@jym, I believe our state is a fire at will state. So several of us could not understand why this had to be done in such a way.
After this happened, understandably this ex-employee likely hated everyone of us. (BTW, that person now works for Apple, where his boss thinks he is performing. So it was good for him in the end. One of our colleagues once joked ghat our company was like a training camp for these large established companies; one after one, after a new college graduate was trained enough to be productive, such a young engineer went working for a large company. On top of my head, at least half a dozen of our ex-employees jumped there. It is definitely not an under-performing issue. Well…another person who was let go seemingly due to a performance issue on the surface was recruited by the same company. Young engineers still have their options – the key is they had to be young and are willing to put in at least 10 hours a day. If unlucky, may need to have a teleconferences several days in a week , at 10 pm for an apparent reason.)
Many companies, especially some of the top companies, require several years of experience before they will even consider an applicant for hire. So if your company is willing to hire green engineers with little or no job experience, then yes, your company may well be the training ground where the fresh out of school or limited experience workers get their experience and then jump ship to the bigger/better companies with bigger/better pay/benefits. That’s the point of the OP. And many get bored or itchy to try something new. Some give up stable jobs for opportunities with start-ups (that was mentioned in the article and I know some who have done just that). Its not uncommon in some cases for someone new coming into a job to get a higher salary/ bonus structure than someone who has been with the company for years and just gets their annual review/raise/etc. While you consider yourself lucky to have only changed jobs once, I think the article suggests that many do better, financially and with respect to quality of life, if they change jobs several times.
I started my first job after UG in the late 80’s with a big company that many people had historically retired from. I am now on my 4th employer. All of my moves have been about work/life balance. I guess I was just ahead of my time. :-?
However, the employer dismissing an employee does want to have enough documentation to make it more likely to prevail in court if the dismissed employee sues claiming that s/he was dismissed for an illegal reason.
Nowadays, people don’t stay at employers for extended periods especially in the corporate world. Employers see employees as a commodity, not an asset. When you are new to the work force; sometimes, you can advance your career faster by changing employers.
God, I hate articles about millennials. Pretty much every single one of them. It kind of pokes at us like we’re zoo animals and ascribes a generational reason to things that are just a result of youth. Of course young adults newly out of college change jobs a lot - as we figure out what we like and learn about new careers. Plus, most of those of us who are 22-32 graduated from college either right before the recession or in the few years after it. I’m 29, and I graduated in 2008. Yeah, good luck with that! A lot of us took jobs just to pay the bills while we looked for work that was actually in our area or waited out the recession. Some people went back to graduate school after a year or two in a dead-end job. When things got better a lot of us finally got the opportunity to switch to our desired career. Or, when things got better, we realized that they got better in a direction away from the one in which we’d been trained, so we retrained and switched fields.
The author cited some employment statistics about people moving jobs and then used two anecdotes from people who are related to each other to try to make some kind of statement about millennials moving companies because of not feeling “fulfilled” or wanting to “add value.” First of all, that’s a terrible way to support an argument - we have no idea whether this is a general trend amongst millennials or whether these two are just outliers.
Second of all, the stories themselves don’t even really support that idea. The main story about Margaret Davis presents simple details: She wanted some work that her employer promised but couldn’t deliver on, and she’d been in the workforce long enough now that she’d explored and learned about some options she didn’t realize were open to her before. The article also says straight up that the job wasn’t going anywhere and she’d need to leave for advancement. The boyfriend she mentioned basically made the same decisions: he left a lower-level role at one company for a higher-level role at a different one. People of all ages do that all the time.
Also, every state is an “at will” state, but some states have exceptions to at-will employment. Nevertheless, nothing in mcat2’s story sounds illegal or discriminatory. Singling one employee out for a skills test isn’t illegal as long as they aren’t being singled out because they are in a protected class.
First it was the baby boomers. Then it was the gen x’ers, millenials and gen Z’ers. They all get labeled, and written about, with silly generalizations and assumptions made about them. It is what it is.
As for employment, while its very likely there is much more to mcat’s story that was told here, having one employee devise a “test” for another coworker, who is required to take it and then let go a few days later, can easily be seen as discrimination, especially if no one else had to take this “pop quiz”. And many who sue will make accusations of discrimination or being a protected class even when they aren’t. Doesn’t stop them from trying. In this case, the terminated employee could claim wrongful termination, hostile work environment, harassment or possibly retaliation, depending on what the employee might have said or done. Most companies go to lengths to document, document , document performance issues or attendance issues, or what have you to problem employees, and short of a reason for immediate termination, they will typically give them “falls to meet” or “below level” performance review, put them on a performance improvement plan (PIP) and document in advance the benchmarks that the employee needs to meet in order to maintain employment, with frequent meetings, documented performance, if the employee meets the required benchmarks, etc. Having someone come up with some random “test questions” to give a co-worker and then showing them the door a few days later, presumably because of his performance on it (or more likely unwillingness to take the test) just isn’t likely to happen.
And states vary with respect to their individual laws, and case law regarding to what degree they follow the “at will” doctrine. Some states are more employer friendly, some more employee friendly. And many terminated or about-to be terminated employees try to claim minority or protected class status when they are not, but some HR departments will go out of their way to avoid litigation, and the managers dealing with the problem children have to put up with difficult, problematic or incompetent employees.
This isn’t just this group. I started seeing this in education about 20 years ago. Prior to that time, many folks found teaching jobs, and stayed in them for a long time (I was at my last job for 30 years). But attrition is very high in education now, with more than 50% permanently leaving the profession within 5 years. Mana any of these folks are likely finding other kids of work.
As noted above…the generation who were parents of the boomers often worked for places for their whole working careers. And many boomers did or continue to do the same.
one reason I would not recruit students straight of college (other than lack of real life experience and possible maturity issues) is that you can bet the farm they will be gone pretty soon after you hire them. and the return on investment will be slim to none.
Anyone who has looked at a resume in the last 20 years knows this. “In our day” you stayed with the same company a long time; having a succession of short term jobs suggested the person was flighty or a risk. Nowadays, it just doesn’t have that connotation.
Why? Even back then, employers could not be counted on to retain the employee for more than a few years before downsizing or going out of business. An employee who is not flighty is often required to find a different job due to employer decisions.
You probably have to go back two or more generations to get to the idea of mutual loyalty between employer and employee, and then only in companies that have a strong enough market position that they do not need to downsize at every downturn just to survive. Perhaps Wall Street was not as short term focused back then as well, so a minor miss in earnings did not lead to Wall Street pressure to downsize as much as it does now.
The vast majority of the working public does NOT work on Wall Street.
I agree with PG. moving around a lot,when I was younger drew questions…because it just didn’t happen a lot. Folks often took jobs…and stayed with them. They certainly didn’t change jobs often in the first 10 years.
I was an exception to this…and every time I applied for a job, I had to give all,the reasons why I had changed jobs.
Now…I think it’s viewed as having diverse experiences to offer.
My DH worked for one company for 20 years. I know several of his colleagues who did, and many who worked for companies like IBM who did too, until the pension plans changed.
In the first few years after college, I changed jobs frequently. I was kind of “warned” by many in that generation that it is better not to switch jobs so frequently. What PG said was true for me in those days.
I do not win the prize. The longest time that I was with a company is about 20 years (I think it is about 6 months short of that.) Most people I happen to know did not work so long with a single company but I might be the oldest among them.
At many work places these days, it is not easy to work for more than 20 years. Either the project is ended after some time (and it could be a struggle to get into a new project) or the whole company does not survive that long unless it is a more established company.
I once met a colleague at another company. He was graduated a year or so ago with an engineering PhD degree from a well-known school. He said the manager hired him but did not have a project or assignment for him. He finally figured out that the manager himself did not have a role in the company or an assigned project either. The purpose for him to hire him is that the new hire could somehow help land on some project so that the manager could say he is on this project as well. The manager actually had his backup plan already in case his new hire could not find him a job before company’s next round of shakeup: He had already had his next job lined up: a teaching job at a local university.
Both of them left this company in a year or two. (This is a Fortune 100 company! There is occasionally a weird thing happening in the corporate world.)
This is another “good” one: An engineer working on a project could not get what they had been doing for several years off the ground and felt trapped. A veteran or lifer in fhe company gave him this advice: As long as you could hang on till next summer when there are many NCGs (new college graduates) coming in, you could dump this project to one of them and you are free to join another project who has been in its early phase in its project life cycle.
There are a lot of “dead-end” project in corporate world that will end your career very easily if you are unlucky yo be in such a project. I am not talking about the fact that such a project will be terminated soon; the project could be non-existent in the first place (or not justifiably be a legitimate project), or worse, your “experience” with such a project would ruin your career or does a great damage to your career. I would not blame anyone who try to get out of such a situation as soon as possible.
One coworker once told me that at one startup company he had been working for, ALL projects are “vapor” projects like this and the CEO still tried to have a IPO (but failed of course.)
Thought you said you changed jobs only once. Sounds like it was more than that. And corporate America , and other international companies, have many “weird things” happen. It’s hardly “occasional” in the Fortune 100s.
^ I heard some of these stories from employees who have been working for several companies before. It was about another company.
When I first graduated with an UG, I indeed changed many companies (actually not in US at that time.) Then, I “retooled” myself by going back to grad schools (not only one, but two! What a wasteful of my youth years due to a poor planning.) I had a better luck to get a longer term job during a major part of my “second phase” of my career.