Corporate bureaucracies often move slow, and they also want to see you can do the job first. I’m seeing most younger people don’t seem to have patience for this.
They also grossly overestimate their knowledge and ability. I’ve seen a significant number of people talk like they mastered a job after 1 year, then they stared asking me how they could get on my team doing what I do. I did the job they were doing for 10+ years. The reason they think it’s easy is because I defined the processes of how to do it all, wrote all the documents on how to do it, made a training program they went through, and worked with other teams to remove a lot of the toil. I then started building tools to make it easier for anyone off the street to do a lot of the work, and do it at scale. Thats why I have the job I have; it wasn’t given to me, I created it out of a desire to make the team better after realizing we could only go so far if I just worked faster. They didn’t see any of that.
For those that seemed interested, I’d give them the tools they needed to help, to see if they were the type to do this kind of stuff. I’d provide feedback, answer questions, or do anything else I could to help them. Out of the dozen or so who asked, only 1 person has done it to a limited degree. Thats why companies don’t just offer it up quickly and easily. A lot of people talk, but not many back it up.
So when my team lead quit I decided to look around to see if I was right to think I was underpaid, and the first place I applied offered me more than a 20% raise. I think I've been patient, but I'd much rather have money now that later.
Is it possible that "the market" has wages that are higher than the company's revenue per employee?
The last one was the chief architect on a project I was assigned. She turned the org upside down, left the day after her bonus hit, came back 6 months later, turned the org upside down again, and again left the day after her bonus hit. If she comes back a 3rd time I won’t be engaging.
I’ve been burned by these people a lot. They have absolutely obliterated the culture and the stability of our infrastructure, and in a few short years destroyed what I spent a decade helping to build. They replaced it with fragile systems without any kind of support model, which now get full re-writes every year… just because.
I see wave after wave of job hoppers hired to “transform” the organization and all they ever do is repeat the same old mistakes, which we could tell them if they weren’t too arrogant to listen.
Every job hopper I’ve worked with has simply been a distraction to the greater goals of the organization to serve the customer. I’ve lost all patience and respect for the people who practice it, and the companies that set themselves up in a way which encourages it.
I don’t know how we find our way back, but I think companies and employees would all be better off with some stability and more long term thinking.