Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends on the candidate's situation. If they had a series of 1-2 year stints at companies that were interrupted by the company going out of business I wouldn't hold that against them because it could just be bad luck. If they were laid off repeatedly (with the company still surviving) it would make me question why their name always seemed to make it onto the layoff list. If they changed jobs repeatedly ev…
As someone who recruits for Electronic Arts who has far from a stellar record where the treatment and retention of staff is concerned; I would take this with a grain of salt.
Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#32a series of 1- or 2-year stays will still hurt you. Five to 7 years at a company is a good run. Consider 2 to 3 years the minimum commitment when accepting a new job. Is this statement accurate? At first glance it seems to be a little conservative. I ask as a potential career changer with 2.5 years in my first position, and 1.5 into my second.
I think it depends on the candidate's situation. If they had a series of 1-2 year stints at companies that were interrupted by the company going out of business I wouldn't hold that against them because it could just be bad luck. If they were laid off repeatedly (with the company still surviving) it would make me question why their name always seemed to make it onto the layoff list. If they changed jobs repeatedly ev…
But I'm not sure you should assume a candidate who changed jobs every 1-2 years will continue doing so indefinately, especially if they have only had 2 or 3 jobs. Personal circumstances change and peoples appetite for risk generally decreases with age (and experience) especially once they pick up partners and children along their life journey. Intuitively it feels like a very bad metric for gauging if they are a longer term employee.
If you have high staff turnover the larger factor may be an environment which drives them out. Though admitedly, if you have a say on hiring and don't have a say on the employees working environment then I guess you have few options.
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#33OP is a wanker. Wah-wah, Millennials are entitled and don't want to do 70 hours per week of our grunt work, and they leave before they burn out and we can fire them. People should leave jobs as soon as they realize they aren't going to learn or grow where they are. This can happen after 8 years, or 3 months. Companies don't promise to employ people for 3 years regardless of whether they are any good, so why should an…
Hey Mike! Hope you're doing well. Wah-wah, Millennials are entitled and don't want to do 70 hours per week of our grunt work, and they leave before they burn out and we can fire them. I think you're misrepresenting OP's argument here. He's arguing that younger people with repeated job jumps may raise flags at prospective employers. I tend to agree with OP, too. Jumping between gigs can be a problem, especially for pe…
I know what the OP's saying, and I'm probably exaggerating my normal reaction. I just feel like this idea that "job hoppers" are the problem rather than a symptom is a bit ridiculous. I don't know anyone who goes into a job intending to bolt after 1 year.
I think one of the most perverse things about the job market is that it's, in almost all companies, a lot harder to get a transfer (much less promotion) than to get a new job. Job hopping exists because companies impose timetables based on the average.
I've actually known people to look for jobs within their own companies using external recruiters because it's easier to do it that way than through the official transfer process, which often has bureaucracy and political overhead attached.
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#34OP is a wanker. Wah-wah, Millennials are entitled and don't want to do 70 hours per week of our grunt work, and they leave before they burn out and we can fire them. People should leave jobs as soon as they realize they aren't going to learn or grow where they are. This can happen after 8 years, or 3 months. Companies don't promise to employ people for 3 years regardless of whether they are any good, so why should an…
OP is a wanker. Wah-wah The rest of your post was really good, you don't need to debase it with that kind of pointless drivel.
Expect to spend 2 to 3 years learning how the company works,
though it may be longer before opportunities arise.
And people think millenials are entitled. Sheesh.Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#35Moral of the story, who cares what's the "right" amount of time to be at a job. Enjoy what you do, do it well, and it will reflect on you accordingly.
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#36"I see a lot of CVs. For years, I’ve noticed that some people—a lot of people, actually—don't stay very long at their first jobs. They may accept the job intending to retire there in 30 or 40 years, but instead they leave quickly, adding an early blemish to their CVs." Leaving your job is considered an early blemish? Give me a break
In something like a biomedical lab, as a first job fresh out of university you're likely going to be something of a lab assistant, doing grunt work as you learn the ropes and work with an experienced team who has been doing this for decades. The accomplishments section of that job are likely going to be incidental with things such as "improved accuracy of testing by 58% in the first three months; reduced sample contamination from an average 1 in 23 to a notable 1 in 287 through an innovative workflow" (and bonus points if you translate that into specific business value such as cutting trial times by 9 months with an estimated savings of $15M). Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but you barely got your feet wet and any job you move to is going to be more of the same.
In a software startup, you can be doing anything and everything as a first job and, if you're an accomplished hacker with passion and have been building things in your spare time, your accomplishments will have a lot of incidentals but will be overshadowed by things such as building the product from scratch, launching it, and scaling the production environment to handle 10M paying users with peaks of 50K simultaneous users. Switching jobs at that point can be chalked up to "did something awesome, handed the project off to an experienced team for continued development, and looking for the next challenge".
Of course, there's still something to be said for being tenacious and fighting through the drudgery of ongoing maintenance. It's amazing how much you learn about how you ought to have built something when you are required to continue to grow and iterate on what you built. It's not something that someone will necessarily learn as part of their first job unless they stay with it for a while.
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#37"I see a lot of CVs. For years, I’ve noticed that some people—a lot of people, actually—don't stay very long at their first jobs. They may accept the job intending to retire there in 30 or 40 years, but instead they leave quickly, adding an early blemish to their CVs." Leaving your job is considered an early blemish? Give me a break
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#38At my last job I helped in the process of interviewing for an embedded USB developer position. It was extremely difficult to find people with that expertise. I remember one candidate in particular had 13 jobs over a 20 year career with the most time spent at one company being just under five years. When we all gathered at the end of the day to discuss the candidate I brought this up and my manager and he admitted he noticed this but filling the position was so difficult he didn't care. My takeaway from this was if you have a sought-after skill no one cares how long you stayed at previous jobs.
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP is a wanker. Wah-wah The rest of your post was really good, you don't need to debase it with that kind of pointless drivel.
On the contrary - I thought it was a pretty accurate description of the article, especially when you have statements like: Expect to spend 2 to 3 years learning how the company works, though it may be longer before opportunities arise. And people think millenials are entitled. Sheesh.
If the game is worth playing, you have to execute and that takes time. That can take 2-5+ years. Whatever the vision is, it's going to take a lot of effort to put it together. But you can usually figure out when a game is not worth playing in a couple of months. I'm not saying that people should quit a job after a shitty week because even the best jobs have bad spells, but people shouldn't waste time because of a need to keep up a false appearance of loyalty. Again, it comes down to this: are you the chef's protege, or are you washing dishes?
Re: Why Good People Leave Good Jobs
#40OP is a wanker. Wah-wah, Millennials are entitled and don't want to do 70 hours per week of our grunt work, and they leave before they burn out and we can fire them. People should leave jobs as soon as they realize they aren't going to learn or grow where they are. This can happen after 8 years, or 3 months. Companies don't promise to employ people for 3 years regardless of whether they are any good, so why should an…
Insults and straw men don't belong here.