On September 17, 1985, Steve Jobs resigned as chairman of Apple to start a new company, NeXT. Apple sued. It said Jobs had lured five employees, “including senior engineers and marketers,” to join him. It also said he had “secretly planned” to compete with Apple “while pretending loyalty.”
Jobs called the suit “absurd.” “When someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond,” he said. The suit was dismissed before trial.
Since 1979, a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey has followed the same group of Americans. When first interviewed, the 9,964 men and women were ages 14 to 22. By age 58, they had held an average of 12.9 jobs. For the survey, a job is “an uninterrupted period of work with a particular employer.”
Much of the changing happened early. Over 40 percent of these jobs were held from ages 18 to 24.
In November 2021, Lincoln Riley left the University of Oklahoma to become head football coach at USC. He was the first Oklahoma coach since 1946 to leave for another college job. On February 1, 2022, Oklahoma’s quarterback Caleb Williams said he would transfer to USC.
“Getting to know Coach Riley and gaining familiarity with his offense definitely played a part in my selection,” Williams said. Other Oklahoma players, among them Mario Williams and Latrell McCutchin, also followed Riley.
Noah Kravitz wrote for the website PhoneDog and built up 17,000 followers on Twitter as @Phonedog_Noah. When he left, he changed the name of the account to @noahkravitz and kept the followers. In 2011 PhoneDog sued him. It said he owed $340,000, “or about $2.50 per follower per month for eight months.”
The court never decided who owned the followers. The two sides settled in December 2012. The terms were not disclosed, but Kravitz kept control of the account.
Deloitte calls its former employees “Colleagues for life.” In 2018 its U.S. alumni network had more than 200,000 people. In the fiscal year that ended in May 2017, 2,800 former employees came back to work at Deloitte. That was 32 percent more than the year before. Microsoft invites its alumni with the line “Join for the discounts, stay for the connections.”
Returning workers are called “boomerang employees.” In a 2015 survey of more than 1,800 HR professionals, 76 percent said they were more open to hiring former employees than in the past.
In the season 3 finale of Mad Men, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.” (AMC, November 8, 2009), Don Draper and three partners plan to leave Sterling Cooper and start a new agency. They have one weekend to get as many accounts as they can.
Don and Roger Sterling visit Pete Campbell at home. Pete has called in sick to interview with a rival agency. They offer him a junior partnership, and he agrees. Pete joins the new firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and brings his Sterling Cooper clients with him. The new agency first meets in a hotel room at The Pierre.
In 1975 five agents at the William Morris Agency, among them Michael Ovitz, planned to start their own agency. William Morris fired them before they had their financing. They started Creative Artists Agency in a small rented office “outfitted with card tables and folding chairs.” Their wives took turns as receptionist. Sam Weisbord of William Morris said: “this is treason!”
“Several clients followed them over the next few weeks.” The money did not follow at once. The commissions on those clients “stayed at Morris until their agency contracts ran out.”
On November 17, 2023, the board of OpenAI fired its CEO, Sam Altman. Microsoft quickly hired Altman and the co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new AI research team. On November 20, more than 700 of OpenAI’s roughly 770 employees signed a letter. They said they “may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary.”
The letter demanded that the board resign and reinstate Altman and Brockman. On November 20, the chief technology officer, Mira Murati, posted: “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” On November 21, OpenAI announced that Altman would return as CEO. Most of the board was replaced.
McKinsey & Company keeps track of more than 65,000 alumni. It hosts about 180 alumni gatherings each year. It says roughly 90 percent of its former consultants take part regularly in at least some of these programs. In 2025 Fortune counted 18 current Fortune 500 CEOs who had worked at McKinsey.
Many alumni later work with the firm again, often as clients. One senior partner told Fortune: “There isn’t a single major client situation I’m in where there isn’t at least one McKinsey alum involved.” Another said: “When someone becomes a CEO and the stakes are high, they come back to the people they trust.”
“People leave managers, not companies” is a widely repeated saying in American business. A variant recorded in 2002 is “people do not leave their jobs, they leave their bosses.”
The saying appears in First, Break All the Rules (1999) by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman: “It tells us that people leave managers, not companies.” The phrase researcher Barry Popik found the same words in the Washington Times of May 3, 1999. He says the book “probably originated or popularized” the saying. It is not certain who used it first.