Yet another “hop” invites the gnawing question that you weren’t thorough enough in your vetting of a potential employer. This can be especially true for the first few changes. However, in a good job market, I never saw my first few jobs as failures by any stretch. I simply outgrew the environment quickly. I'd like to believe that I gave enormous value in return for the opportunity afforded.
There ought to be a good-faith effort from both the employer and prospective employee to accurately represent themselves. Amazingly this isn't always the case with employers. The older I get, the more up front I find I need to be. I don't try as hard to impress. I'm interested in the work. Restarting a job search shortly after arrival is a terrible feeling. I'm not magnificent enough to afford an ego that naturally looks for the next job just after signing on. I consciously try to minimize the risk of a wrong match so I don't have to look for the next job but instead dive into the work wholeheartedly.
For later hops much the onus may lie with the hiring company in their candidate evaluation processes. They need to size you up correctly and display themselves correctly. If they present the wrong face, the engineer figures it out too late and may not consider himself bound to stay. I have gotten the sense at least once that a company was very happy they had gotten a good deal, more than they needed. Unfortunately the work they had turned out to be well below what I could and wanted to do. I keep wondering what questions I should have asked in the interviews that would have flushed this out before accepting. I got close to the truth, but not enough. It cost me months of growth and I left when an opportunity presented itself. Don't hire overkill.
Every company wants to believe they offer a rewarding and challenging environment. Naturally, we all want to present our best face, interviewer and interviewee. "Work hard, play hard" was repeated as a mantra in more than one interview. This is a warning sign for me: that this company wants to paint pictures of business environments of the past, good feelings, close culture, the workplace as your most exciting home. But these are not the same companies nor are these applicants and the market the same. No one wants to admit their work is normally a dull, tedious job that won’t engage the same engineers who recently left the same at their last company.
It's relative. Real work is sometimes, often tedious, but there will always be someone who actually wants to do it for what you're offering. Don't paint too-rosy pictures to those who can do the work. Find those people who want to grow into that work instead. When I was more junior, I leaped into a number of positions that I wouldn't touch now. Because it meant opportunity more than pay.
I’m getting better trusting my gut, and have experienced some truly awful interviews along with the good ones, but you only have a number of options in a given job search and without obvious red flags you must finally proceed with the assumption that the most attractive company represented itself and the work accurately.
There ought to be a good-faith effort from both the employer and prospective employee to accurately represent themselves. Amazingly this isn't always the case with employers. The older I get, the more up front I find I need to be. I don't try as hard to impress. I'm interested in the work. Restarting a job search shortly after arrival is a terrible feeling. I'm not magnificent enough to afford an ego that naturally looks for the next job just after signing on. I consciously try to minimize the risk of a wrong match so I don't have to look for the next job but instead dive into the work wholeheartedly.
For later hops much the onus may lie with the hiring company in their candidate evaluation processes. They need to size you up correctly and display themselves correctly. If they present the wrong face, the engineer figures it out too late and may not consider himself bound to stay. I have gotten the sense at least once that a company was very happy they had gotten a good deal, more than they needed. Unfortunately the work they had turned out to be well below what I could and wanted to do. I keep wondering what questions I should have asked in the interviews that would have flushed this out before accepting. I got close to the truth, but not enough. It cost me months of growth and I left when an opportunity presented itself. Don't hire overkill.
Every company wants to believe they offer a rewarding and challenging environment. Naturally, we all want to present our best face, interviewer and interviewee. "Work hard, play hard" was repeated as a mantra in more than one interview. This is a warning sign for me: that this company wants to paint pictures of business environments of the past, good feelings, close culture, the workplace as your most exciting home. But these are not the same companies nor are these applicants and the market the same. No one wants to admit their work is normally a dull, tedious job that won’t engage the same engineers who recently left the same at their last company.
It's relative. Real work is sometimes, often tedious, but there will always be someone who actually wants to do it for what you're offering. Don't paint too-rosy pictures to those who can do the work. Find those people who want to grow into that work instead. When I was more junior, I leaped into a number of positions that I wouldn't touch now. Because it meant opportunity more than pay.
I’m getting better trusting my gut, and have experienced some truly awful interviews along with the good ones, but you only have a number of options in a given job search and without obvious red flags you must finally proceed with the assumption that the most attractive company represented itself and the work accurately.
No company is perfect. There is always something about it you're not going to like. Expecting perfection, or leaving because of its absence is absurd. The question is are you still effective in your role?
It's rare that the match between employer and applicant seems perfect from the beginning. There's always an element of risk, proposing to hire and agreeing to be hired. You just do as much as you can on both sides to manage and mitigate the risk. It's in a company's (and applicant's) best interest to know what they want, know the person they need and have capable people handling the interview. It's a pain to restart your job hunt, but it costs the company money and time.
A company may ask where the employee's good faith was if he/she is unwilling to give it the chance to rectify the situation? It may be an issue of time -- some jobs, it may take months or a year to change the role for the better. That's a year of growth lost to the engineer. On the other hand, a good engineer can't see everything until he's hired, but once in he must make an assessment as to whether this is truly a good fit and if the company has the ability to offer him the environment he was up front about needing. And then he has a decision to make: stay and accept it, or try again.
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