Ask HN: I've constantly changed companies. Would I be considered unreliable? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I've constantly changed companies. Would I be considered unreliable?

36 pointspanjaro73 comments

From the beginning of my career in 2007, I have left jobs once I got comfortable to take challenging ones. 2.5 years is the longest I've worked, in my first job. After that all jobs I took I left within 1.5 years. Once I get into the company and get hold of everything, I find it a little boring and have changed company to get more challenging ones. Does this mean I am unreliable and my career is going in wrong direction?

UPDATE(explanation on why I left):

I left first company because there were no signs or plans of upgrading to new technologies. After 2.5 yrs all we were doing was changes and bug fixes. I had to upgrade myself So went to gain experience in large company with some process in place and lot of good programmers.

I left that company after working for 1.5 yrs to open a company with a friend as we found an investor. However the investor said he was short on budget and never gave us full amount. So I did freelancing for 2 years

Then I moved out of country and took a new job. It was all good. I wanted to try if Research career is good for me So left the company in after working 10 months to pursue research career.

However I found research isn't for me as it presented lot of challenge financially.

Then I joined a big name company before 2 months. I had long term plans but found out the IT department is just kind of support and even to make simple changes decisions take weeks. On top of that I got an offer to be first in house employee of a company where I am expected to do everything now and manage as company grows.

Suddenly I realized I have changed 4 companies in 6 yrs. That made me a bit worried.

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I know someone who has followed a career path of frequent job changes (always in the same metropolitan area, mine, the Twin Cities of Minnesota) in computer-related work and who has always managed to make each job change a net raise. He is making substantially more money now than many of his contemporaries who stayed at the same company for years, and has leaped over some of those persons for more responsible roles with more challenge (what you desire) and a better pay-and-lifestyle balance than other people with similar technical skills in the same company have. In other words, it depends. If you make sure to trade up every time you trade, you have set up a ratchet that should make your career better over time.

Not a programmer, but I've done this as well. Averaging a job change about every 14 months (always leaving on good terms after another company or recruiter has reached out to me). It's given me a wide range of experience, let me try a few different industries out, and I've upped my salary a little under 50% in 5 years.

I've been at my current job 2 years. Things have slowed down a lot in Alberta, so new offers and opportunities are very hard to find. But I've made myself useful to a handful of companies, and don't anticipate any shortages in work (during a period when many are getting laid off and taking paycuts). When things pick back up, I've got a verbal offer on a position which should bring me another hefty raise.

My advice: Switch whenever an opportunity comes up that offers better work or pay. Employers are generally reluctant to hand out a 10-20% raise, but they will easily pay that money to someone new coming in to fill a hole in their organization. It can be difficult to explain coming-and-going in interviews, but if you have a solid line of references and some okay answers, their need to hire is often stronger than their desire to see what's wrong with you.

The Twin Cities is an interesting environment for that. It's so enterprise-heavy here (imho we're as much a tech city as Silicon Valley, just in a different expression), there are lots of people who stick to the same company for 10, 20 years or more.

As someone who has job-hopped a lot in this environment, the worst thing about it is tech environments where the leadership doesn't keep up with trends even on an awareness level. They just stick with the legacy stack they've been supporting for years, which can be incredibly wasteful and limiting. Their software is bad, but it's all they've known for so long that they have no clue how much better things can be. And then the contractors and other floaters they bring through are appalled, frustrated, and often flip quickly to the next job in hopes of less "maturity". Sigh.

Mind if I ask which expression? I liked the twin cities the one time I visited, but I've never heard of it described as a tech city.

Enterprise. There are more Fortune 500 headquarters in the Twin Cities per capita than anywhere else in the world - more than New York, more than the Bay area, more than London or Tokyo. Working in IT in the Twin Cities generally means working for the likes of Target, United Healthcare, Best Buy, 3M, Carlson Wagonlit, Monsanto, and other tremendously huge companies.

Last fall, I was in Silicon Valley at an enterprise meetup, and was talking to people there about a sense of scale. I observed that if you saw a startup generating $50M in revenue, you'd think they were very successful. I've worked on three different projects larger than that (some private, some government), and they were just side businesses to bigger enterprises.

I agree with this statement. I lived in the Twin Cities for a decade and worked for four (4) different companies--the last three of which recruited me away from my then-current position.

As another responder said, the Twin Cities is very tech centric. While there are quite a few enterprise jobs, there are plenty of opportunities across the corporate-size spectrum--from startups (a large startup community exists there) to global Fortune 50 companies.

It truly is analogous to Silicon Valley.

As a hiring manager, I look for employees who have stayed at previous jobs at least two years. If you switched a few, that is fine, but if your average is around 1.5 years, then that seems like a problem.

For most companies with complex environments, it might take 6 to 8 months to fully get you up to speed. Why should I put that into you only to have to do it again? Perhaps you're looking for jobs in the wrong part of tech, or corporate tech isn't for you? Have you considered trying to found a startup, one that you yourself are directly vested in? Perhaps that is your best bet for the future.

I find this logic itself unreliable, because it presumes that all opportunities are created equal. In a number of cases I've stayed less than a year at a place where I really could see what was wrong a couple weeks in, because you get several offers, and once you choose one, everyone else evaporates.

I've certainly had to put my shoulder into getting past this, but it's shocking how common it is for basically any hiring manager to assume that the behavior of past hiring managers was correct.

In this way, hiring managers can be replaced by LinkedIn.

Also, keep in mind that your recruiters are contacting us when we're happily employed, and that at a recent meetup in San Francisco, I'm told someone raised their hand to say, "We're hiring", to a room of booming laughter. ;)

UPDATE:

I was thinking about this, something I think about a lot, and certainly one could say, "But how do you end up with several bad managers in a row?"

I think that once you have a resume that is off the beaten path at all - and mine was almost 10y off the beaten path before my recent spate of job hopping - it's tough to get hired by anyone except the desperate, who can't fill their position. You can learn and grow in these positions for a few months, but you look around and see stagnation in people who stay longer. I also worked for a number of managers who had never been a manager before, for a CTO who hired someone 3 months a year to do a job that he otherwise insisted on doing (badly), and for someone with an MIS degree that often talked about having been taught to intentionally foster dishonest and manipulative relationships with his staff.

I'm hoping the new gig sticks for a while, but you have to give respect to someone who keeps trying. Otherwise, I will say, in the past six years I've interviewed at over 200 places and worked at aybe six, and over 100 of those companies were the same bush league situation, and usually they had terrible diversity, and even though I'm a straight cis white male, the "bro" factor was way, WAY too high for me.

> I find this logic itself unreliable, because it presumes that all opportunities are created equal.

Good for you, but I'm with SEJeff on this one. Like him, we invest 6 to 8 months of training to get an employee productive, and job hoppers cost a lot of money, and contribute little. The ROI is typically not very good.

We make no assumptions on the part of other hiring managers, and are interested to hear why you job-hopped, but it would be an issue to consider carefully for us.

What surprises me is that when you get calls from Hiring Managers or recruiters, they talk so good of the employer and judge candidates from every perspective. But you start in the company and it's not even 50% of what recruiters describe.

So they call employed people, offer a wonderful opportunity at a wonderful company. Then they have no idea what takes work in there. If someone stays long, they get left behind in current tech trend. If you don't stay long, they question why. So, either way its employees fault.

I have only 2 1/2 years of experience so far - I have generally gotten up to speed in companies' stacks in 1-2 days (I work on the frontend). My average tenure is 9-10 months at a company when omitting my employment at one company (3 months, very poor fit - even then that company was sad to lose out my talent, having been called the best engineer at that company).

I would probably fail that criteria, even though just about everything else is considered stellar to most companies (high quality open source work & contributions, hard & extremely efficient work at companies I have worked at, Marine Corps infantry experience, 4 years at a prestigious math PhD program, etc.).

Many other extremely good developers I have encountered would also fail that criteria - this is because the industry does not reward loyalty, and the developers get burned for showing any.

And I'm a former US Army Military Intelligence person with 0 college experience. Thanks for your service Marine. I was self taught and my first hiring manager very much took a chance on me, one that he was happy to take that turned out well. More than 10 years (and 3 jobs later), him and I are still friends.

When you only have a few years of experience, or one/two jobs, that is different. But if you've worked in the industry awhile, it shows either a lack of discipline, lack of respect, or both. Occasionally, you have someone unlucky to accept shitty offers at multiple places and leave due to personality conflicts. That is something that I'd ask you were you to interview for a position on one of the teams I'm on the hiring board for. It is all about perception. If the perception is that you're going to leave after a very short period, I'll generally be gunshy, as many other experience managers will also do.

Do you have a Github profile I can follow? Don't know many other former Marine developers.

https://github.com/wesleycho

Also, in a lot of cases, github replaces a long resume if you contribute to a lot of open source software. Please do keep that up as it is also a great way to stay current on tech you like, but might not be able to work on as part of $DAY_JOB.

I hold working open source code that is reasonably good higher than job experience in a lot of cases.

My github: https://github.com/SEJeff

On the other hand, the guy who switches because he's interested in harder problems might not take the same amount of time to train up.

At my last company my boss hired me with the intention of me taking a year to learn the business (it was an entirely new industry for me). I was running a part of a new team 3 months later. After a year he left, and brought me with him to a new company. If you ask him I was a pretty successful hire. If you look at my resume, and ask... why only a year? You might think I am unreliable.

Just for the record, 6 months of training and 1.5 years of work is the same ratio as 8 months of training and 2 years of work.

So if you're okay with someone taking 8 months of training and staying with you a total of 2 years, what's your objection to the shorter cycle?

Do you ever hire contractors for odd 6-month jobs?

Don't worry. This stuff is ultimately judged by the biases of whoever is reading your CV, and people vary a lot.

If an employer is particularly worried about employee staying for extended periods, your record will work against you and you won't get that job, all else equal. But, that's not as bad as it sounds. Some employers value people with Math Degrees. Some prefer PHDs. Some don't. Some employers don't like autodidacts. etc. A 1.5 year average employment period is in that category of preferences. Different employers will treat it differently. Same applies to your time as a freelancer.

Long term, 1-2 year stints early in your career is not usually seen as indicative of anything later on. It's common. So unless it is not causing you problems now, it probably won't later on.

I don't know how it looks when you get to 10X1.5 year jobs though. It would certainly make you an unusual candidate. I've never hired someone with that much experience so never seen these CVs.

The real "problem" cases are people with multiple < 1 year jobs. If your last 3 jobs were under one year, most employers will see that as "The last 3 people that hired him regretted it." That doesn't sound like your record though so like I said, don't worry.

Also, just building your CV your whole life sounds like a drag. Staying at a job you dislike for years just to change your CV image is like taking a job you don't want or doing a degree you hate for your CV, it's unattractive as a lifestyle. If you like changing jobs, do it.

As someone who as doubled our eng team in the past four months and plans on doubling it again in the next 6, here's my view:

I use the term jumpy. It is a negative signal, but not a killer signal. You'll have to make up for that with numerous other positive signals, such a extreme technical competence, culture fit, evidence of shipping, etc.

I probably wouldn't point it out on a resume or whatnot, but when asked about it, be honest. Also consider being more picky about the jobs you take. Try to stick and your next place 2-3 years or switch to contracting.

> consider being more picky about the jobs you take.

This. It looks like he didn't understand what he was getting himself into, in a number of occasions (including academia and "financial difficulties" -- ever seen anyone getting rich while working as university researcher? Me neither). Maybe he should just take some time to find a job he's really into, rather than jumping on the first successful offer and regret it 6 months later.

As someone that has run a company (several hundred employees) and hired a lot of people, I would say "yes". If you were someone I was interested in, I would certainly ask you about your job switching. If you told me you got bored and moved on, I'd be very reluctant to invest time in you, only to have you leave. If you're constantly bored, maybe you're looking for the wrong jobs.

If you are not changing jobs at least every three years, you are not being paid enough.

Changing jobs every 1-2 years just means you are ambitious. Keep it up! You might find your previous employers will hire you back at a contractor rate remotely in the future.

It's great if you're ambitious for raises, not so much if you're a ladder-climber and want career growth.

While you might be able to get a PAY increase by switching jobs, it's very unusual to get a job/responsibility promotion by switching jobs. If you're a Senior Software Engineer at Company X, you're going to be a Senior Software Engineer at Company Y. Nobody is going to hire you as Director of Software Engineering since you've never managed people before. However if you stay at Company X, maybe in five or ten years you'll gain their trust and get to start managing and working your way up the ladder...

Also, you can't just job hop infinitely and count on the same % raises each time you do it. Your salary will hit a ceiling. My first job hop was probably a 33% increase. Fifteen years later, my most recent one was about ~0.5%.

If I had a chance to do it all over again, I would have picked a solid company as my first employer and stayed with them as long as possible. I have a friend who's worked at Intel their ENTIRE career (will probably die there LOL) and is doing really well.

Well management is different. Its very easy for a developer to hop from a junior position to a mid level to senior to lead if they have the chops both technically and personality-wise.

Seconding this. I went from "HTML Programmer" to "Lead Software Engineer" (however briefly) in less than three years by changing jobs three times. It wasn't always a voluntary change, but the title improved with each new job.

Hi, can you elaborate more about your carreer path. I'm currently in a simmiliar position.

Money has never been the factor for change. I have always wanted to be someone who contributes more and is an important part of the business rather than some guy writing code for them.

It's absolutely normal to feel bored with a project around a second year of it. Consider finding an environment where you can switch projects while staying within the company. Most large corporations would allow you to do that, at a cost of being probably less flexible with toolchain and decision making process.

You've spent the first several years of your career figuring out what you want. That's ok. But I would be worried about your time at BigCo, because it seems like you didn't ask the right questions and understand the environment before you signed on. That would make me wonder whether you understand how my team works well enough to know that it's what you want. Based on your history, you've now been in just about every situation out there, and are old enough that you should know what you want and how to ask the right questions during interviews. So at this point I'm expecting that you're going to commit to something long enough to see it through to completion, and I'm going to be asking you tough questions along those lines, mainly to be sure that you know what we're doing, that you're excited about it, and that you intend to finish. If I did decide to hire you, I would probably be looking to structure your compensation around retention through the completion of whatever project I'm hiring for. That said, there are positions where the ramp time is very low and I would basically assume you're like a short-term contractor, and for those positions I wouldn't care. If you find one like that, it's a low-risk opportunity for both sides. The drawback for you is that those positions don't always pay well and are often the first to be eliminated when business slows.

I guess that highlights for me the biggest problem: you've talked a little about what you've done, but nothing about what you want to do. That kinda matters. If you want to be an engineer, you need to prove that you can stick with something from concept to at least the first upgrade cycle (you'll learn more from an upgrade cycle than you will from shipping ten products and then walking away from them each time). That might be a year or it might be ten. If you want to do operations, you need to complete projects and then stick around long enough to learn from what you did. An in any case, hiring managers will want to see that you've shipped something, because that's the only way to be sure that your work was good enough to use. Repeated departure well before shipping (or completing an internal project, etc.) is a big red flag, much moreso than the length of your tenure. And not staying in one place long enough to learn from past mistakes greatly reduces your value. Again, it's not the calendar time, it's what you did and learned.

Thank you so much for taking time to write detailed reply.

I feel I have learned a lot changing companies - both technical as well as social skills. I would definitely want to be developing solutions. I have no problem doing day to day jobs as long as I'm am important part of the business. However, if I feel neglected then I ask questions on what would be the future like and what works are coming. In many occasions owners have no answers.

On top of that I have tried a lot of things now and am pretty sure I want to be a programmer/developer/engineer/whatever whose contribution is valued.

I lasted about 1.5 years each at my first 3 jobs, then I moved to a company I've been at for 4 years. No one questioned anything at any job about past employment lengths. I'm starting to think I should have moved on long ago.

> I had long term plans but found out the IT department is just kind of support and even to make simple changes decisions take weeks. On top of that I got an offer to be first in house employee of a company where I am expected to do everything now and manage as company grows.

No one would want that kind of job, changes taking weeks. They should have made that clear, that they basically do all maintenance. The new job offer sounds more challenging and full of opportunities. Staying at your current job sounds like a really bad idea.

Just be aware and look for more opportunities to do interesting projects at your new place.

New place seems interesting as well as challenging. Provided that I'm close to 30 but not above I'm taking this chance. After all, it'll be another opportunity to learn even if I fail.

> Suddenly I realized I have changed 4 companies in 6 yrs. That made me a bit worried.

4 companies in 6 years is nothing. I would be more wary of someone switching job every 2/3 months. So, more than 6 times the number of companies you have been working for. You are fine.

I've worked at 4 companies in three years. Any company worth working for doesn't give a shit and they'll recognize your abilities.

> Does this mean I am unreliable and my career is going in wrong direction?

Self-awareness is good step forward in managing your career. Be upfront with potential employers on what you've learned so far. And be prepared to address concerns they may have over your decision-quality, stick-to-itiveness, and maturity.

Relative to your next move(s) suggest that you create a scorecard-- get clear about the types of environments & work you find appealing and intellectually challenging. You must probe for those things as you explore new opportunities. Put some serious thought into evaluating if the next job is a strong match.

The problem with switching often is that there are good reasons to do it, and bad reasons forcing you to do it... That is, many people that read N books and look like experts at a first glance, but can't actually code tend to switch work very often since after some time they are "uncovered" and move away. There are other good reasons to switch often: being exposed to new technologies, getting a raise, and so forth, the risk is to be confused for a frequent changer for the reason she/he can't actually code.

I'm like you, I changed many times. I get bored easily. I think I found what is right for me, maybe it can help you. I now work for a big IT consulting firm on projects averaging 3-5 months.

This is a great path if you like starting new projects from scratch every few months. Also advertising agencies do this, although it may not be as interesting as far as technical programming challenges.

10 years ago I was a bit bored in my contract business. As I'm starting yet another new project, I'm talking with the main contact person who happens to be an attorney, and he said something rather interesting. He's been doing what he's been doing for a long time and he's very good at his job, but it's also a bit bland. I think he called it bread and butter work. He doesn't hate it at all, it's just not that interesting, but it pays the bills and, again, he's very good at it. Yet he thinks about retiring. But every once in a while, every 2-3 years, an interesting project (case) comes along that gets him excited and keeps him in the game.

My take away was: it sounds very romantic to be in love with your job, always, but isn't very realistic. Being good at your job is realistic, but many people aren't good at their job. If you are, you stand out and can command a good salary, working hours, benefits, whatever is important to you. And every once in a while you should try to get an interesting project to keep things fresh.

So who's responsibility is it to get that occasional interesting project? I'd loosely say that's 50/50 split between employee and employer. You can't just expect to get spoon fed interesting projects. You have to look for them, and the company has to be in a relevant position to support that.

If you like research, if you good at ramping up and learning new skills, that can be a good way of acquiring the occasional interesting project, while getting better paid for it.

Its only a problem if it causes you problems. You shouldnt make decisions about which jobs to stay at or leave because you have some perceived correlation between length at a job and reliability.

This is one of those classic cases where the culutural pressures and beliefs are wrong and ripe for ignoring. Especially for an engineer/hacker its important to second guess your societal perceptions and make decisions on more substantial foundations.

It's like the old real estate mantra goes: "It's all about location, location, location."

There will be some metros where no one cares; they're so short-handed and the tech market so hot, they won't care and will hire you. Other metros which are more sedate, with few companies and therefore over-saturated with techs and H1Bs will look at you and laugh.

I would look at how long someone needs to work in that industry to meaningfully complete a project or two. In mine, it is about 2 years. If they consistently have below this, I would have to question the depth of contributions to the projects they worked on. New grads I do give a little leeway as they are just figuring out what they want to do.

I definitively would hire someone who has experienced different kind of codebases, business styles and products. Think about it.

Sounds like you might enjoy freelancing more? Not sure how it works in the RoW - but in the UK you look for contracts, when you find one setup your Ltd Co and engage an accountant - and you're set --- with the added bonus that your will stick with you employer (yourself) for many years.

Freelancing was challenging and fun but I'd lean more towards permanent roles where I have more knowledge of business while developing solutions.

Try to show proof that the companys want to keep you- and have a very good reason - like i get bored easily.

For companys the questions is do you reach the break even- the point where the investment that they did by hire and assigning somebody too you, to introduce you to your tools and internal operations. Everything else is rather benefical.

Cooperations outsource codejobs to strangers today. And they do well with it. Never heard a hiring manager complain about the company beeing "a problem case" when it came to investments in hirde guns.

You might not hit it off with your collagues though. Many want the safety. If somebody appears who represents the opposite lifestyle, and shows everyone that life can be lived different- which theire manager might use for pressure once you are gone - things can get a little frosty.

Do not say you get bored easily. That is a huge red flag to potential employers.

As a contractor/freelancer, you may very well switch every 6 months. Nobody says anything about that. It is an absolutely normal thing to do. Just say that you had achieved the goal of the short-term contract for which you had been hired. In a sense, it is probably true anyway.

Please don't misrepresent a 6 month span of a full time gig as a short term contract. No one ever expects a FT employee to stay only 6 mos.

I recommend looking into a large company that lets you move around (specifically let me recommend Boeing). I have changed groups several times and there is very little stigma assuming you can get yourself up to speed in a reasonable time frame and you're not, "leaving behind dead bodies".

Consider reading a book called, "The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels". It's contents helped me gear my interviews towards how and when I would add value to a new group. I believe that is the key to changing jobs - average time to positive ROI from the new group's perspective, not average time spent in a group.

You have some great recommendations in this thread, so thank you for asking!

It's not that you have changed jobs, it's how and why you have done it. From your description you seem to be directionless, impatient, and prone to experimenting over informing yourself properly. Yeah I would definitely consider you 'unreliable'.

It sounds to me like becoming a contractor might perhaps suit you better - is that a possibility where you are based? On the other hand, contract roles often involve the kind of problems you wouldn't necessarily find "challenging".

Contracting would be nice but wouldn't it be stressful looking for work every time project is finished?

No, it's common. Many developers focus on purely contract or project work, so 4 companies in one year isn't uncommon.

You have an increased validation in your hirability, as four different companies have thought you were good enough to give an offer to.

Like others have said, the important thing is do you just bore easily?

You have mostly pretty good reasons for the switches. The possible exception is the research career move ... didn't you know going in how little money you'd be making? Sounds a little flaky to give up on it for that reason. If I were interviewing you, I'd drill down on that one.

The trick is, would I even interview you or would I see the resume and think, hmm, I don't know? I try to be very thoughtful about that but I usually get a lot of applicants ... I think you should try to keep this new position for a while.

If he keeps the current position for 2 years or for 4 years, does it change dramatically the view you would have of his CV? I guess staying there for 10 years would have a sensible impact on how the resume would look like, I'm just trying to calibrate your perception as an interviewer.

Sometimes I've gotten 200 applications for a job posting. Not for a long time, but in 2000-2001, after the Internet crash, it was ugly. You had no choice but to filter a lot. You did your best, knowing that you were missing some good candidates. But any little flag was enough to push you into the "no" or the "maybe" pile.

Even when I've gotten relatively few applicants, it's still time-consuming to bring people in. I wouldn't say that a bunch of short-term jobs would rule out anybody on its own, but I would still like to see something that shows you had an impact during your short time. And like others have said, there's a lot of value in seeing big projects through from start to finish, so there might be positions where I'd be like, sorry, I need to see that you've done that before I hire you for this job.

It's not the years, really, but what you've done in the amount of time you had. Like I said, the ones stated are mostly all good reasons for leaving a job. In an interview I woudld probably find them convincing. I also think it would be great to be able to say, for at least one job, "I stuck this one out and did everything I could, despite the odds stacked against it, because I really wanted to see something through."

To you question specifically, I think having at least one job with a longer tenure would be a big improvement to the first-impression reaction most hiring managers would have to the resume.

Thanks a lot for your answer, I found it really useful.

I would love to have answer to this question. If I stay in my current position doing support/changes for next 4-5 years, would that mean my chances of being hired be high?

I don't get bored easily but If the company/boss doesn't show any sign of progress or doesn't explain what I'll be doing in next 6 months then it disappoints me. But not to the extent that I'd leave. Changing country and a desire to do a research degree were reasons for leaving 2 companies. After that I had no job and I took whatever came my way.

Finding and hiring the right person is very time consuming, training up that person is very timing consuming, and when someone leaves, training someone to take over their responsibilities is very time consuming. Combining all of those these together, each time a person leaves a company it incurs a cost of about 6 months of their salary. I'd rather pay more for someone that's going to stick around then hire people who are likely going to get bored and leave. Many companies try to figure out way to reduce turnover - it's very expensive.

But Once hired they are put into a corner and company doesn't even answer their questions on future, career etc. I have seen a colleague at current office. She has been there for more than 5 years and believe it or not she doesn't even know what an ORM is. She is good at sql queries and she is busy all day with support work. If the company decides to let her go, It'll be very hard for her to get a job. That is what companies/founders/bosses don't care about and that's why people who worry about their time of life they're spending in the company to take some actions.

It's not all about company's money. It's about people's life.

Startups aside I'm about 1.5 years on average and the massive finance company I'm at right now only asked about my entrepreneur itch and whether I'll be tempted to jump back in..

As an employer, I would have concerns about your job hopping, and it would certainly be discussed in an interview. I would want to know why you job-hop. sometimes, life gets in the way of your plans, so it wouldn't be a determining factor in deciding to interview you. In your case, after your explanation, we'd discuss internally to see if we could offer you enough of a challenge and keep things interesting for you.

It depends on the type of work you do and the size of the projects you work on.

If you work on small projects with a 1 month ramp up time then it's not a big deal to leave after a year.

On the other hand I'm currently working on a million+ loc application and the typical ramp up time for a good dev is 6 months. I'm not going to hire somebody who will probably be gone in a year.

It's definitely a negative signal for me if someone has moved around a lot within the last few years.

It's not so much a problem for a senior engineer who can onboard relatively quickly.

But for junior engineers, I would be a lot more hesitant because the onboarding that the company invests in you is lost if there's a high chance you'll move on a few months later.

Just to be on the safe side, I would stay at least 3 years on a job. 2-3 years is what recruiters/hr people look in CV. If it is less for too many jobs, then they assume that you are a job hopper.

So in your case, yes I would say that 1,5 years is controversial. For 6 years you should have changed 2 jobs (maybe 3 with a good explanation)

Unfortunately, yes. Your recruiter and/or hiring manager are definitely going to ask you this and make sure you have a ready-made answer for this question which doesn't involve "boring".

Why can't it involve "boring"?

1 - The fact that you were bored does not mean the place was boring. Your ability to make this distinction reflects A LOT on your ability to perform critical thinking and objective evaluations, both of which are part of most technical jobs.

2 - If you chose multiple jobs and were bored in all of them, the problem start to look like it's in you, not in the jobs. Therefore, it's a problem you will bring into your next job, and few companies want that.

When explain that I left my job at a bank after 3.5yrs to go back into videogames dev, nobody bats an eyelid if I say I was bored. Even so, I do not say it, because the important bit is where I wanted to go to, not where I wanted to get out of.

It raises a bunch of red flags to hiring managers myself. In every job there are parts that are somewhere between mind-numbing and straight out boring, but that doesn't mean they don't need to get done. If you're leaving jobs after a short time because you're bored, that makes people think you're lacking the stamina that's necessary to be successful longer term.

I personally have a decade on my resume where I changed jobs quite frequently. Most of them were contract or consulting work so by the very nature of them, they were short term. Some people take issue with that, others note the fact that I had no downtime between contracts and choose to ignore the frequent changes.

I don't mind junior candidates who change jobs a few times early in their careers as I see that as them getting their bearings, but once people figured out what they want to do, I expect job tenures to lengthen or at least expect people to have a good explanation as to why they kept moving on.

You prefer to do short term consulting work over long term jobs? Fine with me. You joined a bunch of startups that ran out of money after a year? OK.

It certainly can, but IMHO it won't maximize his/her prospects of getting hired. And (anecdotal) most of the jobs have boring periods in them and you hurt your chances.

If the company asks you what you look for in a job, frame it in a positive way.. like "intellectually rewarding" without going into the negative part i.e. "I hate getting bored/working on boring projects".

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