18 ms·

When is short tenure a red flag?

• jstx1 4y ago
  It's a good article, thanks for sharing. (I'm just now discovering the author)
  • gruez 4y ago
    [flagged]
• Hackbraten 4y ago
  Excellent article. Thank you for this.
• davesque 4y ago
  Am I the only one that feels like jobs that are good enough to warrant a 2-3 year tenure are actually rare? I'd say tenures in the 1-2 year range should be considered normal. However, I agree that less than a year feels short. But honestly, that sort of implies that the average job is worth sticking around for a year or longer. Putting it that way, even that claim seems a bit shaky. In reality, I think good leaders and teams are pretty unusual. Most people are just good at dealing with bad ones or living in denial of them.
  • throwaway6734 4y ago
    I don't understand how many people can have an impact over a 1-2 year period at a company. That's not nearly enough time to build relationships or see the long term results of your work
    • davesque 4y ago
      I think you're looking at things backwards. The questions you should be asking are how likely is it that any employee who joins a random new company feels as though they can have an impact on that company and how likely is it that they'll be compensated at market rates over a period longer than a year? I'd say the chances are generally pretty low. Therefore, a short tenure should be the average case for a rational employee. Don't kill the collective messenger.
      • alkonaut 4y ago
        > Therefore, a short tenure should be the average case for a rational employee. Is rational the same as “maximizing career income”? I just feel it’s hard to give up domain knowledge in one thing (say insurance or flight scheduling or whatever) that you aggregate, to be a complete rookie in some other business. Software skills are the easy bit. It’s the domain knowledge that takes time. Rational employees want to feel good at their job, intellectually challenged, and appreciated for what they do. That involves financial compensation but I think it’s far from the major driver. Perhaps there are two major categories of devs: those that have broadly applicable skills (say web development) but no really deep domain knowledge or interest. They can write crud for insurance year 1 and crud for food delivery year 2 and continue that way forever while making good salary jumps each year. To those it seems almost like a bad idea to grow too fond of the details of insurance, as it would hinder their careers. On the other end of the spectrum you have devs that aggregate lots of domain knowledge in some narrower field. They might switch jobs every 10 years but when they do they almost have to go to a competitor in the same industry because otherwise they throw away too much domain knowledge. The only way they can capitalize is by selling that knowledge.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      You don't build relationships, you solve the problem you were hired to fix. Companies don't hire employees to be a preschool playpen for adults. They hire them to do work.
      • klipt 4y ago
        At least at big companies, fixing problems often requires good cross team relationships.
        • thrown_22 4y ago
          Great, something for management to do.
          • astrange 4y ago
            If you can manage your own relationships then you don’t need nearly as many managers. That’s more money for you!
            • thrown_22 4y ago
              And yet I'm always paid more than lifers at a company. Funny how that works.
            • lmm 4y ago
              Sadly how many managers there are seems to have very little connection with how many are needed. If there are a lot of managers with nothing to do, they're not going to just disappear, and sadly the main way they can make themselves look busy is by wasting your time. (And I can't really blame them; I'd do the same in their place).
      • eclipxe 4y ago
        Sometimes the hardest problems to fix involve building relationships first.
        • 4y ago
    • tonightstoast 4y ago
      At the web dev startups I have worked at I was able to hit the ground running (okay, maybe like 2 weeks of training). If you know the UI & server frameworks most companies aren’t doing anything complicated from a business perspective. Half of them are crud with layers
      • code_runner 4y ago
        They all think what they’re doing is magic and impactful but “crud with layers” is IT
      • alkonaut 4y ago
        I think this is the key here: anything that’s crud with layers is the same job. Of course you can be productive within a year if what you are doing is literally the same job. Sadly this is too common. But what about proper changes of job? Going from embedded to game dev to web to HFT to Ai? Do people not do this kind of switch at all when they say “I just work 1-2 year stints”? That sounds like a pretty dreadful career to swap one crud gig for another, never really knowing a domain deeply.
        • tester756 4y ago
          >But what about proper changes of job? while I did switch like the ones you mentioned then I don't agree with you calling it "proper" I'd call it: making yours life harder due to curiosity.
          • alkonaut 4y ago
            I guess. But on the other hand I guess in the last decade of web dev just trying to stay afloat in the sea (or tire fire, depending on your perspective) of web dev frameworks and tooling is a full time job and career. To some that’s probably also something that’s intellectually satisfying.
    • Tade0 4y ago
      Impact? I've had projects get cancelled when I was less than six months in. Often there's no space for impact.
    • MDTHLN 4y ago
      This almost certainly depends on the size of the company. Two years is plenty of time to make an impact at a startup.
    • snovv_crash 4y ago
      If you hire a John Carmack or Jeff Dean (or equivalent) and they can't make a difference in your company within 2 years, your culture is broken and needs to be fixed first.
      • yongjik 4y ago
        John Carmack founded id Software in 1991 and stayed until 2013. Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is still there. These are not the kind of people we talk about when one asks "Is two year too short to be a tenure?"
        • snovv_crash 4y ago
          If Carmack or Dean were unable to make an impact after 2 years despite their exceptional skillsets, they probably wouldn't have stayed as long. If your culture doesn't let top performers, well, perform, then why would they waste their time in a place where their contributions can't reach a level of impact that can justify paying them what they're worth?
      • throwaway6734 4y ago
        99.9+% of devs don't come close to the skill of those two
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • saagarjha 4y ago
      Depends on what your work is. There’s a lot of stuff you can ship on a short timescale with tons of “impact”. You can’t directly see the results of long-term plans, but you can definitely lay the groundwork and watch people execute on it from outside the company.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      I do Rails/React work and everything is becoming more or less the same thing with the same problems to work on regardless of the job so I'm able to hit the ground running almost immediately.
    • scruple 4y ago
      I used to feel similarly. But (most) businesses today can barely see beyond the next quarter. We're always cutting corners, we're always up against insane deadlines that started as estimates, etc. I'd care a lot more about the long-term effects of the code that I write and the systems that I build if I was given ample opportunity to actually engage with long-term planning. But I'm not, so I care less about what impact I have a year or two from now with each passing day.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      It really depends on how you define impact. After joining my more recent team, I had some manual labor thrown my way. Me being me did what I thought a reasonable person should do in those circumstances: automate what I could. As a result, time spent on manual labor was cut by a ridiculous amount. I almost don't get why no one did it before me.. In my career so far, it is not uncommon to see low hanging fruits like that, but then I mostly worked in banking ( which is its own little world ). My point is, you can do a lot in 2 years depending on what you are looking for.
    • bitL 4y ago
      LOL, you probably never heard of Meta or Amazon where not having an impact in the first 6-12 months will get you PIPed...
  • sjfidsfkds 4y ago
    I don’t get it. What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not 2-3 years? What happens at 2 years that makes you want to do the job before and not want to do it after? If you never like your job I don’t think switching every 2 years helps. And if you are in it for the paycheck, 4 is usually optimal. Personally, I found whether I’m having a good time depends on the team and the project. And usually one or the other changes periodically.
    • davesque 4y ago
      For me, it's the fact that roughly 1 year seems to be the average cutoff point for how long I can tolerate doing something that feels meaningless to me and otherwise doesn't bring me any financial advantage that would allow me to duck out of the game altogether.
      • gumby 4y ago
        Perhaps you're choosing the wrong jobs, as suggested by the article?
      • microtherion 4y ago
        Have you considered the possibility that with a 1-2 year time horizon, you're more or less setting yourself up for exactly the series of meaningless jobs with limited financial upside that you're seeing as the reason for your time horizon?
        • devoutsalsa 4y ago
          No one leaves a job that’s interesting & lucrative. How many companies make it a priority to make jobs interesting & lucrative? Very few.
      • BurningFrog 4y ago
        But you expect the next job to be just as meaningless. So changing does nothing to address your stated problem.
  • michaelt 4y ago
    It depends what your goal is - there are some contributions you can make at an employer on day 1. There are other contributions that demand deeper understanding of more things. If you're joining the best self-driving-car company because you want to see self-driving cars halve road deaths in the United States - you're not going to achieve that in 1-2 years :)
  • bradleyjg 4y ago
    You’re looking at this backwards. Understandably so, but still backwards. There’s no platonic “considered normal” there’s employee and employer incentives and how they play out in combination. If there’s a high probability that you are going to think my team is bad and not worth sticking around for, why would I want to hire you?
  • alkonaut 4y ago
    I’m on year 15 with most colleagues in the 5-15 range, some approaching 20. I wouldn’t say someone can’t contribute at all initially, but I’d say the first year I expect any new hire to be almost net negative (in the sense that while their output is good, it’s often with a lot of support that takes time from more senior colleagues). If I was suspecting someone wouldn’t stay say 3 years, I’d definitely not hire them at all.
    • JamesianP 4y ago
      > I’m on year 15 with most colleagues in the 5-15 range, some approaching 20. That doesn't counter their theory though, since people (presumably) won't tend to stay at jobs that aren't worth staying at. Sooner or later everyone finds their way to a job worth staying at and becomes another example of survivorship bias. The biggest factor is presumably the company itself, some are much more successful and generous as a result while others struggle more and share the pain. But also within a company, there can be a counter-effect where making some jobs better causes more crappy jobs, for example if you're constantly pushing the less fun and career-dead-ending stuff onto the new guy while the senior people with all the political sway take the fun, cutting-edge, etc new tasks.
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
      the last two roles ive been in honestly expect real contributions beginning about the 6th week, and tbh I thought that was late. where are you finding places where you can be net negative for an entire year?
      • GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
        anything infrastructure
      • atq2119 4y ago
        A year sounds extreme for being net negative, but I have a somewhat similar experience in a mixed hardware/software company. There's so much domain-specific knowledge that takes most people a long time to ramp up in. You haven't truly arrived unless you've ramped up and seen a full product cycle. That takes years, because hardware is slow to iterate.
  • treeman79 4y ago
    Another aspect is early career moving around a lot gets you exposed to tons different ideas and approaches, which is crazy valuable.
    • mostertoaster 4y ago
      Ultimately you know it’s like both things can be valuable. A bunch of 1-2 year stints might quickly help you identify the patterns if things they work well generally abd what doesn’t. Meanwhile a 5+ year stint will give insight into how a company maintains things and adapts and can also teach valuable lessons.
  • eyelidlessness 4y ago
    I’ve stayed at every previous professional job I’ve had for 3+ years. One was ~6, but probably should have been 4. One was ~3 and ran out of funding, otherwise I probably would have stayed much longer. One was ~5 and definitely should have been 4. My current job is approaching 2 years, and I can’t foresee ever wanting to leave it. I think jobs that are good are pretty rare (my current one really stands out here). But among “good enough”, I think staying longer can be valuable depending on what you value, what you’re looking to get out of a longer tenure (and how motivated/positioned/stubborn you are about getting that), and just plain how “good enough” it is. The 6 year job should have been 4 because my potential and existing skillsets were outgrowing the scope of the job, with no business reason for room to advance. The 3 year job I would have stayed at longer fostered tremendous professional growth for me, and erased significant comp disadvantages I’d accrued before it. The 5 year job which should have been 4 didn’t produce such tremendous growth, but did produce several surprising opportunities to grow in areas I’d never anticipated, and it further erased some comp disadvantages; it should have been a year shorter due to burnout and various incompatibilities that grew over time. My current job is wonderfully meaningful to me and has almost all of the right balances (for me) of potential and real impact on a global scale, responsibility and agency, life balance. In short it’s the closest thing I could describe as a dream job. This I agree is rare, and I think the set of things which could make a given job fit that kind of role in someone’s life will vary wildly person to person. But for “good enough”, the prior jobs I’ve had largely lasted as long as they did because I focused (albeit imperfectly) on only having jobs that are high on the “good enough” scale, to the extent I have that option. I optimized for wanting to stay long term, even before I realized that’s what I was doing. I’m certainly leaving figurative money on the figurative table, and probably many other nice things I haven’t considered important. But I don’t want to work anywhere I won’t want to work when some arbitrary timer reaches zero.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I kept people for decades, and they didn't actually make that much, compared to others in similar positions. When they finally wound up our department, the person with the least tenure had over ten years. Good managers are worth their weight in gold.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > Am I the only one that feels like jobs that are good enough to warrant a 2-3 year tenure are actually rare? If good teams and good leaders are rare, you might want to re-examine your company selection process. In my experience, it's easy to find bad jobs if you just let the winds of the industry carry you around from job to job. Bad companies always have high turnover, which means they're always hiring. They may even pay above market because that's the only way they can continue bringing people in to replace everyone who's leaving. The good jobs are often more selective about their hiring. Many of them may not even post public listings. Going through a network is much more efficient for selecting into the good companies.
    • cratermoon 4y ago
      > it's easy to find bad jobs if you just let the winds of the industry carry you around from job to job Can confirm. If you're young and inexperienced it's easy to fall victim to recruiters who talk a good game. If you're older and can see through these, you can at least make a choice: do I need to take a job quickly for financial or other reasons? If so, you can find a lot of offers, but don't pretend these are going to be jobs you'll love. At the very least, go ahead and ask for the above-market rate. They worst they can do is say they don't have the budget. Ideally, you'd work a must-take position just long enough to get back on your feet while you hunt for the job you want. It will probably going to leave a short tenure position on your resume if you do that. Finding a job in this industry has never been especially difficult. Finding a job that you'd be willing to settle into for 3+ years is hard.
    • kovac 4y ago
      This sounds true. Could you point out some features of a hiring process we can look out for for signs of good teams/leaders? Number of interviews, time it takes to complete the process, kind of questions they ask, etc?
    • bradlys 4y ago
      Having worked in SV for a while and talked to many within SV... Good teams and leaders are rare. Most are garbage. Most people are just worked to death and have crazy ambition/work ethic to make stupid shit happen. There's no good way to find good teams/leadership. Often people just follow the person that has given them the most favor in their career. It doesn't mean that the manager is a good manager or a good leader - it just means that they're going to treat a particular person favorably. This is a very important distinction. I can count on one hand the amount of good leaders/managers that I've interacted with in SV and I've interacted with hundreds. It is a toxic place.
  • noelsusman 4y ago
    I was at my last job for 6 years and I've been at my current job for 4 years with no plans on leaving anytime soon. It's a little insane to me that anyone would consider leaving their job after 1-2 years without something being horribly wrong about the work environment. It takes a year for me to even feel moderately productive in a new environment. Job hopping ever year or two seems like doing the worst part of employment over and over again. It makes no sense to me.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      I will agree that a lot will depend heavily on individual circumstances. I remember joining a group that seemed like a match, but rather quickly turned out not to be. It was only due to the economy at the time that I could not get out faster. In my case, my mental health was worth more than worrying over anomaly in my resume.
    • Shorel 4y ago
      They do it because employers are too averse to increase salaries, and job hopping is sometimes the only way to get raises. It is a game of perverse incentives.
  • mostertoaster 4y ago
    I’ve averaged about 5 years over three jobs. My current one was going pretty well for a year, but COVID stuff and life craziness made it less enjoyable for the next year after a re-org. I waited another year and tried switching teams at the company and while it started rough I feel like I might find a groove that will get me a couple of years. After that I might go look for something else. Sometimes there is a good year followed by a bad year followed by three good years. If you leave after that first bad year you might just jump to another good year bad year cycle and in the end have less good years if you just stayed five years at each place.
  • devoutsalsa 4y ago
    When I stop learning, I leave. I might stick around longer for extra compensation, but there’s not usually an incentive retention. I often don’t want to leave, but I have to keep my skills sharp & I don’t want to slowly become irrelevant because there’s limited opportunity to try new things.
• aaronrobinson 4y ago
  It’s fine as long as you don’t have a history of short tenures because then you’re the common factor.
• code_runner 4y ago
  I had semi-short tenure at my last few jobs… a couple of startups and a couple of genuinely awful places to work… no real pushback during the interview process and think I landed somewhere GREAT. average tenure at last 4 jobs or about 18 months?
• lvl102 4y ago
  I once had an interview where the guy genuinely complained about me skipping around jobs. My average tenure was four years.
• gumby 4y ago
  If you have only one short stint job, just leave it off. If anyone even notices and asks, you can say, "yeah, seemed like a good idea to take some time off and not get burned out." Maybe not your idea to take the time off, but in ay case...
  • ycombobreaker 4y ago
    I've talked to some strong candidates with some short-stint history. I think including it, and being candid about the rationale, could be mutually beneficial. Hiring is expensive, and hiring the wrong person is tough. If the prospective employer can identify that the "short stint" reason would apply to them as well, it's best for everyone to part ways immediately. If not, that's good news for both of you!
• extragood 4y ago
  This article hits on some very good points. I'd like to add another from the perspective of the hiring manager, now that I've had a few years experience in that role. It's been my experience that people generally produce their best work after the first year. It takes a while to get to know any business: what its strengths and weaknesses are, and it's only with that understanding that someone can identify areas to make meaningful contributions. If someone's tenure is consistently around their one year mark, it's unlikely that they've really ever expressed their full potential in a professional setting. They leave before things get really good. Hiring is an investment - less what the candidate can do today, but what they can contribute over a more substantial period, given the right encouragement.
  • godelski 4y ago
    > Hiring is an investment I think this is why many employees are frustrated when they find out that new hires get paid substantially more than them. Which encourages jumping ship, to get a similar wage bump. I've said this before, I don't understand why wage renormalization isn't a standard practice and why it is considered controversial. When investing you don't just buy investments and then when they are working out and have good future potential buy new riskier investments for higher premiums. You should generally continue to add to what has been working. You should have a balanced profile too. You do need some risk (new hires) but you shouldn't spend all your money on new risky things when what's been working continues too. And just like you want to rebalance your profile frequently, to ensure you're not too leveraged, you too need to renormalize wages. People are frustrated because management is not in fact treating hiring like an investment.
    • YZF 4y ago
      Where I work we would generally pay the new hire and the existing employee about the same. I.e. there's no such thing as a new hire gets paid more than the existing employee of a similar "level". It's more likely to be the opposite. That said you usually aren't going to be able to hire someone away from their current job by offering them less. The person jumping ship every year to get small raise is eventually going to run into the problem of not having accomplished anything worthwhile in their career. It's arguably better early on in your career to work for less but do things that are more interesting and have better learning opportunities. One might argue it's always a better choice. As a manager I would like people to stay, and they mostly do, and I am going to try my darnedest to make sure they are compensated well for their contribution (including the fact that they are more effective by knowing the code base and the product). It is pretty tricky though with the competition constantly trying to recruit way from you and their deep pockets, ensuring people don't burn out or get bored etc. Lots of factors I can't control.
• Tade0 4y ago
  In the ten years that I've been in this industry, my application was rejected on grounds of tenure once - by GitLab. > If you want the people that you hire to stay, do it by building a great workplace and paying people well – not by finding staff who are too timid to leave bad situations. This is an important point. I quit one project after eight months and at least two people out of my 11-person team referred to this decision as a "luxury available to those who have savings". Plenty of people paint themselves into a corner like that.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    I was jokingly called a coward when I quit job. Yep, spot on! I don't want to work somewhere where doing a job is heroic. Unless I own that company.
• tptacek 4y ago
  Jacob is smart and has been around the block a couple times, but I find this whole post kind of frustrating. Essentially what he's talking about is reading tea leaves out of peoples' resumes. I think that's a comprehensively flawed way of qualifying candidates. It's reasonable to be concerned about behavioral patterns in candidates. Some otherwise-qualified people will be behaviorally incompatible with the roles you have. Maybe they're hard to work with, or need too much or too little structure. To the extent you're concerned about stuff like this, you should probably just check references. Other than that, what are we talking about here? Hiring managers spend too much time looking at resumes already. It's possible to hire without looking at them at all; the last several companies I've worked for have done just that: just ask people to demonstrate that they can do the work the role requires, build a rubric to assess their performance, and hire the people that clear the bar. It wouldn't even occur to those teams (or my current team, I guess) to look for patterns and indicators like this, because they're just not making any decisions off of resumes to begin with. I've been in this business since 1995, and studiously avoiding resumes since around 2010. I have made more bad hiring decisions by carefully assessing resumes than I ever have by just asking people to demonstrate the work, and then taking the time to build a serious evaluation checklist for the work. If you're worried that people are habitually bad communicators, are disorganized, can't manage scope and are adrift without structure, can't stop talking and just deliver some practical unit of work, won't ask questions or collaborate: you can assess for all of these things! If you're worried that people are ladder-climbers, or aren't here to do the work, you can set expectations. And if you're worried that candidates aren't going to be loyal and are going to jump ship when presented with a funner job with higher comp at a more promising company, well, that's life in the Professional Golfer's Association, I guess.
  • kasey_junk 4y ago
    I’ve recently developed a fairly strong anti-FAANG bias. It would be easy to hide this bias based on their pattern of employment history. Their employment terms make it extremely rational to leave after 4 years, so telling myself a story around that as a hiring criteria (eg “only people uncommitted to an idea leave every 4 years”) would make it easy for me to make my bias into a supposedly rational hiring criteria. Instead, I just don’t look at resumes. I don’t ask about job history and I don’t bring it up in interviews. Rather, I create a rubric based on something I can judge outside of a resume and stick to that. This is frustrating! I myself have a long resume. I’d like to not have to explain it over and over again and expertise is a thing! But the rubric can account for this without pattern matching against a persons career history, and must or you fall into the bias trap.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• prepend 4y ago
  If I run into an asshole once that’s normal. If I run into assholes all day, I’m the asshole. It’s perfectly normal to have a few positions with short stints and as long as there’s a decent story it shouldn’t be a big deal. But if there’s a long string of 3-6 month positions and there’s not something clear (specialized consultant) then that’s a warning sign.
• charles_f 4y ago
  Interestingly you don't see lots of article on the converse, but I'm getting thrown off by long tenures as well. I've seen a lot of issues with people staying 10-15y in the same job People get set in their ways, lack the diversity of experience that helps be creative in finding solutions, considering certain issues as insurmountable and a fact of life. In my current job I work with a few people who have been around forever pretty clearly because they are bad and failed to find something else. It might be generalizing a bit and certainly staying 15y in a job doesn't mean the person is bad, but it certainly brings some questions as well. We don't talk a lot about that, but I see long tenures as an anti pattern.
  • hackitup7 4y ago
    I think it depends a bit on the job trajectory as well. Getting promoted several times in 10 years at a company that grows and successfully vs. a flat career trajectory at a company with flat growth tells a pretty different story.
  • ip26 4y ago
    On the other hand, I’ve seen very strong candidates who nominally worked the same job for 10-15 years, but when I probe I discover they have explored every nook and cranny of that job, developing expertise in the entire possible scope. That’s a positive look IMO.
  • AndyDevine 4y ago
    I'm 37 years in the industry. Four jobs. 1 year (starter marriage at a big company in a big city), 10 years (great startup with a great leader where the culture was destroyed after he sold the company), 17 (the best technical challenge for me, but small company bought by big company which outsourced slowly but relentlessly. I would have left five years earlier but in 2008 I was just happy to still have job. I did my best work there), 9 years (still there, now principal SE). I'm a serial monogamist. I think staying, being invested and caring is in my best interest and the company's best interest. The down side is knowing when it's time to go. Similar to what OP said about short tenures, you need to find out why people stayed so long. Agreed it can lead to parochial thinking. I've also known long tenure seniors that are at best no better than juniors only a couple years out of school. I hate interviewing candidates, but my former manager told me it was the most important thing I do. Choose my future teammates. An hour is precious little time to suss out competence and character.
• sokoloff 4y ago
  I mostly agree with the article. For me, as long as I see one job where you saw something through and got a promotion in it, I will overlook several short stints at other places. (I’m just trying to avoid the “talks big, works tiny” pattern or someone who will leave every time someone else offers them 3 nickels more.)
• Krisjohn 4y ago
  A hiring manager that assumes businesses are, by default, good unless proven otherwise is a red flag for anyone looking to work at that business. Not only is it typically the opposite, but advertised jobs are disproportionately bad because people tend to hang onto the good ones. Workers are far more likely to cycle through a batch of bad jobs that, at best, nobody wants (and just as likely include unlawful worker exploitation) before finding a job that doesn't suck to the point of being abusive. I can't tell that a job is toxic until I've been there a bit, any more than a hiring manager can tell that an employee is toxic until they've been there a bit.
• annie_muss 4y ago
  I like this article and I'm terrified of actually following through with the advice. I have multiple short tenures on my resume due to undiagnosed ADHD. Now I know I have it I'm making some small improvements but I can't see being honest about it being anything more than a massive red flag. Do employers actually care enough about a single employee to consider these things?
  • helldritch 4y ago
    My ADHD was diagnosed last year, around the age of 30. I started medication in January and I've been able to turn my life around - I no longer have that awful feeling that my next crisis is constantly flying towards me, just waiting to happen. I was open and honest in my interview with my current company about my ADHD, and that I didn't need any form of special treatment (with the exception of a keyed locker to keep my medication in - it's a controlled substance in the UK). Everyone was understanding about it, and I have a lot of support on offer from them, but ironically I no longer seem to need it, my medication has completely removed my symptoms. Large companies these days want to appear welcoming and care about things like diversity. We have a disability, and it's important we see it that way. Without my medication, I struggle to integrate with society, I struggle to focus on tasks (or obsess over them to an unhealthy degree). There's also a lot to be said for hiring developers with ADHD who are being treated: We spent decades learning behaviors to allow us to focus on tasks, once we're being treated, the issues goes away but the behaviors remain. It can be a superpower sometimes. I spent my life wondering how people focus on work for 9 hours a day: It turns out that they don't, but decades of trying to emulate that combined with "performing enhancing" medication means that we _can_.
• YuriNiyazov 4y ago
  “It’s fine even if it’s fifth or seventh” - this is bad advice (citation: I’m a hiring manager). My sourcer will filter you out even before your resume hits my part of the pipeline, so you can’t depend on me figuring out if you are a good candidate despite your bad tenure.
  • freedomben 4y ago
    Can you describe your company? Are you a startup? A big corp?
    • YuriNiyazov 4y ago
      50 software engineers, 100 total employees, post-series D
      • PheonixPharts 4y ago
        So you're a small startup no one has heard of, you offer ~50% of the TC most of the engineers you reach out to currently have and you're likely not going to survive until the next round of funding if interest rates keep rising. Nice. I've also been a hiring manager in similar environments and let me give you a bit of advice: don't boast about how strong your filter is. Your best bet at hiring talented engineers is to find great people who slip through the cracks everywhere else. You're not looking for candidates who could also pass a FAANG process, anyone who could and is applying for your team has something very wrong with them. What you're looking for is that diamond in the rough. That candidate that went to community college instead of Stanford but has built some amazing projects on the side. Or, that person who is not a good fit for big corps and so has left 2-3 of them after a year, might be a bit cranky but is absolutely brilliant and will thrive on the right team with a bit of humanity thrown their way. My best hires have been candidates that HR threw out.
        • sgustard 4y ago
          I'm also that hiring manager. First of all: HR is throwing out your best hires? Get on the same page with HR already. Next: Isn't FAANG all in a hiring freeze right now? All their staff looking at a 50% drop in their RSUs? Twitter's about to shed thousands of employees? There's no better time for startups to find people and pay them realistic salaries. The "hard to work with job hopper" isn't going to make the cut.
• tjr225 4y ago
  Short tenure has always resulted in me getting massive raises by moving around. I’m not saying that’s always the case, but when my wife and I were 80k in the hole with student loans, wanted a house and a kid, I’ll just take whatever recruiter throws the most money at me. I had big bills to pay always going for 20-40k raises helped me pay them off.
• hsn915 4y ago
  I've never held a job for more than 2 years. I can come up with a reasonably convincing story for every individual Job about why I quit that one. But taken together, there's no reasonable story that would convince a hiring manager. It comes down to this: I hate being an employee. I want to work on my own projects on my own terms. This is the only way I can find work that is worth doing. That said, the wording of the article is weird. > If your job is terrible, you can leave As if you're affirming an anxious person. Listen, yes, you can leave, but you shoule know that there absolutely will be consequences for leaving too early. Fewer employers will consider hiring you. For one thing, I have relatives that got into the tech scene after me, but rack in much higher salaries than me. I'm not sure what it is, but probably staying in their jobs for more than two years helps. If your goal in life is to find a stable employment, then you should absolutely not "just leave". For me, that was never my goal in life (and frankly I can't understand people whose goal in life is that). So I had no qualms about leaving when I found that I lost the will to continue working the job. That said, I still hesitated and took my time. I still cared about finishing whatever project it is I'm working on. I felt a sense of responsibility for the company, because they are paying me to do a job, and quitting half way through is just not the right thing to do.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > I can come up with a reasonably convincing story for every individual Job about why I quit that one. But taken together, there's no reasonable story that would convince a hiring manager. > It comes down to this: I hate being an employee. If the bottom line is that you hate being an employee, then it seems that being suspicious of your resume would be the correct call. > I want to work on my own projects on my own terms. This is the only way I can find work that is worth doing. This is something hiring managers try to screen for during the hiring process. Being part of a team and working together on the teams' terms is crucial. There isn't room for a "lone wolf" kind of programmer in most companies. This personality might work at small companies that can only afford to hire a single programmer who owns an entire domain from start to finish, but those jobs come with their own issues.
    • ditonal 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• squokko 4y ago
  As a former hiring manager of software engineers, I can shed some light on when (and why) I don't like to see short tenures. 1) In a large software engineering organization (1000s of employees), knowledge of internal issues becomes a much bigger bar to getting something shipped than simple chops. When you look at big product failures from companies like Microsoft/Google/etc. they're much more due to the company making bad decisions rather than individual engineers not being technically competent enough. Guiding the company to better decisions is something that you can only get really good at with time and repeated interactions with people (although time certainly doesn't mean you'll get good at it!) 2) In hiring any software engineer, the organization needs me to have a 1/10th chance of hiring a future manager, 1/50th chance of future Director, 1/1000th chance of hiring a future VP, and 1 in 25,000th chance of hiring a future CEO of the company. A job hopper is unlikely to become anything but an IC. 3) There are some scenarios where I don't need someone to develop knowledge of the internal org, in fact I need to bring in external knowledge. For example, nobody in the company has done anything but React Native and I need someone with React Native experience to help jumpstart something. Here I'd happily hire a job hopper as they will get a working prototype built faster than anyone else, and by the time they're gone the org will likely have made a decision on whether to staff up a full team around it or scrap it.
  • avmich 4y ago
    > A job hopper is unlikely to become anything but an IC. Why do you think so? Is it because you project job hopping in the past into the future history of working in your company, and so IC won't have time to become CEO? Or because of something else?
    • squokko 4y ago
      Literally none of the managers and higher levels that I've ever worked for have been job hoppers. They haven't all been lifers, but like a new job every ~5 years kind of thing, which in this industry is not a "job hopper."
      • avmich 4y ago
• pyuser583 4y ago
  I work at startups. I’ve been let go a lot, and the rest were soft layoffs (“your entire department should start looking for jobs”). I “quit” quit once, and that was because I felt my job was done and I wasn’t doing anyone favors my sticking around. Basic startup stuff. Startups rebrand, refocus, deploy new products, and make drastic changes all the time. I like startup work, and hope one day I’ll be in the “next big thing”, but I’m also fine being the guy who left Netflix in 2009 because they preferred Oracle cloud to Cassandra.
• User23 4y ago
  Something like “it wasn’t a good fit” is always a valid answer for a short tenure. Your interviewer may try to dig deeper, but they’ll respect your refusal to be more specific. Alternatively you can just leave that position off your résumé entirely. In tech it’s normal to take 3-12 months off every decade or so, so it probably won’t even raise any eyebrows.
• evilotto 4y ago
  I am not interested in hiring someone who doesn't want to stick around for 2 reasons: First, as others have said, it takes time to learn an organization, far longer than learning say, a new programming language. Someone who only sticks around for a year is barely getting their feet wet and is only going to be making surface contributions. Not to mention they usually check out a month or so before they leave. Second, hiring is a pain. It's time consuming and expensive. I don't want to be doing it any more than I need to, and someone who joins with the intent of leaving in a year is only making my job harder.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    This pain also scales with the size of the department. If a company fills an entire team with job hoppers who leave after a year, the entire team will turn over every year. Revolving door companies are terrible to work for because everyone around you is relatively inexperienced at their job. You don’t really want to invest too much in work relationships because you know everyone is just waiting to hop somewhere else. Eventually, you get sick of it and want to leave, too. In a way, hiring too many job hoppers becomes contagious as the turnover burns out the remaining employees who have to shoulder more work simply because they’re the only ones who have been around long enough to have the knowledge necessary to get things done.
  • Vibgyor5 4y ago
    I wonder what would be your take on my stints (non-tech Ops guy here, based out of Asia/Europe for reference). I have changed jobs 5 times in 6 years: # Company 1: First stint after university at a Bank. Management development program. Left after 4 months to join a startup backed by renowned European VC/accelerator. 4 months #Company 2: Technically an internship here which was supposed to be full-time after 6 months. 3 months in, co-founder who was also my hiring manager died - startup was on the verge of sinking. 5 months. #Company 3: Ops role with plenty of ownership at Food-delivery company (think Doordash for Europe). Left after 1 year due to personal reasons (had to move back to Asia due to medical reasons in my family) Good impact here though. #Company 4: Asian unicorn. Impactful role, scaled a new business vertical to $xM ARR fwiw. Left after 3 years to change industry. #Company 5: Booming startup that ultimately did not succeed. Very short time but still made some strides. 3 months. Laid off along with 75% of the company. Now, what's your take if you were to look at my resume? As you can see, I had just 1 long stint so far (3 years). My only saving grace is that my projects were at least somewhat notable. Especially in the current climate where entire teams can be laid off and many orgs are downsizing, I feel insecure that another short stint < 1-2 years would be a red flag to recruiters and Hiring Manager - circumstances notwithstanding.
• StopHammoTime 4y ago
  I only have one question to everyone here who is complaining about “job hoppers”. Do you pay more than 5% increases in salary per year for performance? If you don’t like job hoppers, be the change you want to see in the world: create a good team, pay well, and retain your employees.
  • ev1 4y ago
    Pretty much this - even if I like a job, what am I supposed to do when I'm getting a 5-10%+ pay cut every year?
  • khazhoux 4y ago
    As a BigCo hiring manager, I can tell you we are forced into a rough spot. During perf/comp season, I get only a relatively small pool to allocate as salary/bonus/RSU increases. And when hiring, every candidate worth hiring demands a total comp that exceeds my highest-performing engineers. Recruiting and even my own management chain is OK with giving in. I've let several candidates go even though my management told me to just pay up, because it's unfair to the current team to introduce such an imbalance, and at any rate it causes me all kinds of headaches during the next perf/comp season when the new-hire wants a huge bonus on top of their huge hiring package.
  • rkho 4y ago
    I agree. The most disingenuous framing of the conventional 3% inflation adjustment (which, as CPI has demonstrated, does not remotely cover inflation) is that it is "a merit increase which is based on performance". Companies who try and ignore data-driven CPI during performance discussions are just encouraging job hoppers.
• lgleason 4y ago
  Staying somewhere too long is just as bad as job hopping. I've also seen a lot of developers who stayed in their job for a long period of time and were not very good at it, while the "job hoppers" were at the top of their game. One of the biggest challenges is that the interview process does not give an employee or an employer a good signal on if the relationship will be mutually beneficial and a good fit for both people. I've also seen a lot of companies that will present the environment etc. one way during the interview only to find that things are much different once you get into the day to day. Also, the followup article adds some more nuance to this here. https://jacobian.org/2022/oct/20/tenure-and-seniority/ https://jacobian.org/2022/oct/20/tenure-and-seniority/
• levelforge 4y ago
  As a hiring manager, and a professional who worked their way up. I would add if you leave because a place is terrible… leave out what you think is terrible about your current or previous company in your new interview. Focus on the positives and your professional growth. It is almost always a red flag if someone focuses on their pain points with the previous org. After you’re hired you can for sure bring up a lesson you learned from the previous org that is related to a successful outcome you want to create with your new team.
  • khazhoux 4y ago
    > leave out what you think is terrible about your current or previous company in your new interview Are you saying that one shouldn't say to their potential new manager: "Every manager I've ever had was an idiot who didn't recognize how good my ideas were?" ;-)
    • levelforge 4y ago
      Obviously… if you’re that smart you would have picked me as a manager and never quit ;-)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• POPOSYS 4y ago
  I see an unrecognized bad pattern here: managers who make people leave early. And of course you should be proud that people are leaving early some job just to get into your team! Discussing "short tenure" as a problem is, well, short-sighted. Nobody leaves his job when the job is ok. And when the job is not OK and you now it (yes, this exists), then it is on you as a manager to make people stay anyway. I see another pattern especially in youngster IT managers: they try to develop psycho-powers to understand how humans are programmed - this is just magical thinking. Leave the psychology to the professionals and just do your job - manage your project in a way that people like working there.
• Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Questions about short tenure cuts both ways. The first couple of jobs I had were about 2 or 3 years. First company went broke, second company was some soul-crushing telecoms multinational and so I decided to quit and look for a new job. My interview was for a business analyst role with some fairly large gas company. Ended up interviewing with some senior exec/business person who absolutely fixated on the tenure of my previous two roles. Like 40 minutes worth of questions as to why I was "only" in my previous roles for a couple of years. If the interviewer was getting red flags, I most certainly was - so I turned it around and asked what the expected tenure for this role was, and the answer was 10 to 15 years before any promotion. That was it for me, emailed HR directly after the interview saying I wanted to withdraw from the process. Apparently, this got around and the boss of HR wanted to call me back in for a debrief. Didn't have the time, but I did email saying that questions about previous tenure were a major red flag for me. Didn't hear anything back after that, but I keep checking out the gas company's staff turnover on Glassdoor/LinkedIn and it seems like six months is closer to their expected tenure in that department.
• buro9 4y ago
  I've only ever seen a few resumes that were exclusively short tenure careers. The two questions it raises for me: 1. Is this a person who has ever lived with the consequences of their decisions and code? Can they maintain what they write? 2. Is this a person worth investing training, mentorship and coaching into? I will still interview the person, but I change my questions to find out if they've maintained systems, lived with code they've written. To the second I ask no questions... It's just a risk. Onboarding takes time from a productive engineer, if I don't believe someone will stick around that time is wasted when paid double (for this person and the person that will replace them within a year). That's only a few people in hundreds of people interviewed. I hired one, they left after 10 months :shrug These people are likely not you though. There's a big fear that "I've only had one job and I'm ten months in and it's truly awful, if I quit have I destroyed my career?"... no, you're fine, just quit. Or "I've worked a few jobs for 3+ years and then had a couple less than a year, I'm trying to find the right thing for me and this isn't it, if I quit have I ended my career?"... no, you're fine, just quit. A resume covering a decade or more of entirely short tenure things is a different beast from whatever your circumstances are likely to be. But if you are one of those people, consider the signal it sends... has this person ever lived with the consequences of their decisions (both technical and interpersonal)? How would you show this? Do you have a long-lived OSS project? A long-lived and maintained side-project. Extracurricular isn't needed to get a job, but if your resume can't communicate something then this is where that stuff helps.
  • donkeyd 4y ago
    I have had pretty short tenure for most of my career up to now. The reasons for this are pretty much your questions turned around: 1. Am I allowed to write maintainable code, or just have to push features? 2. Will the organization invest in me, coach me and allow me to grow into roles with more purpose and hopefully financial reward? If companies treat me like a piece of meat, in stead of a human who's trying to build a career, I get out. And often it takes a while for the truth to appear. I always hope to find a place where I feel good enough to work for 5 or 10 years, but up to now no employer has treated me well enough to stick around that long.
    • 4y ago
• cabbagesauce 4y ago
  Funny how raising red flags may correlate with plain pay raise strategy. It's a known fact, that 2+ yr tenured workers will get smaller salary bumps for loyalty or staying with the company. And the next guy walking in may have a significantly bigger salary for the same title and set of responsibilities. I was this "next guy walking in" and during kitchen banters with colleagues it was revealed they have had a 30% smaller compensations. Since that day I never trust it's in company's interest to fairly bump salaries of tenured staff. They'd rather get a new guy and pay him more. And it's simple economy: giving 15% raise to X members with base comp Y every year is much more expensive than, say, give a 150-180% base of Y to a single fresh hire. From my point of view, a raise flag is not getting a decent pay raise and not getting any articulation on why cloaked as annual company policy et cetra.
• eins1234 4y ago
  If I don't think someone can bring significant value to the business by the second month at the latest, I won't hire them. And if I do hire someone and they don't end up bringing significant value to the business by the second month (or if they end up bringing negative value), then I let them go. So if they make it even to just month three, it means the hire was well justified. If they leave any time after that, even if it's before their first anniversary, I wish them good luck on their next venture and thank them for the value they brought to the business during their tenure. The length of their tenure for past positions is completely irrelevant in all of this, so doesn't factor into my hiring decisions at all. Frankly I don't understand why anyone would do any differently. At the end of the day, I think preferring employees who are "loyal" to past employers is a sign of insecurity on the company/hiring manager's side. It means they secretly think their company is at best only average at retaining great employees, so they resort to biasing towards "loyal" employees as a clutch. I would suggest they work on employee retention instead of disqualifying perfectly good candidates for not having been "loyal" enough in the past. Employees don't owe any "loyalty" to their employers. It's the employer's job to retain employees. When an employee leaves early, it's almost always because the employer was doing a shitty job at retention.
  • club_tropical 4y ago
    The clear divide in hiring preferences will be if it's owner operated or manager operated. Owner (like I suspect, you) will have clear goals, expectations, and fast ramp-up for the position. Manager wants cog_A in engine_B - predictable, loyal (to the hiring manager & their chain), good at office politics.
• nraynaud 4y ago
  I have found at 43 that I have ADHD and that there is no cure. I have left the employment world a few years ago in favor of contracting, but it’s still very hard to read that I have to change. There is no changing my condition, the only thing I can do is travel from rejection to rejection until I find a niche where my skills outweigh my handicap, or I collect an addiction that kills me.
• superdug 4y ago
  I've always been told that short tenure is "red flag" and I think it's bullshit. I've accelerated my net worth by a rate of return of 12% compounded over the last 20 years of professional life. My resume has 10 separate entries in it which means I last on average two years. Why do I expire after two years? Because no one in my industry gets promoted from within. No one in my industry is ever given more than a cost of living wage increase, and certainly not a 12% year over year average increase. It takes two years of watching people get hired over you with no raise to decide that you deserve more money and you go out and find it. I believe in judging my value in monetary terms and as I increase my experience, knowledge, and value, I expect that amount to increase as well.
  • PedroCandeias 4y ago
    I've definitely seen and experienced this. Yes I changed jobs three times in the last 7 years but my compensation went up 3x too. It might have done had I stayed in the first job, it might have not. I would certainly have missed out on all the experiences and adventures of the other jobs. Things do stagnate when startups mature. Now I'm a director of engineering at a massive (not faang) tech company and it feels like a longer tenure would be better - it takes time to sink in, develop connections and get high impact things done at this level. But I'm not sure I would have gotten here without all the variety of experiences that I gained in the last few +-2 year stints.
  • Vinnl 4y ago
    So that's a red flag that you're likely not to stick around on the same salary and undervalue your work :P
    • superdug 4y ago
      It's a red flag to assume that I'm going to want a raise, regularly? I don't know that it's my undervaluing of the work that's the problem ... I'm fairly certain that the company undervaluing my work is the problem that makes me leave.
      • 4y ago
• ThalesX 4y ago
  Having short tenures (is 2 - 3 years short?) allowed me to be an IC for cool projects, to be CTO at a bootstrapped company, to be CTO of a VC backed company, to work on amazing projects around the world with interesting people, consult in big projects, to learn so many technologies and ways of doing things and on top of this to make so much money doing things I love, and have the autonomy to make my own life decisions. This has happened while some people I know have been working on and maintaining the systems they got hired 15 years ago to build. Power to them. But they get paid like shit and I can’t really talk to them about the current technological landscape as they’ve been doing the same thing, in the same way without any disruptions. You’d expect them to be domain / tech-vertical masters, but unfortunately when you’ve been sliding in comfort for a decade, there’s a chance you lost most of your edge. In my experience, there’s two (relevant to the point) kind of devs; the comfortable ones that you can rely on to basically almost never leave - they might be interested in politics but usually it’s just skimming the surface for that little extra cash or that little promotion; and the ones that need constant simulation, that mostly play politics with themselves and are a flight risk. Ultimately, as a hiring manager you must make a decision knowing that whatever you choose you leave something on the table.
  • andrewaylett 4y ago
    My worry when I read your first paragraph is that you haven't stayed anywhere for long enough to see the consequences of your actions. Especially for senior positions: there's a reason why "seagull management" is a cliche. It's a real problem, though -- as you say, there's no money or glory in building something for the long term.
    • ThalesX 4y ago
      > My worry when I read your first paragraph is that you haven't stayed anywhere for long enough to see the consequences of your actions. This would be a valid concern, and truth be told I haven't, apart from on/off maintenance of the systems I built for various clients. While I agree that this is a problem, in my experience a decently built system is not going to need some amazing maintenance that only a select few senior engineers can do. It's usually run of the mill maintenance. 80% small changes to the application that realistically can be undertaken by most mid-level developers, and the occasional 20% larger changes to modules, architecture, deployment and / or infrastructure, which might indeed warrant more senior roles, and it's usually when I get a call to be involved. If anything, in my "n = 1" I have found that management is a lot more powerful in both setting up consequences, as well as handling them, than your junior / mid / senior ICs. > Especially for senior positions: there's a reason why "seagull management" is a cliche. I've helped build teams that are still performing long after I am gone, with mostly procedures put I consulted with, after seeing so many teams fail / win. But you are right, I wouldn't hire myself for a senior managerial position out of the box because I am just too much of a flight risk and I don't have a visible track-record for this role; I would also not disregard my skillset and breadth of experience when it's needed just because I don't tick a certain pattern. My plan, whether stupid or not, is to continue accumulating experiences and knowledge for another 5 - 10 years (dare I dream 15?), moving to different projects (1 - 3 years) that suit my fancy, then move on and climb the ranks in a corporation from the bottom, all the way to top technical leadership. I feel a lot of companies will disregard me because I have this kind of fractured CV, but the one that won't might get a person with broad experience that also wants to 'settle down'. I am also very upfront and honest about my outlook. > It's a real problem, though -- as you say, there's no money or glory in building something for the long term. One of my most beloved projects (that I was involved in, not mine alone), is also one that I was paid the least amount of money on, and also I feel brings me the most glory; it involves a solution that saves lives daily. It's been running since a decade in production and the maintenance team has slowly dwindled down to only two people (one if I'm being realistic), and I don't think they'll need much more unless a revamp is required. Even though I love the project, my career would have looked a lot different if I chose to stay there and maintain the solution.
• Manjuuu 4y ago
  The only thing that is really a red flag to evaluate the other side is this attitude of trying to find dumbed down solutions to evaluate situations that are full of nuances, and that cannot be analyzed with a series of simplified rules. Sort tenures, resume holes, etc... do not matter in isolation and you don't always have to try to be the judge of the circumstances of someone else. Evaluate knowledge and attitude and past results, the rest is not for you to judge.
  • jstx1 4y ago
    The article goes into really good detail about the nuances. It feels like many people in this thread are giving their answer to the question in the title instead of commenting on any of the content in the article.
    • Manjuuu 4y ago
      Could be, and pedantic comments add even less to the discussion.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  My first few jobs were very short tenure, because I was afraid to ask for fair salary, it was easier to just leave.
• devmor 4y ago
  I've rarely stayed with a position longer than 2 years. For me, it's usually a simple matter of economics - why would I stay at Company A if my bonus/raise barely overcomes inflation, but Company B is offering me 50k more per year? There's also the false advertising factor. Almost every company I've worked for has promised an exciting environment developing new things, and in reality after a few months almost all of my time is spent maintain some crusty old platform that no one wants to improve again. If I'm not getting the experience and career growth I signed up for, there's a lot less motivation to stay.
• cassepipe 4y ago
  >> I think the reasoning is some sort of unspoken value of “loyalty” – an expectation that there’s an implicit agreement to “stick it out” even if things get bad. This is hot garbage. If you want the people that you hire to stay, do it by building a great workplace and paying people well – not by finding staff who are too timid to leave bad situations. I liked that part although it seems to me that the unspoken truth of management is that they are overseers of the workforce. In some places, where the workforce is educated and its qualifications rare on the market, it entails "building a great workplace" but in others it totally entails finding staff that are "too timid to leave bad situations". In the end of the day, it making a profit entails miserable work relationships and everyone feeling sad and frustrated... oh well
• captainpiggies 4y ago
  I am in the process of writing a paper about retention in relation to employee satisfaction with their leadership. One thing I learned is that for Switzerland which is the country for which I am writing my study the net rotation quota (how many people changed their job in the last 12 months) is around 25% for people under 24 years, and still around 20% for people under 39. I, personally, felt like I was changing jobs a lot, but what my research made me realize is that I am not changing jobs a lot. I am changing at an average rate. Long story short, even if you change jobs yearly or bi-annually, you are not changing jobs at an abnormal rate statistically.
• 627467 4y ago
  random reactions: - "lack of loyalty" as the article called out is pure BS, but a very real BS specially among small- medium-sized orgs. I ask: how can you even developed loyalty over a short period of time. You may lack the perseverance to enable loyalty, but this says nothing about being able to be loyal - I guess short stints here means you quitting rather than being poached because From where I am, updating the linkedin profile after switching jobs make you "hotter" for recruiter and propositions follow for first couple of months increasing the chance for another short stint
• jherskovic 4y ago
  I'm a hiring manager (not at a tech company, FWIW) for college-degreed, relatively senior professionals. If your resume shows a short job, say, less than a year, I won't care. If the last five jobs you held down have been for less than a year each, it goes in the circular file. Maybe I'm missing out on good people, but I have more candidates than I can handle already, and it's a pretty abnormal pattern in the field.
  • neweroldguy 4y ago
    Recently made the mistake of hiring someone with a few short stints. Each had a “good explanation”. 9 not-so-productive months later, they’re gone… Will be taking your approach in the future.
    • jherskovic 4y ago
      It's basically the old doctor joke: Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I touch my shoulder. And it hurts when I touch my knee. And when I touch my head. And when I touch my other arm." Doctor: "Your finger's broken."
• drbojingle 4y ago
  I wish I could say. I think it depends really. I like jumping jobs around every 2 years. If I don't like the people I'll jump sooner but in 12 years that's only happened once. You gain perspective with every new company and industry which seems valuable on paper. It's like traveling. No idea how this compares to sticking it out but I've gotten use to being new, doing interviews, and having to start over with no context. I've worked in telecoms, education, social media, aviation, and agricultural insurance. Different tech stacks and different cultures each with different clients (younger tech suavy web natives vs old farmers who dont know to scroll to get to the bottom of a page). Security passes, controlled goods and smokers at the door who come on in behind you when they're not suppose to be there vs 20 something year olds making the rules (you can imagine). Ive been treated well and poorly. I like the broad range of things I've gotten to see going job to job. The main catalyst for leaving is pay. If i could find another company that would pay me more I'd present that to my current employer and if they couldnt match it then off I go. Usually I wait a while to start looking. I saw one comment hear talking about maintenance and consequences and that's interesting! For myself, I gravitate to greenfield work. Startups and the like. Your code doesnt always live a long life in those environments and prehaps this shields me from the worst of the maintainability issues. Ive actually grown distasteful for to much "maintenance programming efforts" as I've seen months of such work disappear after a pivot (replaced a series of sequential forms with a table view once after the team spent months getting the forms right. Sad.) I believe that 'bad code' that takes you from 0 to 1 is a good headache to have. I've also seen people call code bad when i saw no issues with it (terria.js) and went on a months long run to rewrite a frontend months from release. Went about as well as expected. Code got written to replace already working code. No comment on whether it was better or not but my opinion is a likely no. There's a level of subjectivity to code quality that i think gets lost on people sometimes.
• captainredbeard 4y ago
  As a hiring manager I view even a single short run as a potential red flag —- and like any such finding I ask about it versus simply rejecting outright. 3+ and I ignore the resume.