5 ms·

You can find a job within two or three weeks, sure, but you're not switching jobs every two or three weeks. If there's a company that's willing to hire you for

by geofft 8y ago

You can find a job within two or three weeks, sure, but you're not switching jobs every two or three weeks. If there's a company that's willing to hire you for $10K more but doesn't have headcount until next quarter, you're not getting that $10K, and you'll typically go years before the next time you negotiate. (And if you jump ship after a quarter, your market value goes down because people start looking at your resume suspiciously; in exchange that company would have to offer significantly more than $10K to compensate you for that risk and encourage you to jump ship.) A liquid market typically doesn't have the restriction that after a trade, the asset stays off the market for years until the next trade. A liquid market typically has market makers, who buy whenever sellers are ready and sell whenever buyers are ready and make a little profit from the spread, and thereby ensure that the market itself serves as a mechanism for price discovery. There's no equivalent of that in the hiring market. Nobody will hire you now for $9K more in the expectation that in a quarter they can contract you out for $10K more. The hiring market does sort of compensate for this with raises, but - because everyone knows that there's a cost to switching jobs - raises don't have to match your current market value. They just have to get to your current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now.

scarface74 8y ago
I agree, even though I switched jobs 5 times in 10 years I had to have a story to tell - one company went out of business, one product was cancelled, one was a “change of direction and they didn’t want to be a software company”, but they did want me to finish a project and paid me well enough to lead it to completion. But now I am starting to get the job hopping stench about myself. But if you really want to stay liquid - contract. You don’t get the job hoppers stench about you if you do want to go full time later on.
dunpeal 8y ago
Insightful comment overall, but I disagree with your implication that the formula for pay raises is generally "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now". First of all, what "cost of switching jobs" are you referring to? If I live in SF, "switching jobs" likely means getting off at a different BART station. Hell, I might be able to walk to my next job. I think the well-known fact that pay raises fail to keep up with market wages in tech - isn't some brilliantly efficient calculation like "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now" as you suggest. It's clearly not working very well, since job hopping in the valley is crazy high, and everyone knows that's done because of pay. To wit, the longer you work for the same company, the farther your market comp will drift away from you, and the only way to catch up with the runaway comp-train is to hop jobs. I think it's simply the traditional American 2-3% raise model clashing with a booming tech reality where your market wage will likely increase much higher. Plus, the traditional model itself never worked very well for well-performing employees: > It used to be that jumping ship meant landing a salary 10 percent to 20 percent higher than your previous one. While increases of that size aren’t as widespread as they used to be, switching jobs is still the most common path to the best pay raise. > If you stay at the same organization, your annual increases may be restricted by your current base salary because companies have a narrow percentage range within which they can boost your pay. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/090415/salary-secrets-what-considered-big-raise.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041... Simply stated: employers were never very efficient at raising comp for good performers. Even decades ago, in industries nowhere near the growth rate of current tech, top performers were much better off job-hopping. Tech just made it even more lucrative.
- geofft 8y ago
  By "cost of switching jobs" I mean that there's a negative cost in the long term to having a short job on your resume (especially if your previous job was also short), to not having an enthusiastic positive reference, to maybe getting a reputation as someone who doesn't want to stay at a job, etc. If I take a job paying, say, $100K, and someone is offering me $120K after six months, waiting until I've been at the job a year or two is technically costing me $10-30K over jumping right now but is probably worth more than that in the long term just to not have that six-month stint on my resume and to not burn bridges with my current employer. After a couple of years it becomes more defensible to leave, so there are mechanisms for giving you significantly more money after several years (promotions, promotions to manager track, refresher grants, etc.) but fewer mechanisms for giving you more money in the first year or two, and basically none for within the first year, because employers know that even if your market value is theoretically higher, you can't actually take advantage of that yet. I think that even in markets where job-hopping is high in general, any particular individual can still only job-hop so many times before it backfires on their ability to get a high salary.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    Hopping after 6 months, or say less than a year, will definitely hurt your resume, even in the Bay. As a hiring manager, I'll typically assume your either got fired, or gave up too quickly. Both strong reasons not to hire you. Hopping after 2 years in the Bay is extremely common. So much that I'm not even sure it's considered "hopping" anymore. I'm not sure how long of a time horizon you mean when you suggest job-hops will eventually hurt you. In the Bay, at least, if you have say 5 2yr stints, what's likely to hurt you is... your age. A developer with 2 2yr startup stints is your typical Bay "senior developer". And a developer with 1 2yr startup stint is your typical "experienced" Bay developer, and generally one of the most in-demand categories of developers in the Bay. I'd go so far as to say that the 2 2yr stints will look better to a startup hiring manager than 7 years in an corporate environment like Oracle. The former is definitely in tune with SFBay startup-scene vibe, the latter looks like a corporate potato whose fit for startup life is questionable (not to mention a little too old as well ;).

by geofft 8y ago

scarface74 8y ago

I agree, even though I switched jobs 5 times in 10 years I had to have a story to tell - one company went out of business, one product was cancelled, one was a “change of direction and they didn’t want to be a software company”, but they did want me to finish a project and paid me well enough to lead it to completion. But now I am starting to get the job hopping stench about myself. But if you really want to stay liquid - contract. You don’t get the job hoppers stench about you if you do want to go full time later on.

dunpeal 8y ago

Insightful comment overall, but I disagree with your implication that the formula for pay raises is generally "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now". First of all, what "cost of switching jobs" are you referring to? If I live in SF, "switching jobs" likely means getting off at a different BART station. Hell, I might be able to walk to my next job. I think the well-known fact that pay raises fail to keep up with market wages in tech - isn't some brilliantly efficient calculation like "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now" as you suggest. It's clearly not working very well, since job hopping in the valley is crazy high, and everyone knows that's done because of pay. To wit, the longer you work for the same company, the farther your market comp will drift away from you, and the only way to catch up with the runaway comp-train is to hop jobs. I think it's simply the traditional American 2-3% raise model clashing with a booming tech reality where your market wage will likely increase much higher. Plus, the traditional model itself never worked very well for well-performing employees: > It used to be that jumping ship meant landing a salary 10 percent to 20 percent higher than your previous one. While increases of that size aren’t as widespread as they used to be, switching jobs is still the most common path to the best pay raise. > If you stay at the same organization, your annual increases may be restricted by your current base salary because companies have a narrow percentage range within which they can boost your pay. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/090415/salary-secrets-what-considered-big-raise.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041... Simply stated: employers were never very efficient at raising comp for good performers. Even decades ago, in industries nowhere near the growth rate of current tech, top performers were much better off job-hopping. Tech just made it even more lucrative.

geofft 8y ago
By "cost of switching jobs" I mean that there's a negative cost in the long term to having a short job on your resume (especially if your previous job was also short), to not having an enthusiastic positive reference, to maybe getting a reputation as someone who doesn't want to stay at a job, etc. If I take a job paying, say, $100K, and someone is offering me $120K after six months, waiting until I've been at the job a year or two is technically costing me $10-30K over jumping right now but is probably worth more than that in the long term just to not have that six-month stint on my resume and to not burn bridges with my current employer. After a couple of years it becomes more defensible to leave, so there are mechanisms for giving you significantly more money after several years (promotions, promotions to manager track, refresher grants, etc.) but fewer mechanisms for giving you more money in the first year or two, and basically none for within the first year, because employers know that even if your market value is theoretically higher, you can't actually take advantage of that yet. I think that even in markets where job-hopping is high in general, any particular individual can still only job-hop so many times before it backfires on their ability to get a high salary.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  Hopping after 6 months, or say less than a year, will definitely hurt your resume, even in the Bay. As a hiring manager, I'll typically assume your either got fired, or gave up too quickly. Both strong reasons not to hire you. Hopping after 2 years in the Bay is extremely common. So much that I'm not even sure it's considered "hopping" anymore. I'm not sure how long of a time horizon you mean when you suggest job-hops will eventually hurt you. In the Bay, at least, if you have say 5 2yr stints, what's likely to hurt you is... your age. A developer with 2 2yr startup stints is your typical Bay "senior developer". And a developer with 1 2yr startup stint is your typical "experienced" Bay developer, and generally one of the most in-demand categories of developers in the Bay. I'd go so far as to say that the 2 2yr stints will look better to a startup hiring manager than 7 years in an corporate environment like Oracle. The former is definitely in tune with SFBay startup-scene vibe, the latter looks like a corporate potato whose fit for startup life is questionable (not to mention a little too old as well ;).