> 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.
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.
> they can get away with de facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits
I would also add "free Red Bull, breakfast buffets, Friday Beer Time" and other "Freebies" DO NOT count to me as benefits. So many of the startups I've interviewed for try and lure you in with all these additional "benefits". No, ten cases of free Red Bull will not pay my rent.
These companies routinely low ball really good developers with these freebies thinking it makes up for paying them slave wages; expecting them to work 50-60 hour work weeks and burn out like clockwork every 18 months.
It's sad so many people I know just grab that carrot and don't realize they could be at a Fortune 500 company making triple what they're making at a startup who claims its harder to get hired at their company than to get accepted at Harvard.
I already perceive "free coffee" as a red flag, but "free Red Bull" would make me run away screaming.
(Not sure if this needs explaining, but if company provides all kinds of free drinks, it could be generosity, but if the choice is suspiciously limited to stimulants... you will probably need them.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Nah, they are ok with big turnover. Typically, they believe that everyone who left was bad employee in some way.
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?
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.
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.
> 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 service.
I disagree. There are plenty of jobs which are basically about qualified warm bodies. It doesn't matter who is doing it, it will get done. Even in high tech there are plenty of jobs like this. Not all companies have a heavily customized set of libraries. Most use off the shelf fairly famous things. It costs less to hire someone new and let them ramp up than to give someone a raise.
You’re really talking about two different things here, but you’re wrong on both of them.
For starters, your typical software engineer hire will cost you more than the value they provide for at least their first six months. If they stay for less than 18 months, then you’ll never get a return on that investment. Realistically you need them to stay longer.
Secondly, even if your just a vanilla web dev shop, using the most basic set of frameworks available, if the average tenure of your staff is too low, then the quality of your product/service will massively suffer.
Ask anybody who’s had the analyze this in a management position (like I have for instance, many times). To make this work (and I have seen it work), you need an incredibly atypical set of circumstances. For starters, you need to be in a position where quality absolutely does not matter at all. This sounds ridiculous but there are some cases where this can be true (for some period of time at least, but maybe you don’t care about it lasting forever...). Companies that have built themselves an unassailable position in the procurement pipelines of government or large enterprise can exploit such dynamics, on a limited term basis, for example. Secondly, you need to have eliminated any quality control in your recruitment pipeline. Naturally, this will result in hiring a lot of very low quality labor, but as above, maybe that’s fine. Finally, you need to have completely eliminated any onboarding or training. You need people to turn up to work, and almost immediately start producing low quality work.
Such companies do actually exist, but they are very, very uncommon. If you happen to find yourself working for one, though you may be underpaid and treated poorly, you can at least know that your employer is likely extracting very little value from you at all, regardless of how personally talented you might be.
> that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this
?? What if the company saves a lot of money, and only lose a tiny percentage of employees every year?
I think it's pretty safe to say that most salaried employees will just keep trucking along happily so long as their bills are paid and they don't feel horribly oppressed or stressed out.
If there's a mandatory 5 minute daily meeting at 10 AM and free dinner at 7 PM, it's pretty easy to get everyone to put in 9 hours a day along with the occasional hour of e-mail at home or chunk of crunch time.
So long as everybody gets a 2-4% raise every year and feels like there's another job title to strive for, they'll just keep falling farther and farther behind the market rate.
Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work.
Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. Assertive workers hop jobs when the situation demands it, less assertive ones suffer.
> Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work.
Pay and hours worked is really only one part of the equation, but this is pretty much right. Complaining won’t do anything to solve retention problems though.
> Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it.
This really depends on your definition of “getting away with it”. If continuing to perpetuate the problems that cause it, at great expense to the business is “getting away with it”, then I guess your right. You could “get away with” never going to work again, if you were prepared to accept the costs of being destitute for the rest of your life. However I think you’ll find there’s a large number of companies that have been forced to improve their practices in order to remain competitive. Anecdotally speaking, it’s why I personally won’t get out of bed for less than 4 figures after tax per day, and why I’d be incredibly reluctant to work in an office that didn’t provide me with free food, coffee and other drinks.
To themselves. The best advice I ever received was from my dad. And it was 6 months into my first job. I wanted to hop and there came the advice 'investments matter more than income, and you need stability to borrow money for the big ticket ones'. I hopped anyway because like your case I was looking at doubling my income.
But the next two ones I've gone slow and with stability built up good investment assets.
The advice is true. Inflation can eat whatever you earn, so investments are where the magic is.
The employer almost always makes more money than the employee and is the one profiting from the worker. It is not an equal comparison and the worker will always make less than the money they bring in to the company.
That's the dream, isn't it? Like a network of microservices. And we must realize that a few hundred years ago that was the default (well, if you were not a slave of some description).
I never said they were the same things. One thing replaced the other. I can replace my daily fruit from apples to oranges. They both serve the same purpose (filling my tum tum), doesn't mean they are the same.
I think Adam Smith and other economists would say that if everyone was an independent businessperson with full autonomy then we’d have less exploitation and more equality. But people are willing to trade essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety (and a whole array of consumer goods they don’t need and pay high rent for status), to quote a certain modern philosopher.
I've never liked that Marxian interpretation of the employer-employee relationship.
Why can't we both profit? If I buy a product from you, you make money from it. And while I lose money (because I gave it to you) I probably increase something else - happiness, if it's for my hobby, or the ability to make more profit, if it's for my job.
With that analogy in mind, consider a test pilot, who wants to push the edge of experimental aircraft. There's no way for anyone except a Howard Hughes to do that without being employed. So sure, the test pilot's employer might make money (if it's a profit-making company and not a hobby or government project), but in exchange the pilot gets to fulfill something highly desired, which otherwise cannot be done.
Another problem I have with that interpretation is that some jobs are synergistic, such that you cannot look to pairwise relationships to understand the economics.
There aren't that many successful solo bass players. If I were a bass player, I'm much more likely to make money as part of a band than working on my own. So my relative profit is greater by being in a band, even if I don't make my full share of income to the band.
The third problem (or the first one re-visited) is that it focuses on the traditional employer/employee relationship. If I'm a gig-worker, brought in as a third-party contractor, I'm not an employee. Nominally, my clients buy my time, so I'm the one to profit. But yet they expect to many more money from the work I do for them.
Which means any exchange must be un-equal, which makes it a pretty useless interpretation.
This isn't marxian and nowhere did i mention his name or philosophy. I don't agree with him much either.
This is a basic understanding of how the world works. It is clearly impossible for an employee to be making more than they bring money into the business. Otherwise the business wouldn't exist.
> Marx's exploitation theory is one of the major elements analyzed in Marxian economics and some social theorists consider it to be a cornerstone in Marxist thought. ...
> Exploiters appropriate another's surplus labour, which is the amount of labour exceeding what is necessary for the reproduction of a worker's labour power and basic living conditions. ...
> Once capitalists are able to pay the worker less than the value produced by their labour, surplus labour forms and this results in the capitalists' profits. This is what Marx meant by "surplus value", which he saw as "an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist".[9] This profit is used to pay for overhead and personal consumption by the capitalist, but was most importantly used to accelerate growth and thus promote a greater system of exploitation.
> The heart of Wolff’s argument centers on what Marx called “surplus labor,” which is what employers appropriate above what they pay for wages. After further deducting raw materials, machinery and the like used in the production process, what’s left is the employer’s profit.
> Wolff maintains that the fact that productive workers are not compensated for the full amount and worth of their labor constitutes “exploitation.”
I think it's understandable why I saw them as being similar.
Is the main difference between you and Marxian thought that you don't consider the difference to be "exploitation"?
You wrote: "It is clearly impossible for an employee to be making more than they bring money into the business. Otherwise the business wouldn't exist."
The Wikipedia page gives some criticisms to that Marixan view, which also hold for your statement: "They suggest that Marx should have allowed for two things; namely, permit a fair profit on the risk of capital investment and allow for the efforts of management be paid their due. "
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.
I always told myself it wasn't worth the trouble to apply to jobs where the salary was 50%+ higher than my current salary. When I finally did (because the requirements were so well aligned with my skillset), I was floored by how eager they were to interview me. I think my previous job paid around 75k CAD which is... Admittedly terrible for someone with my experience. Now if I apply to jobs offering twice that salary I can often get an interview.
I know these numbers are tiny for many people on HN, but bear with me.
It truly does pay to just try. Why not find out? I've probably worked for far less than I was worth for the majority of my career. The day I became a developer I was titled as a graphic designer (I was a designer who could code), and I kept that title and salary for 2 years. That really set the tone for me, I think. I was making $32.5K/year building honest to gosh web applications.
Ironically I decided to do my own thing once I realized I was undervaluing myself. Probably not wise, but I've wanted to for so long and I never did because I figured I didn't have the skills.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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')
> 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.
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)
> The ceiling is actually the minimum of what you contribute and the wage of the person they can replace you with.
Only if you are unaware of the competition, which is highly unlikely if you have such skills. Lots of companies have server farms they'd love to shave 1% off of.
It's like if you're a movie director that has a track record of making hit movies. Your compensation goes way, way up. Same if you're an athlete that brings the fans in (usually by winning).
There's no ceiling on what a movie director makes or an athlete.
Some are unique enough to get that $1m compensation. I don't know what John Carmack's compensation is, but I bet it's north of $1m. And he'd be darn well worth it. Ditto for Linus Torvalds.
Well, let's not take into account extreme outliers. Most devs are not John Carmack. Most devs code HTML forms in Django and faint at the sight of raw SQL.
Talk to recruiters, as they can tell you what to expect at the companies they’re recruiting for, and to some extent in general.
Also your network and online databases and discussions. Some info is public, some info is more available if you can find a private professional community.
If you want to email me I can calculate what to ask for based on my research and experience working with a wide range of engineers.
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?"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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. :-)
My perspective is highly biased because I started my career as a DBA before moving more into web dev. The things I learned from databases have been tremendously useful first principles for writing other software, especially relating to concurrency and data structures. I’d highly recommend you learn about the first few normal forms and why they’re useful, and how explain plans work in relation to time complexity, you could pick that up from some casual googling. They’re usually presented in relation to databases, but the concepts are useful in any form of schema design. Ive also found understanding concurrency control to be very useful, specifically I learned about MVCC first. I think those concepts are relatively easy to grasp, but are largely neglected by a lot of SWEs.
Otherwise in general I just always try to think about the underlying logic of the code I’m writing. If it feels hacky, overly complex or fragile, it probably is, and I probably need to take another look at the problem I’m trying to solve and consider whether I’m approaching it correctly, using the correct tools, or even whether I’m even using the tools correctly.
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.
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.
My experience, at least in the valley has been there gets to a point where it’s easier to get internal promotion than hired in at that level. For example it’s easier to go from L6 to L7 than to get hired as L7.
EDIT: You can take a quick skim through the FAANG VPE's on LinkedIn. Most were:
1) Promoted internally to VPE vs hired in at that level
2) At the company for a significant amount of time.
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.
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.
This starts to apply at the director level, where if you’re not even sticking around to see the outcomes of your decisions it tends to look bad. 5 years is the cap on that though, unless you’re constantly renegotiating.
This matches my experiences, and I'm certainly no Distinguished Engineer, but as a PE I would still have relatively few options to work at a similar level and compensation if I was looking. Thankfully I'm quite happy where I am.
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.
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.
I only have anecdata, but my Dad worked at a total of 2 places since his late 20’s (he retired several years ago).
He spent a decade at one company then left for another company where he worked for 30 years and topped out at a VP making 200-something a year in a low cost of living area.
No college degree, not very substantial critical thinking skills, and not a good “people person.”
When interviewing for his replacement, they wouldn’t consider anyone without an MBA.
well I remember articles from the beginning of the century talking about how much more job switching there was nowadays, with comparisons to the 60s 70s 80s, my memory suggesting that the trend was generally suggested to have started in the 90s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you've got 15-20 years of experience and you've never stayed somewhere more than 12-18 months, it's a very different scenario than someone with 5-6 years, even in SV.
A 1.5 to 2 year stints seem totally fair to me. A number of 6-month stints would raise questions from me, personally. I still wouldn't rule out such a candidate, but would proceed with caution.
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?
It depends on the company and their needs. In the majority of cases, I would say this is a positive thing for your resume.
If their goal is to hire someone for a specific position and they hope that person stays in that same role long term, maybe not so much. Companies are generally happy to just have you stick around, though - if you are moving within the company, you should in theory still be providing value to the company, and potentially even more value, if the moves are upwards.
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.