‘I’m proud of being a job hopper’: Seattle engineer’s post about company loyalty goes viral
‘I’m proud of being a job hopper’: Seattle engineer’s post about company loyalty goes viral
Alex Nguyen. (LinkedIn Photo) People tell me I don't have company loyalty. But then I ask which companies have employee loyalty. Those two lines are part
‘I’m proud of being a job hopper’: Seattle engineer’s post about company loyalty goes viral::undefined
Most people over-index on maximizing compensation or holding on to stability. But there’s more to work than money and stability. Work is about growth, building connections, working on things you care about, being challenged and creating a legacy.
Fucking legacy? Is this a joke? Who gives a shit about what shitty products they launch for FAANG companies? I certainly don't - not beyond keeping my resume and portfolio up to date.
Compensation and stability are the only things that matter beyond basic working conditions and a non-toxic environment.
Well in my case I created a legacy by helping to unionize my workplace. I don't even care if I'm ever remembered for that, not many legacies can be beat
Very nice! Unionization is the only way to make employera care about workers rights.
Man we've lost something along the way. When did our jobs become purely a means of money and contributing nothing to society.
Mine turned into that when it stopped paying enough to provide me with basic needs.
If it's fuck me, then it's fuck all y'all too.
When they started treating employees and disposable cogs to be exploited.
The exact moment the employer only cared about money and not its employees or contributions to the society.
Executives used to be stewards of the company. They took care of brand, and people.
Then we switched to a bottom line focus. Now, profit, stock prices are the only thing that matters.
Shortcuts, layoffs, benefit cuts, etc are the only way to offset not making continuous market growth, and still rack ridiculous profits.
Also, great deal of Americans started not giving a shit about where the product comes from or who makes it. We want the cheapest thing, fast. Just has been our personal priorities.
There's not much incentive for a company to consider it's corporate image, contributions to community and public, etc.
I'd say that's when.
When capitalism. That’s when.
Edit: to clarify, it wasn’t much better before capitalism. But it was less all-encompassing. Feudalism was a shitty structure, worse even than capitalism tbh. But it was much easier to escape it. Not just in the “survivalist hippie camp” that still exists now. But even in everyday life. The system wasn’t shaping every facet of human existence. Only production relations (which is the big one yes). But capitalism has shaped everything around us. Our places of work, sure, but our personal lives. Our inner lives. Everything has been commodified. Mental health, religion, wellness, friendships, love and relationships, families, sickness, children etc. etc. etc… That is the main reason capitalism is worse than anything before it. No other system had the capacity to destroy the planet. None. To destroy all life in it. All in the name of profit. An immaterial, formless concept. Not even a real thing. And there’s not much we can do it seems. I mean there is, and I think it’s pretty clear. But I bet even that gets commodified soon. Bring on the politicians/capitalists death match reality game shows I guess…
Man we’ve lost something along the way. When did our jobs become purely a means of money and contributing nothing to society.
This mythic past where our jobs meant "more than money" and we "contributed to society" never existed anywhere
Probably around the time they took away pensions
I don't know man, I've always liked the idea of a project outliving me. Though for the sanity of future engineers I hope that is not the case. Today's solutions are usually just tomorrow's problems.
On a long enough timeline, all things end, and tech has hyper accelerated timelines.
I was once interviewed by a guy who asked for my biggest failure, which was basically "favorite open source project didn't work out". He let me know he worked on an early competitor of the X windowing system and really believed in it. And we laughed about that. (He hired me).
So yeah, I kinda agree with this job hopper guy on everything but legacy, but only because we really don't get to have a say on what our code ends up meaning to anyone. The sands of time are nothing compared to the brutality of tech stack churn.
My legacy is my kids, and that’s time no company can take from me
Yet...
Who invented Google home? Like, what's the person's name? What about the person that designed the Sonos Move?
There's no legacy. There's business objectives and getting those completed so upper management can move their plans forward. Who gets them there is irrelevant.
Google did
Seriously, nobody is going to remember you. Like 3 generations down, you'll even be a tiny blip in your descendents world. Even most billionaires will be remembered through an encyclopedia entry and nothing else.
Agreed, something has gone wrong if I individually am so important that what I leave at a job is considered a legacy.
All I want is for the things I work on to be useful for the lifetime of the product and some appreciation from management for putting in the work while getting paid well.
Companies get mad when the employees look at their jobs the way execs look at their employees. Cue outrage. The only reason they mad is because they own the newspapers, too.
The audacity of these removed. I have a mercenary outlook on work too. If you love me, keep paying me good.
I'm not loyal to anybody, I'm a demon / I have no loyalty for anyone, never did, never will
I've been practicing the mercenary method for about 5 years now. Since then I've significantly increased my salary and I've been a lot happier at work. That on top of learning to say "no" has improved my career life exponentially. NO loyalty. No unpaid overtime. No going above and beyond for a company that isn't going to return the favor.
What about when they do return the favour, though?
As someone who has spent a fair bit of time on the other side of this issue, I've found people tend to assume I'm being shitty even as I am actively going out of my way to accommodate and support them.
One time I moved someone from hourly to salary because he was very receptive to guidance and was learning very quickly - essentially I didn't want him to be compared on hourly terms as his pay increased, since the cap for more independent salaried employees was much higher. I was kinda risking my own ass in doing this since he had neither experience nor education, but I saw incredible potential, and felt it made sense. As part of this, to ensure he wouldn't be shortchanged by the conversion, I had payroll add 5K when they switched him. I expected this would be well received, but he had so many concerns that made absolutely no sense. We got through it, but in the end it seems he thought that all of the extra time I was spending personally to teach him a new role and help him get from ~40K to 100K within a year and a half was something to be wary of.
I have many stories like this. Sometimes when I feel hurt by people I've been so loyal to, I get urges to stop being compassionate and stop prioritizing their concerns so heavily. I don't think I'll ever change, but it is extra exhausting to go through this stuff over and over only to be lumped in with folks who do treat people like shit.
Perhaps the model is just fundamentally broken, and there's no way to win as long as there is any sort of power differential in the relationship (implied or otherwise). More and more I feel that that is what I'm up against, and no amount of concern for an employee's wellbeing will ever be able to overcome this.
So, my question is not rhetorical - I realize this isn't my post, but I'm super curious about others' perspective on this: are you open to the idea that at some point in your career someone might actually care about your wellbeing? Will it matter to you, or just ... get whatever you can, and never stop trying to fuck the system?
they dont even pay enough for our loyalty lmao
We're soldiers of fortune we'll fight for no country but we'll die for good pay. Under the flag of the greenback dollar or the peso down Mexico way..
I'm fine with my reports taking better offers if they've got em. I don't get how these people get hired though. When I see these resumes that flip jobs every year, I immediately just kinda figure it's a waste to invest time in this person.
I look at it differently. It's my job to invest in, and create an environment that people don't want to ever leave. It's a two way street. If people are only hanging around for a year, something is up, and it probably ain't their fault.
"Having hired over 500 engineers personally in my career, if your resume came across my list, I would definitely pass."
Heh.A job seeker with three FANG companies on their resume does not give a shit if this random person would bin their resume.
Also, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally, in a single career isn't embarrassing.
Edit: "You think you suck at retention? Let me tell you how my year went!"
Your second paragraph tells you who you’re trying to find in your third paragraph: FAANG. Hiring 500 engineers and bragging about it something you can do when you’re just interested in shareholder value not customer experience.
I wouldn’t hire the guy in the article because I haven’t seen strong candidates come from FAANG and I’ve been very happy to lose the people I did to FAANG because they weren’t good engineers, they just knew how to leetcode and tunnel vision trivia.
It's not about having FANG in your job history. It's about switching companies three times in three years.
Where I work, we tend to lose money on new hires for an average of the first six months. That's time where not only the new engineer isn't very productive, but other engineers on the same team aren't very productive. They're sinking time into difficult conversations like "yeah you need to go back and redo the last two weeks of work — it's perfectly good code, but you used library X, and we decided four years ago to is use library Y because X has this rare edge case issue when combined with library Z which we also use...".
If someone only works with us for a year... we haven't made enough of a profit to cover the losses in the first half of their employment with us. If you want to work for us, we're not going to force you into a multi-year contract but we do want to be as confident as possible that you're going to stay here long term.
I wouldn't turn someone down for changing jobs three times in three years... but I would definitely ask what happened. And they better answer with something that will happen at my company.
I’m trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally
It takes, what, 10 minutes to read a resume? 30 minutes interview someone? Lets round that up to one hour to cover discussing two promising candidates with a colleague... it's still only 500 hours of work. Or 12 weeks. Obviously you also need to read all the resumes and do interviews with people who were turned down but over an entire career working in HR for a large company... 500 people isn't that many at all.
Sometime who's hired that many people would understand how job hunting works more. If you've worked at 3 FANG companies in 3 years, you're not quitting your job then interviewing, you're interviewing while you're employed and only quitting when you've secured the next job. Also, with a beefy resume like that, companies will be reaching out to you to poach you, and in those cases they can't complain about the work history because they're the ones trying to steal you away.
It certainly wouldn't be unreasonable for someone over a few decades who's built several teams at a number of different companies. That would be about one person a month over forty years.
"Having hired over 500 engineers personally in my career, if your resume came across my list, I would definitely pass."
Heh.A job seeker with three FANG companies on their resume does not give a shit if this random person would bin their resume.
You'd be surprised. Anecdotes what they are, I know a stunningly-capable dev with an ROTC accelerated BEng degree and a BSc+MSc chaser, an international resume including Snap, FB, Apple, A-I shops, instruction, leading teams; it's heroic.
Been out of work for months after a start-up imploded and ghosted the dev and didn't send the RoE nor apparently also tax withholdings and all manner of retroactively-shady stuff. Start-ups are risky, kids, even if the idea is amazeballs-great.
It happens in this job and this market. It's happened before, and it will happen again if we live or have lived long enough.
Also, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally, in a single career isn't embarrassing.
Consider a career that spans more than a year.
At my last dotcom, a vPBX 10 years ago, they were hiring 2 people a day for a year. Every damned day. The niche was huge and they were gutting the local market of sound and kernel and Kafka and mqtt people. Very minimal ditching, all new nerds.
So that's 700+ in just a year. And people work at their jobs for often far more than that: sometimes they make a career out of it, my dude.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Companies are forcing return to office policies as a covert way of doing layoffs without compensation, if they're not kicking people out with the thousands and are shocked to discover workers are now not particularly loyal to employers.
They also hate it when employees use the exact same economic reasoning as they do to maximize revenue and take opportunities.
Companies: "You are nothing but a cog in a machine. You will be placed in the machine if and only if you help the machine generate maximum profit. If your presence ever causes the machine to generate less than maximum profit you will be summarily discarded."
Employees: "Okay, so you try to get the maximum profit for you and I try to get the maximum profit for me."
Companies: surprisePikachu.jpg
I've averaged ~12 job hops in the last 6 years and I wouldn't change a thing. Compensation growth has been roughly 6.05x. The previous 6 years was...maybe 3? And maybe 2x.
I owe the big corps nothing. I meet expectations and deliverables and I support my team however I can, but that's about it.
But eventually don’t you risk being unhireable with this sort of work history? We recently hired someone who had a similar work history and I remember that being very much a red flag when we hired them. Turns out the red flag should have been payed attention too since history is a good predictor of future behaviors.
As a hiring manager I would think twice about investing anything in an employee who jumps around THAT much. I mean I don’t blame you, I’ve had the same job for 23 years and I could be making a lot more money. But salary is not everything and I love my job. My mental health is very much an extra benefit.
I could see that if they were all W2. But near the tail end of my more aggressive efforts I started branching into 1099 work and they don't mind at all.
I also have a much wider breadth of technology experience now so it really opened the doors on the opportunities I qualify for.
I've shaved something like 5-7 years off my retirement age with this short stint. Even if I just coast at a single job from here on out, I think it was worth it. You are 100% correct that salary isn't everything. I'm really hoping to grow the 1099 portfolio at this point, there's something a little freeing about it, weirdly enough.
Also hiring manager here and I agree with you--I wouldn't hire even the best person if they displayed this behavior.
For most people, this is the case. But for the super elite tech worker, this is not the case--they are sought after. The stories you read here are from the elitest of the elite CS/CE program graduates.
How do you even explain that during the hiring process? That's not even enough time to figure anything out
Honestly, nobody has ever asked (yet).
That can vary widely across industry and circumstance. I’ve stayed with the same company (granted through a couple mergers) and grown my comp more than 10x in that time.
And while I’m not at all advocating for being any more loyal to a company than they are to you, I can definitely say seeing a big string of quick flips in jobs in their resume is a big red flag for me when hiring people.
I don’t mind people having a practical attitude to comp, but in my line of work at least I find it takes a good few months of orientation for someone to start adding real value anyway. Definitely not something I’m looking to repeat all the time with folks I hire. Granted, I also work damn hard to earn some loyalty and put “my money where my mouth is” for my people, I’d often not the case.
In any event, I’d definitely agree you’ve got to keep a close eye on your own self interest. You may run into bosses and companies that will do right by you like I have, but there is sure as hell no guarantee of it and precious little way to tell the difference till you’ve spent time there.
Nguyen previously wrote a guest post in Business Insider that detailed his post-graduation move from New York City to Seattle for a tech job and how it “turned out to be the loneliest time of my life.”
Sounds like The Seattle Freeze.
--
Anyway. Yeah, if I'm looking at a candidate and see they had three jobs in three years, that's a minus. Are they insufferable and they're being fired? Are they actually bad at their job? Even if they are good at their job, are they going to stick around here long enough to be worth the resources spent onboarding them?
It's a risky move.
Would be better if employers made more effort to retain people, but here we are.
Yes, however recruiters see someone like this and see a great opportunity to fill their quota, so it all balances out.
I live in Seattle and honestly have never experienced any freeze at all. Maybe it’s because I’m queer or maybe it’s because I have good social skills, but I have had no issue integrating myself with the community here and have made lots of friends. Seattle responds well to those who put themselves out there and aren’t republican weirdos.
I'm just glad I have a name for what I'd also agree was the single most lonely time of my own life, hunkered-down in a North Seattle apartment for 18 months before bailing on my green card and h1 and going back to Vancouver.
Because the weather wasn't the issue; but I'd suggest improving the rail transit and rolling the shitty moldy wet-wood lowboy apartments into something more dense to allow for beneficial green-space. This emerald city needs a little more greenery!
But transit and greenery may be a little avant-garde for a country still undecided on the issue of felons as kings :-\
How's it risky? Normally you secure the next job before quitting.
It's risky to the employer.
This proof fails when n>2.
People in Seattle are seriously the coldest mofos you've ever encountered. They really don't want anything to do with anything outside their bubble. As a result, the only way to make friends is to share activities like sports or whatever.
So been working as a software engineer for twenty years now and seen the steady decline of workers. Started out as the last straggler for a pension, rapid decline of insurance, crap ass 401ks, the lack of employee investment and the chacing of the median salary.
I tell every new hire to spend a year here, get your experience, then look for another job, come back a few months later if you really like the work.
I mean honestly, fuck these corporations, they don't care or have loyalty to their employees and you can be screwed with a 401k anywhere so get you pay bump and fuck their expectations of loyalty.
I think jumping after 1 year is a bit extreme, but after 3 years (my target was 2) I landed a new job I start soon! 47% salary increase plus better benefits and more time off - there's no way my current employer could ever match that!
I got a 73% raise for jumping ship after just under four years at my old job, back in
20212022. I was getting nothing but gaslighted when I pointed out that my salary was becoming a bit under the indicated going rate. Which to me quickly indicated that they saw me as disposable, as they refused to respond to clear and well laid out backup. Then the phone rang, so I mean that was that. I did what disposable people do, and jumped out the window.I've since gotten one promotion and about another 30% increase from my starting rate, which means I'm making more than double what I was just two years ago. But I'm not resting on that. I'm always watching and thinking about what's next. It's a competition for my labour, and I will more often than not side with the highest bidder. I don't give a shit about tenure, or my potential growth, or my so-called future within your company. Unless you show me the path, a well laid out timeline with mutually defined goals that you clearly will stick to, and the money. Then I might care. But even then, I'm always a bit weary, and it's almost always more rewarding to chase external opportunities and promotions. That said, I've also never had an employer that's truly believed in me and actually been legitimately concerned with my growth before. It's always been take take take, false promises and failures to actually deliver on insinuated opportunities when the chips fell. Ones mileage may vary though.
How is this even considered an article? The title is half the length of the article.
It was a rather shallow article.
I’d go out of my way not to hire someone who has worked for shit companies like FAANG/MAANA.
there absolutely is no loyalty from an organisation.
This is why I jump ship without any further thought or feeling of remorse. They would throw you out on your butt without a second's hesitation whenever they feel like it.
This is something that is still better in Germany. Companies are forced to have somewhat of an employee loyalty and some corporation go well above what the law forces them to (like VW). The way things are going lately, it feels like this won't be like this forever. But atm it's still one of the good things about Germany.
If you hop jobs, I'm not hiring you*. Yes I make those decisions. No I do not expect you to stay forever, but 1yr at a time I can barely get productivity out of you. Some of these people do 6 months. To everyone that knows, all that looks like is grifting your probationary period. Get hired, assigned tasks, fail spectacularly, get booted out or leave before they find out you're incompetent.
*Except one guy. He was a brilliant weirdo that job hopped because no other company would bend their policies to fit weirdo's requirements about work and life. He was exceptionally brilliant, like dozens of patents under his name, and literally invented novel ways of doing things. He got a try. His weirdness evolved into even weirder, we let him do his thing and whatever because again, absolutely brilliant. And he's still there and happy enough.
If you hop jobs, I’m not hiring you*
That's okay, someone will and for more than you're offering
You saying you wouldn't hire them doesn't matter. They will get hired elsewhere. If people are leaving there after such a short time regularly, than that says more about the company culture. It means you aren't good enough to retain employees.
For anyone reading this who it scares off, by job hopping 3 times in my first 5 years of employment post-college I just under tripled my salary.
Move early move often and keep interviewing while you have a job as it lets you be the pickiest in choosing where you'll have to spend your working hours.
Companies overwhelmingly have no loyalty to you whatsoever (how I wish I was in a co-op so this wouldn't be so), so aggressively pit them against eachother regarding your labor.