It's a little nuts for a message board to simultaneously say "the only way you'll get a good raise is to get a different job, power to the workers" and "we punish jobhopping when we hire". We're the ones hiring! It's up to us!
Ask HN: Is job hopping as bad as they say?
41–45 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is job hopping as bad as they say?
#42The longer you continue with your job hopping the more likely your next job will be short-term.
There are 2 different career paths, both valid, both with their pros and cons.
With short-term positions you will be "hired gun", where they hire you to contribute on a particular project and will likely view you as expendable when budgets are cut or shifted to other priorities. This is not necessarily bad though, if you keep getting good references companies will continue to hire you knowing that you will deliver. Plus getting a raise is way easier when moving from company to company vs getting 1.5% annual raise. Plus prospective employers know that you've been to number of companies and can provide outsider's prospective on a number of subjects.
Whereas when you stay employed at the same company you learn all the nooks and crannies and will likely be either promoted to management position (if you wish to do so so) or get other benefits (longer vacation, higher bonus, more freedom in determining your schedule, projects, who you work with, etc etc). At the same time, if the employer does decide to lay you off, finding another job will be difficult since you don't have much experience in job hunting, and much of your experience is with the same company (not necessarily applicable to other companies).
So at some point in your career you will have to choose a path and stick to it.
Re: Ask HN: Is job hopping as bad as they say?
#43I take the opposite view to most of the comments below, and have a strong opinion on it. I think the idea of long term loyalty to one company is naive, I'm sure there are exceptions, but, I believe staying at one place limits your personal growth, experience/variety, and most importantly earning potential. Work is transactional, most of us only do it because we get paid, if you get a better offer you should go, you o…
I concur with this comment with the caveat that if you want to do this and climb the ladder, then you need to be aiming to be promoted within that 2-3 year tenure between hops; or up-leveled during the interview loop.
Re: Ask HN: Is job hopping as bad as they say?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think longer tenures are as positive of a signal as you're making them out to be. - You can essentially have 1 year experience repeated n times. - People with very long tenures can have a narrower view of what software development is. By switching more often you get to be exposed to different domains, teams, managers, ways of working and in a way you can mentally abstract over them instead of learning the pro…
I think if every tenure is less than two years it's a red flag for a senior position. Anyone can get by for a year but if you're around for two you'll inevitably need to deal with conflict resolution and maintaining relationships and products. If you can't stick around two years anywhere I'm prone to thinking you're someone who vomits a bunch of code and then leaves the team to pick up your mess. Or someone who can't…
Well, I can't stay in a place more than 3 months, because when I walk in, I am the best engineers they ever seen in their lifetime.
I can produce code in 10x less than they do, I can replace the BA, while at the same time write specs, I did so many jobs in so many companies, and they don;t know it because I am very very humble, and I don;t like to show off.
Then they ask me to do a noob job, or to work on the ugliest piece of spagetti code for few months, or they ask me to work with this Junior dev who got a shit mouth and likes to show off how much younger and vocal he is compared to me, and all of it is making me feeling like I don;t belong there, and that I am not valued for my uncommon talents ( I have 4 ) - and no matter how much effort I put in trying to help them, they won;t note that I can actually be much much more effective at helping them if they stop explaining me how to do my job - or pretending they know how to code - because they wrote a couple of Todo app in React for job interviews.
Re: Ask HN: Is job hopping as bad as they say?
#45It’s not bad at all. Companies forced this by not rewarding people who stay.