16 ms·

> So, how does one communicate that they are hirable after running a semi-successful startup for years The fact that you've held a job for more than just 6 mon

> So, how does one communicate that they are hirable after running a semi-successful startup for years The fact that you've held a job for more than just 6 month stints is enough to push you all the way to the front of the line. Most applicants we see just do 6 months here and there. I refuse to hire anyone that hasn't stayed at a company at least 2 years (excluding new grads). 4 years is pretty much a unicorn nowadays.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
I've seen two types who fit the six month pattern: 1 Devs who simply can't code and get fired/managed out/not contract renewed 2 Unlucky people who don't put up with crappy work environments The first groups should be easy to weed out with decent interviews. The second are a goldmine as long as your company isn't as dysfunctional as the companies that drove them away previously.
- amyjess 10y ago
  Or, for that matter: 3 Unlucky people who have a tendency to get hired just before the company changes course and begins laying people off That was the case with my last employer. Right after I was hired, our revenue sources began to dry up, and we couldn't stop the bleeding, so eventually a third of the company, including me, got laid off. I lasted 15 months before the axe fell, and I was worried when applying for new positions that my resume would be thrown out because I was there less than two years.
  - derefr 10y ago
    As just this sort of person, I get the sense that I'm probably looking for new employment the wrong way, because I only start hearing about opportunities at startups when those startups are fait-accompli dead-in-the-water. My hypothesis: most startups don't bother advertising openings publicly while they can get by using private word-of-mouth in their network. Since I'm not well-enough-connected, none of the private word-of-mouth ever reaches me; so I only ever hear about these companies once their well of private leads has run dry—which really should be taken as a vote-of-no-confidence from their network.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  I've found that the type of person who "[doesn't] put up with crappy work environments" is often the type of person who finds all sorts of perfectly fine work environments to be crappy.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I'm that person. For me it's the code quality, attitude and direction that matter the most. There is an awful lot of terrible code out there and an awful lot of companies that are either oblivious to it or lying about it until post hire. I can handle terrible code, but if there isn't a solid plan in place to improve it for whatever reason (or if it's getting worse) then I'm out of there.
    - jimmaswell 10y ago
      Personally, I don't foresee caring this much about the quality of the codebase I'm hired onto, the direction of the projects, etc. as long as I'm getting paid for it.
    - MyNameIsFred 10y ago
      So you're an example. What's your rate of job turnover with a policy like that?
      - flukus 10y ago
        It varies from years to months/weeks, although a lot of the months ones were contract jobs. My longest stint was 3-4 years, which I only left because I relocated. The shortest is weeks, this is at places that have mountains of technical debt as well as other problems, like managers that don't understand the limitations of that technical debt and want everything done yesterday. The last job was 18 months. despite a lot of bad code I had a free hand to add gradual improvements. The current one is looking to be considerably shorter.
    - abawany 10y ago
      I can empathize. You have one life to live so why be miserable? When a company's management disrespects its talent by imposing on them one or more of bad processes, malicious and/or incompetent minders, poor technology, and other non-technical obstacles, you enable and enforce this behavior by staying. There is only so much one can ask before accepting an offer, especially when some have no problems with lying. I resent the implication that I must agree to be voluntarily Shanghai-ed by the omnipotent employer for fear that I turn off some nebulous good prospect down the road. I hope the people who I encounter in desirable employment situations in the future evaluate history individually vs. do the whiteboard-interview lazy equivalent.
- angryasian 10y ago
  I don't get this at all. As developers we should always be looking out for our best interests. If you think you can find something better for more money do it. The whole idea of company loyalty is bs in my opinion. They generally aren't loyal to you.
  - piva00 10y ago
    I kinda agree with you on that but there's also another point: when a company hires you it takes some time for you to be really productive, in the meantime you must be a "loss" or just a tad bit of breaking even. From my previous job as a tech lead I've seen this ramp up time taking from 1 month (for a very well defined position with the perfect match) up to 6 months (someone who was curious about a new line of work and had to learn a lot but was a very intelligent person). So of course, company loyalty is bullshit but there's also a point where your contribution almost didn't pay off their effort and money, those are the people I'd avoid hiring. Anywhere after 1 to 1.5 years at the same job and I'd not bat an eye, many experiences lesser than an year would not put me off instantly just by looking at a CV but I'd definitely take more time to discover what happened.
  - timv 10y ago
    Your immediate self interest may not end up being your long term self interest (or it might, I don't profess to be an expert on your career) As a hiring manager it's not in my interest to hire someone who is likely to leave in 6-12 months. If I have a team that is growing, then I am already spending a considerable portion of my time recruiting, I can't afford to have to rehire my whole team every single year. I do want people who have personal drive and high standards - who won't put up with a toxic workplace. So if you've left 1 or 2 places after 6-12 months, then that could be a good sign, and I'll probably get you in for an interview and ask about it. But if you never stay somewhere for more than a year, then I don't like my chances of being the place that breaks the pattern, and it's unlikely that I will bring you in for what is intended to be a permanent position. While I can absolutely understand why someone might want to jump around every 6 months for better pay, don't expect me to sign up to be the next stop on that trip.
  - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
angersock 10y ago
Out of curiosity, why do you think that that is? How do you feel about that?
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  Hiring and training is expensive. Contrary to what most people think of themselves, they aren't capable of hitting the ground running. If their history is indicative of their career with my company, I have an expectation that they are going to cost me money, not make it.
vonmoltke 10y ago
What specialty are you hiring for? Is it something about the people in that area? I have personally worked for two companies in my 14-year career, and most people I have worked with have had similar tenure lengths. I do embedded/systems/scientific-type work, though.
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  I do web development, but I'm not involved with any of the designer hiring, which I understand to be more of an expectation of short term contracting. I hire for back end web-dev/dev-ops. We do long term contracting with brick and mortar businesses building internal efficiency web apps. Web-dev tends to be more of a "startup of the week" field, so it's harder to find people that fit my "formula". Part of it is that my background is originally in finance, where the formula is 2 years at Bank A, 2 years at Bank B, 2 years at Bank A, etc. taking a 20% pay boost each time you switch.
ep103 10y ago
Heh, I've yet to work for a company where management stayed stabled for 2 years, 4 would be a pipe dream.
- eru 10y ago
  Google seems stable enough.
  - ep103 10y ago
    Unfortunately, I don't work for Google. But if you're offering... :)
    - eru 10y ago
      Googlers are mostly happy to give referrals. After all it's almost no work, and the possibility of a referral bonus. However, I am about to move to Bloomberg.
overcast 10y ago
After twelve years at the same company, I must be some type of ultra grand wizard unicorn.
- mateo411 10y ago
  You are a dodecacorn!
  - overcast 10y ago
    Sweet, I'll add it to my resume!
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  Triceratops.
cableshaft 10y ago
Here's what the last 6 years of my resume look like: * 1.5 years - Startup I joined crashed and burned * 0.5 years - Contract work for web design firm while I went back to university, they couldn't get their clients to pay their invoices * 1.0 years - Worked for the university while I finished my degree * 1.0 years - Startup I joined crashed and burned * 1.5 years - Small company that was doing well, but proceeded to have one of its worse years as it lost all but one of its clients, eventually laid off 75% of its staff * 0.75 years - Contract work for department in enterprise corporation that decided to cancel its own internal development and fire everyone after the lead developer quit * 1.1 years - Current job, Fortune 500 corporation, still going well for now, but I'm expecting the sky to fall at any minute considering my luck.
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  Hey now, keep your head up. I worked almost two years for a government agency that went out of business. :)
- tamana 10y ago
  Let me rephrasethar for you: * 5.5 yrs of contract work as proprietor of Cableshaft Technology * Gig 1 * Gig 2 * ....
- tener 10y ago
  Just short the stock of your current company, profit will come :)
- toadi 10y ago
  I work on projects not on jobs. Meaning I develop something bring it life and handover to operations. This means I work on projects taking 3 months to 3 years. It all depends. I don't care about jobs. I just like to build things. 99% of my projects I work until delivery. Even when I hate it. This is the reason I always say don't like to the time I worked for something. I finnish and deliver.
xophishox 10y ago
Company I come from I was at 5 1/2 years, through 2 departments, 3 managers, 2 CTO's, and a number of just fucked up things in general. The company I'm going to even highlighted that me being somewhere for 6 years was unheard of today, especially to have put up with everything I went through at that place.
segmondy 10y ago
> 4 years is pretty much a unicorn nowadays. I've been at my company for >= + years, but I can tell you that 4 years is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes people that stay for a long time are people who are no good and know it, they have found a safe environment that tolerates their incompetence so they never leave! I say this as someone who has interviewed people with 10+ yrs experience and who have stayed at once location for a long time. Most of them had no idea what is currently going on in the industry, heck, they didn't even have the fundamentals down or claim to have forgotten it all. I rather get a solid programmer for 1 year than an incompetent one for 5.
- louthy 10y ago
  That's unlikely (but not impossible) to be true for founders. Anything that's going 5+ years has some semblance of quality behind it.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Not in the enterprise world, a lot of terrible stuff lumbers along because of the huge gap between software users and software purchasers.
    - MyNameIsFred 10y ago
      Sometimes its just funding decisions made years in advance and "we've already spent too much on this to not to put up with it".
bbarn 10y ago
Yeah, it would be great if people were dedicated to one company for a long time, but that isn't our field anymore. Companies come and go very fast. Move fast break things means breaking companies some times, and fail fast means fail to be able to keep the good people you went through so much effort to get and afford. All of these new companies starting up look greener to devs and a lot of the time they are. As a developer, you can hitch your wagon to a fair bet, or take a risk and go to the place that might be awesome. It's a real big ask to assume everyone who's good gets only long term jobs at great places. Good people don't stay long if the job isn't good - they don't need to. The logical reason to want someone who stays at a job a long time is that you want to feel like your investment in that person is going to pay off. I challenge that and say that you don't really need to invest in a developer (up front I mean) if it's a good development job. You point them at the problem, help them understand the business case, and if they need more than a week to ramp up in the code base with your team, either A. they suck, or B. your code base sucks.
eropple 10y ago
This feels to me like a rationale for trying to get something for nothing, to be honest. Why would a quality engineer with an understanding of their worth stay at a company for two years when the next company's offering 20% more after twelve months? "Make hay while the sun shines."
- derefr 10y ago
  Boy, what I'd give for a career trajectory that looks like that. But I'm not moving to the US any time soon (my family is quite happy here), and my local market caps out at ~$110k for "senior" devs. It's annoyingly hard to find remote jobs working for US firms that pay US salaries.
  - eru 10y ago
    Apparently you wouldn't give enough.. I'm not in the US, and not an American citizen, but I got a similar trajectory from moving around globally. (Not a criticism of you, just saying that you made your choice.)
    - derefr 10y ago
      Honestly, a "choice" between a pay-raise and a marriage isn't much of a choice.
      - eru 10y ago
        It is a choice, just an exceptionally easy one. Most of the important decisions in life are actually easy to make, I think. (Just sometimes hard to live with.) I took my marriage with me. But she knew from the start what she was in for.
  - eropple 10y ago
    FWIW, I'm not a senior dev, if I went back to FT I'd be somewhere between lead/staff and principal and I've steered my career towards in-demand areas (mobile for a while, then devops/platform engineering). The reason I saw salary bumps the way I did was because I negotiate hard and I didn't specialize, but rather learned the new trends and jumped on them. That said, I feel you on the lack of remote gigs; a big part of why I went towards consulting is the opportunity to go screw off to somewhere warm for a month or two--I don't have a wife or kids at the moment--and work remotely. If it fits your skillset and your temperament, it might be worth a shake.
eru 10y ago
I'd stay longer at companies, if they were as eager to increase my compensation while staying as they are for when I am switching.
raverbashing 10y ago
> I refuse to hire anyone that hasn't stayed at a company at least 2 years (excluding new grads) Then you're selecting for people that care more about a paycheck than the work they're doing Also, I was let go after a couple of months in a small company because they closed the office I worked on, my fault I guess
- SoapSeller 10y ago
  I always thought that the opposite is true - people who care about their paycheck jumps ship every couple of months to improve their paycheck(it easier to get a raise in a new job than in your current one, right?)
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Not so easy depending on the circumstances Of course it's a bonus, but different locations may pay less
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  > Then you're selecting for people that care more about a paycheck than the work they're doing You can only go through so many companies before you need to acknowledge: "maybe it's me, not them".

quantumhobbit 10y ago

I've seen two types who fit the six month pattern: 1 Devs who simply can't code and get fired/managed out/not contract renewed 2 Unlucky people who don't put up with crappy work environments The first groups should be easy to weed out with decent interviews. The second are a goldmine as long as your company isn't as dysfunctional as the companies that drove them away previously.

amyjess 10y ago
Or, for that matter: 3 Unlucky people who have a tendency to get hired just before the company changes course and begins laying people off That was the case with my last employer. Right after I was hired, our revenue sources began to dry up, and we couldn't stop the bleeding, so eventually a third of the company, including me, got laid off. I lasted 15 months before the axe fell, and I was worried when applying for new positions that my resume would be thrown out because I was there less than two years.
- derefr 10y ago
  As just this sort of person, I get the sense that I'm probably looking for new employment the wrong way, because I only start hearing about opportunities at startups when those startups are fait-accompli dead-in-the-water. My hypothesis: most startups don't bother advertising openings publicly while they can get by using private word-of-mouth in their network. Since I'm not well-enough-connected, none of the private word-of-mouth ever reaches me; so I only ever hear about these companies once their well of private leads has run dry—which really should be taken as a vote-of-no-confidence from their network.
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
I've found that the type of person who "[doesn't] put up with crappy work environments" is often the type of person who finds all sorts of perfectly fine work environments to be crappy.
- flukus 10y ago
  I'm that person. For me it's the code quality, attitude and direction that matter the most. There is an awful lot of terrible code out there and an awful lot of companies that are either oblivious to it or lying about it until post hire. I can handle terrible code, but if there isn't a solid plan in place to improve it for whatever reason (or if it's getting worse) then I'm out of there.
  - jimmaswell 10y ago
    Personally, I don't foresee caring this much about the quality of the codebase I'm hired onto, the direction of the projects, etc. as long as I'm getting paid for it.
  - MyNameIsFred 10y ago
    So you're an example. What's your rate of job turnover with a policy like that?
    - flukus 10y ago
      It varies from years to months/weeks, although a lot of the months ones were contract jobs. My longest stint was 3-4 years, which I only left because I relocated. The shortest is weeks, this is at places that have mountains of technical debt as well as other problems, like managers that don't understand the limitations of that technical debt and want everything done yesterday. The last job was 18 months. despite a lot of bad code I had a free hand to add gradual improvements. The current one is looking to be considerably shorter.
  - abawany 10y ago
    I can empathize. You have one life to live so why be miserable? When a company's management disrespects its talent by imposing on them one or more of bad processes, malicious and/or incompetent minders, poor technology, and other non-technical obstacles, you enable and enforce this behavior by staying. There is only so much one can ask before accepting an offer, especially when some have no problems with lying. I resent the implication that I must agree to be voluntarily Shanghai-ed by the omnipotent employer for fear that I turn off some nebulous good prospect down the road. I hope the people who I encounter in desirable employment situations in the future evaluate history individually vs. do the whiteboard-interview lazy equivalent.
angryasian 10y ago
I don't get this at all. As developers we should always be looking out for our best interests. If you think you can find something better for more money do it. The whole idea of company loyalty is bs in my opinion. They generally aren't loyal to you.
- piva00 10y ago
  I kinda agree with you on that but there's also another point: when a company hires you it takes some time for you to be really productive, in the meantime you must be a "loss" or just a tad bit of breaking even. From my previous job as a tech lead I've seen this ramp up time taking from 1 month (for a very well defined position with the perfect match) up to 6 months (someone who was curious about a new line of work and had to learn a lot but was a very intelligent person). So of course, company loyalty is bullshit but there's also a point where your contribution almost didn't pay off their effort and money, those are the people I'd avoid hiring. Anywhere after 1 to 1.5 years at the same job and I'd not bat an eye, many experiences lesser than an year would not put me off instantly just by looking at a CV but I'd definitely take more time to discover what happened.
- timv 10y ago
  Your immediate self interest may not end up being your long term self interest (or it might, I don't profess to be an expert on your career) As a hiring manager it's not in my interest to hire someone who is likely to leave in 6-12 months. If I have a team that is growing, then I am already spending a considerable portion of my time recruiting, I can't afford to have to rehire my whole team every single year. I do want people who have personal drive and high standards - who won't put up with a toxic workplace. So if you've left 1 or 2 places after 6-12 months, then that could be a good sign, and I'll probably get you in for an interview and ask about it. But if you never stay somewhere for more than a year, then I don't like my chances of being the place that breaks the pattern, and it's unlikely that I will bring you in for what is intended to be a permanent position. While I can absolutely understand why someone might want to jump around every 6 months for better pay, don't expect me to sign up to be the next stop on that trip.
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago

angersock 10y ago

Out of curiosity, why do you think that that is? How do you feel about that?

lloyd-christmas 10y ago
Hiring and training is expensive. Contrary to what most people think of themselves, they aren't capable of hitting the ground running. If their history is indicative of their career with my company, I have an expectation that they are going to cost me money, not make it.

vonmoltke 10y ago

What specialty are you hiring for? Is it something about the people in that area? I have personally worked for two companies in my 14-year career, and most people I have worked with have had similar tenure lengths. I do embedded/systems/scientific-type work, though.

lloyd-christmas 10y ago
I do web development, but I'm not involved with any of the designer hiring, which I understand to be more of an expectation of short term contracting. I hire for back end web-dev/dev-ops. We do long term contracting with brick and mortar businesses building internal efficiency web apps. Web-dev tends to be more of a "startup of the week" field, so it's harder to find people that fit my "formula". Part of it is that my background is originally in finance, where the formula is 2 years at Bank A, 2 years at Bank B, 2 years at Bank A, etc. taking a 20% pay boost each time you switch.

ep103 10y ago

Heh, I've yet to work for a company where management stayed stabled for 2 years, 4 would be a pipe dream.

eru 10y ago
Google seems stable enough.
- ep103 10y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't work for Google. But if you're offering... :)
  - eru 10y ago
    Googlers are mostly happy to give referrals. After all it's almost no work, and the possibility of a referral bonus. However, I am about to move to Bloomberg.

overcast 10y ago

After twelve years at the same company, I must be some type of ultra grand wizard unicorn.

mateo411 10y ago
You are a dodecacorn!
- overcast 10y ago
  Sweet, I'll add it to my resume!
lloyd-christmas 10y ago
Triceratops.

cableshaft 10y ago

Here's what the last 6 years of my resume look like: * 1.5 years - Startup I joined crashed and burned * 0.5 years - Contract work for web design firm while I went back to university, they couldn't get their clients to pay their invoices * 1.0 years - Worked for the university while I finished my degree * 1.0 years - Startup I joined crashed and burned * 1.5 years - Small company that was doing well, but proceeded to have one of its worse years as it lost all but one of its clients, eventually laid off 75% of its staff * 0.75 years - Contract work for department in enterprise corporation that decided to cancel its own internal development and fire everyone after the lead developer quit * 1.1 years - Current job, Fortune 500 corporation, still going well for now, but I'm expecting the sky to fall at any minute considering my luck.

SmellTheGlove 10y ago
Hey now, keep your head up. I worked almost two years for a government agency that went out of business. :)
tamana 10y ago
Let me rephrasethar for you: * 5.5 yrs of contract work as proprietor of Cableshaft Technology * Gig 1 * Gig 2 * ....
tener 10y ago
Just short the stock of your current company, profit will come :)
toadi 10y ago
I work on projects not on jobs. Meaning I develop something bring it life and handover to operations. This means I work on projects taking 3 months to 3 years. It all depends. I don't care about jobs. I just like to build things. 99% of my projects I work until delivery. Even when I hate it. This is the reason I always say don't like to the time I worked for something. I finnish and deliver.

xophishox 10y ago

Company I come from I was at 5 1/2 years, through 2 departments, 3 managers, 2 CTO's, and a number of just fucked up things in general. The company I'm going to even highlighted that me being somewhere for 6 years was unheard of today, especially to have put up with everything I went through at that place.

segmondy 10y ago

> 4 years is pretty much a unicorn nowadays. I've been at my company for >= + years, but I can tell you that 4 years is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes people that stay for a long time are people who are no good and know it, they have found a safe environment that tolerates their incompetence so they never leave! I say this as someone who has interviewed people with 10+ yrs experience and who have stayed at once location for a long time. Most of them had no idea what is currently going on in the industry, heck, they didn't even have the fundamentals down or claim to have forgotten it all. I rather get a solid programmer for 1 year than an incompetent one for 5.

louthy 10y ago
That's unlikely (but not impossible) to be true for founders. Anything that's going 5+ years has some semblance of quality behind it.
- flukus 10y ago
  Not in the enterprise world, a lot of terrible stuff lumbers along because of the huge gap between software users and software purchasers.
  - MyNameIsFred 10y ago
    Sometimes its just funding decisions made years in advance and "we've already spent too much on this to not to put up with it".

bbarn 10y ago

Yeah, it would be great if people were dedicated to one company for a long time, but that isn't our field anymore. Companies come and go very fast. Move fast break things means breaking companies some times, and fail fast means fail to be able to keep the good people you went through so much effort to get and afford. All of these new companies starting up look greener to devs and a lot of the time they are. As a developer, you can hitch your wagon to a fair bet, or take a risk and go to the place that might be awesome. It's a real big ask to assume everyone who's good gets only long term jobs at great places. Good people don't stay long if the job isn't good - they don't need to. The logical reason to want someone who stays at a job a long time is that you want to feel like your investment in that person is going to pay off. I challenge that and say that you don't really need to invest in a developer (up front I mean) if it's a good development job. You point them at the problem, help them understand the business case, and if they need more than a week to ramp up in the code base with your team, either A. they suck, or B. your code base sucks.

eropple 10y ago

This feels to me like a rationale for trying to get something for nothing, to be honest. Why would a quality engineer with an understanding of their worth stay at a company for two years when the next company's offering 20% more after twelve months? "Make hay while the sun shines."

derefr 10y ago
Boy, what I'd give for a career trajectory that looks like that. But I'm not moving to the US any time soon (my family is quite happy here), and my local market caps out at ~$110k for "senior" devs. It's annoyingly hard to find remote jobs working for US firms that pay US salaries.
- eru 10y ago
  Apparently you wouldn't give enough.. I'm not in the US, and not an American citizen, but I got a similar trajectory from moving around globally. (Not a criticism of you, just saying that you made your choice.)
  - derefr 10y ago
    Honestly, a "choice" between a pay-raise and a marriage isn't much of a choice.
    - eru 10y ago
      It is a choice, just an exceptionally easy one. Most of the important decisions in life are actually easy to make, I think. (Just sometimes hard to live with.) I took my marriage with me. But she knew from the start what she was in for.
- eropple 10y ago
  FWIW, I'm not a senior dev, if I went back to FT I'd be somewhere between lead/staff and principal and I've steered my career towards in-demand areas (mobile for a while, then devops/platform engineering). The reason I saw salary bumps the way I did was because I negotiate hard and I didn't specialize, but rather learned the new trends and jumped on them. That said, I feel you on the lack of remote gigs; a big part of why I went towards consulting is the opportunity to go screw off to somewhere warm for a month or two--I don't have a wife or kids at the moment--and work remotely. If it fits your skillset and your temperament, it might be worth a shake.

eru 10y ago

I'd stay longer at companies, if they were as eager to increase my compensation while staying as they are for when I am switching.

raverbashing 10y ago

> I refuse to hire anyone that hasn't stayed at a company at least 2 years (excluding new grads) Then you're selecting for people that care more about a paycheck than the work they're doing Also, I was let go after a couple of months in a small company because they closed the office I worked on, my fault I guess

SoapSeller 10y ago
I always thought that the opposite is true - people who care about their paycheck jumps ship every couple of months to improve their paycheck(it easier to get a raise in a new job than in your current one, right?)
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Not so easy depending on the circumstances Of course it's a bonus, but different locations may pay less
lloyd-christmas 10y ago
> Then you're selecting for people that care more about a paycheck than the work they're doing You can only go through so many companies before you need to acknowledge: "maybe it's me, not them".