You mean, the company that would cut you loose in about three seconds flat if you became unproductive?

Employment is an economic transaction. If you pay me, I will do high-quality, honest work for you. That's fair. If I don't produce, you can stop paying me. That's fair. But if you don't pay me well, or mistreat me, I'm going to leave. That's also fair.

Funny... Sam Odio thought the same thing.

http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2010/03/confession-i-was-one-who...

We just don't know. But what we do know is that this is exactly the kind of half-story that gets people going on forums: an antagonist everyone loves to hate, and structural reasons why we're probably not getting the whole story.

Many, many times I've seen users on a forum go on the warpath after hearing half of a story, then look like fools when the second half emerges. I don't like to think how many times I've been fooled myself, between Reddit and HN.

It would be nice if Internet culture could evolve to reserve judgment when a story like this appeared, in the same way it has evolved not to trust any story that appears in a much-forwarded email. I would be proud if HN was the place that mutation began.

Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.

The "job hopper" stigma originally came into existence because people who did so would rise rapidly in salary through iterated negotiations; in times such as the late 1990s, it's possible to get to a very high salary level this way. Pursued inflexibly, it's a terrible strategy in the long term, because it makes you less likely to end up as someone's protege (rolling stone, no moss) and eventually compensation will reflect the resulting stagnation. But most "job hoppers" do not fall into this category; they change jobs not because they are trying to game the system, but because they realize they are wasting time.

If your career is not improving-- you're not learning, inadequately mentored, and no one is looking out for your advancement-- then you should change jobs as soon as you can do so with minimal harm to the company. (If you're in a small company, it might be right to stay on for a couple months, at least to train someone else.) Since most people are not and cannot be "protege", this means that it's good to shift around a few times until finding a fit.

Likewise, everyone has to do some grunt work and deal with some unpleasantness, and recognizing this is just being a mature person, but anyone who finds out his job is mostly or entirely grunt work, or work unrelated to his career (e.g. the programmer who gets put full-time on office tasks) is wasting time and should leave.

Sorry, but I have to say all this because I am sick and fucking tired of people ripping on my generation for not playing by someone else's shitty rules. Are the older people really so damn entitled as to not understand all this? And how can they expect loyalty to companies when layoffs happen all the time?

If you have had lots of employees leave your company during a recession, you’re 98% likely to be an ineffective employer.

While it looks super-scary and certainly sucks for those few people who were affected, and is embarrassing to us, it's a lot less bad than it looks.

This could have been phrased a bit better to include an actual apology. It's pretty easy to do: "Several months ago Blippy's limited beta test leaked data about four customers, including their credit card numbers. That is totally our fault. We have apologized to those four customers personally and have taken steps to make sure it cannot happen again. The site currently does not leak data, but those four customers' numbers are still visible on Google searches. We are working with Google to correct this and expect it to be resolved in a few hours.

Here are the improvements Blippy has made to deserve our customers' trust:"

[Edited to add:

The Japanese salaryman in me would suggest that the CEO sign this post. Phrasing might include "This was ultimately a failure of our internal quality controls, because it should have been caught several times before this data was exposed publicly. I take full responsibility for the lapse and have begun..."]

Hey Evan,

We're mighty sorry, but we understand. If things don't work out at yahoo! as planned we want you to know the door is always open to return, after all we hate to see you go.

Please tell the rest of your team that you go with our blessing and that we look forward to seeing you do great things in the future. We all know if there is one thing they need over there it is quality people.

Since we still owe you more vacation days than your severance we can of course not hold you to stay longer but we'd really appreciate it if you could somehow squeeze out an extra few days to transfer your duties to John, of course we'll compensate you for that.

All the best!

j