Depends on the company you’re interviewing with and (IME) region you’re looking for work. In my 26 years since graduating university, I’ve had 13 jobs. So an average of 1.8 years per job. My longest was 6 years at Amazon (ironically enough considering they have such a high turnover) and my shortest was 3 weeks (I knew during the interview it wasn’t a good fit, but I was young and they threw a stupid amount of money at me).
Where I am now (Seattle area), it isn’t really seen as a that big of a red flag. I always had good reasons for leaving. Other than 2, I’ve tried to never burn bridges intentionally and was even a rebound employee at 1 place (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).
I grew up in the South and moved back there for a brief period of time. It was very hard to find work down there because they called me a “job hopper” (which I was/am). I was asked several times “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one.
That’s been my experience. I’m at a place now where I can see myself staying for awhile. I’m not curing cancer or doing machine learning or scaling things to gagillion requests per second. But I like the people, like my boss, and the problems are meaty enough to engage me during the day, but not so complicate that I work on them in my off hours.
> (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).
I'll offer a corollary: have already said everything you think before you quit. That way, there is nothing else to say during the exit interview anyway.
There are two reasons for saying what you think while you're still employed:
1. How will anything improve unless you voice your concerns? (Not saying they will when you do, just that they definitely won't when you don't.)
2. You are paid to think and then communicate your thoughts. If they only wanted your body, they could have bought a robot -- no, they're paying money for your brain too. Give it to them.
I agree with you. I generally don’t hold anything back in my 1:1, skip level 1:1, etc. But if you’ve communicated effectively, it makes no difference to rehash it to HR on the way out the door. HR, usually, doesn’t care.
And I’ve left positions where the company pivoted, and I didn’t agree with the pivot. Told the powers that be, but the pivot was done. No reason to dredge it up again.
> “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one.
As someone who has a number of short stints on his resume, I usually go with, "There's a big difference between ten years of experience, and one year of experience repeated ten times. I have experience with a wide variety of frameworks and architectures. I've done real work in both front-end and back-end codebases. I've worked in Windows environments and Linux environments. I've even done some DBA work. I can bring knowledge of a wide variety of best practices to bear on any problem that I'll encounter at this current role."
The other thing I've found is that the companies that make a really big deal about "job hopping" and "employee loyalty" aren't really ones that you want to work for anyway. They're paranoid about employee loyalty for a reason, and rather than look at their own management to see why employees are leaving after short stints at that firm, they blame the employees, usually with some absurd generalizations about "millenials" or "gen z".
That doesn't answer the question at all. You were asked "how do I know you won't leave in a short time frame?" and you answered the completely different question "what benefit (to you) have you got from having lots of jobs?". If anything, it suggests you view leaving companies after a short time as a positive thing you'd want to do again.
By the way, I don't agree that if a company would like employees that tend to stick around then that indicates some sort if weird cult-like behaviour. It's more like a recognition that productivity naturally is lower in the months after someone joins than after they've been there for a year or two. Choosing people that are able to stick at a job for a few years is just a sensible business decision. Admittedly it does have social benefits too i.e. there's a better work environment for everyone if you get to know other people over a period of time (in spite of some HN commenters' views that we're all robots that shouldn't care about interactions with coworkers). But, in my view, even that is reasonable justification.
You can also mention how companies encourage disloyalty by paying new starters significantly more than existing employees. I’ve seen great people working hard towards a promotion, putting in the hours, playing everything right - only to be passed over for a promotion due to management politics and a boss that was looking out more for herself than her team. Meanwhile, another employee simply just left and walked into another job with a £25k pay increase. As long as companies continue to be myopic with regards to salaries, it incentivises people to jump ship every couple of years.
Probably better off responding more along the lines of:
I bring a wide array of industry experience, that you'll benefit from. I'm hoping for a longer term engagement, but even if it's a shorter one, I typically leave them better than I found them.
In your own words, ofcourse.
P.S. I suspect your statement will get you rejected from companies that know they have the same problem but can't fix it. If you don't need a job, be as honest as you want, if you do, you're better off going with the positive spin.
Yup, this. We took temporary pay cuts last year, which was more or less understandable, business was down. But I did a couple of interview rounds and got offers that were 15-20% above my pre-cut salary. And people were shocked that I was leaving.
Usually say it with more tact, but it is along the lines of - “Yes. I’m a professional new guy. I’ve seen and worked on a lot of different types of technology, and I come up to speed quickly. I’m not afraid to ask ‘dumb’ questions when I can’t find what I’m looking for.”
Something along those lines. I lean into it. But as I said, it doesn’t come up too often in the PNW.
I mean, that’s cool, but you haven’t actually adressed the problem, which is that I’ll spend 3 months training you, only to have you quit after 9 more. That’s not really a good investment
His point is that it will only take a month to get him up to speed, not 3.
But I agree that a better answer would probably be something along the lines of "I have so much experience that I deliver in a year what the average guy would give you in 5; and if you're good to me, I might well stick around as much as I did at X", or something along those lines.
GP here, responding directly. I've been told by a ycombinator company that they want to see 2+ years at an engineering heavy company. I also just regret not making more conventional career choices that you don't have to struggle to explain during interviews. Far easier if you have an unbroken line of employment. But alas.
I like Hinge's blog: http://hingeirl.com/. It has some solid tips. Besides that, I haven't found anything else too useful and mostly learned by putting myself out there and making a ton of mistakes. That's not to say there might be some other useful material out there.
I'd be weary of taking advice from reddit or similar communities. Most people who frequent those forums and give advice tend to be plagued with relationship problems themselves.
Of course, dating in a Covid-19 world might be tricky, and it's not something I feel is worth the effort, though YMMV. (fwiw, I used to think the same about online dating, and I was completely wrong.)
Something that always bothered me when I read posts on Google's blogs: why is it that it's always authored by a PM? Why can't perhaps a senior engineer also write an announcement post occasionally?
Yes, the names of the engineers on the team are present in the acknowledgement section: but, this is a single line at the bottom of the post, whereas the name of the PM and the fact that he is the author is featured prominently below the title. This pattern is common across many product/OSS library announcements.
Sure, one could argue that the PM has a holistic view of the product or library being announced, and that developing this perspective is in fact their job. But surely a sufficiently senior engineer can (and often does) have an equally holistic, or perhaps even more insightful overview. At least sometimes. Even if this were not the case, why not acknowledge everyone's contributions at the same place in the article?
I think this is symptomatic of the ubiquitous class divide between the "suits" and "nerds" in the corporate world.
In my observation, it's mostly because engineers usually don't want to write this kind of articles which needs to be reviewed by multiple stakeholders. If they want to write its themselves, I believe it's possible and there's some instances as well.
Thank you! I believe AutoML has huge value and can be a new standard in ML. I would like to see the adoption of AutoML - that's why I'm open sourcing it. Otherwise, I would need a lot of money for marketing and sales to make it popular.
Before open sourcing I was looking at Metabase and Redash solutions, and I was very impressed with their business model - I would like to achieve something similar. The goal is to be ramen profitable.
I will offer hosted paid version (SaaS offer similar to redash) and I will offer paid white labeled embedded machine learning platform (similar to metabase). Plus paid support, paid feature requests, ML consulting. Does it make sense?
Do you know if there are any other markets other than the USA where a competent (but not necessarily celebrity-famous) dev can make 300-400k a year?
For many good devs, immigrating to the USA is close to impossible in these times. Would be nice to know if these kinds of salaries are attainable outside the states.
Plenty of those American companies hire remote developers. I spent several years working for them here in France and the UK, for market compensation as measured at the Bay Area companies being discussed here.
Some places will try to pay you less based on your location. You can't blame them for trying, but you don't have to accept their first offer, either. The market is really good now.
Would you be so kind as to look at my resume and give some feedback? I know I'm an internet stranger asking for your time - I'd understand if you don't want to do it, but I'll be very grateful if you did! :)
Looks great, even though its 2 pages long, since you have lots of experience. Top 1% on kaggle is seriously impressive though
I see a few grammatical errors, "i". The "Subnero" link is broken by the way, might want to point it to the correct spot. If you use google link, I would suggest doing analytics tracking to see how many times its clicked (this gives you a good indication fo how many people read your resume)
I imagine this is for datascience jobs, the things that stood out to me the most were
- youtube links to actual talks is very good
- 1% kaggle is really hard to get
- actual publications
otherwise it looks perfectly fine. Make sure the PDF is OCR readable, and make sure there is an accompaning .docx format as well
ah okay you made it in latex. I always run my PDF's through Adobe Acrobat Pro X for OCR recognition. CTRL+F some words on there to see if it works. You want to ensure if it is OCR because it's going to be scraped for content through HR processors. That's why I recommended .docx format as well, granted that also let's headhunters delete your email address.
Pandoc has a latex to pdf converter, I imagine this is what you used
Also, you might want to change the resume name a bit differently. You wrote down "shankar_resume_cto.pdf". You might not be applying to a CTO position and might be taken as a threat to someone's existing CTO position.
By the way, you should really link your kaggle profile on there if you really are in the top 1%. Gives recruiters no doubt that you are actually what you say you are.
Ah - thanks, its amazing how I tend to become "blind" to errors in my own writing!
Great point about the "cto" suffix! I once applied for a CTO position, and saved the tailored version of my resume at that time with a "cto" suffix. Since then I have been using modified versions of that resume, but I must get rid of the suffix now.
I held the top 1% rank in 2014. I'm not active on Kaggle anymore. They have since changed the way they calculate rankings, and you lose your rank if you don't stay active. As a result, while I still have my Kaggle profile, its now unranked. I figure its easier to explain this when asked, rather than link to a profile page that seems to contradict the claimed achievement.
