Comment by justrudd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justrudd | Hacker News Reader

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Depends on the company you’re interviewing with and (IME) region you’re looking for work. In my 26 years since graduating university, I’ve had 13 jobs. So an average of 1.8 years per job. My longest was 6 years at Amazon (ironically enough considering they have such a high turnover) and my shortest was 3 weeks (I knew during the interview it wasn’t a good fit, but I was young and they threw a stupid amount of money at me).

Where I am now (Seattle area), it isn’t really seen as a that big of a red flag. I always had good reasons for leaving. Other than 2, I’ve tried to never burn bridges intentionally and was even a rebound employee at 1 place (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).

I grew up in the South and moved back there for a brief period of time. It was very hard to find work down there because they called me a “job hopper” (which I was/am). I was asked several times “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one.

That’s been my experience. I’m at a place now where I can see myself staying for awhile. I’m not curing cancer or doing machine learning or scaling things to gagillion requests per second. But I like the people, like my boss, and the problems are meaty enough to engage me during the day, but not so complicate that I work on them in my off hours.

> (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).

I'll offer a corollary: have already said everything you think before you quit. That way, there is nothing else to say during the exit interview anyway.

There are two reasons for saying what you think while you're still employed:

1. How will anything improve unless you voice your concerns? (Not saying they will when you do, just that they definitely won't when you don't.)

2. You are paid to think and then communicate your thoughts. If they only wanted your body, they could have bought a robot -- no, they're paying money for your brain too. Give it to them.

I agree with you. I generally don’t hold anything back in my 1:1, skip level 1:1, etc. But if you’ve communicated effectively, it makes no difference to rehash it to HR on the way out the door. HR, usually, doesn’t care.

And I’ve left positions where the company pivoted, and I didn’t agree with the pivot. Told the powers that be, but the pivot was done. No reason to dredge it up again.

> “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one.

What's the answer?

Usually say it with more tact, but it is along the lines of - “Yes. I’m a professional new guy. I’ve seen and worked on a lot of different types of technology, and I come up to speed quickly. I’m not afraid to ask ‘dumb’ questions when I can’t find what I’m looking for.”

Something along those lines. I lean into it. But as I said, it doesn’t come up too often in the PNW.

How about “I leave subpar companies quickly and stay in great companies like Amazon for many years”?

I mean, that’s cool, but you haven’t actually adressed the problem, which is that I’ll spend 3 months training you, only to have you quit after 9 more. That’s not really a good investment

His point is that it will only take a month to get him up to speed, not 3.

But I agree that a better answer would probably be something along the lines of "I have so much experience that I deliver in a year what the average guy would give you in 5; and if you're good to me, I might well stick around as much as I did at X", or something along those lines.

If he's getting hired, it's obviously good enough.

Depends on how often they’re hired versus not.

"You're gonna have a good year"

As someone who has a number of short stints on his resume, I usually go with, "There's a big difference between ten years of experience, and one year of experience repeated ten times. I have experience with a wide variety of frameworks and architectures. I've done real work in both front-end and back-end codebases. I've worked in Windows environments and Linux environments. I've even done some DBA work. I can bring knowledge of a wide variety of best practices to bear on any problem that I'll encounter at this current role."

The other thing I've found is that the companies that make a really big deal about "job hopping" and "employee loyalty" aren't really ones that you want to work for anyway. They're paranoid about employee loyalty for a reason, and rather than look at their own management to see why employees are leaving after short stints at that firm, they blame the employees, usually with some absurd generalizations about "millenials" or "gen z".

That doesn't answer the question at all. You were asked "how do I know you won't leave in a short time frame?" and you answered the completely different question "what benefit (to you) have you got from having lots of jobs?". If anything, it suggests you view leaving companies after a short time as a positive thing you'd want to do again.

By the way, I don't agree that if a company would like employees that tend to stick around then that indicates some sort if weird cult-like behaviour. It's more like a recognition that productivity naturally is lower in the months after someone joins than after they've been there for a year or two. Choosing people that are able to stick at a job for a few years is just a sensible business decision. Admittedly it does have social benefits too i.e. there's a better work environment for everyone if you get to know other people over a period of time (in spite of some HN commenters' views that we're all robots that shouldn't care about interactions with coworkers). But, in my view, even that is reasonable justification.

Keep in mind that the answer was not written by the OP of that comment.

You can also mention how companies encourage disloyalty by paying new starters significantly more than existing employees. I’ve seen great people working hard towards a promotion, putting in the hours, playing everything right - only to be passed over for a promotion due to management politics and a boss that was looking out more for herself than her team. Meanwhile, another employee simply just left and walked into another job with a £25k pay increase. As long as companies continue to be myopic with regards to salaries, it incentivises people to jump ship every couple of years.

Probably better off responding more along the lines of:

I bring a wide array of industry experience, that you'll benefit from. I'm hoping for a longer term engagement, but even if it's a shorter one, I typically leave them better than I found them.

In your own words, ofcourse.

P.S. I suspect your statement will get you rejected from companies that know they have the same problem but can't fix it. If you don't need a job, be as honest as you want, if you do, you're better off going with the positive spin.

To be fair: the company might not have a need for the skill level which allows for a drastic pay increase.

Yup, this. We took temporary pay cuts last year, which was more or less understandable, business was down. But I did a couple of interview rounds and got offers that were 15-20% above my pre-cut salary. And people were shocked that I was leaving.

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