And yet that has terrible implications. Job hopping is both extremely unsatisfying on an individual level (no place to belong; you're just an interchangeable cog in the machine being swapped around, giving you no sense of purpose in your work) and on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).

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manlymuppet 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

A competitive labor market doesn't automatically mean you switch jobs constantly though. You get choose which job you go to, and if you have better options available, and choose your optimal fit, that can give you more purpose, not less.

And while it is inefficient if a company has to constantly retrain employees, overall you can have a more efficient market when people are given options, since employees can find the best fit. If you're working a job that isn't the best possible fit (something that's harder to find when your limited by time and resources) that's worse overall for the economy.

Of course there's more nuance here, but this is the core debate of unemployment payments. More unemployment benefits incentivizes people to stay unemployed longer (bad), but when they do find eventually find employment, it's usually better employment (very good).

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applfanboysbgon 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

> A competitive labor market doesn't automatically mean you switch jobs constantly though.

Maybe "a competitive labor market" doesn't, but "job hopping" does. That is, in fact, the definitional meaning of job hopping. They specifically made the claim about "job hopping" as pertains to a mechanism for achieving wages. This is incompatible with finding an optimal fit -- even if you found your optimal fit, you would essentially be taking a massive wage cut to stay at your optimal fit job for more than a couple of years, if job hopping is the chosen mechanism for society-wide wage growth. I was responding to the claim that was made about job hopping, not some other claim about competitive labor markets.

	▲	manlymuppet 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You're right, and I should've addressed you more directly. Job hopping is the result of competition in the labor market, and while some may find it unfulfilling, that is usually the exception, and macroeconomically speaking, more job hopping can be really good for the overall market. That's all I was saying, though I forgot to mention how competition in the labor market relates. My definition of job hopping is to switch jobs continually until you find the right fit, the right fit including wages as a factor among many others. I suspect that your definition means jumping jobs arbitrarily for the highest wage. In that case you are right that job hopping is bad, and it's my fault for confusing job hopping as wage increasing mechanism vs job hopping in general.

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ch4s3 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Competitive labor markets are FAR more efficient in terms of labor productivity, allocation, skill development, and spreading ideas around. One of the reasons the Industrial Revolution happened in England was because labor was more mobile than on the continent.

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skybrian 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Job-hopping doesn't seem to have those downsides in Silicon Valley though? I think the "feeling like a cog" aspect has more to do with company size. Can you get a meeting with the CEO?

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applfanboysbgon 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't know why you think SV doesn't have those downsides. In fact the entire world suffers the price of SV driving away their own employees with institutional knowledge and massively diminishing the quality of their software as a result.

	▲	skybrian 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I worked at a series of startups and I think having lunch every day with the other employees was an excellent way to get to know them. These jobs didn't last long because the startups weren't all that successful, but I remember them well. Or maybe it was because I was younger then? Stayed at Google over a decade and it wasn't quite the same, particular when working with people in distant offices.