This is so true, and the weirdest thing in the world to me. Especially in tech, you get really heavily punished for staying at a job more than a few years. To the point where, in interviews, you are asked why you stayed so long. Why would you penalize someone who might make a long-term commitment to your company? You're basically flushing all the training and institutional knowledge they hold down the drain.
I've been at my current job 13 years (although I have advanced through multiple titles in that time). I may be slightly underpaid, though last time I looked a few years ago it was about average for the area. I've considered leaving occasionally, but I like the people I work with and the work most days is interesting and engaging.
Moreover, I'm content. Maybe I could get more money if I job-hopped or moved to a place like the Bay Area. But why? I'm comfortable now, all my needs are met, I have plenty of disposable income, and my family is happy. We never want for anything.
We have this weird aversion to people being content. There's a lot to be said for stability.
> This is so true, and the weirdest thing in the world to me. Especially in tech, you get really heavily punished for staying at a job more than a few years. To the point where, in interviews, you are asked why you stayed so long. Why would you penalize someone who might make a long-term commitment to your company? You're basically flushing all the training and institutional knowledge they hold down the drain.
In Germany, the mentality is different. If you switch jobs after few years, you have to give very good reasons - for exactly the outlined reasons.
As an immigrant I feel this is quite an American thing - there's always talk of your _career_, your _pursuits_, your _goals_, interesting things you did over the weekend...
I would gleefully take a pay cut to have a 35h work week _if my wage still allows me to eat out once 3x a week_, but I will work 40h + commute and feel always exhausted until I get there. See how easy is to fall on that trap.
The caricature you are offering only really works for overpaid tech workers.
Yeah, that's right I'm over paid. Eat a bag of biscuits you assuming flesh bag.
I'm giving up parts of my life to make money, and you expect me to want less than what I'm making?
Let's start at the numerator - you appear to be calculating life "happiness" (according to some internal metric) vs ... cost. You appear to be calculating costs as being:
- Not making more money because the degree did not lend it to making more money
- Social approbation for not making more money
- Missed revenue (income) because time spent with family/childcare
- Social approbation for not taking the higher-ranked (and labeled as such) gig
- Missed economic opportunity (income) for work-social reasons or work-enjoyment reasons
I mean - I'm a fan of doing what you like - but surely you don't expect society to pay you to watch Jerry Springer and smoke week all day at home munching down on pizza, right? How is this different?
Am I missing something?
https://www.askamanager.org/2019/07/can-you-advance-professi...
This is definitely an uncomfortable truth that isn't talked about very often, and the information age seems to exacerbate it.
>Become pregnant, and/or plan to work fewer hours for some time to take care of your kids or any older relative?
>Stay in your job for 15 years because you like the people, the work itself or some particular perk?
>However, lately the tension between those two is so high that any small decision towards living the life you want to live may very well end in financial misery for the rest of your life.
Are you expecting society to reward you for making ultimately selfish choices aimed at maximizing only your own personal happiness?
In the case of the degree choices, I know plenty of people who have jobs with a much higher social utility than mine, yet make much less and suffer long periods of unemployment (I'm thinking about, for example, people whose job is to educate people from marginalized communities).
In the case of taking care of other people, I just can't fathom how would you find selfisness in stepping out of a job in order to take care of other people.
And about staying a lot of time in a job, it can definitely make you incredibly productive, and in all cases I know in tech it forces people to have a "big picture" idea of some problem domain which is damn useful when trying to move to a company working within the same domain; it's very different from hopping companies and having to learn a slightly different tech stack and/or company structure each time. Sadly, this doesn't translate at all into a better salary, because as an industry we seem to have collectively decided that staying too long in a job is anathema.
The penalty persists because the years spent pursuing goals other than those that confer useful skills and experience cannot be regained. Are you suggesting that we reward all people equally, regardless of whether they are able to demonstrate the same degree of utility?
>In the case of taking care of other people, I just can't fathom how would you find selfisness in stepping out of a job in order to take care of other people.
Selfish from the perspective that taking care of a sick loved one does not necessarily provide a benefit to society at large. More importantly, that time spent not working or learning is effectively a pause in ones growth as a professional - what is the alternative, making hiring and salary decisions by age rather than experience?
>I know plenty of people who have jobs with a much higher social utility than mine, yet make much less and suffer long periods of unemployment
This is a bit of a conflation. I am arguing over choices which do not benefit society, in which case it is reasonable that one's career value is lower. This particular problem is one of misplaced valuation in our society, as there are tangible benefits to the degrees your acquaintances pursued.
Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.
There is no intrinsic benefit to society at large in pursuing a degree - only those degrees which enable one to contribute in some form, and even then the benefit only occurs if one uses the knowledge obtained to conduct useful work.
>Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.
Businesses have the goal of generating some sort of value. Yes, that means that employees must make certain sacrifices with their time and future plans - that's why they get paid. But this conflict between the goals of a business and the goals of an employee exist regardless of whether we organize into business-employee relationships or not, because fundamentally any significant, communal goal requires these same sacrifices to be achieved. We won't have any engineers or doctors or programmers if everyone majors in English Literature out of a fundamentally selfish desire to learn something with significantly less benefit to society.
The same goes for the other listed pursuits. I'm not saying that one should dedicate themselves to their work - but the detriment to one's career that comes with pursuing these, again, selfish goals (from the perspective of society) is generally just, because it isn't fair to force others to allocate their resources to activities which do not benefit them.
There are some theories that this magically coincides with creating value in an ideal model, but no period in history has actually worked that way. There are many proposed explanations for why it doesn't, but I'm not much interested in why. All I care about is that those models don't describe reality.
So businesses are all about generating income for their owners. But society is about all people in it, not just those who control the capital. It is necessarily true that there will be cases where the best thing for society is not the best thing for businesses.
Business has pushed the public narrative too far towards blind support of "business is a good thing." Your post even seems to just assume that as a given. You claim that a goal is "selfish (from the perspective of society)" when the only thing you can criticize about it is that it isn't maximizing business value.
Business isn't everything. Sure, a society needs a functioning economy in order to survive. But that's a far cry from assuming "good for business" is the same as "good for society".
The latter is certainly more nebulous, though, and I can understand why you might wish they were the same thing. It would allow you to optimize society with simple quantitative measures instead of complex qualitative discussions about which sets of opposing goals have the better overall outcome. But the real world doesn't cooperate with such things. There are always going to be conflicts over goals, priorities, and even values. Resist the temptation to believe in an easy answer. Reality isn't easy.
>No more selfish then changing job because some perk.
The point here is that GP was complaining that there were no career benefits to making such a decision - why should there be, exactly? Such a career move benefits oneself and ones family. No one else.
Same as leaving the job and changing. Benefits no one but you.
When all possible actions are framed as selfish, that whole argument is nonsense.
Because it proves they are decent people I guess?
Choose a degree that appeals to you, where you will learn what you like, instead of one which acts as a stepping stone for a higher paying job? Even in countries with sane tuition prices (read: not the US) plenty of people will blame you, and that decision in particular, for any financial problem for all your life.
Become pregnant, and/or plan to work fewer hours for some time to take care of your kids or any older relative? How brave of you. Here's your prize in the form of reduced pay for the next 10 years or so.
Decline that managing position because you like your current job better and you know you won't enjoy being a manager? Cue the disapproval stares from people close to you.
Stay in your job for 15 years because you like the people, the work itself or some particular perk? When you finally leave, your next job will pay less than if you had hopped around each 2 years. That's if someone wants to hire you.
Sure, every decision counts and very often there is a tradeoff between trying to find happiness and trying to find a job that sustains you. However, lately the tension between those two is so high that any small decision towards living the life you want to live may very well end in financial misery for the rest of your life. This is not hyperbole; I know people who fucked up mildly once, fifteen years ago, and are still paying the price. And I'm one of the lucky ones... I haven't fallen through the cracks. Yet.