You mean, the company that would cut you loose in about three seconds flat if you became unproductive?

Employment is an economic transaction. If you pay me, I will do high-quality, honest work for you. That's fair. If I don't produce, you can stop paying me. That's fair. But if you don't pay me well, or mistreat me, I'm going to leave. That's also fair.

I'm guessing the reason for the entire post is actually that while Calacanis is okay firing someone, he gets angry if anyone leaves his company for a better position. There was a kerfluffle over that yesterday in various parts of the net (someone from his company sent a 2-weeks notice, and he blew up, firing them and telling them they had their last day and never set foot in the office or email his staff again). I'm guessing his tweet of 23 hours ago is due to him still being pissed at someone jumping ship from Mahalo.

Edit: It came to mind that there's a perfectly capitalist way of solving the problem, for companies that really do hate the idea of someone leaving: sign an employment contract with time terms, rather than hiring at-will employees. :)

(Because you certainly didn't expect me to agree to that clause for free, did you? No, you're going to pay. And the sooner you lock me in, the more you'd better pay if I can't even evaluate the job before the lockin starts.)

Solution: If you want people to stay at your company, then pay them reasonable amounts and don't be a dickhead.

Assuming that your employees aren't clueless (ie. know their market rate) and are free to leave (eg. not family members or H1-Bs), then you'll see significant employee churn if:

                  asshattery
  $ < $market x  -------------
                  cool factor

Apple, for example, has a high asshattery factor (Steve Jobs) and market rate (they want awesome people) but also has a huge cool factor to balance it out somewhat (I heard they pay ~1.5x market).

Banks, Traders, Insurance companies, etc. have low cool factor, so they have to make it up with large salaries and perks and not be too toxic to work at.

In the case of Mahalo, it seems like they have a large asshattery factor (Calcanis is an overbearing idiot who will post nasty things about you on Twitter), and cool factor < 1 (spammers) and (it seems) they pay below market rates, so it's not suprising that they're seeing lots of "job hoppers".

Why anyone would willingly work for someone like that is beyond me. You're setting yourself up for abuse, ensuring other employees are abused in the process.

In my view, once you post something ugly about any of your employees, you lose your ability to hire any non-desperate (let alone loyal) employees forever.

I'd word it as "would willingly work for very long"....

So, I came aboard. The principals had just left for an extended sabbatical (they departed shortly after I interviewed with them). Morale seemed excellent when I started, and there was a great deal of interesting work to be done. When they returned, the mood changed very quickly, and it didn't take long to understand why.

I spent enough time there to do some interesting things, and help them over a knowledge slump during an infrastructure forklift, but it quickly became apparent that the owners and I had different ideas about how people should be treated, and how businesses should conduct themselves. My personal google-fu failed me on this one.

I showed myself the door to take a position that I would have never otherwise considered taking, knowing full well how that would look on a resume, but also knowing I didn't want to continue contributing to their bottom line.

(I have a few items on my resume I do not enjoy discussing in an interview, and I've had to add this one to the list: being vague or evasive suggests you're hiding something, but any real explanation just invites the idea that you're the kind of guy who doesn't work well with others. But, such is life.)

"That awesome gal you hired in engineering has job options and she knows it."

I can totally imagine him lobbying for more H1-B visas so he can get "captive" employees who are stuck without options to leave.

If I need to launch a complex product in 6 months or die, I don't care whether my senior developer had his entire family die from serial dysentery. You're either working as hard as you can getting us to the milestone, or you're not a developer here.

The truth is that being "loyal" will kill a startup.

Actually, I know what kind of psychopath: the kind who ran the only startup I ever joined. He once told me, "I am at war, and if one of my men can't keep up, I will shoot him." A remarkably similar sentiment to yours! He also used to phone people up and yell at them if they didn't stay till midnight or come in on weekends.

Needless to say (or so I would have hoped), this is an algorithm to produce not a "complex product" but a fiasco, and that is exactly what happened. I was long gone before then, though. What kind of leader shoots his own men? What kind of people want to work for a leader who shoots his own men, or doesn't care if their families die? I know what kind: scared, servile placators. And since such a team hardly makes for startup success, there really isn't an argument here, only a form of hypnosis.

If I need to launch a complex product in 6 months or die, I don't care whether my senior developer had his entire family die from serial dysentery.

Yeah, yeah - really respectful and caring.

"Respect and care" means among other things, that you keep your business running so it can respect and care for the majority of employees. If you're going to take things to extreme, why then I need to "respect" every candidate by hiring, and "care" for any employee who just feels like taking a 20-month meditation trip to Tibet, since the woes of this modern world are depressing him.

The fact remains the same: a lean, highly leveraged startup can't allow developers to go off on vacations for 3-6+ months, no matter how badly they need it. Hell, if you're that kind of startup, those 3-6 months may very well be your entire product (or life!) cycle.

Also, taking that sort of hard-nosed attitude will make the other developers on your team more wary, which will result in higher salaries, more turnover and (if you're a real idiot) no new staff, since word gets around. Ultimately you depend on your staff, so if you play hardball you're likely to reap the 'benefits' further down the track when you need them.

* - this was your original point, not some "meditation trip to Tibet"

And yes, anyone expecting any kind of job security at a startup, especially a VC backed one, is simply fooling himself.

If you're developing an innovative product for the iPhone market, you can be sure that it won't be "innovative" in a year, especially if it was a good idea to begin with. Not to mention that in a year, such a fast market will move so far, that your original business model will be outdated in significant ways, because your price point, features, and target audience analysis are now all obsolete.

Even without that, though - you realize that VC-backed startups are a huge chunk of the startup sphere? In fact, the author of this article is a VC, and probably most of this article was written with VC-backed startups in mind.

If you are an early startup employee, you normally get compensated primarily with equity. Hence, you are the company; hurting the company will just hurt you. There's a big difference between an economic transaction between you and a big company, and an economic transaction which is largely between you and yourself.

If you can't keep your talent as an employer, that's your fault. Berating them for taking care of themselves is immature. Welcome to capitalism, you make money off them and they're free to take the best offer on the table.

As an employer, I prefer have people with many job experiences - so when they show up here they can tell they're respected and fairly compensated!

  "Mary Poppins was the ultimate flake; she also offered no value during her stay."

I "hopped" my first 3 jobs because my employers seemed bound & determined to wreck their companies, and me with them.

It's not MY fault that they were too gutless to fire the "expert" who spent his whole day nagging me for help, and who used raise_error() as GOTO. And who earned $15k/yr more than me, I knew, thanks to the H1-B notice posted in the kitchen.

It's not MY fault they joked about how this client (MY client) was a sociopath who called people and ranted at them at 3am, and then expected me to give him my cell phone number.

It's not MY fault that my boss had a tantrum in a meeting, screamed at people, then busted up a printer in a rage.

It's not MY fault that the CEO constantly derailed our projects and everybody stuck around only because of the golden handcuffs, but I was tired of being demoralized and feeling like I wasn't earning my pay.

I did my best for every employer I ever had, and they never did the same for me. To the contrary.

Maybe he just doesn't want to hire job-hoppers because they have a sense of self-respect.

Job hopping in response to that might just reveal quick growth in skill, leading to better alternatives. It is a competition both ways. That guy that job hops a lot, maybe he can do that _despite_ a resume showing what employers consider disadvantageous, because his or her expertise is clear in interviews. Almost by definition, job hoppers are more in demand.

The ultimate goal of an employer should be to attract and retain the best employees. It is true that retaining is easier if you decide to exclusively pick from people who didn't have better options when their jobs suck, but personally, I'd rather have someone like you who left when the scene got crazy. Maybe that's just because it so closely reflects my experiences. (In fact, I think we shared an employer)

Too bad most employers seem constitutionally incapable of executing on that list :)

I also doubt that we shared an employer. It's more likely that employers are universally flawed in the same ways. But if we did, interesting!

Am I wrong for choosing the path that brings me personal success at the cost of "company loyalty"? The depiction of an ideal employee painted by this author sounds a lot like the Japanese Salaryman - diligent and loyal to the company. Isn't that model considered totally broken? Company loyalty as a top priority comes at the cost of ineffectiveness and lower morale. It just doesn't seem right.

If your employees are being scalped away at salary+15, maybe you're not paying them enough. If your employees are working 12 months and switching jobs, maybe you don't offer enough internal growth. If your are rejecting applications of "job hoppers", maybe you're leaving major value on the table.

In Silicon Valley, it's an employee's market. The employer has to work to retain, support, and fairly compensate your employees. Otherwise, you shouldn't be surprised when they up and leave.

Also, notice that the "Japanese Salaryman" model is not only completely unworkable for high productivity, highly creative projects such as tech startups - it doesn't really apply here. That model, and all models like it in Europe and elsewhere, has two sides - the employee doesn't leave, and the company doesn't (easily) let him go. Needless to say, nobody in his right mind would suggest implementing the latter part, least of all the author who comically insists on the former part.

In other words, what we have is an employer who insists on applying half of a completely irrelevant model to his particular line of business.

It also makes job switching harder, for both sides - you lose all the benefits when you switch - for the first 3 months, you are on "trial" and can be fired at will, after that you lose the extra free days (we get 1 extra day of vacation every 4 years with the same company), and the firing money the company has to pay doubles every year (up to a maximum)

The author of the article acts as though anyone who doesn't stick it out for 5 years is actively trying to screw over the company. That's just plain BS.

When you're great at what you do - or even slightly better than 'good' - EVERY market is an employee's market.

(I did similarly to you. $55k (3 mos) -> $65k (6 mos) -> $68k + bonuses (4-day work week, same job as prior, +6 mos) -> $91k + profit sharing (total pay about $130k, 13 mos))

Then I quit and did high-dollar consulting. This January I quit consulting and am building my own products. Working for other people blows at any price.

If you have had lots of employees leave your company during a recession, you’re 98% likely to be an ineffective employer.

Flakes lack accolades. They leave jobs at the sign of trouble, or they get fired. It really is that cut and dry.

On the other hand, you have individuals (like me, prior to striking out on my own) who consistently find jobs they excel at, and produce results. What any hiring manager, and any recruiter who is worth the salary they are paid should look for are results. Is the candidate simply listing job duties that they are expected to accomplish, or do they go into detail and educate you on the accomplishments and success they've experienced at each job?

There is a difference, and if you're unable to make that distinction, I won't be sending anyone to work for you because that indicates to me you're looking for grunts. Not team members.

Mark Suster implicitly is thinking about sifting through a thousand resumes. In that context this is a perfectly valid heuristic. If you end up in a thousand-resume situation you have no major accomplishments. If you have no major accomplishments you had better have at least shown staying power.

Outside of this scenario, though, I imagine this heuristic can be mis-applied.

On top of this, you have to consider that hiring managers and recruiters are just the first barrier to defense when it comes to the process of making hiring decisions. Often, they have to place individuals in departments that aren't development, thus, expecting them to look at any code you've produced or software you've written is almost moot. They don't know what the code means, if it's good or bad code and whether or not it's a fair indicator of how your contributions and work ethic can impact the department needing a vacancy filled. At the same time, they have no idea if the software you've provided a download link to is software you wrote over a weekend by copy and pasting tutorial code, without actually learning how to employ critical thinking skills as a developer.

In my work process, when screening clients, a resume entails everything from candidate discovery to candidate placement, it's entirely in the candidates ability to sell to me that they are the candidate for the job vacancy. The physical resume is just the bridge I use to connect that candidate to the hiring manager.

Sifting through resumes is admittedly tiring, but the moment I come across one that has actual accomplishments and enables me with a feeling that this person did more than clock in, crunch away at an IDE, and clocked out, that's when I set that resume to the side and make a mental note that "John Doe deserves a phone call".

mark zuckerberg talked about how he was happy creating a culture where great people should be able to come in, start being effective immediately, and move along after a year or so.

paul buckheit mentioned his reason for quitting google, it was basically, because you need to stir stuff up, he just went from a comfortable but awesome job to something completely different, a new challenge.

I couldnt help feel a bit depressed thinking about working for zappos for the rest of my life, no slight against zappos, they seem like an awesome company and I would love to have a chance to work there, just meant I could help felling depressed about working for any single company for the rest of my life.

Unfortunately it seems like the standard MO in this industry is to dangle a tasty carrot of an offer for jumping from your current ship, and then the gravy train stops, your raises can't cover cost of living increases, and your only way to advance is to jump ship again.

If your employees feel valued, feel like they're treated fairly, only a small portion will quit (the ones who just have to get up and do something else, and that's fine). If you have a persistent, significant problem with "hoppers" that speaks more about you as an employer than about your employees.

To my surprise, they not only took me out for a going away lunch, they even paid for it. While a job transition is stressful, professional treatment at exit does re-inforce goodwill (which is already earned: kind treatment on the way out, implies kind treatment while I worked there). I still endorse their products (on technical merits) and talk to my former coworkers there.

At the exit interview with my then-manager (who, by the way is great), I expressed my regrets at leaving so soon. While he was understandably upset, he mentioned that while short stints will close some doors, loyalty isn't an end to itself; he found that many candidates that stayed 15+ year for most of their career weren't very impressive during interviews.

Obviously, I think there are exceptions to this rule: if you're lucky to join a place with a strong hacker culture (e.g., Google, PARC, Bell Labs, Sun, Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft etc...) at the right time and on the right team, there's good chance you will be able to do rewarding work for a long time. However, the name alone is never a guarantee (there are plenty of non-interesting but business-crucial projects at these companies e.g., not everyone can work on Search or GMail at Google), nor do these companies last forever (as Sun's decay exemplified).

On the other hand, if you systematically stay for less than a year at various jobs (particularly at companies with longer development cycles e.g., bigger companies, or start-ups still in product-development phase), you might never get a chance to complete (or even undertake) challenging and rewarding projects.

This can lead to a vicious cycle: you will your work is always unrewarding (as you'll never stay long enough to either reap the rewards of the work or even receive challenging projects in the first place) tempting you to change jobs again. At the same time doors begin to close: the stigma of "job hopping" (Silicon Valley tech companies can understand 4 jobs in 5 years, 10 jobs in 10 years is a more serious red flag), lack of age-appropriate experience, confidence and leadership skills that come from finishing projects and shipping products, and "burned bridges" due to upset coworkers (who else would serve as your references?). In the end, you're ending up with progressively worse options.

There's a balance. If you're happy with the job, are learning and find the work itself rewarding, don't actively "go on the market". Don't leave before you get a chance to learn anything. However, once you feel you're either no longer learning anything new, or have not learned anything new at all after a year, do something. As I've mentioned in another comment, bring it up with leads/management first (something I regret not having done twice in my career): a manager will likely not realize you're underused and unhappy (provided you act in a professional manner and still do the job asked of you), many companies are open to internal transfers (most notably, but not exclusively, Google); furthermore this avoids the ambiguity of counter-offer (are they doing this because you've "put a gun to their head" and simply need you to finish a project, or are they genuinely interested in your success?) and stigma/un-professionalism of accepting one.

Choose your jobs carefully: is the focus of the company aligned with your interests, is the product valuable to you (e.g., if you don't understand the value of recreational social networking, Facebook -- otherwise a great company -- may not be a good place to work), will I be able to keep up with the greater technology curve in my specialty area, will I be able to learn new concepts (and not just new technologies), is the engineering team strong and influential? Don't optimize prematurely for salary and title (if your title is too senior, you might not receive the needed amount of mentoring or the chance to be a protege), don't guess whether or not you'll get rich from the stock options (if you're actually great at guessing the value of stock, consider a career as an investor), while you should know how long the company will be able to pay you (given their current burn rate) don't stress over current or rumored layoffs (I've declined two very interesting offers in Summer/Fall 2008 due to recent/possible layoffs, I grew to regret it. Is your most interesting offer from Yahoo? Then take it and ignore that Techcrunch and Gawker say!

Don't just shop your resume around, focus on a few positions that interest you and apply just to them. Don't limit yourself only to start-ups or only to Fortune-500 companies; don't just limit yourself only to the two extremes, with the exclusion of medium sized companies which often have the benefits of both start-ups and big companies, pay more fairly than both and give equity that may not be life changing, but is actually worth something (I'm biased, as I work at one such company). There are teams within big companies that exhibit the positive aspects of a start-up (2-3 people working on a project, each owning a significant chunk), there are start-ups which exhibit the negative aspects of big companies (outdated technology, mediocre technical teams, all technical decisions being made by non-technical management). In some cases, start-ups live up more or just as much to big company stereotypes than do advanced technology companies: open floor plans are almost universal (big companies go for cubes or offices shared by developers), use of Blub languages, non-technical professional CEOs running the show, projects generally consisting of putting a UI on top of buggy code written by somebody else (e.g., API mash-ups, Facebook apps, CRUD applications). The ones that stand out from that (at least in some respect) are the ones likely to be great (compare this job posting http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc?... with the average "2+ years of RoR, Flash, HTML, Javascript and MySQL" one).

Ask "will this job be valuable to me even if I don't stay there for a long time?", as chances are one that's valuable for two years is also valuable for five. If it fails after the two years, but the environment stimulated you to do great work, you'll not only walk away with knowledge but with respect of peers who will be ready to refer you to other jobs. Accept that you will make mistakes, be ready to (carefully and patiently) correct them and learn from them.

(footnote) Since the original article was prompted by Jason Calacanis' reaction to an employee leaving Mahalo -- his start-up -- to join Yahoo, I should note (to those in the Web 2.0 "reality distortion field") Yahoo still counts as a best place to work amongst the Fortune 500 (my first job out of college and also my longest stint as a full time employee) and Mahalo doesn't. Somebody leaving a hyped company to join one that is going through a difficult time to do work they find meaningful and interesting is someone I'd like to hire even if they have a few 11 month stints on their resume.

This is a VERY excellent point, now that you mention it, and probably a near-perfect shortcut to evaluating how the employer supports the learning, growth & wellbeing of the employee.

The second job I left banned former employees from their offices after I attended a user group there (!!).

The third one paid for my goodbye lunch and invited me back for the epic parties.

I would have happily stayed at the third jobs for years, if they'd just let me ship ANYTHING without derailing it completely.

It's not even an idealogical, but plain economical observation: take two companies. One is low-stress, slow, steady money. The other is a crazy fast, big money. Angels or VCs give you tons of cash, you can afford to pay top employees almost any amount of money, with any kind of crazy benefits you can think of (including those freshly baked blueberry muffins in the lobby, which nobody ever eats) but if you don't get that product out before your competitor, you lose it all.

Which company will be faster shedding an unproductive employee?

I can't count the amount of VC funded startups I've known to fire entire teams just because the product vision changed a bit. The main client is going to be an iPhone app instead of a web widget? Immediately fire with no notice or compensation all 5 "star" web developers who left permanent positions at Google, Amazon, Facebook etc to come and help your realize your dream.

I'm not even talking about non-productivity, incompetence, or engineering mistakes that would get you fired from a trail-blazing startup in about 5 minutes.

To expect "loyalty" under these kind of terms is sheer delusion. The only "loyal" employee you're going to get is someone entirely unfamiliar with the above realities - aka a clueless newbie on his first startup job.

There's not much point explaining how the notion of "job hopping" being an employee's "fault" is entirely baseless in this context. This is an important discussion, but so much beyond the grasp of this curious article, that purports to apply to the reality of startups while ignoring the elephant in that particular room.

People have been loyal, but they have been paid back with lay offs, either the company goes belly up, or people/projects get cut. Once it happens to you once, you don't do that mistake again. If you see the 'shitty times' ahead sign, some people will leave, and for good reason.

Want to keep them around? Give them an incentive to do so, more equity, more responsibility/better tittle, and promise higher pay when things get better.

But a lot of companies just don't do it, and expect blind obedience. Also they turn blind eye when shitty managers ruin teams, and take action only after half of the team has left already. First guys out of the door are always the good ones.

If a candidate tells you: 'I left company x, b/c my manager was a dickhead, and that I'd rather work somewhere for good people, then compromise my dignity and integrity just to make a manager look good', means that guy actually has a backbone. A weak person will bend and please his manager, even though what the manager is demanding might be damaging to the company on the long run (you see this often in tech. companies).

My experience as a Gen Y, when I started my first job (2002), as an intern, i saw 3 out of 8 team members get laid off. One guy had be there for 2 years, one 6 and one 14! That's a good lesson you get for life. A lot of people that started their careers between 99-2003 saw this first hand. Sorry, but loyalty goes so far.

Expect the average person to stay 1-4 years in one place, with the 3 year mark the good time to find a new job. Any more than that, then they probably have no ambition, unless they are moving really high up in the ranks.

Fair, but I wouldn't advise anyone, under any circumstances, to badmouth an ex-boss at any stage of the job search process. It's one of the most common interview fuckups.

That's because they're founders and CEO's. If you're hiring me, by definition I'm not the founder (but if I have lots of equity and am treated as an equal partner maybe we'll split the difference on that one). Are you hiring me to be CEO, then? If not, find a better example to compare me against.

Someone who tries a corporate job for four months, realizes that he isn't getting good projects, and leaves, is (a) doing what he should do, since he's undervalued in his current role, and (b) not really hurting anyone.

I think Mark is right, that chronic switching is a leading indicator of selfishness. But the days when employees are kept around while they fill out their pensions are gone. Most employers are signaling that it's every man for himself.

If you founded a startup, then quit abruptly at the first sign of real challenges, and now you're trying to found another startup - how would prospective investors look at you? (Even if the former investors aren't already suing you, which is entirely possible).

On the other hand, if you are an early startup hire, and you stick with what is obviously one of the vast majority of failed startups, so you get to be fired when they reduce their headcount to what they consider the best engineer (you, alas, happen to be considered the 2nd best) - how is an employer going to look at you, compared to someone who left two months before?

That's right - you were fired, and he quit. There's obviously something wrong with you.

Comparing employees to founders isn't only completely bogus - it also shows why the entire article is false, trying to explain why employees need to behave like founders while they are a very, very different thing.

That seemed to work for him. And I think Mark Suster has had success with his preferences in the opposite direction. So maybe this is an example of hiring to our biases that don't matter as much as we think.

The fact of the matter is that contemporary work culture is (for better or worse) progressing towards lower job security, and more job hopping is an inevitable consequence of this. When job security goes down in the economic community, the propensity for job hopping goes up--even when employee's jobs are not directly at risk. This is a natural and rational response to low job security.

Judging workers who have job hopped in the past can be unfair to those workers, especially when many companies are decreasing their own loyalty to their employees. Why shouldn't workers chase higher paychecks outside of their current companies, if those companies don't adequately value their worth? If an employer has not demonstrated a commitment to retaining its employees, it shouldn't expect any commitment in return.

That said, I do agree with the fundamental sentiment behind the article--that companies who are loyal to their employees should prefer employees that will be loyal to them in return.

However, I don't think that's the point of the article. The author is saying "I'm a businessman, and I've learned not to hire 'job hoppers', and you shouldn't hire them either." He's giving advice to other employers, and as such, he doesn't have to be 'fair' to the job hoppers. From his perspective (and that of other employers), hiring someone is a considerable investment (estimates vary, but between 30 and 40% of annual salary seems to be common). Having made that investment, no one wants to see it walk out the door 2 years later. It only makes sense for the employer to look at an individual's job history and form an opinion about whether they are a good risk. It doesn't really matter why you left six jobs in the last 10 years - your reasons only have to satisfy you - from his perspective, you are not the person he wants to invest in.

As I see it, if you like to change jobs frequently that is your business. You should do what you want to do, and accept the consequences (that some prospective employers will consider you too flaky to take a chance on). But don't turn around and complain that people aren't willing to take a chance on you, and won't give you the job that you now think is the perfect one for you. All other things being equal, if you were the employer and had a choice between someone with a track record of 'job hopping', or someone who seemed steadier in their employment history, which would you choose?

No shit, Sherlock. Is the company going to be in it for me? Quid pro quo.

I can see the author's point that it is bad to hire job-hoppers at a startup. A startup probably needs people to stay around for their knowledge.

But this is such a terrible generalization. People leave for basically one reason - they will be happier doing something else. Why not make your company the place they will be happiest at rather than blaming those around you?

The author is upset because with "job-hoppers", employers do not have as much power as they once did. This advice is incredibly biased towards keeping the status-quo for the author's own selfish reasons.

If they just bailed at the first sign of difficulty, ... well how are you going to learn that?

That may be a little delusional (might be his MBA showing) in light of the recent reports of major hiring drives from the big names: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230462870457518...

* 1.5 years, left after the group was split in half and I was forced into full time testing (I enjoyed part time testing and the first year in that role was outstanding, the new position and team was not a good match).

* 1 year, taken over, got J2EE experience and worked with a great team, too bad the office was scheduled to be closed and that we were given no work to do.

* 6 months, layoff, worked with the full cutting edge J2EE JBoss (Seam) stack but was let go as one of the newest employees and the only one that didn't know C# (15% of IT laid off) when the budget was shifted.

* Short stint at a failed startup, learned some PHP

* New stint at a promising startup

Technically, with the take over, that's now 7 employers. I think the new job looks quite promising, and I don't regret any of those experiences, as I now have a lot of breadth.

I freely admit that I had to work to avoid appearing as a job hopper, and that hurt in the recently ended job hunt. I still think (hope?) that I've ended up at my best work place since that year learning J2EE.

*editted for clarity and inserting some more details in the first few minutes

As you discovered, with all your recent jobs being short(er), you needed a good story, etc., but post dot.com crash I hope it wasn't too difficult. I wouldn't remove you from a job search for the above history.

In this case, the J2EE, Hibernate and Seam (usually in place of Spring) experience has opened up a lot of interviews at places that wouldn't have looked at me before.

Another friend truly does have a terrible manager. He's been with his company for 5 years and had consistently great performance reviews until he transferred locations. Six months later there's a position at a different location and they won't let him transfer and he's getting poor reviews with no suggestions for improvement. He's thinking about quitting and getting re-hired at the new location. This would result in a pay cut and loss of vacation time but he's willing to do it. He loves the company overall but his current management has made things very difficult for him. That's loyalty.

Then this guy gives examples of a bunch of founders who started immense companies and stuck with them. Of course founders are going to be loyal to their company. They're the founders.

Now for this example he gives: You start fighting with your co-founder whom you thought you understood. Your revenues are “just around the corner.” Your angel investors are nervous because the VCs aren’t moving that fast to fund your next round.

As an employee faced with that situation and with a better offer standing, which would you go with? The company you're not sure is going to be around because the founders are arguing and the capital is drying up or the one with money to pay you more? I'm not sure why he used that as an example.

The author of the post seems to expect a lot from people he describes as feeling entitled.

Heck, if you're not in it for the money, don't take equity, don't take a paycheck, and heck, don't even charge for your products or services. After all, desiring money is bad. Just stay home, eat popcorn and watch TV and -- hey wait a minute: all of that costs money!

The good news is that these clever entrepreneurs tend to get what they pay for. But then they have more time than successful ones to wax poetic about this "generation" and its many misgivings.

This historical trend is continuing, the old forms are breaking down, and our little corner of society (the software startup world) is one edge of whatever is emerging to replace "jobs". It isn't clear yet what the next form is. But these angry arguments about who owes what to whom are symptoms of the churn of this process.

Personally I think it would be great if we eventually moved fully beyond the master-slave relationship. As someone with a strong aversion to both sides of that dichotomy I find it a little annoying to be part of a civilization based on it.

What I look for in a job is autonomy, great co-workers and interesting work. The moment any of these decline, I leave. Why should I stick on to a dead end job because someday some fellow like the author might not like my cv?

Do what makes sense to you at each decision point. If you are any good technically you will never have a shortage of job offers. If you are really good you'll be drowning in them.

His article on the role of a CTO vs. VP of Engineering mentioned having an opinion on Ruby on Rails and familiarity with Hibernate as examples of description of a CTO. Compare this with a real technology company e.g., where the _CEO_ -- a "business guy" -- wrote lex as a his Thesis project.

I believe you've been in his world (enterprise software and consulting), so it's fairly clear to you that he neither needs -- nor is able to attract -- very strong technical people. That's fine: if you're building business software, hire people who are competent in writing software and who have understanding of business, but it does put perspective on the situation. He does not "get" what actual engineers (vs. business software developers) aim for a career: doing interesting work, continuously learning (thus becoming more valuable to present and future employers) rather than receiving a high salary and working for a successful company. That's why Calacanis didn't get why Evan left to join Yahoo (oh no, they're not cool according Techcrunch!), that people could be happy when they're doing interesting work even if their workplace is no longer considered hip and sexy.

Low compensation or feeling of an employer being a sinking ship will eventually get engineers to consider switching jobs (especially if they have a life goal that requires the additional money e.g., buying a house; this is especially true of those who started as "college hires" at companies with formulaic salary ranges and didn't think to negotiate), but it's never just about the money.

The barrage of vitriolic and savage responses here is totally deserved, I can't get over the fact that people like this still exist.

Also think if you were in the software field in the mid/late 90's and you were NOT job hopping, in some sense, you were probably not being very smart. Because there was so much demand for our skills that you could almost always get more money by moving on. Once all the frothy demand died down, yes, it tended to become smarter to stay. But all of this -- all of it -- is just generalizations. People leave jobs for all sorts of reasons which do not or should not reflect badly on them. Family, sickness, education, career growth, moving to a better home or community, etc.

I think loyalty is more important at a startup than at a larger, more established business. But never EVER assume the business will be loyal to you, the employee. If you're lucky, they will, but don't assume that. The whole point of the business is to maximize profit for the owners, and the executive/managerial class sometimes really is just out for their own best interests, even if that means canning employees and/or shutting down entire lines of business that otherwise are staffed with good people doing good work. They look at the numbers, and may often "do what the numbers tell them." Likewise, an employee can analyze matters in the same way. It's fair.

Your extreme suspicion of anyone who stays for so long reveals a more fundamental truth about the software industry: very few companies manage to keep employees happy and challenged for so many years.

I've reviewed hundreds of resumes, hired great people, and hired some not great people. Sometimes they leave because of you and your company, sometimes they don't. In my experience, a history of short employment can mean one of two things:

1. This candidate is extremely talented, independent, and a self-starter. Hire these people. Now. 2. This candidate leaves before he or she is truly accountable for the code they write.

2 is very dangerous. You don't want to hire an engineer who will write a subscription billing platform and quit the week after launch. It's often tough to determine the difference between 1 and 2, and it takes many pointed questions to figure it out.

What a delusional asshole. If anyone says they care more about a company (and in turn the success of the shareholders) over their own success, they're lying. Anyone who expects this is insane.

I am sorry but the author supports a very prejudged and one sided viewpoint. The converse of the above quoted statement is: employers who enact massive layoffs at the first sign of trouble. The dynamics of the American work force have changes, many companies are no longer loyal so many employees are no longer loyal.

I totally disagree with the filter. I don't want employees that aren't going to tough it out and quit mid-project either. That isn't what we are talking about though. We are talking about people that probably switched jobs for any number of reasons. Not hiring someone just because they switched jobs or independently consulted, that seems so arbitrary it is almost comical.

It really is a two way street. I worked at a place that had 98% employee retention for multiple years through the boom. Almost everyone there was heavily recruited and almost no one left. Even the people that were previously independent consultants and the ones that had job hopped. Why? It was a great place to work with above average compensation and awesome people to work with.

My point is that if you compensate people well and you provide a great place to work you don't have to filter for potential job hoppers. You are then free to filter for the important things like work ethic, aptitude, skill, and fitting in.

In my experience, people who have worked at various companies bring a more diverse set of experiences to the table. They know that there's more than one way to do something.

On the other hand, people who have stayed at one job for a long time (in a non-executive role) while everything around them was changing probably aren't as good as identifying opportunities or accepting change.

You're doing it wrong!

BTW I don't want to employee someone who doesn't want to be there. If he wants to leave, he's doing us both a favor.

It's important to explore why the candidate wasn't happy or had leave the company.

they hire a person, and then if they work like a slave for them...the most they'd see is a 5% raise if that. And in this economy, chances are the company won't even give the people a raise for years. And early on, in one's career, the experience you gain is valued way more than a 5% raise.

I'll give you an example of my friend. He came into his company and ended up with a $12K raise in salary. Pretty much was the top performer there. So the first year he got a 5% raise(max available, and only after 4 months on the job). Second year the market crashed. And the company pretty much slashed the work force. 50% of people were let go. Out of 30 people in his department, only 3 were left. No raises that year. The next year, no raises, more jobs slashed, the rest of his team was let go...and my friend ended up being the only person in the department(company has multiple divisions, so he was just transferred to another department). The next year the company turned around...but once again no raises.

So look at my friend...1. top performer...out of 30 people in his department, the only one who wasn't laid off. 2. more and more responsibilities, pretty much attached to his blackberry. Works nights, weekends from home too. 3. the ONLY person in the entire company who knows anything about 60% of the company's internal software..and no raises. And due to inflation....you can even say his salary was slashed, because it wasn't adjusted with inflation for multiple years.

Now why would anyone stick around with a company like that? Why wouldn't he move to another company for a 20-30% raise? In fact he wants to...but he can't because he is the only person working in his family, has kids and he figures, it's better the devil you know, so he is waiting for the market to turn around...+ he likes his commute.

Now let's say he sticks around for another year, and the next year the company decides to give everyone raises. Do you think the company will be fair, and will give people raises for the 3 years they stuck around supporting the company through the tough times w/o getting paid their fair market value? Or do you think they'll just give people 5%(if that) and maybe a $500 bonus?

Bottom line: Employees will stick with you through thick and thin as long as you pay them their fair share...noone likes changing jobs...noone likes the first 3 months on a new job when you don't know if they want to keep you, noone likes job hunting, noone likes interviewing.

If you don't, you shouldn't be surprised if they feel justified to look for a company that pays them what they are worth.

Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.

The "job hopper" stigma originally came into existence because people who did so would rise rapidly in salary through iterated negotiations; in times such as the late 1990s, it's possible to get to a very high salary level this way. Pursued inflexibly, it's a terrible strategy in the long term, because it makes you less likely to end up as someone's protege (rolling stone, no moss) and eventually compensation will reflect the resulting stagnation. But most "job hoppers" do not fall into this category; they change jobs not because they are trying to game the system, but because they realize they are wasting time.

If your career is not improving-- you're not learning, inadequately mentored, and no one is looking out for your advancement-- then you should change jobs as soon as you can do so with minimal harm to the company. (If you're in a small company, it might be right to stay on for a couple months, at least to train someone else.) Since most people are not and cannot be "protege", this means that it's good to shift around a few times until finding a fit.

Likewise, everyone has to do some grunt work and deal with some unpleasantness, and recognizing this is just being a mature person, but anyone who finds out his job is mostly or entirely grunt work, or work unrelated to his career (e.g. the programmer who gets put full-time on office tasks) is wasting time and should leave.

Sorry, but I have to say all this because I am sick and fucking tired of people ripping on my generation for not playing by someone else's shitty rules. Are the older people really so damn entitled as to not understand all this? And how can they expect loyalty to companies when layoffs happen all the time?

The article at part reads like the vague "get off my lawn" ramblings of a bitter elderly man. Good luck attracting top young talent with this attitude.

Another important point is that most startups aren't a good place to stay long term, simply because (duh!) most of them do not succeed. Curious, isn't it?

Statistically, over a 3-4 year period, your startup is 90%+ likely to fail. Why would the best and the brightest stay in a failing project? The captain may be expected to sink with the ship (he often doesn't, and especially his first officers don't), but when you realize that this isn't your company, your "stock" isn't going to be worth a nickel since any meager sale profit will go to the series A investors, and if you don't start sending out resume you're going to be fired in a couple of months - why again are you expected to stay?

Also, many of the best engineers I've known have periods where they changed jobs, and then periods where they stayed at the same job for 2-3+ years. That just makes sense. If you can get hired anywhere, and since you can't really gauge the merit of a company from a few hours of visiting it pre-hire, you're likely to shop around and try to find a place that you like.

Ultimately, as you correctly pointed out, if an employee is truly happy in his current position, s/he will not leave. And it's your job as employer is to keep the employees you want happy and productive in your company (what other task does a manager have, really?). How anyone can ignore this simple fact is beyond my grasp.

Startups have some dreadful lows, so I can understand not wanting to hire people who will leave at the first painful moment, especially because one departure can trigger a fatal exodus. There are also people who just collapse during painful periods and a startup can't afford to have them... but the ones who collapse tend to have a certain passivity about them that makes them incapable of being voluntary job hoppers.

However, we're talking about entirely different sets of motivations when we compare the "stay-or-go" decision at a big company vs. at a startup. Someone who leaves a mediocre corporate job after 6 months because he isn't learning anything and because it's obvious that no one with any power cares about him is, in my opinion, savvy and ambitious. This sort of person could easily be a great startup employee-- knows what he wants (and is therefore less likely to job-hop out of ignorance and confusion) and seasoned enough to cut through bullshit and avoid the wasting of time.

The cruel truth is that this business is so competitive, that if you make too many mistakes you're going to lose to those 1 or 2 among your hundreds of competitors that were lucky and competent enough never to have these kinds of failures.

In any case, I agree about the failure to distinguish fundamental (and very different) motivations here. Certainly you don't want someone crumbling under stress, but these kinds of people are easy to identify. Did that person had a very long vacation after leaving (for whatever reason) a startup? Does he seem to shy away from risk, stress, and high pressure positions?

If so, and you're hiring for such a position, it probably shows obliviousness and lack of self recognition and maturity for him to even apply.

This is the wrong economic (and political) climate for this kind of BS.

In my experience, the worst agents (psychopaths and narcissists who will fuck up the company for their own gain) are almost never job hoppers. Sociopaths understand social power and how to get it, and they know that it takes time. They don't job hop often (and they look before the leap) because they rarely need to, being inherently good at politics and quite capable of getting a pay/promotion trajectory far better than would be available to them if they changed companies (and had to start over, politically speaking) every few months.

The worst corporate sociopath I've ever seen is 28 and has just been named CEO of a company with about $10 million in revenue. He's been there for 4 years, and it's his second job since college. The company will probably crash and burn under his rule.

Every generation has it's problems, it goes two ways. More importantly, especially in the startup scene, the EMPLOYER is probably going to get a big payday at the end. I'll see little / none of it so of course I'm going to move with incremental changes.

That does not mean a 'job hopper'. I'm fairly certain that most are smart enough to think ahead and ensure that long term career prospects are not being jeoparidzed. And in 10 years, when this breed of CEO's dies out it is a null point anyways.

This is a great comment. While part of working for a start-up is being willing to do work that is "below" you (e.g., doing operations and release engineering from time to time, because it has to be done even though you're a software engineer), at one point you have to ask yourself: suppose this company sinks or has a layoff, will I still feel that I've learned and moved my career forward in the mean time? If the answer is no, politely bring it up with the management first (perhaps they don't realize you're underused and not learning), and if no concrete steps are taken to improve the situation, find another position.

The reason to bring it up before looking (or at least before submitting your resignation and accepting a job offer from elsewhere) is not to be tempted to stay when given a counter offer. If there's a genuine desire to retain you long-term, they should have responded when you brought the issue up; otherwise, they just have a business-critical project they want you to finish and can then let you go.

I do have one comment to make: when selecting a job, don't select by thinking "which company will be the most stable and profitable?". Think, instead, "if all of these companies were to tank in a year, my stock becoming worthless, in which one would I have learned the most?". The "paradox" here is that the interesting working and continuous learning will make one feel engaged and fulfilled, leading them to stay longer and contribute more to the company, becoming less likely to be laid off and earning respect from coworkers and business partners, leading to employment opportunities in case of failure.

Compensation and the perception of a company (especially a start-up) as possessing a unique business idea can also cloud people's brains. A lesson I've learned is that if I can't decide between several offers, as they all seem the "same" (in terms of quality of the engineering team, technology used, culture, interesting-ness of their focus), I should pick the one that seems the least financially lucrative to be sure I'm not being "blinded" by the money.

Paul Bucheit's experience at Google (taking a paycut to join Google, despite being convinced they will fail) illustrates this. He didn't go in thinking "I will build my career and become rich here", he went in thinking "I will learn tons here".

When you hire that professional, you're not only paying for his experience, but all those other things, as well. There's a premium attached to those clauses and insurance. You could choose to forgo those assurances, and save some money, but you have a higher risk. Not to mention, a lot of better professionals would refuse, thus limiting the pool of candidates.

The author of the article wants it all: the assurance of the higher-cost option without the premium.

He builds the house on the cheap, in exchange for a percentage of the final selling price. If the contract was sound, why wouldn't that be an equitable deal?

There's probably a law against it, though (houses are funny that way).

In the case of the original post, I would be willing to work there - as a very expensive contractor, with the degree of my loyalty explicit in the terms. He'd probably object to the part about him paying my attorney to review it, though.

This man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.