Article is old but I have often heard this anecdotally. I have known a number of people over the years who changed jobs every 1-2 years, because they said it's the only way to get ahead salary-wise. I suspect it's a lot harder to pull it off now, tough. There's a lot of fake job postings. Not to mention running the gauntlet of submitting your resume 300 times to get auto-rejected 299 times by some dumbass AI where a clueless HR person typed in the criteria prompt. "A young person with at least 30 years of experience who knows ALL the latest technology but will work for less than a landscaper per hour thanks bye".
P.S. I'm not shitting on landscapers. They do real work, unlike most office drones like me.
Data engineering, pipeline stuff, cloud dev to support the pipeline... with enough cs chops to pass software engineer interviews rust/TS/python. Obv SQL too. Docker, terraform and similar like cloud formation. Conversational enough to interface with PMs and external clients.
Enough architecture experience to build out medium scale data applications
It sounds cool, tbh. I'd be willing to look a lot of places in tech for something new. My current place is just verifiably insane. They had no help desk tickets when I got here.
Unless you have a union job, then you're making the same thing as anyone else with the same experience as you and you've got benefits and probably job security 👍
This sucks for the general public. You're always either going to be dealing with a] a disgruntled employee who knows he deserves a raise or b] an under trained new guy. You never get the one who knows the job really well.
Incidentally it can also work at your existing company. I’ve gotten 5 promotions in 6 years and my salary is 120% more than when I started. It’s less the company hopping part and more ensuring you grow in your career. I’ve found that it’s definitely about stating your desires (having a clearly defined “this is where I want to go in my career”), volunteering for the random projects your boss or their boss needs done and showing you want to grow.
That only works if you have managers that give a rip about helping you grow and compensating you well for that growth, which sadly, most people don't have.
In my experience, staying at the same place and taking on more "growth opportunities" was just an excuse for management to throw more on my plate without compensation increases. Sure I would get a little raise sometimes, but it was always pissy amounts of money, even when I asked for more.
I started jumping jobs aggressively and magically my pay exploded upwards. I now have basically zero loyalty to the companies I work for, just like they have for me. Contract work is even better for this, but the downside is usually you have bad or zero benefits.
I've been mostly working at startups since I graduated and I haven't had a job for longer than 2 years once I stopped delivering pizza for Papa John's and driving for Lyft. My pay is pretty good but it's kinda balanced out by the amount of time I've been unemployed.
That said, it would interesting to see what the actual numbers are, although I'm sure it will vary a lot between industries and jobs and other factors. Anecdotally it sounds correct but that could just be true for some trait of my social circle, or some other bias about mentioning pay or something. Or just that people tend to be more likely to change jobs when they are underpaid, so the pay jumps from changing jobs seem bigger since the job they're changing to will be closer to the market, whereas well paid employees will stick around and maybe not notice the gradual pay increases as much.
That being said, word is that in the tech industry at least, hiring budgets are clearly higher than promotion budgets and that moving every 2 years or so is clearly the best strategy for career advancement.
Just one industry, of course, but the pattern certainly seems to have settled in there, and it may not be a stretch to speculate it will spread to other industries perhaps under the shitty influence of AI.
Backing up "word is" by an article that says "word is" is kinda meager though. There are many things widely believed to be true that are not, or only mildly so our in specific circumstances.
Backing up “word is” by an article that says “word is” is kinda meager though.
Well I'm relaying what is basically common knowledge in the industry shared by people in the industry. The thing about promotion/hiring budgets is something I know directly or through people at their companies.
Sure, it may not be industry wide, of course, but I've not seen any hint of a countervailing trend or pattern. What's more, in the tech industry, it makes sense. There's a fair amount of pivoting which is often deemed to be done best by hiring (at least some) new staff with the required expertise/experience. And maintaining existing/legacy systems is often de-prioritised such that those who've been at the company for a while who understand the existing systems well are not as valued as those who may help the company "grow". Which is why I bring up the possibility that these patterns may spread to other industries.
I'm not sure what you're saying. The size of the labour force and the way salary "growth" relates to employer movement rate seem to me relatively independent dynamics. Moreover, I'd imagine increased layoffs positively correlate with the advantage that regularly moving employers can provide.
Yea interesting. I have no numbers and I'm not really "plugged in" at all ... but I've certainly heard of smaller places doing layoffs after Google etc. No idea how widespread that is though.
How does this work out with all in value when it comes to stock options or other vesting based non salary compensation? Aren't you leaving a lot on the table if you switch every 2 years? Does salary alone make up for that?
Don’t know! AFAIK, some stock options do partially vest before two years. But this isn’t just salary, it’s career advancement, which means seniority and arguably experience, all of which tend to stay locked in for the rest of your career and lead to more stock options should you arrive somewhere you’re willing to stay longer at.
Idk about it being locked in. I have seen people with Sr and Lead titles interviewing for a lower position these days. Those things don't always stay with you the rest of your life. But titles are cheap. Salary, bonuses, and stock are money.
For me, I had considered job offers with higher salary. But then when I looked at the salary and reduced PTO I realized my hourly wage didn't change that much. When I factored in the stock package and downgrade in 401k match these 10%+ percent salary increases put me behind near term (near term being about 3 years until the new company started to vest and become regular earnings).
my work experience is almost entirely 2 & 3 year tenures and (anecdotally) companies are making vesting a bigger part of the compensation package and getting rid of pto to counteract people's attempts at improving their livelihoods.
if you see a vesting heavy or "unlimited pto" compensation packages on offer; they don't expect to keep you for very long.
My company gives up to an extra 2 weeks of PTO based on years of service. Stock Options/RSU have like a 3 to 5 year pay out vesting timeline with a % of it vesting every year. but you get new grants every year. So after you've been working for 3 or more years, you basically have a "full" grant value vesting every year. throw in 6 percent 401k match at 100 percent match my on paper below market value salary actually returns a pretty good total comp package. I'm not sure if switching every 2 or 3 years would provide me any significant benefit because of how my long term tenure at the company has paid off with these incentives for staying. I imagine there's a probably something about jumping around early vs mid vs late career that factors into this equation too.
Every single time I see this type of conversation come up it's always about the more privileged higher paying white collar work.
In my shit experience, blue collar work is "get shit raises or take massive pay cuts." There is no "change job and also make more." I've been stuck in the same cycle for 15 years now... Every time I leave a job I get knocked back to the wage I made when I first started the job I left regardless of the new position.
But that's because only white collar workers are seen as people. Us blue collar workers are just meat machines that never deserve more than we were "bought" for and any new employee is automatically assumed to be as intelligent and skilled as a dead cockroach.
Every single time I see this type of conversation come up it’s always about the more privileged higher paying white collar work.
this is true and i know i because i'm one of those workers while my siblings aren't and only my pay increases significantly each time while theirs remain stagnant.
on the other hand recruiters hate "job hoppers" and you'll end up with more gate keepers to jobs the more often you do it; while my siblings barely get any questions when they have to switch jobs.
moving every 2 years or so is clearly the best strategy for career advancement.
it's a double edged sword in my experience from to talking to recruiters who seem to have an irrational hatred of "job hoppers" and they're, anecdotally, a majority.
however it is still true that you'll get higher pay as i did; but be sure to spend a LOT of time keeping your connections alive because most recruiters (still anecdotally) will red flag 2 & 3 year tenure-ships; effectively gate keeping you away from many jobs.
if it weren't for being in a relatively lucrative and in demand field (software development); i would be screwed because of those recruiters.
I've averaged about a 4 year tenure at my previous employers -- some a bit more, some a bit less -- but usually with a competing offer or two in that time period that I've used as a lever for a pay raise. Nobody's complained about me being a job-hopper or short-timer.
I have noticed that my two last employers, both large national firms, have moved towards a model of career-tracking with a defined pay structure, similar to government work where different positions and experience levels have a pay range attached to them and you're not able to negotiate out of that range. This has been framed as a protective move against wage inequality suits, but I suspect it's more about preventing employees from negotiating especially high compensation packages. I haven't had it cut against me yet -- in both cases I got a very minor pay bump when my employers actually went out and compared their pay scales to what the market was demanding -- but if enough employers start benchmarking against each other and using that to cap pay, it will functionally become like a wage-fixing cartel similar to what's happened to rent in the last 5-10 years.
Well, it does match my own experience and observations (in Software Development in a couple of countries in Europe) going back to the 90s.
The shift to "no loyalty to employees and hence for employees being loyal is a net negative" was around the point when companies started refering to employees as "human resources" and IMHO, resulted from the increased use of MBAs in Management, which in Tech happenned aound the early to mid-90s (though it dependend on country and the actual Industry making heavy use of IT).
Mind you, at least in IT and even all the way back then, it was already a good idea to move places at least once in one's career because people who worked all their life in one place don't really know any other way of working than the one of their place, which is limiting for one's professional growth (though plenty of people did manage to just keep ticking up on salary purelly on age-seniority even well after they stopped improving as professionals) because no one company has "the right processes" for everything.
Personally I actually think it's healthy to move companies at least a few times in one's career, but my point here is more about one's career and income growth stalling (and pretty early on, too) if you don't move companies.
That said, I'm talking about expert and in high demand career tracks: I don't really know if in the kind of jobs were the bean counters basically see employees as commodities there is any significant benefit from job-hopping, unless it's job-hopping into a different kind of job.
While not focused on exactly the same topic, this HMW video has some intersection and gets into the nitty of what's going on.
It also means the employers hosed themselves, since skilled labor is not threatened by a potential firing (the way they once were) and are continuously looking for their next rung on the ladder elsewhere. Also, it means promotions are no longer an incentive for hard work, since the workers expect you to hire from elsewhere. So all those incentives to overperform are gone.
PS: Curiously in The Sims 2 (a 2004 game) I figured out the best way to get rich legitimately (e.g. without using cheats, and not getting an Open For Business storefront, was to swap careers whenever you reached the top tier of a career ladder while sustaining necessary skill and friend minimums. The sim would get promotions every day of work, including a fat bonus, and I could finally afford that pre-built dream-house I made.)
Or, as my omniscient relatives and neighbors who have on countless occasions provided unsolicited commentary on my career would say, "a nice stable job, why don't you ever stay in one place?"
This has been well documented for at least a decade.
Meanwhile, employers feign concern over turnover but know it's a better bottom line and their bonus to let employees with standards leave than to do the right thing.
Well, it's different if you work for good companies. I've stayed at my last 3 jobs for well over 2 years each and my career is going great, making twice as much money as I need. IT / technical stuff. 6 years at one, 4 years at the next, currently at 3 years with current.
I've never lasted that long at any former employer though. My shortest employment was half of one shift at a factory, it sucked so bad I left on my first lunch break. The moral of my story is that it's OK to stay with a good company, if you can find a good job like that. Experience counts for a lot towards getting hired to these good jobs.
By changing workplaces twice I tripled my income in under 2 years. The biggest thing that happened is that I was promoted to a much more senior position 6 months into the middle workplace, but they screwed me on the salary thinking that because it was a big bump from my lower position it would keep me around.
So I did that job for a year and got hired for the same job elsewhere for a 50% pay increase.
Old article, but it’s certainly true in my industry. Having said that, I’m a bit conflicted with this at least for my own personal situation.
I’ve been with my current employer for a decade. I’m sure I can get a significant pay bump if I switch, but I’m in a comfortable position where I think the trade off is worth it. I earn enough to support myself and my wife on a single income. Work from home, unlimited PTO, and the job itself is not super stressful that I get good work/life balance. My manager and teammates are awesome. The company has great benefits and lots of perks.
I’m at a point in my life where I no longer want to be “challenged” with work. Meaning, I just want to clock in, do work, clock out. I don’t yearn for promotions, new challenges, and moving up. I just want to get paid for work I’m familiar with and good at, and focus my energy on my personal life. And my current job allows me to do that plus all the perks mentioned. So the question is, will I be willing to potentially sacrifice all the comfort I currently enjoy to get paid more? Sure, there’s a chance I could get a better paying job AND all the same perks, but that’s not a guarantee and I will never know until I’m working that new job. Also take into account all the effort required to learn everything on the new job and having to “perform” to impress as a new hire.
But who knows, it might come to a point where my current pay is no longer enough. Only time will tell.
It sounds like you are in a good place, and are satisfied. For what it's worth, IMO, just stay happy. If that means staying where you are, you don't gotta impress nobody but yourself. So don't worry about all the other noise. Always keep one eye on the prize, like in today's professional world, you always have to be prepared for the rug to be pulled up from under you with a layoff or if the company hires a new boss for you and they are a zeeb, but once you got that concern appropriately hedged, always put professional well being above everything else.
I left my last job to make double what the previous one paid, and my job is a nightmare job. Each successive job pays me more, makes me more miserable, the people are always worse and more money just means more problems. Money ain't everything, and I mean it. Make enough to survive, live your happy idea of a perfect lifestyle, save for rainy days and retirement, and the rest is just noise.
I think job-hopping helps people who still need to climb the ladder until they land some “senior” position into which they can settle in, safe in the knowledge that they can always find another job elsewhere with their experience.
The public sector model, there's definitely something good about knowing exactly where you are and where you're going, only a problem when the scale is totally off of whack with current CoL etc.
forbes.com
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