[janetacarr]

I think I need more context. Do you only have FAANG names on your resume? How many jobs have you held in your career? Do you have a lot of experience interviewing? Are you applying for jobs in a different area/level? (Management or higher seniority) Are you hoping to jump to a radically different org? (FAANG -> startup)

I’ve been a hiring developer for a lot of my career and with more context I might be able to give you pointers.

[throwaway_sp11]

To answer your questions:

1. Not only FAANG, I was a first eng hire at a startup, did some consulting work, etc.

2. It's 5 positions excluding internships.

3. I'd say I have some experience, I did competitive programming back in the day and the usual LC-style questions are not a big problem for me. I used to land jobs without doing any prep at all. Although I'm sure I've gotten a bit rusty.

4. I applied to some higher seniority jobs, but I'd say that's not the majority.

5. A startup would be great, I love wearing many hats, but I've been applying to what I considered mid-level companies with a larger engineering workforce, processes in place, etc.

Thanks!

[hardware2win]

>It's 5 positions excluding internships.

Do I get this right?

5 jobs over 7-8 years?

In my opinion this is very bad

How you can have strong experience if you rarely go thru whole software development lifecycle unless projects are small?

This is genuine question

If project takes a year to develop and you leave a few months later, then how do you know implications of your design??

[throwaway_sp11]

Ok, that is truly useful feedback. I didn't consider it like that.

My current role is 3.5 years. 1.5 years was a startup, start-to-finish. In the end it failed, so it's not like I left voluntarily. Before that I was a student so I picked up junior and project-based jobs to finance myself.

[jasonlotito]

So, you are selling this wrong. You didn't have 5 jobs over 8 years. You had 3 jobs. Your current role, a startup, and when you were a student, you did "contract work." Lump them together. Contract work can be explained. 5 jobs in 8 years is sus.

Now, with 1.5 years at a startup that didn't go anywhere, fine, but people are going to see this as your first job out of school.

If FAANG isn't your current job, that means it was during our "contract work" period, which is gonna be meh at best. Spending 8 months in a junior role at a FAANG tells me 1) that you interview well or that you have connections in some way (neither of which are impressive) and 2) you aren't working there now.

FAANG alone gets your resume a second look. FAANG likes to play up the "you'll have us on your resume" and sure, it might impress some people, but it's also just like any other job.

My frank opinion? With what you've posted? You are still likely junior dev/dev. Apply to a lot of places. Best chance? Make connections with people. I hate to say it, but knowing people is still the best way to get in. Maybe reach out to those FAANG contacts you should still have.

[throwaway_sp11]

Thank you for the suggestions and the reality check. It all makes sense.

I think my original post was misleading, but I can't edit it anymore. I currently work at FAANG, 3.5 years there, mid-level but expecting a senior promo soon.

[clcaev]

Consider listing 2 jobs then, over 5 years of professional experience. If you think it's actually relevant, include college experience under the education section or another grouping that includes open source works, community volunteering, etc.

[Scubabear68]

Just based in your initial post and your replies here, putting on my hiring manager hat, you have me a bit confused (and that is not good).

For me at least, I want to see work experience first (post-college), then educational experience, then projects, open source, part time stuff. The progression is full time pro work, school, and “other”.

Your answers appear to be conflating full time work with school and projects and maybe open source. It makes it very difficult to get a handle on your “true” background.

You can deviate from that pattern, but you have to be very clear about it. Because as a hiring manager, if it’s clear we are starting on a good foot and building trust. If it’s not clear, I worry about communications skills, and maybe I worry you are trying to promote a side project as a full time job. Trust wanes a little.

Another example of that is single person consulting to various companies. Some people are clear about this on their CVs, and list the roles and companies they consulted to. Very clear, and short tenures are not a problem because that’s the nature of the beast (as long as you’ve had a perm job somewhere and shown some stability).

I have seen others with similar backgrounds list themselves as CEO of XYZ LLC and paint themselves as a C suite exec, and you dig and single it’s a sole proprietorship out of Kentucky (or whatever). Not good, I lose trust in the candidate (side note: LinkedIn kind of sucks at showing this clearly).

CV’s are very interesting because you do want to sell and market yourself, but at the same time you do want to steer clear of dark patterns that go over the line from selling yourself to over inflating your role too far.

Always put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager truly trying to understand your career and abilities, market yourself well but be accurate and clear.

[throwaway_sp11]

Thank you for the feedback. I regret wording my OP that way, but I can't edit it anymore.

It makes a lot of sense to split it up like that. My early experience (throughout college) was some full-time roles (that I quit e.g. to accept a FAANG internship, which I think I would be foolish not to), some project-based work, and I list all of that as regular work experience. It's clear to me now that this causes some confusion.

I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me as someone who is on the other side of the process, and I'll incorporate this knowledge in my resume (which, it looks like, I need to fully rework).

[Scubabear68]

Happy to help! Yeah, the point is it not all about the code, but also how you work in professional corporate environment and how productive you will be in that environment. That is why college and projects are separated out.

[tomrod]

Project-based roles aren't jobs, typically, they're freelance or consulting.

I had three "roles" during graduate school that I jointly put on as "independent contractor" for awhile. It barely had relevance afterwards and certainly by a year in my field it was not really worth mentioning.

[lotsoweiners]

That sounds to me like you have 5 years professional experience since I’m not sure I’d count side jobs/projects while you were in school.

[astura]

That's only 2 jobs over five years.

>Before that I was a student so I picked up junior and project-based jobs to finance myself.

If you think this is relevant (I review resumes and I don't, fwiw) list them all under one "independent contractor" umbrella.

This is why I said we can't give you useful feedback without seeing your resume.

[ac2u]

best to file that under one contiguous period titled "Contracting" or "Freelancing". On your resume you can go into detail, but I wouldn't list them all as separate positions.

The resume game is sometimes a matter of the same information framed in the right way.

[gymbeaux]

I have 8 YoE and have worked at 4 places (excluding an internship), 5 if you count a longer-term moonlighting role. We'll just say 4. You'd probably still find this to be "bad", it's about 2 years per role. I would say though that I am often poached (e.g. I'm not actively looking but someone wants me bad enough to pay me a lot more than I am currently making). The moonlighting thing was kind of a poach. They wanted to hire me full-time but then COVID hit.. but I had already resigned from my current job in anticipation (I wanted a break between the two roles). My current job was a poach. I was poached from my internship-turned job. I don't go looking for a new job typically, but what am I supposed to do when someone offers me a 30-50% pay bump? Say no because that might make it harder for me to find a job down the line? That's kind of a paradox, no? If I refuse the guaranteed higher-paying role, I may still not get a particular role down the line, perhaps for a reason other than my "job hopping".

I agree that job-hopping is a YELLOW flag that interviewers should prod on a bit, but ultimately the reason that I "job hop" is that whoever my current employer is, can't remotely compete with this unsolicited job offer I have received.

More details for anyone curious:

When I was a sophomore in college, a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn asking if I was interested in an internship at a startup. I accepted because I needed the money to pay for college, and internships = good yadda yadda. Paid me $14.50/hour and I was full-time in the summer, part-time (20 hours) during school.

In that fall semester, after being at this startup for around 8 months, I gave a presentation for a class, where the class broke up into teams and each worked with a local company for a web-related project. The day my team presented happened to also be the day the Allstate team presented, so people from Allstate were in the audience during my presentation. They were impressed and offered me a job basically on the spot. I resisted, partially feeling guilty about leaving the internship that gave me a chance and kicked off my career. Ultimately though, the startup failed to deliver on promises of one-on-one mentorship and getting to work in certain technologies like ElasticSearch, which at the time was the "new hotness". The pay, which was $16/hour now, was competitive (at the time), and I figured if I asked Allstate for a stupid amount of money, they would say "no" and I could make myself feel a little better about "declining" a role that promised a fast-track to leadership/management, which was something I was interested in at the time. So I met with the VP-level guy at Allstate who had seen my presentation, and I asked for $25/hour. Surprisingly, he said yes, and so as uncomfortable as it was, I gave my notice at the startup. There were around 9 of us at the time, and the other two devs were upset, really almost angry with me, and they were shitting on Allstate, saying how I wouldn't grow as much there as I would here, etc (they were wrong).

So I'm at Allstate working under this VP who saw my presentation, and I'm spending a couple hours each week one-on-one with various devs in the company, getting all this personalized attention and education, and it's great. By the summertime, I am working 4 days/week remote. The devs got to work from home. I forget if the BAs and QAs and PM could. I don't think so... Anyway, we would just come in on Wednesdays, that was the designated "meeting day" where sprints would start and end, so we'd get the retro and planning out of the way. Things are going pretty well, until my team completes the project we were created to complete. The team I end up on after that is pretty toxic, and there was a guy who was jealous that a 20-year-old college student was making waves (a lot of people were jealous of me, understandably- but this guy took it to another level). This one guy, I would find out, is a sociopath (or a psychopath). It was only after I left (to get away from him) that the company realized he's bad news and got rid of him. He lied compulsively, and sold himself as this unicorn cowboy that could do anything, but he ended up failing miserably as a dev lead. He bashed me behind my back to management and anyone who would listen, so he could get the dev lead role I was supposed to get, only to completely blunder it. Absolute ass.

Anyway, so I had to go out interviewing to get away from this guy and this team, and I ended up at actually a really nice place that was on the tail-end of its "startup" phase. I got a huge salary bump, a title bump, and got to work in more cutting-edge stuff than what Allstate was about. There was a lot of free food and such too, of course. After about a year and a half at this company, this startup founder reached out to me on LinkedIn and wanted to talk about working with me on a moonlighting basis. I said sure (I love networking) and I did some 1099 work for him for a few months. They started asking about whether I wanted to join them full-time after a couple of months of that, and I indicated I was open to it, but I was just given more responsibility at my current job and I wasn't sure I wanted to leave. They pushed, and again I did my "give them a large comp figure" thing... and again, they accepted. Nothing was written in stone, but I was having a great time with the stuff I was building for this startup, and I loved the people, the office location, the product idea itself. It seemed like a perfect fit. So I quit my day-job, expecting to take about a month off in between to reset and relax. That's when COVID broke out in the US, and the startup was having a harder time getting funding and getting clients, so I ended up unemployed for a couple of months while the world figured out how serious COVID was, and then I interviewed and got a job at a random no-name company, again making a lot more than I was in my previous job.

This company made all manner of promises related to moving from waterfall to agile, implementing Apple's release cycle (one big release per year, et. al.), doubling the size of the dev team, moving to Azure and being able to immerse in that... most of it did not come to fruition and the bits that did, did so much later than originally promised. This company was by far the worst-run software shop I have ever heard of or worked at. It was a sweatshop, and there was never any time to breathe, much less learn new things on the job. This was my shortest tenure at exactly 1 year. I wouldn't necessarily have left at that point, though, except that I got an unsolicited message from another recruiter on LinkedIn about a very unique-sounding role on an R&D team at a larger company.

I interviewed, got the job, and I've been at this company since (going on 2 years). What has me looking NOW is the company was hacked/infected with malware 3 times last year, and so the CIO is "overcompensating" with measures that really only serve to make our jobs harder. For example, we must log back in to things like the AWS console several times per day because the timeout is so low. So I'll be in the middle of something, and suddenly get kicked out of AWS and have to go MFA back in and refresh all my AWS tabs because they all pop up with the "you have been signed out" message. Also, accounts that are inactive for something like 1 week are automatically deactivated, so anyone who goes on any real vacation comes back to... bullshit. There is apparently no provision for saying "hey I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, do not deactivate my account). It's incredibly dumb, and I know that most companies won't put me through stuff like that... so I am looking again, casually, but... I know in the long-term all these "security measures" will kill my morale.

So I guess from my perspective... either I am incredibly unlucky, or y'all just suck it up and stay in shitty situations for one reason or another, perhaps in-part because you are afraid of how it will look on your resume. I dunno man. Life's too short, I think. Yeah I have had a couple of companies poke me about the short tenure average, but they were all companies I did not want to work for anyway (really it was that they were people I did not want to work for).

[stcroixx]

5 positions in 7-8 years would be a red flag for me. I wouldn't want to invest in someone who isn't likely to stick around for more than 1.5 years. I think it typically takes at least that long to start to understand the business and be effective in your role.

[rogerkirkness]

Assuming some are obviously capped length internships it is not a big deal. But if they are 5 full time jobs my first question in the interview would be 'what are you looking for that you haven't found yet?'

[astura]

They said

>It's 5 positions excluding internships

So, no, some aren't "obviously capped length internships."

[jasonlotito]

The problem is, 3.5 years at the current place, 1.5 years at a failed startup, which leaves 3 jobs for the remaining 3 years (none of which they say are 1 year). And they don't mention that FAANG is where they are currently at, and obviously it's not the 1.5 year job, which means it's stuck in the 6 jobs over 3 year area. So, it's a sub-1 year FAANG role. =/

[throwaway_sp11]

Sorry, I think I worded my initial post badly. 3.5 years is at FAANG, that's my current role. I'm close to a senior promo. Before that, failed startup, and before that, shorter stints as a student. I've already been made aware in this thread that this history needs to be sold in a much, much better way.

[jimbo9991]

It's possible that the short tenure is holding you back from the companies with a larger engineering workforce, or from higher level roles. To be honest, it's unusual in my experience to be mid 20s with 5 non internship positions on your resume. I recognize this is not fair in many cases, especially if many of them are startups and whatnot. I would try extra hard to emphasize that (not too on the nose) on your resume.

I know the meme on HackerNews and in tech is to always be job hopping / once a year is fine, but in my experience that isn't as normal as internet people make it seem. People who never did the startup circuit are not going to understand so you need to help them.

[throwbadubadu]

> once a year is fine

Really? Agreed, full red flag and hands off those guys, everytime we hired such a person it ended badly, and they left or had to leave after another year ;) Gaind nothing, usually negative work (though it is unfair to generalize, but why take the risk if there are better candidates).

Even two years, and a fine&competent person, cost of onboarding to everything is usually just too high.

[throwaway_sp11]

I understand. This is something that hasn't crossed my mind, but is a great point. I'll try to rework my resume according to that. I provided some context on the number of positions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34610342

[nostromo123]

On the contrary, in my experience startups are even more wary of job hoppers, because the cost of finding people and onboarding is too high.

At my company, we are spending months searching for people, so we are definitely not hiring anyone who will leave after 1-2 years.

[janetacarr]

People here say your experience is a red flag (5 positions), but honestly I don’t think it is. That would never bother me.

I suspect what’s happening is, your resume looks great to recruiters/HR/manager, so you get the initial call(s), but somewhere through the process things get hairy. You get talking to engineers and they’re: impressed with your experience, but can’t afford you; lost by your experience because you’re talking from experience using in-house FAANG tools and processes; intimated by you; put off by some kind of interpersonal quirk like not asking enough questions or the right ones.

The tough thing about interviewing is it’s basically a tough sales call, and it’s administered to people with little sales experience. Here’s a quick tip: ask questions about what problems they’re facing right now, and tell them how you can solve those problems for them.

[throwaway_sp11]

My problem is that I don't even get the initial calls.

[astura]

>7-8 years of professional experience

>It's 5 positions excluding internships

Five jobs in seven years is likely why you aren't getting callbacks.

[crispyambulance]

You need to get a pro (or skilled and trusted mentor) to examine your resume and how you are communicating. Right off the bat, saying you are in your mid-20's with "8 years of experience" sounds not quite right-- like you're stretching a bit. You absolutely might not be, but that's how it comes off.

Big traditional companies frown on too many 1-yearish stints. The first couple of jobs, sure that's OK, but 5 in a row is a red-flag for many. They will wonder if you're just going to be there for a year and then vanish.

[throwaway_sp11]

I didn't see it that way, but the consensus in this thread is that I'm absolutely stretching. Which is very good to know and something actionable to fix. My roles have been getting longer with time, the short stints were when I was a student, e.g. I quit at a job so I could accept a big name internship, which was an opportunity I couldn't miss.

[rigelbm]

That means 1y6m per job? I know it might not mean anything relevant, but it might look like job hopping for the hiring companies. Also, market is pretty tough right now, and flooded with experienced people from big tech. Good luck on your job search!

[ajoseps]

just my 2 cents, I also have had 5 jobs around the same amount of time, non-FAANG but a diff industry. For me personally, 3 of those jobs were 2-3 years, and the other 2 were short stints at place that were a bad fit. I still get interviews and callbacks and general interest. I only know of one place that was not interested due to the short tenure at some places. It probably also helps that I moved cities to explain some of these hops. Basically I don't think this is such a hard and fast rule that short tenure == no callbacks.

[wendyshu]

Why did you switch jobs so often?

[throwaway_sp11]

I tried to give some context in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34610342

[JohnFen]

It's a pretty serious red flag. You should address and explain it in your cover letter.