Rands lists the major ones, but there can be dozens of others. I personally call them "red flags" and once I see enough, it's resume time. I've tuned my own threshold pretty well and walked away from some perfectly good jobs and companies, only to see them implode in my rear-view mirror a year or two later.
My current employer, who has treated me well to date, just went back on a promise not to move the factory to Mexico. At the announcement they promised not to relocate Engineering. I updated my resume over the holiday break.
No, he doesn't. The full list from him includes:
Am I happy with my job?
Do I like my manager? My team?
Is this project I’m working on fulfilling?
Am I learning?
Am I respected?
Am I growing?
Do I feel fairly compensated?
Is this company/team going anywhere?
Do I believe in the vision?
Do I trust the leaders?
The sooner you become consciously aware of it, the better.
Not to mention that your answer implies that people only do things because of some list of personal criteria -- e.g. that they always take conscious and/or rational decisions.
Wanting to move to a different area for any number of life reasons
Wanting to change to a different career entirely
Need to take time off to deal with a new child, a sick relative, etc.
Finding an opportunity for something you can't offer them, like a chance to start their own company
And about a hundred other things that I couldn't imagine.
His job as a manager doesn't really include making sure your children don't get sick, or convincing you that California weather isn't that nice, or that you don't really want to have the life goal of starting your own company. I'd saying restricting the list to questions that a manager could have an impact on is more valuable than a more generic list that encapsulates everything.
Being fairly compensated and being adequately compensated are two different things. Sometimes you have to pay more than what is "fair" to keep people. Fair is tied to market forces, forces that assume people can/will move between jobs. To stop people from falling prey to market forces and leaving you need to pay them above the going rate, beyond fair.
An extreme example of this is where the fair/market rate is zero, or even below zero. People like interns on film/tv productions are paid nothing, sometimes for years. There are even examples of people paying for the opportunity to work without pay. If you want such people to remain loyal you have to pay them something, which would be more than the fair/market rate of nothing.
For an example of negative market rates in the medical field, see http://thetab.com/uk/uclan/2015/10/04/is-uclan-elitist-1193
"There has also recently been criticism of work experience placements in a private hospital being sold for £500 per week, which would help students improve their applications to study medicine at university."
But such markets are only approximated in practice, and the interesting part of Economics is studying the effects of how actual markets differ from being perfectly free and efficient.
Conditions leading to a shields down moment for someone switching to job that might be preventable by management is pretty well contained by this list. It doesn't account for life goals or circumstances that drive you in a truly different career path.
In one example in my career, a big employer was trying to change its culture, and set up a group to change its practices. Hired a lot of good, pretty expensive people. And it all worked well for a while, until one person decided that grass was greener somewhere else. Losing a teammate led to another, then another. The people that left had new employers, and happily recommended them. Others that were happy before were less happy with enough good coworkers gone, as management did nothing to special to keep them. In 6 months, everyone in that change initiative, and a lot of other employees they had contact with, were all gone. They ended up having to outsource everything said department was doing, because too much of the knowledge and expertise had left.
So beware when people leave, because coworkers leaving can a very common trigger for shields to go down.
It's weighted by whether the coworker was good or not, which makes you wonder if he knows something you don't. THAT'S when you start sniffing around and discovering other things that say yeah, he was right and it's time to bail.
The only implicit assumption in the author's thesis is that people value stability and are generally content with the status quo until it is challenged. I'm not sure this applies to all people, though I'm willing to consider the possibility that it applies to most. And if not most, then certainly many.
All of that said, your point about changing life goals is a great one. People definitely leave jobs for reasons beyond those articulated in this article. Rands' thesis is not completely encapsulating. But it doesn't need to be complete in order to be compelling. So long as what he's saying provides a decent, rough framework for managers and leaders to keep in mind -- which I'm interpreting as his intent here -- then it's still valuable.
Or have to begin at the bottom somewhere else. In other words: give up what you reached at the first company when you go somewhere else.
What I've done in the past though is simply mkae the older stuff increasingly terse to the point where the really old stuff is just the dates, company and title.
Conversely, if I had a job that paid well enough I knew I could retire healthy and happy, and in the meantime I didn't actively dislike it, I could tolerate a little monotony.
Unfortunately, most jobs couple monotony with long hours and think money will make up for it. This becomes a viscous cycle - the few hours you have to yourself are not a state where you are prepared to go out and learn new concepts, so you get locked into moving up the career ladder to get higher pay, rather than switching careers.
To me this is an attempt to look past the BS of generic reasons given while quitting. What happened a year prior to lead to that moment? Regardless if it's 1 or 20 years into the employment.
If what you said was the absolute case nobody would quit unless they were going to a job that is more meaningful to them in relation to their life goals, which happens to a degree but I believe is sill in a minority. Reality is much less idealistic and the 10 smaller reasons listed in the post can absolutely lead to shields down.
Even if you're at SpaceX you may treat it as "paying the dues" or apprenticeship period of your life until you can go off and have more impact somewhere else.
That said, there are 3 companies I've worked at I would have stayed at 2-3x as long if I'd been happier at them where in this particular instance happiness = having more fun at work and building stronger/closer relationships with my co-workers.
work is a means to sustenance. you help someone make a lot of money (either exploring space or showing ads in a plagiarized fart app) for a paycheck and then you use that money to sponsor your life style.
work is not supposed to be a hobby.
The most realistic shot at really working on what you love is to start your own business, but even then you often have to pivot to something less interesting to you, and either way, in time you're likely to end up doing mostly administrative work.
So yeah, I ended up assuming that work will not be my hobby, and it's up to me to maximize its profit while minimizing time spent on it.
impossible to start my dream job, and i already tried twice
You see, your company is probably not SpaceX, nor NASA. It's not pushing the frontiers of what's possible, or helping make the world a better place. That iPhone-app-cranking shop is just a marketing gig, nothing important on the face of this planet. And many people, many employees, have dreams. Or seek fulfillment, which they may not find in shipping out yet another webapp. They are in your company because it's fun to work on the problems it has - and it pays well - but that's not the extent of their dreams. Especially in this industry, where a lot of people were originally hobbyist programmers, which means tech is for them a part of life, a part of themselves, and not an otherwise uninteresting money-making skill set.
Happy people may very well leave their jobs, even if they love them, because it's unlikely that their life goals are perfectly aligned with company goals.