7 ms·

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 teet

by 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.
- pm90 9y ago
  A lot of this can be mitigated by managers having genuine conversations with their employees. The ideal manager I would work with (I've seen some managers come close but never hit all the right notes) would first and foremost be genuinely interested in my career progress as an employee. Different employees have different ambitions and expectations and there is just no way for a manager to know all of this just by observing someone; they really need to actively communicate and find out, to have a genuine conversation about how much raise they can provide or why they can't, what future they see for the employee. Especially if the employee is performing below expectations... that conversation can be tough, but I think one of the qualities of being a good manager is to convey this information in a way which makes the employee try to remedy the situation rather than just disparage them.
  - wyc 9y ago
    One on ones are important to me, and have been among the most enjoyable interactions in my professional life. My favorite point on this was by Andy Grove, who suggested that there's a limit to the number of your direct reports because you owe each of them about half a day per week to properly manage and support them.
  - VLM 9y ago
    That would imply the hiring process didn't select a perfect match 100% of the time, which is a slap in the face of a large budget item, that's not going to happen. The fiction must be maintained at all costs that the employee was the perfect fit at hiring time; neither overqualified aka too expensive or underqualified aka the manager screwed up.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      Not at all. People change, companies change, the business changes. The person you needed when you hired him might not be the exact person you'll need in a year, but a good manager will first see if that person can grow into a new role instead of firing him and hiring someone else.
  - 9y ago
wastedhours 9y ago
I fully support that idea - in fact, your example is pretty much where I am at the moment: marketer who wants to start a company, working for another startup to deliver more strategy and system development. It'd be great if it was on a tour-of-duty type contract where someone could come in, deliver on their area, and then transition out onto the the next thing when the company lifestage has been fulfilled feeling satisfied the role had been done.
0x4f3759df 9y ago
One idea I've heard is that Wall Street has solved this problem in the form of bonuses. If companies want their talent to stick around, a bonus structure would go along way, especially since a quick job move can get a person $10k bump.
- s73ver 9y ago
  Don't many of the big tech companies have this with their stock options? And I've heard that, with the Wall Street approach, your bonus is the lion's share of your income for the year. If true, I don't know if I'd like to go to that, given the propensity for letting people go in this field.
  - spinlock 9y ago
    A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Wall Street bonuses are cash. Your options are restricted and the value is very unknowable.
    - dv_dt 9y ago
      A stock option is a lottery ticket (some are better odds than others). Notice how the wall street guys that deal with probabilities in financial instruments all day long in a professional capacity expect bonuses in cash.
    - bradlys 9y ago
      I think at the big tech companies, it's comparable to cash but favored even more so because (if you hold them for a year) you can take capital gains (15-20%) on them instead of paying 40%+ tax. I don't think s73ver wasn't talking about startups that are pre-IPO. I think this only applies at companies not using RSUs. Since I think you get taxed immediately (no capital gains) with RSUs.
      - mahyarm 9y ago
        No when you receive the RSU unit or exercise your option, it's taxed as income. Whatever gains you make after that event is taxed as capital gains, like any other stock.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
I am happily at the 2.5 year mark at my first real job out of college, and my employer-sponsored master's degree courses begin this fall. Couldn't be happier. Higher education is a great place to work.
s73ver 9y ago
I think for this to work, we'd have to have some form of Universal Healthcare in place. Right now, if you don't have employer sponsored health insurance (and I doubt many employers would want to offer that to people who are simply doing a "tour of duty" [yeah, there should be a better name for that]), insurance isn't good. It became better with the ACA, but I don't know how hopeful I'd be that it sticks around.
ssharp 9y ago
> 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. That seems like it would be incredibly difficult to match up needs, considering how hard employers say it is to fill jobs and how hard many people find it to land a job. There's already serious matching issues with a relatively simple system for hiring.
sgt101 9y ago
Fine if the employer pays upfront or into a trust. If you sign on exclusively then you need to know the other side is committed, we know the military is committed... tech company x, not so much.
georgeecollins 9y ago
There are two problems to this in my mind: people are always scrambling for the rare "experienced" people because too little training happens. The other problem is that the best project work I have seen have come from experienced, cohesive teams. It's true that many experienced teams are not cohesive or even sometimes skilled. But I think continuity helps. A company wonders why their development team is performing and they decide they don't have hotshots, or need more "hotshots" they can recruit from whatever company they think is a good place they can poach from. Communicating to the team that if you want to grow or be promoted, switch jobs. So a lot of money is spent and chaos created to get the results that a solid, if not brilliant or terribly experienced team, could accomplish.
- gregjor 9y ago
  This has been observed repeatedly, Fred Brooks wrote a whole book about it. Everyone says they've read and agree with "The Mythical Man Month" but when schedules loom the first reaction is always to throw more people at it. An expensive hot-shot added late in the project can grind the gears much worse than a green trainee.
georgeecollins 9y ago
There are two problems to this in my mind: people are always scrambling for the rare "experienced" people because too little training happens. The other problem is that the best project work I have seen have come from experienced, cohesive teams. It's true that many experienced teams are not cohesive or even sometimes skilled. But I think continuity helps. A company wonders why their development team is performing and they decide they don't have hotshots, or need more "hotshots" they can recruit from whatever company they think is a good place they can poach from. Communicating to the team that if you want to grow or be promoted, switch jobs. So a lot of money is spent and chaos created to get the results that a solid, if not brilliant or terribly experienced team, could accomplish.
soulnothing 9y ago
This is why I find contracting to be ideal. Minus the night mare of health insurance. I'm in for X months, and it may be renewed. I know what I'm getting in. If they don't deliver on their end, i.e. the project is canned, or a death march. Either way I have an out. I also structured my year so I did two contracts. Allocating about 10 months then took two months off. I would like to be loyal to a company. But have found the "lying through their teeth" to be apt. I tried full time again. But the end result is I regressed my career by about five years. If it weren't for the health insurance I don't really see a point to full time. It's all project based, deliver something and move on.
adventured 9y ago
It's worth noting that people are staying at their jobs for longer periods of time, not shorter. [1][2] "As of January 2016, the typical U.S. worker had been in their current job for 4.2 years, up from 3.5 years in 1983, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics." There has been a significant slowdown in the speed at which people are changing jobs. Younger people today are also not showing any indication of switching jobs more frequently than in the past: "Millennial workers are as likely to stay with their current employers as members of Generation X were when they were young adults back in 2000, according to a report released this week by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think-tank based in Washington, D.C. Roughly 63% of millennial had been with their employer 13 months or more as of last years, versus 60% of Generation-Xers in 2000. Additionally, a fifth of millennials have been with their company for five years or longer, again in line with Generation X." [1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2012/12/27/how-long-do-americans-stay-in-jobs.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2012/12/27/how-l... [2] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/young-americans-stay-in-jobs-longer-than-you-think-2017-04-20 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/young-americans-stay-in-job...
- pge 9y ago
  I wonder if there is bias there in the moment in time chosen. Having been a genX young professional in 2000, my impression at the time was that the rocketing Internet bubble caused a lot of people to switch jobs much faster than they had done even just five years earlier (lots of Internet companies were recruiting heavily and plucking people out of other jobs because the demand for new hires was so high. Lots of rapidly growing companies with stock options to offer made for an employees' market). After the bubble collapsed, jobs were much harder to come by, which in turn meant job tenures were longer. It would be interesting to compare today to 1997 or 2007, rather than 2000.

by wyc 9y ago

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.

pm90 9y ago
A lot of this can be mitigated by managers having genuine conversations with their employees. The ideal manager I would work with (I've seen some managers come close but never hit all the right notes) would first and foremost be genuinely interested in my career progress as an employee. Different employees have different ambitions and expectations and there is just no way for a manager to know all of this just by observing someone; they really need to actively communicate and find out, to have a genuine conversation about how much raise they can provide or why they can't, what future they see for the employee. Especially if the employee is performing below expectations... that conversation can be tough, but I think one of the qualities of being a good manager is to convey this information in a way which makes the employee try to remedy the situation rather than just disparage them.
- wyc 9y ago
  One on ones are important to me, and have been among the most enjoyable interactions in my professional life. My favorite point on this was by Andy Grove, who suggested that there's a limit to the number of your direct reports because you owe each of them about half a day per week to properly manage and support them.
- VLM 9y ago
  That would imply the hiring process didn't select a perfect match 100% of the time, which is a slap in the face of a large budget item, that's not going to happen. The fiction must be maintained at all costs that the employee was the perfect fit at hiring time; neither overqualified aka too expensive or underqualified aka the manager screwed up.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    Not at all. People change, companies change, the business changes. The person you needed when you hired him might not be the exact person you'll need in a year, but a good manager will first see if that person can grow into a new role instead of firing him and hiring someone else.
- 9y ago

wastedhours 9y ago

I fully support that idea - in fact, your example is pretty much where I am at the moment: marketer who wants to start a company, working for another startup to deliver more strategy and system development. It'd be great if it was on a tour-of-duty type contract where someone could come in, deliver on their area, and then transition out onto the the next thing when the company lifestage has been fulfilled feeling satisfied the role had been done.

0x4f3759df 9y ago

One idea I've heard is that Wall Street has solved this problem in the form of bonuses. If companies want their talent to stick around, a bonus structure would go along way, especially since a quick job move can get a person $10k bump.

s73ver 9y ago
Don't many of the big tech companies have this with their stock options? And I've heard that, with the Wall Street approach, your bonus is the lion's share of your income for the year. If true, I don't know if I'd like to go to that, given the propensity for letting people go in this field.
- spinlock 9y ago
  A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Wall Street bonuses are cash. Your options are restricted and the value is very unknowable.
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    A stock option is a lottery ticket (some are better odds than others). Notice how the wall street guys that deal with probabilities in financial instruments all day long in a professional capacity expect bonuses in cash.
  - bradlys 9y ago
    I think at the big tech companies, it's comparable to cash but favored even more so because (if you hold them for a year) you can take capital gains (15-20%) on them instead of paying 40%+ tax. I don't think s73ver wasn't talking about startups that are pre-IPO. I think this only applies at companies not using RSUs. Since I think you get taxed immediately (no capital gains) with RSUs.
    - mahyarm 9y ago
      No when you receive the RSU unit or exercise your option, it's taxed as income. Whatever gains you make after that event is taxed as capital gains, like any other stock.

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago

I am happily at the 2.5 year mark at my first real job out of college, and my employer-sponsored master's degree courses begin this fall. Couldn't be happier. Higher education is a great place to work.

s73ver 9y ago

I think for this to work, we'd have to have some form of Universal Healthcare in place. Right now, if you don't have employer sponsored health insurance (and I doubt many employers would want to offer that to people who are simply doing a "tour of duty" [yeah, there should be a better name for that]), insurance isn't good. It became better with the ACA, but I don't know how hopeful I'd be that it sticks around.

ssharp 9y ago

> 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. That seems like it would be incredibly difficult to match up needs, considering how hard employers say it is to fill jobs and how hard many people find it to land a job. There's already serious matching issues with a relatively simple system for hiring.

sgt101 9y ago

Fine if the employer pays upfront or into a trust. If you sign on exclusively then you need to know the other side is committed, we know the military is committed... tech company x, not so much.

georgeecollins 9y ago

There are two problems to this in my mind: people are always scrambling for the rare "experienced" people because too little training happens. The other problem is that the best project work I have seen have come from experienced, cohesive teams. It's true that many experienced teams are not cohesive or even sometimes skilled. But I think continuity helps. A company wonders why their development team is performing and they decide they don't have hotshots, or need more "hotshots" they can recruit from whatever company they think is a good place they can poach from. Communicating to the team that if you want to grow or be promoted, switch jobs. So a lot of money is spent and chaos created to get the results that a solid, if not brilliant or terribly experienced team, could accomplish.

gregjor 9y ago
This has been observed repeatedly, Fred Brooks wrote a whole book about it. Everyone says they've read and agree with "The Mythical Man Month" but when schedules loom the first reaction is always to throw more people at it. An expensive hot-shot added late in the project can grind the gears much worse than a green trainee.

georgeecollins 9y ago

soulnothing 9y ago

This is why I find contracting to be ideal. Minus the night mare of health insurance. I'm in for X months, and it may be renewed. I know what I'm getting in. If they don't deliver on their end, i.e. the project is canned, or a death march. Either way I have an out. I also structured my year so I did two contracts. Allocating about 10 months then took two months off. I would like to be loyal to a company. But have found the "lying through their teeth" to be apt. I tried full time again. But the end result is I regressed my career by about five years. If it weren't for the health insurance I don't really see a point to full time. It's all project based, deliver something and move on.

adventured 9y ago

It's worth noting that people are staying at their jobs for longer periods of time, not shorter. [1][2] "As of January 2016, the typical U.S. worker had been in their current job for 4.2 years, up from 3.5 years in 1983, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics." There has been a significant slowdown in the speed at which people are changing jobs. Younger people today are also not showing any indication of switching jobs more frequently than in the past: "Millennial workers are as likely to stay with their current employers as members of Generation X were when they were young adults back in 2000, according to a report released this week by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think-tank based in Washington, D.C. Roughly 63% of millennial had been with their employer 13 months or more as of last years, versus 60% of Generation-Xers in 2000. Additionally, a fifth of millennials have been with their company for five years or longer, again in line with Generation X." [1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2012/12/27/how-long-do-americans-stay-in-jobs.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2012/12/27/how-l... [2] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/young-americans-stay-in-jobs-longer-than-you-think-2017-04-20 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/young-americans-stay-in-job...

pge 9y ago
I wonder if there is bias there in the moment in time chosen. Having been a genX young professional in 2000, my impression at the time was that the rocketing Internet bubble caused a lot of people to switch jobs much faster than they had done even just five years earlier (lots of Internet companies were recruiting heavily and plucking people out of other jobs because the demand for new hires was so high. Lots of rapidly growing companies with stock options to offer made for an employees' market). After the bubble collapsed, jobs were much harder to come by, which in turn meant job tenures were longer. It would be interesting to compare today to 1997 or 2007, rather than 2000.