Related, I remember a friend telling me a story. It wasn't so much about leaving, but how to leave.
She was in a job that was just a mess. Finally one day during a spectacle of mismanagement, she just quit in disgust. She said it was a mistake. If she could have done it again, she would have just shut up, quietly gotten a job, and quit in a stable, predictable way.
I really felt abused, devalued, and a tool for the shitty ethics of the corporation. So one day I pull my team lead and the other lead into a Zoom meet and unload and quit. I get myself on LinkedIn, canvas a few available jobs and within two weeks get a new job. In the interviews I made it crystal clear that I valued transparency and that I would not be forced to lie to anyone. Turns out that's one of their cultural pillars (transparency is an entire slide in their slide deck).
I have a manager I can honestly engage with. He knows what happened at the last company and he values that I spoke up.
These principled stands are not for nothing. We have to be able to believe in our own ability to have a social impact, however small. Shutting up and inoffensively walking away just buttresses shitty people (or shitty corporations, which are just egregores that have been hijacked by shitty people).
The remaining people/mgmt will either do nothing, see it as a squeaky wheel thankfully now being gone, or maybe even add "we need to do something about attrition" to quarterly goals but not actually change anything meaningful.
So even if you get past the "oh they were just disgruntled" justifications, I find that companies are more likely to add ping pong, beer fridays, or even bump compensation before significantly trying to change the culture.
Game theory has no ethical compass. I can't think of a worse instrument to apply to human society.
When the compassion & effort of providing the info looks like it may possibly have a good effect, and is likely to be reasonably safe (e.g., minimal retribution/fallout effects, and is delivered with kindness - it can be good for all.
But one should first consider the consequences. Sometimes it really is best to just get away while the getting away is good.
I do make that list. Alongside the negatives I include positives. If I decide to resign, then the list has served is primary purpose. There is no sense burning bridges or trying to trying to change everyone's priorities to your priorities.
Similar to the list, is the exit interview. One of my regrets is that I gave that list verbally in a rant to a HR member during my exit interview. (Not ranting at the HR person - I was very polite and made it clear that my comments were about my team's management). But I still regret it. You never know who is going to read it, take offence and encounter you later in your career. War stories are for the pub.
Where I am now (Seattle area), it isn’t really seen as a that big of a red flag. I always had good reasons for leaving. Other than 2, I’ve tried to never burn bridges intentionally and was even a rebound employee at 1 place (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).
I grew up in the South and moved back there for a brief period of time. It was very hard to find work down there because they called me a “job hopper” (which I was/am). I was asked several times “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one.
That’s been my experience. I’m at a place now where I can see myself staying for awhile. I’m not curing cancer or doing machine learning or scaling things to gagillion requests per second. But I like the people, like my boss, and the problems are meaty enough to engage me during the day, but not so complicate that I work on them in my off hours.
I'll offer a corollary: have already said everything you think before you quit. That way, there is nothing else to say during the exit interview anyway.
There are two reasons for saying what you think while you're still employed:
1. How will anything improve unless you voice your concerns? (Not saying they will when you do, just that they definitely won't when you don't.)
2. You are paid to think and then communicate your thoughts. If they only wanted your body, they could have bought a robot -- no, they're paying money for your brain too. Give it to them.
And I’ve left positions where the company pivoted, and I didn’t agree with the pivot. Told the powers that be, but the pivot was done. No reason to dredge it up again.
What's the answer?
The other thing I've found is that the companies that make a really big deal about "job hopping" and "employee loyalty" aren't really ones that you want to work for anyway. They're paranoid about employee loyalty for a reason, and rather than look at their own management to see why employees are leaving after short stints at that firm, they blame the employees, usually with some absurd generalizations about "millenials" or "gen z".
By the way, I don't agree that if a company would like employees that tend to stick around then that indicates some sort if weird cult-like behaviour. It's more like a recognition that productivity naturally is lower in the months after someone joins than after they've been there for a year or two. Choosing people that are able to stick at a job for a few years is just a sensible business decision. Admittedly it does have social benefits too i.e. there's a better work environment for everyone if you get to know other people over a period of time (in spite of some HN commenters' views that we're all robots that shouldn't care about interactions with coworkers). But, in my view, even that is reasonable justification.
I bring a wide array of industry experience, that you'll benefit from. I'm hoping for a longer term engagement, but even if it's a shorter one, I typically leave them better than I found them.
In your own words, ofcourse.
P.S. I suspect your statement will get you rejected from companies that know they have the same problem but can't fix it. If you don't need a job, be as honest as you want, if you do, you're better off going with the positive spin.
Something along those lines. I lean into it. But as I said, it doesn’t come up too often in the PNW.
But I agree that a better answer would probably be something along the lines of "I have so much experience that I deliver in a year what the average guy would give you in 5; and if you're good to me, I might well stick around as much as I did at X", or something along those lines.
This is why one should choose opportunity over loyalty -- have no loyalty to location or corporation. Be an absolute opportunist, doing whatever is best for future in the current situation, unbound by the past.
This.
My OH's currently moving jobs and we have been discussing how overdue this move is. Somehow once you make the decision to leave it brings all the blur of past injustices/lunacy* into proper focus.
The last time I left somewhere, after a fairly long relationship, they went into insolvency proceedings within a year**
* For my OH's move: her old lot couldn't even get the announcement of her departure right - it was announced by accident by a senior manager on a conference call, two weeks before she'd even seen, never mind signed the new contract, or given notice ... <rolls eyes>
** not my fault, honest
So, move on from bad jobs, move on from meh jobs, and be quick about it. Eventually you'll find somewhere you enjoy and you can stick around for a while.
I was young, and was making more than literally every single person i knew, i bought an apartment in a year in cash. I thought it was once-in-a-lifetime job which will never happen to me again.
IMHO, a promotion before you leave confer s legitamacy to your tenure.
With a record like that, there's zero reason to expect they're going to stick around. Why invest in bringing them up to speed if they're just going to leave?
With the exception of my current gig, my early career was hopping non-stop. My shortest stint was literally 4 days, my average was probably about 1 year. Each time, pretty simple, you look at the paltry 2-4% increase being offered by your current employer versus the 20%+ increase from hopping literally anywhere else, and, well, you surely see why people hop ship all the time.
Your "investment" means very, very little when it's not backed by the thing that actually matters (the money).
Employer runs a business and will do w/e is best for him money wise. If ppl want to work for 50% what they are worth - employer will alow it (bad employer).
Ppl tend to quit such places because they see no options to advance.
Employers rarely learn from such cases. For me its the issue of poor middle management not managing career of pupils correctly.
Even aside from the FAE, this kind of attitude also systematically reinforces structural discrimination within an industry, since candidates from unusual or unprivileged backgrounds are less likely to have been offered major career opportunities, or been obliged to juggle many life priorities along the way, and thereby more likely to have taken whatever they could get, or could realistically manage. Yet these can be some of the most interesting hires, thanks to their diverse/alternative perspectives, and may also be top-tier outliers when it comes to resilience, self-management, and self-directed learning.
It’s also a failure of values since there’s an underlying assumption that people are interchangeable widgets, which is both false and dehumanising.
For my own account, I hopped a lot in my early career before finding places where I felt I could belong and stay for years, and this pattern has repeated. So you’d likely have taken a pass on me whilst I went on to become senior this and principal that elsewhere, en route to starting my own firm. Go figure.
Past behavior is a pretty good predictor of future behavior. If you're dating someone whose previous 3 spouses died in mysterious kiln explosions, I'd stay away from the ceramics factory.
How about this analogy instead, being more in the realm of the applicable and commonplace: I broke up with many girlfriends, and had many short- and medium-term partners, before meeting my wife of over a decade now, who continues to knock my socks off to this day.
In practice, past performance is not a guide to future outcomes. How many times have we heard this caveat applied, in far more predictable markets than hiring and/or dating? Past performance of employment candidates is a subjective and observational assessment; relying upon it (especially in a negative framing) is to invite not only ones own biases to take center stage, but also those of others; see earlier point re. reinforcement of structural discrimination.
At most, someone’s past successes qualify them for my interview shortlist, but there are many other green flags besides, and I’ll save my type 2 errors for the back half of the hiring funnel, after assessing someone’s potential.
[Dying is easy / Comedy is hard]
Employment is not marriage.
Hiring someone who has hopped jobs 3 times is more like dating someone who has dated 3 other people before you.
Maybe, but they obviously also have a track record of being a poor judge of environment, since they got it wrong so often.
> It’s also a failure of values since there’s an underlying assumption that people are interchangeable widgets, which is both false and dehumanising.
Well, job hopping (in my experience) often signals that the candidate thinks of employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing. Employers are but a group of other humans. It's a different kind of interpersonal relationship than between friends or family, sure, but it's still just as much an interpersonal relationship.
That said, sometimes things aren't what they seem, as you say. It becomes a question of judging the risk and the reward.
As a tool, there's also the interview, where one is supposed to try to figure this sort of stuff out.
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Note that I'm not saying you should stay at a crappy job. In fact, I came in here to post specifically that my biggest mistake may have been staying at a crappy job for too long. (May have because you never know -- maybe that's what made me value a good job so much.)
I'm just saying that despite agreeing with most of your comment, when I'm making the hiring decision of someone, I will read the implied "cannot pick an employer they fit with" in a job hoppers resume. I will try to work past that bias, but candidates are rarely able to defend that very well. What they say usually ends up being a roundabout way of saying "so far I've not been very good at picking an employer I fit with."
And that is going to weigh into the decision.
> "so far I've not been very good at picking an employer I fit with"
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. My view is that marketing instincts are not super relevant except when hiring directly for the sales/marketing function, and speaking as someone who is absolutely terrible at marketing, you can even make CEO without it.
> but they obviously also have a track record of being a poor judge of environment, since they got it wrong so often.
I recommend reviewing an article (even the wikipedia entry will do) on the Fundamental Attribution Error, because this statement is a perfect illustration of the FAE. That is, there's nothing intrinsically obvious about track records, and in particular, assuming negatives such as this, is a great way to miss out on great people.
As I've said elsewhere, I suggest biasing a hiring funnel for Type 1 errors early on, and Type 2 errors later.
> employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing
Well, no, employers are, for the most part, companies, so they're not humans; that's certainly distinct from bosses, of course; but nevertheless, the power gradient between employer and employee is steep, sometimes incredibly so, which is why the overwhelming majority of industrial relations law is essentially protecting the individual from employer abuses.
To look at that another way: it's much more impactful on someone's quality of life for them to seek a new boss, than it is for a boss to seek a new staff member. I've never appreciated the fiction of "we're like a family", a paper-thin deception that doesn't survive past one bad earnings quarter, and I don't inflict it on my own crew.
Curiously, one of the goals of much collective bargaining is to make employees and employers nigh-on interchangeable via standardized agreements. Corollary: the unions of today would make Adam Smith proud.
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.
Really? In my experience it signals that most humans recognize that the vast majority of employers are not interchangeable (hence looking around). And I'm not going to be upset by dehumanizing corporate organizations that are not human in nature in the first place.
It's a lot to ask for every company to have a role available for every employee when they're ready for more responsibility, and expecting them to just hang around waiting for their chance is pretty naive, I think.
Personally, I don't care about working on cool technology. I care about getting paid. I can't afford to buy an absurdly overpriced house without getting paid.
This chap had about 10 jobs on his resume, 6 to 18 months in each, on average less than a year.
If you’re not having difficulty hiring while rejecting those candidates, that suggests you’re probably attracting people like me who stick around longer (for better or worse all around) or something about your offer is appealing to talent who have a knack for finding good long term opportunities.
People don't job hop for fun, they do it because they find better opportunities elsewhere. The way you say it, it sounds like you're holding back everyone you employed from getting a better deal.
If you truly offer competitive compensation and work conditions, than that person wouldn't have a reason to leave, but if 2 years down the road you didn't keep up with what others are offering them, I mean, the question is, why wouldn't they hop?
Given the level of effort involved in bringing someone on, my outfit cannot afford to be staffed like a fast food joint.
If you're growing the business at a healthy clip, maybe those sorts of raises are sustainable.
What DOESN’T do wonders for your career is thinking/hoping/praying that sticking it out at a subpar company year after year will magically bring you those same benefits, if it’s not already happening and you’ve already asked politely for it to be resolved.
Make a career change and get a new set of folks around you without having to leave everything behind
Basically taking jobs I knew I wasn't a good fit for because I needed them.
I don't get too comfortable, not too attached, tend to live in the moment, enjoy the good parts, ignore the bad ones, think of the next person in my role, stay on the lookout for my next job/role, but not overdo it.
I've been able to stick to this, but haven't come up with a ways to enforce it.
I mean, I value continuity and a healthy long-term relationship with a reciprocating organisation more than most, but the first few years I spent at a crap shop for crap pay and with only fear of my superiors motivating me? I think I could have gotten the same experience but better in a few other places I've been since.
(On the other hand, maybe that first experience is what made me so picky in selection of employers after that?)
So: If you ever think things might not turn out as well as you hoped, move on. There is so much else going on in the world that is at least as interesting as what you are doing, where you have a much better chance of making a difference, that spending time on things that you might not end up proud of is a terrible waste of your short time on Earth.