My biggest mistake, that I made again and again, was not leaving a job when it was time. I thought I had something to prove, but there was never any point to it. You don't owe anything to an employer. You can't prove anything to an employer. They have absolutely no loyalty to you, and care less than nothing about what is right or wrong, wise or foolish.
So: If you ever think things might not turn out as well as you hoped, move on. There is so much else going on in the world that is at least as interesting as what you are doing, where you have a much better chance of making a difference, that spending time on things that you might not end up proud of is a terrible waste of your short time on Earth.
Every time I've left a job, I've been uncertain and conflicted. every. time. Then, after being in the new job for a short while, I thought, "wow! I should have done this sooner!"
Related, I remember a friend telling me a story. It wasn't so much about leaving, but how to leave.
She was in a job that was just a mess. Finally one day during a spectacle of mismanagement, she just quit in disgust. She said it was a mistake. If she could have done it again, she would have just shut up, quietly gotten a job, and quit in a stable, predictable way.
I was inexperienced and moved from one job to another and it was absolutely AWFUL. I feel like I got fed a load of bullshit that I believed and left within 2 months. The first place I worked was great, and the second and third place I worked were churn and burn code monkey houses that were absolutely awful. My fourth software job was (is) great, though, and better than the first one.
I don't know about this one. Sometimes it's important to take a principled stand. I was at a stocks company for all of two weeks, hired by a former friend. The very first day I was told not to email the security team directly and that all my emails from then on must be approved by my team lead. Within a week, I was told to lie to the security team. I spent most of those two weeks either in meetings or as a glorified page.
I really felt abused, devalued, and a tool for the shitty ethics of the corporation. So one day I pull my team lead and the other lead into a Zoom meet and unload and quit. I get myself on LinkedIn, canvas a few available jobs and within two weeks get a new job. In the interviews I made it crystal clear that I valued transparency and that I would not be forced to lie to anyone. Turns out that's one of their cultural pillars (transparency is an entire slide in their slide deck).
I have a manager I can honestly engage with. He knows what happened at the last company and he values that I spoke up.
These principled stands are not for nothing. We have to be able to believe in our own ability to have a social impact, however small. Shutting up and inoffensively walking away just buttresses shitty people (or shitty corporations, which are just egregores that have been hijacked by shitty people).
To attempt to reach synthesis, I would say it could be valuable as a therapeutic exercise for yourself. However, my own experience is that choosing to vote with your feet doesn't really effect change that often. I've done it twice and while it felt good, life just kind of went on at the places I left behind.
The remaining people/mgmt will either do nothing, see it as a squeaky wheel thankfully now being gone, or maybe even add "we need to do something about attrition" to quarterly goals but not actually change anything meaningful.
So even if you get past the "oh they were just disgruntled" justifications, I find that companies are more likely to add ping pong, beer fridays, or even bump compensation before significantly trying to change the culture.
This is not good advice for most people. You should always leave on good terms regardless of how much you hate a job. As an employee you often don’t know the constraints or risks of a project so you can’t make a firm judgement on ethics or transparency. It’s a small world and you’ll likely run into former colleagues again or rely on them for a reference (even without your knowledge). Under game theory there is no advantage with being a being a difficult leaver.
It's our duty to our fellow human beings to construct a world we all want to live in. That can sometimes mean pushing back on bad behavior when it occurs. The only way we get a world that respects human dignity and values honesty is by holding each other accountable for our actions.
Game theory has no ethical compass. I can't think of a worse instrument to apply to human society.
I appreciate this advice, and generally agree, but game theory doesn't take externalities into account. If your employer is particularly toxic and hiding it, a noisy exit might bring extra scrutiny that could help other people who stay with the organization, though maybe not. Plus, sometimes the previous employer makes leaving on good terms impossible, like if your employer is being criminally investigated for tax fraud.
Telling the uncomfortable truth plainly is a reward, a grace to someone. Why would give this favour to a bad employer? Don't lie but let them sort out why you (and other valuable people) left. Find a friend to vent to.
Because that's not compassion. The mercies we offer are chances for redemption. My team lead was young and inexperienced. I hope, with wisdom, he learns that telling the truth maximizes good outcomes.
When the compassion & effort of providing the info looks like it may possibly have a good effect, and is likely to be reasonably safe (e.g., minimal retribution/fallout effects, and is delivered with kindness - it can be good for all.
But one should first consider the consequences. Sometimes it really is best to just get away while the getting away is good.
You also don't know who your boss knows or who you'll run into again. Burning bridges is satisfying but I'm sure I was turned down for at least one job based on the circumstances under which I left. Even though it was all supposed to be confidential.
That's really hard to do, but I agree. It's a bit like, "Don't tweet about some controversial topic when you're angry and drunk".
I do make that list. Alongside the negatives I include positives. If I decide to resign, then the list has served is primary purpose. There is no sense burning bridges or trying to trying to change everyone's priorities to your priorities.
Similar to the list, is the exit interview. One of my regrets is that I gave that list verbally in a rant to a HR member during my exit interview. (Not ranting at the HR person - I was very polite and made it clear that my comments were about my team's management). But I still regret it. You never know who is going to read it, take offence and encounter you later in your career. War stories are for the pub.
Counterpoint: I consistently leave jobs too early when I could have instead stuck around and made larger impacts during restructurings or just sat around and done nothing and gotten paid. Would I be better programmer? Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But would I have gotten paid and had a more intact career? Certainly.
As long as you hung around long enough to figure out how to work with difficult people, and learn how your design decisions and code actually run in production (ie: you got to fix your own bugs) then you probably didn't miss much. I worked with one person who had an impressive string of senior roles at big companies, but my personal experience was that they implemented a dumpster fire using the latest hot new thing, and quit after it blew up production a few times.
Depends on the company you’re interviewing with and (IME) region you’re looking for work. In my 26 years since graduating university, I’ve had 13 jobs. So an average of 1.8 years per job. My longest was 6 years at Amazon (ironically enough considering they have such a high turnover) and my shortest was 3 weeks (I knew during the interview it wasn’t a good fit, but I was young and they threw a stupid amount of money at me).
Where I am now (Seattle area), it isn’t really seen as a that big of a red flag. I always had good reasons for leaving. Other than 2, I’ve tried to never burn bridges intentionally and was even a rebound employee at 1 place (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).
I grew up in the South and moved back there for a brief period of time. It was very hard to find work down there because they called me a “job hopper” (which I was/am). I was asked several times “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one.
That’s been my experience. I’m at a place now where I can see myself staying for awhile. I’m not curing cancer or doing machine learning or scaling things to gagillion requests per second. But I like the people, like my boss, and the problems are meaty enough to engage me during the day, but not so complicate that I work on them in my off hours.
> (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).
I'll offer a corollary: have already said everything you think before you quit. That way, there is nothing else to say during the exit interview anyway.
There are two reasons for saying what you think while you're still employed:
1. How will anything improve unless you voice your concerns? (Not saying they will when you do, just that they definitely won't when you don't.)
2. You are paid to think and then communicate your thoughts. If they only wanted your body, they could have bought a robot -- no, they're paying money for your brain too. Give it to them.
I agree with you. I generally don’t hold anything back in my 1:1, skip level 1:1, etc. But if you’ve communicated effectively, it makes no difference to rehash it to HR on the way out the door. HR, usually, doesn’t care.
And I’ve left positions where the company pivoted, and I didn’t agree with the pivot. Told the powers that be, but the pivot was done. No reason to dredge it up again.
> “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one.
As someone who has a number of short stints on his resume, I usually go with, "There's a big difference between ten years of experience, and one year of experience repeated ten times. I have experience with a wide variety of frameworks and architectures. I've done real work in both front-end and back-end codebases. I've worked in Windows environments and Linux environments. I've even done some DBA work. I can bring knowledge of a wide variety of best practices to bear on any problem that I'll encounter at this current role."
The other thing I've found is that the companies that make a really big deal about "job hopping" and "employee loyalty" aren't really ones that you want to work for anyway. They're paranoid about employee loyalty for a reason, and rather than look at their own management to see why employees are leaving after short stints at that firm, they blame the employees, usually with some absurd generalizations about "millenials" or "gen z".
That doesn't answer the question at all. You were asked "how do I know you won't leave in a short time frame?" and you answered the completely different question "what benefit (to you) have you got from having lots of jobs?". If anything, it suggests you view leaving companies after a short time as a positive thing you'd want to do again.
By the way, I don't agree that if a company would like employees that tend to stick around then that indicates some sort if weird cult-like behaviour. It's more like a recognition that productivity naturally is lower in the months after someone joins than after they've been there for a year or two. Choosing people that are able to stick at a job for a few years is just a sensible business decision. Admittedly it does have social benefits too i.e. there's a better work environment for everyone if you get to know other people over a period of time (in spite of some HN commenters' views that we're all robots that shouldn't care about interactions with coworkers). But, in my view, even that is reasonable justification.
You can also mention how companies encourage disloyalty by paying new starters significantly more than existing employees. I’ve seen great people working hard towards a promotion, putting in the hours, playing everything right - only to be passed over for a promotion due to management politics and a boss that was looking out more for herself than her team. Meanwhile, another employee simply just left and walked into another job with a £25k pay increase. As long as companies continue to be myopic with regards to salaries, it incentivises people to jump ship every couple of years.
Probably better off responding more along the lines of:
I bring a wide array of industry experience, that you'll benefit from. I'm hoping for a longer term engagement, but even if it's a shorter one, I typically leave them better than I found them.
In your own words, ofcourse.
P.S. I suspect your statement will get you rejected from companies that know they have the same problem but can't fix it. If you don't need a job, be as honest as you want, if you do, you're better off going with the positive spin.
Yup, this. We took temporary pay cuts last year, which was more or less understandable, business was down. But I did a couple of interview rounds and got offers that were 15-20% above my pre-cut salary. And people were shocked that I was leaving.
Usually say it with more tact, but it is along the lines of - “Yes. I’m a professional new guy. I’ve seen and worked on a lot of different types of technology, and I come up to speed quickly. I’m not afraid to ask ‘dumb’ questions when I can’t find what I’m looking for.”
Something along those lines. I lean into it. But as I said, it doesn’t come up too often in the PNW.
I mean, that’s cool, but you haven’t actually adressed the problem, which is that I’ll spend 3 months training you, only to have you quit after 9 more. That’s not really a good investment
His point is that it will only take a month to get him up to speed, not 3.
But I agree that a better answer would probably be something along the lines of "I have so much experience that I deliver in a year what the average guy would give you in 5; and if you're good to me, I might well stick around as much as I did at X", or something along those lines.
GP here, responding directly. I've been told by a ycombinator company that they want to see 2+ years at an engineering heavy company. I also just regret not making more conventional career choices that you don't have to struggle to explain during interviews. Far easier if you have an unbroken line of employment. But alas.
It depends hugely on job location market company and myriad other circumstances. Again, HN average experience is not necessarily worldwide average experience :).
> They have absolutely no loyalty to you, and care less than nothing about what is right or wrong, wise or foolish.
This is why one should choose opportunity over loyalty -- have no loyalty to location or corporation. Be an absolute opportunist, doing whatever is best for future in the current situation, unbound by the past.
> My biggest mistake, that I made again and again, was not leaving a job when it was time
This.
My OH's currently moving jobs and we have been discussing how overdue this move is. Somehow once you make the decision to leave it brings all the blur of past injustices/lunacy* into proper focus.
The last time I left somewhere, after a fairly long relationship, they went into insolvency proceedings within a year**
* For my OH's move: her old lot couldn't even get the announcement of her departure right - it was announced by accident by a senior manager on a conference call, two weeks before she'd even seen, never mind signed the new contract, or given notice ... <rolls eyes>
I made this mistake once in my first proper job. It took me 2.5 years to leave a place where I was really unhappy.
So, move on from bad jobs, move on from meh jobs, and be quick about it. Eventually you'll find somewhere you enjoy and you can stick around for a while.
This. Your working career is actually pretty short - for many of us in tech each year is at least 2 percent of your total working life. And hit 40 and it might be 5 percent a year. Do you really want to waste 5 percent of your working life/opportunities/salary doing a job you hate?
I can only second it so many times!! I can't say i made SO many mistakes in my career, but i have left my then utterly dead-end first job too late, in 2007 while things were abundantly clear about it by 2005 already and i wasted two extremely frustrating years trying to keep it afloat. Lives of everyone who stayed were ever more destroyed than mine was.
I was young, and was making more than literally every single person i knew, i bought an apartment in a year in cash. I thought it was once-in-a-lifetime job which will never happen to me again.
I agree, but just a note: it doesn't do your career any good to hop a lot. I won't hire someone that looks flaky. If you find yourself at a bad job, sure, move on. But work on sussing out the good from the bad so you don't put yourself in a bad situation repeatedly.
Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).
In my experience, it is hard to tell the difference between someone who killed it at a job for 1 year and moved on from someone who couldn't hack it and moved on. Promotion at a company signifies that they were well received and able to adapt and meet milestones. Same job title in and out reads to me to believe that they couldn't hack it and were no goes development opportunity.
IMHO, a promotion before you leave confer s legitamacy to your tenure.
What if there are no promotions to be had? My longest tenure at any one company was 8 years and I never got promoted because it was all remote and I was technically an independent contractor. No one got promoted.
I've refused to hire people who job-hopped every year or two.
With a record like that, there's zero reason to expect they're going to stick around. Why invest in bringing them up to speed if they're just going to leave?
Use this One Weird Trick to keep employees: pay them money.
With the exception of my current gig, my early career was hopping non-stop. My shortest stint was literally 4 days, my average was probably about 1 year. Each time, pretty simple, you look at the paltry 2-4% increase being offered by your current employer versus the 20%+ increase from hopping literally anywhere else, and, well, you surely see why people hop ship all the time.
Your "investment" means very, very little when it's not backed by the thing that actually matters (the money).
Exactly. I'm happy where I am but I've currently got companies willing to increase my salary by 2-3x if I leave my current employer. I'm totally going to use that as leverage in negotiations for a raise. I'm due for one.
But that really only helps low pay was the reason for hopping. The comment that sparked this discussion talks about a bad environment etc. as a reason for hopping. Wads of cash won't help retain an employee that's obviously bad at judging whether they'll be a good fit at an employer.
Just to point out. At my current workplace I got a huge pay increase only in one situation. „When I said I quit”..
Employer runs a business and will do w/e is best for him money wise. If ppl want to work for 50% what they are worth - employer will alow it (bad employer).
Ppl tend to quit such places because they see no options to advance.
Employers rarely learn from such cases. For me its the issue of poor middle management not managing career of pupils correctly.
Because maybe they’re just looking for the right environment, and maybe you’re it. Hiring is like dating, after all. This reads instead like an egregious case of the fundamental attribution error, and one that’d I’d view as quite the blunder by my management team, since the real consequence is limiting our access to the talent pool.
Even aside from the FAE, this kind of attitude also systematically reinforces structural discrimination within an industry, since candidates from unusual or unprivileged backgrounds are less likely to have been offered major career opportunities, or been obliged to juggle many life priorities along the way, and thereby more likely to have taken whatever they could get, or could realistically manage. Yet these can be some of the most interesting hires, thanks to their diverse/alternative perspectives, and may also be top-tier outliers when it comes to resilience, self-management, and self-directed learning.
It’s also a failure of values since there’s an underlying assumption that people are interchangeable widgets, which is both false and dehumanising.
For my own account, I hopped a lot in my early career before finding places where I felt I could belong and stay for years, and this pattern has repeated. So you’d likely have taken a pass on me whilst I went on to become senior this and principal that elsewhere, en route to starting my own firm. Go figure.
Past behavior is a pretty good predictor of future behavior. If you're dating someone whose previous 3 spouses died in mysterious kiln explosions, I'd stay away from the ceramics factory.
Well I think that’s an absurd and extreme example, so the reductio ad absurdum is self-limiting, since serial killers are, hopefully, not the common case.
How about this analogy instead, being more in the realm of the applicable and commonplace: I broke up with many girlfriends, and had many short- and medium-term partners, before meeting my wife of over a decade now, who continues to knock my socks off to this day.
In practice, past performance is not a guide to future outcomes. How many times have we heard this caveat applied, in far more predictable markets than hiring and/or dating? Past performance of employment candidates is a subjective and observational assessment; relying upon it (especially in a negative framing) is to invite not only ones own biases to take center stage, but also those of others; see earlier point re. reinforcement of structural discrimination.
At most, someone’s past successes qualify them for my interview shortlist, but there are many other green flags besides, and I’ll save my type 2 errors for the back half of the hiring funnel, after assessing someone’s potential.
And considering that, someone who has only held long stints at previous jobs probably gets a red flag for not being desirable enough to more companies or just plain lack of curiosity.
> Because maybe they’re just looking for the right environment, and maybe you’re it.
Maybe, but they obviously also have a track record of being a poor judge of environment, since they got it wrong so often.
> It’s also a failure of values since there’s an underlying assumption that people are interchangeable widgets, which is both false and dehumanising.
Well, job hopping (in my experience) often signals that the candidate thinks of employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing. Employers are but a group of other humans. It's a different kind of interpersonal relationship than between friends or family, sure, but it's still just as much an interpersonal relationship.
That said, sometimes things aren't what they seem, as you say. It becomes a question of judging the risk and the reward.
As a tool, there's also the interview, where one is supposed to try to figure this sort of stuff out.
----
Note that I'm not saying you should stay at a crappy job. In fact, I came in here to post specifically that my biggest mistake may have been staying at a crappy job for too long. (May have because you never know -- maybe that's what made me value a good job so much.)
I'm just saying that despite agreeing with most of your comment, when I'm making the hiring decision of someone, I will read the implied "cannot pick an employer they fit with" in a job hoppers resume. I will try to work past that bias, but candidates are rarely able to defend that very well. What they say usually ends up being a roundabout way of saying "so far I've not been very good at picking an employer I fit with."
> "so far I've not been very good at picking an employer I fit with"
then the only inference one can draw, is that they're bad at self-promotion, since there are zillions of ways to present the same kind of facts with a more positive spin. My view is that marketing instincts are not super relevant except when hiring directly for the sales/marketing function, and speaking as someone who is absolutely terrible at marketing, you can even make CEO without it.
> but they obviously also have a track record of being a poor judge of environment, since they got it wrong so often.
I recommend reviewing an article (even the wikipedia entry will do) on the Fundamental Attribution Error, because this statement is a perfect illustration of the FAE. That is, there's nothing intrinsically obvious about track records, and in particular, assuming negatives such as this, is a great way to miss out on great people.
As I've said elsewhere, I suggest biasing a hiring funnel for Type 1 errors early on, and Type 2 errors later.
> employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing
Well, no, employers are, for the most part, companies, so they're not humans; that's certainly distinct from bosses, of course; but nevertheless, the power gradient between employer and employee is steep, sometimes incredibly so, which is why the overwhelming majority of industrial relations law is essentially protecting the individual from employer abuses.
To look at that another way: it's much more impactful on someone's quality of life for them to seek a new boss, than it is for a boss to seek a new staff member. I've never appreciated the fiction of "we're like a family", a paper-thin deception that doesn't survive past one bad earnings quarter, and I don't inflict it on my own crew.
Curiously, one of the goals of much collective bargaining is to make employees and employers nigh-on interchangeable via standardized agreements. Corollary: the unions of today would make Adam Smith proud.
This comment grew way too long. Tl;Dr: I agree with most of what you say. However, I think employment is way too complex a multi-way relationship to be considered interchangeable by any party. By that I mean it's possible to do so, but at a great cost of productivity for all involved.
That means employers shouldn't instinctively fire employees in any situation; first, they should make a reasonable effort at fixing the issue while retaining the employee. (Be it through training, changing their role, whatever it might be.) Anything else is a great hidden cost of productivity.
It also doesn't mean employees shouldn't leave bad jobs -- it just means they should make a reasonable effort at "changing their employer" as someone put it. If that fails, quitting is necessary, but also that is at a great hidden cost in the complexities of employment.
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> then the only inference one can draw, is that they're bad at self-promotion, since there are zillions of ways to present the same kind of facts with a more positive spin.
They do try to spin it, of course. But their longer message boils down to "somehow I keep ending up at jobs where I don't feel like I belong."
That doesn't have to be bad, but if it seems like they just keep shooting from the hip and just hoping to end up somewhere good, then there's very little to reassure me that they will. If they show me they are working actively on fixing the problems (whatever they are) that put them in bad places, then that's a completely different matter.
> I recommend reviewing an article (even the wikipedia entry will do) on the Fundamental Attribution Error,
I strongly believe people's actions are primarily responses to their historic and present environment, so while I do worry about FAE-type problems in general, this is not one of the situations where I think it applies too much.
You're right in a sense, though: I did use the wrong phrase. It's not that I believe the candidate is bad at picking employers, only that a history of repeatedly ending up with the wrong employer leads me to require more evidence than usual that this is also not one of those unlucky circumstances where they somehow end up with the wrong employer -- maybe through no fault of their own. (Accidentally speaking of correlation as causation is a big problem, and I readily admit this was a huge mistake of mine in the previous comments.)
I am worried about one common inferential error, though: the people who don't have resumes full of job-hopping could very well have just the same propensity of ending up with the wrong employer, only they don't take action on it. Is that situation even worse? Maybe. Probably. How likely is this confounder? No idea. It certainly makes the problem much more complex.
> Well, no, employers are, for the most part, companies,
Technically, yes, an employer is nothing but a legal entity with some accounting rules to follow.
That's not the sense in which I view employment, though. It's also a set of co-workers, it's processes through which work gets done, it's perks, it's insurance, it's the actual jobs to be done, it's consumer desires, it's supplier knowledge, it's future prospects, it's social status, it's connections and a network, and so on and so forth. Reducing it to a legal entity is an over-simplification. If it were that simple, then sure, they'd be exchangeable. (Maybe this is my fault for choosing the wrong word again; would it have been more clear if I said employment instead of employer?)
I don't contest we have an awful history, present, and future of employers abusing workers. I don't think that makes employments interchangeable -- if anything, it's the opposite.
> I've never appreciated the fiction of "we're like a family"
Neither have I, and I think I said as much in my comment too.
> Curiously, one of the goals of much collective bargaining is to make employees and employers nigh-on interchangeable via standardized agreements.
I do admire the efforts of collective bargaining that have gotten us this far (I live in a country that was strongly shaped by this process, and it's on many international scales one of the best places in the world to live and work.) I can't really say many negative things about it.
I don't think commoditisation of employers and employees is a way to prosperity. There is a lot of hidden complexity in the relationship between employee and their employment and the employer that is incompatible with commoditization and interchangeability.
Just as I cannot take whatever I have learned (technology, processes, co-workers, consumer desires) and productively apply it blindly in a new employment, my employer cannot take another developer of similar demography as me and expect them to know the technology, processes, co-workers, and consumer desires the way I know them after so-and-so many years working hands-on with continual improvement.
> Well, job hopping (in my experience) often signals that the candidate thinks of employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing
Really? In my experience it signals that most humans recognize that the vast majority of employers are not interchangeable (hence looking around). And I'm not going to be upset by dehumanizing corporate organizations that are not human in nature in the first place.
Frankly speaking you really shouldn't be hiring anyone with the expectation that they'll be in their role more than a year or two. Ideally, you're working with them to move into a position with more responsibility and then you need to backfill their position anyway. What does it matter if their next role is with you or somewhere else?
It's a lot to ask for every company to have a role available for every employee when they're ready for more responsibility, and expecting them to just hang around waiting for their chance is pretty naive, I think.
I'm seeing this with my current employer. I'm helping out the hiring manager with interviews and technical assessment. He's trying to target people who will stay with the company for 8-10 years. It's ridiculous. (Almost) no one does that. Especially when you can make a whole lot more by changing jobs regularly.
Personally, I don't care about working on cool technology. I care about getting paid. I can't afford to buy an absurdly overpriced house without getting paid.
I jumped every 2 years and tripled my salary in 10 years. I started way under paid and made it to average to slightly higher than average pay. Guess what the employers were happy to underpay as long as they could get away with it.
Well, I think other people hire them because there’s high demand for talent and that kind of churn is expected.
If you’re not having difficulty hiring while rejecting those candidates, that suggests you’re probably attracting people like me who stick around longer (for better or worse all around) or something about your offer is appealing to talent who have a knack for finding good long term opportunities.
Conversely, I've worked at places where the people who had been there for 5-10 years were just coasting, the product was stagnant, and constantly hiring new people was the only way to get out of a rut. They were paying these people for maintenance and to hold on to institutional knowledge, but everybody was so comfortable that very little got done.
> With a record like that, there's zero reason to expect they're going to stick around. Why invest in bringing them up to speed if they're just going to leave?
People don't job hop for fun, they do it because they find better opportunities elsewhere. The way you say it, it sounds like you're holding back everyone you employed from getting a better deal.
If you truly offer competitive compensation and work conditions, than that person wouldn't have a reason to leave, but if 2 years down the road you didn't keep up with what others are offering them, I mean, the question is, why wouldn't they hop?
What is "frequently"? I'd like to see a minimum of three years ahead of a transition, and a decent story why. Often the contract ends, the company is sold and the new policies are draconian, etc. Fine.
Given the level of effort involved in bringing someone on, my outfit cannot afford to be staffed like a fast food joint.
From memory: last I heard the average is 18 months. I don’t know if that was accurate then or still is, nor how much it varies regionally or by any other criteria (I can look it up later but had a quick moment to reply and HN moves fast and might fill in the gap before I can take more time to look).
Consulting is a little unique in my experience - if there's a steady stream of work, you never really stick with the same client full time for the full 5 years. It's a lot easier to keep your skills fresh and move around to find interesting challenges
Does your employer offer its people the 10-20% annual salary increase so they do not have to look elsewhere for what the market is willing to provide? I ask this seriously.
I’m sorry but I very much disagree. Each hop netted me much better work-life balance and much higher pay, and actually broadened my horizons and whag I bring to the table because I have experienced a wide array of corporate cultures and team styles.
What DOESN’T do wonders for your
career is thinking/hoping/praying that sticking it out at a subpar company year after year will magically bring you those same benefits, if it’s not already happening and you’ve already asked politely for it to be resolved.
I'd just like to say, sometimes moving on is within your company. If you're somewhere that's good about letting folks try out different parts of the business, it can be good to stay.
Make a career change and get a new set of folks around you without having to leave everything behind
I got a good client and he kept giving me more work. 15 years later it was the only thing I could list on my resume. More variety also means experiences and learning.
I've adapted my mindset to think of my job/role as a car lease . Expires in 3 years.
I don't get too comfortable, not too attached, tend to live in the moment, enjoy the good parts, ignore the bad ones, think of the next person in my role, stay on the lookout for my next job/role, but not overdo it.
I've been able to stick to this, but haven't come up with a ways to enforce it.
Seems this is more common than I anticipated. That said, I've only done that at my first job, not so much because I felt like I owed my employer anything but because it was my first full time job as a developer so I questioned every descision.
This is largely true but I know there are employers who do care and who are loyal to their employees. It's all a matter of people and who you are dealing with.
That's my experience too. As a junior, however, I couldn't tell good employers from bad so I tended to pick bad ones (they vastly outnumber the good ones, after all) and then stay with them for far too long.
I mean, I value continuity and a healthy long-term relationship with a reciprocating organisation more than most, but the first few years I spent at a crap shop for crap pay and with only fear of my superiors motivating me? I think I could have gotten the same experience but better in a few other places I've been since.
(On the other hand, maybe that first experience is what made me so picky in selection of employers after that?)
The problem is where to find these companies. Job review sites are either turfed by companies who tell their employees to leave a good review, or by disgruntled leavers who want to unload.
So: If you ever think things might not turn out as well as you hoped, move on. There is so much else going on in the world that is at least as interesting as what you are doing, where you have a much better chance of making a difference, that spending time on things that you might not end up proud of is a terrible waste of your short time on Earth.