I feel that 6 months isn't enough time to conclude much. Also, I don't see how you are able to mature your technical skillset in 6 months because a large portion of maturation in software design is reflecting back on how your deliverable performs in future.

If I ship a product this year, next year I can reflect back on how the requirements change, how I didn't anticipate a customer use case and learn from this for future design.

Delivering some code for 6 months won't get you anywhere past a code monkey in my opinion.

Its a huge red flag.

Job Hopping every six months translates to 'cant be trusted with any serious work'.

In India its more or less a given, that your resume won't even make it past the screening stage.

But if the prospective employer saw the kinds of companies I worked for and heard their reviews, they'd be silly not to try to hire me (especially in the current market). Some companies might think it is a red flag but I wouldn't want to work for such a silly companies anyway - These often don't do very well because they prioritise things like employee discipline over raw performance.

When you job hop a lot, you become very adaptable. I can start contributing high quality code after the first week. I can internalise the coding conventions and all the nuances of the code base straight away because I've seen it all and I understand the different team mindsets and dynamics really well.

If you job hop a lot you cannot build anything of substance or scale. Launching a first version of something in 6 months is great, scaling it globally and iterating 2 or 3 times is the part you are completely missing and cannot do in 6 months. This is why I think you need to spend at least a year somewhere to learn much of anything aside from writing code. Learning software design doesn't happen without hands on experience iterating on a major project.

Being adaptable and delivering a few one off features is junior engineering which senior engineers can coach through. Coding conventions differ from team to team, package to package adapting to these also doesn't mean you are a robust engineer. It means you are competent. Solid engineer are expected to adapt. All big software projects that stand the test of time have nuances and even possibly anti-patterns because the initial design missed something.

I'm not sure what you mean by "saw the kinds of companies I worked for" but if you worked at Google for 6 months, Facebook for 6 months and Amazon for 6 months it still wouldn't mean much to me. All it means is you are smart enough to get your foot in the door but not successful enough to succeed.

I disagree, most companies don't really 'grow' like you're suggesting. The odds of joining a company like AirBnB, DropBox, Facebook, etc... While in its early stages approaches 0% - There is a massive amount of luck involved. These kinds of learning opportunities are essentially impossible to come by. However, if you switch companies often and work for a range of companies at different stages of development, then there is a very good chance that you will have the opportunity to learn about all the different stages of development without putting all your bets on one horse.

99.9% of the time, the single-company mindset that you're suggesting just gets people stuck in a rut (I've seen it). If you've had a different experience then you're one of the lucky ones.

My first job out of university was at IBM. I distinctly remember thinking "this is just like being a part of the Borg" about a month in. You're connected to the hive mind through Sametime (internal IM client). Anything you need is available in w3 (intranet). External ideas or processes are assimilated (rebrand, and usually made worst through IBM-ification). Drones are constantly indoctrinated in how good IBM is and the proud history of the company.

> how good IBM is and the proud history of the company.

I bet this gem didn't make the cut: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/tripp...

hmm...you certainly burnt lots of bridges. If you did contractor work for those companies that would be fine, but a full-time hire that does this would be a serious red flag.

Many of the companies I quit told me that I am welcome back any time. Just don't leave any lose ends on your way out and you'll be fine.

You meet a lot of different people when you switch companies often. I think you build many more bridges than you burn.

Jealous after bailing after six months? Are you sure it’s not pity? How many times have you quit in a row?

I'm almost 30, the longest company I worked for was almost 2 years; it was a startup and they're doing very well now - I would have stayed even longer but I wanted to move to Europe. Other than that I never stayed longer than 6 months at a company and I'm really glad because most of these companies were stagnant or failed.

I've quit my job probably about 10 times now. Employers don't care at all how often you change jobs; they all think they're special and so you'll stick around for them... They all think that they're the next unicorn... Funny thing is that if they were actually a unicorn, I would stay.

If my employer is a visionary genius, I make money.

If my employer is a delusional fool, I make money.

6 months is a good amount of time to figure out which one it is.

Um, many employers care very much. This pattern of job hopping is a red flag at many firms.

Man, I wish that were true! I'd love to sit in one place for 2 years. I can't seem to find a job that will last more than 18 months. Some will, but the pay is stagnant and there are no promotions. You must job hop. As one anecdata point, employers all seem to know that diagonal promotions are the standard now and they don't fault you at all. If they did, well then they gave me a red flag, if anything.

It's a good point. The reasoning behind the moves matter. There's a huge difference between switching jobs because a better opportunity is available, and switching jobs frequently for lateral moves.

It would probably be more accurate to say that it's a yellow flag, requiring a bit of explanation but not necessarily a bad thing. I find the pattern of switching every 6 months for (presumably) ~10 years to be pretty extreme and difficult to explain, though. Not to mention exhausting! How many job interviews must that have taken?

> Exhausting

No kidding! Here I am complaining about 18-24 month moves and the OP was moving in 1/3rd to 1/4th of the time. Whatever uppers he's taking can't be good for you. Either that or he has the best spouse in history.

Still, honestly, it's a yellow flag. If the guy is good, 6 months may be just fine. But it's a cautious interview I'd think.

I've been at this job 2 years, and for 7 years at the job before it. 5-6 years of the previous job were great (promotions, raises, etc). The current job is stagnating; I can't stay here much longer.

18 months is a lot different than 6 months. You can’t even ramp up fully on a codebase in 6 months, arguably.

Having worked at over a dozen places in my career, I've never encountered a code base that takes longer than three months to master let alone ramp up on. This includes shitty code, overly complex code, and well written code. I'd say the challenge is staying interested and challenged after three months.

The more you change projects, the faster you are able to ramp up to new code bases. It takes me 1 or 2 week to understand the code base well enough so that I can start contributing - This is pretty standard for many contractors like me. Adapting to unfamiliar code bases is a skill on its own.

You don't need to master the whole code base in order to make high quality contributions but you need to be aware of what you don't know and focus your efforts on the parts that you understand really well while learning more about the parts that you don't understand. You can learn as you go throughout for the first 3 months.

If you're already familiar with the framework that the company is using, that's already a big step. Peer review can help as well.

Most good companies have similar coding styles and follow similar practices but they might have different requirements when it comes to testing, security, scalability, Agile/Scrum, etc...

> for many contractors like me

Ooooooh! Yeah, I should have caught that earlier. 6 months now makes a lot more sense.

You've said shitty and complex code...how about voluminous code, or old code? The main product that I work on has about 2 million lines of C, C++, and Java code in the core of the system, then about 20 plugins ranging in size from a few thousand lines to a few hundred thousand lines.

We basically hire for sections of the codebase. It's pretty common for developers to discover the existence of an area of code that they haven't had to touch before and were unaware of the existence of even years after starting to work here.

2 Million! Wow! Now that is a LOT of code. I can't imagine anyone being able to master all of that and then keep up with the changes. That would take a decade at least!

For reference, the Bible has ~30k verses in it. A verse isn't a line of code, but I'd say mastering the Bible is a good benchmark for equivalent complexity to coding. If anything the Bible is more straightforward than a 2 million line code base.

> 2 Million! Wow! Now that is a LOT of code. I can't imagine anyone being able to master all of that and then keep up with the changes. That would take a decade at least!

The people who'd I'd say mastered the core codebase were the people that wrote it. Over the last couple years, they've been laid off one by one, but most of them have been around for 15-18 years already (the prototypes were built around 1998, and I think that the current code descends from stuff written in 1999). I've been around it for about 8 years now, in total. I wrote most of the current build system, a lot of the packaging code, the initial version of two or three of the plugins, and individual features in a few of the others.

The Bible has a distinctly different kind of complexity, though. Social complexity, rather than technical. A line of code has an unambiguous meaning, with other lines of code, the OS, and the underlying hardware providing an unambiguous context. A verse of scripture can have multiple simultaneous meanings, and the context is provided both by surrounding text and by the millennia-old cultures that the verses were written in. I'm not sure how I'd make the comparison.

Why have everyone know all of 2M lines of code? Programming is about abstraction, knowing what a subsystem does, what it's responsible for should be adequate most of the time until you need to fix something inside it.

We aren't doctors, we just need the skills to figure things out and fix them quickly.

The system's more broad than deep, mostly. Lots of functionality covered, but for the most part, the abstractions aren't super-deep.

My point was that someone can ramp up quickly on a portion of the system and have a vague idea of other parts of it, but "mastering" it covers too much code to do it in a reasonable time. Each plugin introduces special cases for the data flow, and the plumbing for that ends up running through the whole system.

If you find yourself unhappy at every company you work for after 6 months the problem might not be with the companies you work for.

Your coworkers probably aren't jealous of your inability to stay at a job for more than 6 months.

I'm a little over 30, and the shortest I've stayed somewhere is a little over two years (and counting...)

I can't imagine wanting to leave just 6 months after starting somewhere.

I am an MD graduate and from studies in top notch databases I am waiting for a systemic review to show that my fears are true. Healthcare staff from the president to the hard working orderly, they are doing nothing for nosocomial or hospital associated infections. The ER becomes the reason for an admission. An athlete with a concussion does not need to be left lucid because of the diverse nurses are on smoke break 12. Then by force the medical student learned it from the class before. Do the minimal because you are not responsible as a pupil. The boards book after all will be the reason for the coming plastics beach life. Nobody has time to check hygiene or naps. More? The ICU. They changed the waiting room for rich with no idea about fake double blind studies. Guarantee in intensive care, bugs resistant to every antibiotic. I want to fix a block at least.

You may've posted this on the wrong thread.

It’s hard to tell the difference between your narrative and the narrative that you can only be hired at failing companies because they can’t afford someone who will stick around.

I don't care. I enjoy being able to express my opinions and I only want to work for companies who support that.

While I don't have your approach to my career, I do share this with you. :)

respect.