This is a good point. Most people singing the praises of job hopping are early (<10 years) into their careers. That's when you get the big jumps in comp when you hop. My first job hop netted me +50%. The next one, about +20%. The next one, maybe 5%? I don't know, it wasn't remarkable. Now that I'm 20 years into my career, changing jobs doesn't really increase comp at all (last change was probably negative when you considered the difference in equity). You hit the comp plateau, after which, changing jobs really doesn't get you anywhere unless you can get a higher "level" (senior eng -> staff eng or manager, staff eng -> principle eng, principle eng -> executive) which is not always easy.
The youngsters among us will eventually understand, after you've reached that plateau and your next job is going to be +1% at best, all the work it takes to reskill, grind leetcode, interview prep, interview, negotiate, move your family, change your mailing address, etc. kind of stops being worth it.
That might be the biggest luxury of being in this field at least for the time being. You don't need to constantly looking for a different job that pays a little more to not live hand to mouth, nor do you need to climb the corporate ladder or move to a specific city/country to be able to have a good quality middle class life.
We consider it unacceptable if all the projects a candidate wants to talk about "began before I was hired, and shipped after I left." And that's what you get if you are an aggressive job-hopper your entire career, not just at the beginning.
I am never against someone wanting to negotiate the compensation they deserve for the skills they have developed. And certainly, for many skills, job hopping is the strategy for maximizing your pay for the skills you are able to learn and refine in 1-2 years per job.
But if you don't develop the skill of taking a major multi-year project from inception to completion, there is a skill you don't have that we will not pay for by hiring you at the top two levels of our org.
I'm not sure what company you're at but there is certainly not a multi-year project in any I've worked at. There are long term _product_ roadmaps but in order to stay agile you never commit to something as big as a multi-year project. There are only individual features that get committed to. Even in core infra (heavily technical) where needs and solutions are known committed work goes out a year tops.
Absolutely you want people who delivered things from start to finish but I've never heard of those things taking multiple years. If it takes 2-3 years for your product to go to market it's a failure, regardless of whether it's an external or internal product.
Out of curiosity, what product does your company make? What kind of moat do they have if anything you do can be replicated in under a year by a competitor?
If a roadmap goes out 3-5 years and a candidate only executes on one or two of those years, the candidate hasn't gained experience with which parts of a roadmap stay committed and which ones change in response to new information/priorities.
Most of this does not apply to a hot startup where the founders are still coding every day, but those aren't the only senior engineering opportunities.
My meta-experience is that the kinds of things I'm talking about tend to be most highly prized by companies that have been around longer than a startup, and now have problems to solve technically and organizationally that can most effectively be solved by people who have stayed in one company longer than one-two years.
Such companies aren't usually as exciting as pre-IPO startups, so absolutely no side-eye from me if anyone reading this is thinking "You can take that job and shove it, I'm busy inventing the future on a two-pizza team in a six-pizza startup."
1. Experience with the consequences of their choices. Ok, you were able to get a job at company X, get up to speed, and lead a major cross-team or cross-group initiative within two years. What happened after that? Did it create the desired outcomes? Why? Why not? Were there unanticipated consequences? What part did you play in dealing with those?
2. Experience with change. Managers--even entire management orgs--change. Were you around long enough to live through one such change? Or did you jump ship without acquiring any experience or scars from the change? Strategies change, e.g. Pivoting from B2C to B2B, or weaning a company off a dependence on sales-led growth. Do you have experience with not just the technological consequences, but the organizational consequences? Do you have the skill of creating an oasis of calm within the chaos?
Consider someone who works as a team lead at a startup for two years, it goes IPO, they cash out. Do they stay, learn about working in a bigger company and become the kind of person I'm describing above?
Yes, if that interests them. But that isn't the only road. They could also go join another startup. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck and skill, they could keep honing their skills as a leader of teams in a fast-paced early-stage environment, without ever becoming the kind of person a 500-person engineering group is trying to hire as a Principal Engineer.
Nothing wrong with that, it's the engineering equivalent of a serial entrepreneur. Some founders want to run their company for their entire career, like Ken Olsen, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Others are happy to sell out and start all over again.
Do what makes you happy. I'm just explaining what one company is looking for at a senior level.
Jumping around every 1-2 years is fine if you're junior or mid. After that you're suspect. We had a guy who left after 1.5 years. It was sudden and disruptive, and the guy burned bridges. We were not surprised since his past jobs were like that (short stints, and anger by the end of the last one). However, now, everyone we interview who's senior, we look at a different light with regards to job hopping.
Lesson learned with regards to that. Beware of senior engineers who job hop.
I think this is a bit too much of a generalization. I would caveat this with "understand what you're hiring for".
In some cases, you need a specialist to come in and laser-focus on a problem, and then maybe someone who won't be with you for long, but will tackle those problems, is just fine - and even what you really want: no seat-warming, just get it done and get out.
But if you're hiring someone to lead a long-lived team working on big projects, then your point stands.
I go through a lot of resumes, but hardcore job hopper resumes are still very rare. Numerically, they'd have to be overrepresented in the applicant pool due to changing jobs 2-5X more frequently than everyone else.
It's not a big deal if someone has a couple short jobs on their resume or even a series of short-term engagements. But what may not be obvious until you've done a lot of hiring is that it's really hard to tell the difference between someone who changes jobs every 12 months for a pay increase compared to someone who changes jobs every 12 months because they get PIPed and managed out of every company they work for. Some people are really good at interviewing, but will show up at your company and proceed to ride your performance management track until they're pushed out, at which case they hop into the next company and move on.
So at minimum, job hoppers get much more intensive interviews and reference checks. But more realistically I just give priority to candidates who have track records of accomplishing bigger things over longer periods of time at companies.
On top of that, most of our most productive engineers stayed over 4 years.
Unless you’re a senior or lead, it’s unlikely that you have had the opportunity to gain enough deep exposure to many technologies and problems in a very short tenure at a company.
Also I don't think seniors and leads with short stints are to be trusted (from recent experience with such people).
Staying after that in a lot of these cases mean a lack of interesting projects, and also end up with stagnation. My experience may be a bit affected by freelancing though :)
A few short engagements are no big deal, but serial job hoppers are a warning flag for deeper investigation.
I won't overlook a resume for having a job hopper signature, but we will be going very deep into their accomplishments at these companies. It's often hard to ramp up at a company and deliver something significant from start to finish and production follow-up in 12 months.
Most of the job hoppers I interview end up citing projects that they contributed to, but can't really pin down much significant that was really their own contribution. It's not impossible, but it's far more common to find significant contributions in 2-4 year engineers.
People who haven't worked on any significant projects start - to - finish, and have a demonstrable trial of being a drifter aren't fit for senior positions by very definition.
Personally I tend to think drifters and coasters are basically the same things.
No serious shop or hiring manager I know would touch these people with a 10 foot pole.
>>For me a questionable resume is someone who spent the past 20 years at Accenture or something.
Somebody who spent 20 years at a firm, but are involved in new projects every few years make the perfect hires. The top performing talent in Google, Amazon, Boeing or any where for that matter are these kind of people.
HMs in small companies, maybe, in big companies , they dont care, they are paid to bring talent in, they don't get penalized if an employee quits after a year.
> This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build ....
I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business , you have an obligation to yourself(or your family, etc...) not to your employer, most smart people hiring understand that you switch jobs seeking a higher TC, in the same way businesses change course/pivot seeking higher profits. The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion, lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered, so you would have to wait until your manager (or next level pos) retires or leave. Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
> It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
"Anything big" like what?
Hiring managers care because it's a big hit to your deliverables every time someone leaves and you have hire someone else, bring them up to speed, and try to get them back up to the same level of knowledge as the person who left.
If you have a team of 6 and everyone leaves every 12 months, that means you're hiring and re-training a new person every other month. And every other month, 17% of your team's accumulated knowledge/experience walks out the door. And every year, you're basically starting over with a new team.
It sucks, and that's why hiring managers give preference to people who aren't serial job hoppers.
It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
> It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
Which companies are doing this?
The way companies keep employees around is with good RSU vesting schedules, and end of the year bonuses, etc... I understand that a team with people leaving all the time, is bad for business , that's why companies (that care) have incentives in place to avoid that. But judging a person for wanting a better pay/treatment/wlb is ridiculous, I can see your point from the business owner perspective.
You mean like Amazon with it's weird vesting schedule? Those companies also struggle to attract talent, especially combined with obscure PIPs which can push employees out before a single RSU has vested. Those companies are not going to do well in this hiring market.
It should be easy to fire bad employees, and on the flip side, it should be easy to fire bad employers too.
In also know that there is a point (basically staff/principal) where we are very reluctant to make outside hires who haven’t been at that level at another big tech company for a while. We’ll almost never up level someone at hire time. You have to have demonstrated impact over time and that is hard to do without 2.5+ years at the company (although I’m getting the sense that once you break that threshold, moving around more frequently can help again.)
> The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion
These statements are FAR from universally true. My TC has more than doubled in the last 5 years without a job hop. In the same time period, many of my peers have hopped to facebook et al and increased their TC comparably. There is no one true way.
There is no one true way, yes, but one gives the employee more control over their destiny.
Recruiters might be paid to bring people in, but HMs are the ones whose teams these hires typically work for, so being able to do productive things with them is more important than just bringing people in. The cost of retraining, losing institutional knowledge etc, and just the time it takes to bring in a new person are all costs that take away from the actual work of building the product.
You're confusing recruiters for line managers. HM == Hiring Manager == the person who's trying to build a team to accomplish a project, and at large companies most likely a multi-year roadmap.
They absolutely care about people staying a long time - it is expensive to train people on the internals of each company. At a FAANG++ company, you get your first code checked in in your first week, but it takes a YEAR to be truly productive where you are fully autonomous, and have paid off the initial ramp-up period.
> I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business
According to you. Not everyone's focus is 100% financial-based. Do I want to maximize my earning potential? Of course. But work is also 1/3 of my life. Another 1/3 is sleep. They money is for the last 3rd. So is my entire focus on 1/3 of my life to make the other waking 3rd to be as lucrative as possible? I think that's one way to approach it, but I think that's extremely short-sighted and unfulfilling.
I want my work to be meaningful, challenging, interesting, and impactful. At this point in my career I can control all this by finding workplaces, coworkers, and projects that match my skillset and my impact, and I can realize this. This means committing to multi-year plans to achieve something significant. (In the olden days we would have called this a "legacy", and I suppose that's still appropriate to some degree, though I don't expect to get a plaque on a bridge for it).
I think a lot of people are in the same boat as me. It's also part of the hacker and startup ethos - to make an actual dent in the universe.
Your attitude is very cynical, and while I agree with you that you don't owe anything to the capitalist system that is cynical about using you, that doesn't mean seeking money is the only way.
> lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered
Absolutely not true. All the FAANG++ companies do promotions based on accomplishments and achievements, not a quota of budget or availability of folks at the next level.
> Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
Not the case. These managers exist, but they're not the majority. Most people who go into management genuinely care about people, and are interested in developing them. They'd like to reward loyalty. Unfortunately the aforementioned capitalist system does not permit this, but on an individual level managers are human beings with usually more empathy than IC's (out of necessity).
> "Anything big" like what?
A major software project that takes a team of people several years to accomplish.
I work at one of the FAANGs, and have found this to be 100% untrue. I was fully productive within a week, because I was already an SME in what the team was doing. Likewise, everyone hired on the same team have also been immediately productive. Perhaps it's years of consulting experience (where immediate productivity is expected in hours, regardless of environment), but that is not an uncommon path.
You absolutely do not owe companies loyalty. The same will not be displayed to you when "tough times" hit those companies. Trying to divert from this truism with "startup ethos" or similar such woo is not useful to the majority of people.
I disputed OP's point that Hiring Managers don't care about loyalty, and care if you leave after a year.
Not in my experience. Most engineers spend 1-2 years, then leave.
> move up the in-company career ladder.
That's a hard ladder to climb from the inside. Politics lead to entrenchment.
> accomplish anything big
A great deal of work is plumbing and KTLO. What do the folks working on these things get? They're not great promo or resume fodder for internal mobility.
Which, unsurprisingly, also happens to (usually) be the vesting period for their stocks/options they agreed to receive when starting there.
And we're not talking a measly $30k bump, but more like $100k. It's far more advantageous to move on than to work toward an internal promotion.
As someone in charge of hiring at my current company, having brought on 17 devs over the past year, the ones we really worry about have a bunch of 6-9 month engagements. But every 1.5 years or so, with some lesser here or there... no problem at all. More likely than not they're great at what they do.
In reality, most engineers aren't bouncing around from company to company every year trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their compensation. The strategy works well for a few iterations in early careers, but eventually it starts becoming counter-productive.
If you have 10 jobs in 10 years on your resume, every hiring manager who sees it will instantly recognize that you're a job hopper who isn't likely to stay longer than a year. It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
Most people I know who end up at FAANG level companies are interested in sticking around for at least 3-4 years, if not longer. This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build an actual reputation within the company, and move up the in-company career ladder. Jumping to other companies for a $10-50K immediate bonus could be shooting yourself in the foot relative to sticking around long enough to get a promotion and retention awards.