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"I have personally seen friends get filtered out of senior and executive opportunities for having “too many” short stints in their resume" I think this is grea

"I have personally seen friends get filtered out of senior and executive opportunities for having “too many” short stints in their resume" I think this is great advice, and it runs counter to advice from sites like Blind that essentially encourage you to treat your career as a graph search algorithm optimized for any incremental increase in compensation. Hopping around is fine in small amounts and can work for increasing comp. But if you establish a pattern people notice, and they won't want to be the next stop on what they perceive to be a hot potato adventure (whether that's fair or not doesn't matter in practice). Also a good callout that this is extra true for senior roles where it will be more complicated to replace a short-tenured leader.

metadat 4y ago
This is a shortsighted hot take. If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement, or even for an orthogonal move to a less toxic environment. When the situation is good or at least reasonable, the rational person will stick around and see it through. There are endless shitty places to work. You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly. Hiring managers who choose to judge a person in this fashion, solely based on their resumé and how long a person put up with a mediocre or poor work environment in the past, have nothing of real value to offer and don't deserve the good employees. They don't take good care of them.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  The author agrees with you. From the article: "You can absolutely explain those stints, and a reasonable interviewer won’t penalize you, but my lived experience is that landing a senior role requires passing multiple somewhat arbitrary process gates"
  - hackitup7 4y ago
    Yeah, and in my experience it's also about the pattern. There isn't a rule or anything. 1-2 short stints, totally fine. 3-4 short stints but with one or more 5+ year stints, probably also fine. 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months? Whatever is going on, it doesn't seem crazy to expect that it's going to manifest at job #6 as well.
    - defrost 4y ago
      > 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months? So .. someone with less than 5 years on the workforce? Look, I'm 60+ (ish) and still actively managing projects in code, engineering, mining, signal processing+interp - from my PoV anyone with less than five years on the workforce is still a child. When I look for people to land roles that shepard a five+ year project through I'm looking for people with at least 8-10 years employed already with at least one two year run and a stated intent to "settle" into a position - ie maybe kids, perhaps a new house, maybe family in the area, etc. Exposure to multiple bad projects is fine, especially if they can articulate how things went bad and how things might have been better managed to avoid that (ie big picture awareness). You do have a point, however you might be setting the bar a little low .. less than five years in is barely a toe in the paddling pool of life.
      - joebob42 4y ago
        Fwiw this perspective (talking about expectations of age, family status, background as conditions) would get you kicked as far away as possible from any hiring decisions where I work. I think mostly for legal / dei reasons to my understanding, but your whole statement reads like a radioactive hr bomb to me.
        defrost 4y ago
        Sure, none the less, if you're looking for someone (any age, any gender, any etc.) for a long term position who will stick through the good, the bad, and the ugly that might occur during a five to ten year time frame then you're looking for any signs and indications that people have some past experience of sticking through things, are willing to stick through things in the future, and have an understanding of how things can go sour and what steps can be taken to mediate. There are many indications of the ability to make a long term commitment and survive a rocky path, not all of them traditional and conventional, with the least common factor being some time at the pump.
        pc86 4y ago
        This just smacks of wanting to treat people like shit. Given the tone of some of your other comments in this thread that actually makes perfect sense. If you want people to "stick through...the bad and the ugly" compensate them accordingly and perhaps most importantly make sure their salary keeps pace with the market as a whole instead of the typical 2-3% raises most people see every year. But even that won't keep the best people, because the best people don't have to tolerate assholes at their job, they can just go get a better one.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    >I was there to solve a problem and stayed no longer than was needed to solve that problem. What problems do you have that need to be solved? Done. It's like people who stay at one job for year never practice for interviews or something.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement. There is an old saying: once is luck, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. A similar argument applies to people who have past employments of unusually short tenure. Anyone can have a miss and want to move on. Some people could be really unlucky and have it happen twice. If someone gets five years into their career and still hasn't held down any job for more than a year then something is up. Even if they're the most unlucky employee in history they still won't have the practical experience to match their YOE. They're probably the perfect example of the meme about having five years of experience or one year of experience five times. So hiring that person into a senior role isn't looking like a smart move in any case.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    5 consecutive jobs on my resume: 1 year: Student software dev job working for the university I attended while in school. Couldn't continue it even if I wanted to. 1 year and 3 months: Game producer for a small game publisher that got some bad luck (and a few bad decisions in hindsight) with a few game releases, and the parent company shut it down. 1 year and 1 month: Lead developer at a tiny app development startup where after a while it became clear the board members funding the company didn't know anything about apps and the executive producer didn't know anything about proper marketing or making sure the product made had an audience (but that became clear a little too late to do anything about it). The apps we made were perfectly good quality, but didn't find an audience. Board members eventually pulled the plug after the fourth app release. 1 year and 2 months: worked as a developer (and project manager/dev on one game) for a company that was doing incredibly well when I joined, but had a string of struggles for the following year after. I was part of a major layoff after a big release when the client decided to stop most of the funding. I could tell things weren't going well with the main client, but it kept looking like maybe we were a month or two out from landing a sweet development contract for various large opportunities to work on a big game for a publisher (none of which ended up panning out), so I stuck around just in case. They never did. 0 years and 9 months: worked as a contractor for a consulting company at a small marketing department at an insurance company, mainly just me and a lead developer. One day the lead developer got fed up with his ideas not being used and walked out and started his own company shortly after. The marketing head at that point decided to do something else with the project and didn't need me anymore so my contract suddenly ended. Next job: 6 years. Joined the company and a few months later they announced getting bought by a major corporation. The merger started and everything started getting shittier, a couple major layoffs happened, people kept leaving on top of that, but I decided to stay, in part, because "I have so many short stints on my resume, I need something longer, I should stay at least 2-3 years!" At 3 years, the large corporation we merged with posted nothing but losses every quarter for 2 years, raises were pretty much nonexistent, the bonus I was hired with got taken away during the merger, and our department had about a third the employees it had when I started...but then the pandemic happened, and they had already closed down our office space, so I was already fully remote, didn't have to deal with any uncertainty about being forced back into the office, so I stayed even longer than I should have. So I've had short stints 5 times in a row, always being laid off for nothing that had to do with my performance or capabilities, and that led to me staying way too long at a shitty job to make up for it. A long stint that almost wasn't, btw, as during one of those major layoffs after the first year, as I found out I was on one of the big layoff lists, until a few people quit before it happened and my boss could lay off less people as a result. Been at my current job for a year, and so far it's been doing well and they've had 5 straight years of rapid growth, but we'll see. I sometimes joke that I'm the Ted McGinley[1] of software companies. [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4549382 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4549382
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement. The problem with this take is that over time, those incremental improvements become harder to find for someone who has established a pattern of job hopping. It’s not a big deal when you’re 24 years old and you’re not really owning major initiatives and long-term projects. It becomes a big problem when you’re at 15 YOE and your resume has ten different companies where you never stayed long enough to even see the long-term consequences of your decisions. I’ve seen a lot of pattern job hopper candidates who clearly have “One year of experience repeated 10 times” who can’t really compete with someone who has fewer jobs but stuck around long enough at each company to make a bigger impact. If job hopping continues, it catches up to you later in a career.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    I think these concepts are orthogonal. You can have one year of experience 10 times by working 10 years in a single company and not self-actualising. One could argue an employee can stay too long at a job for the comfort and lack of ambition, coasting. Even at the executive level, staying long does not guarantee owning to one‘s mistakes, since there are many ways to deflect blame and many places where top of the org has little accountability.
    - hnaccount_rng 4y ago
      Genuine question: How can you ever learn from feedback loops that take 2-3 years if you only ever stick around for a year?
      - mejutoco 4y ago
        TLDR: you cannot. I am saying they are independent concepts. Basically, if you stay for one year it is not possible to learn the effects of longer projects (very valid point you mention). _But_, staying 10 years does not mean necessarily that you did learn from 2-3 years cycles. It will be _possible_. It could mean you are very good at deflecting, coasting, or playing golf with the right people, among many other possibilities. Unrelated: today is on the news that Unilever's CEO will be resigning after 3 years, which also seems short to me.
- dasil003 4y ago
  Here's the rub: the "bad situation" you are in is not independent of you as an individual. When you're young and early career you simply don't have the experience to judge what is good or bad (this is one of the reasons employers like hiring young people). You also haven't demonstrated what you are capable of, so why should anyone else hire you? Short of obviously toxic environments, the best bet early career is to put your head down and see what you can deliver in each job, build a network by impressing your colleagues, and keep an eye out for the next opportunity whenever the time is right. It's very easy to fall into a self-pity or entitlement trap that can work against you. Just as bad employers sabotage themselves by not caring about employees, individuals can sabotage themselves by not recognize what they are being paid for.
- zb1plus 4y ago
  Yep. This whole thing about not hiring "job hoppers" is a conspiracy to suppress wages by the management class. Companies will drop you without a second thought, you should have the right to do the same. I think more software engineers should move into consulting where the gun for hire nature of our industry isn't hidden.
  - dijonman2 4y ago
    I couldn’t disagree more. I want to see commitment, not leaving at the first sign of trouble. It costs a lot to acquire and hire talent.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > It costs a lot to acquire and hire talent. Probably because of your attitude towards it and throwing away people that follow the industry average churn rate. Reminds me of someone who complains about how hard it is to find a date but has criteria tolerances for partners that would make aerospace engineer blush.
    - LunaSea 4y ago
      How do you know it's only the first sign of trouble? Regular employees don't have the possibility to change companies from the inside, leaving is the only option.
      - gnz11 4y ago
        Well, technically there is another option: unionization.
        LunaSea 4y ago
        Don't companies currently prevent the creation of those?
        enriquto 4y ago
- drc500free 4y ago
  That makes sense early to mid career. At some point you become responsible for creating the culture, not running away from it.
  - silksowed 4y ago
    never thought of this but glad you said it. one thing i also think about if i was manager was creating a resilient system of employment. what happens if x leaves tomorrow? is x too critical and knows too much domain knowledge? how am i as a manager going to share that knowledge across my team so if any one person leaves we at least have some way to continue on.
- onion2k 4y ago
  You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly. If someone says they're a senior and they're hired into a senior position but then it turns out that they're not really capable of doing the job of a senior that isn't the company's fault. Those are the people who companies are filtering out when they reject resumes with lots of short jobs. The false negatives of people who left roles because the companies were bad are unfortunate but probably a lot less common.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Uh, what? Whether someone is capable of doing a job is totally up to the employer. Yes, one has to self assess to an extent and apply to realistic roles, but for the most part the blame doesn't lie on the individual. A senior position at one role may mean something totally different from a senior position at another company. Is it really someone's fault that they were a senior engineer at BrownGrassCo and applied for a senior position at GreenGrassCo only to find out that their definition of "senior" more closely resembles something like a team lead with managerial tasks their previous position didn't involve at all?
  - pc86 4y ago
    This reminds me of that wojack meme with the normal distribution. There are certainly people on the left side of the curve who just can't operate at a senior level. Nothing wrong with that, most projects need a solid mid-level or two who can chug through well-scoped tickets. They might have a lot of short stints on their resume. But on the right side of the curve are the really great engineers who recognize a situation as bad pretty quickly, and are able to easily get another role. You can't the difference between these two based on the resume, which is why I try to talk to all of them if I can.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
I think it depends on whether you want a career or just want money. I will take money. If at the end of my life, not a single thing I have coded has made a damn penny or been used by a single person, I am perfectly fine with that.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I think GP is saying that even in your own self-serving interest, you're better off sticking around longer once you reach more senior levels. Otherwise potential employers will hesitate to hire you for fear that you will leave after a short time. Even if you just want money, the long term consequences are worth considering.
- dasil003 4y ago
  Employers want you to care about those things though, especially as you become more senior. That doesn't mean you have dedicate your life to work, but someone with 10-15 years experience who doesn't understand the big picture of how the software is used will make bad decisions. Don't let an overly mercenary attitude lead to a perception that you're a liability.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Eh, we all want things. In a practical sense, if the company wants me to stay, they should make the environment, where I want to stay. Staying just so that it looks good on the resume is a disservice to one's own career, but truly depends on available options and whether one can deliver in the short tenure they are at a given place ( and depending on what we mean by short tenure -- I think 2 years is acceptable ). We are all mercenaries. If you buy into the mission statement, the management is actually good at selling their vision, you buy it because it resonates with you, you are the owner in some way or you are new to the game and are being used. Sadly, it is that simple. I also disagree with the premise of "someone with 10-15 years experience who doesn't understand the big picture " example. Person in that example is an idiot. Doing something for over a decade and not knowing what they are doing after seeing different setups in different roles? I have yet to meet a person, who moved a lot, who does not have a well of experiences to draw from.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Job hopping has a high ROI early in one’s career, but becomes a negative ROI in the later years. In the first few years after college it’s not a big deal to change companies several times in short succession because you’re not really a key player in an organization. Once you reach the leadership and middle management roles, job hopping means you’re never really staying at a company long enough to establish yourself and to own the long-term consequences of your actions. It’s very easy to come in, make a mess, and then leave before any consequences catch up to you. It’s much harder to stay and own things for 3 year or more. > Also a good callout that this is extra true for senior roles where it will be more complicated to replace a short-tenured leader. Well said. It’s not a big deal if one of several similarly qualified developers rotates out of a team. It is a bigger deal if your teams have a new leader every 12 months because you hired people who can’t stay in one place very long. Even as an employee it gets painful and worrisome when management is changing over frequently and nobody really knows why. How many times have we seen “Ask HN” posts where people complain that they’ve had a new manager every 12 months and everyone comments that it’s a red flag? As a company, you can’t afford to hire flakey senior leaders and managers who have a history of disappearing the second someone offers them a slightly higher salary. Keep them compensated, of course, but there will always be recruiters hunting for someone willing to jump ship in exchange for a $10K signing bonus.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  That’s interesting advice that I haven’t seen out play that way in my experience. In very senior roles at big tech companies, even staying in the same role provides 0 guarantee you’re working on the same project or even that the project you start lasts 3 years. Also, the difference isn’t 10k. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars at middling levels. It’s in the seven figures at the upper levels.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    From a job hopping POV, projects or roles don't count, it's all about how long you've worked at the same company. My current tenure at giant company X is "10 years", even though I've held at least 4 radically different roles across three different products during that time.
datalopers 4y ago
I straight up don't hire people with repeated short tenures. Their ego is always far beyond their capability, and there are plenty of now doomed VC-backed startups to fuel their path.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I'm interested in how you view consultants and contractors. They will be on the job for a few months, or a year or two at most, and move on to the next contract. How do you handle them compared to people with short tenures ? (vice-versa: how would you deal with a full time employee that you know might not be there a year or two but could be valuable in the meantime)
  - kamaal 4y ago
    The right metric should be to measure how many turnkey projects you have done. If you are known to abandon projects midway hoping others to cleap up or build up after you. It should be plainly obvious, you are not some one who gets work done.
- cbm-vic-20 4y ago
  It also means they don't stick around to deal with the consequences of the decisions they make.
  - aastronaut 4y ago
    It could also mean they stick around just as long as to notice that they have to deal with the consequences of the decisions they inherited and cannot change.
- mrmuagi 4y ago
  There are a lot of reasons why tenure might be short, but many short tenures, I agree are alarming because people are more lenient when a developer "ramps" up. If they are able to stick around and get promoted, that's a strong counter signal. I'm curious, but not to pry the exact details, how long are your tenures on average -- and would you similiarly penalize someone who worked at one company for many years?
makeitdouble 4y ago
Yes. If you are moving around in short bursts, you have to show up with enough convincing results to make it seem worth hiring you even for a potentially short time. It's a dead strategy if it takes you 6 months to get familiar with the company, 3 month to start delivering some small improvements and proceed to leave after one year.
gajjanag 4y ago
One interesting question that isn't really addressed in the article or the comments here is what advice applies to folks who don't really want to move beyond the staff engineer (IC track) or senior manager (management track) level. I have not heard of anyone getting penalized at the staff level for short stints; though I do agree with the gist of this comment and article at the principal engineer (IC) or director (management) levels. Companies across the industry are well known and notorious for having 4 year cliffs. HR often has no interest in keeping a good senior/staff level developer. Furthermore, companies are also known for making subsequent promotions harder than the first and are more than happy to let developers stagnate - managers at most companies are not responsible for providing growth opportunities beyond the so called "terminal levels" which is roughly senior/staff at most places. The easiest way for many to keep learning, keep compensation in line with the market, and continue working on interesting projects is to simply hop for a new opportunity after a few years; cliff just makes the choice easier most of the time. At least from what I have seen, one has to be really fortunate to have good managers/leaders (who can help with some of these issues) and/or a company which aligns very well with one's own goals over a long period of time. I don't believe either of these are common.
lumost 4y ago
Depends on what you mean by “senior”. If a company has only been around for 3 years or or less, what’s so wrong with a candidate who only sticks at a place for 1.5 years.
- ehnto 4y ago
  I have found the senior tag to be a bit inconsistent. Some roles it meant more experienced, more challenging work and more architectural input was expected. In other roles it meant less software and more soft skills were expected, talking to clients, being a defacto project manager for a particular project team etc. My unsolicited advice to anyone applying for a senior role is to ask what they mean by senior, because the job descriptions often look identical, but actual expectations differ.
  - lumost 4y ago
    This is a great take, even within the same firm I've found huge mismatches in expectations when a "senior" is hired for soft skills, but internally the role aligns to hard skills - or visa versa. Throwing a project master at a hard tech problem will usually result in disaster. However the same is often true of a hard tech researcher. Eventually people tend to acquire relevant skills from both sides or move into management.
ram_rar 4y ago
I mostly agree with this, especially on senior roles. But what constitutes a short stint? How many short stints does it take to negatively impact future opportunities? Does 2 yrs suffice to demonstrate real impact? There is a lot of grey area here. Almost everyone can agree that less than a year consecutively in a role is a short stint. But people have begun to gamify the system. I see many resumes with ~2yrs exp in each role before they jump on to next. Where would you classify them?
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Curious about this as well. What’s the difference of 2 years of experience, vs. 2.5, vs. a full 3 years? Sure, everyone can agree 4 years, a fully vested tenure is commitment by this industry’s standards. But where is the line between 2-3?
kortilla 4y ago
This is not true for what we call “senior software engineers”, which is someone not in a high level position in the company. We have knowingly hired many people with the expectation that they will leave after 2 years on average. > won't want to be the next stop on what they perceive to be a hot potato adventure This is not how top tech companies think, and it’s the reason that the average job duration is so short at the top of the industry. It’s not viewed through some sour grape lens of “if I can’t have them for 10 years, I don’t want them!” It’s, if they work at least a year, it will be a great opportunity to build cool stuff for however long they are around. What you’re saying might be true for some senior management side things where long-time relationships are more important, but it’s not for people who want to be highly ranked ICs.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  "Senior" doesn't even mean the same thing from tech company to tech company. Couple that with misleading job postings and responses to question in the interview process and you're almost flipping a coin with the kind of employee experience you'll actually be getting for a role.
silisili 4y ago
There's nothing wrong with job hopping, and I've seen no indication that patterns affect anything. The fact is, we are all working for a wage. With the death of unions, and right to work, that's about all we're working for, personal motivation aside. If a company is willing to pay more to hire you than your company is willing to pay to keep you, take it. Only suckers stick around out of some loyalty. See how loyal the company is when times are tough. In my personal experience, the tenured, high paid 40 and 50 year olds are the first to get the axe.
- onethought 4y ago
  Well of course you only see the times the employer axes - but you never even hear about the times they don't.
  - silisili 4y ago
    I worked at the same company for a decade. There were three times the company did mass layoffs, and every time it trimmed a ton of long term employees.
    - onethought 4y ago
      Yes but you might be surprised how often "I think we need to do layoff" conversations happen and how often that a leadership team goes in to bat for keeping people for as long as financially possible. I understand there are shitty companies. But if you're judging just by the "harshness of layoffs" you don't have the full picture. Though to your point about laying off long term employees, depends on the country but it's often cheaper to cut shorter term ones (as they have less entitlements accrued, if that's a thing in your country). The other reason long term employees may be cut is they have accumulated too much in terms of small percentage pay bumps over the years and you end up with a team where 1 person is earning 50-100% more than the person next to them, and it's just an obvious cut.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Right to work didn't kill unions, Europe has right to work and unions do just fine, California doesn't have right to work and software engineers still don't unionize. Right to work is just a ruse trying to make you focus on the wrong thing.
blitzar 4y ago
I have personally seen scores of people employed to senior and executive opportunities whos resume is a total joke. 6 months here, year there, 3 months somewhere else, etc. having worked with and under such people so many times for 6-12 months before they inevitably move on, I am not at all impressed. But then, every time, mega corp pas them a 6 fig sign on with gauranteed bonus, 2 levels higher than their last role, so what would I know.
mylons 4y ago
this speaks to the power dynamics between employers and employees. it’s predatory to not give raises that would match finding a new job. it’s also unfortunate finding a new job is the only way to get a raise due to the lack of productivity in ramping up for X months every job, and having to reform networks. the simple solution to not encouraging job hopping is to.. wait for it.. pay people what they’re worth on the open market. the saddest part about this to me is that people on an interview panel have some sort of subconscious bias/loyalty to the company and will say, “well they have several short stints,” and perpetuate the bullshit.
- manfre 4y ago
  Reducing time spent interviewing and onboarding candidates might not have anything to do with company loyalty. Some of us don't enjoy the process and take steps to reduce the amount of time spent on it.
esel2k 4y ago
I agree that hoping jobs can be seen bad. But isn’t it a chicken and egg problem? If you don’t have interesting experience nobody will hire you. If you have too many job hops nobody will hire you. I am exactly in this position. My current and previous role where both not very interesting on paper, so the interview ended when I was talking about my job in detail. So is hoping jobs to get more valuable experience better or staying in a job just to demonstrate stability better? Nobody is saying hoping is good but not everyone has landed a great job yet…
BoxFour 4y ago
FWIW, I've noticed candidates have started catching onto this and will do some sneaky resume adjustments involving leaving off some short stints. It gets explained as: 1. I just took some time off between Job A and C (when really there was a job B inbetween) 2. I tried to start a company between Job A and C (when really, again, there was another corp B) 3. I was at Job A the whole time (when really the progression was A -> B -> C -> A again) 4. I went straight from Job A to Job C (when, again, there was a job B) and the dates get fudged +/- a few months I usually ask about the resume just as a conversational thing at the end of the interview, but my company's pretty strict about checking history so they get denied for any of the above reasons. We appear to be the exception, since most candidates express a lot of surprise that we even bothered to check.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  How do they check?
  - treis 4y ago
    Most employers outsource payroll and those payroll companies sell the data. You can get the employment record of most applicants this way.
  - BoxFour 4y ago
    HR actually calls/emails to verify employment dates/eligible for rehire, though I wouldn't be surprised if some of it was automated (like the other poster noted) through payroll data to catch the omitted company B. For most companies they'll just find them directly and call, and if they can't for whatever reason (company doesn't exist anymore, multiple companies with the same name) they'll ask the candidate to provide a point of contact. Of course now that I said that out loud I suppose the next step for a candidate is to provide a fake number/email as a reference, but that doesn't really work if you say that you worked at Amazon/etc.
bufordtwain 4y ago
My own experience has been that upper level executives are the most frequent job hoppers.
- TecoAndJix 4y ago
  I was told in a business ethics class that the average tenure of executives is 6-8 years. The professor did not think this was optimal as consequences of their decisions were not yet apparent by the time of their exit.
dominotw 4y ago
radical job hopping is THE way. I will hop for 30% increment( all else being equalish). Screw the fearmongering. I would've lost hundreds of thousands every year if i cared about tenure on my resume. Local optimization is the way to go. Sure have a long term career plan and it is important to work on critical projects and get promoted but don't get taken advantage of by employers paying you 30% less than someone who just hopped into the same job from outside. Are you really going to be able to tolerate this and stick out for some supposed 'long term' .
amazonjob332 4y ago
How does this apply to switching teams within a company? Currently on my first real job out of college and after 6 months not really feeling this team. I know Amazon has more dev-ops work than most companies for SDEs, but my current team feels like it has too much. I don't feel I'm actually learning much about programming or software design. I am considering switching teams to try and find something a bit more programming focused. Interested in hearing feedback.
- hackitup7 4y ago
  If you read this: I would feel free to try to switch teams without anxiety, all else being equal. IME you can hop a few times without anyone thinking twice, especially early in your career. The point is that you just don't want to establish a pattern of "something always seems to prevent this person from staying at a job for more than ~1 year". If the job content is better on the new team that's really important early in your career. Good luck!
  - amazonjob332 4y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! Good to know
Vibgyor5 4y ago
I'm actually experiencing this and feeling very down especially as an Asian targeting roles in Europe and remote roles at US-based companies. My career trajectory after undergrad: 4 months: Project manager at a bank. Management development program that I left to join a startup in Berlin. 5 months, internship: promising startup in Berlin that I joined as intern. Founder passed away so the company almost went down under and they couldn't support me with visa. 1 year: Well-known German startup, notable turnkey projects. Left to home country due to family issues (closer to ageing relatives) 2 years 8 months: Rising Asian unicorn, notable turnkey projects, some good impact here. Left after a while to switch industry 3 months: Remote role at a US-based startup. Loved the time here and was actually able to scale a program. Laid-off along with half of the company due to investor pulling funds. Am I a serial job-hopper? There are reasons behind every move. Some decent impactful projects as well and I can provide strong references from my previous employers. But this is not immediately evident to a recruiter and raises questions, more so in this market. Now I'm job-searching while simultaneously freelance consulting on the side but as a generalist, non-tech, I'm somewhat jaded with job-hopping and want to aim for longer run at a stable company.
htkibar 4y ago
This is a personal pet peeve of mine. Workers react to the environment they are in. Calling it a "graph algorithm / hot potato" is belittling, especially in the sense that most people who switch jobs; don't even want to do so in the first place. However, as a company, if you are unwilling to stay in line with the market; worst yet hand out relative pay decreases (2% raise with 12% inflation anyone?) then obviously people will leave. If you have a culture with issues that everyone and their grandmother know on your company, and can't even give hope that it'll improve even the slightest bit; people will leave. The issue is, it is far too common for what I just explained to be your 1st, 2nd, 5th company and so on. If you want long term commitment & loyalty from workers; you better make sure to give them something, anything that they can at least sleep well at night and not feel royally f'd & bitter. And if you are a hiring manager who passes on people because the environment in general is this way; then you are delusional. Glad we are not working together in the first place; you aren't looking for people who can commit, you are looking for subservience.

metadat 4y ago

This is a shortsighted hot take. If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement, or even for an orthogonal move to a less toxic environment. When the situation is good or at least reasonable, the rational person will stick around and see it through. There are endless shitty places to work. You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly. Hiring managers who choose to judge a person in this fashion, solely based on their resumé and how long a person put up with a mediocre or poor work environment in the past, have nothing of real value to offer and don't deserve the good employees. They don't take good care of them.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
The author agrees with you. From the article: "You can absolutely explain those stints, and a reasonable interviewer won’t penalize you, but my lived experience is that landing a senior role requires passing multiple somewhat arbitrary process gates"
- hackitup7 4y ago
  Yeah, and in my experience it's also about the pattern. There isn't a rule or anything. 1-2 short stints, totally fine. 3-4 short stints but with one or more 5+ year stints, probably also fine. 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months? Whatever is going on, it doesn't seem crazy to expect that it's going to manifest at job #6 as well.
  - defrost 4y ago
    > 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months? So .. someone with less than 5 years on the workforce? Look, I'm 60+ (ish) and still actively managing projects in code, engineering, mining, signal processing+interp - from my PoV anyone with less than five years on the workforce is still a child. When I look for people to land roles that shepard a five+ year project through I'm looking for people with at least 8-10 years employed already with at least one two year run and a stated intent to "settle" into a position - ie maybe kids, perhaps a new house, maybe family in the area, etc. Exposure to multiple bad projects is fine, especially if they can articulate how things went bad and how things might have been better managed to avoid that (ie big picture awareness). You do have a point, however you might be setting the bar a little low .. less than five years in is barely a toe in the paddling pool of life.
    - joebob42 4y ago
      Fwiw this perspective (talking about expectations of age, family status, background as conditions) would get you kicked as far away as possible from any hiring decisions where I work. I think mostly for legal / dei reasons to my understanding, but your whole statement reads like a radioactive hr bomb to me.
      - defrost 4y ago
        Sure, none the less, if you're looking for someone (any age, any gender, any etc.) for a long term position who will stick through the good, the bad, and the ugly that might occur during a five to ten year time frame then you're looking for any signs and indications that people have some past experience of sticking through things, are willing to stick through things in the future, and have an understanding of how things can go sour and what steps can be taken to mediate. There are many indications of the ability to make a long term commitment and survive a rocky path, not all of them traditional and conventional, with the least common factor being some time at the pump.
        pc86 4y ago
        This just smacks of wanting to treat people like shit. Given the tone of some of your other comments in this thread that actually makes perfect sense. If you want people to "stick through...the bad and the ugly" compensate them accordingly and perhaps most importantly make sure their salary keeps pace with the market as a whole instead of the typical 2-3% raises most people see every year. But even that won't keep the best people, because the best people don't have to tolerate assholes at their job, they can just go get a better one.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >I was there to solve a problem and stayed no longer than was needed to solve that problem. What problems do you have that need to be solved? Done. It's like people who stay at one job for year never practice for interviews or something.
Silhouette 4y ago
If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement. There is an old saying: once is luck, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. A similar argument applies to people who have past employments of unusually short tenure. Anyone can have a miss and want to move on. Some people could be really unlucky and have it happen twice. If someone gets five years into their career and still hasn't held down any job for more than a year then something is up. Even if they're the most unlucky employee in history they still won't have the practical experience to match their YOE. They're probably the perfect example of the meme about having five years of experience or one year of experience five times. So hiring that person into a senior role isn't looking like a smart move in any case.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  5 consecutive jobs on my resume: 1 year: Student software dev job working for the university I attended while in school. Couldn't continue it even if I wanted to. 1 year and 3 months: Game producer for a small game publisher that got some bad luck (and a few bad decisions in hindsight) with a few game releases, and the parent company shut it down. 1 year and 1 month: Lead developer at a tiny app development startup where after a while it became clear the board members funding the company didn't know anything about apps and the executive producer didn't know anything about proper marketing or making sure the product made had an audience (but that became clear a little too late to do anything about it). The apps we made were perfectly good quality, but didn't find an audience. Board members eventually pulled the plug after the fourth app release. 1 year and 2 months: worked as a developer (and project manager/dev on one game) for a company that was doing incredibly well when I joined, but had a string of struggles for the following year after. I was part of a major layoff after a big release when the client decided to stop most of the funding. I could tell things weren't going well with the main client, but it kept looking like maybe we were a month or two out from landing a sweet development contract for various large opportunities to work on a big game for a publisher (none of which ended up panning out), so I stuck around just in case. They never did. 0 years and 9 months: worked as a contractor for a consulting company at a small marketing department at an insurance company, mainly just me and a lead developer. One day the lead developer got fed up with his ideas not being used and walked out and started his own company shortly after. The marketing head at that point decided to do something else with the project and didn't need me anymore so my contract suddenly ended. Next job: 6 years. Joined the company and a few months later they announced getting bought by a major corporation. The merger started and everything started getting shittier, a couple major layoffs happened, people kept leaving on top of that, but I decided to stay, in part, because "I have so many short stints on my resume, I need something longer, I should stay at least 2-3 years!" At 3 years, the large corporation we merged with posted nothing but losses every quarter for 2 years, raises were pretty much nonexistent, the bonus I was hired with got taken away during the merger, and our department had about a third the employees it had when I started...but then the pandemic happened, and they had already closed down our office space, so I was already fully remote, didn't have to deal with any uncertainty about being forced back into the office, so I stayed even longer than I should have. So I've had short stints 5 times in a row, always being laid off for nothing that had to do with my performance or capabilities, and that led to me staying way too long at a shitty job to make up for it. A long stint that almost wasn't, btw, as during one of those major layoffs after the first year, as I found out I was on one of the big layoff lists, until a few people quit before it happened and my boss could lay off less people as a result. Been at my current job for a year, and so far it's been doing well and they've had 5 straight years of rapid growth, but we'll see. I sometimes joke that I'm the Ted McGinley[1] of software companies. [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4549382 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4549382
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement. The problem with this take is that over time, those incremental improvements become harder to find for someone who has established a pattern of job hopping. It’s not a big deal when you’re 24 years old and you’re not really owning major initiatives and long-term projects. It becomes a big problem when you’re at 15 YOE and your resume has ten different companies where you never stayed long enough to even see the long-term consequences of your decisions. I’ve seen a lot of pattern job hopper candidates who clearly have “One year of experience repeated 10 times” who can’t really compete with someone who has fewer jobs but stuck around long enough at each company to make a bigger impact. If job hopping continues, it catches up to you later in a career.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  I think these concepts are orthogonal. You can have one year of experience 10 times by working 10 years in a single company and not self-actualising. One could argue an employee can stay too long at a job for the comfort and lack of ambition, coasting. Even at the executive level, staying long does not guarantee owning to one‘s mistakes, since there are many ways to deflect blame and many places where top of the org has little accountability.
  - hnaccount_rng 4y ago
    Genuine question: How can you ever learn from feedback loops that take 2-3 years if you only ever stick around for a year?
    - mejutoco 4y ago
      TLDR: you cannot. I am saying they are independent concepts. Basically, if you stay for one year it is not possible to learn the effects of longer projects (very valid point you mention). _But_, staying 10 years does not mean necessarily that you did learn from 2-3 years cycles. It will be _possible_. It could mean you are very good at deflecting, coasting, or playing golf with the right people, among many other possibilities. Unrelated: today is on the news that Unilever's CEO will be resigning after 3 years, which also seems short to me.
dasil003 4y ago
Here's the rub: the "bad situation" you are in is not independent of you as an individual. When you're young and early career you simply don't have the experience to judge what is good or bad (this is one of the reasons employers like hiring young people). You also haven't demonstrated what you are capable of, so why should anyone else hire you? Short of obviously toxic environments, the best bet early career is to put your head down and see what you can deliver in each job, build a network by impressing your colleagues, and keep an eye out for the next opportunity whenever the time is right. It's very easy to fall into a self-pity or entitlement trap that can work against you. Just as bad employers sabotage themselves by not caring about employees, individuals can sabotage themselves by not recognize what they are being paid for.
zb1plus 4y ago
Yep. This whole thing about not hiring "job hoppers" is a conspiracy to suppress wages by the management class. Companies will drop you without a second thought, you should have the right to do the same. I think more software engineers should move into consulting where the gun for hire nature of our industry isn't hidden.
- dijonman2 4y ago
  I couldn’t disagree more. I want to see commitment, not leaving at the first sign of trouble. It costs a lot to acquire and hire talent.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > It costs a lot to acquire and hire talent. Probably because of your attitude towards it and throwing away people that follow the industry average churn rate. Reminds me of someone who complains about how hard it is to find a date but has criteria tolerances for partners that would make aerospace engineer blush.
  - LunaSea 4y ago
    How do you know it's only the first sign of trouble? Regular employees don't have the possibility to change companies from the inside, leaving is the only option.
    - gnz11 4y ago
      Well, technically there is another option: unionization.
      - LunaSea 4y ago
        Don't companies currently prevent the creation of those?
        enriquto 4y ago
drc500free 4y ago
That makes sense early to mid career. At some point you become responsible for creating the culture, not running away from it.
- silksowed 4y ago
  never thought of this but glad you said it. one thing i also think about if i was manager was creating a resilient system of employment. what happens if x leaves tomorrow? is x too critical and knows too much domain knowledge? how am i as a manager going to share that knowledge across my team so if any one person leaves we at least have some way to continue on.
onion2k 4y ago
You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly. If someone says they're a senior and they're hired into a senior position but then it turns out that they're not really capable of doing the job of a senior that isn't the company's fault. Those are the people who companies are filtering out when they reject resumes with lots of short jobs. The false negatives of people who left roles because the companies were bad are unfortunate but probably a lot less common.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Uh, what? Whether someone is capable of doing a job is totally up to the employer. Yes, one has to self assess to an extent and apply to realistic roles, but for the most part the blame doesn't lie on the individual. A senior position at one role may mean something totally different from a senior position at another company. Is it really someone's fault that they were a senior engineer at BrownGrassCo and applied for a senior position at GreenGrassCo only to find out that their definition of "senior" more closely resembles something like a team lead with managerial tasks their previous position didn't involve at all?
- pc86 4y ago
  This reminds me of that wojack meme with the normal distribution. There are certainly people on the left side of the curve who just can't operate at a senior level. Nothing wrong with that, most projects need a solid mid-level or two who can chug through well-scoped tickets. They might have a lot of short stints on their resume. But on the right side of the curve are the really great engineers who recognize a situation as bad pretty quickly, and are able to easily get another role. You can't the difference between these two based on the resume, which is why I try to talk to all of them if I can.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

I think it depends on whether you want a career or just want money. I will take money. If at the end of my life, not a single thing I have coded has made a damn penny or been used by a single person, I am perfectly fine with that.

gnicholas 4y ago
I think GP is saying that even in your own self-serving interest, you're better off sticking around longer once you reach more senior levels. Otherwise potential employers will hesitate to hire you for fear that you will leave after a short time. Even if you just want money, the long term consequences are worth considering.
dasil003 4y ago
Employers want you to care about those things though, especially as you become more senior. That doesn't mean you have dedicate your life to work, but someone with 10-15 years experience who doesn't understand the big picture of how the software is used will make bad decisions. Don't let an overly mercenary attitude lead to a perception that you're a liability.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Eh, we all want things. In a practical sense, if the company wants me to stay, they should make the environment, where I want to stay. Staying just so that it looks good on the resume is a disservice to one's own career, but truly depends on available options and whether one can deliver in the short tenure they are at a given place ( and depending on what we mean by short tenure -- I think 2 years is acceptable ). We are all mercenaries. If you buy into the mission statement, the management is actually good at selling their vision, you buy it because it resonates with you, you are the owner in some way or you are new to the game and are being used. Sadly, it is that simple. I also disagree with the premise of "someone with 10-15 years experience who doesn't understand the big picture " example. Person in that example is an idiot. Doing something for over a decade and not knowing what they are doing after seeing different setups in different roles? I have yet to meet a person, who moved a lot, who does not have a well of experiences to draw from.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Job hopping has a high ROI early in one’s career, but becomes a negative ROI in the later years. In the first few years after college it’s not a big deal to change companies several times in short succession because you’re not really a key player in an organization. Once you reach the leadership and middle management roles, job hopping means you’re never really staying at a company long enough to establish yourself and to own the long-term consequences of your actions. It’s very easy to come in, make a mess, and then leave before any consequences catch up to you. It’s much harder to stay and own things for 3 year or more. > Also a good callout that this is extra true for senior roles where it will be more complicated to replace a short-tenured leader. Well said. It’s not a big deal if one of several similarly qualified developers rotates out of a team. It is a bigger deal if your teams have a new leader every 12 months because you hired people who can’t stay in one place very long. Even as an employee it gets painful and worrisome when management is changing over frequently and nobody really knows why. How many times have we seen “Ask HN” posts where people complain that they’ve had a new manager every 12 months and everyone comments that it’s a red flag? As a company, you can’t afford to hire flakey senior leaders and managers who have a history of disappearing the second someone offers them a slightly higher salary. Keep them compensated, of course, but there will always be recruiters hunting for someone willing to jump ship in exchange for a $10K signing bonus.

vlovich123 4y ago
That’s interesting advice that I haven’t seen out play that way in my experience. In very senior roles at big tech companies, even staying in the same role provides 0 guarantee you’re working on the same project or even that the project you start lasts 3 years. Also, the difference isn’t 10k. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars at middling levels. It’s in the seven figures at the upper levels.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  From a job hopping POV, projects or roles don't count, it's all about how long you've worked at the same company. My current tenure at giant company X is "10 years", even though I've held at least 4 radically different roles across three different products during that time.

datalopers 4y ago

I straight up don't hire people with repeated short tenures. Their ego is always far beyond their capability, and there are plenty of now doomed VC-backed startups to fuel their path.

makeitdouble 4y ago
I'm interested in how you view consultants and contractors. They will be on the job for a few months, or a year or two at most, and move on to the next contract. How do you handle them compared to people with short tenures ? (vice-versa: how would you deal with a full time employee that you know might not be there a year or two but could be valuable in the meantime)
- kamaal 4y ago
  The right metric should be to measure how many turnkey projects you have done. If you are known to abandon projects midway hoping others to cleap up or build up after you. It should be plainly obvious, you are not some one who gets work done.
cbm-vic-20 4y ago
It also means they don't stick around to deal with the consequences of the decisions they make.
- aastronaut 4y ago
  It could also mean they stick around just as long as to notice that they have to deal with the consequences of the decisions they inherited and cannot change.
mrmuagi 4y ago
There are a lot of reasons why tenure might be short, but many short tenures, I agree are alarming because people are more lenient when a developer "ramps" up. If they are able to stick around and get promoted, that's a strong counter signal. I'm curious, but not to pry the exact details, how long are your tenures on average -- and would you similiarly penalize someone who worked at one company for many years?

makeitdouble 4y ago

Yes. If you are moving around in short bursts, you have to show up with enough convincing results to make it seem worth hiring you even for a potentially short time. It's a dead strategy if it takes you 6 months to get familiar with the company, 3 month to start delivering some small improvements and proceed to leave after one year.

gajjanag 4y ago

One interesting question that isn't really addressed in the article or the comments here is what advice applies to folks who don't really want to move beyond the staff engineer (IC track) or senior manager (management track) level. I have not heard of anyone getting penalized at the staff level for short stints; though I do agree with the gist of this comment and article at the principal engineer (IC) or director (management) levels. Companies across the industry are well known and notorious for having 4 year cliffs. HR often has no interest in keeping a good senior/staff level developer. Furthermore, companies are also known for making subsequent promotions harder than the first and are more than happy to let developers stagnate - managers at most companies are not responsible for providing growth opportunities beyond the so called "terminal levels" which is roughly senior/staff at most places. The easiest way for many to keep learning, keep compensation in line with the market, and continue working on interesting projects is to simply hop for a new opportunity after a few years; cliff just makes the choice easier most of the time. At least from what I have seen, one has to be really fortunate to have good managers/leaders (who can help with some of these issues) and/or a company which aligns very well with one's own goals over a long period of time. I don't believe either of these are common.

lumost 4y ago

Depends on what you mean by “senior”. If a company has only been around for 3 years or or less, what’s so wrong with a candidate who only sticks at a place for 1.5 years.

ehnto 4y ago
I have found the senior tag to be a bit inconsistent. Some roles it meant more experienced, more challenging work and more architectural input was expected. In other roles it meant less software and more soft skills were expected, talking to clients, being a defacto project manager for a particular project team etc. My unsolicited advice to anyone applying for a senior role is to ask what they mean by senior, because the job descriptions often look identical, but actual expectations differ.
- lumost 4y ago
  This is a great take, even within the same firm I've found huge mismatches in expectations when a "senior" is hired for soft skills, but internally the role aligns to hard skills - or visa versa. Throwing a project master at a hard tech problem will usually result in disaster. However the same is often true of a hard tech researcher. Eventually people tend to acquire relevant skills from both sides or move into management.

ram_rar 4y ago

I mostly agree with this, especially on senior roles. But what constitutes a short stint? How many short stints does it take to negatively impact future opportunities? Does 2 yrs suffice to demonstrate real impact? There is a lot of grey area here. Almost everyone can agree that less than a year consecutively in a role is a short stint. But people have begun to gamify the system. I see many resumes with ~2yrs exp in each role before they jump on to next. Where would you classify them?

Apocryphon 4y ago
Curious about this as well. What’s the difference of 2 years of experience, vs. 2.5, vs. a full 3 years? Sure, everyone can agree 4 years, a fully vested tenure is commitment by this industry’s standards. But where is the line between 2-3?

kortilla 4y ago

This is not true for what we call “senior software engineers”, which is someone not in a high level position in the company. We have knowingly hired many people with the expectation that they will leave after 2 years on average. > won't want to be the next stop on what they perceive to be a hot potato adventure This is not how top tech companies think, and it’s the reason that the average job duration is so short at the top of the industry. It’s not viewed through some sour grape lens of “if I can’t have them for 10 years, I don’t want them!” It’s, if they work at least a year, it will be a great opportunity to build cool stuff for however long they are around. What you’re saying might be true for some senior management side things where long-time relationships are more important, but it’s not for people who want to be highly ranked ICs.

ravenstine 4y ago
"Senior" doesn't even mean the same thing from tech company to tech company. Couple that with misleading job postings and responses to question in the interview process and you're almost flipping a coin with the kind of employee experience you'll actually be getting for a role.

silisili 4y ago

There's nothing wrong with job hopping, and I've seen no indication that patterns affect anything. The fact is, we are all working for a wage. With the death of unions, and right to work, that's about all we're working for, personal motivation aside. If a company is willing to pay more to hire you than your company is willing to pay to keep you, take it. Only suckers stick around out of some loyalty. See how loyal the company is when times are tough. In my personal experience, the tenured, high paid 40 and 50 year olds are the first to get the axe.

onethought 4y ago
Well of course you only see the times the employer axes - but you never even hear about the times they don't.
- silisili 4y ago
  I worked at the same company for a decade. There were three times the company did mass layoffs, and every time it trimmed a ton of long term employees.
  - onethought 4y ago
    Yes but you might be surprised how often "I think we need to do layoff" conversations happen and how often that a leadership team goes in to bat for keeping people for as long as financially possible. I understand there are shitty companies. But if you're judging just by the "harshness of layoffs" you don't have the full picture. Though to your point about laying off long term employees, depends on the country but it's often cheaper to cut shorter term ones (as they have less entitlements accrued, if that's a thing in your country). The other reason long term employees may be cut is they have accumulated too much in terms of small percentage pay bumps over the years and you end up with a team where 1 person is earning 50-100% more than the person next to them, and it's just an obvious cut.
Jensson 4y ago
Right to work didn't kill unions, Europe has right to work and unions do just fine, California doesn't have right to work and software engineers still don't unionize. Right to work is just a ruse trying to make you focus on the wrong thing.

blitzar 4y ago

I have personally seen scores of people employed to senior and executive opportunities whos resume is a total joke. 6 months here, year there, 3 months somewhere else, etc. having worked with and under such people so many times for 6-12 months before they inevitably move on, I am not at all impressed. But then, every time, mega corp pas them a 6 fig sign on with gauranteed bonus, 2 levels higher than their last role, so what would I know.

mylons 4y ago

this speaks to the power dynamics between employers and employees. it’s predatory to not give raises that would match finding a new job. it’s also unfortunate finding a new job is the only way to get a raise due to the lack of productivity in ramping up for X months every job, and having to reform networks. the simple solution to not encouraging job hopping is to.. wait for it.. pay people what they’re worth on the open market. the saddest part about this to me is that people on an interview panel have some sort of subconscious bias/loyalty to the company and will say, “well they have several short stints,” and perpetuate the bullshit.

manfre 4y ago
Reducing time spent interviewing and onboarding candidates might not have anything to do with company loyalty. Some of us don't enjoy the process and take steps to reduce the amount of time spent on it.

esel2k 4y ago

I agree that hoping jobs can be seen bad. But isn’t it a chicken and egg problem? If you don’t have interesting experience nobody will hire you. If you have too many job hops nobody will hire you. I am exactly in this position. My current and previous role where both not very interesting on paper, so the interview ended when I was talking about my job in detail. So is hoping jobs to get more valuable experience better or staying in a job just to demonstrate stability better? Nobody is saying hoping is good but not everyone has landed a great job yet…

BoxFour 4y ago

FWIW, I've noticed candidates have started catching onto this and will do some sneaky resume adjustments involving leaving off some short stints. It gets explained as: 1. I just took some time off between Job A and C (when really there was a job B inbetween) 2. I tried to start a company between Job A and C (when really, again, there was another corp B) 3. I was at Job A the whole time (when really the progression was A -> B -> C -> A again) 4. I went straight from Job A to Job C (when, again, there was a job B) and the dates get fudged +/- a few months I usually ask about the resume just as a conversational thing at the end of the interview, but my company's pretty strict about checking history so they get denied for any of the above reasons. We appear to be the exception, since most candidates express a lot of surprise that we even bothered to check.

moneywoes 4y ago
How do they check?
- treis 4y ago
  Most employers outsource payroll and those payroll companies sell the data. You can get the employment record of most applicants this way.
- BoxFour 4y ago
  HR actually calls/emails to verify employment dates/eligible for rehire, though I wouldn't be surprised if some of it was automated (like the other poster noted) through payroll data to catch the omitted company B. For most companies they'll just find them directly and call, and if they can't for whatever reason (company doesn't exist anymore, multiple companies with the same name) they'll ask the candidate to provide a point of contact. Of course now that I said that out loud I suppose the next step for a candidate is to provide a fake number/email as a reference, but that doesn't really work if you say that you worked at Amazon/etc.

bufordtwain 4y ago

My own experience has been that upper level executives are the most frequent job hoppers.

TecoAndJix 4y ago
I was told in a business ethics class that the average tenure of executives is 6-8 years. The professor did not think this was optimal as consequences of their decisions were not yet apparent by the time of their exit.

dominotw 4y ago

radical job hopping is THE way. I will hop for 30% increment( all else being equalish). Screw the fearmongering. I would've lost hundreds of thousands every year if i cared about tenure on my resume. Local optimization is the way to go. Sure have a long term career plan and it is important to work on critical projects and get promoted but don't get taken advantage of by employers paying you 30% less than someone who just hopped into the same job from outside. Are you really going to be able to tolerate this and stick out for some supposed 'long term' .

amazonjob332 4y ago

How does this apply to switching teams within a company? Currently on my first real job out of college and after 6 months not really feeling this team. I know Amazon has more dev-ops work than most companies for SDEs, but my current team feels like it has too much. I don't feel I'm actually learning much about programming or software design. I am considering switching teams to try and find something a bit more programming focused. Interested in hearing feedback.

hackitup7 4y ago
If you read this: I would feel free to try to switch teams without anxiety, all else being equal. IME you can hop a few times without anyone thinking twice, especially early in your career. The point is that you just don't want to establish a pattern of "something always seems to prevent this person from staying at a job for more than ~1 year". If the job content is better on the new team that's really important early in your career. Good luck!
- amazonjob332 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Good to know

Vibgyor5 4y ago

I'm actually experiencing this and feeling very down especially as an Asian targeting roles in Europe and remote roles at US-based companies. My career trajectory after undergrad: 4 months: Project manager at a bank. Management development program that I left to join a startup in Berlin. 5 months, internship: promising startup in Berlin that I joined as intern. Founder passed away so the company almost went down under and they couldn't support me with visa. 1 year: Well-known German startup, notable turnkey projects. Left to home country due to family issues (closer to ageing relatives) 2 years 8 months: Rising Asian unicorn, notable turnkey projects, some good impact here. Left after a while to switch industry 3 months: Remote role at a US-based startup. Loved the time here and was actually able to scale a program. Laid-off along with half of the company due to investor pulling funds. Am I a serial job-hopper? There are reasons behind every move. Some decent impactful projects as well and I can provide strong references from my previous employers. But this is not immediately evident to a recruiter and raises questions, more so in this market. Now I'm job-searching while simultaneously freelance consulting on the side but as a generalist, non-tech, I'm somewhat jaded with job-hopping and want to aim for longer run at a stable company.

htkibar 4y ago

This is a personal pet peeve of mine. Workers react to the environment they are in. Calling it a "graph algorithm / hot potato" is belittling, especially in the sense that most people who switch jobs; don't even want to do so in the first place. However, as a company, if you are unwilling to stay in line with the market; worst yet hand out relative pay decreases (2% raise with 12% inflation anyone?) then obviously people will leave. If you have a culture with issues that everyone and their grandmother know on your company, and can't even give hope that it'll improve even the slightest bit; people will leave. The issue is, it is far too common for what I just explained to be your 1st, 2nd, 5th company and so on. If you want long term commitment & loyalty from workers; you better make sure to give them something, anything that they can at least sleep well at night and not feel royally f'd & bitter. And if you are a hiring manager who passes on people because the environment in general is this way; then you are delusional. Glad we are not working together in the first place; you aren't looking for people who can commit, you are looking for subservience.