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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

  4. Why do you change jobs so often (so rarely)?
  How does that matter? If I am a match for the company
  in terms of qualifications and personal qualities, how
  will my job history and reflection help? I changed jobs
  every year or so. Is that “often” or “rarely”? What’s
  wrong with changing jobs frequently?

It is actually important to ask this of a candidate who seems to frequently change jobs. A hiring manager may not want to hire someone who will leave soon. It often makes more sense to hire someone who is capabale and wants to work for you.

Several of the questions in the article are very good questions to ask. Their purpose isn't for the candidate to give some canned response, like the article states. Their purpose is to help the candidate shine by asking questions that can be answered with examples from the candidate's background. If the candidate can't give solid answers that's not an issue with the questions.

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"I actually come prepared for this question, and have a line to explain each and every job I've departed in reverse chronological order. And I'd be happy to read them off if you'd like. You do? Okay...

  - VCs merged us with a Chinese acquisition and sent our work overseas
  - Manager ignored my memos for 5 years and then said "you have no new ideas" to my face in a review
  - Sales team demanded an emergency prototype and then let a competitor steal the contract
  - Company pivoted into a different tech stack overnight
  - Google rewrote our code in a weekend and kicked us out of Android 
  - Owner wouldn't install health benefits (+$5K) but hired his daughter for the summer for busywork
  - Company abandoned the market and went into Facebook games

Now hopefully none of these scenarios will ever happen here. Right? Glad to hear it."

While I agree all of these scenarios are good reasons to leave, I have a feeling (based on being an American for all 30 years of my life now), these answers would be classified as "TOO REAL" and as a result you might be filtered for "culture fit" aka manager doesn't think he/she can control you.

I agree, but at that point if they're going to make this kind of observation on my resume ("hmm, you move around a lot"), the reply is going to be of equal tone ("I move around a lot because the companies I choose tend to make bad decisions and change direction with equal frequency").

There's nothing much to lose by that point.

Lol, after 3 small companies, I joined a large systemic bank. It's less exciting but I can see projects to their completion without being surrounded by bumbling idiots barely out of business school barking nonsensical orders.

Agreed. You changed twice last year and you have good reasons, fine. You changed every 6 months for the last 10 years and it is always the others fault? Either you've been really unlucky and I am sorry for you or the blame is not on the others and you may want to ask yourself some existential questions.

Interviews are here to determine if the place is a good fit, on both sides.

Exactly, I dont get it why some folks are clearly in the job for short stints over and over, and clearly dont have stability in mind, yet they want this stable position and frown upon rejection as clearly a bad match. I'd say this is an epitome of bad match, since people with too little/incorrect experience are normally filtered out by agencies, but this is more personality mismatch.

Some things are just damn too easy to spot without even trying, and this one of them. Have a great story to explain why you are actually wont leave when meeting first frustrating item at your work.

Also, everything is being evaluated, including how you react to uncomfortable questions. Parents snarky response would be a nogo on itself, regardless of subject.

That's a fine question. The "what's with this gap in your resume" makes me want to slap someone. I didn't feel like working and I am compensated well for my skillset that you seek hereto, so how about why haven't you taken a break recently, son? Huh? Too busy catching up on the Joneses to keep yourself relevant? Thought so.

"It says here that for 22 years you went... Kerouac on everyone's ass?"

Yeah it's ridiculous to think it's a wrong question because you're in a resume competition and a peer is at 4 years per job average and you're at 1. Purely neutrally, for the hiring person, he s faced with a short term guy vs a medium term guy.

If the guy reply "why do you care", then it s def suspicious and the short term guy might be so incompetent he s pushed away and doesnt last more than a year. I d take the guy who seem to survive 4 years most jobs to be safe.

> A hiring manager may not want to hire someone who will leave soon.

I was one of those, but I don't think that there's many.

I remember talking to a manager of a startup we were working with, and he told me that the average stay of an engineer was 18 months, and that they plan for that.

I bounced like that, for my first three jobs, but stuck at my fourth, for nearly 27 years.

> It is actually important to ask this of a candidate who seems to frequently change jobs.

It seems very inaccurate to judge that probability purely on past performance, which is likely to be just a handful of data points.

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