This comment grew way too long. Tl;Dr: I agree with most of what you say. However, I think employment is way too complex a multi-way relationship to be considered interchangeable by any party. By that I mean it's possible to do so, but at a great cost of productivity for all involved.
That means employers shouldn't instinctively fire employees in any situation; first, they should make a reasonable effort at fixing the issue while retaining the employee. (Be it through training, changing their role, whatever it might be.) Anything else is a great hidden cost of productivity.
It also doesn't mean employees shouldn't leave bad jobs -- it just means they should make a reasonable effort at "changing their employer" as someone put it. If that fails, quitting is necessary, but also that is at a great hidden cost in the complexities of employment.
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> then the only inference one can draw, is that they're bad at self-promotion, since there are zillions of ways to present the same kind of facts with a more positive spin.
They do try to spin it, of course. But their longer message boils down to "somehow I keep ending up at jobs where I don't feel like I belong."
That doesn't have to be bad, but if it seems like they just keep shooting from the hip and just hoping to end up somewhere good, then there's very little to reassure me that they will. If they show me they are working actively on fixing the problems (whatever they are) that put them in bad places, then that's a completely different matter.
> I recommend reviewing an article (even the wikipedia entry will do) on the Fundamental Attribution Error,
I strongly believe people's actions are primarily responses to their historic and present environment, so while I do worry about FAE-type problems in general, this is not one of the situations where I think it applies too much.
You're right in a sense, though: I did use the wrong phrase. It's not that I believe the candidate is bad at picking employers, only that a history of repeatedly ending up with the wrong employer leads me to require more evidence than usual that this is also not one of those unlucky circumstances where they somehow end up with the wrong employer -- maybe through no fault of their own. (Accidentally speaking of correlation as causation is a big problem, and I readily admit this was a huge mistake of mine in the previous comments.)
I am worried about one common inferential error, though: the people who don't have resumes full of job-hopping could very well have just the same propensity of ending up with the wrong employer, only they don't take action on it. Is that situation even worse? Maybe. Probably. How likely is this confounder? No idea. It certainly makes the problem much more complex.
> Well, no, employers are, for the most part, companies,
Technically, yes, an employer is nothing but a legal entity with some accounting rules to follow.
That's not the sense in which I view employment, though. It's also a set of co-workers, it's processes through which work gets done, it's perks, it's insurance, it's the actual jobs to be done, it's consumer desires, it's supplier knowledge, it's future prospects, it's social status, it's connections and a network, and so on and so forth. Reducing it to a legal entity is an over-simplification. If it were that simple, then sure, they'd be exchangeable. (Maybe this is my fault for choosing the wrong word again; would it have been more clear if I said employment instead of employer?)
I don't contest we have an awful history, present, and future of employers abusing workers. I don't think that makes employments interchangeable -- if anything, it's the opposite.
> I've never appreciated the fiction of "we're like a family"
Neither have I, and I think I said as much in my comment too.
> Curiously, one of the goals of much collective bargaining is to make employees and employers nigh-on interchangeable via standardized agreements.
I do admire the efforts of collective bargaining that have gotten us this far (I live in a country that was strongly shaped by this process, and it's on many international scales one of the best places in the world to live and work.) I can't really say many negative things about it.
I don't think commoditisation of employers and employees is a way to prosperity. There is a lot of hidden complexity in the relationship between employee and their employment and the employer that is incompatible with commoditization and interchangeability.
Just as I cannot take whatever I have learned (technology, processes, co-workers, consumer desires) and productively apply it blindly in a new employment, my employer cannot take another developer of similar demography as me and expect them to know the technology, processes, co-workers, and consumer desires the way I know them after so-and-so many years working hands-on with continual improvement.