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The fact that "job hopping" is usually used in the pejorative says a lot about the master / slave mentality that large (and small) companies have. Why would an

The fact that "job hopping" is usually used in the pejorative says a lot about the master / slave mentality that large (and small) companies have. Why would anyone have loyalty to a company that has no loyalty in return. This is especially true in the US with employment at will. It's less true in some countries but is usually legally enforced as opposed to cultural. My wife's career has been defined largely by strategic hops. Her reputation has been built up by doing good work -- her title and salary are almost entirely due to moving around when it was advantageous. A lot of companies are reluctant to promote internally due to office politics. In my wife's industry, it's nearly impossible to go from XXX to YYY at the same company. So, she joined a much smaller company that could only offer title advancement. Six months later she was back at a major player, with title YYY and the salary to match. (The CEO of that company called her a job hopper.) She did the same thing hopping out of the industry to take over a company as ZZZ. Now's she back in as an AAA, one position away from running the company (a top company in her industry). Her industry needs more YYY and AAA, but won't promote to create them. Catch-22 they only want to hire people who already have those titles. So, your choice is either grind with little or no real advancement or use companies and their current situation to your advantage. This is necessary and isn't just about your personal gain. My wife's career has helped a lot of her younger colleagues navigate their own. Employees owe companies nothing. Act accordingly.

paulgb 8y ago
> The fact that "job hopping" is usually used in the pejorative says a lot about the master / slave mentality that large (and small) companies have. Same with the word "poaching". Offering somebody a better job is not property theft.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I agree with what you've written, but I will say that as someone who's hired lots of folks, the time spent at each "hop" matters. That is, I want people who have dealt with a reasonable lifespan of a product and been responsible for multiple stages of growth. Thus, if you've had 5 different jobs in the past 5 years I would look at that as a real negative (one reason being that given how difficult hiring is I want to invest in someone who is going to stay longer than 6 months or a year). However, if you spent an average of at least maybe 2-3 years at different companies (and perhaps a much shorter term stint at one company for whatever reason), I wouldn't look at that negatively at all.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  Maybe you should start paying people what they are worth? Those annual job hoppers do so because a year later someone is offering a 20% raise and you offered a 3% bump and an "atta boy". Companies are trying to control wage inflation by refusing to pay market rate to their current employees. For the record the average tenure in the Bay for a software engineer is 2 years. So your "at least" is the average.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    It’s so strange, you’d think the cost of recruiting, hiring, and ramping up a new employee would be much more than just bringing your existing productive employee up to market rate, yet few employers seem willing to do this. I left my previous employer on very good terms and on the way out made it clear that I liked working there and all it would have taken to retain me was to adjust my comp up to market rate. They looked at me as if I just escaped the lunatic asylum.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - oculusthrift 8y ago
      the strangest is when if you were a new hire you would have gotten the salary you asked for..
      - ryandrake 8y ago
        Sometimes I think it would be worth it to just quit and re-interview for your current job every year as an outside candidate--you'd end up ahead of just staying there.
    - CzechTech 8y ago
      From my experience, one of the causes of this issue is that in some companies, the people who are in charge of the money (upper/top management) are rarely also people with software engineering backgrounds. These people are often unable or unwilling to fully grasp the concept of "ramping up a new employee" in the context of software development. The fact that any large codebase will take a smart person 3-6 months to acclimate to and become productive. The fact that other people on the programming team have to help these new people (and therefore lose productivity themselves). The fact that the new person is going to produce more errors and the number of defects in the product will temporarily increase. If you look into the history of a company (e.g. by looking at how many users in the issue tracker are no longer in the company etc.), it's usually quite obvious when there's a systemic problem - the employee turnover is high. The management is interested in saving money by looking at the market and trying to hire at or just below the average compensation levels. In their eyes, it's cheaper to bring a new employee to the team (and there's always some fresh meat on the shelves of the job market) than to pay the current (experienced) employee more. And in the short term, they're probably right. But in the medium to long term, this approach tends to have a cumulative effect resulting in high employee churn rate. The problem? Software development is not fast food industry. You can't have high employee churn rates without it manifesting somewhere. But pointing out exactly where and how is not easy (linking causation and effect in a discipline involving multiple people across multiple years is not trivial), especially when you need to link it to the bottom line (the market state and marketing efficiency will mess with your analysis... not that you typically even have access to the financials as a run-of-the-mill employee) and even if you do, there is no reason to expect that you would be able to effectively bring these findings to the management (such work would probably be seen as you overstepping the bounds) or that the management would change the processes responsible (that would be expensive). It's an uphill battle. When you are in a company with high employee turnover, there's typically not much you can do other than to start looking elsewhere. These types of companies will have problems (lower level of respect/loyalty, higher level of product defects, lower productivity, higher technical debt), it's best to leave them as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
cocoa19 8y ago
"Why would anyone have loyalty to a company that has no loyalty in return". As a temporary US worker, hopping to a new job is too risky. Will I get fired at a new job?, I need to get a job fast or leave the country. Also, there's a lot of uncertainty over what happens if your employer started a green card process, and you want to switch jobs.
- branchless 8y ago
  That's why your current company hired you.
- devocracy 8y ago
  The slavery of foreign workers looking to employers to sponsor them on their path to citizenship. We have a similar program in Canada, and it's really sad to see talented people stuck at dead end jobs making crap money, all because their employer is their visa sponsor. It's even worse in the lower wage sectors with temporary foreign workers.
yourapostasy 8y ago
> Employees owe companies nothing. Act accordingly. I try to impress upon younger workers that in the vast majority of cases, employees owe their managers nothing. Too many young employees get trapped into thinking, "yeah, the company is uncaring, but my boss is awesome". They don't have the life experience to inform them that no matter how awesome their boss is, it is extremely unlikely they have no external pressures to trim staff whatsoever. The rare cases are those bosses who own the company outright, and make it plainly obvious with how they compensate and treat employees over time (2-3 years of consistent, first-hand observed behavior) that they plan retention over the long term. Or you're part of a worker co-operative or similar stability-promoting arrangement. Okay, then I'll grant you that you might afford the luxury of developing a less self-interested, short-termism strategy. It's not all sunshine and roses on that side of the fence, either; plenty of criticism from market fundies that such arrangements are only possible in sclerotic, uninnovative, inefficient, dullard organizations (I happen to disagree with the fundies on this point, but that's a discussion for another time).
pwaai 8y ago
In East Asian economies, it's perfectly acceptable but I'd argue that they care of their employees much better but obviously not without strings attached-productivity is low due to insane working hours. For instance, my cousin works at Samsung and although he is pretty much a highly paid slave, he is better off than most Koreans... I don't know if it's right to act entitled. After all, we are receiving money in exchange for our time. If one is not happy with it, then wayne gretzky it.
deltateam 8y ago
Part of this comes down to the expense needed to find and train employees. The structure is set up to resent this expense and the probability of the expense. The incentives guide behavior. I'm not offering a solution, just the observation.
ta_asdfgh 8y ago
Question. I started working with a startup right after my Masters when it barely had about 10-12 employees. I got some stock when I started. This was my first start up and so I don't know if what I got was a fair deal (if not a good one). Now, its been about 4 years since and the company has grown to be about 60-70 employees and I am yet to get a raise, the company still doesn't match 401k etc. I hope the stock pays off eventually, if the company does well, but I am not sure if or when or how good that will be. Reading articles like this or articles that mention salaries that people are offered in other companies, I am beginning to think if "job hop" is probably the way I should go, even though the work environment is fairly good and I have enjoyed my time here.
- slavapestov 8y ago
  > Now, its been about 4 years since and the company has grown to be about 60-70 employees and I am yet to get a raise, You're getting ripped off. Quit.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    Get another job first, but yes, market rates go up much faster than 0%. You wouldn't cut an annual check to your boss for $10k just to be a team player. With compound interest, etc., four years of no raises looks like five figures, easy. And that assumes you haven't gotten valuable experience and developed marketable skills in the meantime.
- sidr 8y ago
  Did you get stock or did you get options? Stock seems very odd to me for a 10-12 person startup. Also, I'm assuming you got a refresher on the equity at some point (otherwise you're no longer vesting after 4 years)? No raises for 4 years is simply unacceptable, regardless. You're losing money at this point. I haven't gone a single year without a substantial raise since I started working.
  - ta_asdfgh 8y ago
    Options. I am one month away from completing 4 years and vesting completes then too. I did not get any refresher on equity. As far as I know, there was a round of raises/appraisals and end of year 3 but I was left out. I was on a F1 (student) visa when I started with this company and I was unlucky enough that I didn't get H1B visa until my 3rd attempt (lost the first 2 attempts in the lottery), I am guessing here, but I think I didn't get any raise/equity because they knew I couldn't afford to leave back then with my H1B processing still going on.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> Why would anyone have loyalty to a company that has no loyalty in return. Because companies benefit from this form of asymmetry and others, e.g.: - The company can hire many employees but employees cannot work for multiple companies at the same time - The company knows salaries of all employees and does market research but employees are recommended not to share and compare their salaries - The company can offshore work but employees cannot.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

paulgb 8y ago

> The fact that "job hopping" is usually used in the pejorative says a lot about the master / slave mentality that large (and small) companies have. Same with the word "poaching". Offering somebody a better job is not property theft.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

I agree with what you've written, but I will say that as someone who's hired lots of folks, the time spent at each "hop" matters. That is, I want people who have dealt with a reasonable lifespan of a product and been responsible for multiple stages of growth. Thus, if you've had 5 different jobs in the past 5 years I would look at that as a real negative (one reason being that given how difficult hiring is I want to invest in someone who is going to stay longer than 6 months or a year). However, if you spent an average of at least maybe 2-3 years at different companies (and perhaps a much shorter term stint at one company for whatever reason), I wouldn't look at that negatively at all.

jhall1468 8y ago
Maybe you should start paying people what they are worth? Those annual job hoppers do so because a year later someone is offering a 20% raise and you offered a 3% bump and an "atta boy". Companies are trying to control wage inflation by refusing to pay market rate to their current employees. For the record the average tenure in the Bay for a software engineer is 2 years. So your "at least" is the average.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  It’s so strange, you’d think the cost of recruiting, hiring, and ramping up a new employee would be much more than just bringing your existing productive employee up to market rate, yet few employers seem willing to do this. I left my previous employer on very good terms and on the way out made it clear that I liked working there and all it would have taken to retain me was to adjust my comp up to market rate. They looked at me as if I just escaped the lunatic asylum.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - oculusthrift 8y ago
    the strangest is when if you were a new hire you would have gotten the salary you asked for..
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Sometimes I think it would be worth it to just quit and re-interview for your current job every year as an outside candidate--you'd end up ahead of just staying there.
  - CzechTech 8y ago
    From my experience, one of the causes of this issue is that in some companies, the people who are in charge of the money (upper/top management) are rarely also people with software engineering backgrounds. These people are often unable or unwilling to fully grasp the concept of "ramping up a new employee" in the context of software development. The fact that any large codebase will take a smart person 3-6 months to acclimate to and become productive. The fact that other people on the programming team have to help these new people (and therefore lose productivity themselves). The fact that the new person is going to produce more errors and the number of defects in the product will temporarily increase. If you look into the history of a company (e.g. by looking at how many users in the issue tracker are no longer in the company etc.), it's usually quite obvious when there's a systemic problem - the employee turnover is high. The management is interested in saving money by looking at the market and trying to hire at or just below the average compensation levels. In their eyes, it's cheaper to bring a new employee to the team (and there's always some fresh meat on the shelves of the job market) than to pay the current (experienced) employee more. And in the short term, they're probably right. But in the medium to long term, this approach tends to have a cumulative effect resulting in high employee churn rate. The problem? Software development is not fast food industry. You can't have high employee churn rates without it manifesting somewhere. But pointing out exactly where and how is not easy (linking causation and effect in a discipline involving multiple people across multiple years is not trivial), especially when you need to link it to the bottom line (the market state and marketing efficiency will mess with your analysis... not that you typically even have access to the financials as a run-of-the-mill employee) and even if you do, there is no reason to expect that you would be able to effectively bring these findings to the management (such work would probably be seen as you overstepping the bounds) or that the management would change the processes responsible (that would be expensive). It's an uphill battle. When you are in a company with high employee turnover, there's typically not much you can do other than to start looking elsewhere. These types of companies will have problems (lower level of respect/loyalty, higher level of product defects, lower productivity, higher technical debt), it's best to leave them as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

cocoa19 8y ago

"Why would anyone have loyalty to a company that has no loyalty in return". As a temporary US worker, hopping to a new job is too risky. Will I get fired at a new job?, I need to get a job fast or leave the country. Also, there's a lot of uncertainty over what happens if your employer started a green card process, and you want to switch jobs.

branchless 8y ago
That's why your current company hired you.
devocracy 8y ago
The slavery of foreign workers looking to employers to sponsor them on their path to citizenship. We have a similar program in Canada, and it's really sad to see talented people stuck at dead end jobs making crap money, all because their employer is their visa sponsor. It's even worse in the lower wage sectors with temporary foreign workers.

yourapostasy 8y ago

> Employees owe companies nothing. Act accordingly. I try to impress upon younger workers that in the vast majority of cases, employees owe their managers nothing. Too many young employees get trapped into thinking, "yeah, the company is uncaring, but my boss is awesome". They don't have the life experience to inform them that no matter how awesome their boss is, it is extremely unlikely they have no external pressures to trim staff whatsoever. The rare cases are those bosses who own the company outright, and make it plainly obvious with how they compensate and treat employees over time (2-3 years of consistent, first-hand observed behavior) that they plan retention over the long term. Or you're part of a worker co-operative or similar stability-promoting arrangement. Okay, then I'll grant you that you might afford the luxury of developing a less self-interested, short-termism strategy. It's not all sunshine and roses on that side of the fence, either; plenty of criticism from market fundies that such arrangements are only possible in sclerotic, uninnovative, inefficient, dullard organizations (I happen to disagree with the fundies on this point, but that's a discussion for another time).

pwaai 8y ago

In East Asian economies, it's perfectly acceptable but I'd argue that they care of their employees much better but obviously not without strings attached-productivity is low due to insane working hours. For instance, my cousin works at Samsung and although he is pretty much a highly paid slave, he is better off than most Koreans... I don't know if it's right to act entitled. After all, we are receiving money in exchange for our time. If one is not happy with it, then wayne gretzky it.

deltateam 8y ago

Part of this comes down to the expense needed to find and train employees. The structure is set up to resent this expense and the probability of the expense. The incentives guide behavior. I'm not offering a solution, just the observation.

ta_asdfgh 8y ago

Question. I started working with a startup right after my Masters when it barely had about 10-12 employees. I got some stock when I started. This was my first start up and so I don't know if what I got was a fair deal (if not a good one). Now, its been about 4 years since and the company has grown to be about 60-70 employees and I am yet to get a raise, the company still doesn't match 401k etc. I hope the stock pays off eventually, if the company does well, but I am not sure if or when or how good that will be. Reading articles like this or articles that mention salaries that people are offered in other companies, I am beginning to think if "job hop" is probably the way I should go, even though the work environment is fairly good and I have enjoyed my time here.

slavapestov 8y ago
> Now, its been about 4 years since and the company has grown to be about 60-70 employees and I am yet to get a raise, You're getting ripped off. Quit.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  Get another job first, but yes, market rates go up much faster than 0%. You wouldn't cut an annual check to your boss for $10k just to be a team player. With compound interest, etc., four years of no raises looks like five figures, easy. And that assumes you haven't gotten valuable experience and developed marketable skills in the meantime.
sidr 8y ago
Did you get stock or did you get options? Stock seems very odd to me for a 10-12 person startup. Also, I'm assuming you got a refresher on the equity at some point (otherwise you're no longer vesting after 4 years)? No raises for 4 years is simply unacceptable, regardless. You're losing money at this point. I haven't gone a single year without a substantial raise since I started working.
- ta_asdfgh 8y ago
  Options. I am one month away from completing 4 years and vesting completes then too. I did not get any refresher on equity. As far as I know, there was a round of raises/appraisals and end of year 3 but I was left out. I was on a F1 (student) visa when I started with this company and I was unlucky enough that I didn't get H1B visa until my 3rd attempt (lost the first 2 attempts in the lottery), I am guessing here, but I think I didn't get any raise/equity because they knew I couldn't afford to leave back then with my H1B processing still going on.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

> Why would anyone have loyalty to a company that has no loyalty in return. Because companies benefit from this form of asymmetry and others, e.g.: - The company can hire many employees but employees cannot work for multiple companies at the same time - The company knows salaries of all employees and does market research but employees are recommended not to share and compare their salaries - The company can offshore work but employees cannot.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]