
The quitting economy - acconrad
https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters
======
wyc
The most recent resource I've read on this was The Alliance by Reid Hoffman.
In it, he postulates that both employees and employers are lying through their
teeth: employers tell employees about the benefits, investment in its people,
and family-feel. Employees say they want to be lifers. This never happens.

Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar
jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-
hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as
paid masters' programs.

To make everyone better off, Hoffman suggests that we should introduce
timeboxed contracts called "tours of duty" that explicitly state the true
benefits for either party and the duration of the contract. I really am not a
fan of misappropriation of military terms, but I guess it gets the point
across.

For example, maybe a marketer wants to start a company, but an existing
company needs a senior marketer to strategize and execute the plan for its
next segment. The company could give the marketer opportunities to meet
funding sources and receive education about company building, while the
marketer can whole-heartedly deliver on agreed objectives for the time period
of two years.

It's an idea that seems to straddle between W2 and 1099, as many of the "gig
economy" jobs seem to do. Some further definition here may be welcome.

~~~
sidlls
> Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar
> jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-
> hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as
> paid masters' programs.

I'd have gladly stayed at my third job for much longer than the ~21 months I
did had there been training, retirement, reasonable pay increases, and career
development offered. The same for my forth job. Some number of jobs later and
my current one is also my longest tenure to date. Not coincidentally I have
had and continue to have a clear path of career development, non-trivial pay
increases and bonuses that aren't tiny. I've given up on employer-provided
proper retirement plans and education/training.

"Firm hopping" exists, in my opinion, precisely because companies tend to
either not recognize the role they must play in supporting long term tenures
or else simply don't value them enough to allocate resources to the support.

~~~
pm90
A lot of this can be mitigated by managers having genuine conversations with
their employees. The ideal manager I would work with (I've seen some managers
come close but never hit all the right notes) would first and foremost be
genuinely interested in my career progress as an employee. Different employees
have different ambitions and expectations and there is just no way for a
manager to know all of this just by observing someone; they really need to
actively communicate and find out, to have a genuine conversation about how
much raise they can provide or why they can't, what future they see for the
employee. Especially if the employee is performing below expectations... that
conversation can be tough, but I think one of the qualities of being a good
manager is to convey this information in a way which makes the employee try to
remedy the situation rather than just disparage them.

~~~
VLM
That would imply the hiring process didn't select a perfect match 100% of the
time, which is a slap in the face of a large budget item, that's not going to
happen.

The fiction must be maintained at all costs that the employee was the perfect
fit at hiring time; neither overqualified aka too expensive or underqualified
aka the manager screwed up.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Not at all.

People change, companies change, the business changes. The person you needed
when you hired him might not be the exact person you'll need in a year, but a
good manager will first see if that person can grow into a new role instead of
firing him and hiring someone else.

------
diego_moita
Again, here's HN with a Silicon Valley bias.

This is not an unavoidable trend and is not global. Japan's work market isn't
exactly like this. Germany's Mittelstands are eating the world precisely by
buckling this trend. Northern Italy (around Milan) has an artisan industry
that thrives on skilled artisans working for small cottage industries, etc.

If you want workers skilled in a very niche and crucial technology then you
desperately need to invent strategies to avoid this. This is particularly true
to technologies that rely in manual work or manipulating precision machines
such as mechanics, clothing, specialty food (e.g: fine cheeses and wines),
etc.

A better discussion are the side effects of becoming an economy that lost
manufacturing skills, such as Silicon Valley and Great Britain.

~~~
mr_spothawk
> manual work or manipulating precision machines such as mechanics, clothing,
> specialty food (e.g: fine cheeses and wines), etc.

computers count in your list of precision machines, right?

~~~
diego_moita
The key issue is how niche, rare and unreplaceable the skill is.

If your skill is MS-Office then you're not niche and you're easy to replace.

If your skill is Maya, Autocad or Oracle then you are a little harder to
replace and you can see more stable jobs.

~~~
santaclaus
> If your skill is Maya, Autocad or Oracle

Maybe not Oracle, but most gigs related to Maya were shipped off to Canada
yeas ago.

------
dalbasal
I really think trying to reason about labour markets using pure theory in a
Hayek-Friedman-esque way is a dead end.

It's the 2nd time in two days I made the recommendation, but throwing Ronald
Coase into the Neoliberal canon would help a lot. He was a "chicago school"
academic from the same intellectual family, so it shouldn't be too much of a
culture shock.

He wan't like "progressives" in the "evidence based" sense but he also
objected to first principles theory like Friedman. Instead, he tried to find
persistent phenomenon and theorized about why they exist.There was always a
link to the real world.

Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that
markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever.

IRL, labour markets are obviously very different than most other markets. It's
inflexible. People stay in jobs a long time and most employers actively try to
lower their average turnover. Why?

If flexibility is so wonderfully efficient, why do almost all companies have
such a big inflexible workforce? Why is the market for labour so different _in
practice_ than the market for oral hygiene products and services.

Why isn't Wall street staffed by day labourers or SV products built by
quarterly contractors? You have to look past pure theory to answer these
questions. I think you probably have to look beyond economics, or at least to
its fringes (like behavioral economics).

~~~
didgeoridoo
Transaction costs.

Both the employee (search costs, hours in the day) and employer (job training,
search costs, process knowledge) incur far greater transaction costs than you
see in commodity markets. Business models that lower transaction costs (e.g.
"gig economy" middlemen) tend to lead to the emergence of highly flexible
labor markets. This currently only applies to jobs that don't require a high
level of nontransferrable knowledge, because nobody has yet invented an "I
know Kung-Fu" machine that can transplant a company's 5 year marketing
strategy into the head of a day-laborer CMO.

None of this requires going outside pretty basic economic theory.

Edit: I just realized this sounds like I'm explaining Coase theorem to the
person who cited Coase. It's not for you, it's for others reading your
comment. I'm disagreeing with your conclusion, not your premises.

~~~
dalbasal
:)

That's definitely a very Ronald Coasian answer! We should start that lobby to
get Ronald Coase accepted into neoliberalism or novoliberalism or whatever
comes next.

I purposely didn't give the answer because I think there are possibly other
explanations besides transaction costs and regulation (probably the more
friedman-esque go-to). The reason I like his papers a lot is because of his
questions. He has a Darwinian sort of approach. Why does the moth have such a
strange beak. Lets look for the matching orchid.

I think (don't know, speculation) labour markets are special in other ways,
not just high transaction costs. A company is a society. People have loyalties
and identity tied into it. We are a social animal in very fundamental ways.
Our psyche handles the intricate nuances of human cooperation by default.
Things happen in a team of people that know each-other, like each other or
just think of themselves as part of a group that I think are fundamental to
this question. I don't think transaction costs sums it up. I suspect group-
oriented work plays a bigger role. Also employer-specific skillsets, though
that probably can be lumped into transaction costs.

Incidentally, I feel that "basic economic theory" tends to acknowledge
transaction costs mostly as a caveat to basic models: " _assuming no /low
transaction costs_," more often that actually accounting for it. I think this
is also true for "economist hat" thinking. Coase complained about this a lot.
Coase theorem is (at least to me) taught as a theory about bargaining and
contracts solving problems like externalities. For Coase, the caveat was the
"theorem." In the absence of transactions costs blah blah pareto optimals.
externalities... He thought it was obvious that the pareto efficiency doesn't
actually happen in reality, externalities continue. Therefore _transaction
costs must be high_.

To me, this is the big difference between Friedman and Coase. Friedman's a
pure theory guy. The main opposition to this view today is a theory-less
econometrics/evidence based "wonkish" analysis. Coase is a middle ground.
Theories make predictions. In some cases they are good. In cases where they're
not, we need theoretical expansion. Neoliberals tend to reach for "distortion"
as an explanation far too often, and selectively IMO.

(we're really in the weeds here, sorry)

~~~
didgeoridoo
Huh. I think this highlights the fact (that I didn't realize until now,
really) that I never really considered Friedman an "economist" in the
strictest sense — in my view he's more of a normative political theorist, who
uses economic models combined with empirical evidence from history to draw
conclusions about policy. Though I'm politically & philosophically simpatico,
I've never really looked to Friedman (or Hayek, for that matter) for practical
economics.

~~~
dalbasal
Friedman was a professional economist all his life. His most famous area was
on monetary policy which was very politically important in that era of
hyperinflation disasters.

But, economics bleeds into political science readily. Marx was an economist.
Hayek (mentioned in the article) is most famous for political pamphleteering,
but he was certainly an economist too. Both he and Friedman got the nobel
prize for their economics.

Neoliberalism is very much an economics-politics hybrid movement.

------
pmontra
I've been self employed since 2006. In a way, consultants are the greatest job
quitters around and the most flexible. I had so many customers/jobs in these
11 years. I didn't even have to quit and they didn't have to fire me.

About one of the points of the post, companies often chose the fashionable
tools of the year because of buzzwording, ease of recruiting and because they
build the CVs of managers too. Would you manage either a bunch of VB or Elixir
developers today? So I'm working on Python and Elixir now, plus a Ruby pet
project waiting for less busy times.

------
BjoernKW
"[...] thinking of themselves as the CEO of Me, Inc; and to survive in the
neoliberal world of work, the CEO of Me, Inc must be a quitter."

I fail to see how that's a bad thing. I've never quite understood this notion
of tying your fate, your welfare and your livelihood to a single company.

By not thinking of yourself as the CEO of Me Inc. you ultimately become a
commodity for employers to do with as they please. At the very least there
will be a power differential where the employer will always gain the upper
hand in negotiations.

Seeing and marketing yourself as a service provider in a market economy
instead will allow you to focus on creating value in lieu of trading time for
money. This can be beneficial to both parties. This whole idea of using 'time
spent' as a surrogate measure for 'value created' is a large contributing
factor to waste in modern economies.

~~~
michaelt

      I fail to see how that's a bad thing.
    

Quitting itself isn't bad, but shorter job tenures and reduced job security
may have second-order effects.

For example, economic downturns will cause faster rises in unemployment,
leading to faster drops in consumer spending.

And employers are going to see lower returns from investing in training -
meaning colleges might need even more focus on applied skills.

Hell, it might even limit the complexity of projects our society is capable of
delivering - we might be less able to successfully deliver projects that take
longer than a year or two.

~~~
LolWolf
> Hell, it might even limit the complexity of projects our society is capable
> of delivering - we might be less able to successfully deliver projects that
> take longer than a year or two.

I guess that's somewhat true. But I feel that for companies handling more
complex topics (not just the new 'AI deep learning on big data with hadoop on
rails in the cloud' startup), experts are hired with the understanding that
both the work is interesting and it would be a long-term project with long-
term benefits.

This is all, of course, without counting academia as possibly the ultimate
example of long-term hiring with high-risk, high-reward returns.

------
usgroup
This is very noticeable in London. It's a relative rarity to find a dev that's
worked anywhere longer than a couple years. The simple economics of it is that
until a certain salary, there is no easier way to ratchet up the pay scale
then to use the negotiating leverage of having a job to get the next one on
better terms. Meanwhile, the supply situation for devs is such that employers
have to accept the situation. I'm not sure it's an employer led effect at all;
especially given the size of the SME scene in London.

~~~
TomSawyer
I'm reminded of the Netflix slide deck that was making the rounds, last year.
Adjusting pay, yearly, based on the market value of the employee seems like an
ideal solution to this problem. If you stay at a typical company for a year
you might get a 5% raise and have some seniority and relationships under your
belt. This model tends to undervalue the true costs of replacing you and the
likelihood that there's another company willing to pay 10%+ over your current
pay.

~~~
sgt101
In fact you can pay under the market, a bit, if you treat your people like
humans, develop them, stretch them and insist on a positive working
environment (no rudeness, fair dos for everyone even if they look, talk or
smell different). People will not switch away for minimal reward and
considerable risk of being landed in a dead end with a bunch of sociopaths.
Also many people realise that their current track has 5/10 years of seniority
to build - and then that's your lot. The option of switching to management or
to tracks like architecture or even non-functional work like finance or
intellectual property is attractive to many people.

------
mathattack
It can be difficult to hire in this environment. I've had 3 employees quit
less than 3 months into new full-time positions. My first inclination is to
ask, "What are we doing wrong?" but the more I look around it seems like a
common industry problem. Perhaps it's rational behavior - as the article
highlights, companies now view people as disposable. There's loyalty to a
manager, but not a company. (You always want a good reference)

~~~
wonderwonder
Often in the current market you don't even need a reference at all. Many
companies refuse to provide any reference at all besides confirming an
employees starting and ending dates to a prospective employer. This is I am
sure to reduce the risk of litigation thus increasing shareholder value.

------
deedubaya
401k, bonus, sabbatical, profit sharing, "sitting the bench", annual raise,
stipends. These are words and phrases most younger workers don't even know the
meaning of.

Employers have been extracting maximum value out of employees with little
investment in those employees in return. It's no wonder high turn over is so
common place.

------
ThomPete
Firm hopping happens because hierarchy hopping within an organization get's
obstructed. Sooner or later you can't get further up because someone has the
position you want and you start looking for opportunities that allow you to
move up.

~~~
mertd
That reminds me of frequent lane switching in traffic congestion. Unless the
lane next to you is moving faster because of a fundamental reason (early stage
unicorn), you'll get stuck again 100 feet down the road.

~~~
ThomPete
Exactly

------
Anatidae
There is a reality that lots of companies look at their employees as the same
as when they hired them. Meaning, a junior person has a hard time shaking that
"junior" title, but can move to a new company and start fresh.

In addition, it is shocking how often companies don't promote from within, but
offer higher level jobs to outsiders "experts".

Then you have the situation where your company just isn't growing. They can't
afford to give you raises or have positions you can move into. Again, for
growth you have to move on.

Like many others said, the biggest reason employees don't stick around is that
the current corporate culture views employees as expendable resources they
would rather not have to have. Shareholders come first, at all costs - even to
the internal health of the company.

------
FullMtlAlcoholc
One of the serendipitious consequences for the "quitting economy" in my
experience is that I have gained experience working in a number of diverse
industries such as finance, insurance, biotech, entertainment and gaming,
hospitality, etc. giving me first hand insight into how such sectors work.
This has not only increased my ability to apply novel solutions when new
problems approached, it has informed and broadened my world view in seeing how
the pieces of society and the economy fit together for professional and
personal benefit.

Does anyone else feel this way?

~~~
wastedhours
Yep - one of the things I recommend people to do when mentoring them is to
read a sh*t load about other industries (I still maintain that buying random
magazines is a fantastic way for people to learn) - those novel approaches
will work wonders when creating solutions.

If you can sell an employer on the benefits of diverse experience, it can reap
wonders.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Learning from magazines is definitely a great way to ease yourself into
learning about a new subject. It's worked out very well for me. The only other
approach I find that works as well as a starting point is subject-focused
online forums. For example, if I want to learn about creating an electric car,
no magazines that I know of, but there is a forum covering this subject:

[http://www.diyelectriccar.com/](http://www.diyelectriccar.com/)

Just reading through the content gives a good feel for common issues and
solutions.

------
dajohnson89
Every company I've ever worked for nickels and dimes my pay. If I didn't have
to fight for a market/above-market salary, good benefits, and regular raises
commensurate with what I'm adding to the company with my increased tenure and
effectiveness, I'd gladly stay.

But it never works out that way. It's painfully simple -- you get what you pay
for.

------
mcguire
I have a question about the term 'neolibral'.

I seem to have missed when it became common. Further, it seems identical to
what we called neoconservative back in the 1990s: free market economics, very
limited government, Hayak, etc.

Is William F. Buckley a neolibral? Ronald Reagan?

~~~
TheCoelacanth
There is a lot of overlap between people with neoconservative views and people
with neoliberal views. Neoliberalism is purely an economic position while
neoconservatism is primarily focused on foreign policy. Reagan is definitely a
neoliberal.

------
fierarul
I've quit only once, from the mega-corp, in order to start freelancing.

I've never quit from a customer project. And oddly, I've worked for very few
customer for years and years. Controlling and understanding the entire cash-
flow really helped.

My other IT friends did job-hop while young but as they settled down, they
started staying longer. After 30 it's basically smooth sailing.

So, I don't see a quitting economy. It's phase in young adults.

~~~
ell0ell0
I dunno i'm 35, own a home and have a kid and the longest I've ever worked
anywhere is my current job at 2.5 years. I'm only sticking it out here to get
a bit more vested and then I'm taking my shares and going on to the next thing
as always. Especially because each time I change jobs I end up with a close to
a 20% raise on average...

~~~
toomuchtodo
I'm 34, married, have a toddler, and have definitely stopped hopping (used to
be at a gig no more than 2-3 years each).

My last gig was a startup, and it's my last startup. I'm at an enterprise now
that pays a bit less than double what I made at my last gig, no more than 40
hours a week, no on call, and they treat their employees very well.

------
ilaksh
I have a theory that part of this is related to shrinking real economies.
People use less energy, buy less stuff, etc. The real economy shrinks. Money
has less utility. Business lags. Fewer employers can afford to pay
competitively.

I think that the economic system assumes constant growth, and doesn't have a
way to deal with the sustainable consumption rates that we are now trying to
adjust to.

------
zeveb
I think it's important to note the negatives of the previous way of working.
In the old days, pay was less (because the company was responsible for one's
pension, and often for many benefits — e.g. corporate vacations were once a
thing), and if the company _did_ fail then one was left with nothing.
Advancement could be very slow. One was working according to the whims of a
slow-to-change set of central managers, who were no better at allocating
resources than was the Politburo. Since one's colleagues were much the same
for one's career, one youthful slip-up could have lasting consequences. One
didn't have as much flexibility to live & work where one would have wished.

There were benefits to this way of working, of course: one could more-or-less
just turn up, do one's job and life would go on. But it didn't give one as
many opportunities to excel.

Our modern way is more dynamic and _can_ be just as or even more secure,
provided one has the discipline to save, invest & insure.

~~~
Qub3d
> In the old days, pay was less

How can you suggest this? When adjusted for inflation, wages have remained
constant or decreased in purchasing power, _unless_ you happen to be in the
top 5% of earners[0].

>Advancement could be very slow

As opposed to today's "non-existent"? The article we're discussing is all
about how people hop jobs precisely because internal advancement is becoming a
rare thing.

[0]:[https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/dat...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/data/44/440c34f52d3d1d344a1cca6b755557ae.png)

~~~
bretchet
I'm about to hop after being at my current company for almost 3 years. I feel
I've shown my ability to be a lead engineer, but there's no room in my
department for a new lead. I've also expressed the desire to manage, but talks
with my manager about this have dead-ended. We _are_ getting a new manager in
my team's chain, but I was told they would be coming from outside the company.

The sad part is our current lead is bad, really bad. He won't be moved or
dismissed either. So despite leading several successful projects, I'll be
stuck at senior. So, fuck it, I'm moving on.

------
ntrepid8
I've had a few sales jobs where I was employed full-time (w2 not 1099) but
also had an employment agreement with a defined term. Most often the term was
1 to 3 years, and if you were going to be let go it would happen when the term
was over. They just would not renew your contract.

You could still be fired "for cause" but that almost never happened. The
employee would almost have to commit a crime to be terminated early.

Of course you could always quit during the term if you wanted, but that meant
you would have to pay back the signing bonus received when the contract was
signed :)

I really did not mind this structure, but it seems like it's confined to
specific industries and outside of those almost no one does it. For example,
I've never seen a software dev job with this sort of structure.

------
jdauriemma
I am hoping that studies emerge that positively correlate a firm's mean
employee satisfaction / tenure with long-term financial health. This was
conventional wisdom for a while but as far as I can tell, data models just
aren't sophisticated enough to prove it out. Yet.

------
g9yuayon
Changing jobs every two years is not necessarily a good strategy for techies
who want to gain deep experience. When joining a new company, it will take
time for one to become productive by learning the dynamics of the company as
well as the unique business and technical challenges. And then it will take
time for the person to learn something deep by building a truly great product.

------
candles12345
Couldn't we just drop the application bullshit? Didn't they do without this in
the old days?

------
seanmceligot
This quitting is completely forced in government work. Every few years the
project will be turned over to an entire new group of programmers and system
admins at a lower price. They often spend years trying to figure out how the
code and configuration works and learn the business rules. It's sad to watch.

------
treyfitty
tl;dr: Our capitalistic economy, which incentivized the notion of "maximizing
shareholder returns," created an environment in which Companies who are
efficient in hiring the right amount of disposable assets. Because of this,
employees better be ready to quit when they sense better pastures elsewhere.

It was a good read, and a reminder that we are all subservient to the
Shareholders (directly or indirectly). The companies of the previous
generation had 3 pillars that needed to be strong: Sense of Customer, Employee
Satisfaction, Shareholder support. All the attention is now shifted in winning
Shareholder support.

I wish we could abandon this cargo cult mentality that shareholders are the
utmost important stakeholders of a company. It's already been discussed that
maximizing shareholder value is meaningless: [https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-
false-premise-of-the-shareholder...](https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-false-
premise-of-the-shareholder-value-debate)

~~~
haburka
The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is
that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way
investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders. The
shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the
company. Additionally, not all companies serve greedy shareholders. Believe it
or not, shareholders are people too who have multi faceted interests besides
making money.

~~~
tradesmanhelix
The problem with the "shareholder value only" model is its focus on generating
short-term returns vs. creating long-term value. How is this sustainable?

I don't think we should abandon shareholder profit completely (after all,
companies _do_ need to make money in order to stay in business). However, I do
think the philosophy needs to be balanced with other aims like investment in
employees, giving back to the community, environmental stewardship, and
thinking about the long-term future of the company.

Importantly, these things shouldn't be after-thoughts - they should be
cornerstones of the corporate philosophy.

