Not only did I not find Suster's arguments compelling, I found many of them mildly offensive (but then, I offend easily). My immediate reaction was to find the companies he was on the board of (not too many). Speaking as an employer, hiring in this market is dreadfully hard, and smugly advertising this kind of attitude towards candidates (and by extension employees) is... asinine, is the word.
compelling may have been a poor choice of words on my part. clearly, i felt strongly against his position to write about it. the filtering technique was what jumped out at me as plain wrong. not to mention the fact that it was coming from a completely polarized perspective. with all that said, i think i can see where he was going with his post. he's gotten a ton of shit from the community for it, which might have forced him to write his latest piece. have you seen this? : http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/25/job-hoppers-re...
I think he's gone from saying something asinine to something that is common sense. Everybody worries about people who never stay at jobs for longer than 12 months, accumulating long chains of short job tenures.
But that's not what he said. He said:
* Never hire job hoppers. Never.
* You don't have to be a lifer. 6 years is fine.
* If they've had 5 jobs of 2 years or less, buh bye [sic].
* If you're 30 and have had 6 jobs since college, you're probably disloyal, you don't have staying power, you're in it for yourself instead of the company.
Six years! 6-7 years may make sense for the Sr. Managers of Strategy Consulting at Accenture, but it's totally out of step with the industry we work in.
The biggest challenge I had with hiring people who were job hoppers is they didn't have the sort of mentored growth you see in people who spent several years working to grow themselves. Basically, they were doing the same 10-100k line of code projects they were when they got out of college but expecting to be paid more because they had "7 years of industry experience."
I'm sorry, but if you haven't learned to take on larger projects --- and learning two different platforms and a language a year don't cut it --- why should you be paid more than someone with the two years of experience you need to learn to estimate and deliver simple tasks at quality?
This may sound like a hypothetical argument, but it was a serious hiring quality issue I ran into with entire industries that are pro-hopping (finance and startups were the biggest). After a few years of hundreds of phone and in-person interviews with dud "superstar" candidates, you get cynical. As it sounds like the article author is.
The question of how much experience a candidate has on your platform has nothing to do with how often they "hop jobs" (and can we stop calling it that now?).
It's hard to interview people, and the penalty for making a bad hiring decision really is steep. But don't scapegoat.
"1 year of experience, repeated 7 times" is not the same thing as "7 years experience" in my book, and from the heat his original post generated, it's not clear that everyone agrees.
There's a reason that the standard equity vesting schedule is four years with a one year cliff. Great people will stick around if they feel that their equity is valuable even if they can get more cash/benefits/perks/responsibility/credit/fame/fortune/whatever elsewhere. If you're not handing out equity, then you need to compete on all those slashies. It's a competitive market and every employee is a free agent.
Of course employers influence job hopping. The impression I get everywhere is that bad employers outnumber good ones by far (too much to be attributed to selection bias). The prevalence of job hoppers is probably more of an indictment of these employers rather than the job seeker.
"Good" places to work like the one Suster purports to run can probably afford to filter out a lot of false negatives from job hopping behavior. Fine, whatever. Your loss. But don't expect people to take that advice at face value.
You might also claim that good employees should also know better than to steer clear of these bad employers, but these people also have to eat, too.
right...mark did not touch on the topic of toxic workplaces. he focused solely (i guess) on these "good" or "utopian" work situations. that was another catalyst for the post.
however, in his latest blog post, mark addresses these issues. so i definitely credit him there.
I've done a fair amount of hiring, and I would definitely take a slightly less talented employee that has some staying power over a superstar who won't be around in a year.
The product knowledge that walks out the door with a short-term employee is just devastating. Of course, as an employer, we have a responsibility to create an environment conducive to retention (pay well, keep the projects varied and interesting, go easy on the death marches)... but there are certain folks who simply can't stay put no matter how well they're treated. They're just not worth the investment.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 45.2 ms ] threadwhat do you think about it?
But that's not what he said. He said:
* Never hire job hoppers. Never.
* You don't have to be a lifer. 6 years is fine.
* If they've had 5 jobs of 2 years or less, buh bye [sic].
* If you're 30 and have had 6 jobs since college, you're probably disloyal, you don't have staying power, you're in it for yourself instead of the company.
Six years! 6-7 years may make sense for the Sr. Managers of Strategy Consulting at Accenture, but it's totally out of step with the industry we work in.
There's still no debate here.
I'm sorry, but if you haven't learned to take on larger projects --- and learning two different platforms and a language a year don't cut it --- why should you be paid more than someone with the two years of experience you need to learn to estimate and deliver simple tasks at quality?
This may sound like a hypothetical argument, but it was a serious hiring quality issue I ran into with entire industries that are pro-hopping (finance and startups were the biggest). After a few years of hundreds of phone and in-person interviews with dud "superstar" candidates, you get cynical. As it sounds like the article author is.
The question of how much experience a candidate has on your platform has nothing to do with how often they "hop jobs" (and can we stop calling it that now?).
It's hard to interview people, and the penalty for making a bad hiring decision really is steep. But don't scapegoat.
"Good" places to work like the one Suster purports to run can probably afford to filter out a lot of false negatives from job hopping behavior. Fine, whatever. Your loss. But don't expect people to take that advice at face value.
You might also claim that good employees should also know better than to steer clear of these bad employers, but these people also have to eat, too.
however, in his latest blog post, mark addresses these issues. so i definitely credit him there.
Employers want employees that will stay for reasons that are anti-capitalist. (because it's cheaper for them)
Employees will stay for reasons that are capitalist.
The recent bits about interns working for free, deriving the company gain, is right up this alley.
The product knowledge that walks out the door with a short-term employee is just devastating. Of course, as an employer, we have a responsibility to create an environment conducive to retention (pay well, keep the projects varied and interesting, go easy on the death marches)... but there are certain folks who simply can't stay put no matter how well they're treated. They're just not worth the investment.