Career Development is A Toxic Idea

Go on, take that step.

Tech is, for better or worse, an industry made up largely of insecure, overachieving millennials.

And while insecure, overachieving millennials — or IOMs — have built a lot of really amazing products and companies, they can be really terrible as employees for one main reason: they’re flighty.

It’s played out to talk about how millennials have no loyalty, but there’s truth to that. We change jobs more often, we’re less engaged when we’re at at work, and we expect more from our workplaces.

I know all of this because I was a flighty, insecure, overachieving millennial employee myself.

After I first graduated college, all I wanted from my jobs was “career development.”

I had a plan, and I just wanted to work at places where that plan could get nurtured. I was willing to do jobs other people I graduated with wouldn’t. I was willing to take huge pay cuts for learning experiences.

When a workplace didn’t provide me with the exact kind of “growth” I was looking for, however, I’d move on.

I thought everyone I knew who had gone off to work at big companies was doing it all wrong. I thought that I, by flitting from job to job, never staying for more than a year, quickly collecting valuable experiences wherever I could, was growing far more efficiently.

Today, I see this same kind of behavior all the time — only from the other side of the table. And it pains me, both as an employer and as a former IOM myself, because now I can see clearly just how wrong I was.

If I had the chance to hire my younger self today, I probably wouldn’t even give me an interview.

Why I wouldn’t hire my younger self

I never hire job hoppers. Never. They make terrible employees. — Mark Suster

I wrote this post to offer another perspective on a growing narrative around career development that I think is toxic and harmful, not just to employers but not to employees: that people who don’t change jobs every 3 years or so are putting their careers at risk.

Proponents of this narrative say that if you’re not aggressively plotting your next move the moment you settle in with one company, you’re actively failing. You’re no better than the boomers who slaved away at one firm for the promise of a gold watch and a fancy retirement party. If you want to develop your skills and put yourself in a better position in the future, you need to treat each job you have as a learning experience.

In my experience, people who job hop for career development are some of the worst types of people to hire — a fact I know because I was one.

Not all job hopping is bad. There are a lot of valid reasons to change where you work. You might have a terrible boss. The company you’re at might be underperforming.

You might not even have a choice. Lots of startups fail, or even more commonly, lay people off who don’t necessarily deserve to be laid off. Anyone who likes working at smaller startups is going to have a more checkered resume by nature.

Really, don’t hire this guy.

People change jobs all the time for extremely valid reasons and I would never cast any aspersions on those people, but it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t (and you shouldn’t) ever hire job hoppers who job hop for “career development.”

Job hopping for career development hurts both employer and employee in toxic, corrosive, and definitive ways.

The curse of switching costs

The main reason job hopping rooted in career development is toxic for both employer and employee is because of switching costs. These are the monetary, psychological, effort and time costs incurred when a consumer decides to break off their relationship with a vendor.

When one person leaves a job and looks for another, three very time-consuming sequences are set into motion:

• Their previous employer needs to source, vet, recruit, close, onboard, and train a new employee.
• The new employee needs to find, scout, apply, interview, possibly relocate, onboard, and train up at their new employer
• Their new employer needs to filter, vet, choose, interview, deliberate, onboard, and train them

The costs are not the real problem — even the most valuable employees have to get found, onboarded and trained. The real problem is that no one sees the value end of these switching costs for month, or sometimes years down the line.

For employers to expend their time and resources investing in employees, they need to be convinced of ROI.

It takes time for employees to be able to truly understand the value that they can bring to an organization. It often takes even longer for them to be able to deliver new value and prove that hiring them was a good decision — a signal the employer needs so they can make a rational judgment about what and how much to invest in that employee.

Career development, extra responsibilities, seniority, freedom to choose the projects an employee wants to work on — the thing many millennials miss is that these things aren’t meted out as compensation. They’re a form of investment, by employer in employee, that takes place once the employee has demonstrated that its an investment that will prove a positive ROI.

In the short-run, employers have no incentive to offer that kind of career development to millennials who might still be flighty IOMs. Employers are only incentivized to help develop the careers of loyal employees.

When you job hop outside of the circumstances detailed above, it leaves the impression to potential employers that you’re going to be the former, not the latter.

3 ways IOMs can develop their own careers

The #1 thing that IOMs need to first understand is that career development is challenging. You’re probably not going to chance into it because you landed the right job. It’s not going to fall into your lap.

It’s not just dangerously reactive to assume that your career is going to be developed by people that are not you — it’s unprofessional. As an employee, you’re a vendor of your skills. You lease them out to your employer. Vendors can’t expect their customers to develop their careers (especially when they’re highly paid, as they often are in tech).

The solution to all of this is to develop your own career.

1. Make yourself your own CEO

Most employees don’t have a mental model of themselves as “vendors” and their employers as their “customers,” but if they did, they’d probably be a lot more successful in their careers.

When you acknowledge that you are a kind of company — and you specifically are the CEO of that company — it affects a perspective shift that is going to help you in numerous ways. Not least of which is the fact that you will get the kind of career development you want, and grow, much faster than your peers do.

Why? Because when you are the CEO, and you are selling your skills to a customer (your employer), you suddenly aren’t thinking about what your customer (your employer) can do for you. You’re thinking about what you can do for your customer (sorry):

• You’re thinking more deeply on how best to serve your customer within your constraints: You only have so much time/attention/energy in the day. You have to be mindful that you’re delivering the most value you can within your constraints, or else you’ll burn out (on one end) or become complacent (on the other).
• You’re thinking more deeply on how to provide value to your customer: When you’re the CEO of a product company, you can’t just think transactionally. You have to think higher-level, about how the value you bring fits into the bigger picture of your customer’s operation. Thinking this way about your employer, as an employee, is going to help you identify specific career development opportunities you can take — which will also be exciting to your employer.
• You’re thinking more deeply on how to be autonomous: Great product companies build tools that just work, that just help us get stuff done. Similarly, when you think about yourself as the CEO of your own skills & expertise, you’ll think a lot more about how you can be a more effective, self-managing, autonomous part of your employer’s team. The more you can do so, the more valuable and trusted you’ll become
• You’re thinking more deeply on how to take more responsibility: There is a balance of risks, tedium, and complexities between you and your customer. Some, you can abstract away so your employer no longer has to worry about them — that’s positive value for your employer. Some, your employer has to persist in managing — that’s negative value for your employer. Work to abstract away more of the risks, tedium, and complexities of your organization.

Mark Cuban said that the best quality any of his employees could have is the ability to make his life less stressful. While the vendor-customer model may feel like it turns the employee-employer relationship into a transaction, it’s actually a way of getting closer to this very ideal.

When you stop being purely reactive and start treating yourself like you’re the one in control of the relationship, you can more easily see where you truly add value. Adding value in the right places is how any vendor becomes valuable to customers — and the same goes for employees and employers.

2. Invest in your own network

Your physical or digital workplace shouldn’t be the only place where you’re trying to develop yourself and your career. If you want to be successful in your career, you should also be investing in your network.

A lot of talk about “personal brands” is overdone, but the fact remains that without one, it’s much easier to go unnoticed.

Right now, it’s fashionable to say that building cool stuff and getting “inbound” attention for it is better and more likely to lead to success than old-fashioned networking, or getting “outbound” attention. But gaining a reputation for building cool stuff is just as much a method of cultivating of your personal brand as going out and meeting people is.

Both are means of:

• creating opportunities outside of your main job for career development
• meeting more prospective customers of your skills & expertise (e.g “employers”)
• meeting more people who can help you guide your career

If you’re relying solely on your current place of work to help you develop your career and you’re not meeting people on your own, you’re just not putting yourself in a great position to grow. And that’s not a situation you can change by just getting a new job — it’s about you, and what you do outside of your job.

Here are some simple ways you can start investing more in your own network:

• Figure out how you can provide value to other people upfront without asking for any kind of value in return. Reciprocal effort is the basis of all relationships, but beginning one is about proving that you can be generous with your time and abilities.
• Define your niche. It’s hard to network when you see yourself as a “front-end developer.” It’s a lot easier to network when you define your scope more tightly — “senior enterprise C# developer,” “blockchain developer working in NLP,” etc. The tighter and more intimate the community you’re trying to be a part of, the more opportunities you’ll have to get close to and learn from people.
• Take time to meet 1 new person in the industry you’ve scoped out every single week. I’m a huge introvert and so this wasn’t easy for me either, but it’s still important to do.

It’s important to build up capital at your job and with your boss, but it’s just as if not more important to make sure you’re building up capital outside your job too. Your network is your net worth.

3. Become your own customer

The nuclear option for career development is simple: just give up on working for other people and start your own company.

Often, our millennial demands and our desires end up in conflict. We want career development from our employers, but we also want to be flighty and ditch every job we take on within a year or two. No job is satisfying because we’re always looking for that growth from external sources, and never looking within.

The simple solution to all of this is just to start a company, agency, consultancy, etc. and become your own employer. When you’re your own boss, you can assign yourself to any project, create any schedule for yourself.

Most people, of course, won’t do this, because they’re risk averse and also want some kind of steady income from their employer/customer.

In the end, we want the steady paycheck and the lack of risk, and we also want opportunities for career development handed to us.

Those two, unfortunately, don’t usually co-exist.

In the end, something has to give — whether that’s the entitlement or the risk aversion.

Until we decide, there can be no career development.