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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.
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.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"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.
I quit one job after another and now I earn $50k doing IT in Silicon Valley. It works!
is when you already have one
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.
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.
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.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
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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.
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.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
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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.
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."
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.
With an agenda in pocket, you can observe almost anything and write a story about how your observations back up your agenda.
"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.
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.
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.