I love people who take risks and follow their passions, but if your resume lists a series of short stints at failed startups, I think it’s natural to question a

I love people who take risks and follow their passions, but if your resume lists a series of short stints at failed startups, I think it’s natural to question a person’s career management skills. What are "career management skills"? Two interpretations come to my mind. The author could mean a tendency to constantly worry about how one's resume will look to big companies. If this is the case, why does Microsoft care? A person who, whenever considering a new project, worries about how it will affect his resume is more likely to get stolen by a competing big company, since big companies generally prefer conservative resumes. However, a person who isn't scared to have a resume with many jobs at failed startups is more likely to get stolen by a startup, since they generally don't care if a person has such a resume (they may even prefer it), and also because the person probably has lots of contacts in the startup world. In the American technology industry today, headhunting is a danger regardless of how conservative the employee's resume is. Another interpretation is that by "career management skills" the author means a willingness to take a steady, well-paying job when one has a family to support. This makes sense: what would you think of someone who insists on working for startups, even at the cost of having trouble feeding his three children and being forced to live in a dangerous neighborhood? But perhaps he doesn't have a family. Or perhaps the spouse has a steady job to support the kids. Or perhaps he has a trust fund or a bunch of money from a previous startup. There are so many exceptions that a resume full of failed startups is not a reliable signal of this kind of irresponsibility. Neither of these interpretations makes much sense. But there's a less charitable interpretation: "I love people who take risks and follow their passions, but not too much, because then they'd balk at the crap we'd make them do."