Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping • Hacker News Board

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#71

Post by rahimnathwani » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

croon wrote: post #52

rahimnathwani wrote: post #2

The article asks the question "So how long do workers stay with their employers nowadays?", but that question isn't answered by the cited data source. The data are based on 'how long have you been with your current employer?', which of course underestimates the time you will actually stay with that employer (it's unlikely today is your last day). Imagine a world in which every employee stays at each job for exactly 2…

Good point, but your question also has an issue: If my answer is "2", you have no idea if it's almost 1, or almost 3, which is a huge span. I think a better question would be "how long did you stay with your previous employer".

The reason I chose my question is that I only care about employment that started in the last 3 years, and how long that has tended to last.

The potential huge span for an individual answer won't affect the usefulness of the median.

Your question is interesting but would pollute any summary statistic with too much old and irrelevant data. Imagine someone who has had two employers: the first for 2 years, and the second for 45 years.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#72

Post by brmgb » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #57

newswasboring wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but they don't care about employee churn at all. That's the whole point. There is almost an infinite supply of replacements. Did you not read my post?

The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally don’t care about the quality of their product or services. There are very few businesses where this is the case (in software engineering at least), so if you’re trying to suggest that such businesses are a common problem, then you’re delusional.

> The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally don’t care about the quality of their product or services.

Quality of product does not appear on quaterly result and is not taken into account when deciding bonuses. Obviously companies don't care about it.

The only times I have seen companies care about churn is when :

- constant departures started impacting customers delivery scheduldes leading to financial penalties

- costs of hiring started to grate.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#73

Post by gregdunn » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

yibg wrote: post #11

Personally I find it harder to switch jobs often as I go up the ladder. There are just fewer positions and it gets more difficult to go directly into a high level position at a new company. This applies to both ICs and management. E.g most VPs and distinguished engineers stick around pretty long.

This matches my experiences, and I'm certainly no Distinguished Engineer, but as a PE I would still have relatively few options to work at a similar level and compensation if I was looking. Thankfully I'm quite happy where I am.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#74

Post by gregdunn » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

BossingAround wrote: post #55

What I truly wonder is, does hopping between positions within one employer count as job hopping? If I stay with company X for 5 years, but every year, I have switched a position ( e.g. tech support engineer -> QE -> software engineer -> Evangelist -> manager), would that disadvantage me on the job market? Or would I get bonus points for wanting to stick with the company X?

It depends on the company and their needs. In the majority of cases, I would say this is a positive thing for your resume.

If their goal is to hire someone for a specific position and they hope that person stays in that same role long term, maybe not so much. Companies are generally happy to just have you stick around, though - if you are moving within the company, you should in theory still be providing value to the company, and potentially even more value, if the moves are upwards.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#75

Post by gregdunn » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 9:13 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #24

oblio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get asked about those? I've had a bunch of 1 years (or less) stints plus a 1 year sabbatical and I don't think I ever got asked about them, even though I expected I would.

Depends on the market. 1 year stints in SV don't even register on the radar but in some European countries it could be a red flag.

Market, and point in the career.

If you've got 15-20 years of experience and you've never stayed somewhere more than 12-18 months, it's a very different scenario than someone with 5-6 years, even in SV.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#76

Post by eesmith » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 10:27 AM UTC

WilliamEdward wrote: post #32

luckylion wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly not their employer, who is squeezing every cent of labor value from their work. > Also, anecdotally, job hopping has been incredibly lucrative for me. It seems both sides are simply maximizing their value here.

The employer almost always makes more money than the employee and is the one profiting from the worker. It is not an equal comparison and the worker will always make less than the money they bring in to the company.

I've never liked that Marxian interpretation of the employer-employee relationship.

Why can't we both profit? If I buy a product from you, you make money from it. And while I lose money (because I gave it to you) I probably increase something else - happiness, if it's for my hobby, or the ability to make more profit, if it's for my job.

With that analogy in mind, consider a test pilot, who wants to push the edge of experimental aircraft. There's no way for anyone except a Howard Hughes to do that without being employed. So sure, the test pilot's employer might make money (if it's a profit-making company and not a hobby or government project), but in exchange the pilot gets to fulfill something highly desired, which otherwise cannot be done.

Another problem I have with that interpretation is that some jobs are synergistic, such that you cannot look to pairwise relationships to understand the economics.

There aren't that many successful solo bass players. If I were a bass player, I'm much more likely to make money as part of a band than working on my own. So my relative profit is greater by being in a band, even if I don't make my full share of income to the band.

The third problem (or the first one re-visited) is that it focuses on the traditional employer/employee relationship. If I'm a gig-worker, brought in as a third-party contractor, I'm not an employee. Nominally, my clients buy my time, so I'm the one to profit. But yet they expect to many more money from the work I do for them.

Which means any exchange must be un-equal, which makes it a pretty useless interpretation.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#77

Post by roel_v » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #64

roel_v wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number is the ceiling. The floor is what someone else with the skills to make those particular changes will accept as a wage. Do you think a toll booth operator can say 'I do 10k in revenue a day, pay me half of that and we'll call it good'? Please.

> Do you think a toll booth operator can say 'I do 10k in revenue a day, pay me half of that and we'll call it good'? Of course not, because it isn't his skills making that happen.

There are lots of software jobs where the 'skills' are equally interchangeable. Most programmers aren't in a position to negotiate a rate based on the scarcity of their skills; they have to negotiate based on the market rate, which is set by supply and demand under fungibility od the good (or service, in this case). That is not to say that those services are 100% fungible, but a lot closer to 100 than to 0.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#78

Post by mcv » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #33

asdff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally among my fellow millennials across different fields who've jobbed hopped, few did it for the promotion, most did it because they were being exploited and depressed. Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits because people are just that desperate to get a job that whittles down ye olde student loan and has a hea…

> Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits If job hopping is a viable strategy (which it certainly is in some sectors), then that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this. That’s not to say that every company out there is actually going to figure out the source of their staff retention problems, but the fact…

Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work.

Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. Assertive workers hop jobs when the situation demands it, less assertive ones suffer.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#79

Post by AmericanChopper » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 11:16 AM UTC

moneywoes wrote: post #35

AmericanChopper wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people who want to develop their skills tend not to struggle much with employment. The people who I’ve personally seen get the most frustrated are the kind of people who don’t understand why their colleagues are upset about the 15,000 unfixable linting errors in their React spaghetti, and who proudly announce in standup that they fixed the failing pipeline by commenting the tests out. I’m sure we’ve…

As a recent grad looking to get a job and avoid those errors, do you have any resources or suggestions? Maybe like the book clean code?

My perspective is highly biased because I started my career as a DBA before moving more into web dev. The things I learned from databases have been tremendously useful first principles for writing other software, especially relating to concurrency and data structures. I’d highly recommend you learn about the first few normal forms and why they’re useful, and how explain plans work in relation to time complexity, you could pick that up from some casual googling. They’re usually presented in relation to databases, but the concepts are useful in any form of schema design. Ive also found understanding concurrency control to be very useful, specifically I learned about MVCC first. I think those concepts are relatively easy to grasp, but are largely neglected by a lot of SWEs.

Otherwise in general I just always try to think about the underlying logic of the code I’m writing. If it feels hacky, overly complex or fragile, it probably is, and I probably need to take another look at the problem I’m trying to solve and consider whether I’m approaching it correctly, using the correct tools, or even whether I’m even using the tools correctly.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#80

Post by AmericanChopper » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 11:28 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #78

AmericanChopper wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits If job hopping is a viable strategy (which it certainly is in some sectors), then that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this. That’s not to say that every company out there is actually going to figure out the source of their staff retention problems, but the fact…

Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work. Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. Assertive workers hop jobs when the situation demands it, less assertive ones suffer.

> Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work.

Pay and hours worked is really only one part of the equation, but this is pretty much right. Complaining won’t do anything to solve retention problems though.

> Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it.

This really depends on your definition of “getting away with it”. If continuing to perpetuate the problems that cause it, at great expense to the business is “getting away with it”, then I guess your right. You could “get away with” never going to work again, if you were prepared to accept the costs of being destitute for the rest of your life. However I think you’ll find there’s a large number of companies that have been forced to improve their practices in order to remain competitive. Anecdotally speaking, it’s why I personally won’t get out of bed for less than 4 figures after tax per day, and why I’d be incredibly reluctant to work in an office that didn’t provide me with free food, coffee and other drinks.