[Spooky23]

Huh? If someone never stays for more than a year at a job, unless they are consulting gigs, that’s a red flag. The person is either dumb, unable to complete tasks, a risk due to behavior/etc, or otherwise problematic.

Sometimes you see people who hop around while transitioning between roles. It’s fairly typical to see veterans hit 2-3 places after leaving the service. Likewise, if someone leaves a unique vertical (ie healthcare, government, some finance), some hopping around makes sense. But like all things outliers are usually outliers for a reason.

[avmich]

> Huh? If someone never stays for more than a year at a job, unless they are consulting gigs, that’s a red flag. The person is either dumb, unable to complete tasks, a risk due to behavior/etc, or otherwise problematic.

Really, that's the only conclusion here? Can't a person, who's much better engineer than an interview-goer - I mean, to modern interviews in the industry - have to get at some point a position which he isn't so sure about, get his concerns realized, and made to leave? It's tough market for good engineers, despite some media would tell otherwise; search for a position could take months, more than half a year sometimes, and engineers typically have to make some money, not only working software. So if a good engineer loses a good position, it's a situation against him to find another one - and job hopping bias only makes it worse for everybody, except maybe those bad companies who still hire him, but which can't sustain him.

[onion2k]

That's reasonable, and rational, but at the same time I don't want to disrupt my team by bringing in someone who might decide they don't like the job after six months and who isn't able to ask the questions they need answers to during the hiring process to find that out. Consequently I might miss out on some good engineers by rejecting people with a series of short jobs on their resume and I accept that's a downside for me. The upside is better though.

I don't care if the candidate is having a hard time finding their ideal job. I care about my team.

[speakfreely]

> Really, that's the only conclusion here?

Well, yes, because any other conclusion really misunderstands what problem the hiring process is solving. It is not optimizing for hiring the best engineer possible, it's aiming to minimize a range of possible headaches for the employer. There's a hundred ways that best engineer could have work or personality traits that are absolutely terrible for your organization.

[Spooky23]

How do you assess, or even self-assess engineer goodness if they’re never around? Most people take a few months to get productive at a given job and become less productive when they get ready to leave.

So the strawman engineer who has never been at a job for more than a year probably only had 4-6 months of productive work at these jobs, and never had any meaningful responsibilities or career growth.

In my experience, most folks stay around for 2-3 years at a job or >5.

[snapcaster]

Thanks for all your comments on this thread. Made me think more about this issue than I ever had before. Props for standing up to the hive mind. I think for me the crux is that searching/interviewing/etc. all that stuff to find a job _fucking sucks_ and anyone not managing to either pick the right jobs or stay at their current one is a big red flag. I have trouble imagining someone not hating the process of finding a job and so why can't they avoid having to go through it every year?

[csomar]

It's a funny industry full of people making tech to "meritocracize" society and enable everyone; but will dismiss you if you look one pixel different than some arbitrary rule they just thought about when eating sushi at an overpriced cr*phole.