People tell me I don’t have company loyalty.
But then I ask which companies have employee loyalty.
Those two lines are part of a viral post on LinkedIn penned by a Seattle-based software engineer who wrote about why he’s “proud of being a job hopper.”
“Moving from Amazon to Microsoft to Google, I jumped between three companies in three years and never looked back,” wrote Alex Nguyen.
In his post, Nguyen points to the lack of pensions, sign-on bonuses, and at-will employment as reasons for why employees can be drawn to jump ship to another company.
He also noted higher pay and easier promotions. “I had a 20% pay bump moving from Amazon to Microsoft for the same role and job responsibilities,” Nguyen wrote.
The response to Nguyen’s post highlights the debate over company loyalty in today’s corporate workforce climate, particularly among tech companies.
- “There are many benefits to staying around: building your network, learning more of the whole lifecycle of a product/project in an organisation and so on. Equally there are benefits to job hopping and there absolutely is no loyalty from an organisation.”
- “Clearing interviews is definitely easier than getting promoted.”
- “Having hired over 500 engineers personally in my career, if your resume came across my list, I would definitely pass.”
- “There isn’t one *right* approach. Most people over-index on maximizing compensation or holding on to stability. But there’s more to work than money and stability. Work is about growth, building connections, working on things you care about, being challenged and creating a legacy.”
Nguyen previously wrote a guest post in Business Insider that detailed his post-graduation move from New York City to Seattle for a tech job and how it “turned out to be the loneliest time of my life.”
Nguyen also writes on Medium about job resources that helped him land his engineering gigs and about his behind-the-scenes experience at Google.
