Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

This is a shortsighted hot take. If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement, or even for an orthogonal move to a less toxic environment. When the situation is good or at least reasonable, the rational person will stick around and see it through.

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.

View on HN

> the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement.

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.

I think these concepts are orthogonal.

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.

Genuine question: How can you ever learn from feedback loops that take 2-3 years if you only ever stick around for a year?

TLDR: you cannot.

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.

Sure, there are plenty of people with decades of experience who haven't actually developed beyond a mid level engineer. Long stints aren't proof that somebody is skilled. The point is that short stints are a worrisome thing on resumes at some point. Not a hard line - if I've got a personal relationship with somebody or strong recommendations from people I deeply trust it changes things. But somebody coming into a leadership role needs a lot of time to even understand an organization well enough to propose changes, let alone see those changes through.

"Some new director showed up, reorged us, and left" is a failure mode for organizations. It causes huge problems and needs to be avoided.

That used to be called a 'seagull manager' - one who flies in, sh*ts on everything and flies away.

>Unrelated: today is on the news that Unilever's CEO will be resigning after 3 years, which also seems short to me.

Wait til you hear about Australian Prime Ministers

>If job hopping continues, it catches up to you later in a career.

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.

Counterpoint: I have 11 YOE and am at my 6th company (not including freelancing), currently a Senior EM. I've been at my current role for less than 6 months, the place is a toxic nightmare, and have had no problem whatsoever getting interviews for senior IC and team lead positions. The longest I've been at any one role was just under 3.5 years, with most under 2 - basically the first time I asked for a promotion or raise and didn't get it, I'd leave.

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.

At least from my perspective your 3.5 year stint shows that you can stay for a while at one company, so personally I would probably not view your background as one of a "job hopper."

So you are able to get jobs at places that are "toxic nightmares". Perhaps with your job-hopping history you would find it more difficult to get a job at places that nurture a positive culture and high retention.

Might be some correlation.

This seems like a premature conclusion based on one data point out of six.

If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement.

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.

5 consecutive jobs on my resume:

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.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4549382

I think you read the parent comment uncharitably, and they were referring to job hops, not to layoffs or un-renewed contracts.

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.

> I see: 2 layoffs (not your fault), 2 temporary contracts.

How would you figure out just by looking at a resumé that the 1 year job experience listed is a layoff?

You ask. That's what I've done for folks with 4+ consecutive ~1y stints.

I've seen many resumes that say things like "company went bankrupt" or "Entire department was laid off"

>did they not get full time employment because they lacked chops?

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

the contracts are a yellow flag (did they not get full time employment because they lacked chops?)

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.

> 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.

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.

> OP looks like they were relatively inexperienced, had never held a job for 2 years.

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 author agrees with you. From the article:

"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"

Yeah, and in my experience it's also about the pattern. There isn't a rule or anything. 1-2 short stints, totally fine. 3-4 short stints but with one or more 5+ year stints, probably also fine. 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months? Whatever is going on, it doesn't seem crazy to expect that it's going to manifest at job #6 as well.

> 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months?

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.

Fwiw this perspective (talking about expectations of age, family status, background as conditions) would get you kicked as far away as possible from any hiring decisions where I work. I think mostly for legal / dei reasons to my understanding, but your whole statement reads like a radioactive hr bomb to me.

Sure, none the less,

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.

This just smacks of wanting to treat people like shit. Given the tone of some of your other comments in this thread that actually makes perfect sense.

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.

Wage slave mentality

Expectations of 10 years of experience is absolutely not an HR bomb. You need to retake your DEI training.

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.

I was referring to the family / kids but more than the 10 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.

So ... you have issue with people maybe having kids (whether their own / adopted, etc) or perhaps having family in an area (cousins, parents, etc) ?

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?

The problem is favoring candidates based on non-professional features, like their families, as you admitted to doing.

That's not what was said ...

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.

What rubbish, the only commitment for employees is to work to professional standards in lieu of money. If you need such long term commitments then hire like executives with retention, i.e. if you let go the employee before the term (except for misconduct/fraud etc.) then agreed compensation must be paid as per written contract, but you won't do it.

> ie maybe kids, perhaps a new house, maybe family in the area, etc.

None are in any way indicators of professional capabilities.

They are indicators of time commitments to the area. Re-read the thread slowly because you’re incorrectly equating “having kids means they are more likely to be stable” with “they must have kids to be stable”.

You are both unprofessional and violating the law by discriminating against people based on legally protected parameters, like having children or not. Furthermore you're posting this on HN like an absolute fool. This is great evidence for people that claim discrimination is real in the tech industry.

> discriminating against people based on legally protected parameters, like having children or not.

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.

I think he/she misread but one could argue what you wrote is anti-DEI in terms of those who don’t have kids, etc but I can’t imagine anybody proving it.

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

Many companies in Australia do not even put years of experience in job requirements as a HR policy. What matters is experience like "has build complex APIs for integration" not how many years you have been building APIs. Then if you are called for interview you will be compared against the other candidates.

This just seems like theater to me. Having built complex APIs for 2 years is obviously much less desirable than having built complex APIs for 10. You will have seen more, interacted with more, hit more edge cases, etc.

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.

Only on instagram and tiktok do they make someone a "CEO" a year out of school.

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

The owners of this website encourage and invest in startups helmed by people even younger.

And the sucess rate of those at the helm of companies the owners of this website encourage and invest in is <10%.

Imagine unironically saying that someone potentially just a few years from 30 "is still a child." That's nearly as bad as saying your hiring criteria includes someone with kids and a mortgage (presumably because these people are easier to lock into shitty situations as opposed to the "children" who can easily just leave and go elsewhere). Sorry, I mean those are the ones with demonstrated commitment.

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.

Imagine unironically saying that someone potentially just a few years from 30 "is still a child."

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.

>I was there to solve a problem and stayed no longer than was needed to solve that problem. What problems do you have that need to be solved?

Done. It's like people who stay at one job for year never practice for interviews or something.

Yep. This whole thing about not hiring "job hoppers" is a conspiracy to suppress wages by the management class. Companies will drop you without a second thought, you should have the right to do the same. I think more software engineers should move into consulting where the gun for hire nature of our industry isn't hidden.

I couldn’t disagree more. I want to see commitment, not leaving at the first sign of trouble. It costs a lot to acquire and hire talent.

> It costs a lot to acquire and hire talent.

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.

How do you know it's only the first sign of trouble?

Regular employees don't have the possibility to change companies from the inside, leaving is the only option.

Well, technically there is another option: unionization.

Don't companies currently prevent the creation of those?

That sounds like a strong reason to unionize, then!

> I couldn’t disagree more. I want to see commitment, not leaving at the first sign of trouble.

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.

I’ll institute a policy of no layoffs if folks get paid the same as government jobs.

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.

Then while the job market for this industry is fluid, you’ll need to find other ways to entice people to stay.

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.

Then companies should reward stellar talent with raises that go beyond inflation and COL changes. Not job hopping is leaving money on the table. As you say, "It costs a lot to acquire and hire talent" then one would think that companies wouldn't be penny foolish and properly reward talent instead of giving tiny 3% raises to star performers. Stock options are great way to reward and encourage commitment.

If all you want is money go the FAANG route. There are a lot of people who grew up in the 90s/00s who are now hiring managers and they screen for passion not profit.

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.

Something might be a red flag for an employee which causes them to immediately want to move on.

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.

Employees are finally starting to give employers the level of commitment they've received for decades, which is approximately none. We're all better off for it, in my opinion.

Exactly, and most companies have shown they couldn't care less about keeping talent around. If they did, they would have spent a modicum of effort figuring out exactly why people like software engineers leave, which they don't seem very interested in. I've only ever experienced a single exit interview, and it was too little too late. I'm sure if I had said "low pay, shitty codebase, unreasonable deadlines, moving goalposts, no standards, management gave themselves raises during a layoff" that said feedback would disappear into an unlabeled file folder or a trash can.

Exit interviews are mostly just a formality, there is rarely any honest feedback given anyway.

Here's the rub: the "bad situation" you are in is not independent of you as an individual. When you're young and early career you simply don't have the experience to judge what is good or bad (this is one of the reasons employers like hiring young people). You also haven't demonstrated what you are capable of, so why should anyone else hire you? Short of obviously toxic environments, the best bet early career is to put your head down and see what you can deliver in each job, build a network by impressing your colleagues, and keep an eye out for the next opportunity whenever the time is right.

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.

That makes sense early to mid career. At some point you become responsible for creating the culture, not running away from it.

never thought of this but glad you said it. one thing i also think about if i was manager was creating a resilient system of employment. what happens if x leaves tomorrow? is x too critical and knows too much domain knowledge? how am i as a manager going to share that knowledge across my team so if any one person leaves we at least have some way to continue on.

You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly.

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.

Uh, what? Whether someone is capable of doing a job is totally up to the employer. Yes, one has to self assess to an extent and apply to realistic roles, but for the most part the blame doesn't lie on the individual. A senior position at one role may mean something totally different from a senior position at another company. Is it really someone's fault that they were a senior engineer at BrownGrassCo and applied for a senior position at GreenGrassCo only to find out that their definition of "senior" more closely resembles something like a team lead with managerial tasks their previous position didn't involve at all?

This reminds me of that wojack meme with the normal distribution.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com