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‘I’m proud of being a job hopper’: Seattle engineer’s post about company loyalty goes viral
(www.geekwire.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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It's not about having FANG in your job history. It's about switching companies three times in three years.
Where I work, we tend to lose money on new hires for an average of the first six months. That's time where not only the new engineer isn't very productive, but other engineers on the same team aren't very productive. They're sinking time into difficult conversations like "yeah you need to go back and redo the last two weeks of work — it's perfectly good code, but you used library X, and we decided four years ago to is use library Y because X has this rare edge case issue when combined with library Z which we also use...".
If someone only works with us for a year... we haven't made enough of a profit to cover the losses in the first half of their employment with us. If you want to work for us, we're not going to force you into a multi-year contract but we do want to be as confident as possible that you're going to stay here long term.
I wouldn't turn someone down for changing jobs three times in three years... but I would definitely ask what happened. And they better answer with something that will happen at my company.
It takes, what, 10 minutes to read a resume? 30 minutes interview someone? Lets round that up to one hour to cover discussing two promising candidates with a colleague... it's still only 500 hours of work. Or 12 weeks. Obviously you also need to read all the resumes and do interviews with people who were turned down but over an entire career working in HR for a large company... 500 people isn't that many at all.
500 can be a lot unless you're talking about one of these companies with 50,000 employees. If it's a smaller company, that means they're hiring over 4 new engineers a month over a 10 year period.
I'm 45 and have interviewed 500 people easily.
And how many were hired? I think people keep forgetting he said he hired that many. That means many times more interviews and maybe many times more than that in resumes read.
The real question is over what time period we're talking about. Too short and either you work at a huge company or can't retain employees. Could even be both.
You know I missed the "hired" part there. That does sound like someone who never actually gives any particular candidate any time or attention and rather looks for a series of arbitrary checkboxes to fill.
I doubt their career was only ten years long.