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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

As a manager who reviews resumes frequently, I've never really looked down on "job hopping" provided their stints weren't exclusively short (A year or less). I feel like people spend way too much effort trying to suss out "vibes" from a resume. I'm far more interested in having a conversation to understand how they work, their approach to problem solving, testing, how they manage constraints (time or technical ones) and getting a sense for what they'd be like as a team member. And I'd like to see their code and have them talk through it.

I always ask people to just explain why they left their last few gigs. You can read between the lines on the answers and typically they're straight-forward, sympathetic reasons.

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My counterpoint is that it takes time for someone to become productive in a tech job. In my pocket of the industry, I'd say as long as 3-9 months. In fact, in that time the employee is a time sink: you get less done as you're still onboarding the employee.

So if they are going to leave after a year, that's a big disincentive to hire, regardless of how they are at problem solving.

Sure, there's good reasons to leave quickly, but if these stack up, I'm inclined to pass.

I’ve seen this point used a lot and never agreed to it. I think it’s true only for big already established companies/systems, and absolutely not true for startups and consulting jobs. Especially because in those type of environments companies tends to hire for specific tech stacks and business knowledge.

I'm talking about finance, and not the big company end of it. Every company ends up doing things in a very custom way, and it does take a long time to train people up, even in small operations.

What about consultants? I currently am on a "mission" of 1 year 3 months, but really the original assignment was 6 months, which has been prolonged 2 months, 3 months (really, with a change of function), and now (maybe, to be approved) until the end of the year, which would make it 1 year 8 months. But that's exceptional. And really, these were ~10 months in one function, then 5 months (for now) in another part of the company (double consultancy ... sigh). So in at least one interpretation I haven't held down a job for a year in ~4 years. Of course, I did have the same employer for 7 years. But I see my actual employer, and my manager there, maybe 2 times per year.

Because holding a single mission at a customer as a (probably expensive) consultant for a year ... I'd say my average is 8 months. My record is 2 years 7 months.

I'd make it clear on the resume that these were all consulting jobs under the same parent employer (make the formal employer the top bullet, indent for the engagements you want to highlight).

I also did consulting for a long time and never mentioned my customers in my CV, I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to.

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