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Comment by goodoldboys | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, just do the following:

Be generally likable Write decent to good code Connect on a regular basis with current and former co-workers Be aggressive about finding new opportunities (usually through people you've worked with)

I agree with most of the points the author makes here, but I don't think you need to stay 2 years at a particular job - 1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects and still get some decent projects under your belt.

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>1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects

A string of one year stints would be a huge red flag to me. I would have a hard time selling this person up as we don't hire FTE's to come and go in a span of 12 months. Too much churn kills you, I'd likely pass unless circumstances where extraordinary.

I've worked for many 1 year stints (everywhere I've worked besides my old startup), and have never had a problem finding jobs.

Of course I probably wouldn't know if a place passed on me because of that.

I wonder what the probability distribution for how much hirers weight "loyalty" or "stick-around-ness" looks like.

Yeah, no idea. I'm not concerned with loyalty so much as I am with dealing with the fallout of churn. I've only ever worked at small companies on small teams, so a single engineer leaving tends to hurt. The company isn't loyal to them, so I expect an engineer to look out for their own self interest in the same way. That said, one year is a pretty short time, and if they're _only_ concerned with that next pay bump then they're probably going to cause my team some problems.

On the flip side, it's my responsibility to make sure that my engineers are happy in their position and weren't sold on a lie.

What EpicEng said. When I went to Sun it was more than a year before I was really worth anything as a kernel engineer. Took that long for the kernel to "come into focus" for me and the feedback I got from peers and management was that I was fast (I did POSIX conformance in the kernel that first year).

There is a huge difference between being able to fix bugs and being able to fix architecture problems. I needed at least a year before I was capable of the latter in SunOS, probably more than a year.

Yup, and there are plenty of places which expect this sort of churn. Where I work (biotech) there is a _ton_ of time dedicated up front to transferring domain knowledge. It takes at least a year for new hires to really understand how the lab works, how the hardware and assays work (even if they're in a more typical IT role, they need to 'get' what the hell we're actually doing), what the data means, etc. If I think they're likely to leave shortly after that investment I just can't bring them on.

Yep, that's my experience as well. I get that people want more money, I paid my people as much as I could (about $400K in the bay area, total comp) so there wasn't much churn.

But maybe the people jumping every year are doing more grunt stuff and the ramp up doesn't take as long? I dunno, I'm mostly retired and sort of a dinosaur.

What tools do you use and are they applicable to your next job?

I work for one of the big 5 and thus use a lot of the tools I use are developed in house (also, there are lots of special technological requirements that I have to understand and work with).

I've been here a few years and am still learning loads about unique company specific things that save me time when I have to do similar things in the future. 1 year stints would definitely not look good to me.

I'd say 1 year minimum (if you're unhappy), 3 years max if it's a company you enjoy. If you're "meh", start looking at 1.5 years, but only switch if you find something exciting, take your time.

Yeah I wouldn't expect someone to stay when they're unhappy, but I also wouldn't expect to see e.g. eight of those in a row. A couple of short stints here and there, but a pattern would scare me off or at least place them well below similarly qualified candidates.

It's better for the job hopper (and you) if you pass on him, and he's hired by companies that aren't bothered by him leaving after a year. According to the post, there are plenty of opportunities like that. It sounds like consulting to me, though.

Kinda sounds like poor management. It seems to me that proper management would have everything arranged such that an employee is a drop and replace asset.

Even if there is perfect replaceability of transferrable skills, there's a non-zero time to gain familiarity with the unique aspects of the tech stack, specialized domain niche, etc.

Good process reduced this to the level that is practical, but reducing churn is an important key to managing the unavoidable cost due to this.

Having recruited several hundred people, I can say with certainty that several ~12 month "regular" jobs is not optimal for projecting career stability. It's not a positive most of the time.

Yeah you will get to 2x much faster doing 1 year instead of 2. Also, you can probably even explain away one job being less than 1 year pretty easily.

"Oh, I didn't get to work there long because X company made an offer that I couldn't reasonably turn down when taking into account my family's future".

Granted you have to get to the interview stage...

1 year stints wouldn't really fly where I live.

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