I was up to 14 at age 25. When you’re young and inexperienced, any schmuck that will pay you and be slightly less abusive than the last guy is worth working for, and you never owe the last person anything.
Just had a talk about this exact topic in an interviewer today. Talked about how a growing number of companies on my resume no longer exist, and the guy interviewing me said he had the same thing. It’s a rough business world we live in. I’m not gonna hold the number of jobs a person has had against them. In fact, it speaks of experience. Not deep, but certainly wide.
Make friends with the guy. He’s got some some stories. True or not, he’s got some stories.
“Welcome aboard, Johnny Sins”
“That’s so cool man. What was the weirdest one?”
There’s not enough context here to have a strong opinion, but I’ll add that personally, nothing has given me a bigger raise than getting a job at another company.
Let’s judge him for doing something different, while being too afraid of doing the same.
“Cool, tell me about them. Sounds like an interesting life.”
Gen-X in tech here. When I was about to enter the workforce we were told that having multiple jobs in our resume or showing that we stayed at a job less than five years was really bad and would make us difficult to hire because it showed that we couldn’t be depended on.
Fuck that!
I switched jobs all the time as I chased higher salaries and bigger benefits. If they wanted my skills they needed to pay me AND they needed to guarantee me at least two off-site training programs per year. All that training and experience in different technologies and environments made me more and more valuable until my only option was to go into consulting so that multiple clients could benefit at once and none need to commit to paying me beyond the scope of their project.
That’s the right mindset.
For those reading, don’t let them fool you about down selling your worth. If you’ve got the skills they want, and you show that, they’ll pay you. Job history conversations are just a way to try and leverage lower pay or benefits on you.
Up until like 2022, changing your job every one and a half to three years was the best way to increase your base salary and total lifetime income.
I’ve changed jobs every 3ish years for the last 12 years and when I started I was making $15 an hour and now I’m making $67 an hour.
My friend who I met at the $15 an hour job has only changed jobs every 7 years, he’s now making $27 an hour.
We have similar skill sets and graduated from the same college except he was 2 years ahead of me, although, I did move to a higher cost of living area which is probably good for like $20 of the difference.
I’m 38 and I’ve had about half of that, but the vast majority was from 16-25. They were all shitty retail things or short term odd job type things, but work is work so I include them if someone asks how many jobs I’ve had except on a resume of course. I just stick to relevant things there.
I’ve done everything from retail, to refrigeration diagnostic work. From wiping ass and giving meds, to even being a carnie. The only type of jobs I’ve never had are “real people jobs” like office work. I’m just a subhuman meat machine.
I don’t judge others based on their slave
rrecords.I’ve had 50. It depends on the person and the jobs.
Some jobs are minimum wage BS jobs that people are doing just to stay alive, if you burn out on a BS job in 6 weeks that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
I also typically have worked multiple jobs at the same time. I’ve had two full-time jobs and a part-time job while going to school and not sleeping for more than 5 hours a night for like 9 months.
Are you going to hold that against me, or does it show that I have the drive and initiative to accomplish my goals no matter how difficult they may be?
Sure, I bounced between jobs a lot when I was in my teenage years and my early twenties, but once I hit college and built a career and my employment history has been Rock fucking solid, typically 3+ years between job changes.
I would say that my last 14 years of employment weighs a lot more heavily than my first 5 years of employment.
The weird thing is “confessing” about it no?
Just work your shift
I don’t correlate much from job count. I have had 5 in the last 8 years, two of those following layoffs. Shit happens.
Lol shit happens when something unexpected happens. Usually when it is also something out of one’s conteol. 40+ occurances is not “shit happens.”
But like a bunch of people already stated there is barely enough info to even speculate off of nuch less have an opinion of.
