This is my favorite excuse for job hopping. When employers ask me why I am leaving I always say "I am concerned about the company moving jobs to India and I need stable long term employment". This allows you to also focus the conversation on a long term position which is typically what the interviewer wants to hear.
How to explain all your previous job switches? Well the Indian line won't work for all your job switches. Hopefully some of them are contract jobs and you can tell them the contract ended. State that you prefer long term full time employment to contract and only took the contracts because you needed a job.
Also, talk about how you are settling down and want to start a family, so its time to get long term secure work with a good company. Talk about how wonderful this opportunity is(odds are it's a generic BS job) and how wonderful you think the company is (Google them and get some good BS).
Job hopping probably will cost you some jobs. The jobs most likely to pass on you are the mediocre paying positions who do not have promotions and want someone to be happy with the 3-4% cost of living increase for 7 years. These are hard to BS. Sometimes you just need a job and have to take these so it can pose a problem. There is no perfect solution to this dilemma.
Job Hopping is not a cure all and it is not perfect. It probably will cost you some opportunites. However, it will also ramp up your compensation much faster so look at how much more money you made by switching jobs. Also keep in mind that many employers base what they offer you on your "salary history". So you would probably not be able to demand a higher salary by their standards if you did not job hop. You are basically playing the employer's game.
Just so everyone is clear. The best time to job hop is early in your career. Your goal is to get up to your maximum earning potential as soon as possible. Once you get to that level there is less incentive to job hop. However, you should still be ruthless and only work for your employer up to the point where it becomes unprofitable. Even if you are very senior and make alot of money you cannot guarantee that your skills will not become obsolete. You need to work on skills you do not use at work in your own time. To make time for this you need to keep your hours as close to a 40 hour work week as possible.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Work on the Business, Not in the Business
Everyone is self employed.
I read the "World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman recently. He had a chapter that discussed how in the past people would go to work for one company and spend their lives there. Now everyone is expendable and most service jobs can be offshored. This means we are basically businesspeople and we are all self employed. Our skills are our business. If we improve our skills we improve our product.
There is an interesting book by Mark D. Csordos called "35 Business Lessons for Entrepreneurs". One of his most interesting lessons was "Work on the Business, Not In the Business". Mark created and ran a mystery shopping business. He found that he was spending alot of time working on spreadsheets and doing work that he should have his employees do. This is working in the business. He decided that he would spend his time marketing his company and getting new business. This second choice is working on the business.
When you are working for someone else and spend time doing work for them you are working in the business. When you go to user group meets, publish articles, and improve your skills you are working on the business. In order to keep your current paycheck coming you have to spend atleast 40 hours working in the business. There is no getting around this. Keep it at 40 hours and spend the rest of your time working on the business.
No matter what you do for a living you will use a narrow set of skills at any one time. However, there is always something new to learn. Look at the market and decide what you need to learn in order to make you more valuable to other employers who will pay you better. Do not waste your time with lower value skillsets that will not increase your income. For example if you are a software engineer, do not work on desktop support skills. Those jobs pay less than what you make. Work on skills that employers need. By need I mean willing to pay more than you currently make. Spend time at home teaching yourself.
If you are a "workaholic" and your employer loves you, you are working in the business. Yes you may get a "surpasses expectations" instead of a "meets expectations" on your review and get a whopping 1-2% greater raise and/or a slightly bigger bonus, but you are not going to get that 20% pay increase you can get by switching jobs. You will also not improve your skills as much as when you target your learning to new skills at home and on your own.
I routinely hear people say that you should do the best job you possibly can all the time. I then ask why? All I hear back is "because" or "you just should". Wait a second, when you buy a product from a business do you think they are always giving you the best service they can? No they are giving you service to the point where it is profitable to do so. If it costs them more money to give you service than they recieve in revenue, then they will not be bothered to lose you as a customer. Your company treats its customers like this. Your company is your customer. Treat them the same. Do a good enough job.
Now some of you will be concerned that co-workers will not think as much of you. That is not necessarily true. You want to impress fellow technical people because they may know about other jobs in the future, but managers are in a different job category and the odds of you running into them again is very small(though it may happen so at a minimum meet expectations). If you improve your skills and become a knowledge base your co-workers will come to you for help. This will impress them and this adds value to your future career. You get these skills by working on the business and not by doing excessive work for your employer. They are just not worth the trouble.
I read the "World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman recently. He had a chapter that discussed how in the past people would go to work for one company and spend their lives there. Now everyone is expendable and most service jobs can be offshored. This means we are basically businesspeople and we are all self employed. Our skills are our business. If we improve our skills we improve our product.
There is an interesting book by Mark D. Csordos called "35 Business Lessons for Entrepreneurs". One of his most interesting lessons was "Work on the Business, Not In the Business". Mark created and ran a mystery shopping business. He found that he was spending alot of time working on spreadsheets and doing work that he should have his employees do. This is working in the business. He decided that he would spend his time marketing his company and getting new business. This second choice is working on the business.
When you are working for someone else and spend time doing work for them you are working in the business. When you go to user group meets, publish articles, and improve your skills you are working on the business. In order to keep your current paycheck coming you have to spend atleast 40 hours working in the business. There is no getting around this. Keep it at 40 hours and spend the rest of your time working on the business.
No matter what you do for a living you will use a narrow set of skills at any one time. However, there is always something new to learn. Look at the market and decide what you need to learn in order to make you more valuable to other employers who will pay you better. Do not waste your time with lower value skillsets that will not increase your income. For example if you are a software engineer, do not work on desktop support skills. Those jobs pay less than what you make. Work on skills that employers need. By need I mean willing to pay more than you currently make. Spend time at home teaching yourself.
If you are a "workaholic" and your employer loves you, you are working in the business. Yes you may get a "surpasses expectations" instead of a "meets expectations" on your review and get a whopping 1-2% greater raise and/or a slightly bigger bonus, but you are not going to get that 20% pay increase you can get by switching jobs. You will also not improve your skills as much as when you target your learning to new skills at home and on your own.
I routinely hear people say that you should do the best job you possibly can all the time. I then ask why? All I hear back is "because" or "you just should". Wait a second, when you buy a product from a business do you think they are always giving you the best service they can? No they are giving you service to the point where it is profitable to do so. If it costs them more money to give you service than they recieve in revenue, then they will not be bothered to lose you as a customer. Your company treats its customers like this. Your company is your customer. Treat them the same. Do a good enough job.
Now some of you will be concerned that co-workers will not think as much of you. That is not necessarily true. You want to impress fellow technical people because they may know about other jobs in the future, but managers are in a different job category and the odds of you running into them again is very small(though it may happen so at a minimum meet expectations). If you improve your skills and become a knowledge base your co-workers will come to you for help. This will impress them and this adds value to your future career. You get these skills by working on the business and not by doing excessive work for your employer. They are just not worth the trouble.
Be Ruthless Not Bitter
The best way to increase your income in the software industry is to switch jobs. As time goes on I will post advice about how to be an efficient and effective job hopper and how best to increase your income by doing so. I will provide information from my experience in the IT industry along with my opinion of how you should treat your job. Over the last 7 years, which covers an IT job recession, I have raised my income from $45,000/year to roughly $200,000/year. I would never have been able to do this if I stayed with the same company.
Companies today are off-shoring jobs and laying off staff with regularity. Business for the most part have zero loyalty to their employees. Also there has been a large influx of foreign workers on H1B and L-1 visas to the United States. This has lead many members of the IT industry to become angry and bitter. They sit around and complain, yet do nothing about it. They show up for their jobs, take their cost of living salary increase, and do what they are told. Many if not most IT workers complain about their managers, their project, their compensation, and their hours, yet they do nothing about it.
They are bitter. They are essentially lemmings who do what they are told then behind their manager's back complain. The first rule of being a good job hopper is to be ruthless, but not bitter. Your employer should mean a paycheck to you and nothing more. You should not care about your boss or how well the company does since you will not be there that long. If you see them outsourcing jobs, you should quit and if you feel up to it give absolutely no notice.
You should put the level of effort into your job that means your return on investment. This means that if you can replace your job for a comparable pay and less hours don't work the extra hours. What do you get out of it? You should use your extra time to improve your skills at home and thereby improve your marketability. At the senior level it is rarely worth it to get anything above a "meets expectations" on a review. I don't see the point of working long hours to get a 4% raise instead of a 3% raise.
Do not get angry. Do not get attached to your job or your employer. Future blogs will go into more detail about the topics brought up in this post. This post has been left intentionally short and without details since I think its best break up my advice into different blog entries.
Companies today are off-shoring jobs and laying off staff with regularity. Business for the most part have zero loyalty to their employees. Also there has been a large influx of foreign workers on H1B and L-1 visas to the United States. This has lead many members of the IT industry to become angry and bitter. They sit around and complain, yet do nothing about it. They show up for their jobs, take their cost of living salary increase, and do what they are told. Many if not most IT workers complain about their managers, their project, their compensation, and their hours, yet they do nothing about it.
They are bitter. They are essentially lemmings who do what they are told then behind their manager's back complain. The first rule of being a good job hopper is to be ruthless, but not bitter. Your employer should mean a paycheck to you and nothing more. You should not care about your boss or how well the company does since you will not be there that long. If you see them outsourcing jobs, you should quit and if you feel up to it give absolutely no notice.
You should put the level of effort into your job that means your return on investment. This means that if you can replace your job for a comparable pay and less hours don't work the extra hours. What do you get out of it? You should use your extra time to improve your skills at home and thereby improve your marketability. At the senior level it is rarely worth it to get anything above a "meets expectations" on a review. I don't see the point of working long hours to get a 4% raise instead of a 3% raise.
Do not get angry. Do not get attached to your job or your employer. Future blogs will go into more detail about the topics brought up in this post. This post has been left intentionally short and without details since I think its best break up my advice into different blog entries.
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