What we lose through job hopping

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Two years into my first job, I got bored and depressed. Both of these were probably caused by the realization that this is what I was going to have to do for the next forty years: Go to the office, hang out with colleagues, drink bad coffee, meetings, more meetings, do quite a few things that didn't necessarily interest me, company politics, the lot. 

I wasn’t quite prepared for this fate because as a child you are always on your way to the next big thing and that next big thing is usually only a few short years away. For instance in elementary school, I knew that after the sixth "class" (at about age 12) I would go to secondary education, which in the Netherlands involves tests and an important choice of what kind of secondary education to go to (more or less vocational, more or less academic). Then in secondary school, I was in a so-called "bridge year" that was used to determine which of three possible tracks (less academic, more academic, even more academic) I would qualify for.

It turned out that I “qualified” for the less academic track because I completely drowned in that huge secondary school and nobody threw me a life jacket. I later made up for that by switching to the more academic track, which I then immediately dishonored by going to a college that even the less academic track would have gotten me into.

Then after two years in my "chosen" track, there was a point where I would have to select the six topics I would specialize in. This was an important selection because it was in preparation for college; choose the wrong topics —> do not get into your desired college track. Three years later I took the national exams (in by now seven topics) and started applying for college.

After secondary school I was thoroughly "done" with the topics studied there and very much looking forward to the subject-specific education I would get in college. In the first year there was an important cut-off at Christmas (after one trimester) where the college would decide whether your could stay in the program (the “A” track) or whether you be expected to leave at the end of the year (the “B” track).

I made the “A” track :-)

In my college program there were two mandatory internships in the third year, which was something else to look forward to and prepare for. Then, finally, in the fourth and final year, there were exams and a thesis to write, after which I was ready to enter the job market.

So most of my life until that point had been a steeple chase of relatively short-term goals with some major event coming up in 1-3 years.

Then, once I started working, that cadence suddenly came to a halt. There was no more program to get ready for, no calendar of upcoming events, nothing to prepare for. Just a wide open space of indeterminate length until I could finally retire.

I experienced something similar with my daughter. When she was younger and people asked me how she was doing, there was always some event she was hurtling towards: Switching schools, exams, college. Then when she started working she entered a similar open-ended stretch of time with nothing to report on in terms of “the next big thing”. Fortunately she is getting married later this year, so I have something to say when people ask me :-)

After two years of working I was getting uneasy and wondering what my next big thing would be. Because of my very limited imagination, I thought it would have to be another job.

Once I found a new and "exciting" job, people started warning me: You're only 24 and already on your second job. That's not a problem since you stayed in your first job for two years, but you gotta stay here for a while because employers don't like job hoppers.

I ignored them of course because two years later I resigned and tried to move abroad, an overall traumatic experience I wrote about here.

The disdain for job hoppers was common at the time and persisted for quite a while. For most of my life, whenever I looked at a resume and saw a large number of short jobs, that was a strong strike against the candidate. Some people were so worried about the cosmetics of their resume that they passed up on great opportunities, lest there be a short job or an unexplained gap.

This is still the case in some countries like Germany and Switzerland. If you don’t have an unbroken chain of reference letters from employers, you have some explaining to do.

This started changing in the early 2000s, when more enlightened employers didn't necessarily hold a gap in a resume against the candidate anymore. We would still ask about it, but if people then answered that they had taken nine months off to look after their aging parents or to tour Patagonia on a BMW motorbike, we thought that that was actually cool and in fact spoke in favor of the candidate.

How the times have changed!

It is now the rare resume that doesn't consist of a large number of short jobs. I regularly see resumes where the shortest job is in the order of nine months. I always wonder about that because personally I can hardly find the bathroom after a mere nine months.

As it happens at the time of writing I am nine months into my current job and I am only now starting to feel a bit productive.

Of course there is nothing wrong with leaving a job early if you are not happy there or if, all things considered, the job or company are not for you. But I do wonder about what we are losing if we are normalizing the nine month job engagement.

Actually, that's not true, I do not wonder about that at all. I know: It's deep expertise.

The problem is that we live in a time of culturally sanctioned attention deficit disorder and of an abundance of shallow knowledge.

The first problem of that unholy duopoly is there for everyone to see: The world is constantly beeping, flashing, and vibrating in order to draw our attention elsewhere. This has led to, among other things, newspapers brandishing articles that are longer than a few paragraphs, a "Long Read'', a bit like a health and safety warning label: “WARNING: This article requires more than two minutes to read and digest. While you are reading this, someone on the Internet might feel neglected!” We are constantly training our mind to shift attention between various sources of data. Whatever beeps, flashes, or vibrates with the most vigor gets our attention.

Given that sorry state of affairs it is actually a miracle that most people manage to stay in a job longer than a few weeks 🙂.

The second part of the problem is that we have become complacent with an abundance of shallow knowledge. More people know the basics of computer programming than ever before, but really deep knowledge of how to use computers to solve complex problems is still rare. Shallow knowledge allows you to solve simple and obvious problems in obvious ways, but to solve even these simple problems well, requires surprisingly deep knowledge. I see quite a few designs and attend many postmortems where the root problem is a lack of experience with technology and/or the specific domain.

Compounding these problems is the value of a job switch. In a job market that was until recently very stressed, the fastest way to more money and a loftier job title was through switching jobs. Throw in the increasing awareness that in this “winner takes most” world you constantly need to look out for number one, and it is not at all unsurprising that people switch employers for another $10k per year and the addition of "Sr." to their job title.

The combination of these factors leads to an incredible short-termism that is hurting quality and that is preventing people from becoming really, really, good at their jobs.

Getting really good at something requires you follow a curve that is very steep in the beginning but which flattens significantly after a while. The first part of that curve feels like a wild ride as you are gaining a lot of knowledge and hands-on skills, but as soon as the curve flattens, boredom sets in, as you no longer gain knowledge at a high ratel. When that moment comes, it seems that you are doing the same thing over and over and not learning anything anymore. I hear this a lot in fact: “I am looking for a new job because I am not learning anything new anymore.”

This is problematic in a world that promises everyone exciting new challenges every day.

Side story: I recently started baking my own bread. This is a perfect example of this problem: With only minimal effort you can learn how to produce a half-way decent result. But it is obvious that to get really good at it, you need a lot of experience to get all the details right all the time, so you always get a great result.

To make matters worse, the quality curve is exactly the opposite of the learning curve: The decisions you make with a little bit of knowledge only add a little bit of quality, whereas seemingly simple decisions you can only make with a lot of knowledge and insights add a huge amount of quality.

Becoming an expert requires experience and my fear is that all this job hopping gets in the way of building up significant experience in any single domain.

Worse, people are starting to see not job hopping as a negative sign! I've heard many people say that if you stay too long with a single employer in the same job that will hurt your career opportunities. And even worse, they might be right, because the people hiring you are not necessarily the brightest bulbs of the lot and they are liable to review your lack of job hopping with the same dumb eyes as the employers of yore did with a resume that contains a gap and maybe a few short jobs.

This is clearly idiotic. Apply that same logic to surgeons. Imagine you are going under the knife tomorrow: Would you feel great knowing that the surgeon had been doing that only for six months because before that he was a psychiatrist for eighteen months and before that he was a primary care physician for a year?

There is value in staying power because getting really, really, good at something requires experience in a single domain.