13 ms·

Ask HN: How much job hopping is acceptable?

• snockerton 10y ago
  Looking at tenure in isolation of any other context is meaningless. I've interviewed candidates with multiple 6-12 month positions on their resume that turned out to be great contributors, and other folks with 5-10 year positions that were horrible.
• throwaway1979 10y ago
  I don't see a big deal with 1 year tenures. Under 1 (3-4 months seems suspicious). I imagine people leave after 1 year if they took a job that wasn't a nice place but they had some incentives requiring them to stay a year (sign on bonuses are typically vested at 1 year; moving assistance also needs to be paid back if an employee leaves within a year). So ... if a person leaves at the 1 year mark, it was likely they who chose to leave. Given the stories about bad employers in tech and the fact that there are many good employers too these days, I would say good for the moving employee!
  • toomuchtodo 10y ago
    It's really odd. My current startup didn't question my job history of only staying at companies for under 2-3 years (~15 years experience total), but when I interviewed at Deluxe Corp to manage one of their hosting acquisitions, I was questioned quite a bit about it. Their internal recruiter even asked me to justify the short duration at each org. "How do we know you'll stay with us for more than 2-3 years?" "You don't without a contract." (I did not accept the offer) YMMV.
    • pklausler 10y ago
      "You pay me enough that I can't get a better offer."
    • jrs235 10y ago
      "How do I know you'll employ me beyond 2-3 years and won't go under?
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  It's goanna depend a lot on exactly what industry niche you specialize in and what you specialize in below that. As long as the details have a semi-obvious non-negative explanation it shouldn't be a problem. Employees are like expensive, specialized tooling. The more specialized and refined your skill set is then the more acceptable job hopping becomes. If you're the kind of person that's brought in as a subject matter expert to help do something your experience may not be relevant and you may be, expensive, under utilized and dissatisfied when there's no more work for you. To continue the tooling analogy, if a company buys specialized equipment for a contract job it's usually sold afterward. This is why highway plowing and bridge building equipment is all ancient and has had half a million owners. A contract is won, (used) equipment is bought, maintenance (or modification for the specific task is performed), the work is done, someone else wins the contract, the equipment is put up for sale and the cycle continues. It takes resources to keep specialized equipment or specialized employees around and functional (pay/maintenance) and it's not efficient to have it sit around mostly unused (making a senior dev chase bugs). However, if you're switching jobs in less time than a typical project takes you're gonna come under the same scrutiny as the crane that's up for sale while the rest of the fleet is building bridges, "what's wrong with this one?" If you're not sticking around for about as long as it takes to complete on project then it's gonna draw scrutiny. If you're resume looks like you're job hopping and moving up it's likely going to be looked upon neutrally or favorably (i.e. "nobody can keep this guy because everyone else has more important/lucrative stuff for him to do"). Job hopping is definitely within the range of normal for the vast majority of the industries people on HN work in so unless your resume practically says you can't hold a job then it shouldn't be a problem. I'm not going to put a number on "job hopping" because it's dependent on industry, specialization, region, training time and probably a bunch of other things" What's short for someone developing control software for radar systems in Boston is likely an eternity for a JavaScript dev specializing in UI in SV.
• thefastlane 10y ago
  if you're hot, you're hot. tenure doesn't matter anymore.
  • gerbal 10y ago
    If you have a bunch of 1-6 month jobs on your resume your going to get passed over as unreliable and not worth the expense of hiring unless you are one hell of a rockstar.
    • Silhouette 10y ago
      If someone has nothing but a bunch of 1-6 month jobs on their resume without mitigating circumstances, they are unreliable and they are not a rock star.
• jbob2000 10y ago
  I think for software development, it takes about a year to get fully up to speed on a company's development practices and processes. So after a year, most people will ask themselves, "is this the company I want to stay with for a while?" and leave or stay for a few more years. Under 1 year, I have to think that something out of the ordinary happened and I would be inclined to ask about what happened. Did the company go under? Were there some crazy red flags that forced you to leave? And internally, I'd ask myself, is this person really picky? Do they have some red flag that keeps getting them let go? Etc. I don't have an upper limit, but definitely a lower limit; 2 years. 1 year to get up to speed, 1 year to give the company a chance. I recognize that all companies have problems and I want to see progress being made on solving those problems. If, after 2 years, we're still talking about the same issues we faced when I started, then I'm going to start looking. Curious why someone would place an upper limit on time served? If the work is good and the company is good, why leave?
  • fullshark 10y ago
    > Curious why someone would place an upper limit on time served? If the work is good and the company is good, why leave? I guess in terms of professional development the person might think it's important to expose themselves to new companies and challenges. They don't want to just get comfortable somewhere and let their skills slowly deteriorate. I agree that it's not a 100% fool proof plan but I get it as a rule of thumb.
    • 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
      Plus I hear it can be the only way to get real raises.
      • fullshark 10y ago
        It's the easiest way for sure if you work in a competitive industry.
      • fweespeech 10y ago
        As a counter point, I'm not able to get a raise by leaving my job and I've been trying for ~1 year. I'm still going to leave, but I'm probably going to eat an effective 10-15% pay cut.
• pklausler 10y ago
  If the answer to "why'd you leave that job so soon after starting?" was "The next company called me up and offered me a deal that was so much better that I'd be stupid to not take it," then that's totally fine and is in fact a good sign.
  • noxxten 10y ago
    Mostly. Employers could also become afraid you'll walk away from them too.
    • pklausler 10y ago
      And compensate accordingly.
    • Sorry_Rum_Ham 10y ago
      They should be. They'd have no issue cutting you loose at the drop of a hat if layoffs were happening, so why should they expect any sort of company loyalty from you?
      • pklausler 10y ago
        35 years ago, an older coworker at UNIVAC told me that the company gave us its best job offer every other Friday in the form of a pay stub, and other companies were always welcome to beat it. It turned out to be good advice. At my next job, another older and even grumpier coworker told me "face it, we're all whores."
    • jackmaney 10y ago
      Then let them fear. Loyalty between employer and employee (in either direction) died out many, many years ago.
• benjohnson 10y ago
  If someone bails on a pressure-cooker job - I view it as a sign on wisdom.
• fma 10y ago
  I'd prefer if someone joins my team that they show they will stay on my team. I don't want to spend my time getting them up to speed and have them leave in 6 months. I'd rather have an above average developer for a few years than a rockstar for 6 months...because you'll be wasting my time and everyone else's on my team. If I have context why you're job hopping then I'll take it into consideration. There are legitimate reasons to leave in a few months. However, if you've never been at a place or project for more than a year, I can safely assume you never had to support an application much in production because by the time you were knowledgeable enough to do so, you left.
  • mikestew 10y ago
    I'd prefer if someone joins my team that they show they will stay on my team. I'd prefer that, too. Then I get in there and found you vastly under-represented the amount of technical debt you have, I find out that the reason there's no CI isn't because you didn't have anyone to set up a server and tie it to SCM, it's because your devs are lazy and management is too soft to push it. The build is up to 1200 warnings now, so the odds of there are ever being a clean build are zero. The team I now manage has people that were grandfathered in from an extremely low bar and now I can't get rid of them no matter how much they drag the rest of the team down. I wish there were only one place like that on my resume, but I'm a slow learner. Hopefully I've learned enough by now to break out of the control statement before getting to shittyCompaniesOnResumeCount++.
    • fma 10y ago
      And that's why I only join companies where I know of a reference there.
    • leekh 10y ago
      This just happened to me. 3 weeks in I realized the code base needs to be re-written because there was way too much technical debt. I should have quit then, but I decided to give it try. 6 months later, I hand in my two weeks notice.
    • Huppie 10y ago
• itsdrewmiller 10y ago
  There are two types of red flags that can come out of frequent job changes: 1. Several <1 year tenures - this person gets fired a lot 2. Exclusively 1-2 year tenures - This person is trying to jump around to maximize salary (and isn't able to convince their current employer to match/exceed an offer) For #1 job history is usually not the only indication that this will be a problem. Depending on how many open positions you have they might make a screen, with the vast majority washing out there. "It was contract work" is usually a flag, and being at startups that went under is a mitigating factor. #2 is somewhat more risky as a hiring manager - more expensive to interview because they are less likely to flame out early in the process, but then much more likely to not be able to agree on an acceptable offer. Overall these folks are still going to be net positive contributors over their tenure, but there is opportunity cost in missing out on hiring someone who would kick ass over 5+ years at your company. It's hard to definitively pin someone down as this category outside of 4+ jobs never going more than 2 years. If they are coming through a recruiter that's a flag, and if they have moved cities that's somewhat of a mitigating factor. Seeing someone who stayed at the same company for 4+ years and got one or more promotions there is a big plus on resumes. There is not a lot of research into any of this stuff AFAIK, so this is basically all just my opinion. What I have seen basically says that people are pretty bad and inconsistent at evaluating resumes: http://blog.alinelerner.com/resumes-suck-heres-the-data/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/resumes-suck-heres-the-data/
  • 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
    > "It was contract work" is usually a flag Why is that? Aren't there tons of contract jobs, at least in certain areas? > If they are coming through a recruiter that's a flag Why is that?
    • itsdrewmiller 10y ago
      It's been my experience that people with a lot of contract work usually end up being copy-paste style programmers who can't make it through our interviews. Not 100% by any means. Coming through a recruiter means that a) the recruiting contingency fee could end up actually meaning you paid 20% more for the year you get, b) the person feels the need to scale out their effort to find new jobs so confirms my fear about their job history somewhat, and c) means there is another person who may be reaching out to them in a year or two to actively try to get them to leave. This is super sketchy behavior on the part of the recruiting firm, but some of them have such bad internal controls and turnover problems themselves that they will consistently attempt this.
• xutopia 10y ago
  My average is roughly 1 year at every position with the maximum being nearly 2 years. I prefer working in startups and smaller businesses rather than a bank or government entity. In the startup world I found 1-2 year stints don't seem like a bad thing. In the conservative banking world it could be.
• ecesena 10y ago
  It depends if the candidate is applying or you're sourcing her. I generally don't skip based on the very last job, because even if it's 3mo there may be a reason that is worth investigating in an info interview. But in general, I skip if the pattern seems to be hopping every year in the last 2-3 years. Another thing that I look at is where geographically the candidate was working. If I see no hopping for a while, then moved to Silicon Valley and started hopping every year, then I pass, or at least I yellow flag that in the pipeline. I don't have any issue with several years in just a company, actually I think it's rare and very positive.
• logfromblammo 10y ago
  It depends on who initiated the breakup, and why. If a person got fired or laid off, that person might not have had any control over it. If the employee resigned, I'd be wary of any duration shorter than 18 months. It might be that long before seeing your first "annual" pay increase. It is very common for me to see the crap raise that I got for the year and send out resumes to check on competitive offers, to see if I could do better. It is also long enough to see a company on its worst behavior, and decide that enough is enough. I personally go two years with a merely bad--but not awful--company, to see if I can jump-start any improvements. After that, I send out resumes, and jump ship as soon as it is feasible. But I'd also see that as an indicator of the quality of companies these days. I have only worked at two companies (out of 8 jobs) where I would have been happy to stay there indefinitely. They both got bought out, and the new owners laid me off without regard to my individual value. I have always been "at will", so if you're going to question my durance at previous companies, I'm going to question your commitment to all your employees that have no contracts. That door swings both ways. If you're looking too closely at that, I might think you're trying to weed out candidates that are too sensitive to the corporate bullshit that may be driving your existing turnover rate, in which case, I might get spooked and either withdraw or demand a higher offer from the start.
• antoniuschan99 10y ago
  I have been contracting for the last two years and have been doing ~3-6 month contracts so my answer might be a little different. Whatever the stack I get up to speed usually after 1 week and provide value to the company pretty much immediately (it's always scary starting a new project because I feel like I need to prove myself within the first few days since I'm working with a new team). If it's a normal job, I think 1.5 years should be a good amount since that is apparently the median for how long developers stay at a company nowadays. I think the mentality that a hiring manager won't hire someone because he's afraid someone will leave after 6 months is old school. People are going to leave, but you need to figure out how to get the most value out of your developers while they are there. Also, if it takes you that long to get someone up to speed it's either that developer is too slow or there's someone wrong with your process. Ultimately I see the pros of job hopping (early on in your career at least) because you will have worked with so many different people. Your gauge in people's personalities and experience will be a useful asset. Plus you will get to know a lot of people in the industry.
  • fweespeech 10y ago
    > I have been contracting for the last two years and have been doing ~3-6 month contracts so my answer might be a little different. Tbh, I lump all these together under "Self Employed" on my resume. I personally think anything 1099 / short-term contracts should be considered 1 employer (you). I wouldn't call contract work "job hopping" since the employer is really yourself and you are simply working on a series of 3-6 month projects.
    • antoniuschan99 10y ago
      ^ agreed. Job hopping != contracting
    • cloudjacker 10y ago
      the problem is that most people that proclaim self employed are actually unemployed, which is less marketable in corporate culture. so to differentiate yourself, write the project and client details
• apocalyptic0n3 10y ago
  When I am looking at resumes, I generally hope to see at least some stability. If someone has had 10 jobs in 4 years (which I would say is about 1/4 of all resumes I read), it makes me think there is something wrong with the employee, not the employer. Another red flag I look for is when someone has freelancing on their resume and they will basically have this: Freelancing, Inc. 2005-Present Company A July 2014-September 2015 Company B December 2012-August 2013 Company C January 2011 - March 2012 You get the pattern. While those people generally end up spending more than a year with the company, they always quit and go back to "freelancing". I've spoken with some people about it in the past and it seems semi-common for freelancers to work full time for a company, save up as much as possible, then leave and skate through their savings and the odd freelancing job for a year or two, and repeating. That's generally not what we are looking for So for someone with more than a few years of experience, I generally like to see at least one job in the last 5 years where they lasted 2 years.
  • jackson23 10y ago
    I see your points. As a [freelance] Consultant, my resume has over 40 over-lapping, yet relatively short duration (2-6 months) positions listed. As a Farm/Server Architect and Admin for very specific technologies like SharePoint Server, MS Project Server, O365 SharePoint Online/Project Online, I typically Architect the server farm(s), install and configure the servers (automated as much as possible) and turn over the keys. Every day a recruiter calls or a client questions me about the short durations, I simply say "How long did you keep your Architect around after your house was built?" Very few companies need a relatively expensive Architect full-time...which suits me because I've had exposure to so many problem sets, environments, company cultures, great people [mostly]. At many companies I meet some IT folks that have worked at their company for 15+ years. They are typically the ones that need the most help as they have mostly only had exposure to their problem sets and methodologies. New tech, in some cases, scares the heck out of them. The younger ones seem more eager for the change(s)...but c'est la vie.
    • stevenwiles 10y ago
      You list 40 positions on your resume?
• nilkn 10y ago
  I don't mind multiple short tenures in general, but that doesn't mean that they can't be a negative. If you've never stuck at a job longer than a year, then that means you've never had to support your own code and infrastructure at all except perhaps immediately after it was hot off the press. That's pretty critical experience, and if you don't have that experience, I will notice that and take it into consideration when it comes to how much seniority and pay you expect. Speaking of seniority, it's very hard to hire someone into a senior or leadership position if they've never stuck around at a job long enough to actually develop any seniority. It's impossible to develop management skills if you're quitting your job every 12 months. Even at every 24 months you're really limiting your ability to get some truly solid management experience under your belt. All that said, having long tenures on your resume obviously doesn't guarantee anything. A week or two ago I interviewed someone with 15 years at the same company and the title of Chief Architect who seriously struggled with a simplified version of FizzBuzz. The bottom line is that I try to keep an open mind about everyone, and if I have concerns over the lengths of previous jobs I'll always give the candidate the opportunity to explain their viewpoint. Usually I can be convinced and won over.
• davio 10y ago
  I'm a hiring manager and I don't really care about short tenures. I think recent grads are doing themselves a disservice if they aren't moving every year or so for the first 5 years.
• ShakataGaNai 10y ago
  Ask first. Please, please, please. If you are a hiring manager ask the candidate about their job history before you dismiss them entirely on their job history. I had two slighty-more-than-a-year stints in a row and I know some people who it caused concern for. What was the reason? One was a contract with a non-profit that didn't have the budget to continue and the second was a failing startup that was downsizing. Both perfectly logical and understandable. Fortunately my next boss-to-be asked first. I've also seen people who love small startups, they get in on the ground floor and stay for 18months before they move on. They did an amazing job and I wouldn't hesitate to hire them on even if I knew it was only for 18 months. (oh, then they found an amazing startup and stayed for ~4 years) At the end of the day there are way too many variables. As a hiring manager myself I've seen and heard it all. So don't make assumptions. Don't guess. Interview them as normal and ask the pertinent questions about their history.
  • romanhn 10y ago
    I have seen a couple of candidates include short reasons for why they have a couple of short stints ("mass layoffs after acquisition", "group disbanded") - this really served well to allay any concerns I may have had.
• dbrower 10y ago
  A reasonable career trajectory is something like doubling the time at each place until you hit the 8-10 year mark, modulo uncontrollable events, like a place shutting down. When you have someone who's been repeatedly changing employers every 12-18 months for a while with no mitigating factors, you begin to wonder about ability to commit. It may matter less if your are in a field where things are done in sprints, the person is likely to be instantly productive, and there isn't a lot of complexity to absorb. There are people who have the temperament to be short to mid-term contractors, and who don't like to be and wouldn't be good long-term hires.
• cloudjacker 10y ago
  Minimum 1 year Maximum 2 year 1 year for some equity and to judge if I even want it, 2 year solely so hiring managers don't disqualify me (along with random employees that anecdotally heard what red flags). And I remove all the 3 month stints off my resume And I also take off contracts done in chronologically parallel time periods because they confuse people that are silently judging how long I had been anywhere, than any other merit Easier to get an experienced based salary upgrade at a different company, than at the current company. Another quirk seems to be that everyone in engineering seems to like seeing gaps. So disappearing my 3 month stints has an added effect that would be counterintuitive to all the unemployed bloggers writing resume tips on ask.com It is an adaptation. Get money.
• lj3 10y ago
  It doesn't matter. If you have the exact experience and expertise they're looking for, they'll overlook everything else. Otherwise, they'll use anything as an excuse to reject your resume.
• soulnothing 10y ago
  I've been very curious about this as well. For financial reasons I have needed to do contract over the past 2 years. Primarily doing 6 months stints, some were outlined as a year but that fell through. The problem I've had is that mid way through my contract the project is canceled. This has become a really big issue as when I look my "stability" is bought to light consistently. My first two roles were 2.5 years, and 1.5 years respectively. Both times I left on good terms. So I can commit, and will if given the oppurtunity too, and room to grow. My contracts have just been largely proof of concepts, that were shelved. The thing is I'm tired of jumping, worrying how long my contract is going to last. That I need to keep going looking for the next thing, because either the contract will run out or I stagnate. This is also leading to a counter point and negative when I look. I've not been able to ship any projects to production. I feel at this point I'm stuck in a contracting loop, and I'm not sure how to get out.
• Silhouette 10y ago
  (I'm not a dedicated hiring manager, but have been involved in my share of hiring decisions over the years.) I don't really believe in hard and fast rules with recruiting. There are usually too many variables for arbitrary limits to be helpful, and I've seen plenty of good hires with unusual resumes. The important questions are: 1. Is the person you're looking at likely to be an overall benefit if you hire them for the position? 2. Is anyone else who is applying likely to bring more overall benefit? There are three concerns I usually have with a resume full of short-term gigs. Firstly, someone who has never stuck around long enough to deal with the consequences of their own decisions or who has no real understanding of issues like technical debt is a huge liability above entry-level positions. If someone is applying for a senior developer role and I don't see evidence of knowing how to maintain software long-term from their employment history, there would need to be something else in the resume to make up for that or it's basically an instant no-hire. Secondly, the equivalent for more junior positions is that someone moving jobs every few months may not be gaining useful basic skills and developing sound professional judgement as effectively as their time served might otherwise suggest. There's an old joke about someone with ten years of experience and someone with the same year of experience ten times. The latter is probably a no-hire. Finally, there is always some cost and some disruption associated with hiring a new member of staff. Someone whose pattern of previous moves suggests they're just trying to climb a ladder as fast as possible without necessarily contributing much value in each step along the way is a no-hire. Just as important, even someone who looks like they'll probably stick around for a year and generate some real value after a few months ramping up is still going to be a much less attractive candidate than someone who usually sticks around for say two or three years.
• acjohnson55 10y ago
  I'm for more concerned with seeing a record of accomplishment and career progression. If someone is only staying at companies for a year, but they're shipping work through the whole product cycle, I don't have a problem there. However, if they're leaving things undone as they bounce from place to place and not showing experience with the pre-launch, launch, maintenance, and re-launch phases of a major project, that's problematic. On the other hand, if someone stayed at one place for 5 years and doesn't have a lot of progress they can point to, I'd be somewhat concerned about their trajectory in their field.
• brador 10y ago
  Stop waiting until you lose a job to find a new one. Upgrade regularly, as soon as you find a new job that you like more go take it. Building your skills and Networking are key. Network all the time, get to know people who will be hiring, conferences, events, find people who are working on things you want to work on and people you want to work with. Lifes too short to wait it out. Upgrade fast and regularly, pay shoots up, location improves.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• cauterized 10y ago
  Hiring is exhausting and expensive and eats a ridiculous amount of my team's time, not to mention onboarding and learning curve. It's not worth my while to hire someone who I think has a <50% chance of staying at least two years. That doesn't mean every bullet on your resume needs to be 2 years long, but if you're at least a handful of years into your career, you should have at least one. And yeah, if you're working for startups and they keep going under, that sucks. But maybe it suggests that you could stand to learn a bit more about the business end of things and improve your ability to evaluate an employer's prospects.
• UK-AL 10y ago
  Hiring managers ignoring the fact that best way to increase salary is to move. That's why people move a lot. Nothing to do with skill It's because your not paying employees the market rate so they leave. Nothing to do with skill of the employee. They just want to get away with paying below rate salaries.
• tedmiston 10y ago
  I know the stat for average employee duration at a startup is about 9 months, excluding founders I believe. Personally I think I would ask more details of an engineer who stayed with a company 6 months or less but I wouldn't necessarily be suspicious. Anything beyond 12 months, I wouldn't ask at all.
• tedmiston 10y ago
  Re: the trend of shorter tenures - In tech, especially startups, switching companies is still considered the best way for an engineer to get a good raise.
• Gustomaximus 10y ago
  A good rule of thumb is 3 jobs in 10 years. Other factors like contracting/projects etc matter. This could shift to 4 jobs these days as people tend to move about faster. Upper limits depends on company and movement within the company. 10 years in a company with good reputation isnt a problem. 10 years in a staid government department with no movement wouldn't likely represent a go-getter.