Company loyalty is dead. Switch jobs every 18 months to two years. [Career]

I already said this in “Don’t End the Week With Nothing,” but today I read “Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less.” The headline really is the article.

Always be ready to job hop if you are in most of corporate America. You are unlikely to advance if you keep the same job for too long. Company loyalty may have been a thing when your parents or grandparents were in their employment primes, but it isn’t anymore.

This is also why you need to live in a big city. Big cities have more companies and opportunities in them. The dating advantages of big cities are well known, but the employment advantages are similar. Avoid most jobs that will take you to small or rural places, unless maybe your industry depends on them.

The best book about modern corporate America is The Alliance. Don’t be a complete dirtbag, but do set expectations appropriately on both sides.

Corporate loyalty is dead. Loyalty in marriage is close to dead and is at best an uncertain gamble.

A few big companies are alleged to pay people in ways that reward staying for long periods of time. Some of the name tech companies are supposed to do this. But that’s not the majority of companies, and if you can get a 50 – 100% raise, take that money.

This is a short post because there isn’t much to say. The evidence is in front of you. You are only as good as your next opportunity.

Don’t be too eager to get a corporate job and wear a suit [Career][lifestyle]

In an earlier post I wrote, “Don’t End the Week With Nothing,” and a user named USMVP00 wrote:

Any chance of there being a TRP Finance sub? I’m trying to learn as much as possible before I get to College and have to pick a major

At the time I said:

Career advice doesn’t necessarily have to be “Red Pill” per se. The big thing in today’s world is about YOU. No one else will look after you but you. We’ve had decades of time in which implicit promises between companies and employees have been voided. Whether that is good or bad, it means that you always have to look out for yourself and realize that no one else will.

That doesn’t mean you should be an asshole or screw people over, but it does mean that intangible like good will are shit and it does mean that you need to work proactively to advance your career.

Finally, career and money aren’t everything. If you’re young take cool fun jobs as bartenders or lifeguards or shit like that. I have done a lot wrong in my life but going from swim team -> life guard was like a free spot at the free pussy buffet. Don’t be too eager to put on slacks and a shirt and go to an office every day. You have the rest of your life for that, if it’s your path. Do some crazy shit. Work on a cruise ship. Bartender. Tour guide.

That got me thinking about career and life path. I’ve been working in offices for a long time now but before I did that I started out being a lifeguard in high school and college and those were awesome gigs at the time. Every summer and sometimes during the school year I’d get paid to sit in a position of authority and check out / chat up girls (when I wasn’t on the guard chair obviously). The atmosphere at most pools, especially outdoor pools, is great, and lots of girls want to crush on the lifeguard. At the time I had very basic guy game that was still better than like 90% of guys that age so it worked. “Hey, how’s it going?” and “Hey, how’s your summer?” were good. I was scared of hot girls but I was also horny enough to very slowly escalate them into sex in a way that seems pussy now but then seemed titanic.

I’ve got above-average work ethic and above-average workout ethics. In high school I swam, but I was never the fastest or best swimmer, just like I’m not the tallest or best-looking guy. In high school and college I also had almost no money so I had to work. For much of that time I had no car or a shit car but you know what? It didn’t matter much. It would’ve been nice to have a sweet ride but that was not an option, not until much later. Cars are super expensive and many people working low-level jobs end up working to pay for their car instead of working to pay for their lives. My clothes were cheap shit and didn’t fit me well. Didn’t matter.

Being a lifeguard at the right place and the right time helped put me in the right place to meet lots of girls I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Having little money and lots of access to girls is better from a getting laid perspective than the inverse. Being a swimmer helped me in college because I swam on the club team and hung out with lots of other swimmers, including lots of cute girls.

During the school year my college game was basically hosting parties at the swim house every week or two and inviting any cute girls I could meet to the parties. When we weren’t having parties my game was, “We’re having a few beers at the swim house tonight, you should come by at 8.” Seriously that was pretty much it, beyond chitchat about classes, majors, and random gossip.

This strategy won’t work for everyone. The basic idea is adaptable to a wide range of interests. I know lots of guys who worked as bartenders when they could’ve been (unpaid) interns or doing other jobs that didn’t bring them into contact w/ hot girls. Smart guys choose their jobs not only for income but also for freedom and other kinds of fringe benefits. Working in restaurants seems like a mixed bag (it can leave you really tired and drained), but I know guys who’d flirt with their customers, leave a phone # on a copy of receipt, and scoop up a couple new girls a month just by showing up and doing a little low-level escalation.

I know guys I went to college with who were way too eager to get in a suit and meet some girl (who they’d get bored with in a couple years anyway) and move to the suburbs so they could drive 45 minutes – 1 hour to work each way. Bad move. A lot of those guys have crises of various kinds imposed by their unthinking acceptance of whatever they think the “right” or “prestigious” path is. Being a lifeguard can be perceived as less prestigious than a lot of internships or low-level, office-based jobs. Who gives a shit? If you want to get laid more it’s great.

Let me step aside to look at that kind of life as some women will see it. Some women try to convince themselves they “love” a guy who happens to have a good job or lots of money, because they think they should be in love with him. Also a bad move that often ends poorly. Women are susceptible to many variants of the crises men face. A woman who marries young, moves out to the suburbs, has a kid or two with a boring guy working a boring job and who gets fat driving back and forth is plenty likely to GTFO of that situation sooner or later. You would too if you were her.

For the younger guys reading this, don’t be too eager to start working in a lab or corporation. I know because I see and work with young guys making that mistake right in front of me. You have your entire life for that, later on. Eventually you will likely need a real job or consulting gig or similar. There are not very many 50-year-old bartenders or lifeguards. When you’re in high school and college, think about the jobs that will help you build social skills and that will get you interacting with lots of hot girls. The corporate world has some hot women in it but sleeping with them is usually not a good idea and competition for them is fierce. Why it’s not smart to sex up women you work with has been widely covered here, and if you haven’t read about why and can’t figure it out on your own, I don’t know what to tell you. Learn how to learn, I guess.

Your career and your lifestyle are linked. You can’t think about one without thinking about the other. If one is unbalanced it will be very hard to balance it with the other.

Eventually you will probably need a conventional job, job skills, and career or skill path. The number of guys who really go their own way career-wise is small. The guys (and girls) who jump for conventional career stuff too eagerly often come to regret it later, just like the hard-core party animals who get laid all the time but wreck their teens and 20s with partying often come to regret not building real skills and careers. It’s possible to party too hard and it’s possible to not party enough. It’s possible to study too hard and it’s possible to not study enough.

Don’t waste much time on video games

This one is controversial but the topic is so important I can’t ignore it. You’ll quickly understand its relationship to “Most guys are pussies. Be different” or “Today’s men are not nearly as strong as their dads were, researchers say.” The original title was even, “A lot of guys are losers and it’s easy to be better than many (and maybe most) of them.”

I was fucking this too-young-for-a-relationship girl who’s recently out of college, and she told me a little about her college experience and the guys she’d seen. You’ve probably seen the “college experience” in movies and TV, but for most people, and especially guys, college is not like that. Most of the guys at her school were not the masterful party guys of legend. In her rendition most are losers, and she described fucking a guy who would apparently rather play video games than fuck her. She eventually broke up with him because she got irritated by the way he’d spend all night playing video games with guys, rather than actually fucking her. He didn’t get another girlfriend after her.

It appears that a reasonably large number of guys would rather play video games than have sex. If you look at most guys, and I mean literally look at them, this may not be that big a surprise. The average American guy is 5′ 8″ and weighs 195 pounds. He’s a video-game-playing lardass.

There are a large number of frustrated, attractive women who correctly complain that there aren’t “good” guys available. I used to think those women were full of shit… now I’m not so sure. I’ve heard too many stories like this girl’s to think that they’re all delusional or princesses. I hear too many stories about fatass guys and video games and a total lack of ambition to think all of the complaints are exaggerated. I’m also not that great a guy (I think) yet I seem to have few problems getting with women, including ones who should be too young and hot to be interested in me. A lot of them say the same basic thing: I’m not a giant pussy like other guys, I’m not a fatass, I have a career, and they can “just tell” I like sex and am good at it.

If you’re a guy and you want to be a man, the road is sometimes hard but always worth it. It’s especially worth it because most guys seem to abrogate being a man in favor of video games or other fundamentally masturbatory pursuits. Listening to this very pretty girl talk about guys who preferred video games to fucking her seemed crazy to me. Yet it’s apparently common. You can probably do better than those guys if you try. There are reasons why guys who apply themselves often find great success fast. Not all do. Some guys are profoundly fucked up and it will take them a long time to restructure themselves. But many aren’t. They just need a kick in the ass.

Now, you can argue that this girl was trying to boost my ego by talking shit about her exes. Maybe she was. But if so, she wasted her time cause I don’t give a fuck. Her story jives with the data on men. Men are now unemployed at greater rates than women. Men on average do worse in school. The video game obsessives are almost all men. It’s not hard to be better than those guys. If you lift, practice reasonable social skills, don’t eat sugar, and pay attention to how you dress, you’re doing to do better than at least a substantial percentage of guys and maybe most guys. Mastering the basics is easy. Most guys don’t. In any field always start with the basics.

Like I said, a lot of horny and unsatisfied girls are out there. As you master the game you will discover more and more who they are and why they’re justifiably unsatisfied.

To be sure it is possible to play some video games and be all right with women and the rest of your life. But I get the impression that a lot of guys are playing video games like it’s their job. That’s a mistake. Skills and habits compound over time. But no one cares about your video game feats. Use video games to waste time and during your dead time if you want, but be very careful that they don’t consume your real life and real being. You only live once.

Overall, videogames, like smartphones and sometimes the Internet more generally, impede your ability to do Deep Work and for that reason they should be avoided.

“Don’t End the Week With Nothing” [Career]

“Don’t End the Week With Nothing” is some of the best career advice anywhere. It is too long to excerpt effectively and you should read the whole thing. Nonetheless,

One of the reasons developers have embraced OSS so much is because it gives you portable capital between companies: if your work is sitting on Github, even if you leave one job, you can take it with you to your next job. Previously this happened pretty widely but generally under the table. (Is there any programmer who does not have a snippets folder or their own private library for scratching that one particular itch?) One of the great wrinkles that OSS throws into this is that OSS is public by default, and that’s game changing.

Why? Because when your work is in public, you can show it to people. That’s often the best way to demonstrate that you’re capable of doing work like it.

Telling people you can do great work is easy: any idiot can do it, and many idiots do. Having people tell people you do great work is an improvement. It suffers because measuring individual productivity on a team effort is famously difficult, and people often have no particular reason to trust the representations of the people doing the endorsements. . . .

Work you can show off, though, is prima facie evidence of your skills. After your portfolio includes it, your ability to sell your skills gets markedly better. Given that most people’s net worth is almost 100% invested in their personal capital (i.e. if you’re a young engineer the net present value of all future salary absolutely swamps everything in your bank account), this is a fairly radical improvement in your present situation for not a very radical change in how you go about things.

This is particularly good advice because we live in a world in which your employer has zero loyalty to you and will jettison you in an instant if doing so is effective for him or it. Company loyalty is dead and has been dead for decades. Getting a job so you can “pay your dues” is a moronic notion today propagated by employers who want to exploit the worker. Paying your dues means you are lining someone else’s pocket.

Paying your dues is dumb, but if you can get a job that builds skills you should take it. Build your skills and then sell them to the highest bidder. That is how you get to the top of the financial / economic heap. There is an analogy to game here: For many guys who aren’t naturals and don’t have lots of reference experiences banging hot chicks, you build into banging hot chicks by first banging less-hot and suboptimal chicks for experience, skills, practice, ladder climbing, and branch swinging. You’re better off banging than not most of the time. If you don’t have an active harem you should be very wary of the word “standards,” just like if you don’t have a job you should be very wary wary of not getting some kind of gig somewhere doing something.

Back to work stuff though, you need to do at least two things in any modern job: Have skills and be able to demonstrate those skills. Being able to demonstrate those skills means you should not end the week with nothing. You need to be thinking about your portfolio (pretty much every job needs a portfolio now) and how that portfolio applies to your next gig.

This is a particularly timely piece because it’s the end of the year, which means it’s a good time to make a list of everything you’ve accomplished this year and why you accomplished it. You should also make a list of what you’re going to accomplish in the year to come. If you have nothing or too little on your accomplishments list you need to get off the Internet and make a real plan to do what you need to do.

What a portfolio means is going to differ based on your work. Hell even if you’re a bartender you should take pics of the best drinks you make and/or have a bunch of drinks you can make real fast. That is a kinda contrived example but you know what I mean.

You are in a world where your formal credentials, like a university degree, mean surprisingly little and lots of people have them. I have hired and fired many idiots with degrees. You need to set yourself apart and demonstrate that you have real skills. One way to do that is to make sure that what you do is visible in some way, and that you don’t have a lot of weeks where you get to Friday and you aren’t sure WTF happened that week.

“Goodwill” from your employer or clients no longer exists. When someone says they will pay you back down the road they are usually full of shit. Get it now or take your full value elsewhere.

I have other career posts I have been meaning to write, my favorite being that the only way to really get ahead in money and responsibility terms is quitting and getting a new job. Most companies will not bump you by more than 5 – 10% per year, but it is possible to jump by 50 – 100% or more by going from one company to another.

Keeping your financial footprint as small as possible is another good topic. The less you spend the less they own you (the marketing industry already owns you by the way, and if you don’t think so just look at the way people think their car expresses some deep facet of their personality and the personalities of people around them). The three biggest areas of waste are usually housing, cars, and (for younger guys) over-pricey school.

The best cost-benefit things for sleeping with women are clothes that fit, money for drinks, and a gym membership. Those things are orders of magnitude cheaper than cars or “impressive” housing, with “impressive” being defined by some marketing guy.