[eyelidlessness]

Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).

[s1artibartfast]

In my experience, it is hard to tell the difference between someone who killed it at a job for 1 year and moved on from someone who couldn't hack it and moved on. Promotion at a company signifies that they were well received and able to adapt and meet milestones. Same job title in and out reads to me to believe that they couldn't hack it and were no goes development opportunity.

IMHO, a promotion before you leave confer s legitamacy to your tenure.

[HaNeThrowAway]

What if there are no promotions to be had? My longest tenure at any one company was 8 years and I never got promoted because it was all remote and I was technically an independent contractor. No one got promoted.

[s1artibartfast]

I am not saying it is a perfect system, but that would a red flag for a full time employee.

[barrkel]

I've refused to hire people who job-hopped every year or two.

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?

[goostavos]

Use this One Weird Trick to keep employees: pay them money.

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).

[Copernicron]

Exactly. I'm happy where I am but I've currently got companies willing to increase my salary by 2-3x if I leave my current employer. I'm totally going to use that as leverage in negotiations for a raise. I'm due for one.

[kqr]

But that really only helps low pay was the reason for hopping. The comment that sparked this discussion talks about a bad environment etc. as a reason for hopping. Wads of cash won't help retain an employee that's obviously bad at judging whether they'll be a good fit at an employer.

[pojzon]

Just to point out. At my current workplace I got a huge pay increase only in one situation. „When I said I quit”..

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.

[inopinatus]

Because maybe they’re just looking for the right environment, and maybe you’re it. Hiring is like dating, after all. This reads instead like an egregious case of the fundamental attribution error, and one that’d I’d view as quite the blunder by my management team, since the real consequence is limiting our access to the talent pool.

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.

[WalterBright]

> Hiring is like dating, after all.

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.

[inopinatus]

Well I think that’s an absurd and extreme example, so the reductio ad absurdum is self-limiting, since serial killers are, hopefully, not the common case.

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.

[DrJokepu]

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I'm fairly certain that this was one of those so-called "jokes" you may have heard of.

[inopinatus]

Perhaps, but jokes can convey meaning, and I think this was the case.

[Dying is easy / Comedy is hard]

[Buttons840]

> whose previous 3 spouses died

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.

[drewcoo]

And considering that, someone who has only held long stints at previous jobs probably gets a red flag for not being desirable enough to more companies or just plain lack of curiosity.

[kqr]

> Because maybe they’re just looking for the right environment, and maybe you’re it.

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.

----

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.

[inopinatus]

If someone says:

> "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.

[kqr]

This comment grew way too long. Tl;Dr: I agree with most of what you say. However, I think employment is way too complex a multi-way relationship to be considered interchangeable by any party. By that I mean it's possible to do so, but at a great cost of productivity for all involved.

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.

----

> 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.

[eyelidlessness]

> Well, job hopping (in my experience) often signals that the candidate thinks of employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing

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.

[forbiddenvoid]

Frankly speaking you really shouldn't be hiring anyone with the expectation that they'll be in their role more than a year or two. Ideally, you're working with them to move into a position with more responsibility and then you need to backfill their position anyway. What does it matter if their next role is with you or somewhere else?

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.

[Copernicron]

I'm seeing this with my current employer. I'm helping out the hiring manager with interviews and technical assessment. He's trying to target people who will stay with the company for 8-10 years. It's ridiculous. (Almost) no one does that. Especially when you can make a whole lot more by changing jobs regularly.

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.

[barrkel]

Most of the other people we hired back then lasted 5+ years if they lasted one.

This chap had about 10 jobs on his resume, 6 to 18 months in each, on average less than a year.

[S_A_P]

I jumped every 2 years and tripled my salary in 10 years. I started way under paid and made it to average to slightly higher than average pay. Guess what the employers were happy to underpay as long as they could get away with it.

[eyelidlessness]

Well, I think other people hire them because there’s high demand for talent and that kind of churn is expected.

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.

[hdhjebebeb]

Conversely, I've worked at places where the people who had been there for 5-10 years were just coasting, the product was stagnant, and constantly hiring new people was the only way to get out of a rut. They were paying these people for maintenance and to hold on to institutional knowledge, but everybody was so comfortable that very little got done.

[didibus]

> 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?

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?

[flippinburgers]

Because employees enjoy making more money.

[smitty1e]

What is "frequently"? I'd like to see a minimum of three years ahead of a transition, and a decent story why. Often the contract ends, the company is sold and the new policies are draconian, etc. Fine.

Given the level of effort involved in bringing someone on, my outfit cannot afford to be staffed like a fast food joint.

[eyelidlessness]

From memory: last I heard the average is 18 months. I don’t know if that was accurate then or still is, nor how much it varies regionally or by any other criteria (I can look it up later but had a quick moment to reply and HN moves fast and might fill in the gap before I can take more time to look).

[beckingz]

What is an acceptable duration for someone to stay at your outfit?

[smitty1e]

Plenty of career people at this consultancy. Also transplants. I just passed 5 years.

[hdhjebebeb]

Consulting is a little unique in my experience - if there's a steady stream of work, you never really stick with the same client full time for the full 5 years. It's a lot easier to keep your skills fresh and move around to find interesting challenges

[alchemism]

Does your employer offer its people the 10-20% annual salary increase so they do not have to look elsewhere for what the market is willing to provide? I ask this seriously.

[smitty1e]

No, that sounds a bit excessive.

If you're growing the business at a healthy clip, maybe those sorts of raises are sustainable.