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I think we've fully transitioned from the old world, wherein we built our careers around a given company. These days we have to build our careers around skill s

I think we've fully transitioned from the old world, wherein we built our careers around a given company. These days we have to build our careers around skill sets, or industry circles, or knowledge bases. Essentially, the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me. This is not necessarily our choice. But the economy and the job market are a lot more fluid -- sometimes for good, sometimes for bad -- than they were in the past. Even if someone wanted to settle into one company for the long haul, that's not only unlikely, but perhaps even highly improbable. The company itself is likely to be changing and reorganizing at a pace as constant and rapid as its market. The old tradeoff between BigCorp and Startups used to be that Startups were riskier and more exciting, whereas BigCorp was slower, a bit more boring, but highly stable. The stability has fallen out of that equation to a large degree. These days it's a choice between relative degrees of comfort and risk, rather than absolute degrees thereof. Again, much of this is market driven. There are startlingly few companies, big or small, that look anything like what they did five or ten years ago. It's a safe bet that they won't look the way they do today in another five or ten years. Some people thrive in this sort of environment, and those people would probably call it "dynamic." Others hate it, and they'd call it "unstable." Both would probably have to admit, one way or the other, that it's not as easy.

codegeek 14y ago
"the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me." Upvoted for this. If everyone understands this well, they will surely be more happy in the long run.
- davidw 14y ago
  I wonder if perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing back the other way some. I mean, I'm pretty happy doing my own thing, but there are plenty of people who just want to have some security in life, and in a world where there's little of that, a company that provides some might be able to attract people. Maybe not in an industry like ours, but who knows... just a random thought.
  - codegeek 14y ago
    Definitely. "Investing in me" should not just be about doing your own thing necessarily. For me, it is more about "looking out for self interest". If a company provides the things I want in a good way, nothing wrong staying with it for the long haul i guess.
  - nathan_long 14y ago
    To me, "job security" means having marketable skills. It means I don't depend on a single company. It does not mean I trust that my company will take care of me. This is easy to say as a software developer because of the nature of our industry. Niche jobs are probably different, but a smart worker would recognize such a job as a personal risk ("if this company tanks, I have no marketable skills") and require more compensation in exchange for assuming that risk.
  - opminion 14y ago
    That's what having a job means to most people in southern Europe. Everything that falls short of that, which are most jobs nowadays, is considered negative. That's one reason why many people think it is normal that one of the roles of the state is to be a main provider of jobs. Not saying that's good or bad, just what the general feeling is, which is very difficult to understand if your baseline is pure capitalism.
    - davidw 14y ago
      Yeah, I was talking more about the US. Here in Italy, I think people still need to get more used to not having jobs for life.
chrismarlow9 14y ago
It makes more sense to search out the company that fits you as opposed to bending and molding yourself to fit in company X. Not everyone can afford this luxury to just hop from job to job, but if you're top 5 at anything, and I mean ANYTHING, someone is probably looking to hire you and pay you well (even something as meaningless as building models out of toothpicks). My advice to my kids will be to find what you're naturally best at and push it to the max. No matter what it is or how much you may think "this wont pay", there's someone out there that will pay you well for it. Anyways, just an expansion and rant to follow your comment. Thanks for sparking this train of thought in my head. Upvote..
- jonnathanson 14y ago
  "if you're top 5 at anything, and I mean ANYTHING, someone is probably looking to hire you and pay you well (even something as meaningless as building models out of toothpicks)." I've definitely seen this effect in action (not personally, per se, but with peers) -- though it can also be fairly dangerous. For instance, a lot of big companies outside of the high tech industry will gladly fork over truckloads of cash -- I mean that almost literally -- to poach top talent from the tech world. Problem is, once you get there, you're kind of stuck. And you're working with people who have no real clue what you do all day, even if they ostensibly hired you to fill a very real knowledge/skill gap. ("I'll let my results do the talking," you might think, but long before you get to the results, you've got to wage daily battle with politics and ill-advised changes in scope or direction). I guess the point is: skill arbitrage can be a very powerful factor in career growth, but it can also be a double edged sword. I think one needs to choose whether to make this -- almost a form of internal consulting -- a career in its own right. Pick an industry to focus in, or pick a skill set to focus in. Both can be equally valid and equally lucrative choices. But there's less fluidity between the two paths than you might expect. I guess this doesn't apply so much if one is truly a recognized, top-5 expert in his or her given field -- and by truly, I mean this person keynotes national conferences on the subject, or has published a bestseller, or gets board invitations, or regularly books consulting gigs at an amortized hourly rate that would make a managing partner at a giant lawfirm gasp.
AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>Again, much of this is market driven. Agree with this. Which is really the problem with this (from the original post): >Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices). Doing things like that is bad if you intend to still exist in 10 years, unless doing them is necessary in order to still exist in 10 years. Because if you spend the extra time to get it right, and your competitor ships the minute it compiles, by the time your product is on the market a huge chunk of your prospective customers are already locked into a competing ecosystem. "Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking, because big companies can afford to take a hit in a nascent business unit for a year or two in order to more than gain it back a decade down the road. If you're a startup, you often can't afford it -- even assuming your competitors don't beat you to market, "take your time and do it right" can easily cause you to run out of investment capital before the product is finished. I don't mean to imply that this is actually a good thing, just point out that these are the incentive structures we're dealing with. Highly competitive markets have a lot going for them, but stability and long-term planning are not among them. I kind of want to blame the antitrust laws, actually, for being such a catastrophic failure in every direction. On the one hand we have natural monopoly telecommunications companies abusing their control over radio spectrum into control over mobile computing devices and control over last mile wireline service into control over content delivery (classic tying arrangement in both cases), with nary a peep from the antitrust authorities. On the other hand, we have the things that antitrust nominally does prohibit causing the market to run in the opposite direction from the efficient characteristics of monopolistic markets (i.e. non-duplication of effort). When we have multiple startups working on the same general idea, the natural thing for them to do is to get together into a single unified organization and pool their efforts, but we make that illegal. So then they execute the classic race to the bottom where everyone cuts corners and works unsustainable hours just because the first mover gets the whole pie and so nothing is sacred if it can provide a meaningful competitive advantage. I think we need to rethink this whole mess. The shadow of antitrust regulation and the possibility of it being enforced is resulting in all of this widespread inefficiency while the almost complete lack of actual antitrust enforcement against anyone who deserves it is not even providing the supposed benefits that all of that inefficiency is supposed to be buying us. I certainly don't mean to suggest that we don't need something like antitrust -- we can't have AT&T and Microsoft and whatever oligopolies exist in whatever arbitrary industries turning into de facto unaccountable private governing bodies, which is exactly what would happen with nothing (and has happened to greater and lesser extents already), but what we have just isn't doing the job. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any suggestions.
001sky 14y ago
But the economy and the job market are a lot more fluid -- And also management internally. They are are surely related, but ultimately its almost always a people problem, in the sense that a manager is replaced or layered (or perhaps politically ostracised in some machivellian way). Then the employee is asking himself if he is throwing good money after bad, in a landscape where no wager--no matter how astute--will ever pay off.

codegeek 14y ago

"the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me." Upvoted for this. If everyone understands this well, they will surely be more happy in the long run.

davidw 14y ago
I wonder if perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing back the other way some. I mean, I'm pretty happy doing my own thing, but there are plenty of people who just want to have some security in life, and in a world where there's little of that, a company that provides some might be able to attract people. Maybe not in an industry like ours, but who knows... just a random thought.
- codegeek 14y ago
  Definitely. "Investing in me" should not just be about doing your own thing necessarily. For me, it is more about "looking out for self interest". If a company provides the things I want in a good way, nothing wrong staying with it for the long haul i guess.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  To me, "job security" means having marketable skills. It means I don't depend on a single company. It does not mean I trust that my company will take care of me. This is easy to say as a software developer because of the nature of our industry. Niche jobs are probably different, but a smart worker would recognize such a job as a personal risk ("if this company tanks, I have no marketable skills") and require more compensation in exchange for assuming that risk.
- opminion 14y ago
  That's what having a job means to most people in southern Europe. Everything that falls short of that, which are most jobs nowadays, is considered negative. That's one reason why many people think it is normal that one of the roles of the state is to be a main provider of jobs. Not saying that's good or bad, just what the general feeling is, which is very difficult to understand if your baseline is pure capitalism.
  - davidw 14y ago
    Yeah, I was talking more about the US. Here in Italy, I think people still need to get more used to not having jobs for life.

chrismarlow9 14y ago

It makes more sense to search out the company that fits you as opposed to bending and molding yourself to fit in company X. Not everyone can afford this luxury to just hop from job to job, but if you're top 5 at anything, and I mean ANYTHING, someone is probably looking to hire you and pay you well (even something as meaningless as building models out of toothpicks). My advice to my kids will be to find what you're naturally best at and push it to the max. No matter what it is or how much you may think "this wont pay", there's someone out there that will pay you well for it. Anyways, just an expansion and rant to follow your comment. Thanks for sparking this train of thought in my head. Upvote..

jonnathanson 14y ago
"if you're top 5 at anything, and I mean ANYTHING, someone is probably looking to hire you and pay you well (even something as meaningless as building models out of toothpicks)." I've definitely seen this effect in action (not personally, per se, but with peers) -- though it can also be fairly dangerous. For instance, a lot of big companies outside of the high tech industry will gladly fork over truckloads of cash -- I mean that almost literally -- to poach top talent from the tech world. Problem is, once you get there, you're kind of stuck. And you're working with people who have no real clue what you do all day, even if they ostensibly hired you to fill a very real knowledge/skill gap. ("I'll let my results do the talking," you might think, but long before you get to the results, you've got to wage daily battle with politics and ill-advised changes in scope or direction). I guess the point is: skill arbitrage can be a very powerful factor in career growth, but it can also be a double edged sword. I think one needs to choose whether to make this -- almost a form of internal consulting -- a career in its own right. Pick an industry to focus in, or pick a skill set to focus in. Both can be equally valid and equally lucrative choices. But there's less fluidity between the two paths than you might expect. I guess this doesn't apply so much if one is truly a recognized, top-5 expert in his or her given field -- and by truly, I mean this person keynotes national conferences on the subject, or has published a bestseller, or gets board invitations, or regularly books consulting gigs at an amortized hourly rate that would make a managing partner at a giant lawfirm gasp.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago

>Again, much of this is market driven. Agree with this. Which is really the problem with this (from the original post): >Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices). Doing things like that is bad if you intend to still exist in 10 years, unless doing them is necessary in order to still exist in 10 years. Because if you spend the extra time to get it right, and your competitor ships the minute it compiles, by the time your product is on the market a huge chunk of your prospective customers are already locked into a competing ecosystem. "Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking, because big companies can afford to take a hit in a nascent business unit for a year or two in order to more than gain it back a decade down the road. If you're a startup, you often can't afford it -- even assuming your competitors don't beat you to market, "take your time and do it right" can easily cause you to run out of investment capital before the product is finished. I don't mean to imply that this is actually a good thing, just point out that these are the incentive structures we're dealing with. Highly competitive markets have a lot going for them, but stability and long-term planning are not among them. I kind of want to blame the antitrust laws, actually, for being such a catastrophic failure in every direction. On the one hand we have natural monopoly telecommunications companies abusing their control over radio spectrum into control over mobile computing devices and control over last mile wireline service into control over content delivery (classic tying arrangement in both cases), with nary a peep from the antitrust authorities. On the other hand, we have the things that antitrust nominally does prohibit causing the market to run in the opposite direction from the efficient characteristics of monopolistic markets (i.e. non-duplication of effort). When we have multiple startups working on the same general idea, the natural thing for them to do is to get together into a single unified organization and pool their efforts, but we make that illegal. So then they execute the classic race to the bottom where everyone cuts corners and works unsustainable hours just because the first mover gets the whole pie and so nothing is sacred if it can provide a meaningful competitive advantage. I think we need to rethink this whole mess. The shadow of antitrust regulation and the possibility of it being enforced is resulting in all of this widespread inefficiency while the almost complete lack of actual antitrust enforcement against anyone who deserves it is not even providing the supposed benefits that all of that inefficiency is supposed to be buying us. I certainly don't mean to suggest that we don't need something like antitrust -- we can't have AT&T and Microsoft and whatever oligopolies exist in whatever arbitrary industries turning into de facto unaccountable private governing bodies, which is exactly what would happen with nothing (and has happened to greater and lesser extents already), but what we have just isn't doing the job. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any suggestions.

001sky 14y ago

But the economy and the job market are a lot more fluid -- And also management internally. They are are surely related, but ultimately its almost always a people problem, in the sense that a manager is replaced or layered (or perhaps politically ostracised in some machivellian way). Then the employee is asking himself if he is throwing good money after bad, in a landscape where no wager--no matter how astute--will ever pay off.