If you job hop a lot you cannot build anything of substance or scale. Launching a first version of something in 6 months is great, scaling it globally and itera

If you job hop a lot you cannot build anything of substance or scale. Launching a first version of something in 6 months is great, scaling it globally and iterating 2 or 3 times is the part you are completely missing and cannot do in 6 months. This is why I think you need to spend at least a year somewhere to learn much of anything aside from writing code. Learning software design doesn't happen without hands on experience iterating on a major project. Being adaptable and delivering a few one off features is junior engineering which senior engineers can coach through. Coding conventions differ from team to team, package to package adapting to these also doesn't mean you are a robust engineer. It means you are competent. Solid engineer are expected to adapt. All big software projects that stand the test of time have nuances and even possibly anti-patterns because the initial design missed something. I'm not sure what you mean by "saw the kinds of companies I worked for" but if you worked at Google for 6 months, Facebook for 6 months and Amazon for 6 months it still wouldn't mean much to me. All it means is you are smart enough to get your foot in the door but not successful enough to succeed.