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Comment by escherize | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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