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Please Jobhop as much as Possible

146 points by angryasian 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.
- kznewman 17y ago
  In the main I agree, but despite the buzzwords if the corporation really believes and acts as if "employees are the most important asset" and it truly gets that to be profitable it needs to take care of the "knowledge workers" (whatever that means) then it may be that some companies, because of their profit motive, are worthy of some loyalty. Most companies fall short of the ideal so professionalism is more than a second best in this case.
  - billybob 17y ago
    Yes - if my employer is loyal to me, I feel more inclined to be loyal to them. If they make it clear that they'll fire anyone, anytime, as soon as profits drop, then I'm happy moving on whenever I please.
- davidw 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - davidmurphy 17y ago
    This is what it comes down to. Most companies treat workers with absolutely no loyalty these days. (Downsizing, anyone?) So it is absolutely wholly unfair to expect employees to treat companies with excessive loyalty in a one-sided manner, beyond the sort of basic professionalism you talk about. /nostalgic for an earlier era I am to young to have known
- exit 17y ago
  what makes it possible to be loyal to a country? a country is just a bureaucratic + economic entity you randomly get assigned to.
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    Many people (including me) see their country as a collective of shared history, culture and tradition they can associate themselves with. If you see your country as a 'bureaucratic + economic entity' then probably you've never lived in a foreign country. Believe me, that would completely change your perspective.
    - davidw 17y ago
      I live in a foreign country that I chose to go live in. I don't really feel any great "loyalty" to the one I'm in or the one I was born in. There are good and bad things about both. Oh, and my current country of residence, Italy, is a very bureaucratic entity;-)
    - nzmsv 17y ago
      Actually, living in another country has completely changed my perspective - the other way. I wish more people would realize just how similar we all are in the end, and how shallow and arbitrary these cultural differences really are. It's amazing how many people get a sense of superiority simply because they happened to be born in a certain spot. Think of how easy it is for politicians to exploit this feeling. How many wars started this way?
    - exit 17y ago
      > Believe me, that would completely change your perspective. i've lived in two countries other than the one i grew up in.
    - devinj 17y ago
      I lived in countries other than that of my birth for most of my life. Understandably, I think, this has given me a very different appreciation. I mean, what's a "foreign" country, anyway? Is it one different than the one you're raised in? Your parents were raised in? One that doesn't harbor the same culture as you? Where am I from? Is it the country I was born in? The country I grew up in? The country I formed my political beliefs in? That's three different answers, and there are more to choose from. So, I don't buy this "loyalty" thing. Who am I supposed to be loyal to? Why? Why can't I be loyal to an altogether different country that I like more, but have never spent much time in?
- Nervetattoo 17y ago
  Surely you can. Wouldn't you be loyal to your own startup if it turned into a corporation? Any way, you should be loyal to your employer while working there, but that shouldn't be mistaken for selling your soul to them. I don't see the problem with being a job hopper except it sounds really hard to jump jobs once a year or more often considering it takes about half a year to get settled into a new job. Personally I've set myself a 5 year limit as max time to work at one company before moving. This is part of my not-form-lifelong-habits program. So even if I do have my dream job I force myself to leave after 5 years. Forced perspective is good for you, you should always try to push forward and you can't do that by sitting tight in a job. I would be skeptical about hiring someone who switched jobs 6 times the last 5 years, but I'd be even more skeptical hiring someone at 30 with less than 5 jobs on their CV as that might suggest them being lazy sods who didn't have summer jobs etc.
- mseebach 17y ago
  You are loyal to family, friends and country if said entities are worthy of it - i.e. if they reciprocate it. I can think of plenty of reasons why someone would choose not to be loyal to family. Someone I know is gay, his father never accepted, or even respected that, during an entire lifetime, and the guy didn't even show up to his funeral. If a company shows genuine respect, compassion and, indeed, loyalty to an employee, there's no reason they couldn't be shown the same in return - even if it's ultimately for the profit of the company (if said values are expressed, the profit of the company should also positively reflect on the profit of the employee).
- motters 17y ago
  I agree. I would not encourage people to be automatically loyal to any company which they might happen to work for, unless that company has shown loyalty to the individual in return. If the only consideration is profit, then just think of working for a company purely as a business transaction and nothing more than that. Loyalty need not be part of the equation.
- gldalmaso 17y ago
  I totally agree. To ask an employee for loyalty is nothing but moral cohertion. Employess should be comitted, yes, to their work, to the quality of their work, to having good relations with team and colleagues. Where do employers get the idea that a job contract is a soul contract? Unless you are offering significant profit sharing, why expect to be normal that people simply sacrifice themselves for the sake of your company? And seduce you into believing it's nothing more than your moral obligation?!? It's a moral harassment policy! Want people to work overtime and not complain? Pay them fairly for that! Want people to stick with your company and not leave? Provide a good workplace and a deserving salary! The only ones that should have unconditional loyalty to a company are the company owners! Besides, wake up and realize that there is no longer such a thing as a carrier in a single company. At least where I live, you shouldn't expect and IT employee to stick around longer than 4 years, and most leave within 1-2 years. Stop thinking you hire loyalty. And employess, realize that your company won't be any more loyal to you when things get rough and they need to make cuts. In fact, when that time comes, they usually go for the fat paychecks of those that stuck around.
  - eru 17y ago
    > The only ones that should have unconditional loyalty to a company are the company owners! Why? They can just as well shut down the company, if they want, or sell it, or do whatever.
- j_baker 17y ago
  Sure you can be loyal to a corporation. Just like you can be loyal to your government or customers can be loyal to you. The real problem is when you're asked to put loyalty to the company above all else.
earnubs 17y ago
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.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
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 17y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what exactly do you do? Do you do consulting?
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  "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.
  - rikthevik 17y ago
    Agreed. I've found it way easier to negotiate a raise for a new position than to try to get one from my current job.
  - roc 17y ago
    > "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.
    - 17y ago
ctd 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
  - sjf 17y ago
    I'm sure it is possible find to some development job with a patchy resume. But it sounds like you are hiring for a junior position, is that really appropriate for someone with N years experience?
rit 17y ago
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.
shawndumas 17y ago
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.
leftnode 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
pw0ncakes 17y ago
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.
- hello_moto 17y ago
  I somewhat agree with your statement while I can't explain what's going on in this world we live today. There are many CEO out there that read or listen advises on how to make sure their company "lean, mean, and profitable" by laying off people or pushing them to work for more hours and pay less under whatever reason. I'm not asking the leader of companies to pay younger generations more money, at least treat us decent, provide us with trainings (how many companies do give new grad/hire trainings these days?). While I don't mind with below average pay (just not too much), I would hope a bit of compensation in the form of trainings, advancements, bonuses (bigger than 3-5%), etc.
- deleted 17y ago
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- jdminhbg 17y ago
  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?
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
billybob 17y ago
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?"
hello_moto 17y ago
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.
philk 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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 17y ago
        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.
sunir 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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!
  - sunir 17y ago
    Just make sure you leave them in a good state where someone else can pick up after you.
  - snom370 17y ago
    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 17y ago
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.
S_A_P 17y ago
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...
strlen 17y ago
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.
known 17y ago
One of my employer offered me loyalty bonus.
pilib 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.

146 points by angryasian 17y ago

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 17y ago

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.

kznewman 17y ago
In the main I agree, but despite the buzzwords if the corporation really believes and acts as if "employees are the most important asset" and it truly gets that to be profitable it needs to take care of the "knowledge workers" (whatever that means) then it may be that some companies, because of their profit motive, are worthy of some loyalty. Most companies fall short of the ideal so professionalism is more than a second best in this case.
- billybob 17y ago
  Yes - if my employer is loyal to me, I feel more inclined to be loyal to them. If they make it clear that they'll fire anyone, anytime, as soon as profits drop, then I'm happy moving on whenever I please.
davidw 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
- deleted 17y ago
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- davidmurphy 17y ago
  This is what it comes down to. Most companies treat workers with absolutely no loyalty these days. (Downsizing, anyone?) So it is absolutely wholly unfair to expect employees to treat companies with excessive loyalty in a one-sided manner, beyond the sort of basic professionalism you talk about. /nostalgic for an earlier era I am to young to have known
exit 17y ago
what makes it possible to be loyal to a country? a country is just a bureaucratic + economic entity you randomly get assigned to.
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  Many people (including me) see their country as a collective of shared history, culture and tradition they can associate themselves with. If you see your country as a 'bureaucratic + economic entity' then probably you've never lived in a foreign country. Believe me, that would completely change your perspective.
  - davidw 17y ago
    I live in a foreign country that I chose to go live in. I don't really feel any great "loyalty" to the one I'm in or the one I was born in. There are good and bad things about both. Oh, and my current country of residence, Italy, is a very bureaucratic entity;-)
  - nzmsv 17y ago
    Actually, living in another country has completely changed my perspective - the other way. I wish more people would realize just how similar we all are in the end, and how shallow and arbitrary these cultural differences really are. It's amazing how many people get a sense of superiority simply because they happened to be born in a certain spot. Think of how easy it is for politicians to exploit this feeling. How many wars started this way?
  - exit 17y ago
    > Believe me, that would completely change your perspective. i've lived in two countries other than the one i grew up in.
  - devinj 17y ago
    I lived in countries other than that of my birth for most of my life. Understandably, I think, this has given me a very different appreciation. I mean, what's a "foreign" country, anyway? Is it one different than the one you're raised in? Your parents were raised in? One that doesn't harbor the same culture as you? Where am I from? Is it the country I was born in? The country I grew up in? The country I formed my political beliefs in? That's three different answers, and there are more to choose from. So, I don't buy this "loyalty" thing. Who am I supposed to be loyal to? Why? Why can't I be loyal to an altogether different country that I like more, but have never spent much time in?
Nervetattoo 17y ago
Surely you can. Wouldn't you be loyal to your own startup if it turned into a corporation? Any way, you should be loyal to your employer while working there, but that shouldn't be mistaken for selling your soul to them. I don't see the problem with being a job hopper except it sounds really hard to jump jobs once a year or more often considering it takes about half a year to get settled into a new job. Personally I've set myself a 5 year limit as max time to work at one company before moving. This is part of my not-form-lifelong-habits program. So even if I do have my dream job I force myself to leave after 5 years. Forced perspective is good for you, you should always try to push forward and you can't do that by sitting tight in a job. I would be skeptical about hiring someone who switched jobs 6 times the last 5 years, but I'd be even more skeptical hiring someone at 30 with less than 5 jobs on their CV as that might suggest them being lazy sods who didn't have summer jobs etc.
mseebach 17y ago
You are loyal to family, friends and country if said entities are worthy of it - i.e. if they reciprocate it. I can think of plenty of reasons why someone would choose not to be loyal to family. Someone I know is gay, his father never accepted, or even respected that, during an entire lifetime, and the guy didn't even show up to his funeral. If a company shows genuine respect, compassion and, indeed, loyalty to an employee, there's no reason they couldn't be shown the same in return - even if it's ultimately for the profit of the company (if said values are expressed, the profit of the company should also positively reflect on the profit of the employee).
motters 17y ago
I agree. I would not encourage people to be automatically loyal to any company which they might happen to work for, unless that company has shown loyalty to the individual in return. If the only consideration is profit, then just think of working for a company purely as a business transaction and nothing more than that. Loyalty need not be part of the equation.
gldalmaso 17y ago
I totally agree. To ask an employee for loyalty is nothing but moral cohertion. Employess should be comitted, yes, to their work, to the quality of their work, to having good relations with team and colleagues. Where do employers get the idea that a job contract is a soul contract? Unless you are offering significant profit sharing, why expect to be normal that people simply sacrifice themselves for the sake of your company? And seduce you into believing it's nothing more than your moral obligation?!? It's a moral harassment policy! Want people to work overtime and not complain? Pay them fairly for that! Want people to stick with your company and not leave? Provide a good workplace and a deserving salary! The only ones that should have unconditional loyalty to a company are the company owners! Besides, wake up and realize that there is no longer such a thing as a carrier in a single company. At least where I live, you shouldn't expect and IT employee to stick around longer than 4 years, and most leave within 1-2 years. Stop thinking you hire loyalty. And employess, realize that your company won't be any more loyal to you when things get rough and they need to make cuts. In fact, when that time comes, they usually go for the fat paychecks of those that stuck around.
- eru 17y ago
  > The only ones that should have unconditional loyalty to a company are the company owners! Why? They can just as well shut down the company, if they want, or sell it, or do whatever.
j_baker 17y ago
Sure you can be loyal to a corporation. Just like you can be loyal to your government or customers can be loyal to you. The real problem is when you're asked to put loyalty to the company above all else.

earnubs 17y ago

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.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

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 17y ago
Just out of curiosity, what exactly do you do? Do you do consulting?
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  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 17y ago

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 17y ago
"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.
- rikthevik 17y ago
  Agreed. I've found it way easier to negotiate a raise for a new position than to try to get one from my current job.
- roc 17y ago
  > "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.
  - 17y ago

ctd 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
- sjf 17y ago
  I'm sure it is possible find to some development job with a patchy resume. But it sounds like you are hiring for a junior position, is that really appropriate for someone with N years experience?

rit 17y ago

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.

shawndumas 17y ago

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.

leftnode 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.

pw0ncakes 17y ago

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.

hello_moto 17y ago
I somewhat agree with your statement while I can't explain what's going on in this world we live today. There are many CEO out there that read or listen advises on how to make sure their company "lean, mean, and profitable" by laying off people or pushing them to work for more hours and pay less under whatever reason. I'm not asking the leader of companies to pay younger generations more money, at least treat us decent, provide us with trainings (how many companies do give new grad/hire trainings these days?). While I don't mind with below average pay (just not too much), I would hope a bit of compensation in the form of trainings, advancements, bonuses (bigger than 3-5%), etc.
deleted 17y ago
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jdminhbg 17y ago
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?
- pw0ncakes 17y ago

billybob 17y ago

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?"

hello_moto 17y ago

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.

philk 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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.

sunir 17y ago

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 17y ago
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!
- sunir 17y ago
  Just make sure you leave them in a good state where someone else can pick up after you.
- snom370 17y ago
  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 17y ago

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.

S_A_P 17y ago

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...

strlen 17y ago

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.

known 17y ago

One of my employer offered me loyalty bonus.

pilib 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.