Downturn career decisions
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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.
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
To get what the op is looking for, you put the 10 year req, then structure comp ballooning towards the end of the vest and it will get you exactly those people op wants.
You don’t say, “must be settling with a family”. You offer something that is only enticing if you’re going to stay 5 years.
If what you're saying is "that's what I'm looking for but I wouldn't say it..."
I dunno, that seems like exactly the sort of thing people would complain about.
This seems odd to say the least.
As I stated, for longer termed positions that require some stability matching the duration of a capital build project we look for people that have had exposure to a variety of past experiences and some demonstrated ability to stick something out coupled with some indication they making long term plans.
Which bit of that goes agin your HR policy?
Some positions require a degree of intelligence, there are many things that can demonstrate levels and types of intelligence.
Some positions demand a certain amount of physical endurance, there are many things that can indicate physical ability.
Some positions demand a level of stability and commitment to time scale, there are many different factors that can indicate that.
Some comments require a certain ability to read qualifiers and nuance in the English language, there are many that breeze right past such things and imagine things unwritten.
None are in any way indicators of professional capabilities.
Perhaps you might like to re-read what was written, slowly and very carefully.
Some people struggle with parsing meaning from English and jump to rash interpretation.
FWIW your approach is the most sound one I read on this thread and how most successful companies probably do it. I do feel it is slightly discriminatory though against those with un ordinary paths
All this seems to do is make it harder for candidates to know if they're truly qualified, causing them to apply to more things, many of which they're not qualified for, wasting everyone's time.
Even then it is daddy that made them CEO and they are CEO of tidying their bedroom.
Edit: seem I have triggered some 24 year old C suite excutives
Our time on Earth is limited, and five years is a non-trivial percentage of our working life. If you're a highly compensated engineer and you retire on the earlier side of normal for that cohort, you've got maybe 30-35 years.
They... didn't? A developer who has a typical graduate academic career, went straight into the software industry, and then had 5 jobs for less than 9 months each is probably in their mid-20s. In terms of technical skills and professional maturity anyone like that probably is still almost a child in terms of their career and the series of very short tenures definitely makes that more likely.
Our time on Earth is limited, and five years is a non-trivial percentage of our working life.
That's true. But as you point out yourself it's still only a relatively small part of our likely working life unless we luck out and reach FIRE status with a big exit or something. You can pick up some useful skills and develop an effective professional mindset in five years. But you'll do the same again in the next five and then again in the five after that.
Done. It's like people who stay at one job for year never practice for interviews or something.
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.
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.
If I'm looking at your resume I see: 2 layoffs (not your fault), 2 temporary contracts. If you message that in your resume the contracts are a yellow flag (did they not get full time employment because they lacked chops?) but nothing here is telling me you're a runner. I'd happily hire someone with this job history if they interviewed well.
I'd be much more adverse to hiring you if you had been an employee at each of these places and stayed as long as you had.
How would you figure out just by looking at a resumé that the 1 year job experience listed is a layoff?
People can elect not to go full time because they don't feel it's the right fit or it's a bad situation.
But they don't get any credit for sticking out a bad contract apparently
I've seen this idea before but it seems like a very odd prejudice to me. Is it a particularly US-centric thing or something? Here in the UK a lot of good people in tech do independent work at some stage in their careers. Salaries for permanent employees tend to hit a ceiling. Contractors and freelancers can potentially price based on value and charge significantly more if they're worth it.
I would not view being a contractor in the way you describe as a yellow flag, but that's not OP's situation. OP looks like they were relatively inexperienced, had never held a job for 2 years. Even if OP didn't mention they were trying to convert to FTE in these roles and it didn't happen, the descriptions of them tell me that's probably what's happening.
The software dev job before that I had for 3 years. I just don't include it on my resume anymore, for length/ageism reasons (also it was VBA/original ASP, which I never want to touch again).
I'm not sure where you got two temporary contracts, I've only ever had one non-FTE job, and that was the 9 month one, and even then I was an employee for TEKsystems. They would have happily put me somewhere else (hell, they still reach out to me a couple times a year), but I really didn't enjoy my experience, so I didn't continue with them (I was actively interviewing for other jobs near the end of it, the contract ending was a surprise but also a relief). The benefits were the worst I ever had at any company before or since (poor medical insurance, zero PTO/paid holidays or any other benefits), and I got a 25% raise at my next company as a FTE, so it's not because I got better pay than elsewhere.
And if we go before that, I had a fast food job, a retail job, a warehouse job, a stocking job, a data entry job (all of these were at least a year, up to 2) hell, I even helped my dad with construction and apartment maintenance when I was as young as 14. But they're not software-related and basically ancient history at this point, so they haven't been on my resume for about fifteen years now.
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.
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.
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.
"Some new director showed up, reorged us, and left" is a failure mode for organizations. It causes huge problems and needs to be avoided.
Wait til you hear about Australian Prime Ministers
This is not guaranteed. You will limit yourself out of some jobs, but that's true with any career decision you make. Someone somewhere isn't going to like what you did and not give you a job because of their views. But as long as the pool of jobs is large enough, you can find something. If the pool of jobs shrinks so dramatically that this isn't supported, you might survive but you'll end up having a lower salary for it long-term.
These arguments seem to be against full time position job hoppers, but you may not be asking if they were doing contracts or purposeful short-term engagements. And perhaps a contractor is looking to go full-time. But before getting the full story, you've already made your decision.
There is not a optimal path which grants you maximized salary and maximized opportunities. The industry supports multiple career archetypes right now. Don't cast doom and gloom to make people feel anxious that they chose the wrong path when there are viable alternatives.
Now, it's certainly possible that another 3-5 years and another 2-3 companies would negatively impact my ability to land interviews, but I haven't seen the slightest impact yet.
Might be some correlation.
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.
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.
Regular employees don't have the possibility to change companies from the inside, leaving is the only option.
This goes both ways though - employees want to see commitment too - not layoffs at the first sign of trouble (or, often, no trouble at all, but just opportunity to improve short-term numbers by outsourcing to cheaper locations). Want people to stay for a long time with your company? Perhaps you should advertise a policy where you don't lay off staff even if company is in the red.
Notably, government agencies don't do layoffs, and people working there are much more loyal than people in the private sector, even though government pays less.
In all seriousness though this perspective is a double standard. Hiring managers can’t typically setup these policies, and when you leave after a short time they get screwed.
It seems that in a hot market hiring managers are each other’s enemy- they’re competing for labor, after all. They are providing incentives to get your workers to jump. So maybe the framing shouldn’t be employers vs. workers.
Make no mistake that we work to get paid.
But the motivation for working does have a tangible impact on the work product. This is why companies don’t want to hire people who job hop a lot. It’s not to save a buck. If I wanted to save a buck I would outsource.
Companies look for red flags and pass on employees all the time.
Relatively, it's more expensive for employees to take a job then leave.
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.
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.
Even if you just want money, the long term consequences are worth considering.
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.
Learning how to say no is a very important skill. I think it's even better for compensation to find positions in which you are an inherently good fit to create value, and then negotiate to a level of compensation favorable enough that you don't need to think about it for a while.
As the Rolling Stone song goes, "You can't always get what you want; But if you try sometimes, well, you might find; You get what you need".
You could also use it as a stepping stone; be adaptable in the short term to build experience and salary, then you're in a stronger position further down the line when negotiating for the job you actually want.
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.
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.
> 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
If you’re project hopping then you’re not owning long-term consequences either.
But .. in retrospect, I left a lot of money on the table. I also don’t see myself making the next jump (to vp) as I have seen no one do it .. vps come from outside where I am.
I am mulling an mba or emba but it is pretty expensive in time and money.
Online nano degrees seem to be too watered down to take seriously. Need to position self for late 2023.
But be really picky.
But even at those 5-6 years recruiters/hiring managers start to notice, you better have some good story to explain since they will ask. They do care much more if hopping is recent compared to 5-10 years ago. For more senior roles its simply a no-go, I mean think about it - it would be a net loss for the company to hire such a person, and if its obvious from the start why cause this to yourself.
Companies want stability, especially on senior level. If they change, they want to be in control of the change and not the opposite. Instable persons won't bring that, you don't need 30 years of management experience to realize this.
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.
There are reasons behind every move. 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.
Isn't this what the top managers do? Seems to work for them.
(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)
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.
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?
Contractors with repeat business at the same client is a positive signal. Otherwise evaluating a former contractor for a role is about whether they’re interested enough to stick around long enough for the intended achievements of the role.
This is not universal and doesn't work for many countries like Germany where you need to avoid "shadow employment/scheinselbständigkeit" with the same client.
The reasons go deep. They are often connected to being lazy, unmotivated and even just plainly unwilling to commit to any non-trivial effort work.
For URMs, short stints can be because of toxic environments, just as long tenure for immigrants might be due to visa requirements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Fuck I don't want to leave after a short stint either. But when the market is shifting fast as it has been for... my entire career, and people are getting hired in at 20%, 40% more than my salary while I'm on my third 4% CoL adjustment then yeah Imma bounce.
Workers didn't create this situation, companies did. They can figure out the consequences. Having a resume full of short stints never seems to have done me any damage and I don't buy this propaganda that it does.
I won't hire someone who has been at 5 companies in the last 3 years, for example, unless they were explicitly a contractor.
But if you're jumping every 18-24 months, that's expected in your early career. When people are talking about job hopping today, it is contextual to that.
Managers should look at a longer average stay, though there is no shame in leaving a bad situation early or staying in a great situation. (I actually don't yet know what the right timing is for a manager role, honestly, though I'd assume 24-36 months from what I've seen.)
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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' .
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.
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!
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.
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.
"If any given role can prioritize profit, pace, learning, prestige or people, then this is a good time to be focused on working with good people in a role where you’re learning. There’s a lot to learn right now as many companies are abruptly shifting from long-term growth-oriented goals to short-term, profitability orientation" See https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/ for more."
"it’s a tricky time to chase prestige as many companies that were prestigious a year ago like Netflix are in an awkward place or going through a hiring freeze like Meta. Although FAANG will remain prestigious, the most prestigious companies of 2025 are far less obvious than they were twelve months ago" See https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125571/meta-hiring-free...
Related
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/07/19/apple-sl...
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/09/21/heres-ho...
Pull the other leg. Companies haven't care about anything but the next quarter's results since the 80s.
Maybe the 80s marked a shift where companies started caring more about next Q than they did in the decades prior - but there is still plenty of long term execution happening at larger companies that can be reined in for more short term focus.
This is, arguably, backwards. Your package is salary + equity and the amount of equity is based off of current valuation. As an example, Google going from ~3k to ~2k means you get 50% more stock for the same dollar amount equity package.
It's probably the best time to join a FAANG. Certainly much better than those that joined this time last year and have taken a hefty haircut on their equity.
Who says the downturn ends next year?
VCs act like it's all 2008: someone will come and bail them out. Yet, we are literally one Powerpoint away from a multi-year dumpster fire.
If “the economy” believes there will be a recession, there almost certainly will be one. Even if it wasn’t going to happen by itself.
VCs dumping money into the “bottom point” of the market will also stimulate the economy a lot, leading to a recovery.
There have been beliefs there will be a recession from the end of the 2008 recession to date. There has been beliefs that things are great and there will never ever ever be a recession ever again.
People who believe a recession is coming are like broken clocks, many of whom have prediced 45 out of the last 3 recessions.
OP's point as I read it is that once those beliefs hit a critical mass amongst the general population they tend to come true via self fulfilling prophecy. Correlation/causation aside - the point is not "if my uncle thinks a recession is coming, there is", it's "if 100mm American adults think a recession is coming, there is"
That's just the premise of the article base on a historical observation that recessions last around 15 months...this was explained clearly.
If your personal outlook is that we're walking into a multi-year dumpster fire then the advice in the article should be adjusted accordingly.
These VC funds made a lot of money last year, and if they can't make up a reason to re-invest it they have to return it to the next layer up, who face the same decision.
They are probably getting paid on assets under management, so their incentive is to support current valuations by swapping funding rounds at good valuations with other funds, and generally putting the money away before things get any worse.
Prestige comes from past endeavor therefore prestige can end up depreciating fast. I'd argue that one should always focus on learning, or more generally, on growth. FAANG companies do give their employees prestige, yet prestige alone does not carry too much weight, especially during an interview. It is the combination of the growing success of a company and an employee's contribution to the success that gives the true prestige and handsome reward to the employee.
Case in point, a Googler 18 years ago would automatically get tons of respect because Google launched a slew of groundbreaking products and popularized a slew of amazing technologies. GFS, Big Table, MapReduce framework, draggable and zoomable Google Maps by AJAX (even though XMLHttpRequest was invented by MS), 1GB of Gmail storage, amazing search infrastructure that goes way beyond the classic methods in the book Managing Gigabytes, large-scale machine learning for both universal search and semantic understanding of Google search, large-scale Google Ads, and the list goes on. FB employees 15 years ago would likely (likely as there will always be exceptions) got a lot more prestige than today because FB scaled its business to hundreds of millions of users, invented a novel architecture for social networking especially for serving feeds, scaled MySQL along the way, invented technologies like Tao, Haystack, React, HVM, Scruba, large-scale memcached, and the list can also go on. Netflix grew its subscribers from a few million back in 2008 to 70 millions about 7 years ago. Along the way, they showed the world how to be productive with merely a few hundred engineers by building tools. They popularized the concept of circuit-breaking by giving the world Hystrix (yes, I know the concept was quite well known to readers of Release It! and Netflix mentioned that they learned that concept from that very book). They built Asgard and later Spinnaker. They built predictive autoscaling service years before AWS built the same feature. They built discovery service and fast loggers and RxJava and Iceberg and a long list of other systems. Along the way, the Netflix in that era enjoyed prestige.
I'm sure people can come up with equal number of negative examples, like the dude who was L6 in Google but spent the last two years solely coordinating teams to using his team's user embedding, and therefore wondered why other companies kept down leveling him after interviews. Of course, I made this example up but you get the idea.
So, chase growth and therefore prestige in the near future, even in the downturn.
This seems inevitable at large companies. The amount of bureaucracy appears to outweigh the amount of work.
"what about me", cries the person with a $300 RSU price while the stock is trading at $100 -- it always seems like the first thing that comes up in company chat when the company stock tanks. Part of the deal I suppose. Other option is to jump ship, but that's scarier in a bear market.
Also jibed with:
> my general advice to folks would be to stay where you are as long as you’re reasonably happy day to day and feel like you’re learning at a good rate. Even if your effective compensation has declined a bit, it’s very hard to determine if the compensation at any other company will hold up either.
Someone with an RSU they thought was worth $300 when they negotiated and thought it would be at $600 by the time it vested and they could sell it now only get $100 per RSU they actually sell.
My answer to "What about me"? Well boo hoo!
Random internet search yields and example on blind:
FB offer $185k base + $200k RSU/year = $385k total comp
If you still have the option, then you haven't paid to exercise it. Once you exercise it, you have a stock (or the sale proceeds in the case of an exercise-and-sell transaction).
If the fear is getting laid off, why would you jump to a company that is going to lay you off? On the other hand why would staying put in a bear market be safe? You might get laid off anyways.
I wonder if this reflects the demographics of people in executive roles more than anything else.
People who need to take risks to end up in an executive role are naturally filtered out due to risky behaviour, whereas people who have better 'pedigree' (You know what I mean) don't have to take many risks.
Ivy schools are famously cagey about the number of "legacy" admissions, but the best research suggest they weigh legacy many times more than any other criteria, and legacy admissions make up some %15 of the total. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-coll...
Naturally now they are sending their children to private school, their children are not being handed everthing on a plate and their grades are great accomplishments.
Envy really does destroy the functional parts of the brain where intellectual honesty resides.
The difference between the ivies and the others is that the dumbest person at an ivy may well be its richest.
Make of that what you will.
This isn’t true at all.
It’s not pure merit, but no job is. But I’ve seen plenty of executives turfed out of jobs when the CEO failed to hit their numbers and needed a scapegoat.
Then I pivoted to become a software engineer, and I went back to doing research at an industrial research institute. And via a brief stint doing some more software development I ended up being a startup entrepreneur in my late thirties. That was ten years ago.
In Germany where I live it's an almost automatic salary booster, which is nice except I don't get a salary because I'm a freelance consultant and a bootstrapped startup CTO (might get a salary out of that soon). It's what I did after I got my degree that enables me to charge premium rates when I'm freelancing.
Entrepreneurial mindset and straight career paths via some big name university are two things. One requires taking risk, the other is basically about risk averse careers. Big name universities, followed by big name companies and big title career paths. Again nothing wrong with that. But not a likely path for starting your own company, which is risky.
Yeah, but I’d expect an executive to be that sort of person.
Very different career paths.
Companies are onboard with this? Sharing pl data with someone that isn’t even an employee yet seems improbable to me.
Surprisingly few people seem to look up these records when joining a start-up though. But it's definitely useful for business journalists and presumably competitors.
In general, shifting your equity into index funds, and keeping 7% in high-risk markets is a good balance. If you are a family with young children, than that risk-exposure ratio should drop to under 2.5%.
Depending where you live, additional community programs can offer substantially higher than normal returns with tax resistant programs like Education funds for your kids, Disability savings accounts, and First-time home-owner grants.
As a side note, it has been my observation that few people ever see an actual return on in-house stock options in startup tech-companies. Additionally, a purge of senior-staff often happens before a firm transitions into the markets. It turns out, that more often than not these contractual incentives are just a tool to help drive down salaries, or even work for free with the truly audacious cons.
Some have found utility in copying those who can break Market restrictions. ;)
Congress member holdings report:
http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx
Senate member holdings report: