>> 80 per cent of tech professionals don’t think they will be working for the same company in two years.
That is a lot. I am of the current opinion that I will try to get a job offer every year and if I can't refuse it, I won't. Some people warn me job hopping looks bad on a resume, but I disagree and I think the article makes my point
>>“People changing jobs every year or two can be seen by employers as a red flag but, actually, it shows these people are ambitious, adaptable and knowledgeable, traits that every employer looks for.”
Plus this is the sort of thing that works itself out. If it looks bad on a resume no one will hire me until I have been in a place long enoungh
Well I mean tech tenure is what, like, 8-20 months anyway? We’re not building bridges; software projects complete quicker on average than your average megastructure. People move on once the project is done
In what sector of "tech"? Perhaps it's sample bias, but I've never observed this behavior (leaving after less than 12 months, or after your first project) in any of my peers. I could definitely see that for contractors but people who leave that early usually don't do it voluntarily.
Certainly - if years of JIRA bug crushing appeals to the onlooker, power to them. I personally find myself either exhausted or bored after 18 months. This is about the time I've learned as much as the job can offer without the need of extensive force (adhering to the 80 / 20 rule, at the very least)
I am currently in process of getting a very lucrative offer; one of my major considerations was that I've only been in the current position for 7 mo. Your comment was very reassuring for me. However, I have once been declined a position for not having worked enough at (then) current place, and have been asked about whether I would also leave the company in a year or so.
The question that should be asked is why are good staff worth more to the other organisation? If you are doing good work, then surely the current employer should be willing to give you a suitable pay rise that will disincentivate you from changing jobs. It does cost them more to hire a replacement but apparently that is too complicated for the average PHB to grasp.
> The question that should be asked is why are good staff worth more to the other organisation?
Because management is betting that total dollars saved from not raising everyone’s wages is more than total dollars spent on hiring and training and other costs of people going to work elsewhere.
It is not too complicated for the average PHB (what is that?) to grasp. It is known that many people will not leave or shop around for higher wages, so the bet is that letting a few people go is worth it. This especially works out for employers in environments where coworkers can and are expected to take on the duties of the person that left. In that case, hiring someone new does not cost the employer much.
BUT as a business owner, employees focus a LOT more when they are in the office and working with peers.
The focus is actually quite dramatic.
There are just too many distractions in the modern home. Today's world, where we are at the moment, was built on people going to work every day. It worked. Look at how we have advanced.
Sure, now that we have reached to this point, some people can work at home. But the sustained work is done with your colleagues beside you.
The internet. The vast, vast majority of companies that are the backbone of any country. The financial system that runs credit and capitalism. All these things were built in the office or it's equivalent.
I feel like you're projecting. Or, at the very least, operating under the assumption that your exact experiences reflect everyone's.
I live by myself. There is nothing in my home that can/will distract me, aside from the internet--which I can just as easily use as a distraction from an office.
When I was at the office, it was not uncommon for someone to walk up and strike up a conversation that lasted 20 or 30 minutes and was completely unrelated to work.
And, on top of that, there's currently one single person I can think of of who a) I interact with regularly at work and b) works from the same office as me (if I were to go back to my employer's local office).
(Also, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that your entire "argument" is an Appeal To Tradition logical fallacy anyways)
> When I was at the office, it was not uncommon for someone to walk up and strike up a conversation that lasted 20 or 30 minutes and was completely unrelated to work.
I was in an office setting in late 2019, and was often told "go ask so-and-so, he/she knows the foobar/etc". And... when I went to their desk, I was... interrupting. But I was told to do that. And... for the 'company as a whole', I guess you could say it all balanced out and they did knowledge transfer of what I needed to me, then everything eventually "got done". I was painfully aware that I was an intrusion, and was preventing them from hitting whatever deadlines they had to hit. But... this is how the management structured stuff. No scheduled time to document (and update existing docs) from what I could tell. Just "go talk to so-and-so". And that was seen as a 'benefit' of being in the office.
It didn't help that some of the people I'd go to were actually quite hostile to this, and took it out on me some. Some just ... answered some questions then... trailed off and stopped responding to me (weird). A couple folks were quite helpful, but the process was still an unaccounted for interruption.
As one of the guys who gets "shoulder tapped" for a lot of stuff, I can say I'm a lot more productive from home because I can work through a task and then check my messages. Nobody walks up to my desk at home and interrupts me. But now, while I'm busily working, I imagine those people who were used to just walking up and getting an answer probably panic and message 5 different people waiting for a response rather than just walking up to a single desk and demanding attention right then.
Same here. My main distraction is the internet (HN, YouTube, looking up things I'm interested in). That can happen just as easily at work. At least at home, I can take breaks that recharge me better like watering my plants or having a nap.
> The internet. The vast, vast majority of companies that are the backbone of any country. The financial system that runs credit and capitalism. All these things were built in the office or it's equivalent.
Exactly, this is what we were able to achieve while being constrained to being forced to work in an office. Never before have we had tools good enough to empower individuals to work from home and an event to force as many people to work from home.
Free of this constrained mindset, that massive achievement is only possible together in an office, think how much more we will be able to create, build, improve and succeed with even more flexibility.
Like someone else posted, that's the equivalent of saying, because it worked in the past its the only way it can work in the future which is not a growth mindset. We're now empowered with tools to unlock more ideas, creativity, and innovation than ever before. Best of all, we don't have to do it in a noisy and crowded office when we don't want to.
I'm excited to go back to the office, but only 2 or 3 days a week. I can't wait to continue working from home 2 to 3 days a week still be able to contribute just as much as if I were in the office, if not more. I also switched jobs throughout this period. Achievement is just as possible as before. WFH won't change that negatively.
I was at the office the other day. Maybe it's because it's still a novel experience, but there were lots of distractions there, some good, like getting into technical discussions, and some bad, like every other distraction.
I can see both sides. Personally I want to go back to hybrid work and be in the office some of the time for the social aspect.
> There are just too many distractions in the modern home
Have you been in an office? Nobody respects boundaries and you can't teach them to do so, because they're stubborn adults who don't care about you. At home, the only other people are people who are willing to listen and compromise. Perhaps you don't have that and that's very sad for you, but a healthy home has ways to make it more effective and better than an office.
As for your claim about "a lot of people do it so it must be better", that doesn't tell us anything except that it was tradition. A tradition that deserves to die, hopefully with micromanaging managers.
I don't really agree, the difference between being alone in my home vs being in a office with a few people makes me more productive at home. If you're offering personal offices to people that can't have an office at home though, I understand why you would see people more focused at work.
> Sure, now that we have reached to this point, some people can work at home. But the sustained work is done with your colleagues beside you.
Not sure what you mean by "the sustained work". Sure, work was harder when I worked at McDonald's compared to now that I work in software, but on the other hand software gives me way more leverage with what I do, and so I can produce more value. I'm not saying that I'm changing the world here, but I can write a small script in an hour that makes some manual work for a few people automatic, and thus improve their productivity. There's no way I could do something with an impact this big at McDonald's.
> The internet. The vast, vast majority of companies that are the backbone of any country. The financial system that runs credit and capitalism. All these things were built in the office or it's equivalent.
For the internet at least, most people involved had personal offices. Mixing personal offices and open spaces is, I think, a big mistakes. Most employers only gives open spaces, which don't allow to concentrate on work as much as you would like to. I do agree that personal offices with nice shared spaces are an ideal for work. Anecdotally, most research lab that I've seen followed this pattern.
Being in the office is a giant distraction. When I'm in front of my computer at home during work hours I simply work, no distractions. When I'm in the office and I try to work I spend time trying to block out distractions so I can work.
Engineering line managers who don’t firmly grasp the technical subject matter sometimes (in my anecdotal experience, often) use “ass-in-seat”-style proxy metrics to do performance management.
This is harder to do remote. Reading the tasks and diffs is not harder to do remote.
Such managers are often effective at impacting the organization (for better or worse).
I am not surprised there is a “back to the office” lobby, and I won’t be surprised if it’s an effective lobby.
As someone who has the comparison between working solo/freelance on software and being "managed" I can assure you that in my case the "impact" this kind of management has is that it reduces my productivity by at least a magnitude.
Much of what you have to do in this environment is done so managers have the feeling they know what is going on and they have a grip on it. Most of which could be solved for them if they just checked the git issues, commits and/or the wiki. Very often they don't do that legwork so theh have to convince themselves of their usefulness in another way.
Being on site makes it easier to follow this dark pattern.
Engineering managers should not stand in the way of their engineers, but remove roadblocks ahead and create an environment where quality is achieved. Of course that doesn't equal total freedom for everybody, but IMO good engineering managers should feel nearly non-existent when you do a good job. When you make mistakes they should feel like a good friend preventing you to run into your own doom. When you are lazy they should act as an stark reminder.
The useless managers have migrated to Jira with their unproductive busy work. I made the mistake recently of doing some project management work for a toxic organisation and the standup meetings are just a long sequence of the main manager bullying overworked guys with surprise tickets.
Organisations can be just as awful with WFH as the office, but at least I can say obscenities about people out loud on Teams with my microphone muted.
The back to the office lobby simply havent worked out how to abuse Jira and Teams properly yet.
“Ass in seat” metrics are worth less than nothing, they’re trivially gameable. Most of us probably have experience phoning it in and faking productivity during a bad job; there’s no reason to believe that that’s not a regular thing when there is pressure to be seen over working.
Also, I doubt this lobby will work; the labor market for tech is unbelievably tight right now. Workers have the leverage to demand what they want, and I think more of them know it.
Hello from my fourteenth month of working from home for a semiconductor company.
(I'm not quite sure how the people who really do need lab space have been coping, but the thing is that so much of the company is software (firmware and tooling) or simulation/verification that we were able to carry on mostly business as usual. Much to the surprise of the management who were previously skeptical of WFH)
Was working at a semiconductor company when the pandemic started. They sent a millions of dollars of lab equipment to people's houses who had the space/power to use them; and reconfigured the in-office labs for social distancing + setup two-week rotations; then actively prevented all non-essential employees from working in the office.
As far as I know, there was no outbreak in the company.
"“For baby boomers and Generation X, it was quite common to stay in the same company for most of their working lives. Today’s working landscape is different, with millennials and Generation Z open to the concept of job hopping,” he continued.
“People changing jobs every year or two can be seen by employers as a red flag but, actually, it shows these people are ambitious, adaptable and knowledgeable, traits that every employer looks for.”
Generation X'er here. Pretty sure I remember these same articles being a thing - with Generation X being the job hoppers - back when I was ... younger. Job hoppers had a bad rep back then too. It all depends on how long and what you accomplished. Oh you say you invented tcp at your last job where you stayed for 6 weeks? Gonna be an interesting conversation, or maybe an entertaining one.
31 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 79.0 ms ] threadThat is a lot. I am of the current opinion that I will try to get a job offer every year and if I can't refuse it, I won't. Some people warn me job hopping looks bad on a resume, but I disagree and I think the article makes my point
>>“People changing jobs every year or two can be seen by employers as a red flag but, actually, it shows these people are ambitious, adaptable and knowledgeable, traits that every employer looks for.”
Plus this is the sort of thing that works itself out. If it looks bad on a resume no one will hire me until I have been in a place long enoungh
Because management is betting that total dollars saved from not raising everyone’s wages is more than total dollars spent on hiring and training and other costs of people going to work elsewhere.
It is not too complicated for the average PHB (what is that?) to grasp. It is known that many people will not leave or shop around for higher wages, so the bet is that letting a few people go is worth it. This especially works out for employers in environments where coworkers can and are expected to take on the duties of the person that left. In that case, hiring someone new does not cost the employer much.
BUT as a business owner, employees focus a LOT more when they are in the office and working with peers.
The focus is actually quite dramatic.
There are just too many distractions in the modern home. Today's world, where we are at the moment, was built on people going to work every day. It worked. Look at how we have advanced.
Sure, now that we have reached to this point, some people can work at home. But the sustained work is done with your colleagues beside you.
The internet. The vast, vast majority of companies that are the backbone of any country. The financial system that runs credit and capitalism. All these things were built in the office or it's equivalent.
I live by myself. There is nothing in my home that can/will distract me, aside from the internet--which I can just as easily use as a distraction from an office.
When I was at the office, it was not uncommon for someone to walk up and strike up a conversation that lasted 20 or 30 minutes and was completely unrelated to work.
And, on top of that, there's currently one single person I can think of of who a) I interact with regularly at work and b) works from the same office as me (if I were to go back to my employer's local office).
(Also, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that your entire "argument" is an Appeal To Tradition logical fallacy anyways)
I was in an office setting in late 2019, and was often told "go ask so-and-so, he/she knows the foobar/etc". And... when I went to their desk, I was... interrupting. But I was told to do that. And... for the 'company as a whole', I guess you could say it all balanced out and they did knowledge transfer of what I needed to me, then everything eventually "got done". I was painfully aware that I was an intrusion, and was preventing them from hitting whatever deadlines they had to hit. But... this is how the management structured stuff. No scheduled time to document (and update existing docs) from what I could tell. Just "go talk to so-and-so". And that was seen as a 'benefit' of being in the office.
It didn't help that some of the people I'd go to were actually quite hostile to this, and took it out on me some. Some just ... answered some questions then... trailed off and stopped responding to me (weird). A couple folks were quite helpful, but the process was still an unaccounted for interruption.
Exactly, this is what we were able to achieve while being constrained to being forced to work in an office. Never before have we had tools good enough to empower individuals to work from home and an event to force as many people to work from home.
Free of this constrained mindset, that massive achievement is only possible together in an office, think how much more we will be able to create, build, improve and succeed with even more flexibility.
Like someone else posted, that's the equivalent of saying, because it worked in the past its the only way it can work in the future which is not a growth mindset. We're now empowered with tools to unlock more ideas, creativity, and innovation than ever before. Best of all, we don't have to do it in a noisy and crowded office when we don't want to.
I'm excited to go back to the office, but only 2 or 3 days a week. I can't wait to continue working from home 2 to 3 days a week still be able to contribute just as much as if I were in the office, if not more. I also switched jobs throughout this period. Achievement is just as possible as before. WFH won't change that negatively.
For me there is way more distraction in an office. Unless I get a private office with a door that locks.
I can see both sides. Personally I want to go back to hybrid work and be in the office some of the time for the social aspect.
Have you been in an office? Nobody respects boundaries and you can't teach them to do so, because they're stubborn adults who don't care about you. At home, the only other people are people who are willing to listen and compromise. Perhaps you don't have that and that's very sad for you, but a healthy home has ways to make it more effective and better than an office.
As for your claim about "a lot of people do it so it must be better", that doesn't tell us anything except that it was tradition. A tradition that deserves to die, hopefully with micromanaging managers.
> Sure, now that we have reached to this point, some people can work at home. But the sustained work is done with your colleagues beside you.
Not sure what you mean by "the sustained work". Sure, work was harder when I worked at McDonald's compared to now that I work in software, but on the other hand software gives me way more leverage with what I do, and so I can produce more value. I'm not saying that I'm changing the world here, but I can write a small script in an hour that makes some manual work for a few people automatic, and thus improve their productivity. There's no way I could do something with an impact this big at McDonald's.
> The internet. The vast, vast majority of companies that are the backbone of any country. The financial system that runs credit and capitalism. All these things were built in the office or it's equivalent.
For the internet at least, most people involved had personal offices. Mixing personal offices and open spaces is, I think, a big mistakes. Most employers only gives open spaces, which don't allow to concentrate on work as much as you would like to. I do agree that personal offices with nice shared spaces are an ideal for work. Anecdotally, most research lab that I've seen followed this pattern.
This is harder to do remote. Reading the tasks and diffs is not harder to do remote.
Such managers are often effective at impacting the organization (for better or worse).
I am not surprised there is a “back to the office” lobby, and I won’t be surprised if it’s an effective lobby.
Much of what you have to do in this environment is done so managers have the feeling they know what is going on and they have a grip on it. Most of which could be solved for them if they just checked the git issues, commits and/or the wiki. Very often they don't do that legwork so theh have to convince themselves of their usefulness in another way.
Being on site makes it easier to follow this dark pattern.
Engineering managers should not stand in the way of their engineers, but remove roadblocks ahead and create an environment where quality is achieved. Of course that doesn't equal total freedom for everybody, but IMO good engineering managers should feel nearly non-existent when you do a good job. When you make mistakes they should feel like a good friend preventing you to run into your own doom. When you are lazy they should act as an stark reminder.
Organisations can be just as awful with WFH as the office, but at least I can say obscenities about people out loud on Teams with my microphone muted.
The back to the office lobby simply havent worked out how to abuse Jira and Teams properly yet.
The notion that 'people want to stay home, away from the office, and have less oversight' is barely worth a survey, it should mostly be obvious.
The question is what can we do to be effective? Communications, oversight, coordination - this is all real, and hard.
Also, I doubt this lobby will work; the labor market for tech is unbelievably tight right now. Workers have the leverage to demand what they want, and I think more of them know it.
(I'm not quite sure how the people who really do need lab space have been coping, but the thing is that so much of the company is software (firmware and tooling) or simulation/verification that we were able to carry on mostly business as usual. Much to the surprise of the management who were previously skeptical of WFH)
As far as I know, there was no outbreak in the company.
"“For baby boomers and Generation X, it was quite common to stay in the same company for most of their working lives. Today’s working landscape is different, with millennials and Generation Z open to the concept of job hopping,” he continued.
“People changing jobs every year or two can be seen by employers as a red flag but, actually, it shows these people are ambitious, adaptable and knowledgeable, traits that every employer looks for.”
Generation X'er here. Pretty sure I remember these same articles being a thing - with Generation X being the job hoppers - back when I was ... younger. Job hoppers had a bad rep back then too. It all depends on how long and what you accomplished. Oh you say you invented tcp at your last job where you stayed for 6 weeks? Gonna be an interesting conversation, or maybe an entertaining one.