As long as you are classified as an at will employee you should give your employer at will loyalty. They don't owe you anything and you don't owe them anything either beyond the responsibilities of your job in exchange for whatever they're paying you.

It's up to them to make sticking around your best option. But when I'm on interview panels and someone brings up that the person in question is a job hopper, rather than see that as a negative, I see it as a challenge to find a way to get that person to stick around. And the only thing that offends me when someone quits is if the offer to do so isn't better than sticking around.

I am not popular with my fellow managers with this attitude and I expect downvotes for this. Bring 'em. It really doesn't matter to me anymore, the remainder of my career will be spent on making hard things easier rather than making easy things harder.

No reason to downvote you.

However, if someone has generally changed jobs every year or two and I wouldn't hire someone who I knew with certainty would only stay that long, I might think I'm special enough that I can keep them around. But I'd probably be wrong.

I can only speak for myself but so much of my job hopping is geared towards both getting more money but just as importantly trying to find an environment I really like. I want to find work that is fulfilling and that does not make me dread Mondays. I have reached a level financially where while I can always use more I make more than I ever reasonably expected to make and I am making far far less than many on here. My years are precious I want to spend them somewhere that I like both the people I work with and the work I do.

Yes you have figured out the secret (tm) in my opinion. Sturgeon's law applies to tech which is to say 90% of it is crap. Don't waste your time with that 90% and if you find yourself in one of those positions feel no guilt whatsoever running away as fast as you can.

Please read this to avoid bias: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lizryan_the-dumbest-part-of-e...

And that's the thing, it's okay with me if I'm wrong. Or as I responded to a doctor who asked a similar question: "Do all your patients live?" It's not a question of being special to me, it's a challenge to figure out what will make them stick around and make the company money and it's usually strongly correlated in my experience.

But the grandparent comment assumes that you can keep a certain percentage of engineers you want to by making them an offer that gets them to stick around.

Is "at will" the right term here? What's the alternative, granting you tenure at their little company or something? If you are an at-will employee who is kept around, then might that demonstrate actual loyalty (and probably higher pay) versus being at a place that is prohibited by law from laying you off without good cause?

Perhaps you mean if they treat employees like a commodity. They can do that withoug laying people off; universities tend to treat their tenured faculty this way also. Optimizing for getting the most work out of the witth the lowest cost. If so, then yes employees should, in turn, act like the job is a commodity and try to optimize income-minus-costs on their end too.

If I have to sign an agreement that gives my employer permission to terminate me at any time for any reason with or without cause, they should not be surprised that it also grants me the right to quit at any time for any reason with or without cause.

And yet, all that fuss about these job hoppers. How about creating an environment and culture where sticking around beats job hopping instead?

As for the alternative? Check out the severance packages that executives and TLAs get. Try scaling that down to the employee level. Not going to happen.

Well in the past employees got ISO's. Now employees are getting RSU's.

And in our lawsuit-happy culture (with a perverse incentive for companies to always settle lawsuits even when they can win), even the most employee-friendly place probably needs such an agreement for CYA reasons.

I do agree ecompanies can do a much better job of treating employees like partners instead of "resources" to optimize. Even on HN, we have fellow engineers talking of the importance of (soul-crushing) processes that ensure no one is essential. As if it's undesirable to let anyone be special or important...

RSUs happened IMO because Warren Buffett didn't understand tech. But they're fine, really, the same competitive pressures that led to compelling ISOs now lead to compelling RSUs. Not sure what problem that solved though but give me a couple beers and I'll probably come up with one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/business/stock-options-ar...

I'm saying it's a step in the right direction. No more starting at zero or even being "under water" like with ISO's. With RSU's they just grant you the stock like they used to only do for execs (with nonqualified options or whatever). As long as the company doesn't get delisted or something you're a stakeholder.

Employment contracts are a double-edged sword that would warrant their own discussion.

Also you’re not really signing an agreement that they can fire you, you’re signing an acknowledgement of the at-will employment status so you can’t claim any illusions that you had an employment contract, but that status is typically derived from state law and advertised on the job posting you applied for. That paper you’re signing is about the same as an acknowledgement of the warning that you shouldn’t eat tide pods. It’s there because stupid people have necessitated it.

Speaking as a long time employee and now as an owner/employer, I’ve always thought people who bristle at at-will employment don’t really get it — it’s a two-way street, as an employee you can leave anytime, being considerate of professional courtesy for notice, etc.

I was always highly confident in my value and skills, so the idea of an employer randomly laying me off was never an issue - their loss more than mine. Your life will be far less stressful if you can develop that mental confidence and self-actualization, and if there is something preventing it, work on that. Specifically, if you feel lucky to have been employed in your field, and are barely hanging on to your job, maybe you should find a better field?

At-will employment should not even remotely be a big concern in life. Talent is hard to find - there’s more money than talent out there.

I once had to sign a non-compete that came with paying me my full salary during the noncompete period to do anything but what I was doing. I was great with that. And when I left, they chose not to enforce it anyway, but I felt like that was a fair deal.

Paying your full salary is not at all common - though I agree that is sufficient to make a non-compete fair and wish it would become normalised.

So there are a number of people on this site who are not at that level and they get resentful that someone might get a deal like that rather than try to find a path to getting a deal like that for themselves. That's crab mentality and it helps no one.

The way to get there is to refuse to sign non-compete agreements unless they come with an equivalent clause to what I got. When you sell yourself short, you sell everyone else along with you.

Eh, Hoppers I don't worry about. Jumpers, OTOH, Are a negative.

The difference (at least to me) is time. Hoppers are people who typically change jobs every 1.5-3 years.

Jumpers, will have a long history of 6 month stints, very few if any gigs longer than a year. At most places I've worked, depending on the quality of on-boarding it took most engineers 1-3 months to be productive, and 3-12 months to understand the system well enough to make impactful changes to the ecosystem safely.

There's a trade off between exploration and exploitation. And sometimes, because they put on their best face to recruit you, you can't figure out that a seemingly promising idea is actually nonsense and it will never work without joining the effort for at least a month or two to go far enough down the rabbit hole until you realize it's full of manure.

I've lasted anywhere from 30 days to over a decade depending on the gig. And every one of those moves was the right choice. I prefer to rely on my own research of the person's career track and the number of people they can summon as references to say nice things about them. Tech culture brings out survival traits and I'm not going to hold anything against people who act in their own best interest.

That sounds about right to me. The company also has risks in that its interviewing process indeed just found a good match and you will be as good in real as in paper(your resume), I think the salary part covers the first year, no raise for first year makes perfect sense unless you're absolutely undervalued when you're hired.

The other side is that, if you're not as good as you're supposed to be, normally you won't get fired just in one year, you are actually overpaid. From the corporate side, the better engineers are covering the loss(those are overvalued but still too early to be laid-off).

So the best and most capable ones will switch jobs after 3 years, not totally because the company is too greedy. Unless there is a way and culture to make your salary can go up and down each year based on your performance, there is no good solution(because pay-cut is not common no matter what). In the end those who are overpaid will more likely to stay, those who are undervalued will likely jump board.

One way is to keep salary less important, like an average value that is reasonable for both sides, then the company can use monthly/quarterly/yearly bonus to reward the top employees, but who could like it when he has a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage that needs a sense of secure/stable income.

Overall I'd say the whole point of the interview process at senior level and beyond is to make as sure as possible that you are productive immediately. They give you tasks you can do without thorough knowledge of their process. And these days, lots of one-to-one meetings to hold your hand some and keep your productive.

If you don't get a raise in the first year, it's often more about pedantry regarding the HR rules, which tend to be "optimized" by penny-pinching adjustments over the years to take advantage of employees every way they can (this is their job, squeezing money out of people any way they can). E.g. you weren't there for the last round of evaluations so you don't get a raise. Possibly no bonus too. You need to discuss all this stuff when negotiating, they'll be trying to help you work the system at that point, rather than using it against you.

I agree with the both of you, so here is my simple version:

Companies rely on the fact that you stay a couple of years at least. So if you want to make good deal, you need to switch jobs more often.

A year to learn, a year to earn, a year to yearn.

*A year to learn, a yearn to earn, next year churn.

I remember reading somewhere (but I can't remember where): "My job is not my job, my job is to find a better job"

I've come across "My job is to eliminate my job."

Impossible in reality for the most part, but a lofty goal to aim for.

I don’t think this line of thinking will bring out your best work.

They don't pay upfront. That's not how management thinks. Until attrition is below 50% hiring new people with a good hike is profitable than paying to people who don't leave.