[HN Gopher] When Is Short Tenure a Red Flag?
___________________________________________________________________
When Is Short Tenure a Red Flag?
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 33 points
Date : 2022-10-23 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobian.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobian.org)
| Tade0 wrote:
| In the ten years that I've been in this industry, my application
| was rejected on grounds of tenure once - by GitLab.
|
| > If you want the people that you hire to stay, do it by building
| a great workplace and paying people well - not by finding staff
| who are too timid to leave bad situations.
|
| This is an important point. I quit one project after eight months
| and at least two people out of my 11-person team referred to this
| decision as a "luxury available to those who have savings".
|
| Plenty of people paint themselves into a corner like that.
| aaronrobinson wrote:
| It's fine as long as you don't have a history of short tenures
| because then you're the common factor.
| tptacek wrote:
| Jacob is smart and has been around the block a couple times, but
| I find this whole post kind of frustrating. Essentially what he's
| talking about is reading tea leaves out of peoples' resumes. I
| think that's a comprehensively flawed way of qualifying
| candidates.
|
| It's reasonable to be concerned about behavioral patterns in
| candidates. Some otherwise-qualified people will be behaviorally
| incompatible with the roles you have. Maybe they're hard to work
| with, or need too much or too little structure. To the extent
| you're concerned about stuff like this, you should probably just
| check references.
|
| Other than that, what are we talking about here? Hiring managers
| spend too much time looking at resumes already. It's possible to
| hire without looking at them at all; the last several companies
| I've worked for have done just that: just ask people to
| demonstrate that they can do the work the role requires, build a
| rubric to assess their performance, and hire the people that
| clear the bar.
|
| It wouldn't even occur to those teams (or my current team, I
| guess) to look for patterns and indicators like this, because
| they're just not making any decisions off of resumes to begin
| with. I've been in this business since 1995, and studiously
| avoiding resumes since around 2010. I have made more bad hiring
| decisions by carefully assessing resumes than I ever have by just
| asking people to demonstrate the work, and then taking the time
| to build a serious evaluation checklist for the work.
|
| If you're worried that people are habitually bad communicators,
| are disorganized, can't manage scope and are adrift without
| structure, can't stop talking and just deliver some practical
| unit of work, won't ask questions or collaborate: you can assess
| for all of these things!
|
| If you're worried that people are ladder-climbers, or aren't here
| to do the work, you can set expectations.
|
| And if you're worried that candidates aren't going to be loyal
| and are going to jump ship when presented with a funner job with
| higher comp at a more promising company, well, that's life in the
| Professional Golfer's Association, I guess.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Excellent article. Thank you for this.
| code_runner wrote:
| I had semi-short tenure at my last few jobs... a couple of
| startups and a couple of genuinely awful places to work... no
| real pushback during the interview process and think I landed
| somewhere GREAT.
|
| average tenure at last 4 jobs or about 18 months?
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| If I run into an asshole once that's normal. If I run into
| assholes all day, I'm the asshole.
|
| It's perfectly normal to have a few positions with short stints
| and as long as there's a decent story it shouldn't be a big deal.
| But if there's a long string of 3-6 month positions and there's
| not something clear (specialized consultant) then that's a
| warning sign.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I once had an interview where the guy genuinely complained about
| me skipping around jobs. My average tenure was four years.
| jstx1 wrote:
| It's a good article, thanks for sharing. (I'm just now
| discovering the author)
| sokoloff wrote:
| I mostly agree with the article. For me, as long as I see one job
| where you saw something through and got a promotion in it, I will
| overlook several short stints at other places. (I'm just trying
| to avoid the "talks big, works tiny" pattern.)
| gumby wrote:
| If you have only one short stint job, just leave it off. If
| anyone even notices and asks, you can say, "yeah, seemed like a
| good idea to take some time off and not get burned out." Maybe
| not your idea to take the time off, but in ay case...
| charles_f wrote:
| Interestingly you don't see lots of article on the converse, but
| I'm getting thrown off by long tenures as well.
|
| I've seen a lot of issues with people staying 10-15y in the same
| job People get set in their ways, lack the diversity of
| experience that helps be creative in finding solutions,
| considering certain issues as insurmountable and a fact of life.
| In my current job I work with a few people who have been around
| forever pretty clearly because they are bad and failed to find
| something else. It might be generalizing a bit and certainly
| staying 15y in a job doesn't mean the person is bad, but it
| certainly brings some questions as well.
|
| We don't talk a lot about that, but I see long tenures as an anti
| pattern.
| extragood wrote:
| This article hits on some very good points.
|
| I'd like to add another from the perspective of the hiring
| manager, now that I've had a few years experience in that role.
|
| It's been my experience that people generally produce their best
| work after the first year. It takes a while to get to know any
| business: what its strengths and weaknesses are, and it's only
| with that understanding that someone can identify areas to make
| meaningful contributions.
|
| If someone's tenure is consistently around their one year mark,
| it's unlikely that they've really ever expressed their full
| potential in a professional setting. They leave before things get
| really good.
|
| Hiring is an investment - less what the candidate can do today,
| but what they can contribute over a more substantial period,
| given the right encouragement.
| godelski wrote:
| > Hiring is an investment
|
| I think this is why many employees are frustrated when they
| find out that new hires get paid substantially more than them.
| Which encourages jumping ship, to get a similar wage bump. I've
| said this before, I don't understand why wage renormalization
| isn't a standard practice and why it is considered
| controversial. When investing you don't just buy investments
| and then when they are working out and have good future
| potential buy new riskier investments for higher premiums. You
| should generally continue to add to what has been working. You
| should have a balanced profile too. You do need some risk (new
| hires) but you shouldn't spend all your money on new risky
| things when what's been working continues too. And just like
| you want to rebalance your profile frequently, to ensure you're
| not too leveraged, you too need to renormalize wages. People
| are frustrated because management is not in fact treating
| hiring like an investment.
| YZF wrote:
| Where I work we would generally pay the new hire and the
| existing employee about the same. I.e. there's no such thing
| as a new hire gets paid more than the existing employee of a
| similar "level". It's more likely to be the opposite. That
| said you usually aren't going to be able to hire someone away
| from their current job by offering them less.
|
| The person jumping ship every year to get small raise is
| eventually going to run into the problem of not having
| accomplished anything worthwhile in their career. It's
| arguably better early on in your career to work for less but
| do things that are more interesting and have better learning
| opportunities. One might argue it's always a better choice.
|
| As a manager I would like people to stay, and they mostly do,
| and I am going to try my darnedest to make sure they are
| compensated well for their contribution (including the fact
| that they are more effective by knowing the code base and the
| product). It is pretty tricky though with the competition
| constantly trying to recruit way from you and their deep
| pockets, ensuring people don't burn out or get bored etc.
| Lots of factors I can't control.
| tester756 wrote:
| "first year" it definitely varies by company, projects and
| experience level.
| davesque wrote:
| Am I the only one that feels like jobs that are good enough to
| warrant a 2-3 year tenure are actually rare?
|
| I'd say tenures in the 1-2 year range should be considered
| normal. However, I agree that less than a year feels short. But
| honestly, that sort of implies that the average job is worth
| sticking around for a year or longer. Putting it that way, even
| that claim seems a bit shaky.
|
| In reality, I think good leaders and teams are pretty unusual.
| Most people are just good at dealing with bad ones or living in
| denial of them.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I'm on year 15 with most colleagues in the 5-15 range, some
| approaching 20. I wouldn't say someone can't contribute at all
| initially, but I'd say the first year I expect any new hire to
| be almost net negative (in the sense that while their output is
| good, it's often with a lot of support that takes time from
| more senior colleagues).
|
| If I was suspecting someone wouldn't stay say 3 years, I'd
| definitely not hire them at all.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| You're looking at this backwards. Understandably so, but still
| backwards.
|
| There's no platonic "considered normal" there's employee and
| employer incentives and how they play out in combination.
|
| If there's a high probability that you are going to think my
| team is bad and not worth sticking around for, why would I want
| to hire you?
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| I don't understand how many people can have an impact over a
| 1-2 year period at a company. That's not nearly enough time to
| build relationships or see the long term results of your work
| saagarjha wrote:
| Depends on what your work is. There's a lot of stuff you can
| ship on a short timescale with tons of "impact". You can't
| directly see the results of long-term plans, but you can
| definitely lay the groundwork and watch people execute on it
| from outside the company.
| MDTHLN wrote:
| This almost certainly depends on the size of the company.
|
| Two years is plenty of time to make an impact at a startup.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Impact? I've had projects get cancelled when I was less than
| six months in. Often there's no space for impact.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| If you hire a John Carmack or Jeff Dean (or equivalent) and
| they can't make a difference in your company within 2 years,
| your culture is broken and needs to be fixed first.
| yongjik wrote:
| John Carmack founded id Software in 1991 and stayed until
| 2013. Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is still there.
| These are not the kind of people we talk about when one
| asks "Is two year too short to be a tenure?"
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| 99.9+% of devs don't come close to the skill of those two
| davesque wrote:
| I think you're looking at things backwards. The questions you
| should be asking are how likely is it that any employee who
| joins a random new company feels as though they can have an
| impact on that company and how likely is it that they'll be
| compensated at market rates over a period longer than a year?
| I'd say the chances are generally pretty low. Therefore, a
| short tenure should be the average case for a rational
| employee. Don't kill the collective messenger.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > Therefore, a short tenure should be the average case for
| a rational employee.
|
| Is rational the same as "maximizing career income"?
|
| I just feel it's hard to give up domain knowledge in one
| thing (say insurance or flight scheduling or whatever) that
| you aggregate, to be a complete rookie in some other
| business.
|
| Software skills are the easy bit. It's the domain knowledge
| that takes time.
|
| Rational employees want to feel good at their job,
| intellectually challenged, and appreciated for what they
| do. That involves financial compensation but I think it's
| far from the major driver.
|
| Perhaps there are two major categories of devs: those that
| have broadly applicable skills (say web development) but no
| really deep domain knowledge or interest. They can write
| crud for insurance year 1 and crud for food delivery year 2
| and continue that way forever while making good salary
| jumps each year. To those it seems almost like a bad idea
| to grow too fond of the details of insurance, as it would
| hinder their careers.
|
| On the other end of the spectrum you have devs that
| aggregate lots of domain knowledge in some narrower field.
| They might switch jobs every 10 years but when they do they
| almost have to go to a competitor in the same industry
| because otherwise they throw away too much domain
| knowledge. The only way they can capitalize is by selling
| that knowledge.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| You don't build relationships, you solve the problem you were
| hired to fix.
|
| Companies don't hire employees to be a preschool playpen for
| adults. They hire them to do work.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| I don't mean friendships, I mean working relationships like
| "who is a specialist in X", "who knows what work is coming
| down the pipe", etc.
| klipt wrote:
| At least at big companies, fixing problems often requires
| good cross team relationships.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Great, something for management to do.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Sometimes the hardest problems to fix involve building
| relationships first.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Sounds like the management should be fired and replaced
| with people who are more interested in doing things
| instead of protecting territory.
| tonightstoast wrote:
| At the web dev startups I have worked at I was able to hit
| the ground running (okay, maybe like 2 weeks of training). If
| you know the UI & server frameworks most companies aren't
| doing anything complicated from a business perspective. Half
| of them are crud with layers
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think this is the key here: anything that's crud with
| layers is the same job. Of course you can be productive
| within a year if what you are doing is literally the _same
| job_.
|
| Sadly this is too common. But what about proper changes of
| job? Going from embedded to game dev to web to HFT to Ai?
| Do people not do this kind of switch at all when they say
| "I just work 1-2 year stints"? That sounds like a pretty
| dreadful career to swap one crud gig for another, never
| really knowing a domain deeply.
| tester756 wrote:
| >But what about proper changes of job?
|
| while I did switch like the ones you mentioned
|
| then I don't agree with you calling it "proper"
|
| I'd call it: making yours life harder due to curiosity.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I guess. But on the other hand I guess in the last decade
| of web dev just trying to stay afloat in the sea (or tire
| fire, depending on your perspective) of web dev
| frameworks and tooling is a full time job and career.
|
| To some that's probably also something that's
| intellectually satisfying.
| code_runner wrote:
| They all think what they're doing is magic and impactful
| but "crud with layers" is IT
| Gigachad wrote:
| I do Rails/React work and everything is becoming more or less
| the same thing with the same problems to work on regardless
| of the job so I'm able to hit the ground running almost
| immediately.
| [deleted]
| sjfidsfkds wrote:
| I don't get it. What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not
| 2-3 years? What happens at 2 years that makes you want to do
| the job before and not want to do it after?
|
| If you never like your job I don't think switching every 2
| years helps. And if you are in it for the paycheck, 4 is
| usually optimal.
|
| Personally, I found whether I'm having a good time depends on
| the team and the project. And usually one or the other changes
| periodically.
| davesque wrote:
| For me, it's the fact that roughly 1 year seems to be the
| average cutoff point for how long I can tolerate doing
| something that feels meaningless to me and otherwise doesn't
| bring me any financial advantage that would allow me to duck
| out of the game altogether.
| gumby wrote:
| Perhaps you're choosing the wrong jobs, as suggested by the
| article?
| microtherion wrote:
| Have you considered the possibility that with a 1-2 year
| time horizon, you're more or less setting yourself up for
| exactly the series of meaningless jobs with limited
| financial upside that you're seeing as the _reason_ for
| your time horizon?
| bsder wrote:
| > What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not 2-3 years?
|
| A 4% raise.
|
| Management are idiots and will only give out small single
| digit percentage point raises while jumping companies will
| result in 20+% raises. The longer you stay with a company the
| further your salary falls behind.
|
| This financial dictate means that your _max_ tenure at a
| company should be 5 years--and definitely not even that long
| without a _REALLY_ good reason.
| ttymck wrote:
| Is it possible that, given the information your employer
| has, they can determine you are worth no more than a 4%
| raise? While, on the other hand, the prospective new
| employer does not have the same information (the experience
| of actually being your employer) and risks a 20% premium?
| In the end, maybe the market is actually operating
| efficiently?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| In a typical company, raises are budgeted based on a
| company-wide assessment of how much people "should" get.
| So even if your manager is sure you're worth 20% more,
| you simply can't get a 20% raise without some exceptional
| justification.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| How exactly are you measuring impact such that you think
| you have it characterized with 4% error bars?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Lots of tech companies give a stock grant that vests over 4
| years. Then each year an additional "refresher" grant that
| also vests over 4 years. So your comp increases each year
| because of the stacking grants (a lot better than 4%) then
| drops a lot after year 4 when the initial grant expires.
|
| Obviously many circumstances can change the equation.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| It's also pretty frequent at larger companies that new
| hires (even those at a level lower) will get higher comp
| than tenured employees.
|
| Many of these same companies also have very difficult promo
| processes, requiring you to effectively "got to trial" and
| defend why you should be promoted.
|
| This exact scenario has occurred with multiple co-workers
| of mine (most have now left, the rest are actively
| interviewing:
|
| If, after the months of preparation for promo you "got to
| trial" and do so successfully, you may find a newly hired,
| less experienced, lower leveled co-worker with no
| experience with any of the internal processes or tooling
| makes 25% more than you.
|
| When companies behave this way, what's the incentive to
| stick around?
| michaelt wrote:
| It depends what your goal is - there are some contributions you
| can make at an employer on day 1. There are other contributions
| that demand deeper understanding of more things.
|
| If you're joining the best self-driving-car company because you
| want to see self-driving cars halve road deaths in the United
| States - you're not going to achieve that in 1-2 years :)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-23 23:01 UTC)