I'm sorry but if your resume shows you've never spent more than 12 months in a job over the past X years then I pretty much drop it.
I don't really care why your career has played like that.
At best, you are a an awesome employee who won't stay with them more than your "frequency period".
At worst, you get discovered and fired within your frequency period.
Especially true for senior roles. Team lead for 5 months? Drop the resume.
Not always true, but in general terms if you are a great employee then you tend to hang around.
I know these are generalisations but when I am sitting there reading 300 resumes in a row and trying to work out who is going to get through an employers gruelling assessment process then if you hop jobs then it's just not worth the effort to even try to assess you.
In software development, there is a co-investment between employer and employee in which time spent in a job tends to result an an increase of value through knowledge of the systems and therefore productivity. Job hoppers don't accumulate such value, and leaving early removes that value from the employers side of the relationship.
I think the blog post was written specifically for you. Maybe you're wrong?
Specifically with job-hoppers, I've found that they can hit the ground running very fast and make solid contributions in compressed time-frames. The best ones cherry pick the best practices from a more diverse set of previous employers.
Sure, maybe they are good at getting right to work. But then they are gone and all that institutional knowledge goes with them and you have to start over with someone else.
There is a lot of value to having long term employees that have been around and know what is going on.
This is why a documentation culture is so very important. Even on the best terms, the average tenure of a tech employee is two years. That's just today's economic reality. As a leader, a project should not be considered 'done' until its documented to such a level that a well-meaning new employee can come in, read the docs, and be mostly up to speed with at least the daily 'care-and-feeding' tasks and the top 5 failure modes.
There is a lot of risk of long term employees entrenching bad practices by leveraging their political clout due to seniority. In some ways that's worse than the scenario you describe.
Shouldn't this argue for everyone having long tenures, since it's unlikely you'll actively fire competent employees just because they started at their job too long and got too well trusted.
Having a few long term employees and a bunch of short term ones is the worst case scenario, since it only accentuates the disparity in company-specific reputation and clout.
Well in the UK as a DevOps my role is in such a high demand that many workers (including me) only take contract roles as they pay roughly double than permanent. But as a contractor my CV is going to be 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and not years at a place.
This is how it is here and personally I think I have accelerated experience accumulation as every contract excercises a different set of my skills.
Maybe other markets don’t have a contracting culture but I don’t think my CV should automatically be trashed for having short but concentrated employers.
I see where you're coming from but OTOH the path to increase your pay in the tech industry seems to be switching companies. It's not like you're going to see a 10-20% raise every year staying with the same company. Obviously this usually only works for a finite number of years at the beginning of your career.
I work with early stage companies, and those companies don't always exist a year. I've also worked with companies (for multiple years) that were bought & sold a few times, so two employment stints can easily look like five.
What if I was part of a university co-op program where I work for 4-8 months at a time between academic terms (which I am) ? I've left an interview where I could hear the CTO say "so why was he fired after 4 months?" as I walked out the door.
I understand you have 300 resumes, though -- should I put Co-op or Internship in big red letters before the item?
Agree with you. Caveat is that a "couple" can vary based on the length of your career. If you have been working for 20 years and in that time, you had 3 jobs that you only held for 6 months, I'd look at that very differently than someone with a shorter career span.
That’s fair. It’s the narrative that counts. If you look like you’re a good investment then you might be asked to explain but, at least, you’ll probably have the opportunity.
If your history says risk then you need something special to counteract it or you won’t get the chance.
Any reasonable or legitimate circumstance for short job periods can be explained with a well written resume, but yes it should be extremely clear one way or another that you aren't dropping into a series of short jobs and either getting fired or leaving for better job offers.
This runs counter to your initial statement: "I don't really care why your career has played like that."
Which is probably why he's had such a hard time explaining it in the first place. Lots of people aren't going to take the time to actually read and understand the situation.
This is my experience, yes. I suspect many hiring staff look over the job titles and snap onto company/dates employed -- and never see the word "co-op". Thus my idea.
Having attended a university that was coop-based, I've had this discussion (or did when it was more relevant) and the key truly is "a well written resume" (plenty of coop positions come and go so...)
Often I would have conversations with people about resumes where they had problems and those problems would be things like:
* How long is your resume...? (way too long, often)
* Can you drop/compress any positions? (keep recent/relevant)
* Instead of "Employment", can you say "Coop Experience"? for the section?
* etc.
(thought questions, not asking for responses). I do agree, you definitely have to make the "coop" part super obvious otherwise you won't make it past initial filters.
Make it clear. Seeing this on a resume is actually a bonus in my mind compared to someone without that experience.
Of course the farther into your career the less important this is, but for new developers I would say this is an important and positive detail to highlight.
I sympathize with your position but bad management/toxic culture are also systemic problems in the software world. It could be that the person just had a string of bad projects and was trying to avoid getting burned out. It would suck if someone got locked out of a good job that might have helped their career due to that.
Your statemen in the last paragraph about increased value is correct. Alas, too often that does not correspond to the proportional increase in pay. For some reason other companies are willing to pay more.
There is also “people join companies but leave managers“.
I don't know, would it hurt to have one person on the team only interested in pulling tasks and banging out code? They rest of the team could use the extra time to deepen their knowledge of the business.
Given the expense that goes into hiring, on-boarding, and off-boarding employees, yes having to do that more than once a year can hurt. If it's fine, they should be contractors, not employees.
I understand the sentiment, but think about it like this: You've been working at a company for six months. Recruiters, good and bad, have been sending you offers to interview for all sorts of jobs. A recruiter finally sends you an opportunity that you can't turn down (2x compensation, more vacation, dream position at dream company, shorter commute with same pay, etc). You interview, you ace it, you get the offer.
Do you turn it down to build more tenure at your current company? Or do you accept because it improves your situation right now?
Rinse, wash, repeat.
Based on the number of emails I've gotten from recruiters (on a stale resume, mind you!), I'd say that "the market" doesn't care about length of time at an employer as much as one might think.
I was shocked when I saw people were doing that. Some would just make the 6 months stints disappear and add to the job before! Some have generic 10 years "Person Name Services Ltd" where they do "consulting work" but actually just merge all the embarrassing experiences into it.
OP should register himself as an S-Corp, hang out a shingle, and market it as a consultancy. Now the pay triples, your short stay at various companies is downright expected, and everybody's incentives align - OP wants to do the best work he can in the shortest amount of time possible (so he can move on to the _next_ client), and his employers^Wclients will pay more to collect on the value OP's work provides sooner. Ironically, if you start spending more than a year at any given client, future clients will start to get antsy about '...why were you there so long? Are you a foot-dragger? What's the matter with you?" This is why you should NOT do hourly-billing, to make sure everybody's incentives stay aligned as described above. :-)
A) I would do it as an LLC, as it's cheaper, easier to set up and doesn't require a partnership structure.
B) Not every company is looking for a 1099 employee. In fact, I'd wager that most would rather hire W-2 (US) instead.
C) Trying to go the real consulting route will lead to long-ish sales cycles depending on your rate and what you're looking to do. You'll also need to go through procurement at a big enough place; that, in and of itself, can take a while.
D) You're on the hook for health insurance and retirement. Health insurance is expensive.
E) Days off outside of the weekend and federal holidays comes out of your PnL. You can (and should) factor that into your rate, but see (C) for why that might make building a book of business more difficult.
F) You'll need to sell yourself much more than you would as an employee. If you're the type that hates writing/speaking/meetings/selling, then I wouldn't recommend consulting.
LLC/S-Corp/whatever, if you're doing this, you're going to want to make friends with a CPA, and an attorney. Everybody's needs on this front is going to be highly individualized, the couple hundred bucks spent on advice from these two professional friends are going to pay staggering dividends later.
B) Not in my experience. W2 employees have a 20% overhead for various insurances, taxes, etc. There's also significant employment law one has to follow to a T, 'or else'. Consultants, you can be a little looser with.
C) Not disagreeing on this one, but there's also _tons_ of smaller shops and startups who have expensive problems a consultant's specialized knowledge/experience may be uniquely suited to solve.
D) As a non-smoking overweight single male, my 'gold plan' insurance on the west coast is ~$400/mo. At consultant profit margins, that is effectively 'lolwhatever' money.
E) This is yet another example of why hourly billing is nuts. Don't bill hourly. Bill per-project, and charge for the business-value of the work to the business. Considerable literature has been written on this, see works by Jonathan Stark, Alan Weiss, etc. tl; dr - if you're billing hourly, you're doing it Wrong(tm)
F) Strong agree. But just because one may hate writing/speaking/meetings/selling doesn't mean one can't A. learn it, and B. learn to excel at it. Would _you_ take a course on public speaking and read a book on negotiation if you were reasonably certain you could make your current annual income in a quarter's worth of work?
Absolutely agree with (F). Writing, speaking and socializing are learned skills! I'm proof: I was horribly socially awkward until I learned how to speak to people! I also wasn't a great writer, but I kept at it and learned from people better than me. Now, I'm slightly better!
E) I agree that Fixed Cost is better than T&M/hourly...if you're good at estimating and scoping the work beforehand. I.e. if you have lots of experience to sell. It's very easy to lose money on the margin if you're not, hence why I'd recommend hourly for someone new to the game.
(I'd wager that it only makes sense to get into high-rate consulting if you have tons of experience, but that's another debate.)
D) I didn't know it was that cheap for young and single people! But it gets expensive fast if you have a family or advanced conditions.
C) Right, but you'd better be specialized enough to make it worth a startup's while to employ you. Also, it is easier to find startup's willing to hire you in hotspots like NYC or SF than, say, Columbus, OH. You could work remote, but that is a more difficult sell depending on what you do and your rates.
Definitely definitely agree with (A). Mistakes in filling are costly, and you'll eventually have a contract dispute that is easier to suss out with a lawyer.
If you were the owner of a small company and you have two employees who look identical on paper, but one seems to be jumping ship frequently in order to get higher salaries and one seems to be sticking with the same company for years, who are you going to hire?
If I'm giving advice to job seekers, I'd say move around enough to get good salary increases, but don't do it too frequently or potential employers will start to see it as a red flag.
If I'm giving advice to hiring managers, I'd say hire great people, but keep in mind that the best people often get bored or want salary increases, so they tend to move around. If you see someone who has moved around very frequently in the past, then there's certainly a good chance they'll be moving again in the near future.
Counter-point, I've flat out said I have an offer at a company that's offering me double the salary you are, can you offer me something including an in name only title increase and been told no. Companies only see short term, not long term. There is also no guarantee of company loyalty. If the street doesn't go both ways which should the impetus always be on the employee to remain loyal. It's a business contract that should benefit both parties. I've increase my pay to over 5 times what I was making just 5 years ago by changing jobs. Should I feel bad about that? I'd love a company that paid me well and treated the relationship like a two way street. In fact any time I've left it's when the company lost respect for my work, not the work I've put in for the company. I've only been fired 1 time in my life and it was odious and not due to my performance but due to me not accepting public scoldings for things that I had literally no ability to control after a management change.
Do people really do this? I can sort of understand grouping shorter stints into "Freelance" or "Consulting" ...but to just outright lie and say you were at a company for 6 months longer than you actually were? All it takes is one phone call and your cover is blown.
> All it takes is one phone call and your cover is blown.
Not necessarily. When I was interviewing for the job I have now, they were trying really hard to weed out people like OP who claimed to have been at one place for a longer time than they had. They demanded HR contacts for my last _three_ jobs (which in my case stretches all the way back to 2002) so they could make sure that the start & end dates I put on my application matched up with what HR stated. Well, we ran in to an immediate problem with the second job ago - the company had gone out of business since I left, and there was nobody to contact. They shrugged their shoulders and moved on to the most recent job. Well, that was a startup, too - when I started working there, it was a contract-to-hire position, so I was actually an employee of "warm body providers corp" for the first six months. Then, when I was converted to perm at that job, it was bought by "megaglobalcorp" a year later. Then, about six months before I was let go, megaglobalcorp sold our entire office to "evilcorp, inc." who decided to shut down the office (which is why I was out of work in the first place). So when HR at the job I have now started making calls, I had had _four_ different employers in a three year period, even though I had been in the same office, sitting at the exact same desk, reporting to the exact same boss throughout the entire period. I think I may have explained this to the "currentjob" HR eight times before they finally gave up and decided to trust me when I said I had only had three different jobs in the past 16 years.
I am in a similar acquisition/merger type situation. Same department, same desk, four different legal entities. I'm just including the three main ones in the same entry for my resume.
It was a pain in the butt when I bought a house, though, and I needed to write a formal letter explaining all the changes and why it looks like I kept switching jobs according to my tax documents.
Yep, I'm not looking forward to filing taxes this year - I have W-2's from three different employers, just for me (not to mention a few months on unemployment, too).
One could apply these recommendations to all companies really.
I guess the one interesting point was hiring freelancers but in my experience good freelancers are really expensive amd moreover if someone is not invested with a long term view they usually end up taking a lot of shortcuts which leads to a lot of technical debt. Of course, this is just my experience.
I think its more important to consider who startups should NOT hire and give large 'management' roles to. Namely middle managers who come from large bureaucratic, declining public companies.
they bring in all the baggage that startups are supposedly supposed to operate without.
of course there are exceptions (the individual is creative, very high IQ etc)...but if your sole reason for hiring them is 'oh they were the senior director of x at [fortune 500 company]'...just no.
Funny thing about "declining companies", some of these will see more money in their bad times than the sexiest startups in their heyday. It's cruel, but true.
I wouldn't look down on a manager who comes from such a company; they bring a different set of experience that a startup has not gotten to yet. I also think having access to relatively more money allows these managers to develop different kinds of skills.
There's a stage in a startup's growth when that different set of experience is valuable, and at other stages it's often harmful.
I.e. the experience of a manager coming from a 500 person organization is valuable when the startup is scaling to 100 people and is building the structures and processes required for those 100 (and later on 200 and more) to work efficiently; there's a lot of organizational know-how and perspective that would be useful to take into account. The same experience/perspective from the same person are not that valuable and potentially wrong/misleading if you're currently scaling from 10 people to 20.
This assumes that the middle manager knows what they are doing. Sadly in my case I haven't been lucky enough to get someone who understands the job, nevermind the process and politics which has just resulted in a lot of firefighting, inconsistent policies, and then being blamed when we don't know what the policies actually are. No matter where you are having the right people for the actual problems seems to be the correct plan of action.
I think you're losing out. The types of middle/upper management that look to startups from the enterprise have seen how to operate their part of the business at scale, even if it did mean a lot of meetings and red tape, and they are usually looking to work in a startup environment for the challenge and the ability to "make a change."
They might not be a good fit at the very beginning of the business, but they're probably essential post-funding.
As someone definitely in the intersection of "weird dude", "freelancer", and "successful alumnus of a startup", I'm on board with this, strangely enough.
One of the advantages of freelancers is that you get a little bit more consultative relationship than with employees. For myself at least, I bring strategic perspective not just boots on the ground, and that can make a big difference in heading off pitfalls.
I see a lot of startups running from three alarm fire to three alarm fire without the ability to tie things up over the longer term, and that often comes back to bite them. Automate and standardize all the non-core parts of your business or you will pay in distraction.
> running from three alarm fire to three alarm fire without the ability to tie things up over the longer term
No offense but that is incredibly frustrating for employees. It really sucks being in a team that is continually chasing fires with no time to do something strategic -and the a manager will bring some highly paid freelancer who works 9-5 without stress telling you how it should be done. What I'd like is the managers to bring in people to do the shitty work while employees get some downtime to improve things for a change.
Agreed, that's usually why I start a gig - they've hit a wall on technical scaling and need someone to help them dig out of it, so I can take over the firefights and provide the guidance on how to go about it, mentorship on whether a particular path is worth trying, that kind of thing.
And when they don't fix that bad habit early either in their business or their implementing new tech, they become larger companies with the same problems.
I'm not sure about hiring the job hopper. Sure you may get a great talent, but my experience is they will leave you at the worst possible time for your startup.
I agree, lots of wise "old heads" out there who could make a large contribution. Super smart idea because they're being ignored by everyone else in the talent search.
I'm quite disappointed to not find something along the lines of "Hiring employees of different races, ethnicities, sex, socio-economic backgrounds, etc."
It's a poor perception to think that those factors wouldn't have any relation to who is the "best" candidate. Especially when you apply context and subjectiveness to what "best" really means at its core.
It's subjective and depends on the field. Software engineers tend to move around more frequently than say, petroleum engineers, probably owing to the larger number of companies who they can potentially work for. For me, looking at a software engineering resume, ideally I'd want to see at least a few stints lasting two years or more, but I'll forgive occasional short stints, since even great engineers can be bad fits in some companies.
I tend to look at this from a Bayesian perspective. If someone has left a lot of jobs after short stints, then that's a red flag. There's a possibility that they just got very unlucky (e.g. they are an amazing worker, but 5 companies they worked for folded within a few months), but it's also possible that they, for example, don't get along with people or lose interest in things very quickly. The more of a discernible pattern I see, the more likely I am to conclude the latter.
I might decide to hire that person anyway, but it's probably something that's going to weigh against them in the hiring decision.
I don't really care why your career has played like that.
At best, you are a an awesome employee who won't stay with them more than your "frequency period".
At worst, you get discovered and fired within your frequency period.
Especially true for senior roles. Team lead for 5 months? Drop the resume.
Not always true, but in general terms if you are a great employee then you tend to hang around.
I know these are generalisations but when I am sitting there reading 300 resumes in a row and trying to work out who is going to get through an employers gruelling assessment process then if you hop jobs then it's just not worth the effort to even try to assess you.
In software development, there is a co-investment between employer and employee in which time spent in a job tends to result an an increase of value through knowledge of the systems and therefore productivity. Job hoppers don't accumulate such value, and leaving early removes that value from the employers side of the relationship.