What's interesting in this debate is that Mark's own experience isn't where he puts his mouth. He spent the first 8 years of his career at Accenture (which screams failed attempt at making partner -- sorry to be harsh), but drastically changed occupations every two years inside the firm (switching from IT to strategy, changing countries etc.).
I really like reading Mark, so I'm afraid of overbearing my point. But his inital blog post sounded like shamelessly getting his cake and eating it too.
He felt that such frequent career changes were the best way to prepare himself to lead a startup someday -- why would the same trait magically become a liability in others? Optimizing against this very behavior in job selection signals a quite detrimental two-tiered mindset -- himself at the helm, and employees who are there to take orders.
This is to some extent the reality of capitalism, but it isn't admirable leadership, nor a good way to generate innovation, and certainly not the best way to inspire people to stick on a sinking ship while the rats drown away. As the OP said - money can't buy you love... :)
Contrast this with Yelp, Aardvark and the second-generation breed of entrepreneurs coming out of the PayPal and Google mafias.
The distinction between tenured and assignment mentalities made in the HBR article is vital: before offering or accepting a position, make sure you understand the other's understanding of the relationship sought and the nature of the work. Distinguish between project-oriented and task-oriented work and act accordingly. Project-oriented positions have natural life-cycles with obvious times to conclude the relationship and move on (e.g., product delivery).
Finding people with an earnest, project-oriented mentality is hard. A lot of people believe or want to believe they are project-oriented, but are really case-workers, and vice-versa. A good portion of people aren't project- or task- oriented, they're people-oriented and will conform to a project- or case-oriented environment to the extent that it fosters good inter-personal relations.
A small fraction of people are entirely self-oriented: they'll do whatever is necessary to build their self-esteem and satisfy their will to power. They're cancers. One is enough to destroy the team. Filtering-out these bad seeds is the hardest and most important skill a hiring manager (or potential recruit) can develop. Mr. Suster's post isn't particularly helpful in identifying these most toxic individuals: they bind tightly to their hosts and stick through the disease they create, gaining greater responsibilities and better titles.
Salary is priced by the market, and that requires regular testing. Saying you don't want to hire regular job-changers is saying you don't want a functioning market. That, of course, is just what one would expect from companies who don't want to pay people what they are worth. Talk of 'loyalty' is effectively propaganda.
I've been asked for loyalty from companies many more times than I've ever been shown any. It's pretty rare that a company really sticks by their employees.
For the younger generations, after watching their parents work 20+ years at the same organization and receive a cheap watch, they have no illusions about who will be providing the loyalty and who will be receiving it.
"Loyalty" is staying together and providing work or benefits even when it is financially a bad move. I've never in my life seen a company that is loyal to its employees.
Even not firing people in recession times, providing four monitors or free massages and lunches are not loyalty if they make workers more productive or attract better talent. It would be loyalty only when these actions cost the company much more than they benefit it, as a gift to the employees out of sheer good will.
Part of a comment I left on the HN thread discussing Suster's post was "It was most often used when a builder had materials or a little cash available to avoid laying off good workers when there wasn't a contract job available." About builders building houses on-spec to keep together their core workers.
I have actually seen that happen, although it was at a factory, not some white collar place(where the watch would be better). A man worked there for 20 years and the owner gave him a $40 watch. He certainly earned only slightly more than minimum wage those 2 decades—more than the co-workers he himself oversaw. It was quite surreal, and unfortunately the meaning of it was lost on most present. I quit that job not long after.
There is a vast, quasi-invisible economic divide in America between rural and urban. Perhaps it's always been this way.
But if you test your market value too often, you may be tempted to perform incremental changes, that will lead you to a local maximum, rather than find the global maximum
Why? Because by job hopping, you'll find the company willing to pay the most for your current skills, but you'll forgo promotions that would allow you access to even higher-paying jobs.
Cogent: "If you're a job hopper that will translate to how you view entrepreneurship." This is so off the mark it hurts my brain. Let me explain why.
As an entrepreneur there is one benefit that ranks above all others. Stability and a big paycheck definitely aren't it. It's a sense of ownership. It's a sense of owning your own destiny. I've talked to a bunch of other entrepreneurs and they share that feeling.
If you ask job hoppers why they left some of their jobs the story will be the opposite. They left because they weren't given enough ownership. They weren't included in vital decision making processes. When you have the ability to improve your workplace, you have no reason to hop jobs.
Most jobs don't actually give their employees this chance. They're filled with bureaucracy and ridiculous power struggles. That's exactly the opposite of the startup and entrepreneurship experience.
This really resonated with me. The most frustrating jobs for me, the ones that ended in me leaping for my life or being defenestrated, were the ones where I was under extreme pressure to deliver, but the schedule and spec were subject to capricious, unpredictable shifts out of my control. The ones where I had little say in the composition of my team or the methods we used to deliver results.
Ultimately, accountability for the outcome without the authority to manage the effort is about as frustrating as life can get.
Agreed. I gave two week's notice earlier this week. This is the first time I haven't lasted two years at a company, so I am feeling a bit like a job hopper. But the reasons I'm leaving are very much about accountability without authority.
While I empathize with employers that loose good people quickly (< 2 years) I have the following thought: I own my own life. I don't have to stay in Toronto if I don't want to. I don't have to continue to take bullshit for a cheque. I can go off and become a resort hand in Tiji if I wanted to, this is Canada for goodness sake. I am FREE.
Unless I took a signing bonus, both the employer and myself put a lot of effort into bringing me on board. I don't remember getting a cheque for all the interviews I've gone to.
Suster can go ahead and self select for stayers, this is capitalism after all, but he is going to lose out at the margin. Someone can actually get a ton of work done in two years and really and the 10 year employees I've met are rarely rockstars in their field.
As an employer without a lot of credibility, I have been known to pay for interviews. (Now, usually these were interviews where I asked for work to get done, but those are the best kind of interviews, no?)
I don't understand why more places don't pay for interviews; it seems to make a lot of sense all around; I mean, this idea that a recruit will sacrifice the better part of a day to each potential employer speaks to a larger power imbalance between the two than I think exists, at least at the higher end.
I totaly agree with this. Instead of wasting time building generalizing filters take the ones you feel good about on as contractors first. Get a feel for their competency and whether they fit your environment before you buy the cow!
Anything else just seems so ineficient and risky at least when it comes to programmers. Think long term.
Paul, I think you make a compelling counter-argument. Thank you for moving the debate forward. I have written my own follow on posting here: http://bothsid.es/62o that referenced your blog posting
> " If I’m looking at a stack of resumes and have to quickly whittle them down I usually eliminate resumes where people switched too many times and didn’t have a single place that they stayed for 3+ years "
Is a lot more reasonable than the original title (when I see it with people), especially when applied to those ten or fifteen years into their current career (edit: originally I said "30+", but then I realized age is an illegal question and that there may be people who switched careers at a later age e.g., by going back to college for a CS degree at 25).
> Again, this is totally fine. I recommend to people that you put on your resume the reason that you changed jobs.
It would make sense to do this for 6 month stints, but not for 18-36 month ones. One reason is that this question is already asked on most employment applications. It can be confirmed through a reference check (I am still surprised when companies don't do this prior to making an offer). Having reasons stated all over the resume can be perceived as excuses and as bad mouthing (in public, given that the resume is read by many and may be publicly posted) former employers (e.g., if one put down "insufficient challenge" or "inadequate compensation").
When hiring engineers, resume screening should be done by engineers (or at worst, engineering PMs). I know they will hate it, but remind them that they will hate working with bozos a lot more.
I can find a lot better heuristics: do they just list keywords, are there obviously technically inaccurate things, are descriptions full of "wank words" vs. concrete, measurable, achievements. Asking candidates to submit an answer to a _simple_ randomly chosen question along with the resume (e.g., "in C what's wrong with this code: int* foo (void) { int n = 3; return &n; }", posting puzzles (like Facebook does) or doing a "fizz buzz" test over Etherpad are much simpler filters.
If there are red flags on the resume (and I agree that lack of 3+ year stays ten years after the person has graduated college is a red flag), the place to address them is either right before an in-person interview (after a phone screen) or right after (before making an offer). It's the role of the hiring manager, team technical lead and company HR to do this.
As an engineer conducting an interview or a phone screen, I already have a tough issue on my hand: give a binary answer after only forty five minutes with the person; time spent asking about their life's story (other than asking them about specific projects) is better spent finding information that will help me tell me whether they're technical and cultural (in terms of their ability to communicate, passion for software engineering/computer science, etc...) fit for the position or not.
When I was a more naive manager (and employer), I would have agreed with Suster's arguments.
But the startup world is simply not a "stable" place, for either party. There's always a tradeoff; my most stable/non-hopping friends work for the government doing fairly mind-numbing things. Those aren't the employees your startup is looking for.
This is a commercial transaction with all that entails.
If you as an employer are any good - you will have the best people wanting to join you and if you are not , then well , it is going to be a revolving door.
The best people will always have more offers on the table.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Some of the best programmers are abysmal interviewees. So I would suggest that there are a ton of briliant programmers out there with jobs that are well below their level.
True , but then let the code talk , in this day and age of github and other social coding sites - show them what you got and if the employer has any sense he will hire you.
If an employer overlooks good code and instead places more emphasis on an amorphous process like an interview which has plenty of false-negatives and positives , then i would argue against working for such an employer.
I know a few people whom I consider amazing programmers, but that I'd never hire and feel very dubious to have as colleagues due to their personality and how they act. There are very few jobs (if any) where all that counts is the quality of what you put up on github.
Fair enough, but i never said hire programmers based "only" on their code in github.
The assumption here is that certain programmers do not do "technical" interviews well and they can therefore point to their code as proof of their technical competency. If their personality is broken well - that's a completely different problem and i don't know the solution to it.
Either way, i think this particular strain of discussion is in someways orthogonal to the main point of the article.
Hmm. I changed jobs 6 times (5 companies) in 3 1/2 years, which averages to a job change every 6 months. Longest stint I had was about a year. As far as I can tell, I have not been noticeably penalised for it in my professional life.
It's definitely the fastest way to increase one's income, and you can't blame people for doing that. My first job was doing technical support (first full, then part-time) at $8.50/hr, and the subsequent 5 job changes were simply progressions to a very modest mid-level IT salary in the $50-$70k range. I don't think that's ridiculous.
Fair enough, but, it seems to me that it is rarely the case that two positions at two different companies in our field are truly the same, even if the title is the same and/or they draw on similar skill sets.
My jobs were all in different subspecialisations of technology, but there is a certain identifiable sameness that unites all of them, and especially unites the first three (ISP and SMB-oriented IT consulting work) with the last three (VoIP & TDM telecommunications).
Excellent deconstruction of Mark's post. I'd add one point:
I thought that Mark's post was valuable in understanding the perspective of some hiring managers or investors since inevitably a few of those people will be looking at my resume. But I was not convinced that Mark's hiring filter was the correct approach to hiring. As an entrepreneur you're the underdog and need to find ways to do more with less. If all the big name companies are afraid of job hoppers, then you should be looking even harder at job hoppers. Your best chance at finding that diamond-in-the-rough employee is to take a closer look at the applicants that were never really evaluated at other companies because they were "caught by the filter."
According to the definition outlined in the article, I would be considered a "hopper". I've been gone between full-time freelancing and being a senior employee in 3 start-ups over the last 5 years.
Looking just at my employment history at face-value, you could determine (taking the article's definition of dedication and commitment) that I was not truly dedicated to the long-term success of the companies I've been involved in.
The real story, of course, is that there's a lot more beneath the surface. Instead of blowing me off, ask me about the extent of my dedication to each company. I'm absolutely convinced that I've sacrificed, failed, and subsequently learned more in 5 years of "hopping" than the majority of "dedicated" employees who spend the same amount of time in a single job.
and unless you plan on working alone, you'll have to hire people. You can't hire people the same way you talk yourself into entrepreneurship. They're not going to be co-founders, they won't have a great upside, they're going to be paid a salary to do a job for you. Figuring out how to hire the right people is probably harder than anything else I've done.
>They're not going to be co-founders, they won't have a great upside, they're going to be paid a salary to do a job for you.
This is a point that I think most (especially first time) founders would do well to keep in mind when thinking about loyalty or even overall commitment of employees.
As an employee with 1% or less of the company in options and a normal if not below market salary, I simply don't have the upside incentive to go "above and beyond." Combined with the situation of responsibility (handling outages and other emergencies) without authority (advice on major infrastructure changes ignored or delayed), my loyalty or commitment haven't been earned.
I think it is something I think all employers would do well to keep in mind. But especially startups, because as you said, you are almost always getting paid below market rates. And, on top of that, it's a rather unstable job; I mean, if the company goes under, you get fired, right?
The thing is, when you are a startup, you /don't need/ people who want to stick around for 5 years. In 5 years, you will be much bigger, or dead. Either way, the employees you need 5 years from now will be /completely different/ from the employees you need now.
As a startup, you want ambitious people; the sort who hop from job to job to increase their salary and to get more interesting projects. You want someone who is relatively bright but inexperienced who really wants to gain experience. There are people who require constant change, and those people do really, really well at startups, and not so well at large corporations. Often, those people are willing to work for less money in exchange for letting them work in things they are not qualified to work on, and nearly always those people are willing to trade away stability, which is important, because as a startup, you can't offer stability.
Mark is probably right - its hard to manage the entrepreneur types.
There is an interesting treatise called "Exit, Voce and Loyalty" by A.Hirschman that talks about the reasons for withdrawal from a relationship, be it employer-employee, or state-citizen interaction. I think Paul's reasons for 'job hopping' fit into the Exit camp, withdrawing due to either inability to change things or unwillingness to confront the system in a free market with plenty of exit options.
has anyone looked at this through the eyes of the engineer? they are clearly not sold into your vision if they're job hopping--how is this the engineer's fault? your startup can only keep top-notch people as long as it's committed to changing the world. the smartest people i know want to work on hard problems that impact a lot of people. if you can't fulfill that in an engineer, what incentive do they have to stay?
The thing not mentioned in either posting - what about guys like me that take/prefer contract work? When you are an indie developer trying to go your own way you inevetible take a lot of of short-term contract work to keep yourself floating.
You're scary and dangerous to bigger companies. They know you know how to leave and survive at any time, and expect you to get tired of the crazy schedules, overtime, and all that at any time. (At least I've known managers who thought that about your type).
Probably why I'm so startup oriented. Of my fulltime jobs most are startups. Just prefer if i'm going to commit then I'd rather comit to a company I can have the greatest impact at and where the risks/rewards are highest. I'm 'built' for startups, just how my psyche works.
Sadly, my experience is that they're scary to a lot of startups as well. Startups often have one or two former big company types working for them, which may be all that's needed to tip the scales against you.
After a little over a decade working in the software industry, I would put the bozo rate for employers at about 9/10. Though I don't have much direct experience hiring developers, I get the impression that they have roughly the same spread. This industry is like the music industry or Hollywood: a few gems in a sea of nobodies, all looking for a piece of the action. If you're a gem but not in the loop, it could take while to be discovered.
A developer who has changed jobs every year could be a bozo themselves, or they could be a star talent who hasn't been lucky enough to find an equally valuable employer. If it's loyalty you want, find one of the latter and give them a good working experience. They will be very very grateful.
Alex talked about something similar a while ago on TheDailyWTF. I haven't seen anyone post this link in these various discussions yet, so I'll drop it here:
He writes about how IT turnover is a good thing, and suggests that job hoppers are likely to be more talented. Interesting stuff.
(Also, I tried posting this on the linked article instead of here, but it kept rejecting my post, even when I took out the link. No idea what's going on there.)
As much as I understand the developers point of view on this, it is different as an entrepreneur. For a startup it is vital to not have half of your companys knowledge walk out the door. This article just says that there are valid reasons why job hoppers can be good employees.
Mark Suster doesn't say that you should never change your job, nor does he deny young people to have some more tries for orienatation.
In a knowledge worker economy the workers own the means of production. In effect, the factory walks out the door when they do. The only way to prevent it is to make sure the knowledge is shared very well among all workers, no one person is a gatekeeper, code is well maintained and high quality, and firing anyone who purposefully tries to "own" the knowledge before they can own it. That's the only way I've found to make sure the factory stays at your company.
It also means that you have to now treat programmers as the "talent" and not the "workers". Think movie star not factory worker and you'll do a lot better. It may seem retarded, but if you want smart creative people to work for you then treat them like smart creative people. Not like a rivet puncher at a factory.
This can't be emphasized enough. It's not enough that you have some technical wizard who is making everything happen at your startup. You have to make sure that the magic becomes a permanent asset, or you are going to get knocked back to the starting line when mr wizard leaves or when it's time to grow the team.
How to do this depends on the particular kind of work being done, but generally speaking you want maintainable code with lots of tests, and records of the valuable knowledge gained in the process.
It's not easy to get this out of most developers, particularly if you are not a developer yourself. If you ignore it, chances are very good it's not being done at all.
I agree that you don't want half of your company's knowledge to walk out the door. My point was that finding people that are blindly loyal (something you're very unlikely to do) isn't the solution. The solution is to engender an environment that earns loyalty and respect from your employees.
Also, I was really arguing against Mark using it as a filter for ruling out resumes. I just don't think it works in either the positive or negative case. As with most everything in life the answer is more nuanced. If you rule out an entire category of potential employees, you're just limiting yourself.
Most who are fairly paid, valued and treated as human beings won't "walk out". If they like the area and have friends and family close by and they are respected by the company, they will stay.
Disrespect them (low pay, no pay raises, no down time, 80 hour weeks all the time, uncertain/unstable company, etc) and they will leave.
>For a startup it is vital to not have half of your companys knowledge walk out the door.
This strikes me as putting the onus on the company to ensure that knowledge isn't monopolized (as a previous commentor suggests) and, perhaps more importantly, to ensure retention of key people.
One way is to provide ownership, perhaps in the case of a startup, literally, of the company and its outcome.
In effect, this is the difference between another (likely unequal share) co-founder and merely an employee. Even if such a co-founder moves on, there's a strong enough incentive not just to "walk out" and leave the company without access to that knowledge.
It seems like Paul is only looking at one side of the table: the one to be hired. Certainty, we're all able to switch to better opportunities, but the long term signaling effect says you're not going to be their in tough times. Persistence is key in startups, so I can see why he'd be anxious - as would I.
I think loyalty is something earned. I think we should model jobs more like relationships, value has to be given on each side of the equation. If your not treating the girl well, she leaves. You don't go in saying, baby if you date me you have to be here for the next 2 years even if I start beating you.
But a girl who has been changing boyfriends like her clothes in the past is more likely to do so in the future. Maybe that's because she doesn't fullfill her side of the equation in general.
I've heard similar advice about hiring people who are obviously over-qualified and will probably leave in 6 months. You have to use them not as workers, but as trainers and inspiration beacons for the rest of the team.
A plurality of companies have been signaling that they won't be there for the employee in tough times. Goose, gander?
EDIT: You mention specifically start-ups. Ok. There, however, there is reward presumably commensurate with the risk a participant takes. Also, the work is probably more challenging and interesting. I hold that neither particularly apply to other sectors, speaking generally.
There's a fine line between being tough and taking an unnecessary risk. If you're not in a position where you can walk into your job to find it doesn't exist anymore, it is your obligation to yourself and your family to manage that. If you can take the risks to stay, why couldn't you also take the risks to change jobs often?
If you're looking only for people who can put themselves in that position, then I'd bet you'd find a good number of them to be job-hoppers.
How tough are we talking about? If the company runs out of money and asks you to work for free for a few months, I wouldn't fault anybody for leaving. As others have said, working for someone is purely a business transaction. If you aren't getting what you want, you are free to go elsewhere.
actually, I'm looking at it from both sides. I'm working on my own startup right now and I hope that I'll be hiring people later this year. My point is that job hopping doesn't factor in as a signal on whether your resume ends up in the interview pile. I'll let you explain in the interview about your experience rather than just assuming that you're a disloyal sociopath that only looks out for themselves.
I also liked "if you want loyalty without earning it, hire a dog."
Working at a job right now that has several in-house dogs wandering around the office all day, it makes me wonder if they have 401k packages and non-disclosure agreements or not.
The reason Mark is an asshole is that he's trying to create / exploit cultural norms to prevent employees acting in their own self interest. Of course it would be optimal (for the employer) to have employees that never leave, but the vast majority of employers treat their employees fairly poorly. Any social bonds such as employers keeping employees around through tight times have long since been shattered since employers have made it abundantly clear they look out only for themselves. Expecting employees to do differently makes you a dick.
Even the basics -- employers expect two weeks after you resign to help transition your responsibilities -- are asymmetric: how many employers would give you an extra two weeks of wages if they fired you to help tide you over until the next job?
Asshole? Dick? What's the point of that language. Mark's free to hire (or invest) however he wants and you're free to not work with him. Even though I have my disagreements, I found it very useful to hear Mark's perspective on hiring. There are a lot of people who share his philosophy and you're better off understanding it.
On the asymmetry of loyalty, it's just basic economic incentives. An individual has to be much more concerned about what their former employer says about them than a company does about what a single former employee says. It may not be perfectly 'fair,' but that's just the way the world works.
Although I completely disagree with Mark's opinion regarding job hopping, I do not think it is right to call him a a-hole. The guy seems really decent.
Well, there are two ways to deal with employee churn. The first is to create such an awesome work environment (via wages, stock options / golden handcuffs, learning opportunities, career growth, flexibility, etc etc -- whatever it is that works for individual employees) that people laugh at the recruiters that inevitably call. The other way, which Marc advocates, is to create systemic discrimination against employees that seek out the best opportunities for themselves. This is contrary to Marc providing the best opportunities for employees.
Consider, as an example, the Mahalo stuff that started this. Jason's employee was given the opportunity to use his web dev skills on a much higher profile site and to work on a big open source toolkit (I assume he was referring to YUI or similar). Jason could either have wished his employee the best as said employee tried to take his career to the next stage, or provided him with some similar opportunity to convince him to stay, or... advocated for a system in which employees have difficulty switching jobs in order to keep the employee in an inferior position solely for the benefit of Jason. This is what Marc wants.
Note that in Marc's article, there was nothing about retaining employees by creating such an awesome environment that they don't want to leave. Oh, and btw? Here's a protip. If a dev in the valley making $100-$150 leaves for a $10K/year raise? It isn't the money. It's the boss. I claim that except for exceptional cases, salary is a 2nd or 3rd tier consideration for most great employees.
So, does Marc's advocacy of keeping employees by urging employers to systematically discriminate against people that switch jobs to find their best place that make him an asshole? In my book, yes.
ps -- protip #2? One way to discourage people from saying their boss sucked was to discourage it, ala Marc. The other way is to not be a shit boss. Again, Marc chooses the first path.
I agree with your argument.However having read nearly all his posts I see a guy who is ambitious, doesn't hesitate to tell you his weaknesses, talks about how he would go beyond his means to keep great talent within his companies, gives smart/honest feedback about companies that he may not even be affiliated with, etc...
Sometimes people say stuff they don't necessarily mean 100% and before they know it they have already hit publish (And Google caches fast). For Mark, this is the first time I saw such a comment from him. So I am not going to hold it against him. I cannot say the same about Jason.
What's interesting in this debate is that Mark's own experience isn't where he puts his mouth. He spent the first 8 years of his career at Accenture (which screams failed attempt at making partner -- sorry to be harsh), but drastically changed occupations every two years inside the firm (switching from IT to strategy, changing countries etc.).
I really like reading Mark, so I'm afraid of overbearing my point. But his inital blog post sounded like shamelessly getting his cake and eating it too.
He felt that such frequent career changes were the best way to prepare himself to lead a startup someday -- why would the same trait magically become a liability in others? Optimizing against this very behavior in job selection signals a quite detrimental two-tiered mindset -- himself at the helm, and employees who are there to take orders.
This is to some extent the reality of capitalism, but it isn't admirable leadership, nor a good way to generate innovation, and certainly not the best way to inspire people to stick on a sinking ship while the rats drown away. As the OP said - money can't buy you love... :)
Contrast this with Yelp, Aardvark and the second-generation breed of entrepreneurs coming out of the PayPal and Google mafias.