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Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

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Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#91

Post by danbolt »

eesmith wrote: post #76
WilliamEdward wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I'm curious who gets to decide what's synergistic and who gets to decide what's exploitative.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#92

Post by roel_v »

WalterBright wrote: post #89
roel_v wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There are lots of software jobs where the 'skills' are equally interchangeable. The added value of a software engineer is much higher than the value added by a clerk. That's why software engineers get paid much more. Supply and demand will force a company to pay more for a person that creates $100 in value than a person that creates $10 in value.

Of course, but that's not what the original claim was. The original claim was that software engineers, on average, can demand a wage proportional to the value they create. Which is simply not true. They can command a higher wage because they generate more profit, but how much more they will be paid is not that value (or a function of it - and, again, speaking for the average developer, not highly niche specialists), it's set by supply and demand.

If the claim from the beginning had been 'career advice: specialize your tech skills to the point where you can present such a unique proposition that you can command a share of your value add as salary, and also make sure that that specialization is something that brings a high value add', then of course I would have agreed. But saying that the average joe schmoe web developer is in a position to negotiate based on their value add is simply not true. I mean, don't take my word for it - just look at what the salaries for run of the mill software engineers are. (someone is going to bring up big five salaries and claim SE's are paid 1/2 mill - yeah no, those are not 'average')

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#93

Post by AmericanChopper »

brmgb wrote: post #72
AmericanChopper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leadi…

I honestly can’t tell if this comment is supposed to be satire. The quality of your product has a direct impact on ARPC, customer churn, LTV, sales conversions, customer engagement/feature usage, SLA reports, roadmap progress, competitor analysis, and many other metrics. Most, if not all of those metrics will be featured in quarterly reports. I’m getting the very strong impression that most of the commenters in this thread have absolutely no insight at all into how businesses or their management actually operate.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#94

Post by WalterBright »

roel_v wrote: post #92
WalterBright wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are lots of software jobs where the 'skills' are equally interchangeable. The added value of a software engineer is much higher than the value added by a clerk. That's why software engineers get paid much more. Supply and demand will force a company to pay more for a person that creates $100 in value than a person that creates $10 in value.

Of course, but that's not what the original claim was. The original claim was that software engineers, on average, can demand a wage proportional to the value they create. Which is simply not true. They can command a higher wage because they generate more profit, but how much more they will be paid is not that value (or a function of it - and, again, speaking for the average developer, not highly niche specialists),…

> The original claim was that software engineers, on average, can demand a wage proportional to the value they create. Which is simply not true.

It is true from a simple gedanken experiment. Suppose I pay you $10 and you produce $100 in value. My competitor notices this and offers you $20 and entices you away, making $80 on $20 invested. His competitor notices, and offers you $30 to make $70. Rinse, repeat. Your pay will stabilize at $100 minus the opportunity cost of the money, which around 15%.

This scenario relies on the players all being greedy and completely self-interested.

The scenario of someone hiring you for $10 and you producing $100 is highly unstable and unlikely to last very long.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#95

Post by non-entity »

Pfhreak wrote: post #20

> Millennials are labeled lazy, self-entitled, and, therefore, responsible for high turnover rates in the labor market. Who are they supposed to be loyal to? Certainly not their employer, who is squeezing every cent of labor value from their work. I'd understand this attitude if companies took care of their people or if the person was part of a worker's coop. Also, anecdotally, job hopping has been incredibly lucrati…

I mean, I'll stop job hopping when one of the following becomes true:

1. I genuinely enjoy both the work environment and enjoy what I'm working on. (pretty low chance of this happening)

2. I can no longer get a significant [idk, ~20%+]increase in income. (I still have a loooong way to go)

3. My life changes in a way where much more stability is required or ideal.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#96

Post by papito »

WalterBright wrote: post #88
praptak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get real, tech skills are not that unique. Maybe in a very new and very hot area of current research.

> tech skills are not that unique. Some are unique enough to get that $1m compensation. I don't know what John Carmack's compensation is, but I bet it's north of $1m. And he'd be darn well worth it. Ditto for Linus Torvalds.

Well, let's not take into account extreme outliers. Most devs are not John Carmack. Most devs code HTML forms in Django and faint at the sight of raw SQL.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#97

Post by honestoHeminway »

VRay wrote: post #40
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…

> that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this ?? What if the company saves a lot of money, and only lose a tiny percentage of employees every year? I think it's pretty safe to say that most salaried employees will just keep trucking along happily so long as their bills are paid and they don't feel horribly oppressed or stressed out. If there's a mandatory 5 minute daily meeting at 10 AM and free dinner…

At some point, those companys themselves are going to get poached- not for the value they are worth, but for the value they hold back for the market.

Sort of a gold hoarders house bought.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#98

Post by roel_v »

WalterBright wrote: post #94
roel_v wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but that's not what the original claim was. The original claim was that software engineers, on average, can demand a wage proportional to the value they create. Which is simply not true. They can command a higher wage because they generate more profit, but how much more they will be paid is not that value (or a function of it - and, again, speaking for the average developer, not highly niche specialists),…

> The original claim was that software engineers, on average, can demand a wage proportional to the value they create. Which is simply not true. It is true from a simple gedanken experiment. Suppose I pay you $10 and you produce $100 in value. My competitor notices this and offers you $20 and entices you away, making $80 on $20 invested. His competitor notices, and offers you $30 to make $70. Rinse, repeat. Your pay…

That is again another argument than the original one under discussion. Of course prices converge to an equilibrium in a perfectly efficient market. But wages are sticky, and labor is a lemon market the the employer's pov. Amd those are just two reasons for why people cannot walk into a comp negotiation and negotiate based on value produced. (not to mention that no prospective employee would ever even know that value, but I've left that out of the discussion all along)

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#99

Post by eesmith »

danbolt wrote: post #91
eesmith wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I'm curious who gets to decide what's synergistic and who gets to decide what's exploitative.

Anyone? The problem is in convincing others to use the same definition.

Also, I think it's possible to be both synergistic and exploitative.

Re: Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping

#100

Post by hattar »

city41 wrote: post #51
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've interviewed many candidates in SV and many of them have strings of 6-18 month stints on their LinkedIn. It's extremely common; I'd almost even say it's the norm. Before SV I lived in Denver and any job tenure less than 2 years was a huge red flag, and even less than 3 would raise an eye brow.

Hiring manager in Denver here. I see an increasing number of people with repeated jobs where they only work 9mo-1year. Talking to peers I’m definitely not the only person skipping over those candidates. It takes months to get a dev up to full productivity, I don’t want to hire someone who will likely only put a few useful months in before leaving.
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