
Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping - mooreds
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/job-tenure-and-the-myth-of-job-hopping-2071302
======
Pfhreak
> Millennials are labeled lazy, self-entitled, and, therefore, responsible for
> high turnover rates in the labor market.

Who are they supposed to be loyal to? Certainly not their employer, who is
squeezing every cent of labor value from their work. I'd understand this
attitude if companies took care of their people or if the person was part of a
worker's coop.

Also, anecdotally, job hopping has been incredibly lucrative for me. My first
hop, from Boeing to Amazon literally doubled my income. I highly encourage
devs to get out there and see what they are worth, especially if they are
happy at their current place. Get an offer in hand and negotiate hard. Who
knows, maybe you'll land an amazing bump.

~~~
asdff
Anecdotally among my fellow millennials across different fields who've jobbed
hopped, few did it for the promotion, most did it because they were being
exploited and depressed.

Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de facto
50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits because people are
just that desperate to get a job that whittles down ye olde student loan and
has a health plan with a 10k deductible.

~~~
AmericanChopper
> Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de
> facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits

If job hopping is a viable strategy (which it certainly is in some sectors),
then that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this. That’s not to
say that every company out there is actually going to figure out the source of
their staff retention problems, but the fact that those problems exist for
employers is really the only way such conditions will improve.

~~~
newswasboring
The existence of job hopping does not negate existence of abuse. Because the
baseline is, and in my understanding, will remain low. You will get some extra
money but that 50 hour will turn to 55. People are so crushed by their loans
that they will just see the dollar amount because at some point sadness over
amount of work saturates. I am just as depressed at 50 hours a week as I am at
55 hours a week. Of course eventually it creeps up to no weekends and 80
hours. But people don't feel it because it happens gradually and they have by
that point acquired more debt for a house and maybe they have kids.

Also for the lower end jobs there is an infinite supply of people when the
current lot eventually burns out.

~~~
AmericanChopper
> The existence of job hopping does not negate existence of abuse

It (at least to some extent) negates your assertion that employers can get
away with it. Employee churn is literally employers failing to get away with
it. If a bad employer cares about employee churn, then it’s something they’ll
have to address eventually by solving the problems they’ve created that led to
employee churn in the first place.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they will though. Having contracted/consulted
for a lot of companies, I’ve come to the conclusion that most companies are
bad at most things, and that a company really only needs to be good at a
select few things to be viable in the market. But if there’s competition for
labor (which there is in a lot of software engineering sectors), then failing
at employee retention will put them at a competitive disadvantage, and
companies that succeed at it at a competitive advantage.

~~~
newswasboring
Yeah but they don't care about employee churn at all. That's the whole point.
There is almost an infinite supply of replacements. Did you not read my post?

~~~
AmericanChopper
The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally don’t
care about the quality of their product or services. There are very few
businesses where this is the case (in software engineering at least), so if
you’re trying to suggest that such businesses are a common problem, then
you’re delusional.

~~~
brmgb
> The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally
> don’t care about the quality of their product or services.

Quality of product does not appear on quaterly result and is not taken into
account when deciding bonuses. Obviously companies don't care about it.

The only times I have seen companies care about churn is when :

\- constant departures started impacting customers delivery scheduldes leading
to financial penalties

\- costs of hiring started to grate.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I honestly can’t tell if this comment is supposed to be satire. The quality of
your product has a direct impact on ARPC, customer churn, LTV, sales
conversions, customer engagement/feature usage, SLA reports, roadmap progress,
competitor analysis, and many other metrics. Most, if not all of those metrics
will be featured in quarterly reports. I’m getting the very strong impression
that most of the commenters in this thread have absolutely no insight at all
into how businesses or their management actually operate.

------
sillysaurusx
Anecdotally, all of the most significant increases to quality of life in my
social circle has come from getting a new job.

I know someone who was making $65k one year ago, and is now making six
figures. They're a talented and capable dev, but so are many of you. And this
was the midwest.

My own salary bumped from $35k to $75k during my early career after getting a
job at a different gamedev studio. Before that, I was paid $20k for around
three years, then $35k for a year.

($20k was good money in the midwest, especially when you're young and have no
bills. It all went straight into the bank. I'm wistful for those times...)

You are almost certainly underestimating your market value. The only way to
determine your market value is to _go out onto the market_. Go search! Best
case, you find a better job. Worst case, you stay at yours. Middle case, you
can use a job offer to leverage a raise.

~~~
papito
The raises in tech are pretty high if you are starting out and stand out among
your peers. You can easily nail a 25K raise if you are underpaid. My first
job, I requested so little money, they gave me MORE. But I learned a ton, and
then my salary took off like a rocket.

But there IS a ceiling. At some point your salary flatlines as you become very
expensive.

~~~
guynamedloren
The question is.. where is that ceiling? I'm thinking about next steps in my
career and wondering if I've already hit that ceiling, or at least a local
maximum (barring a switch to FAANG). Perhaps the best way to know is spend the
time talking to potential employers?

~~~
WalterBright
> The question is.. where is that ceiling?

There isn't one. It's all about what you can contribute to the company's
bottom line. It's very unusual, but not impossible to get $1m.

You just gotta be able to show the company how much money they can make by
hiring you. For example, can you make their server farm 1% more efficient?
That's worth a great deal of money.

~~~
roel_v
That number is the ceiling. The floor is what someone else with the skills to
make those particular changes will accept as a wage. Do you think a toll booth
operator can say 'I do 10k in revenue a day, pay me half of that and we'll
call it good'? Please.

~~~
WalterBright
> Do you think a toll booth operator can say 'I do 10k in revenue a day, pay
> me half of that and we'll call it good'?

Of course not, because it isn't his skills making that happen.

~~~
roel_v
There are lots of software jobs where the 'skills' are equally
interchangeable. Most programmers aren't in a position to negotiate a rate
based on the scarcity of their skills; they have to negotiate based on the
market rate, which is set by supply and demand under fungibility od the good
(or service, in this case). That is not to say that those services are 100%
fungible, but a lot closer to 100 than to 0.

~~~
WalterBright
> There are lots of software jobs where the 'skills' are equally
> interchangeable.

The added value of a software engineer is much higher than the value added by
a clerk. That's why software engineers get paid much more. Supply and demand
will force a company to pay more for a person that creates $100 in value than
a person that creates $10 in value.

~~~
roel_v
Of course, but that's not what the original claim was. The original claim was
that software engineers, on average, can demand a wage _proportional_ to the
value they create. Which is simply not true. They can command a _higher_ wage
because they generate more profit, but _how much more_ they will be paid is
not that value (or a function of it - and, again, speaking for _the average_
developer, not highly niche specialists), it's set by supply and demand.

If the claim from the beginning had been 'career advice: specialize your tech
skills to the point where you can present such a unique proposition that you
can command a share of your value add as salary, and also make sure that that
specialization is something that brings a high value add', then of course I
would have agreed. But saying that the average joe schmoe web developer is in
a position to negotiate based on their value add is simply not true. I mean,
don't take my word for it - just look at what the salaries for run of the mill
software engineers are. (someone is going to bring up big five salaries and
claim SE's are paid 1/2 mill - yeah no, those are not 'average')

~~~
WalterBright
> The original claim was that software engineers, on average, can demand a
> wage proportional to the value they create. Which is simply not true.

It is true from a simple gedanken experiment. Suppose I pay you $10 and you
produce $100 in value. My competitor notices this and offers you $20 and
entices you away, making $80 on $20 invested. His competitor notices, and
offers you $30 to make $70. Rinse, repeat. Your pay will stabilize at $100
minus the opportunity cost of the money, which around 15%.

This scenario relies on the players all being greedy and completely self-
interested.

The scenario of someone hiring you for $10 and you producing $100 is highly
unstable and unlikely to last very long.

~~~
roel_v
That is again another argument than the original one under discussion. Of
course prices converge to an equilibrium in a perfectly efficient market. But
wages are sticky, and labor is a lemon market the the employer's pov. Amd
those are just two reasons for why people cannot walk into a comp negotiation
and negotiate based on value produced. (not to mention that no prospective
employee would ever even know that value, but I've left that out of the
discussion all along)

------
rahimnathwani
The article asks the question "So how long do workers stay with their
employers nowadays?", but that question isn't answered by the cited data
source.

The data are based on 'how long have you been with your current employer?',
which of course underestimates the time you will actually stay with that
employer (it's unlikely today is your last day).

Imagine a world in which every employee stays at each job for exactly 2 years,
and the distribution of work anniversaries is evenly distributed. If you ask
each person how long they've been in their current job, the median answer
would be 1 year.

I'd love to ask a different question of each respondent: "how many new
employers have you had in the last 3 years?"

~~~
croon
Good point, but your question also has an issue:

If my answer is "2", you have no idea if it's almost 1, or almost 3, which is
a huge span.

I think a better question would be "how long did you stay with your previous
employer".

~~~
rahimnathwani
The reason I chose my question is that I only care about employment that
started in the last 3 years, and how long that has tended to last.

The potential huge span for an individual answer won't affect the usefulness
of the median.

Your question is interesting but would pollute any summary statistic with too
much old and irrelevant data. Imagine someone who has had two employers: the
first for 2 years, and the second for 45 years.

------
AmericanChopper
I think the article is looking too broadly at the market. Job hopping is most
prevalent in high demand sectors (like web development for instance), and then
it’s only really done by the people with at least above average talent/skills.
I had the displeasure of working in a startup that ultimately folded once, all
of the teammates I considered to be competent got new jobs within a week or
so, all of the stragglers struggled immensely.

I also think it’s obviously good for everybody involved. For employees it
means improving your salary and working conditions. For employers, it’s a good
thing in a couple of ways at least. A retention strategy that’s actually done
right will naturally increase productivity (though there’s certainly more to
it than beer, food and video games). It’s also much better for an employer to
have an unhappy or dissatisfied employee leave. The upfront costs are more
apparent, but an employee who wants to leave but can’t find another job will
cost you way more in the long run. Their productivity will plummet and their
unhappiness or dissatisfaction will become contagious.

~~~
solveit
> I had the displeasure of working in a startup that ultimately folded once,
> all of the teammates I considered to be competent got new jobs within a week
> or so, all of the stragglers struggled immensely.

This says good things about the industry's collective ability in evaluating
job-seekers. A breath of fresh air amidst the weekly thinkpieces on how hiring
is broken.

~~~
laurieg
So instead of training up people with weaker skills we are just happy to see
them out on the kerb?

They had jobs already, so how bad could they really have been?

~~~
AmericanChopper
In my experience, people who want to develop their skills tend not to struggle
much with employment. The people who I’ve personally seen get the most
frustrated are the kind of people who don’t understand why their colleagues
are upset about the 15,000 unfixable linting errors in their React spaghetti,
and who proudly announce in standup that they fixed the failing pipeline by
commenting the tests out. I’m sure we’ve all worked with people like that, and
if they end up struggling to find employment, then yes that does reflect well
on recruitment pipelines. They end up producing negative value in any
organisation they work for.

~~~
moneywoes
As a recent grad looking to get a job and avoid those errors, do you have any
resources or suggestions? Maybe like the book clean code?

~~~
PaulStatezny
I'm not the user to whom you directed the question, but I would answer your
question this way:

Software developers fall along a spectrum between "caring intensely about
quality" and "only caring that their ticket/assignment gets done, with very
little regard to quality".

These are the kind of people he or she is talking about.

This can manifest in a lot of ways. Lack of effort in creating names, adding
to the "messiness" of the codebase in various ways, not coordinating or
communicating with team members to do things in a consistent way. In general,
being content with "quick and easy" fixes that take less work but cost
everyone in the long run.

People will notice where you sit on this spectrum.

I don't know what domain you'll be working in, what company, even what _kind_
of company. But if you soak in the need to have a high bar of quality, you
will be able to find the resources that pertain to your
language/tools/domain/etc in order to make high quality software. It just
takes time.

I could rattle off topics to study from the top of my head, e.g.:

\- SOLID principles of OOP

\- Learn the benefit of immutable data

\- Normal forms of relational databases

But the best thing is to get lots of experience. With different projects,
different languages, different programming paradigms, OOP vs FP. Good
books/articles/tutorials help the most when you're applying them to a real
work context. If you constantly seek out wisdom about how to do things better
as you do real work, you won't be the type of person your OP was referring to.
:-)

------
yibg
Personally I find it harder to switch jobs often as I go up the ladder. There
are just fewer positions and it gets more difficult to go directly into a high
level position at a new company. This applies to both ICs and management. E.g
most VPs and distinguished engineers stick around pretty long.

~~~
noitsnot
I feel like when you're outside of let's say a Fortune 500-ish type of
company, there are no 'levels' and a manager will always attempt to minimise
pay/budget and absolutely will not bring up promotion. The structure of the
company isn't there unless there is decent turnover and there is rarely the
growth needed to create new positions. Promotion / pay is most likely
initiated on the employee end. It's easier just to take a few interviews than
try to haggle with current management and budgets.

~~~
fivre
Yeah, this. It's simply not worth it for a manager a company with less
structure to entertain the idea of giving you a raise, even if you're
underpaid, certainly not if you don't demand it. Even then they won't give you
much.

I got a <10% raise after much haggling at one company and a 50% raise by
switching companies into a lower-stress position. Maybe it's better at
companies with a defined career ladder, but it's not worth it to stay
elsewhere.

~~~
VRay
Ugh, same thing happened to me. Bumping my salary from 55k to 60k was
inconceivable, so I went to another company for 120k. (Turns out, the same
skills you use to make piece of crap parking meters/medical devices are needed
to make smartphone operating systems)

Then something similar happened again a couple of years ago.. The top local
software companies in Japan were offended when I told them I'd been making
180k USD/year but would be willing to settle for ~140k USD to work for them.
Anything over 120k was just unthinkable, and even that was a stretch in their
minds. I didn't have much luck explaining that Silicon Valley firms are just
going to roll in and eat their lunch if they don't hire people like me. It was
better for my long-term savings to work 1-2 years in Silicon Valley, then hang
around and be a jobless bum in Tokyo for 1-2 years than to work full time in
Tokyo for 2-4 years.

Moral of the story: Go where the money is

------
cauthon
I don’t think this article makes the right comparison to determine whether
people switch jobs more often “these days”. They only go back to the mid
2000s.

When I hear or talk about the idea that people change jobs more frequently
now, I definitely include people who started working then, and I don’t think a
decade is sufficient time to see a trend in tenure. I’d be more interested in
a comparison between the 00s/10s and the 60s/70s/80s (ish).

Stratifying by age would probably be more informative than simply comparing
the median tenure in two different years as well.

~~~
eesmith
I'm a Gen X "slacker." In my 20s I lived in Silicon Valley during the dot-com
era of the late 1990s.

It was a widely held belief that you needed to move jobs every year or two,
because in-house wage increases weren't following the market demand.

Personally, I despise "millennial" characterizations like 'lazy' and 'self-
entitled'. All they've done is file off the slurs toward Gen X kids and re-
used them for the next wave of young people.

Oh, scratch that - Gen X _and_ hippies. And beatniks. (Shout out to Maynard G.
Krebs!)

Why, it's like old people forget what it was like when they were young.

------
pfarnsworth
In Silicon Valley, until maybe 5 years ago, I would say that 2 years per job
was about the average. My average is about 2.5 years, and I've had many jobs.
I've found that recently, many people, especially young people early in their
careers, have been switching jobs after 1-1.5 years.

When I compare with my non-tech friends in other parts of the country, I have
one friend who has been at the same job for 13 years, and one who has been at
his job for 10 years. I have never held a job for longer than 4.5 years, and
my shortest was 1 year.

~~~
jurassic
The quick early career switch makes perfect sense since market value of a dev
rises so quickly after gaining even a little experience.

------
mewpmewp2
Whenever I say I spent 4 years with my recent employer people are always
surprised that I was at a single place for so long.

------
tempsy
I’ve had a few 1.5 to 2 year stints and I get asked about it all the time.
Certainly there are employers that don’t want to see that, though I’m sort of
at a crossroads after 6 years in tech where I’ve realized part of the itch to
move was less about money and a general dissatisfaction with a traditional
9-5, so I’ve since moved on from it and working on my own projects at the
moment.

~~~
oblio
You get asked about those? I've had a bunch of 1 years (or less) stints plus a
1 year sabbatical and I don't think I ever got asked about them, even though I
expected I would.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Depends on the market. 1 year stints in SV don't even register on the radar
but in some European countries it could be a red flag.

~~~
city41
I've interviewed many candidates in SV and many of them have strings of 6-18
month stints on their LinkedIn. It's extremely common; I'd almost even say
it's the norm.

Before SV I lived in Denver and any job tenure less than 2 years was a huge
red flag, and even less than 3 would raise an eye brow.

~~~
hattar
Hiring manager in Denver here. I see an increasing number of people with
repeated jobs where they only work 9mo-1year. Talking to peers I’m definitely
not the only person skipping over those candidates. It takes months to get a
dev up to full productivity, I don’t want to hire someone who will likely only
put a few useful months in before leaving.

------
goatinaboat
As mentioned in the article, conflating programmers and actuaries muddled the
figures. A better source of data would be LinkedIn, more granular.

------
BossingAround
What I truly wonder is, does hopping between positions within one employer
count as job hopping? If I stay with company X for 5 years, but every year, I
have switched a position ( e.g. tech support engineer -> QE -> software
engineer -> Evangelist -> manager), would that disadvantage me on the job
market?

Or would I get bonus points for wanting to stick with the company X?

~~~
imtringued
That's not job hopping, that's a promotion.

------
c2the3rd
How much of the increase in median job tenure is explained by an aging
population?

