Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

Maybe, but they obviously also have a track record of being a poor judge of environment, since they got it wrong so often.

> It’s also a failure of values since there’s an underlying assumption that people are interchangeable widgets, which is both false and dehumanising.

Well, job hopping (in my experience) often signals that the candidate thinks of employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing. Employers are but a group of other humans. It's a different kind of interpersonal relationship than between friends or family, sure, but it's still just as much an interpersonal relationship.

That said, sometimes things aren't what they seem, as you say. It becomes a question of judging the risk and the reward.

As a tool, there's also the interview, where one is supposed to try to figure this sort of stuff out.

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Note that I'm not saying you should stay at a crappy job. In fact, I came in here to post specifically that my biggest mistake may have been staying at a crappy job for too long. (May have because you never know -- maybe that's what made me value a good job so much.)

I'm just saying that despite agreeing with most of your comment, when I'm making the hiring decision of someone, I will read the implied "cannot pick an employer they fit with" in a job hoppers resume. I will try to work past that bias, but candidates are rarely able to defend that very well. What they say usually ends up being a roundabout way of saying "so far I've not been very good at picking an employer I fit with."

And that is going to weigh into the decision.

At least, the US (outside of the blue states) have some leftover Rights worth fighting for.

> "so far I've not been very good at picking an employer I fit with"

then the only inference one can draw, is that they're bad at self-promotion, since there are zillions of ways to present the same kind of facts with a more positive spin. My view is that marketing instincts are not super relevant except when hiring directly for the sales/marketing function, and speaking as someone who is absolutely terrible at marketing, you can even make CEO without it.

> but they obviously also have a track record of being a poor judge of environment, since they got it wrong so often.

I recommend reviewing an article (even the wikipedia entry will do) on the Fundamental Attribution Error, because this statement is a perfect illustration of the FAE. That is, there's nothing intrinsically obvious about track records, and in particular, assuming negatives such as this, is a great way to miss out on great people.

As I've said elsewhere, I suggest biasing a hiring funnel for Type 1 errors early on, and Type 2 errors later.

> employers as interchangeable widgets, which is just as false and dehumanizing

Well, no, employers are, for the most part, companies, so they're not humans; that's certainly distinct from bosses, of course; but nevertheless, the power gradient between employer and employee is steep, sometimes incredibly so, which is why the overwhelming majority of industrial relations law is essentially protecting the individual from employer abuses.

To look at that another way: it's much more impactful on someone's quality of life for them to seek a new boss, than it is for a boss to seek a new staff member. I've never appreciated the fiction of "we're like a family", a paper-thin deception that doesn't survive past one bad earnings quarter, and I don't inflict it on my own crew.

Curiously, one of the goals of much collective bargaining is to make employees and employers nigh-on interchangeable via standardized agreements. Corollary: the unions of today would make Adam Smith proud.