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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.
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?
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.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
Mandatory reading for modern corporate employment. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/200...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.