That's a paradox I've encountered. Companies don't reward loyalty of their current employees, yet they prefer CVs signalling loyalty to the employer.
Contracting is underdog relation for the freelancer in many industries in Europe, some companies use it as vestibule to the full time employment contract.
It's no paradox at all. In both cases they are simply optimising for paying the lowest salaries they can get away with.
But if you forget to put Kubernetes in your resumé, that's when you are in trouble.
E.g. a technical lead candidate will look very poor if he never actually stuck around any kind of project to actually see the results of his decisions.
But if they do, I wouldn’t want to work there anyway :/
It’s fine up to a certain point, but when they’re living in a villa it starts to feel cheap.
No different to selling secondhand cars, lowballers annoy everybody.
I have a couple of freelancers working with me and I never really paid much attention to their CVs. I value the technical and (written) communication abilities over anything I see in the CV. Especially because everyone is working remotely.
I seem to have have the opposite bias. When I see that someone has spent > 5 years in a well established / post growth company. I see it as a sign of compacency, which has a slightly negative connotation in my books. I totally undestand it if you're getting fat raises and stock refreshers every year at a growth phase company. But if you've been working at a podunk company for 5+ years, that's definitely a negative signal for me.
Also, the old cliche quote: "If you want loyalty, get a dog" comes to mind. Loyalty and ambition are anti correlated. I think the extremes of both are bad, and it helps to strike a balance somewhere in the middle.
To address your specific points, and as someone who's done a lot of hiring for different companies over the years:
- Yes, lots of job hopping can be viewed negatively (please see below).
- I've been amazed by the number of people I know who've changed jobs mid-pandemic. Clearly there is still a job market out there. With that being said my default position agrees with yours: unless you have a very compelling reason to change jobs, if your current job is secure, stick with it.
Back to job hopping...
If you've been working for 10+ years and never held down a job for more than a year or two the alarm bells start ringing. If you've pulled that off for 15 - 20 years all of the alarm bells go into maximum overdrive.
However, I certainly don't mind a bit of job hopping early in your career: it can take a while for people to find a position that really suits them.
Similarly, peoples' circumstances change: they get married, they move, they have children, they're made redundant, they have health problems, they need to care for a relative, they suffer bereavement, or they just get bored and need a change and it takes a while to figure out - not to mention all of the other changes that can happen within a company that make them to look for work elsewhere. The result is that people might go through another period where they change jobs more often: they might start contracting, or if they move and have to change jobs the first job they land might not be that great.
Often I've seen on CVs where people have been with a company for a long time, then might change two or three times after that because really good jobs that suit you well aren't actually as common as we'd all probably like. Again, that's generally OK.
What I do want to see is some solid evidence that under the right circumstances you can hold a job down and stick at it for a few years. The amount of evidence I'll want to see of that increases proportionally to the length of your career.
This is an inexact rule of thumb. Changing jobs a lot may not immediately put me off a candidate but it will, at the very least, mean I dig into the issue very thoroughly during the selection process, and if I don't like what I find then obviously you won't get the job (but that's true of any aspect of selection).
With that said it is possible to stay in a job too long. I was with one company for 10 years, and that was too long. Far too long. But not because it was 10 years: the company had stopped growing at the time and I'd run out of opportunities to really develop and advance in my career. I'd say I wasted at least the last 3 years there. In terms of career advancement that 3 years has probably cost me more like 5 - 7, because I was burned out and pissed off, so I spent a couple of years contracting before moving back into full time employment.
I think that for those who struggle with getting complacent, I would say that they should look at internal job transfers. Different team, different project, something that gives you the change of work/scenery in the company but the constant hopping between different places doesn't look good to someone interviewing you.
As a manager, you're thinking, "I'm taking a risk on this person. Will they be around here for our multi-year project vision?" Someone who job hops likely won't be around long enough for you to execute on the big picture and you'll be back to hiring/training a replacement too soon.
Exactly. Bringing someone onboard, getting them up to speed, training them, etc., is an investment, and one that you want to be confident of seeing a return on.
When it comes to leadership with lots of job changes I become even more wary: I start to wonder what kind of havoc somebody might have left in their wake and, with this stuff, often references only get you so far.
I find myself trying to figure out if I know anyone who's worked with them in the past so I can get a viewpoint from somebody who no longer has a dog in the fight.
There are sadly a minority of people out there who have a habit of changing jobs, with increasing seniority, just frequently enough that they avoid being "found out" whilst in role. I don't want to hire one of them.
Companies where engineers can flit around due to boredom are few and far between. In 99% of companies you are in a position because a company needs someone to do that thing specifically, and you might have your eye on something else internally but it's less risk for management to hire someone new into that position than it is to leave your position uncovered. And you are not there to learn, it's nice if you can learn of course, but the company is paying you to do the thing you do right now, giving the reason that you simply want to learn something new isn't a compelling reason for an internal transfer for most companies, for that reason.
I think your 99% number is way off, I think lots of companies put internal applicants on a reasonably fair footing for lateral and upward moves. Not out of any desire to reward loyalty, but because the worker is a known quantity familiar with the internal culture, and because the fact that they are applying for such positions means it's also likely that they are considering outside positions and that if they don't get an internal job they are likely to take an external one and leave the existing position uncovered anyway.
This in my experience vastly overestimates the competence of middle management. Most programmers are not employed at FAANG or startups but at companies that view them as a cost centre and a replaceable cog.
Sure, a transfer from team A doing line-of-business applications in Java to team B doing line-of-business applications in Java is probably straightforward, especially around the time that team A's project goes live and team B's project is just ramping up.
But if our hypothetical Java dev was bored of Java and wanted to do something completely different, and would take some time to get up to speed in the new thing, that would be a harder sell, and ironically gets harder the better you are at your original job. Say you had been cranking out CRUD apps in Java and had a reputation for it and decided that you wanted to do machine learning all of a sudden. I think you would struggle to do that even in large companies. The best you could realistically hope for would be a promotion within your current silo. Unless you went somewhere you could start afresh.
DO NOT PANIC. DO NOT DO IT.
Stay where you are.
Still, unless it's really dreadful where you are, I'd stay put.