+1 for this. At six months At my current place I am in the top half of engineers for seniority and this has been one of the nicest places I’ve ever worked. At previous companies I’ve been in meetings where high level managers veto prospective hires the entire team wanted because they had been at their current company for “too long” where “too long” was 4 years without moving into management.

It’s not uncommon in my experience to hear engineers say they would view tenures of 2-3 years as a red flag for hiring other engineers, but the hiring managers who actually make the decision have always preferred short tenures of hopping around or staying at one place only if there’s a title change every ~2 years.

I get why engineers hate it. I am on a team where at 2 months, if we become fully staffed at some point, I will be in the top half of seniority between resignations and transfers to new teams.

It is quite concerning to see so much knowledge about how things work walk out the door and it is miserable if something goes wrong and nobody left knows it existed. So I get why engineers view a year as hit and run.

But yes, companies seem to interpret staying a year or two as evidence of growth/a highly desirable candidate.

It makes sense since such people have more diverse experience and more adaptive, agile. They could bring new perspective to the team. I would say balanced approach is better - part of long tenure applicants and part of the hopping ones.

Large traditional engineering companies have tenures like this. I joined a dev team working on CFD software and the average tenure was over 10 years. Made even less sense when by jumping I’m working on much less difficult code but getting paid a lot more.