7 ms·

It's a bit strange that this sort of job-hopping isn't a red flag to employers. You'd think managers would be reluctant to hire an employee who has jumped ship

It's a bit strange that this sort of job-hopping isn't a red flag to employers. You'd think managers would be reluctant to hire an employee who has jumped ship many times before, just as they were becoming useful.

taneq 9y ago
I think it's a bit strange that employers don't consider a fully trained employee to be worth more than a fresh recruit, and compensate them accordingly.
- chrisbennet 9y ago
  Fully trained employees are worth more to the company. They just don't want to pay for extra value unless they have to. To get new recruits, they have to. Most employees don't want to change jobs if they can help it and employers use that "static friction" to pay them less than market.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Depends on the company. Some will hand out 30%+ annual pay increases to keep people at market rates. But, many companies are happy to have high turnover in exchange for lower pay.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      The only company I know of that publicly makes this (bringing existing people up to market rate) is Netflix. Can you name other companies that actually do this?
      - ryanbrunner 9y ago
        I've worked for companies that do this, although it's not publicized so I can't point you to a press release or something. Usually a very strong indicator is to look for companies who publish salaries, either publicly or to all employees. It's almost impossible for a company to underpay people when everyone knows everyone else's salary.
      - anthuswilliams 9y ago
        I believe Adobe is known to aggressively hand out raises like this. Here in Utah, at least, it's extremely difficult to get Adobe engineers to switch jobs.
      - piggybox 9y ago
        Stitch Fix also does that, at least in the data science team.
pmoriarty 9y ago
It's more of a red flag in some industries than others. In the tech field it is quite common, though it's still viewed as a minor red flag, in my experience. Much more important are skills, experience, and team fit.
flukus 9y ago
> just as they were becoming useful. If it takes that long for a employee to become useful then the company has much bigger issues and the need to compensate for whatever it is that makes those 2 years of experience so vital.
- johan_larson 9y ago
  If a company has a large and old codebase with lots of interacting systems built with a lot of specialized tooling, it can take a while for a new arrival to get on par with the rest of the team. Two years is a lot, but six months to a year sounds very believable. Imagine trying to wrap your head around the Windows codebase or the Google ad serving stack.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
jaredklewis 9y ago
Well I'm sure all other things being equal (which they never are), managers would prefer someone with a less chaotic job history. However, employers seems to have a never ending list of wants including that prospective employees be highly educated, very experienced, self motivated, hard working, good at whiteboard coding, prolific blog post writer, conference speaker, active open source contributor, willing to accept part of compensation in equity, and so on. Companies are lucky to get somone that satisfies 2 or 3 of the above. So from that perspective, perhaps it is unsurprising "company loyalty" often doesn't factor into the hiring decision.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  It's a symptom of how hot the job market is, IMO. The traditional view is that employees had to compete to get regular raises and stay employed. It's flipped a bit, and now there's more effort that employers have to make to keep high-value employees from leaving for better pastures. Someone who job hopped five times in ten years has convinced five different employers to give them a significant pay raise to poach them. Someone with one job in ten years is likely in the "I'm just lucky to be employed" category and is less of a hotshot.
twunde 9y ago
It is a red-flag but not an automatic disqualifier. Anecdotally, this is especially true outside of the major metropolitan areas, even just in the suburbs. I worked in the NY and CT suburbs outside the NYC area and it was absolutely used, whereas in NYC it feels like it's expected that most people will leave around the 2-year mark. Realistically this becomes a bigger red flag the longer the company takes to hire and train people.
foobarian 9y ago
With how thin the job market is, any time I interview a good candidate the situation is that they have competing offers and the hiring team/our whole company is the one applying to have the candidate. In my experience, good candidates ramp up very quickly (<1 month) and having them on board for 2 years is plenty of time.
- barrkel 9y ago
  There are a lot of variables in quick ramp-up time. For development, it depends on codebase (the more mature, bespoke, convoluted, the longer the ramp-up) and developer style (I've seen copy/paste/modify specialists ramp up very quickly, but they plateau at an intermediate level and don't have a good filter on what they choose propagate in the codebase). Making bigger changes takes longer; taking leadership on a new top-level feature without breaking other parts of the app or distorting the architecture isn't going to happen in a few months for a codebase of any real size. The question is: is a developer who ramps up quickly going to be able to do that eventually?
- mikegerwitz 9y ago
  Certain places place high value on domain-specific knowledge and trained employees. I work at a wholesale insurance company (middleman); we have over a hundred individual systems, some simple, some quite complex. Some of those systems can be maintained by any programmer that comes in. Others really shouldn't be maintained by someone who doesn't have good experience in writing maintainable code. But many projects require domain-specific knowledge---and not just to specific parts of and companies within the insurance industry, but _our specific company_. For a few years, we hired less experienced candidates with the hope of training them, because the talent in Buffalo NY is hard to come by (which could also be an outreach problem, but our last three hires were from out of state). Our team's consensus is that it takes approximately two years of experience with our systems to have a good, balanced grasp on them. Because of the small team size (five at our highest, two right now), we place great value on team members who have been around long enough to know the systems, the rationale and design decisions, history, etc. This relates directly to Peter Naur's concept of Theory Building.[0] We've had the past four candidates leave in ~2, <2, <1, and ~3 years. Because of the upfront training cost and distraction from the more experienced programmers (the two that remain at the company today), and in some cases the degree of maintenance problems ("technical debt") introduced, I consider three of them to be a wash: we're no better off having hired them than we would have been not hiring them. Possibly worse off. Because we have the tendency to lose employees at around two years, I'm no longer in favor of hiring more "junior" candidates---having to train in both domain knowledge _and_ general programming is too risky and hasn't panned out well. So hopefully we can hire programmers that can immediately get into the code from a general programming perspective, but it's going to take them quite some time to really understand what the systems are all about. I've been there for over eight years, and the last programmer that remains with me has been there for six months longer than me. One of our programmers transitioned to technical director, and has been there for over ten years. My supervisor dropped programming for project management responsibilities, and he has been at the company for nearly ten. Our sysadmin has been there for over ten. We just lost an employee that was there over ten years. We're a close group. Would I be making more money job hopping? Probably, yes. My point here is that the company I work for---the team I work with---values experience with the company, and so long-term employment history is attractive. [0]: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
maxxxxx 9y ago
When I talk to my director he seems to actually dislike people who have worked under him for more than 5 years. He likes "fresh blood". If you stay around you are a loser.
- cgio 9y ago
  For how long has he stayed around? Or does he not report to anyone? Director sounds like an employee role too...
  - kurtisc 9y ago
    Director is the UK term for CEO
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      This particular guy is a middle manager. In the US typically right under VP. He has been there for around 10 years. The fact that he has stayed on for 10 years while mistrusting people who have worked for him for the same time doesn't make sense. But neither does it for managers who have nice offices to promote open office arrangements for their workers. Hypocrites are everywhere.
      - piggybox 9y ago
        LOL
  - dnh44 9y ago
    Director is a position often used in the UK in lieu of C level positions, and in SME's there is a strong correlation that the company director is also a major shareholder/founder. based on my unpublished anecdata
sverhagen 9y ago
The article carefully keeps repeating the two years... I feel this is often perceived as a bit of a magic number, after which it's okay to switch without getting yourself a bad name. One year... raising eyebrows. (I'm sure, like some other suggested, that perception may differ between industries...)
wastedhours 9y ago
Depends if there's a legitimate reason - 2 roles ago I was there for 3 1/2 years and my manager basically said to me I'd do best in my career to leave by then (loved working for her), previous job was 18 months and was doing well, but my current position came up and was something completely different that would be a fantastic development experience. However, I don't think it's a good fit, both from mine and the company's perspective - do I stick it out to ensure my resume doesn't have a half life, or would a next employer understand it was something I had to jump to, but was in everyone's best interests not to drag it out? (we're talking <5 months)

taneq 9y ago

I think it's a bit strange that employers don't consider a fully trained employee to be worth more than a fresh recruit, and compensate them accordingly.

chrisbennet 9y ago
Fully trained employees are worth more to the company. They just don't want to pay for extra value unless they have to. To get new recruits, they have to. Most employees don't want to change jobs if they can help it and employers use that "static friction" to pay them less than market.
- Retric 9y ago
  Depends on the company. Some will hand out 30%+ annual pay increases to keep people at market rates. But, many companies are happy to have high turnover in exchange for lower pay.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    The only company I know of that publicly makes this (bringing existing people up to market rate) is Netflix. Can you name other companies that actually do this?
    - ryanbrunner 9y ago
      I've worked for companies that do this, although it's not publicized so I can't point you to a press release or something. Usually a very strong indicator is to look for companies who publish salaries, either publicly or to all employees. It's almost impossible for a company to underpay people when everyone knows everyone else's salary.
    - anthuswilliams 9y ago
      I believe Adobe is known to aggressively hand out raises like this. Here in Utah, at least, it's extremely difficult to get Adobe engineers to switch jobs.
    - piggybox 9y ago
      Stitch Fix also does that, at least in the data science team.

pmoriarty 9y ago

It's more of a red flag in some industries than others. In the tech field it is quite common, though it's still viewed as a minor red flag, in my experience. Much more important are skills, experience, and team fit.

flukus 9y ago

> just as they were becoming useful. If it takes that long for a employee to become useful then the company has much bigger issues and the need to compensate for whatever it is that makes those 2 years of experience so vital.

johan_larson 9y ago
If a company has a large and old codebase with lots of interacting systems built with a lot of specialized tooling, it can take a while for a new arrival to get on par with the rest of the team. Two years is a lot, but six months to a year sounds very believable. Imagine trying to wrap your head around the Windows codebase or the Google ad serving stack.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

jaredklewis 9y ago

Well I'm sure all other things being equal (which they never are), managers would prefer someone with a less chaotic job history. However, employers seems to have a never ending list of wants including that prospective employees be highly educated, very experienced, self motivated, hard working, good at whiteboard coding, prolific blog post writer, conference speaker, active open source contributor, willing to accept part of compensation in equity, and so on. Companies are lucky to get somone that satisfies 2 or 3 of the above. So from that perspective, perhaps it is unsurprising "company loyalty" often doesn't factor into the hiring decision.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
It's a symptom of how hot the job market is, IMO. The traditional view is that employees had to compete to get regular raises and stay employed. It's flipped a bit, and now there's more effort that employers have to make to keep high-value employees from leaving for better pastures. Someone who job hopped five times in ten years has convinced five different employers to give them a significant pay raise to poach them. Someone with one job in ten years is likely in the "I'm just lucky to be employed" category and is less of a hotshot.

twunde 9y ago

It is a red-flag but not an automatic disqualifier. Anecdotally, this is especially true outside of the major metropolitan areas, even just in the suburbs. I worked in the NY and CT suburbs outside the NYC area and it was absolutely used, whereas in NYC it feels like it's expected that most people will leave around the 2-year mark. Realistically this becomes a bigger red flag the longer the company takes to hire and train people.

foobarian 9y ago

With how thin the job market is, any time I interview a good candidate the situation is that they have competing offers and the hiring team/our whole company is the one applying to have the candidate. In my experience, good candidates ramp up very quickly (<1 month) and having them on board for 2 years is plenty of time.

barrkel 9y ago
There are a lot of variables in quick ramp-up time. For development, it depends on codebase (the more mature, bespoke, convoluted, the longer the ramp-up) and developer style (I've seen copy/paste/modify specialists ramp up very quickly, but they plateau at an intermediate level and don't have a good filter on what they choose propagate in the codebase). Making bigger changes takes longer; taking leadership on a new top-level feature without breaking other parts of the app or distorting the architecture isn't going to happen in a few months for a codebase of any real size. The question is: is a developer who ramps up quickly going to be able to do that eventually?
mikegerwitz 9y ago
Certain places place high value on domain-specific knowledge and trained employees. I work at a wholesale insurance company (middleman); we have over a hundred individual systems, some simple, some quite complex. Some of those systems can be maintained by any programmer that comes in. Others really shouldn't be maintained by someone who doesn't have good experience in writing maintainable code. But many projects require domain-specific knowledge---and not just to specific parts of and companies within the insurance industry, but _our specific company_. For a few years, we hired less experienced candidates with the hope of training them, because the talent in Buffalo NY is hard to come by (which could also be an outreach problem, but our last three hires were from out of state). Our team's consensus is that it takes approximately two years of experience with our systems to have a good, balanced grasp on them. Because of the small team size (five at our highest, two right now), we place great value on team members who have been around long enough to know the systems, the rationale and design decisions, history, etc. This relates directly to Peter Naur's concept of Theory Building.[0] We've had the past four candidates leave in ~2, <2, <1, and ~3 years. Because of the upfront training cost and distraction from the more experienced programmers (the two that remain at the company today), and in some cases the degree of maintenance problems ("technical debt") introduced, I consider three of them to be a wash: we're no better off having hired them than we would have been not hiring them. Possibly worse off. Because we have the tendency to lose employees at around two years, I'm no longer in favor of hiring more "junior" candidates---having to train in both domain knowledge _and_ general programming is too risky and hasn't panned out well. So hopefully we can hire programmers that can immediately get into the code from a general programming perspective, but it's going to take them quite some time to really understand what the systems are all about. I've been there for over eight years, and the last programmer that remains with me has been there for six months longer than me. One of our programmers transitioned to technical director, and has been there for over ten years. My supervisor dropped programming for project management responsibilities, and he has been at the company for nearly ten. Our sysadmin has been there for over ten. We just lost an employee that was there over ten years. We're a close group. Would I be making more money job hopping? Probably, yes. My point here is that the company I work for---the team I work with---values experience with the company, and so long-term employment history is attractive. [0]: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

maxxxxx 9y ago

When I talk to my director he seems to actually dislike people who have worked under him for more than 5 years. He likes "fresh blood". If you stay around you are a loser.

cgio 9y ago
For how long has he stayed around? Or does he not report to anyone? Director sounds like an employee role too...
- kurtisc 9y ago
  Director is the UK term for CEO
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    This particular guy is a middle manager. In the US typically right under VP. He has been there for around 10 years. The fact that he has stayed on for 10 years while mistrusting people who have worked for him for the same time doesn't make sense. But neither does it for managers who have nice offices to promote open office arrangements for their workers. Hypocrites are everywhere.
    - piggybox 9y ago
      LOL
- dnh44 9y ago
  Director is a position often used in the UK in lieu of C level positions, and in SME's there is a strong correlation that the company director is also a major shareholder/founder. based on my unpublished anecdata

sverhagen 9y ago

The article carefully keeps repeating the two years... I feel this is often perceived as a bit of a magic number, after which it's okay to switch without getting yourself a bad name. One year... raising eyebrows. (I'm sure, like some other suggested, that perception may differ between industries...)

wastedhours 9y ago

Depends if there's a legitimate reason - 2 roles ago I was there for 3 1/2 years and my manager basically said to me I'd do best in my career to leave by then (loved working for her), previous job was 18 months and was doing well, but my current position came up and was something completely different that would be a fantastic development experience. However, I don't think it's a good fit, both from mine and the company's perspective - do I stick it out to ensure my resume doesn't have a half life, or would a next employer understand it was something I had to jump to, but was in everyone's best interests not to drag it out? (we're talking <5 months)