Did you leave positive impressions on your coworkers? Did you maintain contact? Part of the advantage of moving every few years is that you work with more people, which means more people are willing to recommend you for open positions. In those three jobs you were laid off from did any of your coworkers also get laid off? Where did they go to, and can they give you a recommendation?
No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.
>Did you leave positive impressions on your coworkers?
Some of them, though it's hard to become really good friends with a coworker after only three months of a remote job.
At the jobs that I stayed two years at I definitely made lots of friends
> Did you maintain contact?
For a few of them, the ones that I got close to (generally the people that were as geeky as I am about bizarre CS concepts). That was immensely handy to get job referrals, and it's in no small part why I was able to land my current (very decent!) gig.
In most places I've worked, people generally like me ok (I hope), and usually I will develop one or two pretty close friends as a result if I've been there sufficiently long.
> In those three jobs you were laid off from did any of your coworkers also get laid off?
Yes, though in the more recent laid off jobs I sadly didn't know people well enough to get them to give me referrals or anything.
> No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.
I mostly agree, but only to a certain extent. If you can make it to the interview stage, a good referral and social contacts can be great and really helpful, but the problem with short stints is that you're considerably more likely to fail the initial screening by the internal recruiter.
I get it, I don't really blame them, you can't go into super thorough detail on every resume that's submitted, so they have to look for red flags to immediately filter out stuff.
I don't know that it's true that moving a lot means you work with more people. I'm at my current company 10 years. From being here 10 years I now know tons of people who came here for 2 years and left. Not to mention all the relationships with people still here.
> I don't know that it's true that moving a lot means you work with more people.
It's generally true that you meet more people switching jobs every 2 years. You work with all the people that stayed and all the people that also left after 2 years. You end up on more total teams.
It's not universally true. If you stay in a place with higher than average turnover, constantly working with new people then you would be in an position to work with more people. Additionally, if you worked in a very centralized team in a very large software company you could end up working with more people.
Finally, the quantity of people you've worked with isn't the key metric you should maximize your professional network for. You ideally want in any 3 month period multiple people in your professional network whose recommendation will carry a lot of weight for an open position you would be interesting in taking that would give you a strong recommendation. After you've reached that level of baseline employment security then you want to maximize for people that will recommend better and better positions.
No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.