The problem with this take is that over time, those incremental improvements become harder to find for someone who has established a pattern of job hopping.
It’s not a big deal when you’re 24 years old and you’re not really owning major initiatives and long-term projects. It becomes a big problem when you’re at 15 YOE and your resume has ten different companies where you never stayed long enough to even see the long-term consequences of your decisions.
I’ve seen a lot of pattern job hopper candidates who clearly have “One year of experience repeated 10 times” who can’t really compete with someone who has fewer jobs but stuck around long enough at each company to make a bigger impact.
If job hopping continues, it catches up to you later in a career.
You can have one year of experience 10 times by working 10 years in a single company and not self-actualising. One could argue an employee can stay too long at a job for the comfort and lack of ambition, coasting.
Even at the executive level, staying long does not guarantee owning to one‘s mistakes, since there are many ways to deflect blame and many places where top of the org has little accountability.
I am saying they are independent concepts. Basically, if you stay for one year it is not possible to learn the effects of longer projects (very valid point you mention). _But_, staying 10 years does not mean necessarily that you did learn from 2-3 years cycles. It will be _possible_. It could mean you are very good at deflecting, coasting, or playing golf with the right people, among many other possibilities.
Unrelated: today is on the news that Unilever's CEO will be resigning after 3 years, which also seems short to me.
"Some new director showed up, reorged us, and left" is a failure mode for organizations. It causes huge problems and needs to be avoided.
Wait til you hear about Australian Prime Ministers
This is not guaranteed. You will limit yourself out of some jobs, but that's true with any career decision you make. Someone somewhere isn't going to like what you did and not give you a job because of their views. But as long as the pool of jobs is large enough, you can find something. If the pool of jobs shrinks so dramatically that this isn't supported, you might survive but you'll end up having a lower salary for it long-term.
These arguments seem to be against full time position job hoppers, but you may not be asking if they were doing contracts or purposeful short-term engagements. And perhaps a contractor is looking to go full-time. But before getting the full story, you've already made your decision.
There is not a optimal path which grants you maximized salary and maximized opportunities. The industry supports multiple career archetypes right now. Don't cast doom and gloom to make people feel anxious that they chose the wrong path when there are viable alternatives.
Now, it's certainly possible that another 3-5 years and another 2-3 companies would negatively impact my ability to land interviews, but I haven't seen the slightest impact yet.
Might be some correlation.
There is an old saying: once is luck, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. A similar argument applies to people who have past employments of unusually short tenure. Anyone can have a miss and want to move on. Some people could be really unlucky and have it happen twice. If someone gets five years into their career and still hasn't held down any job for more than a year then something is up.
Even if they're the most unlucky employee in history they still won't have the practical experience to match their YOE. They're probably the perfect example of the meme about having five years of experience or one year of experience five times. So hiring that person into a senior role isn't looking like a smart move in any case.
1 year: Student software dev job working for the university I attended while in school. Couldn't continue it even if I wanted to.
1 year and 3 months: Game producer for a small game publisher that got some bad luck (and a few bad decisions in hindsight) with a few game releases, and the parent company shut it down.
1 year and 1 month: Lead developer at a tiny app development startup where after a while it became clear the board members funding the company didn't know anything about apps and the executive producer didn't know anything about proper marketing or making sure the product made had an audience (but that became clear a little too late to do anything about it). The apps we made were perfectly good quality, but didn't find an audience. Board members eventually pulled the plug after the fourth app release.
1 year and 2 months: worked as a developer (and project manager/dev on one game) for a company that was doing incredibly well when I joined, but had a string of struggles for the following year after. I was part of a major layoff after a big release when the client decided to stop most of the funding. I could tell things weren't going well with the main client, but it kept looking like maybe we were a month or two out from landing a sweet development contract for various large opportunities to work on a big game for a publisher (none of which ended up panning out), so I stuck around just in case. They never did.
0 years and 9 months: worked as a contractor for a consulting company at a small marketing department at an insurance company, mainly just me and a lead developer. One day the lead developer got fed up with his ideas not being used and walked out and started his own company shortly after. The marketing head at that point decided to do something else with the project and didn't need me anymore so my contract suddenly ended.
Next job: 6 years. Joined the company and a few months later they announced getting bought by a major corporation. The merger started and everything started getting shittier, a couple major layoffs happened, people kept leaving on top of that, but I decided to stay, in part, because "I have so many short stints on my resume, I need something longer, I should stay at least 2-3 years!" At 3 years, the large corporation we merged with posted nothing but losses every quarter for 2 years, raises were pretty much nonexistent, the bonus I was hired with got taken away during the merger, and our department had about a third the employees it had when I started...but then the pandemic happened, and they had already closed down our office space, so I was already fully remote, didn't have to deal with any uncertainty about being forced back into the office, so I stayed even longer than I should have.
So I've had short stints 5 times in a row, always being laid off for nothing that had to do with my performance or capabilities, and that led to me staying way too long at a shitty job to make up for it.
A long stint that almost wasn't, btw, as during one of those major layoffs after the first year, as I found out I was on one of the big layoff lists, until a few people quit before it happened and my boss could lay off less people as a result.
Been at my current job for a year, and so far it's been doing well and they've had 5 straight years of rapid growth, but we'll see. I sometimes joke that I'm the Ted McGinley[1] of software companies.
If I'm looking at your resume I see: 2 layoffs (not your fault), 2 temporary contracts. If you message that in your resume the contracts are a yellow flag (did they not get full time employment because they lacked chops?) but nothing here is telling me you're a runner. I'd happily hire someone with this job history if they interviewed well.
I'd be much more adverse to hiring you if you had been an employee at each of these places and stayed as long as you had.
How would you figure out just by looking at a resumé that the 1 year job experience listed is a layoff?
People can elect not to go full time because they don't feel it's the right fit or it's a bad situation.
But they don't get any credit for sticking out a bad contract apparently
I've seen this idea before but it seems like a very odd prejudice to me. Is it a particularly US-centric thing or something? Here in the UK a lot of good people in tech do independent work at some stage in their careers. Salaries for permanent employees tend to hit a ceiling. Contractors and freelancers can potentially price based on value and charge significantly more if they're worth it.
I would not view being a contractor in the way you describe as a yellow flag, but that's not OP's situation. OP looks like they were relatively inexperienced, had never held a job for 2 years. Even if OP didn't mention they were trying to convert to FTE in these roles and it didn't happen, the descriptions of them tell me that's probably what's happening.
The software dev job before that I had for 3 years. I just don't include it on my resume anymore, for length/ageism reasons (also it was VBA/original ASP, which I never want to touch again).
I'm not sure where you got two temporary contracts, I've only ever had one non-FTE job, and that was the 9 month one, and even then I was an employee for TEKsystems. They would have happily put me somewhere else (hell, they still reach out to me a couple times a year), but I really didn't enjoy my experience, so I didn't continue with them (I was actively interviewing for other jobs near the end of it, the contract ending was a surprise but also a relief). The benefits were the worst I ever had at any company before or since (poor medical insurance, zero PTO/paid holidays or any other benefits), and I got a 25% raise at my next company as a FTE, so it's not because I got better pay than elsewhere.
And if we go before that, I had a fast food job, a retail job, a warehouse job, a stocking job, a data entry job (all of these were at least a year, up to 2) hell, I even helped my dad with construction and apartment maintenance when I was as young as 14. But they're not software-related and basically ancient history at this point, so they haven't been on my resume for about fifteen years now.
"You can absolutely explain those stints, and a reasonable interviewer won’t penalize you, but my lived experience is that landing a senior role requires passing multiple somewhat arbitrary process gates"
So .. someone with less than 5 years on the workforce?
Look, I'm 60+ (ish) and still actively managing projects in code, engineering, mining, signal processing+interp - from my PoV anyone with less than five years on the workforce is still a child.
When I look for people to land roles that shepard a five+ year project through I'm looking for people with at least 8-10 years employed already with at least one two year run and a stated intent to "settle" into a position - ie maybe kids, perhaps a new house, maybe family in the area, etc.
Exposure to multiple bad projects is fine, especially if they can articulate how things went bad and how things might have been better managed to avoid that (ie big picture awareness).
You do have a point, however you might be setting the bar a little low .. less than five years in is barely a toe in the paddling pool of life.
To get what the op is looking for, you put the 10 year req, then structure comp ballooning towards the end of the vest and it will get you exactly those people op wants.
You don’t say, “must be settling with a family”. You offer something that is only enticing if you’re going to stay 5 years.
If what you're saying is "that's what I'm looking for but I wouldn't say it..."
I dunno, that seems like exactly the sort of thing people would complain about.
This seems odd to say the least.
As I stated, for longer termed positions that require some stability matching the duration of a capital build project we look for people that have had exposure to a variety of past experiences and some demonstrated ability to stick something out coupled with some indication they making long term plans.
Which bit of that goes agin your HR policy?
Perhaps you might like to re-read what was written, slowly and very carefully.
Some people struggle with parsing meaning from English and jump to rash interpretation.
FWIW your approach is the most sound one I read on this thread and how most successful companies probably do it. I do feel it is slightly discriminatory though against those with un ordinary paths
Some positions require a degree of intelligence, there are many things that can demonstrate levels and types of intelligence.
Some positions demand a certain amount of physical endurance, there are many things that can indicate physical ability.
Some positions demand a level of stability and commitment to time scale, there are many different factors that can indicate that.
Some comments require a certain ability to read qualifiers and nuance in the English language, there are many that breeze right past such things and imagine things unwritten.
None are in any way indicators of professional capabilities.
All this seems to do is make it harder for candidates to know if they're truly qualified, causing them to apply to more things, many of which they're not qualified for, wasting everyone's time.
if you're looking for someone (any age, any gender, any etc.) for a long term position who will stick through the good, the bad, and the ugly that might occur during a five to ten year time frame
then you're looking for any signs and indications that people have some past experience of sticking through things, are willing to stick through things in the future, and have an understanding of how things can go sour and what steps can be taken to mediate.
There are many indications of the ability to make a long term commitment and survive a rocky path, not all of them traditional and conventional, with the least common factor being some time at the pump.
If you want people to "stick through...the bad and the ugly" compensate them accordingly and perhaps most importantly make sure their salary keeps pace with the market as a whole instead of the typical 2-3% raises most people see every year. But even that won't keep the best people, because the best people don't have to tolerate assholes at their job, they can just go get a better one.
Even then it is daddy that made them CEO and they are CEO of tidying their bedroom.
Edit: seem I have triggered some 24 year old C suite excutives
Our time on Earth is limited, and five years is a non-trivial percentage of our working life. If you're a highly compensated engineer and you retire on the earlier side of normal for that cohort, you've got maybe 30-35 years.
They... didn't? A developer who has a typical graduate academic career, went straight into the software industry, and then had 5 jobs for less than 9 months each is probably in their mid-20s. In terms of technical skills and professional maturity anyone like that probably is still almost a child in terms of their career and the series of very short tenures definitely makes that more likely.
Our time on Earth is limited, and five years is a non-trivial percentage of our working life.
That's true. But as you point out yourself it's still only a relatively small part of our likely working life unless we luck out and reach FIRE status with a big exit or something. You can pick up some useful skills and develop an effective professional mindset in five years. But you'll do the same again in the next five and then again in the five after that.
Done. It's like people who stay at one job for year never practice for interviews or something.
This goes both ways though - employees want to see commitment too - not layoffs at the first sign of trouble (or, often, no trouble at all, but just opportunity to improve short-term numbers by outsourcing to cheaper locations). Want people to stay for a long time with your company? Perhaps you should advertise a policy where you don't lay off staff even if company is in the red.
Notably, government agencies don't do layoffs, and people working there are much more loyal than people in the private sector, even though government pays less.
In all seriousness though this perspective is a double standard. Hiring managers can’t typically setup these policies, and when you leave after a short time they get screwed.
It seems that in a hot market hiring managers are each other’s enemy- they’re competing for labor, after all. They are providing incentives to get your workers to jump. So maybe the framing shouldn’t be employers vs. workers.
Make no mistake that we work to get paid.
But the motivation for working does have a tangible impact on the work product. This is why companies don’t want to hire people who job hop a lot. It’s not to save a buck. If I wanted to save a buck I would outsource.
Probably because of your attitude towards it and throwing away people that follow the industry average churn rate.
Reminds me of someone who complains about how hard it is to find a date but has criteria tolerances for partners that would make aerospace engineer blush.
Regular employees don't have the possibility to change companies from the inside, leaving is the only option.
Companies look for red flags and pass on employees all the time.
Relatively, it's more expensive for employees to take a job then leave.
It's very easy to fall into a self-pity or entitlement trap that can work against you. Just as bad employers sabotage themselves by not caring about employees, individuals can sabotage themselves by not recognize what they are being paid for.
If someone says they're a senior and they're hired into a senior position but then it turns out that they're not really capable of doing the job of a senior that isn't the company's fault. Those are the people who companies are filtering out when they reject resumes with lots of short jobs.
The false negatives of people who left roles because the companies were bad are unfortunate but probably a lot less common.
There are certainly people on the left side of the curve who just can't operate at a senior level. Nothing wrong with that, most projects need a solid mid-level or two who can chug through well-scoped tickets. They might have a lot of short stints on their resume.
But on the right side of the curve are the really great engineers who recognize a situation as bad pretty quickly, and are able to easily get another role.
You can't the difference between these two based on the resume, which is why I try to talk to all of them if I can.
There are endless shitty places to work. You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly.
Hiring managers who choose to judge a person in this fashion, solely based on their resumé and how long a person put up with a mediocre or poor work environment in the past, have nothing of real value to offer and don't deserve the good employees. They don't take good care of them.