Latest / Job Hopping with Fexingo: Tenure, Loyalty, and the Modern Career Resume / How Job Hopping Rewires Your Career Decision-Making
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a study from the Journal of Organizational Behavior, published last year, that looked at decision-making speed among workers with different tenure patterns. The headline finding: people who had held three or more jobs in the past decade made career decisions about 40 percent faster than peers who stayed at one company — with no measurable drop in satisfaction with the choice they made. Luna: Forty percent faster and just as happy? That's a pretty compelling stat. What did the researchers attribute that to? Lucas: They coined a term for it — 'decision velocity.' And the idea is that every time you go through a job change, you're forced to evaluate opportunity costs, sunk costs, and expected value in real time. You get faster at that calculus because you practice it more often. The single-company person might do that calculation once every five or ten years. The job hopper does it every eighteen to twenty-four months. Luna: So it's like a muscle you exercise more frequently. But is there a risk of becoming too hasty — making faster but worse decisions? Lucas: The study controlled for that — they measured decision quality through follow-up surveys six months and a year later. The job hoppers weren't regretting their choices more. In fact, they reported slightly lower regret on average. The theory is that frequent practice also improves your ability to gather relevant information and weigh trade-offs efficiently. You learn what signals actually matter versus noise. Lucas: Think about a marketer who jumps from a startup to a mid-size agency to a tech company in five years. Each move forces them to assess: is the culture fit, is the compensation fair relative to market, is the growth trajectory real? After three cycles, they can probably evaluate a new opportunity in a couple of conversations. A person who's been at one firm since 2016 might spend weeks agonising because they have no recent benchmark. Luna: That resonates. I've seen friends who stayed at the same company for a decade struggle to even know what questions to ask when they finally start looking. They don't know the market rate for their role, they don't know what typical equity packages look like. Their frame of reference is stale. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a cognitive bias at play here — the sunk cost fallacy. When you've invested years in one employer, you're more likely to rationalise staying because of the time already put in, even if the future prospects are weak. Job hoppers are less susceptible because they've already proven to themselves that they can walk away from sunk costs. They've done it before. Luna: It's a nice model. Keeps the conversation clean. And listeners who've donated have told us they appreciate not having a sponsor pitch interrupt the flow. Lucas: Alright, back to that marketer with the three jobs in five years. She's also building what behavioral economists call a 'reference set' — a mental library of what work can look like. Every new job expands that set, so when she evaluates an opportunity, she's comparing it against multiple real experiences, not just one. Luna: Which means she's less likely to be swayed by a single bad experience or a single great one. She has a more calibrated view of what's normal. Lucas: Right. And that calibration matters a lot for something like compensation negotiation. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research a few years back found that people who switched jobs more often ended up with higher lifetime earnings, and a big part of that was simply because they had better information about what they were worth. They didn't anchor on their current salary — they anchored on market data. Luna: But there's a counterargument: staying at a company longer lets you build deep relationships and institutional knowledge that can pay off in promotions or internal moves. Doesn't that count for something? Lucas: It absolutely can. But the question is whether those internal moves happen fast enough. The average time between promotions at large companies is about three years. If you're hopping every two years, you might be effectively getting a promotion-equivalent bump each time — plus the external market tends to be more aggressive with raises than internal budgets. The 2025 data from ADP showed that job changers saw median pay increases of 14 percent, versus 5 percent for stayers. Luna: So the decision velocity advantage isn't just cognitive — it's financial. You're making better decisions faster, and those decisions also happen to pay more. Lucas: Exactly. But I want to be careful not to paint this as universally better. The research also found that job hoppers initially had higher stress during the decision period — they just recovered faster. So there's a short-term cost. And for people in industries where tenure is heavily rewarded — like academia, law partnerships, or certain government roles — the calculus might be different. The decision velocity advantage is strongest in fields where skills are portable and compensation is liquid. Luna: Which is most of the corporate world, honestly. Marketing, tech, finance, consulting — those are the sectors where your value is in your expertise, not your length of service. Lucas: And that's a big shift from even twenty years ago. The average tenure at a U.S. company is now about four years. For people under thirty, it's closer to two and a half. So the norm is moving toward more frequent moves anyway. The question becomes: how do you get good at the decision process itself? Luna: Are there structured frameworks the job hoppers in the study used, or was it just intuitive after a while? Lucas: The researchers did interview participants, and a pattern emerged. Experienced job hoppers had a mental checklist they'd refined over time. Things like: 'Does this role stretch a skill I want to build?' 'Is the compensation at least twenty percent above my current total comp?' 'What's the exit path after this role?' They weren't paralysed by trying to optimise every variable — they had heuristics. Luna: Heuristics that the long-tenure folks often lacked. They'd be starting from scratch each time, trying to evaluate everything. Lucas: Exactly. And there's one more piece from the study I found striking. They measured 'decision regret' six months after a move. The job hoppers reported less regret even when the move didn't work out perfectly — because they framed it as a learning experience. They had a growth mindset about career moves. The single-company people were more likely to frame a failed move as a costly mistake. Luna: Which makes sense if you think of your career as a portfolio of experiments versus one long bet. You can afford more failures if each one is small. Lucas: That portfolio metaphor is exactly what some economists use. If you have one job for thirty years, your career is a single concentrated position. If you've had ten jobs, you've diversified your experience, your network, your skills. The downside of any single move is smaller relative to your whole career. Luna: I wonder how this plays out in interviews. Do job hoppers interview better because they're more practiced at selling themselves? Or do they face bias from hiring managers who want stability? Lucas: Both. There's definitely bias — some managers see a resume with short tenures and assume the person is flighty. But the study suggests that job hoppers often overcome that by being better at articulating their narrative. They've told their story more times, so they're more concise and compelling. And they're better at framing each move as a deliberate choice tied to growth, not restlessness. Luna: So the decision velocity advantage extends to the interview room too. They make faster, better decisions about what to say. Lucas: Right. And I think the ultimate takeaway is that if you're early in your career, you should treat every job change as a chance to practice the decision-making muscle. Not just to get a raise, but to get better at evaluating your own priorities. Because that skill compounds. The person who makes ten good career decisions in twenty years is likely to end up in a very different place than the person who makes three. Luna: Even if some of those ten decisions were wrong, the learning from the wrong ones makes the later ones better. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the core insight from the Journal of Organizational Behavior study. Decision velocity isn't about speed for speed's sake — it's about building a better mental model of your own career. The more data points you have, the clearer the pattern becomes. Luna: I'd love to see a follow-up study on whether that velocity holds up in a recession, when the options shrink. But for now, it's a solid argument for not getting too comfortable. Lucas: That would be a great episode. For today, I think the message is: if you're feeling stuck in a decision about whether to stay or go, consider that the act of deciding itself is a skill you can improve. And the only way to improve it is to practice.