Aline Lerner

There are two types of red flags that can come out of frequent job changes:

1. Several <1 year tenures - this person gets fired a lot

2. Exclusively 1-2 year tenures - This person is trying to jump around to maximize salary (and isn't able to convince their current employer to match/exceed an offer)

For #1 job history is usually not the only indication that this will be a problem. Depending on how many open positions you have they might make a screen, with the vast majority washing out there. "It was contract work" is usually a flag, and being at startups that went under is a mitigating factor.

#2 is somewhat more risky as a hiring manager - more expensive to interview because they are less likely to flame out early in the process, but then much more likely to not be able to agree on an acceptable offer. Overall these folks are still going to be net positive contributors over their tenure, but there is opportunity cost in missing out on hiring someone who would kick ass over 5+ years at your company. It's hard to definitively pin someone down as this category outside of 4+ jobs never going more than 2 years. If they are coming through a recruiter that's a flag, and if they have moved cities that's somewhat of a mitigating factor.

Seeing someone who stayed at the same company for 4+ years and got one or more promotions there is a big plus on resumes.

There is not a lot of research into any of this stuff AFAIK, so this is basically all just my opinion. What I have…

Sometimes its real hard going talking to recruiters, you routinely get eliminated because of job description to C.V. skills match, e.g. i would get told either i didn't get a job or wouldn't get put forward to a job because i'm not "an Agile" or "an Node.js" despite doing JavaScript for around 8 years or so now. Sometimes the non technical recruiters are infront of some really lucrative clients who don't have a good grasp on hiring either.

A technical recruiter i like is aline lerner she has a blog http://blog.alinelerner.com/posts/ and founded interviewing.io some really good data driven insights there e.g. spelling on a C.V. matters more than what school you went too believe it or not.

I also have my C.V. online and found its worked well for me using that as a portfolio http://leepenkman.appspot.com its open source can be forked on Github/self hosted.

When deciding to hire a developer, what i personally look for is passion (something that stands out e.g. personal projects, good grades, good sounding application/well researched) and a depth/breadth of experience rather than a specific industry/exact match skill set which id say you demonstrate, you didnt go to a CS uni so its good you have some things about algorithms on your blog.

For depth id ask more specific questions around some of that e.g. i noticed the recursion post fairly light so id perhaps check for depth and ask more about caching, stack overflow, removing recursion with stacks/memoizing, traversals

many…

As part of the market research for a previous startup, I talked with plenty of recruiters who would love for their to be a market for software talent agents. If you're curious why such a market doesn't exist, read Aline Lerner's article "Why talent agents for engineers don't exist":

http://blog.alinelerner.com/why-talent-agents-for-engineers-dont-exist/

tl;dr: Agents exist when it's hard to get a job. It is not hard to get a job in software right now. If your company mistreats you, you figure that out pretty quickly and move on to a company that doesn't mistreat you. There's no need to pay anyone to make that happen; in fact, you can get paid a significant amount more just by asking around.

You hear about stories of startup employees getting screwed because the software engineering labor market (particularly for startups) is expanding rapidly now, and so there are a large number of employees who have no experience in the industry. These people are easy prey for a good salesman who wants to make their sham company seem like one of the winning startups. But it takes only a couple months for most smart employees to catch on, and move to another job.

My first couple tech jobs were at startups where I was paid below market rate. The first one had some serious shenanigans going on when it went down in flames; the second had no shenanigans, it just wasn't going anywhere. But I left, and my compensation very quickly caught up with and then surpassed what I thought…

For the first question, Aline Lerner, leeny on HN and founder of interviewing.io, wrote an excellent blog post on this very topic: http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interviewers/

Regarding bad fits, I could go on about this all day long, but the two obvious ones I'll offer are this:

1) Assuming you're applying for a software engineering position, if they only ever ask you programming-related questions and don't try to gauge things like professionalism, hobbies, communication skills, how you deal under stress, etc, then they're missing the point. (Being able to program is the MINIMUM requirement for the job, after all.)

2) If the interview feels like an interrogation and not a conversation, that's bad. If they spend the entire interview asking questions and then give only enough time for 1-2 questions of your own, they wasted a lot of your time. Interviews go both ways: it's an opportunity for you to learn about them just as much as it's an opportunity for them to learn about you. You should spend half your time asking your own questions, imo.

These aren't deal-breakers, of course, but they're red flags. Enough red flags and you won't be a good fit.

Anyway, good luck.

I'm just one data point, but having done an MSCS (in person at UT Arlington) I agree - I have no reason to believe that I wouldn't still be in the same place now if I'd skipped it. I was fortunate that my then-employer paid for it, so it was no cost to me and I'm glad I did it, but I'm pretty sure that every job I've gotten since would have been available to me with just my Bachelor's degree. In fact, this recruiter: https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-a-m-s-in-computer-science-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/ insists that Master's degree holders are less competent than BS degree holders.

OTOH, UT Arlington is no Stanford, so maybe it's worth it if you can get into one of the top 10 or so programs in the country.

> In my experience, an MS degree has been one of the strongest indicators of poor technical interview performance.

> Whereas MS degrees used to be a means for departments to begin vetting future PhD students, I believe that the purpose has, in some ways, shifted to be a cash cow for the university in question.

> Part of the problem is that CS fundamentals instruction tends to happen in undergrad computer science courses.

> One tempting option is to try to get an MS from a top computer science school to legitimize yourself on paper. If you actually are passionate about programming, I would urge you not to do that

https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-a-m-s-in-computer-science-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/