You're operating from the 1950s veiwpoint which is really a cultural hold over from the great depression- that employees should be desperate to find a job and companies should be free to screen them out for any arbitrary reasons. Let me guess, you make them write code on a white board too.
If you have a one year cliff you are providing a huge financial incentive for your employees to leave after a year, by shifting the risk onto them.
Maybe that's why you don't have enough people already?
If I'm going to invest into onboarding an employee, training them, providing opportunities for growth, etc. I'm not sure why you find it so disagreeable that I would prefer that they stick around as long as possible. Both parties are free to discontinue the relationship when the fit is no longer there, and that's fine by me.
I'm indeed prejudiced against cowboy coders that want to jump from team to team, focus on picking up new tech for their resumes and do their best to avoid any maintenance work. Maybe that's just me, though...
Being at a company for a year doesn't tell you someone is like that. This is why I called it a prejudice.
Being at a company for a year can also indicate that the person is quality enough to be choosy about where they work and not to stick around when management proves themselves incompetent.
Most statups fail. Most startups management is very poor. The best software developers realize that they are making an investment by working for a startup. Thus staying around past the first year is a judgement call on the future of the company.
For some kinds of work, that's fine, but I think most companies of all kinds would prefer employees who will stay with them for at least a year.
It's totally valid for someone to want to hop companies and favor that lifestyle. But it's also valid for companies to favor people who don't want to hop.
With the 4 year vesting schedule, employees are incentivized to leave after a year to diversify their holdings.
If the resume shows three or more short stints, especially in a row, it's a red flag.
I might still phone screen the candidate if their experience looks relevant and the resume is otherwise impressive, but I'm going to ask about the short positions, and the answer matters a lot.
Or are you stuck in the 1950s era idea of loyalty and these employees are not "loyal"-- yet are you considering whether you're giving them a reason to be loyal?
Most are like that IME. This is compounded by the fact that these are the companies most frequently hiring.
You've probably seen comments along the lines of 90% of candidates failing fizzbuzz? Remember those candidates work somewhere.
I guess what I'm getting at is that the onus for company/team/culture fit is on both the interviewer and the interviewee. Bad luck aside, there's no excuse for running into irreparably lousy workplaces time and time again.
Don't believe it? It's not something I'm just parroting, it's something I've seen for myself, from people with more than a decade of experience.
> I guess what I'm getting at is that the onus for company/team/culture fit is on both the interviewer and the interviewee.
As an interviewee you don't have access to the single most important piece of information to make that assessment, the source code. When this changes then me and a lot of others will stop ending up at crappy companies.
There are a lot of reasons for quality developers to be dissatisfied with shops out there.
To take myself as an example, in my almost 4 year career, I am in my 5th developer job. I have changed jobs every 10 months or so, excepting one job lasting 3 months due to asinine expectations, and my current one that I am 15 months into and counting. The first two I left for better compensation & more responsibility.
I wasn't one for inaction at my jobs either - I was one who would be a driver of change and better practices. At two of the jobs I was promoted to lead developer, including my current one where I am a hybrid between tech lead & engineering manager.
I have interviewed many candidates over the past two years - I have found that candidates who are able to explain their positions well and are open to considering alternative possibilities tend to be passionate ones who care about what they do, which is a characteristic that is a positive if you want to improve the state of engineering at the company. Short durations often tend to mean that they care more than anyone else at the company, and management/executives are too difficult to fight as they have more power to countermand attempts to make things better if it doesn't align with misguided judgment.
I would recommend you rethink your evaluation skills, speaking as one who it sounds like you'd chase away from being interested because such biases would become obvious over the course of interviewing. I am a respected expert in my domain with significant open source work in it & major open source project stewardship. My company has been rewarded with my finding other high quality developers, as well as me being a strong advocate - all due to the simple choice of having good processes and listening to employees & trusting their professional opinion. It's not surprise that the company has risen into Fortune's top 50 small companies to work for.
Why would you stay at a company where you're being under-paid?