We consider it unacceptable if all the projects a candidate wants to talk about "began before I was hired, and shipped after I left." And that's what you get if you are an aggressive job-hopper your entire career, not just at the beginning.
I am never against someone wanting to negotiate the compensation they deserve for the skills they have developed. And certainly, for many skills, job hopping is the strategy for maximizing your pay for the skills you are able to learn and refine in 1-2 years per job.
But if you don't develop the skill of taking a major multi-year project from inception to completion, there is a skill you don't have that we will not pay for by hiring you at the top two levels of our org.
1. Experience with the consequences of their choices. Ok, you were able to get a job at company X, get up to speed, and lead a major cross-team or cross-group initiative within two years. What happened after that? Did it create the desired outcomes? Why? Why not? Were there unanticipated consequences? What part did you play in dealing with those?
2. Experience with change. Managers--even entire management orgs--change. Were you around long enough to live through one such change? Or did you jump ship without acquiring any experience or scars from the change? Strategies change, e.g. Pivoting from B2C to B2B, or weaning a company off a dependence on sales-led growth. Do you have experience with not just the technological consequences, but the organizational consequences? Do you have the skill of creating an oasis of calm within the chaos?
Consider someone who works as a team lead at a startup for two years, it goes IPO, they cash out. Do they stay, learn about working in a bigger company and become the kind of person I'm describing above?
Yes, if that interests them. But that isn't the only road. They could also go join another startup. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck and skill, they could keep honing their skills as a leader of teams in a fast-paced early-stage environment, without ever becoming the kind of person a 500-person engineering group is trying to hire as a Principal Engineer.
Nothing wrong with that, it's the engineering equivalent of a serial entrepreneur. Some founders want to run their company for their entire career, like Ken Olsen, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Others are happy to sell out and start all over again.
Do what makes you happy. I'm just explaining what one company is looking for at a senior level.
I'm not sure what company you're at but there is certainly not a multi-year project in any I've worked at. There are long term _product_ roadmaps but in order to stay agile you never commit to something as big as a multi-year project. There are only individual features that get committed to. Even in core infra (heavily technical) where needs and solutions are known committed work goes out a year tops.
Absolutely you want people who delivered things from start to finish but I've never heard of those things taking multiple years. If it takes 2-3 years for your product to go to market it's a failure, regardless of whether it's an external or internal product.
Out of curiosity, what product does your company make? What kind of moat do they have if anything you do can be replicated in under a year by a competitor?
If a roadmap goes out 3-5 years and a candidate only executes on one or two of those years, the candidate hasn't gained experience with which parts of a roadmap stay committed and which ones change in response to new information/priorities.
Most of this does not apply to a hot startup where the founders are still coding every day, but those aren't the only senior engineering opportunities.
My meta-experience is that the kinds of things I'm talking about tend to be most highly prized by companies that have been around longer than a startup, and now have problems to solve technically and organizationally that can most effectively be solved by people who have stayed in one company longer than one-two years.
Such companies aren't usually as exciting as pre-IPO startups, so absolutely no side-eye from me if anyone reading this is thinking "You can take that job and shove it, I'm busy inventing the future on a two-pizza team in a six-pizza startup."
Jumping around every 1-2 years is fine if you're junior or mid. After that you're suspect. We had a guy who left after 1.5 years. It was sudden and disruptive, and the guy burned bridges. We were not surprised since his past jobs were like that (short stints, and anger by the end of the last one). However, now, everyone we interview who's senior, we look at a different light with regards to job hopping.
Lesson learned with regards to that. Beware of senior engineers who job hop.
I think this is a bit too much of a generalization. I would caveat this with "understand what you're hiring for".
In some cases, you need a specialist to come in and laser-focus on a problem, and then maybe someone who won't be with you for long, but will tackle those problems, is just fine - and even what you really want: no seat-warming, just get it done and get out.
But if you're hiring someone to lead a long-lived team working on big projects, then your point stands.
On top of that, most of our most productive engineers stayed over 4 years.
Unless you’re a senior or lead, it’s unlikely that you have had the opportunity to gain enough deep exposure to many technologies and problems in a very short tenure at a company.
Also I don't think seniors and leads with short stints are to be trusted (from recent experience with such people).
Staying after that in a lot of these cases mean a lack of interesting projects, and also end up with stagnation. My experience may be a bit affected by freelancing though :)
I go through a lot of resumes, but hardcore job hopper resumes are still very rare. Numerically, they'd have to be overrepresented in the applicant pool due to changing jobs 2-5X more frequently than everyone else.
It's not a big deal if someone has a couple short jobs on their resume or even a series of short-term engagements. But what may not be obvious until you've done a lot of hiring is that it's really hard to tell the difference between someone who changes jobs every 12 months for a pay increase compared to someone who changes jobs every 12 months because they get PIPed and managed out of every company they work for. Some people are really good at interviewing, but will show up at your company and proceed to ride your performance management track until they're pushed out, at which case they hop into the next company and move on.
So at minimum, job hoppers get much more intensive interviews and reference checks. But more realistically I just give priority to candidates who have track records of accomplishing bigger things over longer periods of time at companies.
A few short engagements are no big deal, but serial job hoppers are a warning flag for deeper investigation.
I won't overlook a resume for having a job hopper signature, but we will be going very deep into their accomplishments at these companies. It's often hard to ramp up at a company and deliver something significant from start to finish and production follow-up in 12 months.
Most of the job hoppers I interview end up citing projects that they contributed to, but can't really pin down much significant that was really their own contribution. It's not impossible, but it's far more common to find significant contributions in 2-4 year engineers.
People who haven't worked on any significant projects start - to - finish, and have a demonstrable trial of being a drifter aren't fit for senior positions by very definition.
Personally I tend to think drifters and coasters are basically the same things.
No serious shop or hiring manager I know would touch these people with a 10 foot pole.
>>For me a questionable resume is someone who spent the past 20 years at Accenture or something.
Somebody who spent 20 years at a firm, but are involved in new projects every few years make the perfect hires. The top performing talent in Google, Amazon, Boeing or any where for that matter are these kind of people.