I can come up with a reasonably convincing story for every individual Job about why I quit that one. But taken together, there's no reasonable story that would convince a hiring manager.

It comes down to this: I hate being an employee. I want to work on my own projects on my own terms. This is the only way I can find work that is worth doing.

That said, the wording of the article is weird.

> If your job is terrible, you can leave

As if you're affirming an anxious person.

Listen, yes, you can leave, but you shoule know that there absolutely will be consequences for leaving too early.

Fewer employers will consider hiring you.

For one thing, I have relatives that got into the tech scene after me, but rack in much higher salaries than me. I'm not sure what it is, but probably staying in their jobs for more than two years helps.

If your goal in life is to find a stable employment, then you should absolutely not "just leave".

For me, that was never my goal in life (and frankly I can't understand people whose goal in life is that). So I had no qualms about leaving when I found that I lost the will to continue working the job.

That said, I still hesitated and took my time. I still cared about finishing whatever project it is I'm working on. I felt a sense of responsibility for the company, because they are paying me to do a job, and quitting half way through is just not the right thing to do.

> It comes down to this: I hate being an employee.

If the bottom line is that you hate being an employee, then it seems that being suspicious of your resume would be the correct call.

> I want to work on my own projects on my own terms. This is the only way I can find work that is worth doing.

This is something hiring managers try to screen for during the hiring process. Being part of a team and working together on the teams' terms is crucial. There isn't room for a "lone wolf" kind of programmer in most companies. This personality might work at small companies that can only afford to hire a single programmer who owns an entire domain from start to finish, but those jobs come with their own issues.

Candidates are wise to screen out hiring managers like that. They generally don't run teams worth working for, and if you're not smart enough to filter out managers like that, you might end up with too many short tenures.

I wasn't trying to suggest the parent commenter was trying to work for me (nor would that even make logical sense, given that I'm replying to them...)

The comment was a general observation on the hiring process, short tenures, and how hiring managers operate. I meant it in the general context of the article we're all commenting on.

The bottom line is that hiring managers are looking for good employees. If someone outwardly identifies as a person who "hates being an employee" then it would seem the system is working if they're struggling to convince hiring managers otherwise.

I think this looks closest to the problem of misunderstanding. Hiring managers should look for people who solve their problems, not for good employees (in the sense of this discussion). Hating being an employee should be understood correctly.

Firstly it means the hiring manager has to redo this whole process again. So if nothing else a problem for him.

Secondly everything the person worked on will have to be moved to someone else - an expensive cost of time.

Thirdly there's typically a reason for them leaving, and they often pollute the workspace with that discontent on their way out.

As an employer it's not hard to find people with sufficient skills. Despite what programmers think it's not tech chops that are unique. Being a "good employee" for lots of definitions of "good" is exactly what I'm looking for.

One year is plenty of time to make many meaningful contributions, especially if the employee is already experienced. You might not get the super deep knowledge to drive roadmaps and cross team projects. But it's definitely not going to be a net negative unless the employee is just bad (so not likely to make it to a year).

Don't compare the right person staying only one year to the right person staying 3 years. Compre them to no hire, or to the wrong person being hired. Getting amazing people who want to stay with you forever is really rare.

Hiring managers need to look for good employees as well as people who solve their problems, and whoever joins the team is going to need months of training to be productive.

Someone who jumps ship after a year is...not entirely useless, but was certainly a waste.

Perhaps it's different in other domains.

These two things are one and the same.

The idea of a mercenary developer who shows up, solves problems in exchange for money, and then disappears in a relatively short period of time is exactly what contractors are for. Not all problems are amenable to the contractor model, though. It also takes extra work to prepare problems to be solved in this piecewise fashion, so you can’t just apply the contractor model to random problems and expect good results. There’s a reason people loathe consulting companies.

Full time employees really do need to ramp up, integrate with the team, learn how the company works, build relationships within the company, and otherwise become an integrated employee.

Job-hopping isn't some arbitrary threshold that gets crossed. It's more of a pattern that gets identified while evaluating a person's resume.

When I say "job hopper" I don't mean someone who has 10 years of experience across 3 or 4 different jobs. The "job hopper" resumes I see are some times as extreme as 12 jobs in 10 years, or occasionally people who have never reached the 1 year mark at any company. If someone can't last a full year as an FTE at any company, it's hard to argue that there isn't a problem.

It's not a big deal for someone who is 1-2 years into their career. But when someone is 10 years into their career and they're not staying anywhere long enough to really make an impact, why would any hiring manager reasonably expect that to be different after hiring them again for job number 11 or whatever it ends up being? The most likely outcome is that the pattern continues.

If I'm hiring for a senior or better role, I want you to be able to make meaningful, sustainable changes in large and complex systems. It can take the better part of a year to even fully understand many complex systems, so it's unlikely you ever experienced the full long term affects of your changes.

Fully agree. I've seen a few FTEs come in, try to make a giant splash with changes, then leave right when their changes have any sort of major issue.

I'm still dealing with bad code from someone that came in and tried to do that.

Oh, man, I briefly worked adjacent to someone like that who went on to have principal and director level roles at pretty well-known start-ups, despite never sticking to any role for a year (according to their own LinkedIn!). Apparently they're now CTO of a small start-up, which seems like a recipe for disaster.

> why would any hiring manager reasonably expect that to be different after hiring them again for job 11

Thats is I think still the wrong approach, signals the wrong mentality in an IT company(a company thats greatest asset is its employees). Investing in employees can never be a saving center in a good IT business, considering all businesses are becoming IT businesses perhaps in every business in this context. If a candidate has the skills and took time to apply, if they are qualified you are responsible to hire them and keep them. If I was the manager of the hiring manager, I’d probably fire this hiring manager for keeping the organization dumber, and seeks his own interest/status-quo seeking behavior & protectionism with this behavior/approach/mentality. I do believe in moving mountains in 3-6 months, especially in badly managed projects or super fast growing companies.

Sure, you can move a mountain in 3-6 months, I've seen such people. Most of them will move the mountain to a wrong place, and won't stay to help bring it back at the desired one. They will just go, leaving chaos back, totally unaware of the mess they created. Or they will move the mountain to the correct place, but will do it in such a way, that no-one is able to maintain, improve, or fix the mountain.

Leaving before a year or two, means you never owned your mistakes. You never tweaked your engineering intuition for teamwork, reliability, or maintainability.

Hey, you might be brilliant, but that's not what engineering is about.

Significant contributions aren’t a settled thing after six months. There always are loose ends to tie, things to reflect upon or unforeseen evolution forcing you to come back.

The issue with people leaving after six months is not that they might not have made a significant contribution in these six months. It’s that they never had to live through the consequences of what they did. It’s not a deal breaker but it’s career limiting because I very much want to hire people who know how to deal with things not going to plan and able to own their work. That’s why experienced people are paid more after all.

I’m equally suspicious of people with ten years of experience who can’t explain to me when something they were working on went wrong and what they did to fix it. It’s nearly impossible to work ten years on major projects and not having something blowing up on you at some point.

They are paid to stick around? I thought good people would produce work that was well thought out enough to not require endless amounts of "maintenance".

How do you know how much maintenance your work actually needed if you never stuck out long enough to witness it?

I'll throw my own two cents as someone who interviewed a couple hundred senior/staff level eng candidates. When a candidate comes around w/ 10+ years of experience, a career filled with one year stints will not pass the bar for L6 level because some of the evaluated requirements (e.g "consistent cross-functional impact") simply cannot be achieved in <12 month stints (and this shows in the interviews)

Something to consider is that tenured big tech interviewers can have hundreds of interviews w/ 10+ YOE candidates under their belts; they've seen high performers and low performers and inflated titles and smooth talkers and everything in between. So when they say someone doesn't pass a bar, it's not just a quick dismissal of a resume (the interviewing process at these companies typically doesn't even allow that); instead there's a lot of interviewing experience behind that statement.

Having seen a bunch of companies and hiring managers, I don't believe PP's approach is the correct one if he wants to maximize results, not minimize efforts.

There are reasons why at some point stellar candidates stop considering Big Tech, companies like FAANG etc. and also why good engineers deteriorate if staying there for too long (doesn't apply to certain departments, like RnD). Policies are simplifications, and hiring good candidates is a hard problem in modern industry; removing flexibility only makes the task that much harder.

The other thing is that you're assuming a hypothetical candidate w/ only short tenures is someone who is necessarily an ace, vs the original claim that this person is likely a dud. The point I'm making is that in a real concrete scenario w/ lots of numbers to look at, people w/ that sort of resume don't perform well when benchmarked against known high performers. Which then begs the question of whether it is even reasonable to assume that there's any overlap between the extreme job hopper archetype and the "ace" archetype statistically speaking, when comparing to the stats for the cohort of people with "normal" tenures.

I can point to a vast pool of people jumping from one 6 month contract to the next that tend to do abysmally bad in interviews, and I can tell you none of the staff+ or director-type people I know are extreme job hoppers, as anecdotes to support the argument that the overly short tenure strategy doesn't perform as well as average tenures. You'd need to provide a very strong argument for the idea that "short tenures = good heuristic for finding golden needle in a haystack" is a superior strategy for either job seekers or employers, because I just don't see it.

Sometimes you see people who hop around while transitioning between roles. It’s fairly typical to see veterans hit 2-3 places after leaving the service. Likewise, if someone leaves a unique vertical (ie healthcare, government, some finance), some hopping around makes sense. But like all things outliers are usually outliers for a reason.

Really, that's the only conclusion here? Can't a person, who's much better engineer than an interview-goer - I mean, to modern interviews in the industry - have to get at some point a position which he isn't so sure about, get his concerns realized, and made to leave? It's tough market for good engineers, despite some media would tell otherwise; search for a position could take months, more than half a year sometimes, and engineers typically have to make some money, not only working software. So if a good engineer loses a good position, it's a situation against him to find another one - and job hopping bias only makes it worse for everybody, except maybe those bad companies who still hire him, but which can't sustain him.

I don't care if the candidate is having a hard time finding their ideal job. I care about my team.

Well, yes, because any other conclusion really misunderstands what problem the hiring process is solving. It is not optimizing for hiring the best engineer possible, it's aiming to minimize a range of possible headaches for the employer. There's a hundred ways that best engineer could have work or personality traits that are absolutely terrible for your organization.

So the strawman engineer who has never been at a job for more than a year probably only had 4-6 months of productive work at these jobs, and never had any meaningful responsibilities or career growth.

In my experience, most folks stay around for 2-3 years at a job or >5.

The problem with this mentality is that the hiring process isn’t a 1-on-1 process between candidate and employer. When a job opening is posted, you get multiple applications from different people.

It doesn’t make sense to suggest that hiring managers are obligated to hire the first candidate who applies. They collect a number of candidates and try to give the role to the person most qualified for the job.

And that is the core problem for job hopping applicants: Inevitably, you’re going to go up against other candidates with resumes suggestive of longer tenures and, in turn, bigger accomplishments at companies.

Can you consider job hopping as an advantage of the candidate, the same way you seem to consider it as a disadvantage?

I've seen this bias for various people many times, and I also have examples among my fellow engineers, way more competent than average level in tech companies, who can't find a new position, not without many months of search and being dismissed for imagined shortcomings from the fragile interviewing process. Job hopping bias is one of traits lately which skews the field against them even more.

Basically, no. Soft skills are sufficiently different, so that mismatch their should be considered differently. Just like hiring is a hard problem, retaining hard-skillers is something industry has no good solution at the moment.

How does one evaluate the competency an engineer who has never had to consider and be responsible for the implications of their decisions two or three years down the road?

The last big company I worked at made it pretty easy to "team hop", which I'm sure cut attrition to the company overall by quite a bit. There was even a cool "sniper team" that would move around to assist different teams every few months. And of course there were the summer interns, most teams tried to make them net-positives and productive during their few months -- that is, even with some overhead of spinning up to the environment, having some team members mentoring them, and having to make sure their work is well understood enough by others to survive them taking off, you're still happier they were there than not. But IIRC no one was directly hired onto the sniper team, they were internal transfers. Maybe some were job hoppers in the past. But most teams interviewing new outside candidates for FT roles want the same sort of expected stability as everyone else, so of course too frequent job hopping isn't going to be seen positively.

I had a fun experience interviewing someone for a management role, he had previously left the company (after a year or so as a dev and about the same as a freshly transitioned manager) for another, but after maybe a year and a half or so at the other was thinking of coming back to the old one. I can't remember my phrasing but I basically asked him what sort of guarantees (I know I didn't use this word but it captures the desire) he could make that he wouldn't just leave again after a year or so, when this particular position really needed someone invested for at least 3 years. His answer was something like a pretty floaty "we never know what life will throw at us", which sure, there are no real guarantees here, but still, you could at least try and make me believe, like demonstrating a passion for the underlying product space or something, or heck even a simple mercenary view of trying to get a lot more RSUs that don't vest after that many years would be acceptable to me (if not others). Anyway, I recommended against him, for that and other reasons.

Were they actually good? I could see this being an absolute fly-by wharbargle.

For pretty much any team, there's some ramp-up time where a new employee won't be contributing much and may be taking more time/attention from your experienced employees and manager. (explaining how the system works, code reviews, helping debug why something's not working, etc etc) There's some break-even tenure below which it's a net loss for a team to have hired someone. It'll be different for each team and also different for each new-hire. Maybe it's only a couple days, or maybe it's 6+ months. Either way, managers should at least be aware of this when making hiring decisions. (exception: unless they're at a cushy enough gig where there's not much/any pressure to deliver)

Another exception: when the applicant is actually passing able/willing interviews.

Do you really think a good engineer would leave willy-nilly a good place to work? I've yet to see a good software engineer who loves interviewing for the process of it.

No. Which is precisely why, via contrapositive, a string of short stints is a relevant signal that the person might not be a good engineer.

There's also a cost to not having the proper head count

Any other company will prefer someone, who will stay longer, because for 3 months or more (more complex product they have, longer time), you're more cost, than asset, because you don't know the product and need some level of babysitting.

I think it's funny how at the large companies there's an inversion to your "lone wolf" claim somewhere in the promotion pipeline where to get to the next level you're supposed to show leadership and ownership of some core feature domains, you'll be working on basically one bigger thing for months at a time. Sure, technically the "team" owns it, and a few other members may have implemented some of the simpler pieces, or done QE work on it, and you probably had to have meetings with other teams about aspects of it, but everyone knows whose baby it really is and who is best positioned to add new code or debug existing code. When your team is pretty stable for enough years (quite a nice experience) everyone on the team has at least one baby + eventually passable familiarity with everyone else's; not without good reason, it's a pretty powerful way of organizing devs who don't need constant hand holding. It's not as lone wolf as literally working by yourself on your own company, but it's not like you're drowning in collaboration. As people inevitably drop out, there's often an attempt to transfer knowledge formally, because of course there are things that the person leaving knows about their special areas that are not well understood by the rest of the team or company. Companies and teams where there really is a sense of full shared ownership and common almost equal understanding of things are pretty rare, and I would bet tend to be on the smaller side.

I've never seen a company that hasn't had severe problems getting someone else in the domain of a person who left. The problem isn't an asocial person in an important position. It is lack of documentation or at least a paper trail. Various reasons why this could be, but I find the people overly eager to communicate to be the worst offenders of this, not the asocial ones. Personality doesn't magically solve strategy and lack of litmus tests.

And funnily enough, these problems form in domains that are considered solved, too. Everyone writes their own half-attempt without looking at what big corps are already doing. The domain itself is never the difficult part.

99% of the teams that think they have some decent bus factor actually just have bus factor 0 and survive by lighting piles of money on fire with an army of 0.01xers with high turnover and no chance for anyone to ramp.

Give me a single handover .txt file from a lone wolf any day of the week. In fact, that's the exact type of person I want to work with. Fuck "teamwork™" and fuck bus factor.

Nothing is going to substitute throwing a few individuals with zero domain knowledge at your code/docs and seeing if they grasp enough. Certainly not some talking which fades away in 10 minutes.

Although for people like you, I think "team player" means "a guy who does what I tell him to do".

At least when I see candidates worried about how short stints will look on their resume, this much context suffices to be said.

Where it gets weird is when you see people on r/cscareerquestions or whatever advocating for a series of short tenure stints as a "hack" to get into high pay positions quickly. The problem is that anyone that has success with this strategy is a living example of survivorship bias, and the seemingly "easy-ness" of the strategy gets a lot of mind space among young highly impressionable audiences, when in reality, if you want to be career-growth focused, you typically do need at least some long tenure stints to gain experience w/ longer term responsibilities and relationships. I.e. you don't see director-level people advocating for quick job hopping for a reason.

I also check /r/cscareerquestions from time to time. It has a strong "blind leading the blind" vibe lately, wherein inexperienced people are just echoing things back and forth to each other. A lot of the advice tends to be what people want to hear, not what actually mirrors reality.

The hiring boom over the past few years has also severely skewed the results. A lot of the junior devs who recently entered the industry know nothing other than the crazy hiring boom times of 2020 to early 2022. They preach about how easy it is to find a job, but their only real data point was a single job search experience during a very anomalous time.

I see these job hoppers coming from a mile away. The worst part is the rampant "what is absolute least, gaming min-maxing I can get away with to nab my metrics" mindset they rampantly infuse some of their co-workers with.

One way to counter them is to meticulously observe and record accomplishments of everyone and toot everyone's horn to management. This drowns out the Short-Timer Sam's key strategy of success bombing management and they either see the light and stop their shortcuts rampancy (never seen it happen, but I'm sure miracles are out there) or leave because they don't nab the promotion they're angling for by their internal deadline before they head for the next job.

Work culture exists whether you want to believe in it or not. If you don't, then you're letting the culture be dictated Lord of the Flies style. I've worked across a lot of domains and a lot of very large companies during my time working in technology and the most obvious differentiator between successful IT/dev orgs and unsuccessful ones is most often attributed to the work / dev culture. This is especially true when trying to change / influence organizations. The number one thing you have to overcome is culture. Why doesn't agile work? Why doesn't DevOps deliver like promised? Why can't the org successfully shift from a project based delivery to a product based delivery method? More often than not it's due to trying to implement changes without addressing team culture issues.

Technology is mostly easy if you can get cross organizational alignment, but you can't do that without addressing culture.

> If you don't, then you're letting the culture be dictated Lord of the Flies style.

Moreover this is implying that you think of your team as a bunch of children stuck on an island. I'd have more faith in professional adults to do their job. Hopefully, nobody is under the illusion that money comes out of the office printer.

Honestly, I'd want to hire someone who hates being an employee more than someone who doesn't. Then, I'd at least know that they're under no illusions, and smart enough to know that they'll have to work.

Almost none of the red flags have an academic or scientific basis. Almost all of it is rationality with a thousand caveats.

I grew up lower middle class - first to graduate college in my family. Dad could never hold down a job for long. It was a very pressing need for me, for a long time, and still is, to be able to keep gainful employment.

I’m at a stage in my career now where I should not worry about that - I’m skilled enough that if I put in the 3-6 months of leetcode practice I can probably land whatever job I really want. So therefore, my skill and career experience should theoretically land me “stability” and should no longer be the goal - but I resonate with folks that do share that goal. I think upbringing and seeing others not be able to hold a job, let alone a dream job, brings out some conservative sides to folks.

I don’t know your story, but most of my friends that did startups for a long while out of college were almost all from wealthy families. That just never really felt like an option for me.

It's a shame that your actual experience doesn't count for much in comparison to wasting 3-6 months of spare time on arbitrary brain teasers. Not a good place for hiring to be.

My own tech lead left his last two jobs in < 8 months. He's a staff eng now making similar cash. And before my current position the other staff/principal engineers I saw had similar tenures.

I feel like most people either don't care about their work and find meaning in other areas of life, or are invested in playing the corporate game and enjoy being in that environment. If you tell them that you don't want to be an employee at a company, they look at you like you're speaking a foreign language.

The problem is there isn't any identifiable group of people who are like this. It's not "anti-work"; I can work just as hard as or harder than anyone given the right circumstances. It's orthogonal to any specific political view. "Independent" is too broad. "Anti-establishment" is focused on external factors rather than intrinsic motivations. It would be useful to have a term where you could say "I am X" and it would immediately bring up all the right connotations.

Maybe that is true.

Maybe the degree to which I hate being an employee is just much larger than it is for most people?

The problem is with programming it's really hard to leave your job at the office. It's a deep thinking job so it comes with you to bed whether you like it or not.

Jon Blow has previously (8 years ago) left a comment elaborating how working a job robs you of your potential. I have it saved in my favorites. I read it often to remind myself the importance of going independent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789438

There's also this essay by Palladium editor in chief about quitting your job. It was posted a while ago to HN to a mostly negative reception because apparently it's too elitist. It's also one of the pieces I keep re-reading periodically.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/

That Jon Blow comment resonates with me a lot. Definitely saved for future reference.

That is correct, as reported on countless job satisfaction surveys.

I think those people are called entrepreneurs :) Seriously, I think the GP would be better suited to found a startup that to apply for corporate jobs.

> and frankly I can't understand people whose goal in life is that

Not sure I'd call it a goal in life since most people in tech are in-demand enough to take it for granted, but providing the job has good work-life balance and isn't too stressful it's the best way to work to live. Also, not everyone has the luxury of not needing stable employment

Interesting perspective, I usually hear the opposite advice.

That it's easier to find a new job that pays more rather than get a raise through your existing job.

I suppose at some point that can have diminishing returns, I imagine particularly in management positions.

On the other end of the spectrum, someone who joins a Big Tech company right out of college has a lot to gain by staying, learning how the promotion system works, and then working their way upward through the promotion ladder.

I think the job-hopping advice has lost a lot of context after being reduced to a short aphorism. The companies that compensate toward the top end of the curve are actually great places to establish long tenures and move up the comp ladder. The longer you stay, the more allies you have within the company and the more knowledge you have of how the system rewards people.

Yes, but after you have spent 3+ years in your current job.

It also helps to have the ability to put up with all kinds of bullshit - which I don't have.

One time I quit a job because the "boss" talked to me in a bad tone.

Two times I threatened indirectly to leave when someone tried to use their "authority" to talk bullshit to me.

Everytime when the project was setup with complex/confusing maze of docker/k8s scripts, I simply refused to learn their config system because I viewed it as beyond bullshit.

But my relatives who get paid a lot more than me are all just "suffering" this kind of bullshit to keep the job.

It’s impossible for everything to be 100% perfect even if you run everything, because you’ll have to deal with your own mistakes from when you lacked context or experience. “Dealing with bullshit” is part of the job, no matter how you slice it.

It could go either way for GP. I've seen people that bounced from place to place before finding a 'happy spot'...

In smaller shops it is easy to either be non-insulated from general corporate culture (which can be far better/worse than IT, often worse in smaller orgs) or just have to work with 'that guy' too much.

Large orgs with a good strategy will often try to fit a candidate to a team. Sometimes that means interviews with multiple teams. Sometimes that might mean a group interview with leaders (Yes, this leans on the leader more, so risk might go up.)

Devil's advocate; I have -some- empathy when it comes to terraform infrastructures that are so rigid you are -forced- to deploy thing 1 to an environment, then update thing 2 with some token/IAM you got back from deploying thing 1... A worst of both worlds situation I have encountered (or an analogue of) more than once.

> It’s impossible for everything to be 100% perfect even if you run everything, because you’ll have to deal with your own mistakes from when you lacked context or experience. “Dealing with bullshit” is part of the job, no matter how you slice it.

One more DA: There's bullshit on the level of (1) 'fill out a Capex/Opex Timesheet', (2)'do this task that you know you could do differently now and not have to refactor 1-6 months later, but I want it -this- way', and (3) 'hey we just finished standup and we have a meeting in 10 minutes, I said you were the SME of %ThingYouhaveSecondLeastExperienceOnComparedToTeam% and would help answer questions' or 'hey you didn't invite a BA to an engineer-only meeting. I'm going to invite them anyway and talk to you about it in a passive aggressive tone while you are outside'.

I've done all of the above. I don't mind 2 overall, my answer to 1 is a teeth-grit 'Is there a column to track the time I'm doing the timesheet', 3 is an obvious power-play or sign of toxic corporate culture.

I regret the time I didn't leave over #3. I don't regret the time I did.

I’m currently at my favorite job I’ve ever had in my career: I have autonomy, ownership, smart coworkers, great leadership, and a product I largely built and enjoy working on. But there’s still plenty of bullshit! There’s some that predates me, there’s some that is too far outside my sphere of control for me to bother with, and there’s some that I’ve created accidentally. Living with it and trying to keep the level of bullshit tolerable is an important skill in and of itself I think. Tricky to know when it’s too much and it’s time to leave, but you’ll never know if you never try to stick it out for a bit at least once.

> Yes, but after you have spent 3+ years in your current job.

Ehhhh... I've seen plenty of colleagues leave after less than that and get raises. I tend to -prefer- to stay somewhere (despite being considered an excellent interviewer at every place I've worked, I'm a terrible interviewee most of the time, perhaps because I try to ignore what I know about interviewing for the sake of fairness.)

> It also helps to have the ability to put up with all kinds of bullshit - which I don't have.

You have to be careful with this. There's some bullshit you have to grit your teeth to depending on the environment, for better or worse it can pay dividends long term. There are some places where the bullshit never ends, but there are other places where it is more a question of 'built trust' (which is often a flawed practice, but IDK what to replace it with.)

It really depends on context, which can sometime be difficult to give.

There are jobs I have grit my teeth at requests can only be politely put as "a waste of the time and talent of me and my colleagues", and most of those more importantly to my work ethos were a complete waste of the company's money.

Usually, at those times, I would go to my mentor. I'd always have a good argument. It's always easier to get someone to pay attention to, at minimum, providing some way to show your idea has merit.

Sometimes, it's showing potential ROI.

Once in a while, it's 'You trust my estimates, right? Here's my estimates.'

There are other examples as well but you get the idea; the unfortunate thing is it does take time to know how long it takes to build karma as well as how fast you burn it. I've worked places where general goodwill was based on 'good vs bad suggestions', I've also worked at places where 'one good thing = 1 submission for a review'. Obviously the latter is not healthy.

> But my relatives who get paid a lot more than me are all just "suffering" this kind of bullshit to keep the job.

For all the emotion that is in this statement, I understand it.

I once switched jobs, from working at (1) a unique shop where I had some drama around some decisions, but working on a unique system that was rare in my lang of choice, to (2) a shop where the first few months of my job was updating addresses on Crystal Reports.

Job 2 paid more, but yeah I was downright miserable there between the waste of talent as well as the level of office politics resulting in a team being blocked for two months before being -allowed- to talk to me for help (I solved the problem in 3ish hours.)

> One time I quit a job because the "boss" talked to me in a bad tone.

I only did this once... well 1.5 times (The .5 time, the boss had done far worse than talk in a bad tone to myself and others, the textbook if not stereotypical case of an emotionally abusive person) but it wasn't the sole or even major reason.

The challenge of course is that between NDAs and a general fear of reprisal, it is very difficult for a person to speak up about a truly shitty employer without risking some form of retaliation. Some of this may be influenced by the fact many shops I've worked at were small enough, even listing my time of employment would be enough to be 'sussed out'. But I feel like unless you are at a very large shop, the subconscious still sees that risk.

Then if you get past -that-, there is a good chance you are fighting signal/noise ratio, especially if the employer goes as far as soliciting employees to write positive glassdoor reviews.

I know that the worst place I worked, would actually try to bait reviewers who left bad reviews into exposing themselves by suggesting they email an address that would go to HR, likely in an attempt to threaten with clauses about public image. They never went as far as to pressure us to post on glassdoor but definitely had sent cues we should talk them up on our social media! [0]

This was also a place that (1) loved using 'non-violent communication' training as a cudgel for managers to use when an employee stepped out of line (I never dealt with it but know others did); (2) non IT employees had a 'closer to jimmy johns than real trade' training payback clause, their normal non-compete covered the true business case, (3) would time bathroom breaks of hourly employees.

And yet I haven't spoken up about them, because the fear of finding me out and being tied up in litigation is too much. Many of the people who are smart enough to see shit employers also know the ROI on speaking up isn't worth it. Those who don't, well...

------

IDK. I don't fault your overall logic and honesty overall, but as you've seen it can impair some upward mobility. I -will- say that sometimes employers don't do a good job at honesty in interviewing processes.

My first real IT job, probably part of the reason I stayed as long as did, they were -very- honest both in interview and first few weeks that that they had -problems- and did a good job of explaining some of them and being clear (and followed through) on the idea that those problems did not reflect poorly on me or other devs. [1]

It's -far- more palatable than being fed a half-truth or overly-sugared statement about the state of things. The more I know about the shitshow I'm walking into, the more quickly I can be impactful on whatever level the storm allows.

[0] - Tangent, I understand that some companies now pressure/require profile updates on certain websites. I think this is a disgusting practice unless it is limited to making sure there 'opinions do not (necessarily) represent that of my employer'

[1] - I need to restate. This level of honesty and trust was something I've only fully encountered one (1.5?) other time(2) in my career, and it's something I've missed in every job that didn't gave it. The managers both places were truly amazing. (The half-point is for a gig where honestly I trusted the development manager and he was an amazing person, but I could not trust that he could protect me from the rest of the org and it's structure. My apologies and regrets to him.)

Sounds familiar: after mild insuccess in academia I found a permanent job but quitted after 4 months. Didn't help that I was a not very well paid consultant with long commutation time. The job was easy but boring. I don't get how many people are able to endure this.

https://www.adama-platform.com/

This is going to take a few years to mature. While it matures, I'm spending next year improving my UX skills and building a WYSIWYG editor for board games.

My aspiration is to ship a single online board game next year, and then I'll open it up as a "roblox for board games"

I'm doing this solo for a variety of reasons.

The nice side effect of being a contractor is that your CV now looks like you have been in the same position for 10 years instead of a series of 2 year stints.

I have done this and always worked hard to help the team succeed. Later, when I decided to try working for a couple of large companies, I was stunned to be treated as "you work in my organization and will follow my every whim".

One example is attending endless pointless meetings waiting for the client to decide what spec they want, just because the manager wants to everyone on the team to be present (and silent). As a contractor, it becomes quite easy to say "it looks like I am not adding much to your project until the project spec gets settled. Please let me know when you are ready to implement (or have more detailed questions that you need to know to flesh out the spec) and I will be happy to help anytime". In my experience, it is quite common that they will have hashed out the requirements and be ready to start work after 12 months or so and were happy to talk then.

Can't you do this with W2 work too? "Oh, that was all private consulting work. No sorry, I'm not able to tell you who I was consulting."

the transition from independent consulting to long term employment is just as questionable as the one from job-hopping to long term employment. you'd have to be working as an employee for the same consulting company for multiple years to give the impression that you are willing to stick with the same employer for a longer period.

This is very easy to explain. Contracting is inherently a less stable way to make a living, and many contractors return to normal employment when they decide that they want the extra stability back. Perhaps they just want to reduce the stress, or maybe their home-life changed for some reason…

Up until my current employer, I couldn't hold a place more than three years. I'd get bored, my edges would fit the shape of the company, and I just couldn't move.

I did this... at least a dozen times? It's come up surprisingly little!

Whenever it did, I'd usually say the kind of trite things you'd expect from an early 20-something. "I want new opportunities to grow", whatever.

I've had more offers (and turned many away) than outright rejections.

I don't think hopping is perceived that poorly, but there's probably a rather severe grade for someone averaging say, less than a year compared to two or three.

However, this was before the pandemic and the relationship between worker/employer seems more strained now...

Why should anybody hire you to do a thing, you hate doing it?

Personally I am similar to the parent, I have a strong anti-authoritarian streak and I work hard to curb it; what helps me is trying to maintain an open dialogue with my managers and try to get on board with how they prioritise so that I'm invested in solving the same problems as they are.

Being equals in my own mind helps me curb my anti-authoritarian tendencies.

but the obvious answer is: because the alternatives are worse

That's unfortunate. Unless you're already rich, finding stable employment that pays well and reliably is an important goal to have. The opposite would be volatility, and that's not really good for much. There's something said against keeping the exact same job for 5-10 years perhaps, but securing a reliable is the only thing I care about when I'm an employee or contractor. Tech doesn't really have much virtue when you don't have that.

This is just your opinion and temperament.

I know people who are not rich, have held the same job for 10+ years, and think it's very important.

This is my ideology: a bird does not feel safety from being on a sturdy branch, but from his self belief that he can always fly to a new branch at any time.

and maybe that's always been true for you, which is an aspect of being, if not rich, certainly quite fortunate in some way. I felt that way when I was 22, but I had a naive view of the market and my own place in it. There will very likely be a time where that's not true, but if you don't believe that, then the smart move would be to buy the most expensive house you can with debt; you'll never miss me a payment.

Getting new jobs has never been easy for me, and it's getting harder every year, because of ludicrous hiring processes and not choosing to live in any arbitrary forest with flimsy branches.

The problem as well with the analogy is that you'd be stupid to intentionally choose to work for companies that can't pay you, if you need to be paid. It's more likely that you can weather this if you've already been paid, and therefore it's more wise to jump from flimsy branch to sturdy branch until you feel like the risk of the flimsy branch is tolerable.

Therefore, unless I have hundreds of thousands of dollars lined up, I won't be quitting my job before looking for a new one, and that new one will be scrutinized heavily to ensure it can hold my weight.

No it's not. You're thinking from your perspective, with your own mindset, about when you would be comfortable switching jobs.

I've switched jobs with as little as $10k saved up. I've even gone literally broke one time and had to borrow some money from relatives.

It's a mindset, not a material condition.

You could be filthy rich (> $150k in savings) and still be scared to death about being fired.

Worth doing in what sense? Not in the capitalist sense of your work being worth at least your compensation. Maybe you mean "worth it to you, subjectively", but if so I don't understand what information is in the second sentence but not the first. And if you mean it in terms of social good, maybe if you have very unusual values? It can't be a matter of technical challenge; there are plenty of hard jobs out there.

I've spent most of my career in big tech, and I've definitely been frustrated when I've had projects that I worked on canceled. That work obviously wasn't worth doing, in hindsight, except that I still got paid.

But I've also had roles where I had meaningful positive impact on customers and on the business, and I don't think my situation was particularly unusual.

Since you also hate being an employee, this could be your chance to venture on your own and make awesome technical products with great user experience, given that you posit most software suck.

Honestly I'd be willing to bet most (> 50%) readers of HN including myself fit in this description.

I do think it applies to reddit (probably ~80% of them are like that), but for HN I don't think would apply to more than 10%.

The two questions it raises for me:

1. Is this a person who has ever lived with the consequences of their decisions and code? Can they maintain what they write?

2. Is this a person worth investing training, mentorship and coaching into?

I will still interview the person, but I change my questions to find out if they've maintained systems, lived with code they've written.

To the second I ask no questions... It's just a risk. Onboarding takes time from a productive engineer, if I don't believe someone will stick around that time is wasted when paid double (for this person and the person that will replace them within a year).

That's only a few people in hundreds of people interviewed. I hired one, they left after 10 months :shrug

These people are likely not you though. There's a big fear that "I've only had one job and I'm ten months in and it's truly awful, if I quit have I destroyed my career?"... no, you're fine, just quit. Or "I've worked a few jobs for 3+ years and then had a couple less than a year, I'm trying to find the right thing for me and this isn't it, if I quit have I ended my career?"... no, you're fine, just quit.

A resume covering a decade or more of entirely short tenure things is a different beast from whatever your circumstances are likely to be. But if you are one of those people, consider the signal it sends... has this person ever lived with the consequences of their decisions (both technical and interpersonal)? How would you show this? Do you have a long-lived OSS project? A long-lived and maintained side-project. Extracurricular isn't needed to get a job, but if your resume can't communicate something then this is where that stuff helps.

1. Am I allowed to write maintainable code, or just have to push features?

2. Will the organization invest in me, coach me and allow me to grow into roles with more purpose and hopefully financial reward?

If companies treat me like a piece of meat, in stead of a human who's trying to build a career, I get out. And often it takes a while for the truth to appear. I always hope to find a place where I feel good enough to work for 5 or 10 years, but up to now no employer has treated me well enough to stick around that long.

In your first year you can hop after a year. Then you stay for 2 years at the next , 3 years at the next and so on.

Staying at a shitty job at the beginning of your career is a terrible idea. But only having short stints in the later half of your career is also a bad idea.

# 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.

I suspect that the Hiring Managers/HR in the US don't seem to be very pedantic about job-hopping in startup world if we're looking at the first 5-6 years. Europe is a lot more old-school in this sense.

1) In a large software engineering organization (1000s of employees), knowledge of internal issues becomes a much bigger bar to getting something shipped than simple chops. When you look at big product failures from companies like Microsoft/Google/etc. they're much more due to the company making bad decisions rather than individual engineers not being technically competent enough. Guiding the company to better decisions is something that you can only get really good at with time and repeated interactions with people (although time certainly doesn't mean you'll get good at it!)

2) In hiring any software engineer, the organization needs me to have a 1/10th chance of hiring a future manager, 1/50th chance of future Director, 1/1000th chance of hiring a future VP, and 1 in 25,000th chance of hiring a future CEO of the company. A job hopper is unlikely to become anything but an IC.

3) There are some scenarios where I don't need someone to develop knowledge of the internal org, in fact I need to bring in external knowledge. For example, nobody in the company has done anything but React Native and I need someone with React Native experience to help jumpstart something. Here I'd happily hire a job hopper as they will get a working prototype built faster than anyone else, and by the time they're gone the org will likely have made a decision on whether to staff up a full team around it or scrap it.

Strong disagree with this sentiment. I think you (or your company) are alone in the expectation or hope that an IC candidate would have even the remotest chance of rising to director or above.

Every engineering manager I've ever known, when they hire for an IC role they're looking for an awesome IC and that's it. Their hope is that the IC will have the chops, scope, and leadership to build awesome systems/products and grow up the technical ladder.

There's also the slightly more twisted version of this, where companies have special 'leadership' training programs and the employees on teams get 'hand picked' by their managers or the org. It tends to lead to lead to knock-on effects like managers selecting for sycophants in hiring, the program being used as an additional carrot/stick (I saw one abusive manager threaten to get someone 'knocked out' of the program I'm thinking of,) as well as generally causing a level of artificial false seniority.

But, my perspective is primarily the hardware world. Maybe in-house innovation isn't necessary with something like a pure software OS and business suite.

Conventional wisdom is that job hopping is a great way to progress but the reality is: Job hopping forces an evaluation of your skills and values on the market.

The problem with the second statement is that it only works for positions that are hiring, and that means there is an invisible ceiling when certain roles are internal promotions only.

The last 5 people to become my manager did so by being hired internally. The only time I've seen an external director hire in any of my companies was when the company was small or that person had been a director level employee at a rival company.

Either way, those CEO’s deserve to try run their businesses when filled with job hoppers. It better be a simple company that doesn’t benefit from any organisational memory. Do VC’s invest in job hoppers or do you think they might be aware of any…warning signs?

Research studies also suggest that job hopping is the way to raise your salary and job level faster than being loyal, although I think the optimal tenure is 2-3 years (which is longer than a lot of modern job hoppers).

That's the real reason. #1 is a direct consequence of this structure, #2 is a side consequence. There's no good reason you couldn't hire senior people from outside - the only reason to favor promoting from within so heavily is that they have decrypted the power factions while they were "cheaper" junior employees. #3 just sounds like an exception situation - if you were actually tasked to "staff up a full team" - you would no longer consider job-hoppers, for all the previous reasons.

Why do you think so? Is it because you project job hopping in the past into the future history of working in your company, and so IC won't have time to become CEO? Or because of something else?

I'm sorry but this is simply a laughable idea. I encourage you to check in your company how many directors+ were hired externally VS were promoted internally. I guarantee you 80% will come from outside.

I've seen a lot of issues with people staying 10-15y in the same job People get set in their ways, lack the diversity of experience that helps be creative in finding solutions, considering certain issues as insurmountable and a fact of life. In my current job I work with a few people who have been around forever pretty clearly because they are bad and failed to find something else. It might be generalizing a bit and certainly staying 15y in a job doesn't mean the person is bad, but it certainly brings some questions as well.

We don't talk a lot about that, but I see long tenures as an anti pattern.

Similar to what OP said about short tenures, you need to find out why people stayed so long. Agreed it can lead to parochial thinking. I've also known long tenure seniors that are at best no better than juniors only a couple years out of school.

I hate interviewing candidates, but my former manager told me it was the most important thing I do. Choose my future teammates. An hour is precious little time to suss out competence and character.

I'd like to add another from the perspective of the hiring manager, now that I've had a few years experience in that role.

It's been my experience that people generally produce their best work after the first year. It takes a while to get to know any business: what its strengths and weaknesses are, and it's only with that understanding that someone can identify areas to make meaningful contributions.

If someone's tenure is consistently around their one year mark, it's unlikely that they've really ever expressed their full potential in a professional setting. They leave before things get really good.

Hiring is an investment - less what the candidate can do today, but what they can contribute over a more substantial period, given the right encouragement.

I think this is why many employees are frustrated when they find out that new hires get paid substantially more than them. Which encourages jumping ship, to get a similar wage bump. I've said this before, I don't understand why wage renormalization isn't a standard practice and why it is considered controversial. When investing you don't just buy investments and then when they are working out and have good future potential buy new riskier investments for higher premiums. You should generally continue to add to what has been working. You should have a balanced profile too. You do need some risk (new hires) but you shouldn't spend all your money on new risky things when what's been working continues too. And just like you want to rebalance your profile frequently, to ensure you're not too leveraged, you too need to renormalize wages. People are frustrated because management is not in fact treating hiring like an investment.

The person jumping ship every year to get small raise is eventually going to run into the problem of not having accomplished anything worthwhile in their career. It's arguably better early on in your career to work for less but do things that are more interesting and have better learning opportunities. One might argue it's always a better choice.

As a manager I would like people to stay, and they mostly do, and I am going to try my darnedest to make sure they are compensated well for their contribution (including the fact that they are more effective by knowing the code base and the product). It is pretty tricky though with the competition constantly trying to recruit way from you and their deep pockets, ensuring people don't burn out or get bored etc. Lots of factors I can't control.

My experience matches this, but I would add that the company shares some of the blame. It often takes a full year for the rest of the team, department, or company to fully integrate the new person and tailor their assigned tasks to their individual strengths and weaknesses.

I remember struggling to contribute at a company for several months for no reason other than the people I was supposed to be working with would forget to invite me to key meetings. Teams can get very comfortable working with each other and are naturally resistant to bringing in new people. It takes time to break down those barriers.

In most of my other roles, I think I've often become a valuable contributor being able to "pull their own weight" within 1 to 3 months. On a number of occasions I think joining with a "fresh mind" who will say "you guys are doing what?! lol that's crazy, $this is so much better!" has been a real advantage, sometimes even in the first week. I'm not trying to paint myself as some sort of rock-star developer or anything, but in small teams people can get kind of stuck in a sort of an acceptance of the suckage they have, even when it's not needed. One example of this is adding a real database migration instead copying SQL queries from the company chat. Simple stuff really, but does make a meaningful difference.

I do think longer tenures are an advantage because people will have to live with their choices. I have a former co-worker who brags about what he did when he worked for us as being brilliant to this day, but we literally threw it all away because none of it actually worked well; it was complete garbage. But he never stayed long enough to have to deal with any of that.

When I joined we didn't even have a CI, and everyone was committing to master, usually with undescriptive expletive-laden commit messages.

This is a strange sentiment based on my experience.

I leave most jobs after a year because they get boring. I've never not shipped a fairly important project in the first 6 months of employment. After a year nearly every place I've been at has been struggling to find that next thing for me to do since I've finished all the projects they had in the backlog when hiring.

My experience is that at most orgs the one year mark is when coasting begins and I personally find coasting incredibly boring.

For many of us, what we learn in meaningful stretches at companies, is a kind of capital that we leverage to gain access to opportunities that take our career in the direction we want to go.

If I may speculate, perhaps you are overqualified for the jobs you describe. Or, perhaps you love creating new things but not maintaining and augmenting existing things (which is fine, but just like short stints, is a quality that many hiring managers, especially at established companies, view as a negative. You could be an amazing serial startup 0 to 1 person though).

# 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.

I'd say tenures in the 1-2 year range should be considered normal. However, I agree that less than a year feels short. But honestly, that sort of implies that the average job is worth sticking around for a year or longer. Putting it that way, even that claim seems a bit shaky.

In reality, I think good leaders and teams are pretty unusual. Most people are just good at dealing with bad ones or living in denial of them.

If I was suspecting someone wouldn’t stay say 3 years, I’d definitely not hire them at all.

That doesn't counter their theory though, since people (presumably) won't tend to stay at jobs that aren't worth staying at. Sooner or later everyone finds their way to a job worth staying at and becomes another example of survivorship bias.

The biggest factor is presumably the company itself, some are much more successful and generous as a result while others struggle more and share the pain. But also within a company, there can be a counter-effect where making some jobs better causes more crappy jobs, for example if you're constantly pushing the less fun and career-dead-ending stuff onto the new guy while the senior people with all the political sway take the fun, cutting-edge, etc new tasks.

If you never like your job I don’t think switching every 2 years helps. And if you are in it for the paycheck, 4 is usually optimal.

Personally, I found whether I’m having a good time depends on the team and the project. And usually one or the other changes periodically.

A 4% raise.

Management are idiots and will only give out small single digit percentage point raises while jumping companies will result in 20+% raises. The longer you stay with a company the further your salary falls behind.

This financial dictate means that your max tenure at a company should be 5 years--and definitely not even that long without a REALLY good reason.

Many of these same companies also have very difficult promo processes, requiring you to effectively "got to trial" and defend why you should be promoted.

This exact scenario has occurred with multiple co-workers of mine (most have now left, the rest are actively interviewing:

If, after the months of preparation for promo you "got to trial" and do so successfully, you may find a newly hired, less experienced, lower leveled co-worker with no experience with any of the internal processes or tooling makes 25% more than you.

When companies behave this way, what's the incentive to stick around?

Any "red flag" talk is just companies trying to disincentivize employees from effectively negotiating better compensation for themselves. They're trying to eliminate employee BATNAs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

Obviously many circumstances can change the equation.

So changing does nothing to address your stated problem.

Variety also tends to bring financial advantage, increased skills and exposure to new knowledge, a larger personal network in the same time, and if most (but not all) jobs are unsatisfying, variety gives you more chances to eventually find one that's the exception worth staying with.

Frequently, a vesting cliff.

For me, I would swap anyway after 2y for the below reasons but I've found that optimal for income...

Year 1:

* You're learning a lot

* You're on significantly more money and better benefits than before

* You can plausibly believe that all the cultural/structural issues you have will be solved in the next 12m

Year 3:

* None of the above. You're learning very little, you've gotten cost of living raises or a little above but not the 20% + a job change should bring, you realise now the business has no intention of dealing with it's issues. You will just have to live with them...

It is a game of perverse incentives.

There’s no platonic “considered normal” there’s employee and employer incentives and how they play out in combination.

If there’s a high probability that you are going to think my team is bad and not worth sticking around for, why would I want to hire you?

When they finally wound up our department, the person with the least tenure had over ten years.

Good managers are worth their weight in gold.

I think jobs that are good are pretty rare (my current one really stands out here). But among “good enough”, I think staying longer can be valuable depending on what you value, what you’re looking to get out of a longer tenure (and how motivated/positioned/stubborn you are about getting that), and just plain how “good enough” it is.

The 6 year job should have been 4 because my potential and existing skillsets were outgrowing the scope of the job, with no business reason for room to advance. The 3 year job I would have stayed at longer fostered tremendous professional growth for me, and erased significant comp disadvantages I’d accrued before it. The 5 year job which should have been 4 didn’t produce such tremendous growth, but did produce several surprising opportunities to grow in areas I’d never anticipated, and it further erased some comp disadvantages; it should have been a year shorter due to burnout and various incompatibilities that grew over time.

My current job is wonderfully meaningful to me and has almost all of the right balances (for me) of potential and real impact on a global scale, responsibility and agency, life balance. In short it’s the closest thing I could describe as a dream job. This I agree is rare, and I think the set of things which could make a given job fit that kind of role in someone’s life will vary wildly person to person.

But for “good enough”, the prior jobs I’ve had largely lasted as long as they did because I focused (albeit imperfectly) on only having jobs that are high on the “good enough” scale, to the extent I have that option. I optimized for wanting to stay long term, even before I realized that’s what I was doing.

I’m certainly leaving figurative money on the figurative table, and probably many other nice things I haven’t considered important. But I don’t want to work anywhere I won’t want to work when some arbitrary timer reaches zero.

If you're joining the best self-driving-car company because you want to see self-driving cars halve road deaths in the United States - you're not going to achieve that in 1-2 years :)

If good teams and good leaders are rare, you might want to re-examine your company selection process.

In my experience, it's easy to find bad jobs if you just let the winds of the industry carry you around from job to job. Bad companies always have high turnover, which means they're always hiring. They may even pay above market because that's the only way they can continue bringing people in to replace everyone who's leaving.

The good jobs are often more selective about their hiring. Many of them may not even post public listings. Going through a network is much more efficient for selecting into the good companies.

There's no good way to find good teams/leadership. Often people just follow the person that has given them the most favor in their career. It doesn't mean that the manager is a good manager or a good leader - it just means that they're going to treat a particular person favorably. This is a very important distinction.

I can count on one hand the amount of good leaders/managers that I've interacted with in SV and I've interacted with hundreds. It is a toxic place.

Can confirm. If you're young and inexperienced it's easy to fall victim to recruiters who talk a good game. If you're older and can see through these, you can at least make a choice: do I need to take a job quickly for financial or other reasons? If so, you can find a lot of offers, but don't pretend these are going to be jobs you'll love. At the very least, go ahead and ask for the above-market rate. They worst they can do is say they don't have the budget.

Ideally, you'd work a must-take position just long enough to get back on your feet while you hunt for the job you want. It will probably going to leave a short tenure position on your resume if you do that.

Finding a job in this industry has never been especially difficult. Finding a job that you'd be willing to settle into for 3+ years is hard.

Sadly this is too common. But what about proper changes of job? Going from embedded to game dev to web to HFT to Ai? Do people not do this kind of switch at all when they say “I just work 1-2 year stints”? That sounds like a pretty dreadful career to swap one crud gig for another, never really knowing a domain deeply.

while I did switch like the ones you mentioned

then I don't agree with you calling it "proper"

I'd call it: making yours life harder due to curiosity.

To some that’s probably also something that’s intellectually satisfying.

Is rational the same as “maximizing career income”?

I just feel it’s hard to give up domain knowledge in one thing (say insurance or flight scheduling or whatever) that you aggregate, to be a complete rookie in some other business.

Software skills are the easy bit. It’s the domain knowledge that takes time.

Rational employees want to feel good at their job, intellectually challenged, and appreciated for what they do. That involves financial compensation but I think it’s far from the major driver.

Perhaps there are two major categories of devs: those that have broadly applicable skills (say web development) but no really deep domain knowledge or interest. They can write crud for insurance year 1 and crud for food delivery year 2 and continue that way forever while making good salary jumps each year. To those it seems almost like a bad idea to grow too fond of the details of insurance, as it would hinder their careers.

On the other end of the spectrum you have devs that aggregate lots of domain knowledge in some narrower field. They might switch jobs every 10 years but when they do they almost have to go to a competitor in the same industry because otherwise they throw away too much domain knowledge. The only way they can capitalize is by selling that knowledge.

I'd care a lot more about the long-term effects of the code that I write and the systems that I build if I was given ample opportunity to actually engage with long-term planning. But I'm not, so I care less about what impact I have a year or two from now with each passing day.

In my career so far, it is not uncommon to see low hanging fruits like that, but then I mostly worked in banking ( which is its own little world ).

My point is, you can do a lot in 2 years depending on what you are looking for.

Two years is plenty of time to make an impact at a startup.

Companies don't hire employees to be a preschool playpen for adults. They hire them to do work.

Similarly, management that only looks for this is offering no reward for better, and deserves the attrition they'll see.

There are roles and companies where growth is both valuable and rewarded. I think it has to be an org where the technology is the product, and not a cost center (necessary, but not sufficient). I think you really have to be paying attention to know what type of org you are in. Taking this attitude up-front at any new job, you may not even see the opportunity.

A bunch of 1-2 year stints might quickly help you identify the patterns if things they work well generally abd what doesn’t.

Meanwhile a 5+ year stint will give insight into how a company maintains things and adapts and can also teach valuable lessons.

My current one was going pretty well for a year, but COVID stuff and life craziness made it less enjoyable for the next year after a re-org.

I waited another year and tried switching teams at the company and while it started rough I feel like I might find a groove that will get me a couple of years.

After that I might go look for something else.

Sometimes there is a good year followed by a bad year followed by three good years. If you leave after that first bad year you might just jump to another good year bad year cycle and in the end have less good years if you just stayed five years at each place.

I've accelerated my net worth by a rate of return of 12% compounded over the last 20 years of professional life. My resume has 10 separate entries in it which means I last on average two years.

Why do I expire after two years? Because no one in my industry gets promoted from within. No one in my industry is ever given more than a cost of living wage increase, and certainly not a 12% year over year average increase. It takes two years of watching people get hired over you with no raise to decide that you deserve more money and you go out and find it.

I believe in judging my value in monetary terms and as I increase my experience, knowledge, and value, I expect that amount to increase as well.

Now I'm a director of engineering at a massive (not faang) tech company and it feels like a longer tenure would be better - it takes time to sink in, develop connections and get high impact things done at this level. But I'm not sure I would have gotten here without all the variety of experiences that I gained in the last few +-2 year stints.

Also, do you mean your net worth or salary? Those are (sadly) very different numbers... :)

What would your 10 employers have to say?