21 ms·

The quitting economy

274 points by acconrad 9y ago

usgroup 9y ago
This is very noticeable in London. It's a relative rarity to find a dev that's worked anywhere longer than a couple years. The simple economics of it is that until a certain salary, there is no easier way to ratchet up the pay scale then to use the negotiating leverage of having a job to get the next one on better terms. Meanwhile, the supply situation for devs is such that employers have to accept the situation. I'm not sure it's an employer led effect at all; especially given the size of the SME scene in London.
- spoonie 9y ago
  But how is it that there is always another company willing to pay more? Do companies hire devs with X years of experience without planning to pay more for X+1 years of experience?
  - usgroup 9y ago
    Not sure X years of experience matters all that much. For example, Java dev goes to employer and adds Hadoop to her experience, then applies for other jobs for 10k more ambiently for a few months. Eventually nails one and packs her bags, and so on recursively. Sometimes dev don't add anything at all and just go for more money because of change in condition. JS or mobile app dev is a great example. Nothing changed; they just became more demanded. Meanwhile, you can't match someones salary to the market every day of the week, so they leave. From the employer side London is brutal.
    - currymj 9y ago
      What do devs get paid in London on average? I always had the impression, perhaps wrong, that software engineers seem underpaid in England relative to the US, even accounting for currency and cost of living and such (which, probably London is as bad as SF on that front). (i've also gotten the impression that there's not the same level of cultural esteem for engineers and scientists and such in England, and that this might have something to do with it. also could be wrong or outdated.)
      - wastedhours 9y ago
        I've seen RoR jobs go from £35k to £60k in London (and even ones as low as £27k...). Might just be the ones recruiters have tried to pitch though.
        zimpenfish 9y ago
        "How does £35k sound?" "Like a three day week."
      - d4rti 9y ago
        You're not wrong.
      - zimpenfish 9y ago
        Contracting is reasonably good in London. You can easily get £5-600 a day if you're a (provably) senior Rails/Java/C++ and well above that with exotic financial or uberniche things. (Which is probably why more people are turning to contracting in London.)
        crdoconnor 9y ago
        Contracting in London seems to have morphed from "we want somebody for a short term project" to "for the level of experience/knowledge/skills we want this is literally the only way we can get it".
      - CalRobert 9y ago
        No personal experience, but salaries in Europe seem, on the whole, utterly pathetic compared to the US, at least looking at listings. I don't get the impression London bucks this trend. That being said, I moved to Europe and am pretty happy with where I'm at. It helped that my first job was with a company that had SF and Dublin offices, and I knew what the rate in SF was. It's public sector and Ireland, but here's an example of a job paying €28k in Dublin that would be triple that in the states. Note the use of docx... http://www.museum.ie/NationalMuseumIreland/media/Corporate-Information/2017%20ICT%20Off%20Web%20Intranet%20Administrator/Appendix-3-EO-Level-Competencies.pdf http://www.museum.ie/NationalMuseumIreland/media/Corporate-I...
    - spoonie 9y ago
      Right, so does the employer not realize that the Hadoop experi nice they require is valuable? Or are they hoping the dev doesn't know it's more valuable? It seems to me hat in cases like these thare employers are hiring and training but then not compensating employees for the new skills. Thus there is always another employer willing to value that training.
      - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        The business of course wants it for as little as possible, but pricing individual skills can be tricky unless they've done something with it you're specifically looking for. In that case, you know they can do what you want. It's difficult to know if "6 months of Hadoop XP" means more than tutorials and basic usage and if they'll be able to solve your business's problems. 10 years of experience vs. 1 year 10 times is still an issue and should affect the price of an employee, but it can be difficult to asses.
        spoonie 9y ago
        Indeed! But who is the greater fool in this case? The job-hopping employee looking for money, or the new employer willing to pay more for the job-hopper?
        FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        It's difficult to say by predicting. You'd need to know what every business would pay for your skills at any given time, plus what everyone else was paid for their skills, and the rate of false positive hires or hires that ultimately hurt the employer's bottom line (false positive hires, negative productivity devs, bullshit artists, etc.). That kind of price information just isn't available. Otherwise the market would be closer to efficiently pricing developers, matching devs with jobs, and would be more accurate with what individual skills are worth.
  - wonderwonder 9y ago
    They will pay you the range you ask for. If Joe is offered a job at 50k but he does not know the position range is 50 - 70k, he might accept it. Joe now has a job making 50k a year with the potential to earn 3% raises annually. Bob might be offered the same position, but right from the beginning he has indicated he expects to earn 67k or more, they will offer him 67k. The company will hire you for as little as they can. Which is logical for the company. Often there is a range but the employee will not know it unless they insist on asking for what they perceive they are worth. Lately I have seen a trend where people wont even ask the salary until they have interviewed because they don't want to appear rude. I just don't get it. You should provide your salary expectations prior to reaching the interview stage otherwise you are potentially wasting your time.
    - maxsilver 9y ago
      > Lately I have seen a trend where people wont even ask the salary until they have interviewed because they don't want to appear rude. I just don't get it. This cuts both ways too. If a candidate asks the salary before the interview, many companies will perceive the candidate as not caring about the work, and being "only in it for the money". And if a candidate doesn't wait until the interview to discuss money, they have very little to justify the average market-rate wage they're trying to convince the company to pay them.
      - wonderwonder 9y ago
        I hear what you are saying and agree with you. A company though for the most part is "Only in it for the money" and I can't feed my family with work satisfaction. I would caution against working for a company that has a problem with me asking for the salary range. The entire point of a job is to earn money. This is just my opinion though and is in no way a road map for others.
      - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        If a company believes I'm only in it for the money, I'm likely to think that company is using "caring about the work" as a way to reduce my salary. Salary translates to investment. Caring about the work won't grant me another 100k at retirement. The only reason to show that I care about the work and take potentially less salary is if I think the economy is going to take a turn for the worse and I need a job for 3-10 years to ride out the storm. In which case I have to take a lower salary, but at least I have a job. Remember, I can't know how much the company is able/willing to afford. And just to clarify, not caring about the work doesn't mean doing a terrible job. It means giving them what I'm paid for, but I'm not going to go the extra mile for them (overtime) because there's no incentive to do so.
- TomSawyer 9y ago
  I'm reminded of the Netflix slide deck that was making the rounds, last year. Adjusting pay, yearly, based on the market value of the employee seems like an ideal solution to this problem. If you stay at a typical company for a year you might get a 5% raise and have some seniority and relationships under your belt. This model tends to undervalue the true costs of replacing you and the likelihood that there's another company willing to pay 10%+ over your current pay.
  - usgroup 9y ago
    Well said. Also think that the cost of replacement is usually not included in decision calculations at almost any point in time. Perhaps paying N above market may actually be the cheaper thing to do.
  - sgt101 9y ago
    In fact you can pay under the market, a bit, if you treat your people like humans, develop them, stretch them and insist on a positive working environment (no rudeness, fair dos for everyone even if they look, talk or smell different). People will not switch away for minimal reward and considerable risk of being landed in a dead end with a bunch of sociopaths. Also many people realise that their current track has 5/10 years of seniority to build - and then that's your lot. The option of switching to management or to tracks like architecture or even non-functional work like finance or intellectual property is attractive to many people.
- tradesmanhelix 9y ago
  > I'm not sure it's an employer led effect at all; especially given the size of the SME scene in London. In the US at least, my experience has been that most employers would rather let a good dev walk than raise his/her salary to match the going market rate, even if said dev has copious amounts of domain knowledge, works well with the team, regularly receives positive feedback on performance reviews, and consistently ships high-quality code. This is sad to me, but I also think employees are right to vote with their feet and seek jobs elsewhere in such circumstances. Maybe the high turnover will raise some red flags and cause the employer to implement changes. If not, then these employees are smart to leave what I think will prove to be a sinking ship in the long run.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    In my experience, the executives in companies don't even consider that, the only consider the total cost of development. Whether it's a good developer or a bad one doesn't even enter their thinking because they are so far removed from it. They don't have nuanced thinking in those regards or long term planning what so ever. It's quite old fashioned. It's up to individual managers to stick their necks out, and they most likely won't. They are told to reduce costs and they do. Middle managers are trying to hold on for dear life, their future prospects are much worse than a developer in high demand. My experience is working at small, great companies that get acquired and the acquiring company usually wrecks everything. But hey, if you need justification to not stay at a company, there it is. Unfortunately for me, I'm just about capped. Contracting or building a company is the only way up from here on. Having survived the dot.bomb, I can tell you both have a lot of risk that needs to be calculated.
- nikon 9y ago
  I can't help but think contracting is becoming more popular in London. I've been doing it myself now since 2013. I've seen a couple of perm staff walk out of jobs due to petty reasons in the last year, both were <1 year into their roles. Actually trying to move into more of a consulting role going forward, but there is such a demand for contractors IMO it could be shortening the availability of good developers in London.
- pm90 9y ago
  London seems like a place that could easily attract amazing developers simply by raising salaries. The money is there...it is the fucking financial capital of the world (well maybe 2nd after NYC). If the executives at UK financial companies wouldn't artificially hold down salaries, there could probably be a lot more innovation and a much better marketplace for tech workers.
  - nfriedly 9y ago
    Yea, seriously. I've gotten multiple recruiter spam emails that offer the equivalent less than half of my current salary for an engineering job in London. No, thanks.
  - jazzyk 9y ago
    Has it occurred to you that they hold down salaries, because they can? Apparently there are many people willing to work for that money. The word "market" assumes that each party can walk away from the deal. But if you are the sole bread-winner and jobless, you are not in a position to walk away.
    - pm90 9y ago
      > Has it occurred to you that they hold down salaries, because they can? Can we please have a conversation without the snark? Thank you. > Apparently there are many people willing to work for that money. I understand that they probably do find workers willing to work that wage. But what I'm stating is: they can have much more, a thriving hub of tech innovation much like SV, if they were to pay more, and attract talent from around the world, like SV does today. That talent and ecosystem would probably help them a lot more overall.
      - jazzyk 9y ago
        There is more to creating "another SV" than just paying more, and it is quite complex and not precisely measurable. If you are interested, The Economist had a cover story on this a couple of years ago, explaining it much better than I ever could.
treyfitty 9y ago
tl;dr: Our capitalistic economy, which incentivized the notion of "maximizing shareholder returns," created an environment in which Companies who are efficient in hiring the right amount of disposable assets. Because of this, employees better be ready to quit when they sense better pastures elsewhere. It was a good read, and a reminder that we are all subservient to the Shareholders (directly or indirectly). The companies of the previous generation had 3 pillars that needed to be strong: Sense of Customer, Employee Satisfaction, Shareholder support. All the attention is now shifted in winning Shareholder support. I wish we could abandon this cargo cult mentality that shareholders are the utmost important stakeholders of a company. It's already been discussed that maximizing shareholder value is meaningless: https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-false-premise-of-the-shareholder-value-debate https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-false-premise-of-the-shareholder...
- haburka 9y ago
  The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders. The shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the company. Additionally, not all companies serve greedy shareholders. Believe it or not, shareholders are people too who have multi faceted interests besides making money.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    >The shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the company. They don't actually, see: Consider first Friedman’s erroneous belief that shareholders “own” corporations. Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2311&context=facpub http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... [pdf] >The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders. But this is relatively easy! Instead of top level management being rewarded for stock price only, they should also be rewarded for other metrics, like customer satisfaction or how much they lowered the spread between median and mean wages. Hell, we could even allow it to be determined only by share price, but only the share price on a long time horizon, no sales within five years.
pmontra 9y ago
I've been self employed since 2006. In a way, consultants are the greatest job quitters around and the most flexible. I had so many customers/jobs in these 11 years. I didn't even have to quit and they didn't have to fire me. About one of the points of the post, companies often chose the fashionable tools of the year because of buzzwording, ease of recruiting and because they build the CVs of managers too. Would you manage either a bunch of VB or Elixir developers today? So I'm working on Python and Elixir now, plus a Ruby pet project waiting for less busy times.
- deleted 9y ago
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mathattack 9y ago
It can be difficult to hire in this environment. I've had 3 employees quit less than 3 months into new full-time positions. My first inclination is to ask, "What are we doing wrong?" but the more I look around it seems like a common industry problem. Perhaps it's rational behavior - as the article highlights, companies now view people as disposable. There's loyalty to a manager, but not a company. (You always want a good reference)
- wonderwonder 9y ago
  Often in the current market you don't even need a reference at all. Many companies refuse to provide any reference at all besides confirming an employees starting and ending dates to a prospective employer. This is I am sure to reduce the risk of litigation thus increasing shareholder value.
- isuckatcoding 9y ago
  Only time I think one would be loyal to the company is if they own a significant stake in it (which is usually the founding execs). Or maybe if the company has done something amazing like pay for all your college / masters tuition...
- CalRobert 9y ago
  Maybe you're not paying enough?
- aidenn0 9y ago
  1-2 years is business as usual; multiple employees quitting in less than 3 months means you're doing something wrong.
- volune 9y ago
  how many of those that left are going to be better compensated at their new positions?
deleted 9y ago
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diego_moita 9y ago
Again, here's HN with a Silicon Valley bias. This is not an unavoidable trend and is not global. Japan's work market isn't exactly like this. Germany's Mittelstands are eating the world precisely by buckling this trend. Northern Italy (around Milan) has an artisan industry that thrives on skilled artisans working for small cottage industries, etc. If you want workers skilled in a very niche and crucial technology then you desperately need to invent strategies to avoid this. This is particularly true to technologies that rely in manual work or manipulating precision machines such as mechanics, clothing, specialty food (e.g: fine cheeses and wines), etc. A better discussion are the side effects of becoming an economy that lost manufacturing skills, such as Silicon Valley and Great Britain.
- gumby 9y ago
  > Again, here's HN with a Silicon Valley bias. It's explicitly an article about the microeconomic impact of neoliberalism, so discusses places where that holds particular sway such as, as you mention, USA and U.K. You are correct that it is less appropriate to a place such as Germany where Ordoliberalismus is a more popular model. But the article doesn't pretend to discuss this.
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  > manual work or manipulating precision machines such as mechanics, clothing, specialty food (e.g: fine cheeses and wines), etc. computers count in your list of precision machines, right?
  - diego_moita 9y ago
    The key issue is how niche, rare and unreplaceable the skill is. If your skill is MS-Office then you're not niche and you're easy to replace. If your skill is Maya, Autocad or Oracle then you are a little harder to replace and you can see more stable jobs.
    - santaclaus 9y ago
      > If your skill is Maya, Autocad or Oracle Maybe not Oracle, but most gigs related to Maya were shipped off to Canada yeas ago.
BjoernKW 9y ago
"[...] thinking of themselves as the CEO of Me, Inc; and to survive in the neoliberal world of work, the CEO of Me, Inc must be a quitter." I fail to see how that's a bad thing. I've never quite understood this notion of tying your fate, your welfare and your livelihood to a single company. By not thinking of yourself as the CEO of Me Inc. you ultimately become a commodity for employers to do with as they please. At the very least there will be a power differential where the employer will always gain the upper hand in negotiations. Seeing and marketing yourself as a service provider in a market economy instead will allow you to focus on creating value in lieu of trading time for money. This can be beneficial to both parties. This whole idea of using 'time spent' as a surrogate measure for 'value created' is a large contributing factor to waste in modern economies.
- gumby 9y ago
  The article doesn't condem this per se, simply discusses the negative consequences for companies and people working in them (look at the Java/C++ case). I don't think it's safe to assume that the big company will take care of you forever but it's equally disastrous that the metrics of value have become so one sided.
- michaelt 9y ago
  I fail to see how that's a bad thing. Quitting itself isn't bad, but shorter job tenures and reduced job security may have second-order effects. For example, economic downturns will cause faster rises in unemployment, leading to faster drops in consumer spending. And employers are going to see lower returns from investing in training - meaning colleges might need even more focus on applied skills. Hell, it might even limit the complexity of projects our society is capable of delivering - we might be less able to successfully deliver projects that take longer than a year or two.
  - LolWolf 9y ago
    > Hell, it might even limit the complexity of projects our society is capable of delivering - we might be less able to successfully deliver projects that take longer than a year or two. I guess that's somewhat true. But I feel that for companies handling more complex topics (not just the new 'AI deep learning on big data with hadoop on rails in the cloud' startup), experts are hired with the understanding that both the work is interesting and it would be a long-term project with long-term benefits. This is all, of course, without counting academia as possibly the ultimate example of long-term hiring with high-risk, high-reward returns.
sauronlord 9y ago
I'm always ready to quit any position in about 5 seconds. That is the value and importance of not having debt. A mortgage is a noose around your neck. Unless that mortgage is for a rental property that earns more than PITI (principle, interest, taxes, insurance) then you're enslaved. Make sure your first home is at least a triplex or fourplex. There's nothing like the feeling of knowing you will not be homeless and starve if you quit your job or get fired.
dalbasal 9y ago
I really think trying to reason about labour markets using pure theory in a Hayek-Friedman-esque way is a dead end. It's the 2nd time in two days I made the recommendation, but throwing Ronald Coase into the Neoliberal canon would help a lot. He was a "chicago school" academic from the same intellectual family, so it shouldn't be too much of a culture shock. He wan't like "progressives" in the "evidence based" sense but he also objected to first principles theory like Friedman. Instead, he tried to find persistent phenomenon and theorized about why they exist.There was always a link to the real world. Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever. IRL, labour markets are obviously very different than most other markets. It's inflexible. People stay in jobs a long time and most employers actively try to lower their average turnover. Why? If flexibility is so wonderfully efficient, why do almost all companies have such a big inflexible workforce? Why is the market for labour so different in practice than the market for oral hygiene products and services. Why isn't Wall street staffed by day labourers or SV products built by quarterly contractors? You have to look past pure theory to answer these questions. I think you probably have to look beyond economics, or at least to its fringes (like behavioral economics).
- ttoinou 9y ago
  Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever. Proof needed. Have you ever read Hayek or Friedman you're talking about ?
  - DonbunEf7 9y ago
    Go to your whiteboard and draw supply-and-demand curves for a couple derpy markets of widgets and other goods. Then, draw one for labor. Note how the curves are reversed; if you draw it "backwards", then it goes back to behaving like a normal market. Now, try adding employment policies, like minimum wages, to the market; what happens to the curves?
    - CWuestefeld 9y ago
wyc 9y ago
The most recent resource I've read on this was The Alliance by Reid Hoffman. In it, he postulates that both employees and employers are lying through their teeth: employers tell employees about the benefits, investment in its people, and family-feel. Employees say they want to be lifers. This never happens. Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as paid masters' programs. To make everyone better off, Hoffman suggests that we should introduce timeboxed contracts called "tours of duty" that explicitly state the true benefits for either party and the duration of the contract. I really am not a fan of misappropriation of military terms, but I guess it gets the point across. For example, maybe a marketer wants to start a company, but an existing company needs a senior marketer to strategize and execute the plan for its next segment. The company could give the marketer opportunities to meet funding sources and receive education about company building, while the marketer can whole-heartedly deliver on agreed objectives for the time period of two years. It's an idea that seems to straddle between W2 and 1099, as many of the "gig economy" jobs seem to do. Some further definition here may be welcome.
- Jdam 9y ago
  I'm a "young folk" who worked at a company that implemented his Tour of Duty. However, my "tour supervision" was so incredibly bad, I was way better off jumping ship after not even 11 months.
- sidlls 9y ago
  > Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as paid masters' programs. I'd have gladly stayed at my third job for much longer than the ~21 months I did had there been training, retirement, reasonable pay increases, and career development offered. The same for my forth job. Some number of jobs later and my current one is also my longest tenure to date. Not coincidentally I have had and continue to have a clear path of career development, non-trivial pay increases and bonuses that aren't tiny. I've given up on employer-provided proper retirement plans and education/training. "Firm hopping" exists, in my opinion, precisely because companies tend to either not recognize the role they must play in supporting long term tenures or else simply don't value them enough to allocate resources to the support.
zeveb 9y ago
I think it's important to note the negatives of the previous way of working. In the old days, pay was less (because the company was responsible for one's pension, and often for many benefits — e.g. corporate vacations were once a thing), and if the company did fail then one was left with nothing. Advancement could be very slow. One was working according to the whims of a slow-to-change set of central managers, who were no better at allocating resources than was the Politburo. Since one's colleagues were much the same for one's career, one youthful slip-up could have lasting consequences. One didn't have as much flexibility to live & work where one would have wished. There were benefits to this way of working, of course: one could more-or-less just turn up, do one's job and life would go on. But it didn't give one as many opportunities to excel. Our modern way is more dynamic and can be just as or even more secure, provided one has the discipline to save, invest & insure.
- Qub3d 9y ago
  > In the old days, pay was less How can you suggest this? When adjusted for inflation, wages have remained constant or decreased in purchasing power, unless you happen to be in the top 5% of earners[0]. >Advancement could be very slow As opposed to today's "non-existent"? The article we're discussing is all about how people hop jobs precisely because internal advancement is becoming a rare thing. [0]:https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/data/44/440c34f52d3d1d344a1cca6b755557ae.png https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/dat...
  - bretchet 9y ago
    I'm about to hop after being at my current company for almost 3 years. I feel I've shown my ability to be a lead engineer, but there's no room in my department for a new lead. I've also expressed the desire to manage, but talks with my manager about this have dead-ended. We are getting a new manager in my team's chain, but I was told they would be coming from outside the company. The sad part is our current lead is bad, really bad. He won't be moved or dismissed either. So despite leading several successful projects, I'll be stuck at senior. So, fuck it, I'm moving on.
- s73ver 9y ago
ThomPete 9y ago
Firm hopping happens because hierarchy hopping within an organization get's obstructed. Sooner or later you can't get further up because someone has the position you want and you start looking for opportunities that allow you to move up.
- mertd 9y ago
  That reminds me of frequent lane switching in traffic congestion. Unless the lane next to you is moving faster because of a fundamental reason (early stage unicorn), you'll get stuck again 100 feet down the road.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Exactly
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FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
One of the serendipitious consequences for the "quitting economy" in my experience is that I have gained experience working in a number of diverse industries such as finance, insurance, biotech, entertainment and gaming, hospitality, etc. giving me first hand insight into how such sectors work. This has not only increased my ability to apply novel solutions when new problems approached, it has informed and broadened my world view in seeing how the pieces of society and the economy fit together for professional and personal benefit. Does anyone else feel this way?
- wastedhours 9y ago
  Yep - one of the things I recommend people to do when mentoring them is to read a sh*t load about other industries (I still maintain that buying random magazines is a fantastic way for people to learn) - those novel approaches will work wonders when creating solutions. If you can sell an employer on the benefits of diverse experience, it can reap wonders.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Learning from magazines is definitely a great way to ease yourself into learning about a new subject. It's worked out very well for me. The only other approach I find that works as well as a starting point is subject-focused online forums. For example, if I want to learn about creating an electric car, no magazines that I know of, but there is a forum covering this subject: http://www.diyelectriccar.com/ http://www.diyelectriccar.com/ Just reading through the content gives a good feel for common issues and solutions.
- bretchet 9y ago
  I kind of feel that this doesn't happen as much for engineering positions, unless you're moving to a consultancy. However, consultancies are a different beast. I've worked in a few different industries myself, and I feel it gives me a broader view of things. Regardless, most of the engineering orgs I've been in have a heavy NIH mentality. They don't really care what you did at other companies. I've often been met with resistance when I suggest techniques or particular stacks that I've used successfully at other companies. So your experience is often dismissed and it can create a good deal of frustration. I do have friends outside of engineering that have used this to their benefit. One friend had a good amount of experience with merging multinational orgs from an HR (benefits, compliance, etc) perspective. He was hired by Facebook for this exact reason and got a handsome raise and more substantial benefits. A broad experience might be good for soft skills/procedures, but I have yet to experience that in engineering.
mcguire 9y ago
I have a question about the term 'neolibral'. I seem to have missed when it became common. Further, it seems identical to what we called neoconservative back in the 1990s: free market economics, very limited government, Hayak, etc. Is William F. Buckley a neolibral? Ronald Reagan?
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  There is a lot of overlap between people with neoconservative views and people with neoliberal views. Neoliberalism is purely an economic position while neoconservatism is primarily focused on foreign policy. Reagan is definitely a neoliberal.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Further, it seems identical to what we called neoconservative back in the 1990s: free market economics, very limited government, Hayao, etc. Neoconservatism is foreign policy school which embodies a particular attitude toward the use of US military and diplomatic power. It incorporates and aims to spread basically neoliberal economic principles and systems, but it's not the same thing as neoliberalism in the same way that support for Soviet-style Communism as an economic system and support for the Soviet Union vigorously using its military and diplomatic power to spread Soviet-style Communism globally are distinct views.
fierarul 9y ago
I've quit only once, from the mega-corp, in order to start freelancing. I've never quit from a customer project. And oddly, I've worked for very few customer for years and years. Controlling and understanding the entire cash-flow really helped. My other IT friends did job-hop while young but as they settled down, they started staying longer. After 30 it's basically smooth sailing. So, I don't see a quitting economy. It's phase in young adults.
- ell0ell0 9y ago
  I dunno i'm 35, own a home and have a kid and the longest I've ever worked anywhere is my current job at 2.5 years. I'm only sticking it out here to get a bit more vested and then I'm taking my shares and going on to the next thing as always. Especially because each time I change jobs I end up with a close to a 20% raise on average...
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I'm 34, married, have a toddler, and have definitely stopped hopping (used to be at a gig no more than 2-3 years each). My last gig was a startup, and it's my last startup. I'm at an enterprise now that pays a bit less than double what I made at my last gig, no more than 40 hours a week, no on call, and they treat their employees very well.
deedubaya 9y ago
401k, bonus, sabbatical, profit sharing, "sitting the bench", annual raise, stipends. These are words and phrases most younger workers don't even know the meaning of. Employers have been extracting maximum value out of employees with little investment in those employees in return. It's no wonder high turn over is so common place.
jdauriemma 9y ago
I am hoping that studies emerge that positively correlate a firm's mean employee satisfaction / tenure with long-term financial health. This was conventional wisdom for a while but as far as I can tell, data models just aren't sophisticated enough to prove it out. Yet.
g9yuayon 9y ago
Changing jobs every two years is not necessarily a good strategy for techies who want to gain deep experience. When joining a new company, it will take time for one to become productive by learning the dynamics of the company as well as the unique business and technical challenges. And then it will take time for the person to learn something deep by building a truly great product.
Anatidae 9y ago
There is a reality that lots of companies look at their employees as the same as when they hired them. Meaning, a junior person has a hard time shaking that "junior" title, but can move to a new company and start fresh. In addition, it is shocking how often companies don't promote from within, but offer higher level jobs to outsiders "experts". Then you have the situation where your company just isn't growing. They can't afford to give you raises or have positions you can move into. Again, for growth you have to move on. Like many others said, the biggest reason employees don't stick around is that the current corporate culture views employees as expendable resources they would rather not have to have. Shareholders come first, at all costs - even to the internal health of the company.
dajohnson89 9y ago
Every company I've ever worked for nickels and dimes my pay. If I didn't have to fight for a market/above-market salary, good benefits, and regular raises commensurate with what I'm adding to the company with my increased tenure and effectiveness, I'd gladly stay. But it never works out that way. It's painfully simple -- you get what you pay for.
candles12345 9y ago
Couldn't we just drop the application bullshit? Didn't they do without this in the old days?
ntrepid8 9y ago
I've had a few sales jobs where I was employed full-time (w2 not 1099) but also had an employment agreement with a defined term. Most often the term was 1 to 3 years, and if you were going to be let go it would happen when the term was over. They just would not renew your contract. You could still be fired "for cause" but that almost never happened. The employee would almost have to commit a crime to be terminated early. Of course you could always quit during the term if you wanted, but that meant you would have to pay back the signing bonus received when the contract was signed :) I really did not mind this structure, but it seems like it's confined to specific industries and outside of those almost no one does it. For example, I've never seen a software dev job with this sort of structure.
seanmceligot 9y ago
This quitting is completely forced in government work. Every few years the project will be turned over to an entire new group of programmers and system admins at a lower price. They often spend years trying to figure out how the code and configuration works and learn the business rules. It's sad to watch.
ilaksh 9y ago
I have a theory that part of this is related to shrinking real economies. People use less energy, buy less stuff, etc. The real economy shrinks. Money has less utility. Business lags. Fewer employers can afford to pay competitively. I think that the economic system assumes constant growth, and doesn't have a way to deal with the sustainable consumption rates that we are now trying to adjust to.

274 points by acconrad 9y ago

This is very noticeable in London. It's a relative rarity to find a dev that's worked anywhere longer than a couple years. The simple economics of it is that until a certain salary, there is no easier way to ratchet up the pay scale then to use the negotiating leverage of having a job to get the next one on better terms. Meanwhile, the supply situation for devs is such that employers have to accept the situation. I'm not sure it's an employer led effect at all; especially given the size of the SME scene in London.

spoonie 9y ago
But how is it that there is always another company willing to pay more? Do companies hire devs with X years of experience without planning to pay more for X+1 years of experience?
- usgroup 9y ago
  Not sure X years of experience matters all that much. For example, Java dev goes to employer and adds Hadoop to her experience, then applies for other jobs for 10k more ambiently for a few months. Eventually nails one and packs her bags, and so on recursively. Sometimes dev don't add anything at all and just go for more money because of change in condition. JS or mobile app dev is a great example. Nothing changed; they just became more demanded. Meanwhile, you can't match someones salary to the market every day of the week, so they leave. From the employer side London is brutal.
  - currymj 9y ago
    What do devs get paid in London on average? I always had the impression, perhaps wrong, that software engineers seem underpaid in England relative to the US, even accounting for currency and cost of living and such (which, probably London is as bad as SF on that front). (i've also gotten the impression that there's not the same level of cultural esteem for engineers and scientists and such in England, and that this might have something to do with it. also could be wrong or outdated.)
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      I've seen RoR jobs go from £35k to £60k in London (and even ones as low as £27k...). Might just be the ones recruiters have tried to pitch though.
      - zimpenfish 9y ago
        "How does £35k sound?" "Like a three day week."
    - d4rti 9y ago
      You're not wrong.
    - zimpenfish 9y ago
      Contracting is reasonably good in London. You can easily get £5-600 a day if you're a (provably) senior Rails/Java/C++ and well above that with exotic financial or uberniche things. (Which is probably why more people are turning to contracting in London.)
      - crdoconnor 9y ago
        Contracting in London seems to have morphed from "we want somebody for a short term project" to "for the level of experience/knowledge/skills we want this is literally the only way we can get it".
    - CalRobert 9y ago
      No personal experience, but salaries in Europe seem, on the whole, utterly pathetic compared to the US, at least looking at listings. I don't get the impression London bucks this trend. That being said, I moved to Europe and am pretty happy with where I'm at. It helped that my first job was with a company that had SF and Dublin offices, and I knew what the rate in SF was. It's public sector and Ireland, but here's an example of a job paying €28k in Dublin that would be triple that in the states. Note the use of docx... http://www.museum.ie/NationalMuseumIreland/media/Corporate-Information/2017%20ICT%20Off%20Web%20Intranet%20Administrator/Appendix-3-EO-Level-Competencies.pdf http://www.museum.ie/NationalMuseumIreland/media/Corporate-I...
  - spoonie 9y ago
    Right, so does the employer not realize that the Hadoop experi nice they require is valuable? Or are they hoping the dev doesn't know it's more valuable? It seems to me hat in cases like these thare employers are hiring and training but then not compensating employees for the new skills. Thus there is always another employer willing to value that training.
    - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
      The business of course wants it for as little as possible, but pricing individual skills can be tricky unless they've done something with it you're specifically looking for. In that case, you know they can do what you want. It's difficult to know if "6 months of Hadoop XP" means more than tutorials and basic usage and if they'll be able to solve your business's problems. 10 years of experience vs. 1 year 10 times is still an issue and should affect the price of an employee, but it can be difficult to asses.
      - spoonie 9y ago
        Indeed! But who is the greater fool in this case? The job-hopping employee looking for money, or the new employer willing to pay more for the job-hopper?
        FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        It's difficult to say by predicting. You'd need to know what every business would pay for your skills at any given time, plus what everyone else was paid for their skills, and the rate of false positive hires or hires that ultimately hurt the employer's bottom line (false positive hires, negative productivity devs, bullshit artists, etc.). That kind of price information just isn't available. Otherwise the market would be closer to efficiently pricing developers, matching devs with jobs, and would be more accurate with what individual skills are worth.
- wonderwonder 9y ago
  They will pay you the range you ask for. If Joe is offered a job at 50k but he does not know the position range is 50 - 70k, he might accept it. Joe now has a job making 50k a year with the potential to earn 3% raises annually. Bob might be offered the same position, but right from the beginning he has indicated he expects to earn 67k or more, they will offer him 67k. The company will hire you for as little as they can. Which is logical for the company. Often there is a range but the employee will not know it unless they insist on asking for what they perceive they are worth. Lately I have seen a trend where people wont even ask the salary until they have interviewed because they don't want to appear rude. I just don't get it. You should provide your salary expectations prior to reaching the interview stage otherwise you are potentially wasting your time.
  - maxsilver 9y ago
    > Lately I have seen a trend where people wont even ask the salary until they have interviewed because they don't want to appear rude. I just don't get it. This cuts both ways too. If a candidate asks the salary before the interview, many companies will perceive the candidate as not caring about the work, and being "only in it for the money". And if a candidate doesn't wait until the interview to discuss money, they have very little to justify the average market-rate wage they're trying to convince the company to pay them.
    - wonderwonder 9y ago
      I hear what you are saying and agree with you. A company though for the most part is "Only in it for the money" and I can't feed my family with work satisfaction. I would caution against working for a company that has a problem with me asking for the salary range. The entire point of a job is to earn money. This is just my opinion though and is in no way a road map for others.
    - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
      If a company believes I'm only in it for the money, I'm likely to think that company is using "caring about the work" as a way to reduce my salary. Salary translates to investment. Caring about the work won't grant me another 100k at retirement. The only reason to show that I care about the work and take potentially less salary is if I think the economy is going to take a turn for the worse and I need a job for 3-10 years to ride out the storm. In which case I have to take a lower salary, but at least I have a job. Remember, I can't know how much the company is able/willing to afford. And just to clarify, not caring about the work doesn't mean doing a terrible job. It means giving them what I'm paid for, but I'm not going to go the extra mile for them (overtime) because there's no incentive to do so.
TomSawyer 9y ago
I'm reminded of the Netflix slide deck that was making the rounds, last year. Adjusting pay, yearly, based on the market value of the employee seems like an ideal solution to this problem. If you stay at a typical company for a year you might get a 5% raise and have some seniority and relationships under your belt. This model tends to undervalue the true costs of replacing you and the likelihood that there's another company willing to pay 10%+ over your current pay.
- usgroup 9y ago
  Well said. Also think that the cost of replacement is usually not included in decision calculations at almost any point in time. Perhaps paying N above market may actually be the cheaper thing to do.
- sgt101 9y ago
  In fact you can pay under the market, a bit, if you treat your people like humans, develop them, stretch them and insist on a positive working environment (no rudeness, fair dos for everyone even if they look, talk or smell different). People will not switch away for minimal reward and considerable risk of being landed in a dead end with a bunch of sociopaths. Also many people realise that their current track has 5/10 years of seniority to build - and then that's your lot. The option of switching to management or to tracks like architecture or even non-functional work like finance or intellectual property is attractive to many people.
tradesmanhelix 9y ago
> I'm not sure it's an employer led effect at all; especially given the size of the SME scene in London. In the US at least, my experience has been that most employers would rather let a good dev walk than raise his/her salary to match the going market rate, even if said dev has copious amounts of domain knowledge, works well with the team, regularly receives positive feedback on performance reviews, and consistently ships high-quality code. This is sad to me, but I also think employees are right to vote with their feet and seek jobs elsewhere in such circumstances. Maybe the high turnover will raise some red flags and cause the employer to implement changes. If not, then these employees are smart to leave what I think will prove to be a sinking ship in the long run.
- Clubber 9y ago
  In my experience, the executives in companies don't even consider that, the only consider the total cost of development. Whether it's a good developer or a bad one doesn't even enter their thinking because they are so far removed from it. They don't have nuanced thinking in those regards or long term planning what so ever. It's quite old fashioned. It's up to individual managers to stick their necks out, and they most likely won't. They are told to reduce costs and they do. Middle managers are trying to hold on for dear life, their future prospects are much worse than a developer in high demand. My experience is working at small, great companies that get acquired and the acquiring company usually wrecks everything. But hey, if you need justification to not stay at a company, there it is. Unfortunately for me, I'm just about capped. Contracting or building a company is the only way up from here on. Having survived the dot.bomb, I can tell you both have a lot of risk that needs to be calculated.
nikon 9y ago
I can't help but think contracting is becoming more popular in London. I've been doing it myself now since 2013. I've seen a couple of perm staff walk out of jobs due to petty reasons in the last year, both were <1 year into their roles. Actually trying to move into more of a consulting role going forward, but there is such a demand for contractors IMO it could be shortening the availability of good developers in London.
pm90 9y ago
London seems like a place that could easily attract amazing developers simply by raising salaries. The money is there...it is the fucking financial capital of the world (well maybe 2nd after NYC). If the executives at UK financial companies wouldn't artificially hold down salaries, there could probably be a lot more innovation and a much better marketplace for tech workers.
- nfriedly 9y ago
  Yea, seriously. I've gotten multiple recruiter spam emails that offer the equivalent less than half of my current salary for an engineering job in London. No, thanks.
- jazzyk 9y ago
  Has it occurred to you that they hold down salaries, because they can? Apparently there are many people willing to work for that money. The word "market" assumes that each party can walk away from the deal. But if you are the sole bread-winner and jobless, you are not in a position to walk away.
  - pm90 9y ago
    > Has it occurred to you that they hold down salaries, because they can? Can we please have a conversation without the snark? Thank you. > Apparently there are many people willing to work for that money. I understand that they probably do find workers willing to work that wage. But what I'm stating is: they can have much more, a thriving hub of tech innovation much like SV, if they were to pay more, and attract talent from around the world, like SV does today. That talent and ecosystem would probably help them a lot more overall.
    - jazzyk 9y ago
      There is more to creating "another SV" than just paying more, and it is quite complex and not precisely measurable. If you are interested, The Economist had a cover story on this a couple of years ago, explaining it much better than I ever could.

treyfitty 9y ago

tl;dr: Our capitalistic economy, which incentivized the notion of "maximizing shareholder returns," created an environment in which Companies who are efficient in hiring the right amount of disposable assets. Because of this, employees better be ready to quit when they sense better pastures elsewhere. It was a good read, and a reminder that we are all subservient to the Shareholders (directly or indirectly). The companies of the previous generation had 3 pillars that needed to be strong: Sense of Customer, Employee Satisfaction, Shareholder support. All the attention is now shifted in winning Shareholder support. I wish we could abandon this cargo cult mentality that shareholders are the utmost important stakeholders of a company. It's already been discussed that maximizing shareholder value is meaningless: https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-false-premise-of-the-shareholder-value-debate https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-false-premise-of-the-shareholder...

haburka 9y ago
The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders. The shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the company. Additionally, not all companies serve greedy shareholders. Believe it or not, shareholders are people too who have multi faceted interests besides making money.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  >The shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the company. They don't actually, see: Consider first Friedman’s erroneous belief that shareholders “own” corporations. Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2311&context=facpub http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... [pdf] >The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders. But this is relatively easy! Instead of top level management being rewarded for stock price only, they should also be rewarded for other metrics, like customer satisfaction or how much they lowered the spread between median and mean wages. Hell, we could even allow it to be determined only by share price, but only the share price on a long time horizon, no sales within five years.

pmontra 9y ago

I've been self employed since 2006. In a way, consultants are the greatest job quitters around and the most flexible. I had so many customers/jobs in these 11 years. I didn't even have to quit and they didn't have to fire me. About one of the points of the post, companies often chose the fashionable tools of the year because of buzzwording, ease of recruiting and because they build the CVs of managers too. Would you manage either a bunch of VB or Elixir developers today? So I'm working on Python and Elixir now, plus a Ruby pet project waiting for less busy times.

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mathattack 9y ago

It can be difficult to hire in this environment. I've had 3 employees quit less than 3 months into new full-time positions. My first inclination is to ask, "What are we doing wrong?" but the more I look around it seems like a common industry problem. Perhaps it's rational behavior - as the article highlights, companies now view people as disposable. There's loyalty to a manager, but not a company. (You always want a good reference)

wonderwonder 9y ago
Often in the current market you don't even need a reference at all. Many companies refuse to provide any reference at all besides confirming an employees starting and ending dates to a prospective employer. This is I am sure to reduce the risk of litigation thus increasing shareholder value.
isuckatcoding 9y ago
Only time I think one would be loyal to the company is if they own a significant stake in it (which is usually the founding execs). Or maybe if the company has done something amazing like pay for all your college / masters tuition...
CalRobert 9y ago
Maybe you're not paying enough?
aidenn0 9y ago
1-2 years is business as usual; multiple employees quitting in less than 3 months means you're doing something wrong.
volune 9y ago
how many of those that left are going to be better compensated at their new positions?

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diego_moita 9y ago

Again, here's HN with a Silicon Valley bias. This is not an unavoidable trend and is not global. Japan's work market isn't exactly like this. Germany's Mittelstands are eating the world precisely by buckling this trend. Northern Italy (around Milan) has an artisan industry that thrives on skilled artisans working for small cottage industries, etc. If you want workers skilled in a very niche and crucial technology then you desperately need to invent strategies to avoid this. This is particularly true to technologies that rely in manual work or manipulating precision machines such as mechanics, clothing, specialty food (e.g: fine cheeses and wines), etc. A better discussion are the side effects of becoming an economy that lost manufacturing skills, such as Silicon Valley and Great Britain.

gumby 9y ago
> Again, here's HN with a Silicon Valley bias. It's explicitly an article about the microeconomic impact of neoliberalism, so discusses places where that holds particular sway such as, as you mention, USA and U.K. You are correct that it is less appropriate to a place such as Germany where Ordoliberalismus is a more popular model. But the article doesn't pretend to discuss this.
mr_spothawk 9y ago
> manual work or manipulating precision machines such as mechanics, clothing, specialty food (e.g: fine cheeses and wines), etc. computers count in your list of precision machines, right?
- diego_moita 9y ago
  The key issue is how niche, rare and unreplaceable the skill is. If your skill is MS-Office then you're not niche and you're easy to replace. If your skill is Maya, Autocad or Oracle then you are a little harder to replace and you can see more stable jobs.
  - santaclaus 9y ago
    > If your skill is Maya, Autocad or Oracle Maybe not Oracle, but most gigs related to Maya were shipped off to Canada yeas ago.

BjoernKW 9y ago

"[...] thinking of themselves as the CEO of Me, Inc; and to survive in the neoliberal world of work, the CEO of Me, Inc must be a quitter." I fail to see how that's a bad thing. I've never quite understood this notion of tying your fate, your welfare and your livelihood to a single company. By not thinking of yourself as the CEO of Me Inc. you ultimately become a commodity for employers to do with as they please. At the very least there will be a power differential where the employer will always gain the upper hand in negotiations. Seeing and marketing yourself as a service provider in a market economy instead will allow you to focus on creating value in lieu of trading time for money. This can be beneficial to both parties. This whole idea of using 'time spent' as a surrogate measure for 'value created' is a large contributing factor to waste in modern economies.

gumby 9y ago
The article doesn't condem this per se, simply discusses the negative consequences for companies and people working in them (look at the Java/C++ case). I don't think it's safe to assume that the big company will take care of you forever but it's equally disastrous that the metrics of value have become so one sided.
michaelt 9y ago
I fail to see how that's a bad thing. Quitting itself isn't bad, but shorter job tenures and reduced job security may have second-order effects. For example, economic downturns will cause faster rises in unemployment, leading to faster drops in consumer spending. And employers are going to see lower returns from investing in training - meaning colleges might need even more focus on applied skills. Hell, it might even limit the complexity of projects our society is capable of delivering - we might be less able to successfully deliver projects that take longer than a year or two.
- LolWolf 9y ago
  > Hell, it might even limit the complexity of projects our society is capable of delivering - we might be less able to successfully deliver projects that take longer than a year or two. I guess that's somewhat true. But I feel that for companies handling more complex topics (not just the new 'AI deep learning on big data with hadoop on rails in the cloud' startup), experts are hired with the understanding that both the work is interesting and it would be a long-term project with long-term benefits. This is all, of course, without counting academia as possibly the ultimate example of long-term hiring with high-risk, high-reward returns.

sauronlord 9y ago

I'm always ready to quit any position in about 5 seconds. That is the value and importance of not having debt. A mortgage is a noose around your neck. Unless that mortgage is for a rental property that earns more than PITI (principle, interest, taxes, insurance) then you're enslaved. Make sure your first home is at least a triplex or fourplex. There's nothing like the feeling of knowing you will not be homeless and starve if you quit your job or get fired.

dalbasal 9y ago

I really think trying to reason about labour markets using pure theory in a Hayek-Friedman-esque way is a dead end. It's the 2nd time in two days I made the recommendation, but throwing Ronald Coase into the Neoliberal canon would help a lot. He was a "chicago school" academic from the same intellectual family, so it shouldn't be too much of a culture shock. He wan't like "progressives" in the "evidence based" sense but he also objected to first principles theory like Friedman. Instead, he tried to find persistent phenomenon and theorized about why they exist.There was always a link to the real world. Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever. IRL, labour markets are obviously very different than most other markets. It's inflexible. People stay in jobs a long time and most employers actively try to lower their average turnover. Why? If flexibility is so wonderfully efficient, why do almost all companies have such a big inflexible workforce? Why is the market for labour so different in practice than the market for oral hygiene products and services. Why isn't Wall street staffed by day labourers or SV products built by quarterly contractors? You have to look past pure theory to answer these questions. I think you probably have to look beyond economics, or at least to its fringes (like behavioral economics).

ttoinou 9y ago
Anyway, the pure theory approach leads to a general conclusion/assumption that markets are the same. The market for labour, barbie dolls, whatever. Proof needed. Have you ever read Hayek or Friedman you're talking about ?
- DonbunEf7 9y ago
  Go to your whiteboard and draw supply-and-demand curves for a couple derpy markets of widgets and other goods. Then, draw one for labor. Note how the curves are reversed; if you draw it "backwards", then it goes back to behaving like a normal market. Now, try adding employment policies, like minimum wages, to the market; what happens to the curves?
  - CWuestefeld 9y ago

wyc 9y ago

The most recent resource I've read on this was The Alliance by Reid Hoffman. In it, he postulates that both employees and employers are lying through their teeth: employers tell employees about the benefits, investment in its people, and family-feel. Employees say they want to be lifers. This never happens. Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as paid masters' programs. To make everyone better off, Hoffman suggests that we should introduce timeboxed contracts called "tours of duty" that explicitly state the true benefits for either party and the duration of the contract. I really am not a fan of misappropriation of military terms, but I guess it gets the point across. For example, maybe a marketer wants to start a company, but an existing company needs a senior marketer to strategize and execute the plan for its next segment. The company could give the marketer opportunities to meet funding sources and receive education about company building, while the marketer can whole-heartedly deliver on agreed objectives for the time period of two years. It's an idea that seems to straddle between W2 and 1099, as many of the "gig economy" jobs seem to do. Some further definition here may be welcome.

Jdam 9y ago
I'm a "young folk" who worked at a company that implemented his Tour of Duty. However, my "tour supervision" was so incredibly bad, I was way better off jumping ship after not even 11 months.
sidlls 9y ago
> Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as paid masters' programs. I'd have gladly stayed at my third job for much longer than the ~21 months I did had there been training, retirement, reasonable pay increases, and career development offered. The same for my forth job. Some number of jobs later and my current one is also my longest tenure to date. Not coincidentally I have had and continue to have a clear path of career development, non-trivial pay increases and bonuses that aren't tiny. I've given up on employer-provided proper retirement plans and education/training. "Firm hopping" exists, in my opinion, precisely because companies tend to either not recognize the role they must play in supporting long term tenures or else simply don't value them enough to allocate resources to the support.

zeveb 9y ago

I think it's important to note the negatives of the previous way of working. In the old days, pay was less (because the company was responsible for one's pension, and often for many benefits — e.g. corporate vacations were once a thing), and if the company did fail then one was left with nothing. Advancement could be very slow. One was working according to the whims of a slow-to-change set of central managers, who were no better at allocating resources than was the Politburo. Since one's colleagues were much the same for one's career, one youthful slip-up could have lasting consequences. One didn't have as much flexibility to live & work where one would have wished. There were benefits to this way of working, of course: one could more-or-less just turn up, do one's job and life would go on. But it didn't give one as many opportunities to excel. Our modern way is more dynamic and can be just as or even more secure, provided one has the discipline to save, invest & insure.

Qub3d 9y ago
> In the old days, pay was less How can you suggest this? When adjusted for inflation, wages have remained constant or decreased in purchasing power, unless you happen to be in the top 5% of earners[0]. >Advancement could be very slow As opposed to today's "non-existent"? The article we're discussing is all about how people hop jobs precisely because internal advancement is becoming a rare thing. [0]:https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/data/44/440c34f52d3d1d344a1cca6b755557ae.png https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/dat...
- bretchet 9y ago
  I'm about to hop after being at my current company for almost 3 years. I feel I've shown my ability to be a lead engineer, but there's no room in my department for a new lead. I've also expressed the desire to manage, but talks with my manager about this have dead-ended. We are getting a new manager in my team's chain, but I was told they would be coming from outside the company. The sad part is our current lead is bad, really bad. He won't be moved or dismissed either. So despite leading several successful projects, I'll be stuck at senior. So, fuck it, I'm moving on.
s73ver 9y ago

ThomPete 9y ago

Firm hopping happens because hierarchy hopping within an organization get's obstructed. Sooner or later you can't get further up because someone has the position you want and you start looking for opportunities that allow you to move up.

mertd 9y ago
That reminds me of frequent lane switching in traffic congestion. Unless the lane next to you is moving faster because of a fundamental reason (early stage unicorn), you'll get stuck again 100 feet down the road.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Exactly

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FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago

One of the serendipitious consequences for the "quitting economy" in my experience is that I have gained experience working in a number of diverse industries such as finance, insurance, biotech, entertainment and gaming, hospitality, etc. giving me first hand insight into how such sectors work. This has not only increased my ability to apply novel solutions when new problems approached, it has informed and broadened my world view in seeing how the pieces of society and the economy fit together for professional and personal benefit. Does anyone else feel this way?

wastedhours 9y ago
Yep - one of the things I recommend people to do when mentoring them is to read a sh*t load about other industries (I still maintain that buying random magazines is a fantastic way for people to learn) - those novel approaches will work wonders when creating solutions. If you can sell an employer on the benefits of diverse experience, it can reap wonders.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Learning from magazines is definitely a great way to ease yourself into learning about a new subject. It's worked out very well for me. The only other approach I find that works as well as a starting point is subject-focused online forums. For example, if I want to learn about creating an electric car, no magazines that I know of, but there is a forum covering this subject: http://www.diyelectriccar.com/ http://www.diyelectriccar.com/ Just reading through the content gives a good feel for common issues and solutions.
bretchet 9y ago
I kind of feel that this doesn't happen as much for engineering positions, unless you're moving to a consultancy. However, consultancies are a different beast. I've worked in a few different industries myself, and I feel it gives me a broader view of things. Regardless, most of the engineering orgs I've been in have a heavy NIH mentality. They don't really care what you did at other companies. I've often been met with resistance when I suggest techniques or particular stacks that I've used successfully at other companies. So your experience is often dismissed and it can create a good deal of frustration. I do have friends outside of engineering that have used this to their benefit. One friend had a good amount of experience with merging multinational orgs from an HR (benefits, compliance, etc) perspective. He was hired by Facebook for this exact reason and got a handsome raise and more substantial benefits. A broad experience might be good for soft skills/procedures, but I have yet to experience that in engineering.

mcguire 9y ago

I have a question about the term 'neolibral'. I seem to have missed when it became common. Further, it seems identical to what we called neoconservative back in the 1990s: free market economics, very limited government, Hayak, etc. Is William F. Buckley a neolibral? Ronald Reagan?

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
There is a lot of overlap between people with neoconservative views and people with neoliberal views. Neoliberalism is purely an economic position while neoconservatism is primarily focused on foreign policy. Reagan is definitely a neoliberal.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Further, it seems identical to what we called neoconservative back in the 1990s: free market economics, very limited government, Hayao, etc. Neoconservatism is foreign policy school which embodies a particular attitude toward the use of US military and diplomatic power. It incorporates and aims to spread basically neoliberal economic principles and systems, but it's not the same thing as neoliberalism in the same way that support for Soviet-style Communism as an economic system and support for the Soviet Union vigorously using its military and diplomatic power to spread Soviet-style Communism globally are distinct views.

fierarul 9y ago

I've quit only once, from the mega-corp, in order to start freelancing. I've never quit from a customer project. And oddly, I've worked for very few customer for years and years. Controlling and understanding the entire cash-flow really helped. My other IT friends did job-hop while young but as they settled down, they started staying longer. After 30 it's basically smooth sailing. So, I don't see a quitting economy. It's phase in young adults.

ell0ell0 9y ago
I dunno i'm 35, own a home and have a kid and the longest I've ever worked anywhere is my current job at 2.5 years. I'm only sticking it out here to get a bit more vested and then I'm taking my shares and going on to the next thing as always. Especially because each time I change jobs I end up with a close to a 20% raise on average...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  I'm 34, married, have a toddler, and have definitely stopped hopping (used to be at a gig no more than 2-3 years each). My last gig was a startup, and it's my last startup. I'm at an enterprise now that pays a bit less than double what I made at my last gig, no more than 40 hours a week, no on call, and they treat their employees very well.

deedubaya 9y ago

401k, bonus, sabbatical, profit sharing, "sitting the bench", annual raise, stipends. These are words and phrases most younger workers don't even know the meaning of. Employers have been extracting maximum value out of employees with little investment in those employees in return. It's no wonder high turn over is so common place.

jdauriemma 9y ago

I am hoping that studies emerge that positively correlate a firm's mean employee satisfaction / tenure with long-term financial health. This was conventional wisdom for a while but as far as I can tell, data models just aren't sophisticated enough to prove it out. Yet.

g9yuayon 9y ago

Changing jobs every two years is not necessarily a good strategy for techies who want to gain deep experience. When joining a new company, it will take time for one to become productive by learning the dynamics of the company as well as the unique business and technical challenges. And then it will take time for the person to learn something deep by building a truly great product.

Anatidae 9y ago

There is a reality that lots of companies look at their employees as the same as when they hired them. Meaning, a junior person has a hard time shaking that "junior" title, but can move to a new company and start fresh. In addition, it is shocking how often companies don't promote from within, but offer higher level jobs to outsiders "experts". Then you have the situation where your company just isn't growing. They can't afford to give you raises or have positions you can move into. Again, for growth you have to move on. Like many others said, the biggest reason employees don't stick around is that the current corporate culture views employees as expendable resources they would rather not have to have. Shareholders come first, at all costs - even to the internal health of the company.

dajohnson89 9y ago

Every company I've ever worked for nickels and dimes my pay. If I didn't have to fight for a market/above-market salary, good benefits, and regular raises commensurate with what I'm adding to the company with my increased tenure and effectiveness, I'd gladly stay. But it never works out that way. It's painfully simple -- you get what you pay for.

candles12345 9y ago

Couldn't we just drop the application bullshit? Didn't they do without this in the old days?

ntrepid8 9y ago

I've had a few sales jobs where I was employed full-time (w2 not 1099) but also had an employment agreement with a defined term. Most often the term was 1 to 3 years, and if you were going to be let go it would happen when the term was over. They just would not renew your contract. You could still be fired "for cause" but that almost never happened. The employee would almost have to commit a crime to be terminated early. Of course you could always quit during the term if you wanted, but that meant you would have to pay back the signing bonus received when the contract was signed :) I really did not mind this structure, but it seems like it's confined to specific industries and outside of those almost no one does it. For example, I've never seen a software dev job with this sort of structure.

seanmceligot 9y ago

This quitting is completely forced in government work. Every few years the project will be turned over to an entire new group of programmers and system admins at a lower price. They often spend years trying to figure out how the code and configuration works and learn the business rules. It's sad to watch.

ilaksh 9y ago

I have a theory that part of this is related to shrinking real economies. People use less energy, buy less stuff, etc. The real economy shrinks. Money has less utility. Business lags. Fewer employers can afford to pay competitively. I think that the economic system assumes constant growth, and doesn't have a way to deal with the sustainable consumption rates that we are now trying to adjust to.