Weekly Column
Job-Hopping Is a Moral Failure If You Work in Aerospace
Job-hopping is a moral failure if you work in aerospace. It's rational self-preservation if you work in managed services. The difference has to do with supply and demand rather than loyalty, ambition or work ethic. But most hiring managers don't understand this, which is why they still treat résumés with two-year stints like character flaws.
Let's compare it to something like aerospace engineering, a stable, mature field where advancement and compensation arrive through tenure, seniority and clearance level rather than tech-stack knowledge or continuing education and skills. Aerospace projects run for years. Switching employers means new clearance verifications, new projects to become familiar with, and possibly a backlog of company knowledge that may take as much as a year to become comfortable with. Buyers like Lockheed and Boeing are large and established, so raises and promotions are predictable.
I once interviewed with a small MSP owned and run by a brilliant business woman here in Orlando, who, although savvy, knew almost nothing about the technologies that ran her company. Not that she needed to know. She had a team of young, enthusiastic techs who ran that entire side of the business. Two of these young techs sat down to the interview with me while she examined my resume (I can write an entire post about bad interviewing practices, which includes beginning the interview by "looking over the resume." You should have done that already). She ridiculed my job-hopping: "Looks like you don't stay much of anywhere past two years or so."
To her credit, she listened thereafter to every word I had to say, and even took notes. I pointed to the two young techs across the table and said, "How long have you guys been working here? More than two years?" They both smiled and nodded. "Okay, so I can tell you right now that they have learned everything they're going to learn here. They know your entire business, your entire tech stack, and likely the tech stack of every client you have." Again, they nodded, to her this time. "That means that, so long as they keep working here, they're not going to learn anything new. The only reason they keep working for you is either because they like working for you, or they're afraid to move on."
Without any shock or amazement, she said, "So you're saying that job hopping in tech is perfectly acceptable?"
"Within certain sectors of tech, yes. If you want stability you'll find it in very technical roles or skills that only a handful of companies have need of, and those workers stay in those roles for decades. These two," I gestured toward the techs, "could learn a lot more, and probably get a pay bump, by switching to another company, even if they fulfilled the same role. There's simply no incentive to stay longer."
She wrote this down. We continued, a productive discussion, but what I expected, happened: her open position would not have moved me forward, and the abilities and responsibilities I hoped to cultivate did not exist at this company.
This is the difference between sectors. I once knew an engineer at Siemens who spent over fifteen years writing Verilog to define circuit board pathways. Over fifteen years at the same company. Not because he was afraid of change, but because there are maybe a few thousand people in the country with serious Verilog expertise, and maybe 75 companies that genuinely need it. He had zero incentive to leave. His skills were rare enough that staying put was his best move. The MSP's young techs faced the opposite reality: their skills were fungible, their learning curve was flat, and their compensation ceiling was visible from day one.
Daniel