Contributing to yet another collection today - in such a big company it’s only logical there should be at least one each week - it struck me that there must be a breakeven point somewhere at which it is most profitable to leave a job.

I drew a graph on the back of an envelope:

The red line (C) is the amount of money you give over the years, as a cumulative total, so the peak at the end of year seven is the total you have given over all of the years you’ve been in the job.

The blue line (D) shows the value of the collection you can expect to have gathered up for you should you choose to leave at any particular time.

So, my theory goes like this. You start in the job at year zero with very little chance of getting anything more than a few pounds from the people on your immediate team. The longer you stay, though, the more you get yourself known throughout the building, and the more guilty people would feel if they didn’t drop some coins in the communal envelope on your behalf. So, the blue line creeps up as the value of your gift increases.

At the same time, though, the amount of money you have given since starting on the job is creeping up, too. Now, let’s imagine the company hits some financial hard times in years two and three and lays people off. You’ll end up contributing to more people than ever before, and your red line shoots up. The blue line drops, though, as the number of people left there to contribute to your own gift diminishes. At this point, you’ll probably find the red and blue lines reach equilibrium (green line B) where the amount of money you have given outnumbers the amount you’re ever likely to get back in the value of your leaving gift. From this point on, you have to get out as quick as you can, as everything that follows has you in deficit, regardless of how many people are re-hired.

Of course, you should have left at year two, where green line A intersects the red and blue lines with the greatest difference. At this point you were the most in credit to the company, and so the difference between the value of your leaving gift, and the amount of money you have contributed to other people’s envelopes is the greatest.

The trick, then, is to know how to spot point A - the tipping point - where the lines begin to converge and you head for equilibrium.

That, or find yourself a job where you’re happy to pay this loyalty tax for time immemorial.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2003 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.