay the cost if you're still there in a few years. If you stay, then the training was free. If you leave, then hopefully the new salary is sufficiently high that it's still a better move after you pay back the cost of the training.

Re:Nor mine

[aaarrrgggh]

My bottom of pile is less than two years, middle pile might be 4 jobs in 8-10 years. The chances of a positive return on investment diminish as you go down.

We have very high retention though-- about 10% turnover is high for us. Recruiting a person is on average 35% of salary, training in the first year is 30-120%, and overhead on all of that is 60%. With gross margins around 60%, we see break-even around 16-38 months. If someone at 16 months break-even sticks around for 24 months, we just barely cover the enterprise costs.

Re:Nor mine

[ranton]

It's the ones who have done 5 different jobs in the last three years that I'm talking about when I refer to job-hoppers.

From comments here it appears opinions differ on what it means to be a job-hopper. I do agree I would be very apprehensive about hiring someone who worked at five different jobs in three years unless they were all short term contracting jobs.

Each of the places I have worked with for the past 10 years have had a significant number of employees with 10+ years at the company. Most of these coworkers have felt more than two companies in 10 years would be job-hopping. For me I wouldn't be concerned until their average tenure over the past 10 years was 2 years or less.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It seems like our views are actually pretty similar then, we just adopted different definitions of "job-hopping".

And yes, contracting is certainly different. If someone is taking on short, fixed-length engagements then of course you expect them to move on frequently, and that would be true even if both sides were entirely happy with their relationship. It's the person who was taken on as a permie but then either the employer or the employee was so dissatisfied with the relationship that it ended after just a few months that you have to be careful about. That could happen to anyone occasionally, through sheer bad luck and no real fault of either side, but a pattern of that happening several times with few or no longer-term spells of employment would be a pretty big red flag.

Re:Nor mine

[cthulhu11]

In the last ten years at least, NOT job hopping has become a liability, at least in tech on the west coast. The first thing a recruiter or hiring manager asks is why you want to leave if you've been with your current company X years, and they're prone to turning you away as "unable to adapt".

One cannot underestimate the value of a job that will exist next year or five years from now. One also loses thousands with each job transition when the medical deductible gets reset mid-year.

Re:Nor mine

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, they'll expect a raise every once in a while and you have no intention of actually doing anything that would convince anybody to stay there. You want people who will remain loyal to you until you fire them on a whim. You know... suckers.

Re:Nor mine

[mikael]

I was room 101'ed. Basically because a salesguy won the company a hundred million contract. Our competitor poached our two architects, leaving the company headless. Board of directors went into a panic. The local executive government branch told the company "not to promote anyone any further and to have a "fresh talent initiative instead by recruiting foreign workers". Engineers started leaving any way they could.

Being room 101'ed meant I was essentially sitting in an empty corner of the building. For at least 8 cubicles in every direction there wasn't anyone left. Fortunately, I had applied to do a MSc and that gave me a zip line to escape. While doing my MSc, I could watch from a safe distance, as he company was sold off to scavengers/speculators who sold them off to Intel who in turn sued for being sold junk.

If you want loyalty, buy a dog...

[jwcollins]

I work for money and job satisfaction. I've been doing this in Silicon Valley since 1998. This is a newsflash to some people??

Re:If you want loyalty, buy a dog...

[Anonymous Coward]

yep - most of my employees i share the smell of coffee all the time.. they warm up eventually... i am not their babysitter for life yet i really do care about their professional development and overall life cycle as a citizen and positive contributor to mankind..

Domain knowledge underrated [Re:Indeed]

[Tablizer]

It's amazing how little value companies assign to domain (industry) knowledge in IT workers. I often look back at the apps/systems/designs I've done when a newbie at a given org, and laugh at how naive I was about the domain, and thus how clunky the results were.

PHB's are dazzled by the newfangled UI/UX the newbies often bring in, functionality and maintainability be damned; for those fall on somebody else. The shiny red ball wins the monkeys' attention.

On the topic of 'good jobs'

[BlackSupra]

The key to transforming yourself -- Robert Greene, Author of 48 Laws of Power at TEDxBrixton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Fire the HR department

[ghoul]

Any company which will not do hikes unless someone gets a competing job offer is one where HR and COmp are not doing their job. Its their job to study the competitive market and have a number ready for what a person's market value is and then raise it to 15% less than Market. Noone leaves for less than 15%. If HR is not providing this number to the reporting manager they are not doing their job. Rather they are depending on the HR of other companies to come up with a suitable comp for their own employees and then matching that Comp. What this means is the company is having to pay 15% more than what it would normally need to pay because HR is being lazy.

Re:Fire the HR department

[Anonymous Coward]

HR will flat out lie to you, We've had that happen. We would go ask for a raise, and HR was claiming we were at the industry average. Next they hired a new software engineer doing exactly the same job (minus the years of in house expertise we had in designing and developing the software and systems) and someone found out he made 25% more than we did. Handed in our resignation on the spot and e-mailed the executive VP (went over our boss's boss's head) about the situation. All got their 25% raise on their next pay-check plus a good amount of stocks to vest over the next years.
Fuck you very much, HR.

Re: Fire the HR department

[Anonymous Coward]

I would quit for even 10% increase, let alone 15% or more.. if you do that every one/two years you will earn A LOT more than any of your ex-coworkers which didn't change jobs (maybe double than them within 10 years), plus you've learned a ton more in the process.

Re: Fire the HR department

[jbengt]

You're assuming that you can keep doing that for a long time. Chances are, if you job hop that much, you will eventually find yourself in a losing position and end up unemployed long enough to lose most of that extra pay.

who doesn't

[avandesande]

system analyst
senior developer
senior developer /team lead/ senior developer
developer
developer
developer
R&D lab tech (chem industry)
pilot plant tech(chem industry)
plant worker(chem.)
plant worker (chem)
landscaper
pizza delivery
pet store
amusement park cook/operator

Re:who doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

So, after all those tech jobs you finally found your true passion in amusement park operations? I'm impressed how you were able to pivot plant worker into landscaper though... that's lateral thinking at its finest!

Re:who doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the chronological order in ascending or descending order?

Re:who doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

You started as a system analyst and ended up working as an amusement park operator?

Re:who doesn't

[q4Fry]

...
developer
developer
developer ...

Steve?

Seniority

[Anonymous Coward]

And then there's the rejects that never advance their careers yet get 'promoted from within' based on their time spent rather than skills or achievements.

I've increased my salary over the last decade and a half (with no college education or debt mind you) from the minimum wage I was making in high school to the 145k I make today consistently.... by quitting jobs.

It always goes a little like this.

Me: For the skills I'm using and the quality of work I provide, I feel like I deserve more money.
Them: Here's .25/hr raise, you should appreciate it because NOBODY gets that even.

So I go look around and whammo theres some other company looking for my skills.

Me: See ya! I just got a raise and a better position with less overall responsibility... every.. single... time.

Now the current suckers are trying to tell me that if I were full time (hire on with us!) then I could work remote but it 'just doesn't work with contractors'.

Me: Why?
Them: Rubbish
Me: Bye!

Quitting doesn't make you a quitter and thats the end of it. Sometimes quitting is part of winning. Like quitting smoking.

Re: Seniority

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I could upvotes this ++100

Re: Seniority

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any tips for someone looking to get into something like that? I try to stay active with FOSS contributions, but there's a certain point where I need to use stuff in production before I can say I'm well-versed in it. I don't want to lie on my resume or bullshit anyone.

Lack of internal career paths

[Headw1nd]

One thing that has accelerated this trend is the lack of upward mobility many workers find within their company. There is no bonus for being an internal candidate, and in some cases it seems to be a stigma (In one case I know of, a state agency requires extra paperwork if an internal candidate is selected for an open position, to prove they were better qualified). In these cases it's risky to wait years for a possible opening for advancement, better to search around as soon as you feel you are qualified.

Re:Lack of internal career paths

[Bios_Hakr]

Can't speak to anything other than what I've seen: People aren't retiring.

At my last place, we had a workers comp claim by a mid-level manager; she tripped on a power cable and broke her hip. She was already in her late 60s at the time of the accident. And after taking 2 years off to recover, SHE CAME BACK!

We had to make crazy adjustments to our workflow so that OSHA/workers comp would be satisfied.

I was scowled at for suggesting we *not* hire people too old to see the cables on the floor. Or people with such advanced bone density loss that a simple slip/fall means 2 years of physical therapy.

How can a junior manager (or technician) seriously consider staying in a job where his/her boss is only a few years older and is literally planning on working till they die?

Re:Lack of internal career paths

[Anonymous Coward]

You were scowled at because you proposed something illegal. Age and disability (poor vision) are both protected classes.

Maybe you should've suggested the person responsible for running cables do their job correctly?

Re:Lack of internal career paths

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed that too. I prefer to stick within a company, but when outsiders are getting the positions I want, then I start to look elsewhere. If other companies are prepared to give me the job I want and my current company is not, then there is a lot of incentive to jump ship.

Re:Lack of internal career paths

[tsstahl]

Soooo, you feel it is her duty to shuffle off to the corner and die, leaving room for the next generation?

What about when you are a healthy 68 year old with skills and experience to contribute? Should you chuck all that and go on the Kavorkian diet?

I hope there still room for me when I get there. Half way to the end of the race, I've come to admire most of the 'senior' workers around me. Sometimes they do hilariously odd things--just like the young'uns around me, but they all have something to contribute.

My best wire guy is a septuagenarian that still climbs a ladder daily. He can even program the heck out of the phone PBX. He also has a mean golf game and tells us to get stuffed when the weather is nice. The anecdote is to express that people are living longer healthier lives these days. It is pretty stupid to believe that you should work 25-30 years and be able to finance another 25-30 years of retirement.

Re:Lack of internal career paths

[Rande]

Cables across walkways would be consider a Health and Safety violation no matter what the age of the employees.
Ideally, they would be routed out of the way, but sometimes if they company is too cheap to do that, they'll put a protector or a rug over them so they aren't so much of a trip hazard.

unexamined assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

wait, so I have to find a new job if I quit?

You can only quit so many times

[Rakarra]

If you flit from job to job, you can only do that so many times before hiring managers and employees at the companies you're interviewing at catch on. It's a big red flag, and a good reason to trash a resume without ever inviting that person to an interview. We have no interest in putting a lot of training time and ramp-up time for someone uninterested in staying, so that's an easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

These days you also can't call former employers to figure out if someone was fired. Unless they committed a felony, most employers are too afraid of getting sued to badmouth someone, so they give either lukewarm endorsements, "this guy was brilliant!" endorsements, or refuse to say.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[__aaclcg7560]

Whenever a recruiter or hiring manager asks why I don't want a "permanent" job, I ask them why they're hiring a contractor and not a "permanent" employee. I can't get a "permanent" job if all I'm being offered is contract jobs.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

You are better off with contract work anyway. You have them tied down to a particular set of skills in your contract, and have the option of leaving cleanly if something better come along. Having the freedom to leave if you want to is an incentive for them to treat you well. As a permanent employee, you are more likely to be shuffled onto the work that they can't find anyone else to do.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[PPH]

When you get hired away with better offers numerous times, how do the hiring managers view that?

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

Because in a permanent job, HR will be looking at you closely, monitoring the amount of time you spend on your employer's dime getting into childish arguments on Slashdot.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Shados]

If you quit every 6 months, yeah. Every 1.5 to 2 years? No one cares (depends on the industry, obviously, but in tech and related? Nope). Even the occasional "Well, that didn't work out" 2 month sting or the couple of "Meh, I wanted better" 10-12 months won't have anyone bat their eyes at you.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[AmazingRuss]

... you better show an interest in giving people 10% or better raises annually... or you're gonna be surrounded by noobs in short order.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

They leave because of people like you. Referring to your employees or potential employees as "wheat and chaff" tells why you are so miserable in your job.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Rakarra]

Referring to your employees or potential employees as "wheat and chaff"

I'm not referring to the people as wheat and chaff, just the resumes. Which ones should be saved for a more careful look.

Re: You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. I can feel the heat from here!

Re:You can only quit so many times

[__aaclcg7560]

As a permanent employee, you are more likely to be shuffled onto the work that they can't find anyone else to do.

As a contract employee, I look for the work that the permanent employees don't want to do. I get a lot of crap on Slashdot for cleaning out storage closets, but every IT department I ever worked in needed some kind of organization before I can even start my job. By maintaining a clean work area, I set an example to the other workers that they don't have work in obscene clutter.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[__aaclcg7560]

Because in a permanent job, HR will be looking at you closely, monitoring the amount of time you spend on your employer's dime getting into childish arguments on Slashdot.

HR would determine that I get my job done in one hour and recommend laying off three to five workers to give me enough work to keep me preoccupied for the remaining seven hours.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

No, creimer, they wouldn't do that.

" recommend laying off three to five workers to give me enough work"

Narcissistic sociopaths say that.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[__aaclcg7560]

Narcissistic sociopaths say that.

That could explain why I'm always in the top three for getting my numbers.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

If everyone gets roughly the same numbers, a numerical ranking is meaningless. If everyone else gets a "99", and you get "100", you aren't some special human even though you're "top three". You're just part of the herd.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[__aaclcg7560]

If everyone gets roughly the same numbers, a numerical ranking is meaningless. If everyone else gets a "99", and you get "100", you aren't some special human even though you're "top three". You're just part of the herd.

As I pointed out to someone else, my numbers routinely get low balled on Slashdot. This quote is a perfect example, where I went from the top three to being "part of the herd."

When I got ranked last year, I was in the top three with 10,000+ items remediated. Coworkers ranked 4th to 30th had less than 5,000 items remediated. There's a 5,000 point gap between the stallions and the herd.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, look at this stallion. "Please reboot your computer" Bam! Another remediation! Next call!

"my numbers routinely get low balled on Slashdot"

No, the personality you project is that of a terminally over-compensating loser.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

" I get a lot of crap on Slashdot for cleaning out storage closets"

No, you get crap for framing it as some kind of miracle, and last I heard there was ONE such story, so why the plural?

"every IT department I ever worked in needed some kind of organization before I can even start my job"

You know what they say about people who see assholes everywhere? Chances are, they're the asshole.

"By maintaining a clean work area, I set an example to the other workers that they don't have work in obscene clutter."

Not sure what maintaining a clean work area has to do with "organization of an IT department". You sure you aren't mixing up "taking out the candy wrappers" and "org charts"?

You're not qualified to "organize" an IT department. You're a digital cleaning lady. Answer your phones, get a grip on reality, and stop living this fantasy in which you're some kind of superhero saving all these Silicon Valley incompetents from themselves.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

I get a lot of crap on Slashdot for cleaning out storage closets

The reason for that is that you cite it as an example of your abilities to perform "miracles." Cleaning out a fucking closet is not a "miracle," it's a waste of time. You know what I do when I find that my workspace is messy? I call or email facilities, and ask them to come cart away a bunch of bullshit. I may spend 20 minutes of time looking through the pile of shit I want them to cart away to make sure there's nothing important in it, but anything more than that is a massive waste of company resources. I make a lot more than the custodial staff - for me to do custodial work would be a waste of my time, and the company's money.

every IT department I ever worked in needed some kind of organization

So you can't get hired into an IT department that's not in crisis, "run everything on a shoestring," mode? No company with a shred of respectability or organization will have you, so you find yourself relegated to the IT backwaters. Gotcha.

By maintaining a clean work area, I set an example to the other workers that they don't have work in obscene clutter.

I maintain a clean work area without spending weeks "cleaning it up." Because I am not a slob, and I know how to delegate cleaning functions to the people who are hired to do those functions. You have not mastered that tactic yet, which is why you still make slave wages in the area of the world with some of the most overinflated IT wages around.

You get shit for cleaning out storage closets for THOSE reasons. If you said, "Hey guys, I'm a janitor, and I cleaned out a storage closet," I'd say, "Great, you did your job, have a cookie." There's no *shame* in being a custodial worker, it's honest work, and anybody who puts in a hard day's effort is all right by me. But when you cross the line from "working hard" to "puffing myself up as if I'm some kind of elite superstar because I disregarded my job responsibilities, and spent time doing janitorial work instead," that's when I start giving you shit - or as a hiring manager, when I fire you and bring someone else in better suited to the role.

How early did they let you go from that contract again? 3 months, was it? Yeah, that had nothing to do with you wasting company resources. I'm sure.

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

you sound bitter, honey bunny

Re:You can only quit so many times

[Anonymous Coward]

you sound autistic, pal

Also the only way to get a raise

[Anonymous Coward]

Quitting is also the only way to get a raise anymore.

Meh...

[s.petry]

The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees. Hence, the logical step of employees no longer being loyal to companies.

Where I disagree with TFA is in the suggestion that you don't want certain types of experience, and he rattles off quite a bit. Much of which I would say is good experience and can look good on a resume as long as you were successful in that job.

Re:Meh...

[ranton]

The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees.

The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that we are no longer in a post-war economy with little global competition. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 40 years ago. The modern economy requires companies to be more efficient than they were 10 years ago. I have seen many companies which cut their workforce 20+% during the recession, but ultimately found out they had too much bloat and never did rehire to previous levels when business picked up. It took a while for companies to realize how wasteful they were being with our country's human capital in the post-war era, and a more mobile workforce is one of the results.

Re: Meh...

[Cryacin]

Mandatory reading for modern corporate employment. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/200...

Re:Meh...

[ShanghaiBill]

The difference between today and 30/40 years ago is that companies are no longer loyal to employees.

Average job tenure has gone UP over the last 30 years. Your belief in the "Good ole' days" of loyal companies and grateful employees is false nostalgia. The Golden Age of lifetime employment is a myth. It didn't happen.

Re:Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except, there's a lot of institutional knowledge that is lost in cases like this. Raise your hand if you've ever been at a job and a conversation includes comments along the lines of how only one person knew how to do a particular task, and they're no longer with the company for whatever reason. I'm betting pretty much everyone reading this post will be raising their hand. I lost count of how many times I was in a meeting where some variation on that statement was made, not to mention the times I overheard others saying similar things.

I was recently forced out of my job because a coworker who was better politically connected within the company wanted it. With my leaving, so goes a LOT of institutional knowledge. I knew which engineers were responsible for what product lines, I knew each of the engineers and their individual quirks, along with most of the other major players in the process from a design concept to the finished product, so if things got jammed up somewhere, I knew who to talk to about getting it moving again. My "replacement" is content to just let things sit until someone comes to her, which might be all well and good from a moral high horse vantage point, but she never seemed to make the connection that having products to sell means the company makes money, and the company making money means she has a job. The company is in a highly regulated industry, so there were times when if we didn't make some change within a couple days, we couldn't sell that product in the entire EU, for example.

This "quitting economy" also leads to a lot of wasted money training people. Most jobs it takes at least 6 months for you to get up to speed on things. Most people stick around 1-2 years, so by the time you, as an employer, are finally starting to break even on your investment, the person's probably already thinking about moving on to their next job. So then you have to waste all that time and money interviewing new applicants, hiring someone, and waiting 6+ months for them to get up to speed, knowing that they too probably already have one foot out the door. It's this never ending treadmill, where you're lucky if you can keep your head above water.

Don't even get me started on how the people who are left behind usually end up doing their job, plus your job when you leave, and that becomes the new normal. So they burn out a lot faster, make more mistakes, and are generally less productive because they're being pulled in so many different directions at once.

Re:Meh...

[sjames]

And yet, in the past retailers could afford to be closed 52 Sundays a year plus all major and minor holidays and still prosper. Today they're so screwed up they can't even manage to be closed on Thanksgiving without (apparently, according to them) going down in flames.

The rest is just corporations discarding human values and squeezing more out of everyone while paying less.

Re:Meh...

[Hognoxious]

Don't even get me started on how the people who are left behind usually end up doing their job, plus your job when you leave, and that becomes the new normal.

Given the topic at hand, they do have a potential solution ...

Re:Meh...

[barrywalker]

Right. The never-ending race to the bottom.

You're all just human resources to be used, abused and shitcanned when you no longer add value. Either keep your skills up-to-date and grow some balls or be perpetually treated like shit. Your choice.

Re:Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please provide a citation for that statement? ("Average job tenure has gone UP over the past 30 years.") I should say also that I would like to see the statistics for white collar professionals. Jobs such as working at McDonald's and such do not count since those jobs traditionally have been held by younger people who have not yet settled into a career.

Re: Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

It certainly did for some people. My father sold computers for almost 30 years for the same well-known company.

Re:Meh...

[Gavagai80]

Out of curiosity, I googled it and found this: https://www.ebri.org/pdf/notes... . Apparently the job tenure for men decreased, but job tenure for women increased by more (presumably due to fewer women quitting to become homemakers). It's clear from the data that lifetime jobs were not the norm for anyone 30 years ago, though. In 1983 men averaged 5.9 years and in 2013 they averaged 5.5 years, only a few months difference.

Re:Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's how successful people view unsuccessful people, than I can't wait for the second Great Depression. When it happens, please try to remember me.

Re:Meh...

[TheCastro1689]

When most people say things like 30/40 years ago online I realize they mean they 50s and 60s. When they say 10, they mean the 90s. "The CPS evidence shows several striking patterns. First, job tenure appears to be at an all-time high in the early 1960s, as the 1963 job tenure supplement shows an extraordinarily high percentage of workers, 35.5%, with more than ten years of tenure at their current job. " http://ftp.iza.org/dp9776.pdf

Re:Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

>You're all just human resources to be used, abused and shitcanned when you no longer add value. Either keep your skills up-to-date and grow some balls or be perpetually treated like shit. Your choice.

While I agree with you in spirit, your tone is bullshit, because nothing in life is ever this cut and dry. If it was, well, people would be murdering their terrible bosses and going postal every goddamn week.

Re:Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

One area that a person loses in when quitting often is with accurred benefits. PTO, 401K etc. Keep switching jobs and you will always be starting at the begining of these.

Re:Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered overthrowing capitalism?

Re:Meh...

[SCVonSteroids]

Dude, you make me feel like I wrote this. Word for word.

Re:Meh...

[slavdude]

Training? What's that? In my current bitter experience on the job market you get eliminated if you don't already have ALL the skills in the job description.

If you're talking about immersion in the company culture, that's a different thing, in which case I agree with you. Employers aren't doing themselves any favors by not making people want to stay.

Re: Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for this.

Re:Meh...

[s.petry]

The late 80s was the collapse of Detroit and the Automotive companies, which we were the last to have lifelong tenure as long as people wanted it and didn't really, really really F'up. The late 70s early 80s was when steel collapsed with the same. That is between 30 and 40 for those of us who can perform basic math tasks. Yeah, maybe the median for the Country started dropping in the late 60s early 70s but if you restrict to those dates you would be called wrong because of steel and automotives.

In other words, people like you would bitch no matter what was posted.

Re: Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

That certainly was a big pile of ... words.

Re:Meh...

[tsa]

Maybe not in the US but it did happen in Europe. Philips even had its own pension system, and it was not alone in that.

Been there, done that...

[__aaclcg7560]

If you're an IT support contractor, you're thinking about your next job the moment you show up for Day 1 at your new job. When I did a six week contract at Sony, I had job interviews on the cellphone while in the men restroom (mostly in front of the mirror but sometimes at the urinal), as that was the only private spot I could find. For a few weeks, I had an phone interview every day. I had a new job lined up as soon as I finished the contract.

Re:Been there, done that...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you're an IT support contractor, you're thinking about your next job the moment you show up for Day 1 at your new job."

Yeah, you do, because you're a piece of shit. You spend half your day shitposting on Slashdot. Your next job is your agency's problem; not yours.

Re:Been there, done that...

[__aaclcg7560]

Your next job is your agency's problem; not yours.

It's extremely rare for me to work serial assignments for one contracting agency. When a contract ends, I have to work for a different contracting agency. I did two assignments for one contracting agency that were ten years apart.

Re:Been there, done that...

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's extremely rare for me to work serial assignments for one contracting agency. "

That's very selfish, depriving an agency of their star miracle worker.

"When a contract ends, I have to work for a different contracting agency."

But that must be easy, given the 200+ calls a day you get, and the obvious value you bring.

"I did two assignments for one contracting agency that were ten years apart."

My god, how could they have waited so long? How did Silicon Valley survive all those years?

Re:Been there, done that...

[__aaclcg7560]

My god, how could they have waited so long?

Their bread and butter in the mid-2000's was IBM Help Desk, which had long since faded away. They brought me back in for a Dell PC refresh project.

How did Silicon Valley survive all those years?

The contracting agency was located in Hebron, KY, so Silicon Valley wasn't their main focus. They provided me with great references for the last 10+ years.

Re:Been there, done that...

[Anonymous Coward]

"They brought me back in for a Dell PC refresh project."

Just in time for the 2008 economic recovery. I like to think you helped in that.

"They provided me with great references for the last 10+ years."

Yes, certainly. If I ever need a middle-aged phone operator, I'll know where to look! My first job after high school was answering the phones.

Silly me

[Nidi62]

I guess instead taking that internal job that doubled my salary with another division of my company that I now have 10 years with and 6 weeks paid time off was a mistake. I should have just quit and found a much less paying job with another company since that's "what you do now".

Re:Silly me

[Anonymous Coward]

A sample size of one. That's not how it works for most.

I worked for various companies over 30 years but found promotions in the technical field difficult to procure. So I just eventually started consulting for those same people. I make plenty of money, I can take off whatever time I need, and I have enough work to keep me busy until I retire.

But sure, working for the same company for years sounds good, but maybe you don't crave new and exciting or hate change.

Re: Silly me

[Nidi62]

I've had 4 different jobs within that company in 10 years, and not even scratched the surface. I'm currently working on getting informal training for some skills that i can then parley into another position wirhin my company that is 1-2 pay grades higher than i currently am. It's also an international company with 10s of thousands of employees. There's plenty of room left for new and exciting, and I don't have to worry about losing vacation time or seniority by moving to a new company.

Re: Silly me

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the exception not the rule.
99% of your colleagues did not get double the salary and 6 weeks vacation staying with the same company, and you know it.
Most of us must take the hard route which is switch jobs more often.

It's massively different

[rsilvergun]

people are social animals. Stagnant wages mean people aren't changing jobs (and moving, don't forget the moving) to get ahead, they're doing it to keep up. Meanwhile social ties are breaking down as a result of all this moving around. As an added bonus it makes Unionization (and it's best buddy Collective Bargaining) damn near impossible.

Like the 'Sharing' economy the 'Quitting' economy isn't a win for workers. It's a bug, not a feature.

Re: It's massively different

[Anonymous Coward]

So what fix do you propose?

Here's my story

[GerryGilmore]

I started with Data General in January of 1977. Entry-level depot-tech repairing CPU boards by gate-ganging on an extender board. Within a year, I was taken on by Field Service because of my roaring success at the depot. Sure enough, I was quickly being sent to the worst on-going systems problems that no one else could seem to fix around the Southeast and got rave reviews. Each year, my manager would give me "the maximum raise allowed by company policy." About 3%. Aside from the jump in going to Field Service from the depot, that was it. One of our resellers decided to start up his own FS operation and asked me how much I was making at DG, so I told him and he laughed and said "Gerry, you're being robbed. I'll start you at double what you're making now.". OK, says I. When I handed my manager my resignation letter, he was shocked and wanted to know why I was leaving, so I told him about the offer to double my salary. He said: "Oh - no problem. We'll match that! You don't have to leave." To which I replied: "No dice! DG deliberately kept me working for MUCH less than I was worth and NOW they're willing to step up only because I got a better offer? Screw that! DG could have treated me right and I would never be tempted to even listen to another offer. What happens 2, 3, 5 years from now? Do I need to lie to another company to get an offer letter to wave in your face to pay me right? No - y'all don't really care about me so I don't care about you."

Re:Here's my story

[Quirkz]

Yeah, it's a shame when it works that way.

I had the unusual experience of a boss who polled my salary versus others at the university, and finagled a raise from the department because I was below average for that position. I'm not sure it fully got me up to average, but it was at least a few thousand, and it was a completely unprompted action in the middle of the year, between my regularly scheduled reviews and raises, so it was definitely appreciated. I'm not sure if being a university environment made that possible in a way that your typical company might not voluntarily "give up" money, even for the benefit of employee contentment and retention.

Re:Here's my story

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively, tell them "No dice! Not unless DG pays a bonus for all lost wages with interest and grossed up for taxes and inflation fully vested immediately"

Re:Here's my story

[Sir Holo]

I started with Data General in January of 1977. . . . Each year, my manager would give me "the maximum raise allowed by company policy." About 3%. "

3% is roughly the average inflation rate (which I think was even higher in the late 1970's), meaning that your "raises" were actually "pay reductions". They didn't even keep up with inflation.

I had a similar situation at The Aerospace Corporation . One year, I was told that my raise was 3.5%. I asked when the cost-of-living Increase (COLI) kicked-in. "This is it," the boss says. I noted that I had recently looked at the Government Accounting Office's Consumer Price Index (GAO CPI), which translates basically to the inflation rate, and that it was 4.3% for that year, meaning that my "RAISE" was actually a pay cut.

Unhappy manager meetings ensued, and I got a 0.7% "bonus" raise, with instructions to keep quiet about it. Fuck that! I did not keep quiet about it. Not in the least. In fact I made the GAO CPI known to every one of my colleagues.

And yes, I got the hell out of there ASAP. . . to a much better job, I might add.

The Aerospace Corporation can chortle my balls.

Re:Here's my story

[Anonymous Coward]

Data General's experience in your case mirrors what I notice at a lot of tech companies in particular. They are hemorrhaging the people they truly need, who are job-hopping to get what they're really worth. Meanwhile, the lifers who genuinely need that job because they're not motivated or their skills are out of date hang around and get promoted to their level of incompetence. I've known a lot of people who hang out in six-figure tech jobs doing the bare minimum because they just want to see how long they can keep pulling that paycheck and doing little or nothing before they get fired.

Like you, I don't negotiate with my current employer or ask for a raise, ever. I start looking for my next job the day I start at my new one and aim to have another offer in my back pocket 24/7. Manager treats me in a way I don't like? I'll hand in my two weeks on the spot. Didn't give me the raise I was looking for? Bye. Want to know what it would take to keep me? It's already too late. Employers created this game because they saw their employees as a liability and didn't want to pay pensions or keep giving raises to older folks whose skills were out of date. They wanted to force people out and have higher-turnover workplaces so that they could scale their workforce to their needs more quickly. Retaining mostly the worst people is the natural side effect of this strategy.

Re:Here's my story

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar anecdote to add to yours...
My colleague was 4 years in, he was an absolute gem, committed, positive, helpful, productive, innovative, smart, communicative, an ideal employee.
He knew from his circle of friends that he was AT LEAST 20K below his actual street value.
He made repeated attempts at all levels (within the department, dept head, dept head head, HR) to have his salary "corrected".
Repeated refusals at ALL levels.
So he searches, quickly finds 2 offers, and presents them as evidence, saying: "I still want to stay here - can you help me?"
Complete refusal.
So he naturally leaves, and suddenly the extra 20K is made available for his "replacement", who can't do his job at all, and has no intention of ever doing it, but rather pursuing his own junior agenda. And it takes YEARS to become competent at this position.
The team, the dept, the division, the company - and even him - are ALL worse off because of this salary inertia.
Basically, no one thought it "fair" that this young rising star get a 20K increase, and no 20K raise for "me" at the same time.
Humans are stupid and selfish and short-sighted.
That's why HR should have robust, independent procedures and policies.
And it's also EXACTLY the reason why they don't.
I've got used to it - but I always struggle to swallow the excuses, every time I'm left behind to retrain someone else's replacement... :(

Re:Here's my story

[admiral snackbar]

Had the same thing happen to me, except within the organisation. My boss didn't offer me a raise until I told him I was leaving him to another part of the organisation. I told him it was too late.

Re:Here's my story

[cthulhu11]

A while back I read a claim that 66% of those who take a last-second retention incentive end up leaving the company within six months, the idea being that the reasons that prompted a departure generally aren't glossed over by a one-time bump.

Re:Here's my story

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I just applied for a position at The Aerospace Corporation (which I read out loud in the same tone of voice as "the Nozzle" from Venture Bros). Thanks for the heads-up.

Re:Here's my story

[Sir Holo]

Wow, I just applied for a position at The Aerospace Corporation (which I read out loud in the same tone of voice as "the Nozzle" from Venture Bros). Thanks for the heads-up.

Glad to help.

I forgot to mention that I had had a banner year in job performance, so deserved a nice raise. Boss also said that I should be very happy with the "raise".

Open source

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just one reason among many for why open source technologies are best - they aren't one company's stovepipe and you can take all of your skills with you when you transfer jobs.

Re:Open source

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume by "skills" you mean "popular resume keywords" and by "open source" you mean "high profile project" because you're primarily interested in reputation management. You can write as much open source code as you like, but if nobody has heard of the project you're working on, it has the same effect on your job prospects as staying in your basement and doing unpaid hobby projects. Open source is used as a vehicle to establish yourself as a rockstar celebrity, and you don't establish a celebrity reputation by coding in unpopular niche languages for projects with zero users. The openness of open source is irrelevant when all you're really doing is building your reputation.

Try doing open source for the purpose for which it was intended: volunteering your skills for free.

getting laid is the best

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting laid off is the best because as soon as you're unemployed, that's it, you've reached the end of your career, you're no longer a member of the economy, and you can live under a bridge and write poetry for dinner.

Do not apply to every industry

[rbrander]

I put in a 30-year career with my local Waterworks, which became a joint water/sewer utility about halfway through that (and we adapted well; very different pipes, but still, pipes...)

Continuity is huge in some industries. I dealt with some property issues that were decades old; frequently I was able to find somebody who was there at the time, or had been briefed 15 years ago by a guy leaving after 35 years who told them to watch out for that issue that came up in the 70s and remains a ticking time-bomb.

It's about deep familiarity with the whole complex intersection of technical problems, people problems, legal problems, accumulated history around some development issue ("We let company A develop there first, but company B cried foul, so they get to develop the other side of the road...there's a memo in the paper file about it, an Legal has the contract in their files..."), and so on. Most public services have this kind of need for institutional continuity and knowledge; the role in society of police, roads, legal surveyors, courts, and utilities is also a web of relationships.

If this string-of-jobs culture is inherently uncomfortable for a lot of people, the quarter or so of society where that will never be desirable are going to be scooping up a lot of the best people. I know this is slashdot, but the whole world is not tech start-ups, guys.

bravo

[buddyglass]

Having only read the /. summary, this sounds like an excellent and cogent article. My one push back would be that there do still exist companies that hire employees for the "long haul". I have friends who've been working at IBM for the past 15 years.

Re:bravo

[OrangeTide]

It's certainly his choice. But there can be a significant difference in salary for someone who worked at a few difference places over 10-15 years and someone who joined a big company out of school and stayed there.

Re:bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who worked at the same place for 15 years was too lazy to leave and will be unemployable after the next layoff.

Re:bravo

[buddyglass]

Sure. But the article (at least the summary) seems to be saying that you're guaranteed to get the axe these days because all companies are inherently disloyal and will fire you at the drop of a hat. Things may have moved that direction relative to 30-40 years ago, but it's not uniformly true of every employer. Some employers allow for people to be "lifers".

Re:bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

Some employers allow for people to be "lifers".

The "lifers" are token minorities and disabled veterans for diversity purposes.

Re:bravo

[OrangeTide]

Well certainly not malcontents who are white and male. But that's just general of malcontents.

Re:bravo

[buddyglass]

That's not my experience. Most of the folks I know who are still at IBM, where I worked from 1999 to 2004, are white or Asian men. And Asians don't count for diversity purposes.

Re:bravo

[MoarSauce123]

Working at IBM is not a bad thing. IBM will be around for another 15 years....unlike the gazillion startups that may offer good pay if you work 80 hours a week without a day off ever.

Re:bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that's the point. The point is that because companies will give their employees only a few percent in raises each year the only way to really get ahead is to move to another company. In my own case I happen to know that starting salaries for new entry positions pay more than is paid to people who have been in those positions for years. Why? Because those new positions must compete with equivalent positions at other employers to get new hires. The company doesn't worry about existing employees. They are not likely to quit if they don't get a raise, nor will they move unless they get at least 15-20% more.
Since promotions are stagnant, as well as raises they only way to get a higher salary is to quit.

Re:bravo

[OrangeTide]

How is your comment relevant?

You are an employee at will

[Anonymous Coward]

The company you work for is always looking to get rid of you. Do yourself a favor and do the same. Raise by resume always beats raise by effort.

Re:You are an employee at will

[MoarSauce123]

It is much harder to get a raise by resume than a raise by effort. Job hopping only shows that those folks are not interested in putting any effort in and only want to take without giving. Rather craptastic attitude! As far as businesses are concerned, hiring new people to replace others is a major expense and a huge risk. There is a lot of value in business continuity.

Being laid off is not the worst outcome...

[bi$hop]

...if you get a decent severance, and if you're laid off with a group of peers for reasons beyond your control.

Re:Being laid off is not the worst outcome...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope you're not the unpopular one among your peer group, all of whom you are competing with for your next job. If they were a backstabbing bunch while you were employed, they're probably badmouthing you to potential employers right now.

Company Policy on lateral moves

[s1d3track3D]

Not sure I agree with the article but it does remind me of a large company I worked for. I was looking to switch positions within the same company, the new position paid significantly more but company policy for a lateral move was that your salary stayed the same. So in order to actually make forward salary progress you had to quit.

BREAKING NEWS! 27 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to see the article states right off that this started in the 90s.

oh... you mean be unreliable

[Anonymous Coward]

This is fucked up "advice", to use the term very loosely. If you can't be trusted to stick around after they've spent the time, money, and energy training you, then why should they bother hiring you in the first place??? Imagine you're in hr at a firm and you look at a resume that has 10 previous employers in as many months. I doubt their first thought is "gee, I bet they have a wide variety of skills"... NOPE! More like, "gee, this loser isn't planing on staying around long."

You say that like company and employee are equal

[rsilvergun]

and nothing could be further from the truth. The company has a _lot_ more power. You can't, for example, control public policy to increase your job opportunities except in the most indirect way at the ballot box. Companies OTOH do this regularly. I read stories on /. every week about new initiatives to get more kids into programming. They manipulate supply, we just hope for the best...

not at all related

[superwiz]

to the fact that slashdot is owned by Dice, which only profits when people are constantly looking for work.

Re:not at all related

[Quirkz]

Actually, no. Dice sold Slashdot to the new overlords around 9 months ago.

Another step down the shithole

[ET3D]

This is just a reflection of how selfish and uncaring society has become. Not only have we moved to where a job is the end-all of a person's existence, where we frown upon those who don't want to play the game, and where often financially it's necessary to spend your life at work at the expense of relationships with your family, we're also where neither the workers nor the job matter to anyone. It's just a shitty 'earn money while looking to earn more money' environment. And stupid people are still going to pursue a 'career' in high-tech, and there are policies to encourage people to go there, just to add stress to their lives with lack of job security and a good chance of being thrown out of the work force at an age when they still need to support a family.

That's why companies who want to retain people

[Chrisq]

That's why companies who want to retain people need incentives. A good internal career path goes without saying, as well as the training and fair salary reviews which go with it. Things like stock options and bonuses also do well, especially if these build up with time. The best incentive of all is now almost impossible to find, the final salary pension scheme based on years of employment.

Probably UBI

[rsilvergun]

so folks have the resources to slow down. To live in a community instead of abandoning it every time a modest pay raise or better schools for their kids are offered. Folks need a buffer from the current state of desperation.

Re:Probably UBI

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I could moderate this up, but I commented already. Community is more important than people think. In the past, identity sources were very much tied to either employment or religion...both of which are declining in importance.

I don't think there's anything wrong with technological innovation, except the human element. People now think nothing of abandoning a community or company.

Lousy advice!

[MoarSauce123]

The grass is not always greener on the other side and this constant job hopping is a clear sign that folks lack commitment and stamina. As soon as there is a sign of trouble they just give up, quit, and run away. Of course there are reasons to quit, I have done it, but in my professional career spanning 20 years I worked for three companies.The first one I was at for over 6 years and only left after significant restructuring took place essentially eliminating all projects and the entire location soon after I left. The second job was short-lived with half a year but only because it was a research project and federal funding was cut after half a year (Bush needed money for wars). Since then I am for 10 years in my current job despite being offered opportunities elsewhere including management positions. I do not regret at all sticking with the company for this long. If I'd leave I had to rebuild my professional reputation at the new place, forgo most likely 5 weeks of paid time off, and hope to be successful at the new place. Sticking with my current job (and its short commute and work at home option and flexible work time and kick ass benefits) is also less risk having family and house. I am still one of the newer employees, many at my current work are with the company 15, 20, 30 years or longer, for many it is the first job out of college. Maybe they could have went somewhere else for a few bucks more or a mildly more exciting project, but recognizing a good thing is also a skill.

Re:Lousy advice!

[pnutjam]

I'd love to stay at one company, even with low pay raises I would consider it since I'm nearing the top of my pay range. Unfortunately, the companies keep screwing me. I got caught up in the HPE => DXC spinoff and the resulting (0 notice) benefits change yanked about 10% of my salary. I had to dump benefits and cut back 401k, FSA, etc. to keep enough paycheck to pay my bills.

This is the 2nd merger I'd been a part of, both with similar results. The company with worse policies seems to take over everything.

Anyways, I'm gone now, moved on to greener pastures with about 15% more pay. I would have happily stayed there another 3 or 4 years.

Re:Lousy advice!

[Anonymous Coward]

That sucks...you went from EDS to HPE and got spin-merged to DXC? I knew they were doing that for a reason...and I guess the answer was to reset the seniority and benefits clocks.

Re: Lousy advice!

[pnutjam]

Well, my other merger wasn't EDS to HP, but everyone said this one was shaping up the same.

Re: BREAKING NEWS! 27 years ago.

[MoarSauce123]

Yep..the fallout from Reagonomics. True American fashion is hire & fire, but now reversed by joining & quitting. Put it together and you have modern day gig economy where nobody commits to anything for any time and generally does not care what happens long term.

Don't assume all lifers are "lifers."

[ErichTheRed]

I know it's trendy for the Millenial crowd to jump from employer to employer, but I still think finding a decent employer who doesn't treat you like crap is the way to go. Once you find one of those, and some people never do, hang onto it because the grass isn't always greener. I think there's value in sticking with something for a longer period, and at the same time you can wind up in a rut. Maybe it's because I'm 42 and have a family, but I would definitely like to see a little more loyalty on _both_ sides of the employment equation.

I've been with my current employer for a total of about 14 years, in two "tours of duty." But, the key is that I'm not a typical lifetime employee...I work for an IT services company and am constantly shifting around on various projects learning new things. Employees where I work tend to stick around because of the industry-specific knowledge you build up, but it's up to you to avoid becoming pigeonholed in one tiny area. I see this a lot in IT, especially when we hire outside people as specialists. There are so many opportunities to go down the specialization rabbit hole far enough that you become defined by the speciality you work on. Once that specialty dries up, you can become excess weight very quickly. Look at all the Exchange administrators that got replaced with an Office 365 subscription, or CCNAs/CCNPs that are slowly seeing their premium erode due to SDN and cloud providers, or the EMC/NetApp gods whose SANs are being replaced with storage virtualization. You can learn so much about any one of these topics that you practically work for the company that produced them, but at the exclusion of everything else.

There are also some people who spend a career at an organization because they're "political survivors" who always seem to come out on the right side of a layoff/reorg because they spend their time studying organizational behavior instead of doing good work. It is important to keep your ear to the ground and know how to avoid bad situations, but some lifetime employees survive (and often do very well for themselves) because they know exactly what is coming next. We just had a major shake-up at the top levels of the company I work for, and having worked there for a while, I saw some very familiar names surviving (with promotions in some cases) because they play the games. If you don't want to do that, the alternative is to keep doing good work and making yourself valuable enough that they don't think about getting rid of you.

I think we're done with the traditional big-company employer-managed career track in most organizations. I know many people a generation or two back from myself who had full careers with companies like IBM and AT&T. Both of those employers actively developed their workforces back then, and had well-defined career tracks. Now, there's zero loyalty on either side of the table, and employers are increasingly asking that people be 100% trained in their exact narrow set of technologies, skills, etc. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to stick around at an employer as long as you don't find yourself 20 years in doing the same job. It sure beats rage-quitting jobs every year just because you don't like one thing that happened.

The only realistic way to get a pay rise

[Maritz]

In my experience, it is to fuck off somewhere else. Worked so far, gonna keep doing it.

shite

[Anonymous Coward]

what a load of shite

Two wrongs don't make a wright

[Anonymous Coward]

This story bears remarkable similarities to the discredited old theory of free market economics, one supported by the likes of Adam Smith and MIltion Friedman.

Another way of looking at it

[whitroth]

Companies - that is, CEOs and upper management - don't want to pay what you're worth. With the collusion of HR, they'll give you a new, fancier title, expect you to do part or all of someone else's job, but no more money, in spite of how many hours they want you to work. And they feel they can call or text you at any time, and would be annoyed if you don't respond quickly.

Maybe there's something *wrong* with this picture?

But, nahhhh, we don't need unions. They're so... working class.

Die Broke

[opentunings]

"Die Broke" by Stephen Pollan, back in 1998, recommended job-hopping as a strategy. He drew the analogy that all of us need to think like pro sports athletes: go where the money is. If your employer cuts you, they'll tell you "it's nothing personal, it's just a business decision". The employees need to feel and act the same way with their employers: "it's just my business decision to leave, it's nothing personal."