A Short Talk on Job-Hopping

Recently I read a thread titled “Alibaba 700k vs IBM 400k.” The thread was full of bickering about Alibaba’s and IBM’s various travel allowances, which was honestly maddening. I couldn’t help it, so over the weekend I took some time to gather my own thoughts and throw out a brick to attract jade, as it were. Friends are welcome to discuss this together.

Job-hopping is actually a huge topic. You could write at length about it from the angle of dreams, personality, experience, or profession. And since everyone has their own experiences, everyone has their own interpretation. None is entirely right, and none is entirely wrong. All I can do is express my own understanding. If you have more thoughts, feel free to discuss them too.

The Essence of Job-Hopping

Every job change is a choice in your life, and that choice will have some impact on your life. But the starting point of every such choice is the hope of taking your career one step forward, or taking your family’s happiness one step forward.

If you choose family happiness, then in weighing the decision, the family factor naturally takes the top spot.

If you choose your career, the question is whether this choice takes your sense of professional achievement to the next level. When that sense of achievement grows stronger, your motivation at work seems to flow endlessly. That is exactly why there are so many workaholics out there. On the subject of careers, I strongly recommend reading “Why You Don’t Have a Good Job.” It contains some very profound summaries and insights from those who came before.

But whether you choose family happiness or your career, you first have to ask yourself: is this a medium-to-long-term move, or a brief detour? And whether short-term detour or long-term move, does it align with one of your long-range goals?

The Trade-offs of Job-Hopping

Salary

When you talk about job-hopping, salary inevitably comes up.

Jack Ma once explained, in two pithy sentences, why people change jobs. It comes down to just two reasons:

1. The work isn’t enjoyable.
2. The money is too little.

Behind this is the fact that salary can actually smooth over a lot of the problems involved in changing jobs.

When you care a lot about salary, and a job change leaves your pay far below your expectations, I’d advise against making the move, because from the very start your mood is doomed to be poor. That bad state will persist until your next raise, which in turn leaves you full of expectations for that raise; and the higher the expectation, the easier it is to be disappointed. So salary absolutely affects a person’s mood.

Once you start paying attention to things beyond salary, salary’s weight gradually decreases.

I remember on my first job change, my boss’s boss said to me: don’t put too much weight on salary. A few thousand more or a few thousand less isn’t the crux of it. What matters is whether you yourself have a chance to grow more.

The Future and the Present

As your age and experience grow, you start to look at more and more things beyond salary when changing jobs — what Mr. Ma called “the work isn’t enjoyable.” Much of the time it boils down to two ideas: the future and the present.

The future:

1. The future of your own career. Will this move bring an upgrade to your career? Will your perspective, skills, and abilities improve? Or will you get a better position — to put it plainly, a better seat; to put it professionally, a better foothold.
2. The future of the company.
   • Is it possible the company’s future offers a platform that lets you showcase yourself better?
   • Also, does the company’s culture suit you? Many people overlook this factor, but it is often the one that determines whether a person can stay at a company for the long haul.

Family:

1. What changes will this bring to your family? A stable job necessarily requires a stable family.
   • If there’s an improvement — for example, if you were previously living apart from your spouse in different cities and now you’d be reunited — that’s a plus.
   • If there’s a disruption, can you accept it? For example, moving to a job in another city or living apart from your spouse. When such disruption appears, you have to think carefully about the family.

Starting a Business

With the government’s current slogan of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation,” many people run into the question of starting a business in the course of changing jobs.

Starting a business is essentially a kind of job change. Usually the outcome of this particular “job change” (the startup) ends in failure, but you gain life experience from it.

Entrepreneurs often need enough mental and physical strength to face everything known and unknown, and enough capability to handle the grind. So the first step in starting a business is to analyze whether your personality leans toward entrepreneurship. For people with a mature, steady temperament (with little gambler’s instinct) who prefer comfort, I’d suggest working at a large company instead — it may suit them better. Of course, there are too many reasons people decide to start a business to list them all here.

One aside: starting a business has no direct relationship with emotional intelligence. In any situation — whether running a startup, working at a large company, or working at a small company — high emotional intelligence is needed. People with high emotional intelligence will always have a far higher probability of success than ordinary people.

A Few Tips on Job-Hopping

Much of the time, job-hopping means choosing the company and the team yourself, rather than passively accepting the prompting of outside headhunters. Have a rough idea in your own mind of which companies you could go to and which you already want to go to.

If you decide to take the first step toward changing jobs, it’s simple: search for headhunters who recruit for the company you want to join, and send one an email. If you get a reply, attach a resume. Likewise, you can search for employees of that company and email them for help. Every company very much welcomes internal referrals, because they’re more reliable and lower-cost.

As for the techniques during the job-change process, they largely belong to the realm of tactics. There are plenty of articles that cover them in detail. Here are two strategies:

1. Last-minute cramming is essential. Even just polishing your spear right before battle leaves it gleaming. The more you prepare, the more the doors of opportunity open to you.
2. Be as honest as possible.

Finally

Job-hopping is forever a “fortress besieged” story: those outside the walls desperately want in, and those inside desperately want out. Your current company is by no means as unbearable as you imagine, and the new company you’re joining is by no means as wonderful as in your dreams. No company is perfect, so at the very first step of changing jobs, think clearly about what you want and what you want to change.

As a boss, I actually don’t like people who hop jobs too often.