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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 👍
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.
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.
I made the mistake of becoming a manager about 4 years ago. This is one of the most frustrating parts of the job. If you have a good relationship with your team they’ll usually tell you something like “I’ve been getting contacted about other offers, here’s what they’re offering.”
It’s usually about a 20% bump. I’ve not once been able to convince the company I’m at to match it. Usually the best I’m allowed to do is something like a 5-6% raise in the next salary increase cycle.
I’ll usually know for 2-3 months a team member is leaving before it actually happens because of this. Of course, if I’m allowed to hire a replacement they’ll let me pay market value.
Job hopping is definitely the best way to get a pay increase.
And even if that guy they hire is really good, there is still a large period of time where that person has to learn the ropes and is most likely less useful than the person who already knew the ins and outs. Also, most of the time, they are never as good...
Well the goal of an ideal CEO is to pull more money into the company and give as little out as possible. If we saw more AI CEOs we would just have further wealth disparity in our society and workers at those companies would be paid less as the AI would optimize their pay for maximum company profits. It would be everything we hate about capitalism but amplified, and the person who owned the AI would get paid even more for doing even less.
Correct, but often the actions of CEOs are performative and don't actually support the goal of bringing money in. They like to put on a show of being ruthless, and often behave more psychopathic than an "optimal" business AI would.
For example, it's been proven that employee retention is one of the #1 ways to boost productivity. Costco is one of the few companies with a CEO which truly believes in this and despite paying higher wages than any other grocer they are one of the top performers in my investment portfolio.
Remote work? Totally profitable and AI would maximize it instead of forcing workers back to the office to "put them in their place"
4-day week? Also proven to be a net gain as workers are rested and motivated.
A "cold and calculating" AI would be far more likely to make reforms that benefit both the company and the employees, as it isn't motivated by power structures or the need to look ruthless. Cutting pay is a losing move as it loses talent more than it saves money, and deep learning algorithms would realize this easily.
Also the "person who owns the AI" would actually be the shareholders, who are often ordinary investors. Rather than funneling money to bloated C-suites, the money would be more likely to circulate in the economy through dividends.
At this point it would be most likely to be an LLM which just emulates what it has seen CEOs do in its training data and would do the same sort of thing.
Remember that Star Trek where they go to the evil mirror universe and the baddies come to the Enterprise? The bad versions get caught because it's hard for someone with no empathy to fake it.
It's a bit messy for the employer. You can't just hand out 20% raises every time someone threatens to leave. Then everyone would be threatening to leave. And that's a hefty cost to add to what's likely your largest operating expense. Also, that's not just 20% in the employee's pocket, there are additional costs like unemployment insurance and the like.
OTOH, unless your employee plain sucks or the job is simple, it's almost always better to keep them than train a replacement. Tribal knowledge is valuable knowledge.
And no, only very small-time employers expect loyalty. They understand the game, and we should as well.
Funny that lemmy whines and moans about capitalism all day, without realizing they can play as well. Jumping jobs over the last 11 years got me $14 > $22 > $39. Been at this place 5-years, thinking about jumping ship again. Probably put me over $100K with a little luck. Oh, and I've never had such fat benefits or worked less. From home to boot.
Related: When we first moved here, a friend started at an oil change place, well below his skill set and previous pay. Kept job hopping and stacking his resume, now he's the top service manager at the largest auto dealer group. He quit moving, guess he's fat and happy. Sure drags in the $.
Fine. They all claim to have offers. It's not like employers don't track turnover and market rates. Some of them just decide it's cheaper to allow high turnover. Not like they can't work an Excel sheet.
Having said that, I've found many employers wholly ignorant of metrics that aren't easily tracked. For example, 2 jobs ago I was a key player at my shitty little shop. Kept the customers rolling in, despite their aggravations with the company. You can't put a solid number on that. (And many told me they left for the competition when I quit.)
Last job, I quit for an offer doubling my pay and benefits. They loved me, wouldn't go for it. The next year they paid far more in IT costs than it would have cost to keep me.
Back to my point, work hard, achieve something to be proud of on your resume, jump ship. The game is only rigged for the employer is you're in a shit job that requires almost no skills. As to that, see the example I talked about with my oil change buddy.
Do you think employers are stone ignorant of market rates? Who said anything about mass quitting? The people not moving on are the people who can't. Hell, that's where I'm at. Pretty sure I've attained the Peter Principle for now.
We cope by saying they hire a replacement who asked for more. The reality is they generally don’t. They either offload the work to the rest of the dept and go “oh look at that we didn’t need them!” as the group drowns OR they find a wide eyed, younger professional who will take a crap - or at least lower - salary.
This varies from industry to industry but it’s very common.
We cope by saying they hire a replacement who asked for more. The reality is they generally don’t. They either offload the work to the rest of the dept and go “oh look at that we didn’t need them!” as the group drowns OR they find a wide eyed, younger professional who will take a crap - or at least lower - salary.
Which doesnt seem to be common, seeing how you have shit like the report that OP posted that job hopping massively increases income.
I keep waiting for someone to lay it out and explain how the companies are actually benefiting in some subtle way from this arrangement. As far as I can tell, no, this is just what they decided to do.
Maybe an advantage of this setup is that you ensure that your bus factor is high and you're constantly testing it to make sure it stays high? Kind of like how Netflix uses ChaosMonkey.
It all makes "business" sense for those who see employees as "commodities", i.e. all kinda equivalent and hence easilly replaceable with nothing lost when they're switched.
It's basically the MBA thinking of employees as just another "raw material" or "supplier".
The reality, more so in complex domains, is that employees have an adaptation and learning period when they arrive (unlike engineered devices, companies aren't standardized machines using standardized parts, so you a new "part" won't just seamlessly fit and start delivering full performance) and often never written institutional knowledge that goes with them when they leave.
However as those things are not easilly quantified and measurable, MBA types - being unable to add it to their spreadsheets - will simply ignore them rather than trying to balance such costs against salary costs: giving a decent salary increase (a guaranteed cost) will always look like a worse option in an accounting spreadsheet if its only counter is a sub-100% possibility that they might lose that employee (and, remember, since they don't count adaption and loss of institutional knowledge costs, that's listed there as costing nothing) and replace it with somebody else who might even be possible to get with a less "decent" salary (so, more than the current employees but less that a fair salary for the current employee).
Such approach works well if all companies are doing it and the probability that people will leave if they don't get a decent salary is low enough (which it probably is, since the majority of human beings favour stability over change).
I used to be one of the “loyal” ones but around covid time I decided to see where I could get by doing this. Since then, and three jobs later, my salary went from around 66k to now 105k. Current gig seems cool and a cake walk, so may stick around a bit.
Same! There was a shortage in IT for a little while and I took advantage of it and got a $30k increase! With same benefits and paid vacation.
Now even a 2% pay raise is significant on the salary I make. I feel like I'm finally being appreciated and paid what I'm really worth after a decade of struggling.
It's funny when I put in my notice in my last job and why, they magically had money to counter. Like where was this cash when I was closing difficult tickets and completing projects?
My wife and I skyrocketed in our careers. How? Between 1997 and 2008 we did exactly the opposite of what our parents recommended and kept hopping jobs. My longest stint at any one place was 18 months and hers was two years. When we realized that our skill sets were too expensive and rare to waste at a single project, we started our own consulting firm and continue to cycle through projects regularly.
Remember, whether you are self-employed or employed by someone else, you ultimately work for yourself. Act accordingly and guard your self-interests.
But it's also in one's self interest to have a stable relationship with colleagues, being used to an environment, not changing things drastically so frequently.
There is a big, non-monetary cost to job hopping. If life outside of work is not stable, than changing the one constant is suddenly not appealing, even if more money is the reward.
I found that to be the opposite. All of our clients have come to us via word of mouth and all of our initial clients were referrals from past colleagues. Because we jumped around so much we ended up with a very large network of ex colleagues that came to us for help once they knew we were available. As. those colleagues also switched jobs they knew to call us if they needed our help in their new place of employment.
They key is not to stay at one place for a long time but to make an impact during the time you spend there.
It's your Rolodex/LinkedIn, not the company's. Also, the relationship between company and employee doesn't have to be adversarial. A lot of people, and companies forget that.
It doesnt have to be adversarial, but if either party decideds to make it so, it is. For larger companies in particular its pretty much institutionalised to be adverserial from day one.
I appreciate that it worked for you. I don't want to invalidate your experience. I just want to say that there is a good reason such a large gap exists between the evidence that job hopping is beneficial, and people actually doing it.
I want to point out that a) you have a skillset and job area that is conducive to freelancing and b) that building a network requires networking, which again is something that costs energy and social and communication skills.
These are not a given and should not be treated as a no-cost activity. Especially your last sentence implies a required focus on impact- again, your reward is more money, but there is a cost to doing this at work.
Yeah, I did a double-take when I got to the part about expected wage increases for 2014. I suspect it's much worse now, and was interested to see what Forbes was printing about that as at least these days they're notorious for posting stuff with an anti-labour focus. I can't imagine they'd post an article like this these days.
That said, I'm sure this article is more relevant than ever now and it's a damn travesty that this is what the labour market has come to since the 70s/80s.
I'm on the executive team for a small business that my family bought almost two years ago. Many of us had worked there for years beforehand and absolutely weren't paid what we were worth. As soon as we took over, we started to raise wages across the board (other than sales, who are our own little 1% due to the structure we inherited). Wages are still far from where we'd like them to be, but we're trying our best with the resources at hand while we navigate these first few years of ownership. Shit's not easy for a lot of small businesses and I get that many small business owners are outright taking advantage of their staff. We actively try not to (granted, in the Marxist sense we inherently are) but I realize that most of our staff deserve more than we can currently afford to pay them.
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