Comment by iwangulenko

I understand your sentiment but you are missing the point. When recruiters of any sort are going through thousands of CV's, they will filter on anything that helps them find candidates more likely to match a job. Regularly out of work because they are bad at a job, regularly out of work because of a one time issue (family death, illness) look exactly the same when filtering for work gaps, but only one of those is a meaningful signal. But its sufficiently uncommon that you may not lose many quality candidates by doing it. This is what bias looks like, and how it is propagated as well. Desigining a system that may be used by thousands of recruiters has to make decisions on these tricky points, and thoughtfully design around them.

Recruiters don't seem to get to the conclusion that I'm "trying to hide a year and a half" because fwiw it can be a month, or just a change of jobs on Jan 01.

Some recruiters look for red flags in order to dismiss a CV. Year out of work could be such a flag. My job is to hide that red flag. Once being interviewed, I will provide the details if asked.

As a person who "hires people", would it be a good idea for a 50-year old guy to openly state in their CV that e.g. between Mar 2016 and Sep 2017 they were fighting testicular cancer? This wasn't my reason; I'm just asking for a friend.

Unless there is pattern of short stints, no. And if there is pattern over time, you see pattern.

I have seen quite dysfunctional toxic workplaces or teams. If you leave within one month, you have good social understanding and likely have better ethics then those who stayed. Those who stayed for long were all eventually compromised (meaning their ethics changed and they started to accept or do things they should not).

Our company have also few "trap" positions. The people there change quickly, because our hiring manager talks about positives (all true) and does not mention significant negatives. The more capable you are, the quicker you recognize the situation and leave.

It is perfectly fine to have some short stints.

It's not about believing, it's about knowing. You have to couple that time interval with the company they worked for.

At one company it took them 2 weeks to set-up my email, 3 months to decide on which project to work on and in about 6 months I was delivering something. So 6 months "experience" actually meant zero. I was ready to deliver from day 1 but...

At another company I had all the accounts created by the end of day 1, already working on bugs the second day. Some projects took 1 month in total. 6 months could mean 6 projects. The amount of skills accumulated in that time was way over the skills accumulated at the first company.

As you can see the time interval is useless. I think it's fairer if the recruiter simply rolls a dice.

6 months is a write-off? By the time I was 6 months into my first software gig I had 5 months and 2 weeks of being a contributor. It was made clear to me that I was as entitled to voice wrong opinions as anyone else, and also entitled to own as much responsibility as I wanted. I found a niche that nobody else wanted to own and learned way more than I would have being spoon-fed the way you describe.

Then again, I guess there's junior and JUNIOR! Maybe a recent boot camp grad would have been less able to jump in.

If I was treated the way you describe here as a junior developer in the first year of my career, I would have abandoned software a long time ago.

The lack of trust is not something I'd be willing to put up with at the timescale you're describing.

My first two jobs had me undeniably junior but I still had a measurable sizeable impact on the businesses where I worked within the first two months. Seems an overgeneralisation to say the first six months are a complete loss by definition.

What you said is very true, at large companies only. There are way more companies that are smaller and move much faster. When they hire someone, it's very clear to them what they will be doing, who will present the project to them and so on. You could be writing code on day 1.

The length of time is largely dependent on industry as well. In Automotive, 3 to 3.5 years for 1 Project cycle would be a minimum to step out of the Junior status.

“We distrust folks with short stints on their resumes” is a great sentiment to articulate to your staff if you want to reduce turnover via misleading them.

This smacks of the anecdotes anyone will have about someone they know (or a an acquaintance thereof) who's abusing social welfare. In reality, in most European countries, welfare abuse it at most 2% of all social welfare users and usually at 1%. The data just doesn't support large-scale welfare abuse. Is it shallow when people still assume there are huge amounts of moochers?

Now are there reasons why you might ask someone how long they stayed at their previous job? Yes, definitely. Does that make everyone suspect automatically? Hell no.

I don't have more data on the subject, so I won't draw any definite conclusions as to whether it is warranted to base someone's professional worth on the number of years/months served. My own experience shows only a very weak correlation there, and no correlation at all between seniority within a company and said company's attempts at retaining that employee.

I've seen people who had "ten years' experience" who in reality had done the same year, ten times. I've seen people who had three years' experience but were driven, looked into things on their own initiative and who outclasses those "seniors". It all seems to depend on what you're exposed to and, lacking exposure, what you'll subject yourself to of your own accord.

Have you read any studies on the subject?

If they have "X" cases of that, you see that with only years given too...