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The Vocabulary of Leaving

Jump ship. To jump ship is to leave one company for another.

Move on. A person who moves on leaves a job. The phrase carries no blame.

Job hopper. This is someone who changes jobs often.

Poach. To poach is to hire someone away from another company.

Free agent. This is a person who is not tied to any employer.

Hired gun. This is an expert who is brought in for one job.

Golden handcuffs. These are pay or benefits that make it costly to leave.

Don’t burn your bridges. Leave on good terms, because you may need these people again.

In 1956 William H. Whyte published The Organization Man. He set aside the workers and white-collar people who “only work for The Organization.” “The ones I am talking about,” he wrote, “belong to it as well.” They had chosen “to take the vows of organization life.”

Whyte had written about the same managers in Fortune in 1953. One company president told him: “We never plan to transfer, and we never make a man move. Of course, he kills his career if he doesn’t.”

The Transfer Portal

The NCAA transfer portal opened on October 15, 2018. It is a database for college athletes who want to change schools. In 2021 new rules let Division I athletes in football, basketball, men’s ice hockey and baseball transfer once without sitting out a year.

More than 15,000 athletes from all sports entered the portal in its first year. In 2021 the Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin said: “We have free agency in college football.” The Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said: “It’s total chaos right now.”

The Brand Called You

In 1997 the management writer Tom Peters published “The Brand Called You” in the magazine Fast Company. “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.,” he wrote. “Our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” He also told readers: “Forget your job title.”

Ocean’s Eleven

In Ocean’s Eleven (2001), directed by Steven Soderbergh, Danny Ocean and Rusty recruit eight accomplices for one job. Each is a specialist. There is a con man, an explosives expert, a surveillance technician, an acrobat and a pickpocket. The target is the money of three Las Vegas casinos.

After the heist, the team “contemplates their victory before going their separate ways.” The film is a remake of the 1960 Rat Pack film. It earned $450.7 million worldwide.

Tiger Team

A tiger team is “a team of specialists assembled to work on a specific goal.” A 1964 aerospace paper by J. R. Dempsey, W. A. Davis, A. S. Crossfield and Walter C. Williams used the term and defined it.

The paper described “a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem or simulation.”

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning

In 1965 the American psychologist Bruce Tuckman published “Developmental sequence in small groups” in the Psychological Bulletin. He was then at the Naval Medical Research Institute. The paper named four stages in the life of a group: forming, storming, norming and performing.

In 1977 Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning. A summary on infed.org, drawing on Donelson Forsyth’s textbook, describes it this way: “Adjourning involves dissolution. It entails the termination of roles, the completion of tasks and reduction of dependency.”

Mercenaries

General William Westmoreland testified before the Gates Commission, which planned an all-volunteer army. He said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. The economist Milton Friedman stopped him: “General, would you rather command an army of slaves?”

Friedman went on: “If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general.” He added: “we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.” Friedman told the story in his memoir, Two Lucky People.

The draft ended, and the all-volunteer force came into effect on July 1, 1973.

Two Weeks’ Notice

An American who quits a job is expected to give two weeks’ notice. Yet in most cases no law requires it. The employment nonprofit Legal Aid at Work says “there is no legal requirement that you do so.”

The custom rests on other reasons. Minnesota’s labor department says: “Courtesy and time to collect accrued benefits are reasons why notice is given.”

Noncompete Agreements in California

With a few exceptions set out in the law, Section 16600 of the California Business and Professions Code makes void “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind.” The rule dates from 1872. Since 2024 the text adds that noncompete clauses in employment are void “no matter how narrowly tailored,” unless an exception applies.

In practice, an employee in California can leave for a competitor. The former employer cannot use a noncompete clause to stop the move. One California employment law firm writes that the rule has enabled tech workers “to job hop.” It links the rule to the start-up culture of Silicon Valley.