4 ms·

> Every job in the last 5yrs How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years?

by TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

n0mad01 6y ago
some consider jobhopping as a hobby with benefits.
- siliconmountain 6y ago
  An unwise hobby. I know recruiters and hiring managers that see low tenure jobhopping as a red flag
  - analog31 6y ago
    This may just be to discourage you from doing it. I've been on a number of hiring committees, and job hopping was never discussed as a negative. By the time you've been on the job for 1.5 years, chances are the hiring manager and recruiter have both moved on.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      Also, I'm hired to do a job. Around 1-2 year long job. I finish it and move on to what excites me next. My best hiring/HR managers and recruiters understand this, it makes our cooperation a bliss.
    - ViViDboarder 6y ago
      Personally I consider it a yellow flag when hiring. It could be a sign that they are likely to hop to the next thing and not worth investing in, or it could just be that they are looking for the right place to settle in. I will generally ask about their experiences and what they are looking for to try to discern which camp they may be in. As with all hiring though, this is far from perfect.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - siliconmountain 6y ago
      I’m more talking about less than or equal to 12 months. It takes months of investment of my company to train a new hire. At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee and the investment is starting to see returns. Leaving early means the investment wasn’t worth it (compared to hiring someone who doesn’t job hop)
    - baron_harkonnen 6y ago
      Someone mentioned "At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee"... I haven't seen a job like this in a decade or more. The last two jobs I had expected you to be fully productive in a month, and if you not had made major contributions in by 12 months (and more specifically didn't fit in with management) you were going to be let go. Letting go of employees used to be relatively rare, but I find it's becoming standard practice these days. I can't think of a single job I've had where ICs weren't deploying code to production within two weeks and at full productivity in about a month. Decades ago it used to be the case that you could take time to fit in, find your strengths and start growing. But the idea that you would "just be getting started" at 12 months is laughable. Job "hopping" used to make sense a few years ago because it was the fastest way to get promoted. Now I would say it's an essential survival skills as any place you aren't happy at is likely seeing that an planning when they can start to pip you.
    - bpodgursky 6y ago
      It definitely changes the bar for me. If I see someone has a long string of 1-2 year jobs on their resume, the conversation changes from: "Is this someone with high potential who could grow / be trained into a high performer?" to "Is this someone who can hit the ground running and be productive within a month?" It's very possible the answer is still yes, but I'm not going to spend time investing in a more uncertain candidate, if it's pretty clear they'll jump as soon as my time investment starts to pay off.
      - comprev 6y ago
        I was job hopping in Amsterdam where the market is saturated by VC-backed SaaS startups. The churn rate was insane. Many of the teams I worked on have churned so much not one member is still there I worked with - in a space of 18-24 months (this was pre-COVID). It is also worth noting a 12 month fixed term contract for any new full-time employee is standard. Due to Dutch employment law, the employer only has to offer a perm contract after a number of years (after the 3rd I think). This hardly encourages career growth and it if it takes 12 months to be "up to speed" you would have been fired already! At the end of those 12 months they don't have to offer you anything more. Struggling and need extra training? Nope, you're gone. Particular project changing course (new CTO, new management)? Nope, you're gone. Pay rise? Lucky for 1% without threatening to leave... but other companies will add 15% for a new contract in a similar role. It's a no-brainer. There was no sense of loyalty on either side. The large professional network I made in the city helped enormously and heard about open positions on a weekly basis. Now I am in a new role (outside of the Netherlands) where I genuinely hope I can stay with the company for many years and have a long career with them (with opportunities to progress internally). Their niche is something which I believe in and have a sense of pride about what they do.
  - vsareto 6y ago
    Which is implying there can be nothing wrong with any company and it's always the employee's fault when it doesn't work out.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      A bit of a common thread I’ve noticed in the “what’s wrong with hiring” threads here and elsewhere.
  - Taylor_OD 6y ago
    As a former recruiter of 6 years... Most companies do not care. If you can do the job and pass their interview process they will make you an offer. I very rarely had anyone look down on "job hoppers" and if they did it would be when someone had 4-7 six month stints in a row. Normally those people would just say those were contract gigs and then the company wouldnt care.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Why would you list all your jobs to give that impression?
  - engineer_22 6y ago
    In the summer of my junior year at undergrad engineering school I attended a "career accelerator" course, a week long series of lectures from entrepreneurs and practicing engineers. One gentleman working for a multinational industrial corporation said specifically he recommends people get a new job every two years. He said he was on track to become CEO of this multinational company. Sometimes a new job can be found in the organization you work already.
lumost 6y ago
When I entered the industry in 2010, it was the middle of a recession and I was coming from a non comp sci STEM degree. My first job was a 40k per year IT job. I changed jobs every 1.5 years or so, and was able to find a niche in Big Data followed by Real time bidding in ad-tech, and now ML work in one of the FANG’s as a senior engineer. Not many people care about tenure at this point, and working in multiple environments has served me well. It’s worth calling out that I usually took a pay cut when I switched in order to better align with my career objectives (although the raises always made up for the opportunity cost ) I found every opportunity through LinkedIn, along with many that I passed on. I was always immediately connected with a person (recruiter) rather than a blind resume/email response.
- frongpik 6y ago
  For comparison, I started around the same time, never used LinkedIn and still ended up with a job title similar to yours, making a little more than 400k. This is simply a standard rate for someone with 10 yoe who bothers to change jobs.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    These FAANG salaries mystify me. Here I am, in the mid-west, working for a manufacturing company, as a programmer/sysadmin/devop in an engineering department, with 25 years of experience, making almost the top end of what's possible for a non-managerial role, and my salary is NOTHING like that. I just worked with 2 of the world's leading experts in my field -- they literally wrote and created systems to implement the government spec which governs most of our work -- and learned that their salaries -- while staggering in this industry -- weren't even half of this. Sometimes I look at this disparity, and want to take a crack at switching industries, but, frankly, it's intimidating. I guess it's 25 years of conditioning. In old-school manufacturing companies, $400K is VP-level pay. There's probably only a couple dozen people making that at my 30K-employee company. And here you are telling me that it's just a "standard rate" for a devop with 10 years of experience. The difference in worlds is hard to wrap my head around.
    - 6y ago
webmaven 6y ago
> > Every job in the last 5yrs > How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years? I'm old enough to remember when having two or three two-year jobs in a row classified you as a job-hopper to employers. These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.
- bradlys 6y ago
  > These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending. I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. I wouldn't think of being at several places for two years each as complacent or lucky... I do not think being at places for less than two years as the ideal scenario or a great candidate. Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) - I look at it like how I've had it... They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. What's your lower bound on 'several years', in this context? Taken literally it's 'three or more', but not everyone uses the word that way. > Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) I wasn't thinking of pay bumps per-se, but of promotions for increased responsibility. > They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one. Sure, but employers are often insecure. The thought that follows that is "what if they think this job is shitty and then leave?" Employers hate turnover and tend to like having evidence that you will stick around. No matter what the reason is that you didn't stick around somewhere else, however justified or understandable, that reason can't provide the evidence they want.
    - bradlys 6y ago
      If someone doesn't use few and uses "several" then I presume "several" means "seve"n or more. Yes, literal language of several allows for 3 or more but we'd use few then. And it's clearly not many - which I put in the 10+ bucket typically. In my opinion, several years in this context between two companies would be at least 7 years total - however, I think 4-5+ years at one company is a sign of complacency or you got lucky. So, I'd think spending 10 years at two companies very much a sign of complacency or luckiness. I can't imagine doing it unless I got really lucky. Great managers, great organization, great team, decent work, and, of course, great pay... but that is incredibly rare as far as the social circle I'm involved in goes. So, chase the pay at least.
kapilkaisare 6y ago
It looks like OP is a freelancer/contractor with a DevOps focus. I can imagine a profile like that with several short term lucrative contracts.

> Every job in the last 5yrs How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years?

n0mad01 6y ago

some consider jobhopping as a hobby with benefits.

siliconmountain 6y ago
An unwise hobby. I know recruiters and hiring managers that see low tenure jobhopping as a red flag
- analog31 6y ago
  This may just be to discourage you from doing it. I've been on a number of hiring committees, and job hopping was never discussed as a negative. By the time you've been on the job for 1.5 years, chances are the hiring manager and recruiter have both moved on.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Also, I'm hired to do a job. Around 1-2 year long job. I finish it and move on to what excites me next. My best hiring/HR managers and recruiters understand this, it makes our cooperation a bliss.
  - ViViDboarder 6y ago
    Personally I consider it a yellow flag when hiring. It could be a sign that they are likely to hop to the next thing and not worth investing in, or it could just be that they are looking for the right place to settle in. I will generally ask about their experiences and what they are looking for to try to discern which camp they may be in. As with all hiring though, this is far from perfect.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - siliconmountain 6y ago
    I’m more talking about less than or equal to 12 months. It takes months of investment of my company to train a new hire. At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee and the investment is starting to see returns. Leaving early means the investment wasn’t worth it (compared to hiring someone who doesn’t job hop)
  - baron_harkonnen 6y ago
    Someone mentioned "At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee"... I haven't seen a job like this in a decade or more. The last two jobs I had expected you to be fully productive in a month, and if you not had made major contributions in by 12 months (and more specifically didn't fit in with management) you were going to be let go. Letting go of employees used to be relatively rare, but I find it's becoming standard practice these days. I can't think of a single job I've had where ICs weren't deploying code to production within two weeks and at full productivity in about a month. Decades ago it used to be the case that you could take time to fit in, find your strengths and start growing. But the idea that you would "just be getting started" at 12 months is laughable. Job "hopping" used to make sense a few years ago because it was the fastest way to get promoted. Now I would say it's an essential survival skills as any place you aren't happy at is likely seeing that an planning when they can start to pip you.
  - bpodgursky 6y ago
    It definitely changes the bar for me. If I see someone has a long string of 1-2 year jobs on their resume, the conversation changes from: "Is this someone with high potential who could grow / be trained into a high performer?" to "Is this someone who can hit the ground running and be productive within a month?" It's very possible the answer is still yes, but I'm not going to spend time investing in a more uncertain candidate, if it's pretty clear they'll jump as soon as my time investment starts to pay off.
    - comprev 6y ago
      I was job hopping in Amsterdam where the market is saturated by VC-backed SaaS startups. The churn rate was insane. Many of the teams I worked on have churned so much not one member is still there I worked with - in a space of 18-24 months (this was pre-COVID). It is also worth noting a 12 month fixed term contract for any new full-time employee is standard. Due to Dutch employment law, the employer only has to offer a perm contract after a number of years (after the 3rd I think). This hardly encourages career growth and it if it takes 12 months to be "up to speed" you would have been fired already! At the end of those 12 months they don't have to offer you anything more. Struggling and need extra training? Nope, you're gone. Particular project changing course (new CTO, new management)? Nope, you're gone. Pay rise? Lucky for 1% without threatening to leave... but other companies will add 15% for a new contract in a similar role. It's a no-brainer. There was no sense of loyalty on either side. The large professional network I made in the city helped enormously and heard about open positions on a weekly basis. Now I am in a new role (outside of the Netherlands) where I genuinely hope I can stay with the company for many years and have a long career with them (with opportunities to progress internally). Their niche is something which I believe in and have a sense of pride about what they do.
- vsareto 6y ago
  Which is implying there can be nothing wrong with any company and it's always the employee's fault when it doesn't work out.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    A bit of a common thread I’ve noticed in the “what’s wrong with hiring” threads here and elsewhere.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  As a former recruiter of 6 years... Most companies do not care. If you can do the job and pass their interview process they will make you an offer. I very rarely had anyone look down on "job hoppers" and if they did it would be when someone had 4-7 six month stints in a row. Normally those people would just say those were contract gigs and then the company wouldnt care.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Why would you list all your jobs to give that impression?
- engineer_22 6y ago
  In the summer of my junior year at undergrad engineering school I attended a "career accelerator" course, a week long series of lectures from entrepreneurs and practicing engineers. One gentleman working for a multinational industrial corporation said specifically he recommends people get a new job every two years. He said he was on track to become CEO of this multinational company. Sometimes a new job can be found in the organization you work already.

lumost 6y ago

When I entered the industry in 2010, it was the middle of a recession and I was coming from a non comp sci STEM degree. My first job was a 40k per year IT job. I changed jobs every 1.5 years or so, and was able to find a niche in Big Data followed by Real time bidding in ad-tech, and now ML work in one of the FANG’s as a senior engineer. Not many people care about tenure at this point, and working in multiple environments has served me well. It’s worth calling out that I usually took a pay cut when I switched in order to better align with my career objectives (although the raises always made up for the opportunity cost ) I found every opportunity through LinkedIn, along with many that I passed on. I was always immediately connected with a person (recruiter) rather than a blind resume/email response.

frongpik 6y ago
For comparison, I started around the same time, never used LinkedIn and still ended up with a job title similar to yours, making a little more than 400k. This is simply a standard rate for someone with 10 yoe who bothers to change jobs.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  These FAANG salaries mystify me. Here I am, in the mid-west, working for a manufacturing company, as a programmer/sysadmin/devop in an engineering department, with 25 years of experience, making almost the top end of what's possible for a non-managerial role, and my salary is NOTHING like that. I just worked with 2 of the world's leading experts in my field -- they literally wrote and created systems to implement the government spec which governs most of our work -- and learned that their salaries -- while staggering in this industry -- weren't even half of this. Sometimes I look at this disparity, and want to take a crack at switching industries, but, frankly, it's intimidating. I guess it's 25 years of conditioning. In old-school manufacturing companies, $400K is VP-level pay. There's probably only a couple dozen people making that at my 30K-employee company. And here you are telling me that it's just a "standard rate" for a devop with 10 years of experience. The difference in worlds is hard to wrap my head around.
  - 6y ago

webmaven 6y ago

> > Every job in the last 5yrs > How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years? I'm old enough to remember when having two or three two-year jobs in a row classified you as a job-hopper to employers. These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.

bradlys 6y ago
> These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending. I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. I wouldn't think of being at several places for two years each as complacent or lucky... I do not think being at places for less than two years as the ideal scenario or a great candidate. Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) - I look at it like how I've had it... They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. What's your lower bound on 'several years', in this context? Taken literally it's 'three or more', but not everyone uses the word that way. > Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) I wasn't thinking of pay bumps per-se, but of promotions for increased responsibility. > They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one. Sure, but employers are often insecure. The thought that follows that is "what if they think this job is shitty and then leave?" Employers hate turnover and tend to like having evidence that you will stick around. No matter what the reason is that you didn't stick around somewhere else, however justified or understandable, that reason can't provide the evidence they want.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    If someone doesn't use few and uses "several" then I presume "several" means "seve"n or more. Yes, literal language of several allows for 3 or more but we'd use few then. And it's clearly not many - which I put in the 10+ bucket typically. In my opinion, several years in this context between two companies would be at least 7 years total - however, I think 4-5+ years at one company is a sign of complacency or you got lucky. So, I'd think spending 10 years at two companies very much a sign of complacency or luckiness. I can't imagine doing it unless I got really lucky. Great managers, great organization, great team, decent work, and, of course, great pay... but that is incredibly rare as far as the social circle I'm involved in goes. So, chase the pay at least.

kapilkaisare 6y ago

It looks like OP is a freelancer/contractor with a DevOps focus. I can imagine a profile like that with several short term lucrative contracts.