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by throwboatyface 1227 days ago
Even with considerable savings, it's easy to get "I can take a break" money, but it's very hard to get "fuck you" money. With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry, there's other pressures to stay at shitty employers and stay burnt out because you're risking your future employability.

Personally I'm looking to go part-time and have better work life balance because at most places 50% of your time is spent on bullshit anyways.

4 comments

> With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry

Is there a stigma again either of these? In my experience, the stigma against changing jobs is really only if you change jobs a LOT, to the point where the employer is worried your employment won't be worth the investment.

And I've taken breaks between jobs with no problems + don't really see it as an issue when I see it on resume in most cases.

> With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry,

Where is the stigma against changing jobs? From everything I've seen, job-hopping every 18 months seems to be the default in the last couple decades, at least for software developers. I personally think that's suboptimal duration for everything except maximizing TC (costing the company institutional knowledge, and costing the employee learning from seeing both cause and effect in lifecycles), but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority on that.

Maybe VC throwing the brakes on growth theatre will mean that startups will return to business fundamentals, and rethink what engineering practices work for that.

There has long been a stigma in tech hiring against candidate not currently employed. Maybe partly due to the job-hopping convention ("if you're not doing that, you must be stupid"), but I think this particular stigma predated techbros, for a variety of reasons.

(Though, noteworthy contrary data point: before leaving one place, I did ask a recruiter at my favorite FAANG, who assured me that their process doesn't penalize candidates for not currently being employed. They answered as if that was an FAQ and the company had a policy about that. At least regarding whether an offer is made, at that particular company; I imagine that could affect compensation package.)

Maybe the recent rash of big tech layoffs relaxes that particular stigma for everyone in tech.

As a hiring manager, I I only welcome taking breaks between jobs. This way I can be sure the new employee will come onboard full of energy and salf-motivated.
What stigma is there against taking breaks? I have long gaps between every single job on my resume, it's never been an issue.