

Please Jobhop as much as Possible - angryasian
http://angryasian.posterous.com/please-jobhop-as-much-as-possible
I started this rant over at help a startup out, but had more to rant about so its on my blog now. Basically a real world response to Calcanis and Suster
======
driekken
The whole concept of loyalty towards a corporation is off. You can have
loyalty to family, to friends, to a country but never to an economic entity
whose only purpose (on paper) is profit. I think that professionalism and
well-defined internal rules should be the only things expected by employers.

~~~
davidw
In this day and age, yes, you are largely correct, but I don't think it was
always so. I get the impression that at one time, "loyalty" between employer
and employee actually meant something in both directions; the company might
take some losses to hang on to people and/or help them out. Perhaps more so
than would happen today.

I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, yet I wouldn't say that what we have
today is bad either, I suppose they're just two equilibriums. The problem more
likely lies in the transition from one to the other: employees that expect to
be treated with loyalty and are summarily dumped with a few years left before
retirement, or employers who invest a lot in employees and expect to see them
stick around because of it.

This is pretty off topic, but I'm not particularly a fan of 'loyalty' to
countries either. Most people happen to be born in a particular one; at least
a company is something that you likely chose.

~~~
kierank
_In this day and age, yes, you are largely correct, but I don't think it was
always so. I get the impression that at one time, "loyalty" between employer
and employee actually meant something in both directions; the company might
take some losses to hang on to people and/or help them out. Perhaps more so
than would happen today._

The chocolate maker Cadbury would be a good example of this.

------
rit
I'm sorry - It was TOTALLY my fault that I started my career during the Dot
Com days and worked through two bubbles. My fault that I worked for people who
couldn't keep their companies above water despite working 70 hour weeks for
them. I'm glad to know that it will prevent me from working for someone like
Mr. Calacanis because of his narrow world view.

------
DanielBMarkham
I feel somewhat passionately about this, and I've always thought this job-
hopping debate was extremely skewed.

There are people who want loyalty and dedication above all else -- both from
themselves and from their workers and employers. Then there are people who
want challenge, risk, excitement, and travel.

From what I've seen, if you want to learn meta-tech (and not just tech in your
neck of the woods) you need to get out among a bunch of different industries
and job situations and start learning.

Or put a different way: as one of those people, I get approached all the time
for full-time jobs. The conversation goes like this "We see that you have
experience working in X, Y, and Z, and you have industry experience in A, B,
and C. You also have been in G, H, and I job positions. We are desperate to
have somebody with these experiences and skills, but all we find are people
with a lot of experience in just one of these areas. Would you consider a
full-time job?"

My reply is this: if I were the type of person to consider a full-time job, I
would not be the type of person who had all those things you want. Full-time
jobs are stability -- stable platform, stable work environment, stable job
position, stable insurance, stable retirement. Things may start off chaotic
(as in a startup) but the goal is to reach stability.

I've been parachuting into situations where the building is on fire and saving
the baby. It's like startup work all year round -- and for dozens of different
highly-rated companies. And by the way, the rates are great too.

Do that for a while. Learn what you like and what you don't. Then start
looking for stability. Don't sell yourself out too soon in the name of loyalty
and stability.

EDIT: And I know a lot of folks from those companies who only wanted stability
and loyalty and ended up on the street after ten years with very little in the
way of marketable skills. Don't fool yourself: IT is a risky and always-
changing business. Stability and long-term jobs are an illusion.

~~~
j_baker
Just out of curiosity, what exactly do you do? Do you do consulting?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I do work-for-hire, yes. I did so much stuff that now people pay me to help
them learn how to run teams like a startup and not like the IRS.

And yes, I miss the code-monkey and hands-on PM work. That's why in my free
time I still code as much as I can. And why I like hanging out on the net with
you lug-heads so much (smile)

So now instead of the building being on fire, they have 50 teams that are
taking 4 times longer than industry norms to deliver functionality. How do you
fix that without shutting down the place, firing a lot of people, or causing
more harm than good?

The thing you run into with this type of work is that _everybody thinks they
are unique_ , and they are, to some degree. But also there are a lot of
similarities. For somebody without a big breadth of experience who is just
reading a book and trying to apply it, it's not so clear what is unique about
their situation and what isn't. So there's more to it than training. You have
to have a lot of hands-on experience watching what works and what doesn't.
Call it strategic technology management consulting.

Actually it's a much bigger fire, but the sense that you are delivering
something of immediate value is lost. I've found that as you get better and
better at delivering solutions, they give you fuzzier and fuzzier problems,
many times with no clear deliverable. Moving from delivering stuff on-time and
under-budget to fuzzy-world is not easy.

My job used to be the sharpest guy in the room. Now my job is to make a
hundred other guys be the sharpest guy in the room. I don't light the light; I
turn the brightness up 40%.

And there is no way you can be a full-timer at BigCorp for 20 years and do
what I do.

------
Mc_Big_G
I recently had a conversation with my 16 year old son who was having girl
problems. Part of my advice was about playing the field. i.e. "What are the
chances the best woman for you, in all the world, lives 1/4 mile away?"
Similarly, what are the chances the best job for you is your first, or second,
or third? Slim.

Playing the field with employers should be the standard mode of operation.
This possibly benefits employers even more than employees. What is worse for
an employer than an entrenched employee, who hates his job, doing the bare
minimum to stay employed? Surely the answer isn't the guy who was super
productive for a year and then moved on.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
"Surely the answer isn't the guy who was super productive for a year and then
moved on."

I've been that guy for my whole life, and not a single employee has tried to
convince me to stay with better perks, none.

A couple of times I stayed and got not even enough to compensate for
inflation, so fuck em, I moved on.

If you want better perks, every year you have to move on.

ps. But you have to be good, and I mean real good to play the diva card.

~~~
roc
> _"I've been that guy for my whole life, and not a single [employer] has
> tried to convince me to stay with better perks, none."_

Immaterial. You never take the counter-offer.

An employer who refuses to reward you until you're at the point of looking
elsewhere is not worth remaining at. Further, you'll wind up on the short-list
of problem employees and in the event that they do need to reduce headcount
you will be disproportionately likely to lose your job earlier, thus
disadvantaging your next job search.

There's no upside to taking a counter-offer beyond immediate convenience.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Absolutely, I agree with you 100%.

It is not the counter-offer which counts, that in my book is too late. It is
the end-of-year reward which should be AUTOMATICALLY adjusted per inflation
plus at least a 5% increase if you overperformed. So I always expect a 10%
incease WITHOUT asking for it, or else I'll move on.

On my side, I always overperform more than 10% so I deserve what I expect. The
employer? not much, they don't care. They will never care. Their book forbids
10% increase for every employee.

Key point, not EVERY employee deserves 10% increase. Only overperformers. HR
guys need to understand that and learn to differentiate and reward
accordingly, which they don't. They are also collecting their winnings every
month.

ps. I am not talking about food a la carte, or gym towels. I am talking about
money and vacation time. Everything else is a welcomed addition to the perks.

~~~
roc
Ah, I misunderstood; I definitely agree.

------
philk
It's important to remember that Calacanis and Suster are writing advice from a
selfish standpoint. _Of course_ they want the people they hire to keep working
for their companies no matter how shit the conditions are. If I were them I'd
be writing about how the best way to get ahead was to come and work for me for
free.

It doesn't mean it's actually useful advice for someone who wants to get
ahead.

~~~
gaius
Yeah, Calcanis had this weird turn of phrase in his original blog entry "set
his career back 5 years to get his salary ahead by 3 years". WTF does that
even mean?

~~~
roc
It means Calcanis is thinking in terms of seniority and "years of service"
being the keys to career advancement and compensation. The decade's-old
management mindset that gives us things like SLOC and butt-in-seat quotas.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
That's one way to interpret it, but consider a company that pays you to sit in
a broom closet, doing nothing, all day and forbids you working on your own
code at home. Even if you draw a great salary, your skills after three years
on this job may be equal to your skills five year earlier (i.e. you didn't
learn anything but forgot stuff/your skills became outdated).

Clearly, some jobs teach you more than others...

~~~
roc
Absolutely. I wouldn't have taken issue with Calcanis' comment if he'd simply
framed it as choosing salary over personal development.

My criticism has everything to do with his use of "career" where he should
have said "skills" or "personal development" and his use of "years", when time
spent has absolutely no objective relevance, as reinforced by your own
comment: 1 year at firm A is not equivalent to 1 year at firm B.

So the implication that there's an objective salary advancement/year or career
advancement/year rate is nonsense. It's detritus from the failed management
schemes of an older era.

------
shawndumas
Don't leave a job until you are sure that they are the problem and not you.

When I was younger I used to think that my boss just didn't get 'it' --
whatever 'it' was. As I hung in there I started to see that I had been sold a
bill of goods in school.

You get paid for the job you do, not for the job you _think_ you do.

When you are sure you are doing what you thought you were and still are not
getting commensurate pay; that's when you leave.

------
earnubs
My granda used to tell me you should always try and look at things from a
different perspective (which, taking him literally, prompted me to climb the
rock garden to look at our house). Working for different companies gives you
perspective on ideas that you won't get from working for just one company. The
methodology du jour won't work in every situation, it takes perspective to
know that. So I agree with point 4, "The 30 year old with more than 6 jobs in
that time, probably has a lot more to offer", and a lot of that comes from
perspective.

------
S_A_P
Great Article. After college I did what I thought I was supposed to do and
work for 2 large corporations for the first 7 years of my employed life. I
found the pay below average for the market- especially if you are some one who
increases your skillset at a higher level than your peers.

I noticed most of the employees were there to float along with the tide and do
enough to stay employed, while very few had aspirations of making changes and
doing good things. After that I started "job hopping"- Starting with a
contract gig, after 3 months of that went to a medium sized company, and have
now ended up at a small company of 100 or so employees. With each subsequent
jump I have increased my pay by 15-30%, and learned skills I would _NEVER_
have picked up had I stayed at the "big company".

As mentioned in the article, jumping around from job to job made me realize
what I wanted to get out of my employer. Most importantly, I have 20-30 new
contacts that I feel I could tap into should I ever become unemployed. Most of
the time its what you know _and_ who you know...

------
sunir
Having also graduated high school in the middle of the dot.com bubble,
graduated undergrad in the middle of the dot.com bust, and been hustling ever
since, I am also a job hopper. I don't have much trouble landing work because
I have a particular work ethic.

It's a simple heuristic. If I can leave my employers in a good state, I go
ahead and job hop. I stay until the project is done, and then I feel ok
leaving or staying and take on the next project. Very often there is no next
project lined up, so I am compelled to look around.

I think if you have a habit of abandoning jobs in the middle of projects,
leaving your employers holding the bag, you _are_ a flake and a risk to hire.

~~~
scorpioxy
Good work ethic. But so what about the projects that never seem to finish? You
know, the ones that can be done in 6 months and end up taking 5+ years.

I am working on a project right now(in healthcare) that I thought I could
finish in a year's time. After every meeting, I think to myself that I'd be
lucky if I can finish it in a decade because of bureaucracy and incompetence.
What then? I am not going to stay until the project is done, I am mortal after
all!

~~~
snom370
At that point, the good work ethic is to say "look, this isn't working. What
can we do to part on good terms?". It's a lot better than saying "screw you
guys, I'm going home!" :)

------
AmberShah
This post is great and perfectly refutes their points. They want unconditional
loyalty to a low-paying, high-stress job that might sell out or go bust any
minute. And for startups in the VC game, they give drip-drops of equity that
will never amount to anything even if they did get a big buy-out and then
might be asked to move to another city or just laid off. All for the
"opportunity" to work there? I don't think so. Maybe I'll just go work for a
company where I can work 40 hours a week with an extra 50K a year and build a
startup of my own on the side.

------
hello_moto
Love your job but do not fall in love to your company.

On the other hand, where I live, one must switch job to get a better/increase
pay. Yes, sad.

------
leftnode
I guess I have a younger point of view, but it pains me to see people stay
with a single company all their lives, it just seems like such a waste.
They've dedicated their lives to making someone else richer is what it seems
to me.

The last company I worked for went under, and when I was searching for a new
job, I interviewed with the corporation Conn's (similar to BestBuy/Fry's). I
met one well paid executive there who had worked there for the last 25 years.
While well compensated, he looked beaten down, way older than he really was,
and unhealthy.

The point of life is not dedication to one or multiple companies. That just
sounds horrible to me.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_but it pains me to see people stay with a single company all their lives_

When you realize that to most people "it's just a job" it makes more sense.
Work should not be your life. All I ask of my job is that it pay me well and
be pleasant. If there's more, that's icing on the cake, but I look beyond my
time at work to find meaning in myself.

~~~
scorpioxy
Agreed. However, it does become your life when you work 16 hours a day. Simply
because you really don't have any life left to live. Except if you consider
sleeping time to be a vacation.

------
ctd
Jobhop yes, but please be careful--you might just hop yourself right out of
the market.

My resume resembles Swiss cheese. I have a whole bunch of short-term jobs, and
holes where I've taken off a year or more to pursue my own ideas (I'm
"freelancing" during that time).

Fortunately I was able to get another job after the last break, but I didn't
seem to be getting as many callbacks as I'm used to. This, coupled with my
age, tells me I need to stay put for a while. And I hate that.

~~~
jrockway
I doubt it. We are desperate for anyone who can answer our interview questions
correctly. We would not care at all where you have worked, how much time you
have taken for yourself, etc. Just know _something_ about programming.

~~~
bmj
Agreed. My resume looked the same for a time, and I had no trouble landing
interviews and getting offers.

That said, I've been with my current employer for three years now, and I have
no intention of leaving, thanks to their flexible work schedule.

------
strlen
When interviewing engineering candidates I look for competence and
curiosity/passion for technology. Implicitly, I also look for ability to
communicate (why did you come up with a solution that you did on the
whiteboard?). Given that I only have forty five minutes, I simply _can't_
afford to waste time asking about their life story. I'll ask em about their
projects and why they're interested in this position, but I don't need more
than a sentence about why they've switched jobs in the past.

Why did they have six jobs before thirty? Who knows? May be they switched
career orientation (I've started in operations and moved into software
development, that required a "hop"), may be they didn't know what they were
looking for, may be they had a family situation.

Likely, if they worked at a single company for ten years, that's irrelevant
_if_ they manage to have the desired level of competence and have the desired
level of passion and curiosity.

Are they leaving companies since they were fired (rather than downsized or
left voluntarily) or put on a performance plan? That's to be checked through
their references. Are they hopping purely for increased compensation? Then
just refuse to meet outlandish salary demands (out of proportion to their
skill level).

It's true that a bad looking resume may not make it past an HR filter.
However, I've been swamped by recruiters (agency _and_ company HR) _at all
times_ even after my resume had shown I've only been a few months at my
company. Furthermore, when you're over thirty you'll likely have a network of
coworkers who will be able to refer you to jobs bypassing the HR filter.

Rather than worry about what a blogger thinks about you and your generation,
worry about learning and increasing your competence level. Make multiple
companies fight over you (because you have a rare talent and excel at it)
instead of fighting to get into a company.

------
pilib
When I started in IT field (support/sysadmin), I was advised that I should
hold my positions for 2-5 years, and avoid job-hopping, cause it looks bad on
the resume.

Fast forward 6 years, I quit my job, why? I started in tech support. I've
worked night shifts, weekends, crazy schedules when someone was a on a leave
or vacation. No compensation for it, crappy salary, little or no bonuses,
night time work and weekend work was not paid according to the law in my
country (no-one to complain about it, unfortunately). I kept working there
because there was no better offer available, the team I worked in was made of
great people, there was some promotion plans for me, and I had a loan to pay
off. I got promoted. OK, so now I'm a sysadmin, better salary, but still no
compensation for working over-time, doing half-month rotation on-call standby
if something brakes (and it did), etc. Please mind that the better salary was
not a good one, just better. Anyways, one of my fellow sysadmins gets called
into active service (obligatory in my country), and I get stuck with constant
on-call duty, same salary and again, little or no bonuses. This is where I
start looking for options, and I after getting accepted at few other places, I
decide to stay where I am, why? Better tech, more complicated work,
challenging, etc. A year later I discover that no social service, pension
plans and med-care payments were made by my company for me or other people for
the last 5 or 6 years ( in my country, the company pays for it, and it isn't
quite easy for you to check that on a monthly bases), and I get net income, so
I actually don't care about my gross income. I raise hell, and after a few
clashes with local and upper management I decide to get the hell out of there.

So, in the end, my two cents are: Loyalty, to the company, friends, team at
work, family, girlfriends, etc. has to be something that is deserved on their
part, not expected from day one. Dedication and commitment should not be
confused with it.

Anyways, I'm now freelancing, and working towards my degree in soft.
engineering.

~~~
heresy
I come from a roughly similar background, I started out fresh out of high
school in tech support, though had done some programming on the side.

I enjoyed programming more though, so gravitated towards that, and so glad I
did. Most of the people I knew from my time in the support / admin trenches
have similar stories to tell, apart from some exceptions doing large-scale
work for Google, eBay, and telecoms.

On average I think programmers are compensated better, and generally enjoy a
better work environment.

When you're seen as working in a cost center as sysadmin and network admin
often is, you'll always have the spectre of downsizing/outsourcing hanging
over you.

Just don't work permanently at a consultancy (ugh). If you must work
permanently, do so for 2-3 year stints, and at product-focused places or
places where software engineering isn't just doing crappy line of business
apps.

------
billybob
This should be taken with a grain of salt. Yes, change jobs enough to get lots
of experience and pay raises. Don't get stagnant somewhere.

But imagine you never stay more than 6 months! Potential employers may think
"is it worth our time to train this person before he/she leaves? And is he/she
too fickle to accomplish anything?"

------
known
One of my employer offered me _loyalty_ bonus.

------
pw0ncakes
When older people complain about supposedly whiny, entitled, self-centered and
disloyal young people, exactly one work comes to mind: Projection.

We came of age while society fell apart. We're in our 20s and won't be able to
own a house or have children until our mid-30s, due to the still-absurd
housing costs, absent job security, and lack of a decent health care system.

The Boomers were born into an affluent, forward-looking society in which it
was embarrassingly easy to advance. You could be a pot-smoking hippie dropout
at Woodstock in '69 and a CEO by '75, whereas we have to start racking up
internships (unpaid, in most industries) in high school. They inherited a
society that would go forward and achieve great things so long as no one came
along and fucked it up (as the Reaganites did). We inherited a giant,
potentially intractable, mess.

~~~
jdminhbg
This is like a dispatch from Bizarro World.

My parents' Carter-era mortgage was for 15%+, mine signed last year (well
before my mid-30s!) was for 5.5%.

The rest of my counterexperience is just anecdote, so I'll spare everyone the
details and just ask:

Do you have even a single shred of evidence backing up your nostalgia for
things you didn't actually experience?

~~~
gaius
It's more relevant that the Boomers had 10 workers per retiree whereas we have
3 workers per retiree. The Boomers took the next two generations prosperity
and used it all up themselves.

~~~
Alex63
Sorry, I may be missing your point, but how do you blame the Boomers (of which
I'm at the tail end) for this situation? Shouldn't you be blaming the
"Greatest Generation" (parents of the Boomers) for setting up a system that
depended on maintaining a high ratio of workers to retirees?

~~~
JanezStupar
Well its the boomers that "didn't reproduce enough" (I'm not serious about
this one).

However the boomers are the ones that deregulated the shit out of the world,
bankrupted the pension funds, built houses and luxuries on credit (they didn't
invest much into infrastructure). They are also underqualified and sitting on
many positions from which they are screwing their children (that's at least
how it works in my country), while simultaneously taking it out on us - for
supposedly being lazy and incompetent - to create families and build homes.

While we stand on streets - well educated and eager to take on challenges, but
we're unable to because boomers don't allow us the privilege. And I mean quite
literally - don't just whip around mortgage rates. I don't know about USA -
but I'm certain that it's a lot harder and costlier to start and run a
business in a lot of the world nowadays than 40 years ago.

~~~
Alex63
I like the idea that Boomers haven't been reproducing enough (although with 3
children I feel like I've done my part).

As a tail-end Boomer, I don't see current 20-somethings as "lazy and
incompetent", but I know that my peers and I discuss the fact that Gen-Y seems
to be motivated by different things than we were. In the context of the
original discussion about job-hopping, I don't have any problem accepting that
members of Gen-Y have different attitudes toward tenure in a particular job.
However, as I mentioned in comments for a related posting, the issue from the
employer's perspective isn't really whether they agree with your values, but
whether they perceive hiring you as a good investment.

The costs of hiring someone are such that most companies want to be able to
rely on the individual to stay in the role for at least 2 or 3 years.
Furthermore, your value to the company increases rapidly as you gain
experience in their particular business - they don't want to see that value
walk out the door. Other posters in this discussion have suggested that the
answer is for companies to make the job more interesting/rewarding, so that
people will stay. I don't disagree with that - creating an environment that
attracts and retains the best people is a critical success factor for IT
organizations that I've worked with. However, when making a decision to hire,
the employer can only consider the candidate's past track record, not some
possible future where either the company or the candidate change behaviour.

I think this discussion may really be two separate questions: (1) is it
reasonable for companies to discriminate against perceived "job-hoppers" when
hiring, and (2) should companies adjust their practices to retain good
employees? My answer to both would be a qualified "yes", although from some of
the comments it seems like there are some people who would not stay at a
company for more than a year or two regardless of the company's retention
practices.

~~~
DuncanIdaho
As my peer said...

I know that myself and most of my peers would love to be loyal to something,
we are eager to learn... We love to work hard and play hard. We're willing to
learn the ropes - but we have no intention of working for the same company for
all our adult lives - because we have seen many cases on our own eyes how that
kind of attitude is less then beneficial.

But as mentioned elsewhere our bullshit tolerance levels are low.

I agree with you that costs of loosing productive people who understand
context of their work is expensive. I don't agree with you that businesses
care (at least not the ones I saw myself). Well maybe they care - but not
enough to actually invest anything or seriously commit to solving the issue
for themselves.

It's all just talk - yes they'd like if people would stay longer, but they
"can't afford" to actually improve living and working conditions for their
workers.

Just mgmt business as usual - improving sales and market position is hard,
cutting expenses is easy, leave a trail of broken businesses behind on your
path to glory.

