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0 pointswolfgke7y ago0 comments

> I wonder if the added friction of changing your place of work caused by this practice is meant to somewhat counterbalance the heavy incentives engineers have to job-hop in the current climate. Kind of makes sense from the point of view of tech employers.

I am not sure what to think about this claim: it is the other company that prevents you from working for them by this interview process. The current employer has the incentive that you don't leave. The other (potential) employer rather has the incentive to poach you.

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mturmon7y ago

These same employers (famously) had a cartel that prohibited job hopping before - the Jobs/Schmidt email - so it’s not surprising that the system would trend toward the same equilibrium again.

wolfgkeOP7y ago

> These same employers (famously) had a cartel that prohibited job hopping before - the Jobs/Schmidt email - so it’s not surprising that the system would trend toward the same equilibrium again.

This explains this phenomenon plausibly for the FAANG companies. But I think there also exist lots of startups that could easily act as a cartel breaker - to their advantage, since this way they can poach from other companies.

alboy7y ago

Time spent by a new employee learning the ropes is time wasted from the perspective of an individual employer-actor. On the surface, it sounds similar enough to the iterated prisoner's dilemma so I'm inclined to think that a greedy strategy would do poorly here.

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