Eh, at some point you find a place you like and stop worrying so much about getting 20% more in another job
Then you realize, since your raises no longer even keep up with inflation, your current job is now underpaying you - making it more difficult to hold on to what you do have.
Or alternately you jumped around a lot, make much more than your peers, and getting towards mid/late in your career where you become the target of layoffs for costing more than everyone else.
You get laid off… and then one of your connections from the last 15 roles has an open position that you fit in.
alternatively: you as 50something tech worker who has only had one gig for 15 years gets canned for whatever reason goes to the streets and every single employer who interviews you sees just how out of date you are with technology because you haven’t learned anything new in forever. You end up working at an arcade until eventually taking a huge pay cut becoming tech support or working for a low paying company nobody with experience wants to work for.
I have never seen a good worker who moves on not do exceptionally well in a year or two years. Maybe one role or two will be awful for a 20k raise so you stay a year… then the next role gives you ANOTHER 20k raise (so +40k now in just one year) and the new role is phenomenal. Two or three more years you find another role for another 10-20k and then 50k in equity that matures in x years to try and keep you. Odds are by then you have multiple offers to pick from because past managers/companies are interested in you. Maybe now you’re going back to a former company but into a more senior role because of all that modern experience you’ve gained.
As long as you get minimum 1 year in most roles, and do not have significant gaps, you’re gonna be desired. I will as a hiring manager 100% of the time be more interested in the resume of a guy who has been at 5 roles in 10 years for 1yr+ each, than one guy who has been in one role for ten years.
There are definitely reasons not to change jobs constantly. It kind of depends on industry.
Finding a new job might mean you need to relocate, which is inconvenient and becomes harder if you own a home or have a family.
There is also always a risk that the new company’s culture or your new boss are bad. It’s not something you can really know for sure until you switch, but if they aren’t good, it might not be worth the extra money.
It also takes time to ramp up and figure out the way things work. Being new in a job kinda sucks for a lot of reasons.
Your current job might offer something that is hard to find elsewhere like flexibility to work remotely when you want, or free food, or a good 401k match.
Some benefits take time to accrue and starting over at a new company might mean starting over on benefits accrual. For example, some companies increase vacation days based on years of service. Same goes for other things like percentage of 401k match. You might also miss out on claiming the full 401k match that you’ve earned at your current job if you leave early depending on vesting schedules.
Some companies have better job security than others. A new company might pay more, but also do regular layoffs. If your current company is fairly stable, it might not be worth it to move to one that does more layoffs.
Your current employer might pay close to top of market already. It could be hard to find another employer that actually would pay you more, and even if they could, it might not be worth the little extra for all of the other above cited risks of changing jobs.
Tarifvertrag with Entgelttabellen says no
Clickbait.
Article is nearly 10 years old.
Article contains no studies or surveys showing this result.
The 50% figure is calculated by assuming a paltry annual raise and consistent large pay bumps by switching companies.
Well, it does match my own experience and observations (in Software Development in a couple of countries in Europe) going back to the 90s.
The shift to “no loyalty to employees and hence for employees being loyal is a net negative” was around the point when companies started refering to employees as “human resources” and IMHO, resulted from the increased use of MBAs in Management, which in Tech happenned aound the early to mid-90s (though it dependend on country and the actual Industry making heavy use of IT).
Mind you, at least in IT and even all the way back then, it was already a good idea to move places at least once in one’s career because people who worked all their life in one place don’t really know any other way of working than the one of their place, which is limiting for one’s professional growth (though plenty of people did manage to just keep ticking up on salary purelly on age-seniority even well after they stopped improving as professionals) because no one company has “the right processes” for everything.
Personally I actually think it’s healthy to move companies at least a few times in one’s career, but my point here is more about one’s career and income growth stalling (and pretty early on, too) if you don’t move companies.
That said, I’m talking about expert and in high demand career tracks: I don’t really know if in the kind of jobs were the bean counters basically see employees as commodities there is any significant benefit from job-hopping, unless it’s job-hopping into a different kind of job.
That being said, word is that in the tech industry at least, hiring budgets are clearly higher than promotion budgets and that moving every 2 years or so is clearly the best strategy for career advancement.
Just one industry, of course, but the pattern certainly seems to have settled in there, and it may not be a stretch to speculate it will spread to other industries perhaps under the shitty influence of AI.
Backing up “word is” by an article that says “word is” is kinda meager though. There are many things widely believed to be true that are not, or only mildly so our in specific circumstances.
Backing up “word is” by an article that says “word is” is kinda meager though.
Well I’m relaying what is basically common knowledge in the industry shared by people in the industry. The thing about promotion/hiring budgets is something I know directly or through people at their companies.
Sure, it may not be industry wide, of course, but I’ve not seen any hint of a countervailing trend or pattern. What’s more, in the tech industry, it makes sense. There’s a fair amount of pivoting which is often deemed to be done best by hiring (at least some) new staff with the required expertise/experience. And maintaining existing/legacy systems is often de-prioritised such that those who’ve been at the company for a while who understand the existing systems well are not as valued as those who may help the company “grow”. Which is why I bring up the possibility that these patterns may spread to other industries.
How does this work out with all in value when it comes to stock options or other vesting based non salary compensation? Aren’t you leaving a lot on the table if you switch every 2 years? Does salary alone make up for that?
my work experience is almost entirely 2 & 3 year tenures and (anecdotally) companies are making vesting a bigger part of the compensation package and getting rid of pto to counteract people’s attempts at improving their livelihoods.
if you see a vesting heavy or “unlimited pto” compensation packages on offer; they don’t expect to keep you for very long.
Don’t know! AFAIK, some stock options do partially vest before two years. But this isn’t just salary, it’s career advancement, which means seniority and arguably experience, all of which tend to stay locked in for the rest of your career and lead to more stock options should you arrive somewhere you’re willing to stay longer at.
Every single time I see this type of conversation come up it’s always about the more privileged higher paying white collar work.
In my shit experience, blue collar work is “get shit raises or take massive pay cuts.” There is no “change job and also make more.” I’ve been stuck in the same cycle for 15 years now… Every time I leave a job I get knocked back to the wage I made when I first started the job I left regardless of the new position.
But that’s because only white collar workers are seen as people. Us blue collar workers are just meat machines that never deserve more than we were “bought” for and any new employee is automatically assumed to be as intelligent and skilled as a dead cockroach.
Every single time I see this type of conversation come up it’s always about the more privileged higher paying white collar work.
this is true and i know i because i’m one of those workers while my siblings aren’t and only my pay increases significantly each time while theirs remain stagnant.
on the other hand recruiters hate “job hoppers” and you’ll end up with more gate keepers to jobs the more often you do it; while my siblings barely get any questions when they have to switch jobs.
moving every 2 years or so is clearly the best strategy for career advancement.
it’s a double edged sword in my experience from to talking to recruiters who seem to have an irrational hatred of “job hoppers” and they’re, anecdotally, a majority.
however it is still true that you’ll get higher pay as i did; but be sure to spend a LOT of time keeping your connections alive because most recruiters (still anecdotally) will red flag 2 & 3 year tenure-ships; effectively gate keeping you away from many jobs.
if it weren’t for being in a relatively lucrative and in demand field (software development); i would be screwed because of those recruiters.
I’ve averaged about a 4 year tenure at my previous employers – some a bit more, some a bit less – but usually with a competing offer or two in that time period that I’ve used as a lever for a pay raise. Nobody’s complained about me being a job-hopper or short-timer.
I have noticed that my two last employers, both large national firms, have moved towards a model of career-tracking with a defined pay structure, similar to government work where different positions and experience levels have a pay range attached to them and you’re not able to negotiate out of that range. This has been framed as a protective move against wage inequality suits, but I suspect it’s more about preventing employees from negotiating especially high compensation packages. I haven’t had it cut against me yet – in both cases I got a very minor pay bump when my employers actually went out and compared their pay scales to what the market was demanding – but if enough employers start benchmarking against each other and using that to cap pay, it will functionally become like a wage-fixing cartel similar to what’s happened to rent in the last 5-10 years.
That said, it would interesting to see what the actual numbers are, although I’m sure it will vary a lot between industries and jobs and other factors. Anecdotally it sounds correct but that could just be true for some trait of my social circle, or some other bias about mentioning pay or something. Or just that people tend to be more likely to change jobs when they are underpaid, so the pay jumps from changing jobs seem bigger since the job they’re changing to will be closer to the market, whereas well paid employees will stick around and maybe not notice the gradual pay increases as much.
Incidentally it can also work at your existing company. I’ve gotten 5 promotions in 6 years and my salary is 120% more than when I started. It’s less the company hopping part and more ensuring you grow in your career. I’ve found that it’s definitely about stating your desires (having a clearly defined “this is where I want to go in my career”), volunteering for the random projects your boss or their boss needs done and showing you want to grow.
That only works if you have managers that give a rip about helping you grow and compensating you well for that growth, which sadly, most people don’t have.
In my experience, staying at the same place and taking on more “growth opportunities” was just an excuse for management to throw more on my plate without compensation increases. Sure I would get a little raise sometimes, but it was always pissy amounts of money, even when I asked for more.
I started jumping jobs aggressively and magically my pay exploded upwards. I now have basically zero loyalty to the companies I work for, just like they have for me. Contract work is even better for this, but the downside is usually you have bad or zero benefits.
Unless you have a union job, then you’re making the same thing as anyone else with the same experience as you and you’ve got benefits and probably job security 👍