Ask HN: How much job hopping is too much?
My job history is as follows:
7 months - quit because they needed me to relocate a long distance
13 months - quit because we were acquired by another company and the new leadership was toxic in my opinion
5 months - contract, decided to not renew
7 months - current
I am considering leaving my current job, and I'm wondering if hiring managers would see it as a red flag. I don't want to dox myself but the reasons are:
1. Low pay. I was actually happy with the pay when I started but rent and everything has increased tremendously since COVID started. My company's health insurance plan was also changed at the beginning of this year and my cost went from 0% to 10% of my after-tax take home pay. I've talked to my boss about both these things and she said it sucked. So I didn't formally ask for a raise and I don't think I'd be eligible for one anyway, my other coworkers have not yet received one I don't think.
2. I'm not happy about the culture. The only people who get any recognition for their work is the sales team "because they pay the bills." Even my boss (CTO) agrees. My attempts to fix tech debt is shot down because engineering is seen as a cost center to begin with. My team is fantastic to work with but I don't like leadership's position.
3. Related to my second reason, as someone who is junior I want to sink my teeth into a tough and long term project, but management won't allow it and they only want us working on short (and buggy) MVPs and shipped to customers. Our time to ship averages less than a day. I don't think I'm learning many "proper" engineering skills doing this.
4. Similar to my last reason, I want to work in a team with other people in my discipline (QA) to learn from them. Right now my company has 5 engineers but I'm the only one who works in QA. When I ask for feedback on my code the other engineers say they don't know how it works so they can't help. But the frontend and backend engineers get plenty of feedback from the other engineers because they're more knowledgeable. They're trying their best but I feel I'd learn more working in a team of others rather than by myself.
Other than _maybe_ the first reason, I don't think I have many strong reasons for leaving and that's why I think another employer would see this as a red flag. But I also know there are a lot of job openings these days so I'm wondering if I should give it a shot.