Fucking asshole. Almost no one wants to change jobs every 12 months. Looking for work is a pain in the ass and changing jobs is inherently risky. Everyone goes into a job hoping they will work out so well at the company as to have no incentive to leave... at least for 5-10 years. All this is even more true for the best employees, because the number of desirable employers drops off faster than the number of talented people. (The best people, who want only to work at the best companies, have what is in a way the most difficult kind of job search.)
Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.
The "job hopper" stigma originally came into existence because people who did so would rise rapidly in salary through iterated negotiations; in times such as the late 1990s, it's possible to get to a very high salary level this way. Pursued inflexibly, it's a terrible strategy in the long term, because it makes you less likely to end up as someone's protege (rolling stone, no moss) and eventually compensation will reflect the resulting stagnation. But most "job hoppers" do not fall into this category; they change jobs not because they are trying to game the system, but because they realize they are wasting time.
If your career is not improving-- you're not learning, inadequately mentored, and no one is looking out for your advancement-- then you should change jobs as soon as you can do so with minimal harm to the company. (If you're in a small company, it might be right to stay on for a couple months, at least to train someone else.) Since most people are not and cannot be "protege", this means that it's good to shift around a few times until finding a fit.
Likewise, everyone has to do some grunt work and deal with some unpleasantness, and recognizing this is just being a mature person, but anyone who finds out his job is mostly or entirely grunt work, or work unrelated to his career (e.g. the programmer who gets put full-time on office tasks) is wasting time and should leave.
Sorry, but I have to say all this because I am sick and fucking tired of people ripping on my generation for not playing by someone else's shitty rules. Are the older people really so damn entitled as to not understand all this? And how can they expect loyalty to companies when layoffs happen all the time?
This is very true. Good job pointing out how the author rambles about "generations" and what's wrong with them, trying to explain why an employee leaving a job he doesn't like is somehow evil and sinful.
The article at part reads like the vague "get off my lawn" ramblings of a bitter elderly man. Good luck attracting top young talent with this attitude.
Another important point is that most startups aren't a good place to stay long term, simply because (duh!) most of them do not succeed. Curious, isn't it?
Statistically, over a 3-4 year period, your startup is 90%+ likely to fail. Why would the best and the brightest stay in a failing project? The captain may be expected to sink with the ship (he often doesn't, and especially his first officers don't), but when you realize that this isn't your company, your "stock" isn't going to be worth a nickel since any meager sale profit will go to the series A investors, and if you don't start sending out resume you're going to be fired in a couple of months - why again are you expected to stay?
Also, many of the best engineers I've known have periods where they changed jobs, and then periods where they stayed at the same job for 2-3+ years. That just makes sense. If you can get hired anywhere, and since you can't really gauge the merit of a company from a few hours of visiting it pre-hire, you're likely to shop around and try to find a place that you like.
Ultimately, as you correctly pointed out, if an employee is truly happy in his current position, s/he will not leave. And it's your job as employer is to keep the employees you want happy and productive in your company (what other task does a manager have, really?). How anyone can ignore this simple fact is beyond my grasp.
Hardly bitter. Hardly "elderly." And I have tons of young entrepreneurs that I work with. Just because you disagree with my POV doesn't mean you have to try and launch a personal attack on me. What do you gain by this?
Another important point is that most startups aren't a good place to stay long term, simply because (duh!) most of them do not succeed.
Startups have some dreadful lows, so I can understand not wanting to hire people who will leave at the first painful moment, especially because one departure can trigger a fatal exodus. There are also people who just collapse during painful periods and a startup can't afford to have them... but the ones who collapse tend to have a certain passivity about them that makes them incapable of being voluntary job hoppers.
However, we're talking about entirely different sets of motivations when we compare the "stay-or-go" decision at a big company vs. at a startup. Someone who leaves a mediocre corporate job after 6 months because he isn't learning anything and because it's obvious that no one with any power cares about him is, in my opinion, savvy and ambitious. This sort of person could easily be a great startup employee-- knows what he wants (and is therefore less likely to job-hop out of ignorance and confusion) and seasoned enough to cut through bullshit and avoid the wasting of time.
The few successful startups I've known actually didn't have many "lows", and certainly not "dreadful" ones. They had a lot of stress, insane work hours, no life/work balance at all (since "life" was removed from the equation), but not too many of the kind of "omg we're actually failing" type of lows.
The cruel truth is that this business is so competitive, that if you make too many mistakes you're going to lose to those 1 or 2 among your hundreds of competitors that were lucky and competent enough never to have these kinds of failures.
In any case, I agree about the failure to distinguish fundamental (and very different) motivations here. Certainly you don't want someone crumbling under stress, but these kinds of people are easy to identify. Did that person had a very long vacation after leaving (for whatever reason) a startup? Does he seem to shy away from risk, stress, and high pressure positions?
If so, and you're hiring for such a position, it probably shows obliviousness and lack of self recognition and maturity for him to even apply.
The bitching about "job hoppers" mostly has to do with "free agents" who end up, for one reason or another, in high demand and who can ramp up their compensation with frequent job moves. Such people are fairly rare and generally don't make it to the top ranks of anything. This style of free agency may have been common in the late '90s, but it's not nearly as relevant now because the expectation that each job move involves a pay raise is gone. For example, Google is not going to pay ex-bankers more than other employees just because they were overcompensated on Wall Street.
In my experience, the worst agents (psychopaths and narcissists who will fuck up the company for their own gain) are almost never job hoppers. Sociopaths understand social power and how to get it, and they know that it takes time. They don't job hop often (and they look before the leap) because they rarely need to, being inherently good at politics and quite capable of getting a pay/promotion trajectory far better than would be available to them if they changed companies (and had to start over, politically speaking) every few months.
The worst corporate sociopath I've ever seen is 28 and has just been named CEO of a company with about $10 million in revenue. He's been there for 4 years, and it's his second job since college. The company will probably crash and burn under his rule.
Every generation has it's problems, it goes two ways. More importantly, especially in the startup scene, the EMPLOYER is probably going to get a big payday at the end. I'll see little / none of it so of course I'm going to move with incremental changes.
That does not mean a 'job hopper'. I'm fairly certain that most are smart enough to think ahead and ensure that long term career prospects are not being jeoparidzed. And in 10 years, when this breed of CEO's dies out it is a null point anyways.
> Everyone goes into a job hoping they will work out so well at the company as to have no incentive to leave... at least for 5-10 years. All this is even more true for the best employees, because the number of desirable employers drops off faster than the number of talented people. (The best people, who want only to work at the best companies, have what is in a way the most difficult kind of job search.)
This is a great comment. While part of working for a start-up is being willing to do work that is "below" you (e.g., doing operations and release engineering from time to time, because it has to be done even though you're a software engineer), at one point you have to ask yourself: suppose this company sinks or has a layoff, will I still feel that I've learned and moved my career forward in the mean time? If the answer is no, politely bring it up with the management first (perhaps they don't realize you're underused and not learning), and if no concrete steps are taken to improve the situation, find another position.
The reason to bring it up before looking (or at least before submitting your resignation and accepting a job offer from elsewhere) is not to be tempted to stay when given a counter offer. If there's a genuine desire to retain you long-term, they should have responded when you brought the issue up; otherwise, they just have a business-critical project they want you to finish and can then let you go.
I do have one comment to make: when selecting a job, don't select by thinking "which company will be the most stable and profitable?". Think, instead, "if all of these companies were to tank in a year, my stock becoming worthless, in which one would I have learned the most?". The "paradox" here is that the interesting working and continuous learning will make one feel engaged and fulfilled, leading them to stay longer and contribute more to the company, becoming less likely to be laid off and earning respect from coworkers and business partners, leading to employment opportunities in case of failure.
Compensation and the perception of a company (especially a start-up) as possessing a unique business idea can also cloud people's brains. A lesson I've learned is that if I can't decide between several offers, as they all seem the "same" (in terms of quality of the engineering team, technology used, culture, interesting-ness of their focus), I should pick the one that seems the least financially lucrative to be sure I'm not being "blinded" by the money.
Paul Bucheit's experience at Google (taking a paycut to join Google, despite being convinced they will fail) illustrates this. He didn't go in thinking "I will build my career and become rich here", he went in thinking "I will learn tons here".
Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.
The "job hopper" stigma originally came into existence because people who did so would rise rapidly in salary through iterated negotiations; in times such as the late 1990s, it's possible to get to a very high salary level this way. Pursued inflexibly, it's a terrible strategy in the long term, because it makes you less likely to end up as someone's protege (rolling stone, no moss) and eventually compensation will reflect the resulting stagnation. But most "job hoppers" do not fall into this category; they change jobs not because they are trying to game the system, but because they realize they are wasting time.
If your career is not improving-- you're not learning, inadequately mentored, and no one is looking out for your advancement-- then you should change jobs as soon as you can do so with minimal harm to the company. (If you're in a small company, it might be right to stay on for a couple months, at least to train someone else.) Since most people are not and cannot be "protege", this means that it's good to shift around a few times until finding a fit.
Likewise, everyone has to do some grunt work and deal with some unpleasantness, and recognizing this is just being a mature person, but anyone who finds out his job is mostly or entirely grunt work, or work unrelated to his career (e.g. the programmer who gets put full-time on office tasks) is wasting time and should leave.
Sorry, but I have to say all this because I am sick and fucking tired of people ripping on my generation for not playing by someone else's shitty rules. Are the older people really so damn entitled as to not understand all this? And how can they expect loyalty to companies when layoffs happen all the time?