[lhorie]

Personally, I'd refrain from throwing around "If I was the manager of the hiring manager" rhetorics when responding to PragmaticPulp; that's someone w/ a lot of hiring experience in big tech.

I'll throw my own two cents as someone who interviewed a couple hundred senior/staff level eng candidates. When a candidate comes around w/ 10+ years of experience, a career filled with one year stints will not pass the bar for L6 level because some of the evaluated requirements (e.g "consistent cross-functional impact") simply cannot be achieved in <12 month stints (and this shows in the interviews)

Something to consider is that tenured big tech interviewers can have hundreds of interviews w/ 10+ YOE candidates under their belts; they've seen high performers and low performers and inflated titles and smooth talkers and everything in between. So when they say someone doesn't pass a bar, it's not just a quick dismissal of a resume (the interviewing process at these companies typically doesn't even allow that); instead there's a lot of interviewing experience behind that statement.

[avmich]

> Personally, I'd refrain from throwing around "If I was the manager of the hiring manager" rhetorics when responding to PragmaticPulp; that's someone w/ a lot of hiring experience in big tech.

Having seen a bunch of companies and hiring managers, I don't believe PP's approach is the correct one if he wants to maximize results, not minimize efforts.

There are reasons why at some point stellar candidates stop considering Big Tech, companies like FAANG etc. and also why good engineers deteriorate if staying there for too long (doesn't apply to certain departments, like RnD). Policies are simplifications, and hiring good candidates is a hard problem in modern industry; removing flexibility only makes the task that much harder.

[lhorie]

I mean, I think "maximizing results" is a bit of a loaded term. The bar at FAANGs and adjacent companies is already very high to begin with; their systems are optimized to prevent bad hires and I'd argue they're quite successful at that. Also worth noting that when you hire at scale, optimizing for finding mythical 10x'ers doesn't scale, almost by definition.

The other thing is that you're assuming a hypothetical candidate w/ only short tenures is someone who is necessarily an ace, vs the original claim that this person is likely a dud. The point I'm making is that in a real concrete scenario w/ lots of numbers to look at, people w/ that sort of resume don't perform well when benchmarked against known high performers. Which then begs the question of whether it is even reasonable to assume that there's any overlap between the extreme job hopper archetype and the "ace" archetype statistically speaking, when comparing to the stats for the cohort of people with "normal" tenures.

I can point to a vast pool of people jumping from one 6 month contract to the next that tend to do abysmally bad in interviews, and I can tell you none of the staff+ or director-type people I know are extreme job hoppers, as anecdotes to support the argument that the overly short tenure strategy doesn't perform as well as average tenures. You'd need to provide a very strong argument for the idea that "short tenures = good heuristic for finding golden needle in a haystack" is a superior strategy for either job seekers or employers, because I just don't see it.