The Great Resignation Taught Me Nothing: Why Job Hopping Won't Fix What's Really Broken

The notification lit up my LinkedIn feed like Christmas morning: "Sarah has started a new position as Senior Marketing Manager at InnovateCorp!"
Third job change in eighteen months. Same excited language each time. Same profile photos in new office lobbies. Same inevitable disappointment six months later when the "amazing opportunity" turned out to be the same dysfunction with different business cards.
Sarah isn't alone. The so-called Great Resignation has convinced an entire generation of professionals that the solution to workplace problems is geographical—if you don't like where you are, just move somewhere else. It's the employment equivalent of thinking you can outrun your shadow.
After twenty-three years consulting across Australian businesses from startup chaos to multinational bureaucracy, I've watched this pattern repeat itself hundreds of times. People leave jobs hoping to escape poor management, unclear expectations, toxic cultures, or boring work. They research new companies obsessively, negotiate better packages, and arrive at their next role convinced they've solved their career problems.
Six months later, they're having the same complaints about different people.
Here's what the job-hopping evangelists don't want to acknowledge: most workplace problems aren't location-specific. They're systemic issues that exist across industries, companies, and organizational structures. Changing employers doesn't fix poor communication skills, unclear decision-making processes, or the fundamental tension between individual ambition and collaborative requirements.
The most obvious example is management quality. Every industry survey shows that people leave managers, not companies. So logic suggests that finding better managers would solve the retention crisis, right? Except that management skills are in short supply everywhere, not just at your current workplace.
I've consulted for companies that poached "top talent" from competitors, only to discover that the same people who complained about micromanagement at their previous job now complained about lack of direction in their new role. The individuals hadn't changed, the fundamental management challenges hadn't changed, and predictably, the outcomes didn't change either.
The recruiting industry loves this cycle because it generates endless demand for their services. They've created an entire mythology around "finding the right fit" and "aligning values with culture" that makes job changing seem like personal growth rather than expensive lateral movement.
But here's what actually happens in most job transitions: people trade one set of imperfect working conditions for a different set of imperfect working conditions, usually at a higher salary that temporarily masks the fact that the underlying problems remain unsolved.
Take workplace politics, for example. Every organization above a certain size develops internal dynamics, competing priorities, and personality conflicts. These aren't bugs in the system—they're features of human collaboration at scale. You can't escape them by changing companies; you can only learn to navigate them more effectively.
The same principle applies to boring work, unreasonable deadlines, budget constraints, and technological limitations. These challenges exist everywhere because they're inherent to organizational life, not specific to particular employers. Job hopping gives you temporary relief from familiar frustrations while exposing you to unfamiliar versions of the same fundamental issues.
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