An excellent and concise 5 paragraph essay on why his generation "job hops".
It occurs to me that we may be seeing a measured and reasonable response to general trends in US technology management. In the run up to Y2K a lot of programmers said that management had gotten quite bad in the '90s (I'm not sure that I can tell since I spend the '80s in the Boston area and the '90s in the D.C. area).
It was during that period that we started to realize that the wholesale layoffs of mainframe programmers weren't just an "old dog, new tricks" issue but one of gross age discrimination, that salaried programming positions largely evaporate as one hits the 35-40 range (there are a few fields where this doesn't seem to be generally true, e.g. embedded and classified Federal government work). And I think it all came to a head in the dot.com crash early in this century, when we saw what seems like a permanent sharp decline in CS undergraduate enrollment in this country.
"Generation Y" frankly hadn't been given any good reasons to be very "loyal", and many of them and us older types have adjusted our attitudes towards work in the light of harsh experience, ours and those older. There's now no shortage of programmer parents who are telling their children and the peers of their children to avoid the field, although with the Great Recession it might become one of the "least worst" options. E.g. trying to become a lawyer or doctor looks even more iffy right at this moment and of course the financial industry is making what looks to be a long term retreat from its bubble.
It occurs to me that we may be seeing a measured and reasonable response to general trends in US technology management. In the run up to Y2K a lot of programmers said that management had gotten quite bad in the '90s (I'm not sure that I can tell since I spend the '80s in the Boston area and the '90s in the D.C. area).
It was during that period that we started to realize that the wholesale layoffs of mainframe programmers weren't just an "old dog, new tricks" issue but one of gross age discrimination, that salaried programming positions largely evaporate as one hits the 35-40 range (there are a few fields where this doesn't seem to be generally true, e.g. embedded and classified Federal government work). And I think it all came to a head in the dot.com crash early in this century, when we saw what seems like a permanent sharp decline in CS undergraduate enrollment in this country.
"Generation Y" frankly hadn't been given any good reasons to be very "loyal", and many of them and us older types have adjusted our attitudes towards work in the light of harsh experience, ours and those older. There's now no shortage of programmer parents who are telling their children and the peers of their children to avoid the field, although with the Great Recession it might become one of the "least worst" options. E.g. trying to become a lawyer or doctor looks even more iffy right at this moment and of course the financial industry is making what looks to be a long term retreat from its bubble.