This is a self inflicted problem across all companies. As long as companies are not willing to pay the market salary, people will move elsewhere.
> - poor formatting. If they don’t care enough to make their resume look clean and neat, why would I expect them to care enough to be thorough in other jobs. I don’t care too much about the aesthetic style of the resume as long as it is clear and consistent.
As neat and tidy as the resume is, certain employers are looking for buzzwords. So if those buzzwords aren't on the resume, it gets to meet the circular file.
Back when I was on the short term merry-go-round it was because companies hiring were only offering 3 month contracts. After a few of these in a row places offering full time won't look at you and even interviews for 3 month contracts ask "so why so many short term contracts?".
I was well into this career trap before lucking out on one of the 3 month contract that forgot to stop paying me. Eventually they "fixed the glitch" but it still got me back on track career wise.
Why do you say this? Surely underpaying people is one way to make them leave but not the only reason. Some people think “the grass is always greener” elsewhere. Others don’t last long because they are not easy to work with. Others are not great employees and so are encouraged to move along sooner rather than later. Lots of possible reasons. Most do not signal the type of person I want to hire.
I say it because I keep seeing articles like this one [1] all the time: "Workers who stay with a company longer than two years are said to get paid 50% less."
And that matches my personal experience. After spending 14 years at a company giving me 3 percent raises year after year, I've switched jobs frequently, but usually with large pay raises with every job. 8 years out and 4 jobs later now I'm making double the salary I was at the long term job I held.
> Some people think “the grass is always greener” elsewhere. Others don’t last long because they are not easy to work with. Others are not great employees and so are encouraged to move along sooner rather than later. Lots of possible reasons. Most do not signal the type of person I want to hire.
Sure, much of what you say is true. I think it may have been valid maybe 20 years ago.
Lately, though, I think people want to stay relevant in a field with so much churn it makes your head spin. So they see the leading edge of where tech is going, and want to get there first. And if a company has tagged someone as the "Java engineer", it can be hard for that person if they want to switch to ruby on rails, or they want to expand into machine learning but their company doesn't need the skill (or they already have experts doing that work.)
As for me, I've learned to let a technology get established before jumping into it, but even at that rate, the tech I learned 5 years ago, is not relevant today. In college, what I learned lasted maybe 15 years. (Yeah, I'm old).
So yeah, my resume would surely hit your circular file. But I'm in good company I suppose.
The mean job length at google is only 1.1 years even though 84% of people are highly satisfied. [2] Compare this with Eastman Kodak where the median is 20 years, and only 45% of the employees are highly satisfied.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3055035/you-should-plan-on-switc...
[2] https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full...
Out of curiousity, in what region do you live?
I'm a consultant these days, so yeah 1.1 years is actually a long time.
Staying in these companies would hurt me a lot more in the long term. It's hard to convince the next employer that you're worth hiring when you're out of touch with modern development practices and your relevant experience is limited to personal projects you did after 8h of wading through mountains of spaghetti code.
Last 6 months I have been working on a system which uses SQL stored procedures for everything (including business logic and reinventing parsing of XML and JSON - poorly). Every single time I mention this solution the interviewers raise their eyebrows. Not a single interviewer has expressed any positive feelings about the solution.
Am I really expected to stick along working on such an atrocity just so I could put >1 years of a resume?
Asking because I've worked for several startups and tech management has changed several times in a year for both of them, they loose and gain huge streams of revenue rapidly, have worked burnout hours at times at all of them.
All factors that have made me seriously question my employment there at times but the knowledge I'm gaining makes it to good to give up for now.
Suggests median tenures at small tech companies can be as low as 1.5years.
For me - it depends on the stage of career a candidate is at.
If you're not job hopping every 2-3 years in the early stages of your career (say, first 8-10 years out of school), you're without doubt losing out monetarily (which may indicate a lack of ambition).
On the other hand, if you've not managed to hold down a job for over two years (or any job for over 18 months), you ring bells in my head of maybe just having managed to not get let go for lack of performance and bailing out before it makes it to your record.
Those are both offset of some of your roles are listed as contracts (but rest assured I'll be getting your references or LinkedIn or network-sourced ex-colleagues checked to make sure they don't describe them as permanent full time roles).
An outlier versus a pattern is where I see a bad situation versus a concern for hire.
Personally, spending <18 months in a company or on a team doesn't yield enough time to accomplish much. It also doesn't afford you ability to learn from your mistakes and mature.
This is a great way of explaining why I think lots is short stints reflect poorly.
If someone has a number of longer stints, then a short one here or there is no big deal. But I want their resume to tell a story.
Don’t be afraid of explaining circumstances in a cover letter.
- lists of buzzwords without clear descriptions of what they actually did. I don’t care about “fashionable” terms. I wanted heard about concrete things they’ve done.
- poor formatting. If they don’t care enough to make their resume look clean and neat, why would I expect them to care enough to be thorough in other jobs. I don’t care too much about the aesthetic style of the resume as long as it is clear and consistent.