[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]

[disgruntledphd2]

Man, I love Hyperion.

[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.