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‘I’m proud of being a job hopper’: Seattle engineer’s post about company loyalty goes viral
(www.geekwire.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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"Having hired over 500 engineers personally in my career, if your resume came across my list, I would definitely pass."
Heh. A job seeker with three FANG companies on their resume does not give a shit if this random person would bin their resume.
Also, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally, in a single career isn't embarrassing.
Edit: "You think you suck at retention? Let me tell you how my year went!"
Your second paragraph tells you who you’re trying to find in your third paragraph: FAANG. Hiring 500 engineers and bragging about it something you can do when you’re just interested in shareholder value not customer experience.
I wouldn’t hire the guy in the article because I haven’t seen strong candidates come from FAANG and I’ve been very happy to lose the people I did to FAANG because they weren’t good engineers, they just knew how to leetcode and tunnel vision trivia.
Hasn't it changed from FAANG to MAANA?
Took me a while to figure this one out - FAANG to MAANA: Facebook --> Meta Apple Amazon Netflix Google --> Alphabet
I like Magma better (Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon). I know Google is under alphabet but it's still the main company. And Netflix isn't really cutting edge anymore, so I'd put Microsoft above them tech wise.
But most importantly, magma just sounds cool.
No, magma sounds hot.
Noodled!
Is that a thing? Am I a thing now?
We can't wait to find out!
Yeah most of the companies have a different name. That and personally not attractive to those of us in the industry.
IMO this is exactly what happens. the sort of person who acts this way isn't interested in becoming a better person and learning, they were in it for the diploma and the paycheck. this person stopped growing somewhere in high school.
It's not about having FANG in your job history. It's about switching companies three times in three years.
Where I work, we tend to lose money on new hires for an average of the first six months. That's time where not only the new engineer isn't very productive, but other engineers on the same team aren't very productive. They're sinking time into difficult conversations like "yeah you need to go back and redo the last two weeks of work — it's perfectly good code, but you used library X, and we decided four years ago to is use library Y because X has this rare edge case issue when combined with library Z which we also use...".
If someone only works with us for a year... we haven't made enough of a profit to cover the losses in the first half of their employment with us. If you want to work for us, we're not going to force you into a multi-year contract but we do want to be as confident as possible that you're going to stay here long term.
I wouldn't turn someone down for changing jobs three times in three years... but I would definitely ask what happened. And they better answer with something that will happen at my company.
It takes, what, 10 minutes to read a resume? 30 minutes interview someone? Lets round that up to one hour to cover discussing two promising candidates with a colleague... it's still only 500 hours of work. Or 12 weeks. Obviously you also need to read all the resumes and do interviews with people who were turned down but over an entire career working in HR for a large company... 500 people isn't that many at all.
500 can be a lot unless you're talking about one of these companies with 50,000 employees. If it's a smaller company, that means they're hiring over 4 new engineers a month over a 10 year period.
I'm 45 and have interviewed 500 people easily.
And how many were hired? I think people keep forgetting he said he hired that many. That means many times more interviews and maybe many times more than that in resumes read.
The real question is over what time period we're talking about. Too short and either you work at a huge company or can't retain employees. Could even be both.
You know I missed the "hired" part there. That does sound like someone who never actually gives any particular candidate any time or attention and rather looks for a series of arbitrary checkboxes to fill.
I doubt their career was only ten years long.
Sometime who's hired that many people would understand how job hunting works more. If you've worked at 3 FANG companies in 3 years, you're not quitting your job then interviewing, you're interviewing while you're employed and only quitting when you've secured the next job. Also, with a beefy resume like that, companies will be reaching out to you to poach you, and in those cases they can't complain about the work history because they're the ones trying to steal you away.
It certainly wouldn't be unreasonable for someone over a few decades who's built several teams at a number of different companies. That would be about one person a month over forty years.
You'd be surprised. Anecdotes what they are, I know a stunningly-capable dev with an ROTC accelerated BEng degree and a BSc+MSc chaser, an international resume including Snap, FB, Apple, A-I shops, instruction, leading teams; it's heroic.
Been out of work for months after a start-up imploded and ghosted the dev and didn't send the RoE nor apparently also tax withholdings and all manner of retroactively-shady stuff. Start-ups are risky, kids, even if the idea is amazeballs-great.
It happens in this job and this market. It's happened before, and it will happen again if we live or have lived long enough.
Consider a career that spans more than a year.
At my last dotcom, a vPBX 10 years ago, they were hiring 2 people a day for a year. Every damned day. The niche was huge and they were gutting the local market of sound and kernel and Kafka and mqtt people. Very minimal ditching, all new nerds.
So that's 700+ in just a year. And people work at their jobs for often far more than that: sometimes they make a career out of it, my dude.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."