Hacker News Reader

Comment by evilotto | Hacker News Reader

I am not interested in hiring someone who doesn't want to stick around for 2 reasons: First, as others have said, it takes time to learn an organization, far longer than learning say, a new programming language. Someone who only sticks around for a year is barely getting their feet wet and is only going to be making surface contributions. Not to mention they usually check out a month or so before they leave. Second, hiring is a pain. It's time consuming and expensive. I don't want to be doing it any more than I need to, and someone who joins with the intent of leaving in a year is only making my job harder.

View on HN

This pain also scales with the size of the department.

If a company fills an entire team with job hoppers who leave after a year, the entire team will turn over every year.

Revolving door companies are terrible to work for because everyone around you is relatively inexperienced at their job. You don’t really want to invest too much in work relationships because you know everyone is just waiting to hop somewhere else. Eventually, you get sick of it and want to leave, too. In a way, hiring too many job hoppers becomes contagious as the turnover burns out the remaining employees who have to shoulder more work simply because they’re the only ones who have been around long enough to have the knowledge necessary to get things done.

I wonder what would be your take on my stints (non-tech Ops guy here, based out of Asia/Europe for reference). I have changed jobs 5 times in 6 years:

# Company 1: First stint after university at a Bank. Management development program. Left after 4 months to join a startup backed by renowned European VC/accelerator. 4 months

#Company 2: Technically an internship here which was supposed to be full-time after 6 months. 3 months in, co-founder who was also my hiring manager died - startup was on the verge of sinking. 5 months.

#Company 3: Ops role with plenty of ownership at Food-delivery company (think Doordash for Europe). Left after 1 year due to personal reasons (had to move back to Asia due to medical reasons in my family) Good impact here though.

#Company 4: Asian unicorn. Impactful role, scaled a new business vertical to $xM ARR fwiw. Left after 3 years to change industry.

#Company 5: Booming startup that ultimately did not succeed. Very short time but still made some strides. 3 months. Laid off along with 75% of the company.

Now, what's your take if you were to look at my resume?

As you can see, I had just 1 long stint so far (3 years). My only saving grace is that my projects were at least somewhat notable. Especially in the current climate where entire teams can be laid off and many orgs are downsizing, I feel insecure that another short stint < 1-2 years would be a red flag to recruiters and Hiring Manager - circumstances notwithstanding.

My first question for you would be why do you want to work at my company? You like working at early-stage startups, and that's not this company. My second question is what would keep you working at my company when something else catches your interest? I would be extremely concerned that you would get bored with a non-startup and leave after a short time for the next big thing around the corner. The 3-year stint is a good point for sticking around, but if the only thing that keeps you in one role is growing the company to $xM, you're probably not going to be happy here to begin with.

I cannot speak about your specific company - I don't know which one you work for. Nonetheless, I would clarify few things

- I like working on initiatives that yield high impact. There's a correlation between "your work having more observable impact" in early-stage startups. For what its worth, I have worked at a public startup (one of the largest companies in its sector) and a unicorn startup: at both places, my appetite for working on "high ownership projects" was fulfilled.

- I don't jump for "the next big thing" - if that was the case, I'd jump from crypto to AI to Web3 startups but thats not the case. For me, the role/function is critical. I know for a fact that I won't do well at a bank (which is where my career started from) because I'd get bored. But a larger org like Adidas or Mercedes-Bez or Booking.com etc that work on some interesting problems? Sign me up!

- "but if the only thing that keeps you in one role is growing the company to $xM" - Not true. I do love high-impact projects - I am certain I am not alone in it. If anything, I have a demonstrated streak of ownership and bringing results. But, looking at the results, I was asked by the SVP to help with few different tasks (Expansion in a key geography; partnerships across EMEA/APAC; and product ownership and implementation of a 3rd party SaaS tool).

Open to feedback here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com