> As I noted in a previous post, switching teams is a lot easier than switching jobs. I didn’t do this before I left Stripe because there weren’t any other teams that I was super enthusiastic about at the time. But, in retrospect, I probably should have given this a try before quitting.
A few years ago, I was looking for a new job after being laid off. I had two competing companies to choose from, and chose the one that sounded like it would be more exciting. After about five months, though, I was miserable and called the other company to see if they'd still take me; they did, and I've been happily working here since.
But after I announced my departure, a few engineers from other teams came up and told me they wished I'd let them know before quitting, since they would have been glad to have me on their team instead. They knew the reasons I was feeling frustrated, and felt confident that those issues were either not a problem on their team, or were at least being worked on. I still kind of wonder how true that was, and what would have happened if I'd made the switch internally, instead.
Anyway, that was kind of a long and boring story - two whole paragraphs! - but I think this was probably the one of the more valuable parts of OP's post. An internal team change is often a lot less stressful and less risky than going to a different company.
> But after I announced my departure, a few engineers from other teams came up and told me they wished I'd let them know before quitting, since they would have been glad to have me on their team instead.
You know I know folks who've actually taken these kind of opportunities and sometimes it works, but other times it results in a) you finding out there are problems with the transfer (headcount or manager blocks transfer) and b) being distracted from getting out of your current situation.
It's 20/20 hindsight, for sure - but I like to think of opportunities missed as simply "outside my light-cone". How likely was it you would have broadcast your departure early?
They knew the reasons I was feeling frustrated, and felt confident that those issues were either not a problem on their team, or were at least being worked on. I still kind of wonder how true that was, and what would have happened if I'd made the switch internally, instead.
That's always a judgement call on your part. Were your problems just with your part of the management tree, or were they more systematic with the company? If it's the former case, switching teams might help. In the latter, best to get a fresh start and new perspective. Most people feel a bit of exceptionalism when it comes to their team being not like the others, without knowing what your particular issues with your current situation are. In my personal experience "if only you'd have let me know beforehand" comes more from a place of self-interest in finding/retaining talent than necessarily interest in the other person's career.
What people say they will do for you after you've already said goodbye and what they'll do when you just ask for change are often very different things.
It's one of the reasons they say not to take the counter-offer. Because one day while you're brushing your teeth you realize that if they could cough up that much money or control when you tried to quit, why hadn't they factored that into your previous review, when half as much might have prevented the situation in the first place?
I can appreciate this — I stayed with my previous company for 5 years, which seems like an eternity to most folks I talk to, but I worked on 3 very different teams during that time period. It felt like joining a brand new company each time with new challenges and things to learn. I'd recommend exploring that route before leaving if it's open to you.
I've done this as well. Been at MSFT for 7 years, been on 5 different teams, and switched between PM and Dev a few times. It's been great from a quality of life perspective, I think. I've got a lot of experience I wouldn't have had if I stayed on the same team and work has stayed pretty interesting. I've also got a pretty large network of folks I know, which is helpful for a variety of reasons.
Biggest downside is economic; can't negotiate new pay when changing teams by policy and you've gotta build a new case for promos/etc. People who have changed companies 2-3 times are likely making significantly more money than I am. I try to keep it in mind that I'm paying for quality of life by staying, so I need to get my money's worth or it's not worth it.
This strongly depends on the company structure and the political structure. There are many managers that would rather have an employee leave than go to a rival team.
If there are rival teams, then doesn't that mean that by definition resources are allocated less efficiently? (and by extension that competitors will be able to outbid for talent)
Some recent Apple threads seem to support the idea that there was intense internal competition and lower overall compensation at Apple, compared to other tech companies of similar caliber.
> An internal team change is often a lot less stressful and less risky than going to a different company.
This statement really nails it. If you change teams and are still unhappy you can always quit. If you quit without having changed teams and then hate your new job, you might not be able to go back to your previous company (but new team). I think it's general good practice to give another team a change before you leave the company if you're on the fence. If you know it's a company problem, bail, but if you think it could just be your team, give it a shot.
Maybe it's just me, but I like to minimize the amount of decisions I make that I cannot undo.
Not only that, but I'm getting the feeling a developer's best option these days for maximizing pay increases is to spend their free time on Leetcode. Which in my opinion is a problem from an industry perspective.
In my experience, no. I did an internal team transition at a company several years ago, and while it gave me a pretty good salary increase, it was not as big an increase (percentage-wise) compared to my wife's job hopping during roughly the same time span. I hopped jobs a couple more times a few years later and currently make three times more than I did back then. Some of this is attributable to differences in pay levels between cities but there's generally just a lot more room for negotiation with a new company than there is within the same company. I know many colleagues that left a company because of the ease of negotiating better offers outside of one's company.
The power move is to have an offer in hand and then tell your company that you're considering leaving for <reason>, but you'd like to give them a chance to beat your new offer by <increasing salary to $X, resolving reason X with a team move>.
Some companies will flat-out refuse to negotiate in this way as a matter of policy, and some will really appreciate you giving them the opportunity to bid to keep you; it really depends on the company and their comp strategy. I think as long as you're earnest about the conversation and don't try to run a bidding war, most companies won't burn bridges with you over a round of negotiations in this fashion.
I have a habit of slogging through difficult patches that has, for the most part and with only perhaps two notable exceptions, served me well. However, I want to tell the story of one of these exceptions as a counterpoint to other comments here.
A few years ago I started a job where, within the first week or two, I had serious enough doubts about whether or not it was going to work that I spoke to my manager and said that I wanted to leave (even though I had nothing else lined up). He was really good about it and after we talked I decided to make more of a go of it, but it was the wrong decision and I've always regretted it.
In the end I stayed for 8 months and was miserable and frustrated for the entire time. This was, I think, a contributory factor (though by no means the only factor) to the breakup of a relationship that I valued very deeply, and that I have also always regretted the end of. The end of that relationship was really the final straw: the moment I realised I needed to bail, and that I should have bailed long before.
I still I didn't have anything definite lined up, although I did have three options on the table. In the end I chose one of them and started after taking a month off to recover. Even had I left at the beginning, I don't think I'd have struggled for work though.
Every situation is different, and staying is not always the right thing to do especially not - as was the case in my situation - where the cultural and ways of working gulf is so large. I have no awkward explaining to do about my CV but there are sometimes more important concerns in life.
(I've omitted a lot of specifics because I don't want to name either the organisation involved, or impugn the people either - many of them were great. There was certainly nothing unpleasant going on of the sort we've seen discussed a few times recently on HN. It was simply a case of an unresolvable culture clash. The commute was also a horrible slog - anything between 60 and 90 minutes each way even on a motorcycle, and I hadn't realised how exhausting that amount of riding every day would be.)
If you have a 45 minute commute which is allegedly "normal". It's an hour and a half. I would add another hour to that to make that a true door-to-door figure, i.e. from the time you decide to get ready (past breakfast/morning coffee) to when you're actually productive at your desk. Same in the evening from the time you shut work to when you're back home.
If you sleep 7 hours a day, you have 21 waking hours. You're spending 15% of your time (2.5 hours) on a commute. That in my opinion is a lot of waste.
My point being most people seriously underestimate the cost of the commute. It's almost like saying you have to work at least 2.5 more hours a day but you won't be paid for it.
I have changed my first project because manager was unbearable. After spending one more year in the same company but different project and almost ideal manager i have realized that company in general has so many problems that make me unhappy that i have started job search outside. It's really hard sometimes to predict what difficulties are waiting for you in new team/company.
This story isn't boring at all - it's valuable advice, particularly for younger engineers. This is yet another comment on here that I really wish I could email myself twenty years ago.....:)
I'm about a month into a new FAANG job, and I hate it so far. I can't decide if it's better to quit sooner as to not waste the companies time (and avoid suffering more), or if I should give it some more time. My team's work seems super boring, I'm not interested in the tech we use, the setup process has been a shit-show, and I'm feeling zero motivation.
I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the past, but I decided I'd try to do things differently by cramming leetcode and chasing that fat FAANG pay check. Now I'm kicking myself, this is what happens when you follow money over passion. The silly thing is I'm fine financially, yet I lusted after a job with technology I'm not interested in working on just for the lure of the almighty dollar.
> I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the past
I saw an anecdote a few years ago about a hiring manager basically saying, "If you worked happily for a small startup, you will most likely be unable to put up with the bureaucracy of a large enterprise from now on"
I've often wondered how much truth there was to that statement.
The bureaucracy sucks, but I think I could deal with that. The biggest buzzkill for me is working on such minuscule parts of enormous systems. In software, the results of your work are already pretty abstract, but working for a huge company, it's on another level, and I just can't find any motivation in it. It's never interested me, and I'm not sure why I thought it would for the right price.
Personally I have found it to be quite accurate. The smaller the company you work for the likelihood of 'flexibility' in your role increases. Those companies just don't have the headcount to have a full suite of engineers so rely on people dipping their toes in other tasks to keep the machine ticking along (e.g. frontend devs handling deployment).
With a larger company you will typically find they have already hired specialists to handle very specific tasks. You can always do some things but more often than not the rigor of corporate structure says "If you need anything done in dev ops, please speak to _Bob_ and he will sort it out".
Jumping from the challenge of constantly adapting to different tasks to being there to only do a single 'role' can be quite jarring.
Probably a lot. Unless you're getting paid enough to put up with it:) That being said, I think a lot people that aren't singularly money-focused overestimate how much money will outweigh other factors in their job.
Personally I would just work the minimum amount and do open source or other side projects (indie hacking) with the rest of the time. Then leave after 12-18 months.
> the upper rungs of Stripe’s engineering individual contributor (IC) ladder put a lot of emphasis on cross-team coordination and other, managerial-like activities that I didn’t enjoy and felt I wasn’t very good at.
That's just the reality of senior IC engineering positions. At some point, there's a limit to the amount that you can contribute by sheerly by your own work - to have a bigger impact, you'll need to need influence/improve/impact others
I'd argue that it's the reality of most senior IC engineering positions. As a Googler (opinions are my own), to get higher ranks, you need to lead larger projects that are cross team (it's even in our engineering ladder description) and do leadership type work.
BUT, I've met a few people where that is not always true. They tend to be people that can come up with unique solutions to difficult problems that are actually useful in the long run. They tend to be people that have PhD's and thrive in that type of work (and are actually good at it, while also being able to work as a team).
The problem with Google's promo/perf process for years is that this trajectory towards upper level positioning was essentially mandatory. When I started they used to say that if you didn't get to L5 in 4 years or so, you would start getting scrutiny applied to you. L5 is sort of "team-lead light" and does require inter-team collaboration, project/code leadership/ownership, etc. I always felt like this process is corrosive towards individual contributors, and doesn't recognize long-standing committed but less-ambitious or less-social people.
This policy was eventually dropped, thankfully, but among some managers I feel like the attitude has remained.
This is true. It takes a while for some people to really accept this, as it breaks the lone coder myth. There are some people who consider communication and influence to be politics, and think they can do their job solely by programming.
The people downvoting you are likely those you reference. Which is painfully ironic as this comment is should at the top of the thread: work is fundamentally a social endeavour, and if you expect to be promoted, you need to demonstrate the ability to think/talk/socialize/synthesize challenging problems that almost always require cooperation if not collaboration with others.
Not every place is so enlightened. Plenty of places will focus on your individual contributions at review time, essentially devaluing any communication or force multiplication work you've done.
Gee it's too bad you saved everyone on the team 8 hours of work a week because you only got 80% as much work done as they did (ie, we're actually punishing you for making everyone else more productive by comparing you to the yard stick that you just changed).
I can imagine this happens due to malicious-ness, but it seems unlikely.
Individual contributions are necessarily easier to measure and easier to attribute than force-multiplication or communication, so it's going to be easier / less work for managers to pull them out at review time.
Sadly, that means that you need to highlight your own work (in a vaguely PR/Marketing) way that you don't have to for individual contributions.
That means that you both have to communicate well to other engineers "look at this easy way to save 10% of your time", but also communicate the effects of that to management so they'll a) reward you for it and b) invest in making it happen.
Does anyone else find it kind of funny that a lot of companies' "Individual Contributor" roles so many times involve contributions of others once they get past a certain point? Doesn't that mean it's no longer an "Individual Contributor" position?
You can also quit working for other people and pursue your own projects or seek out contract work. Yes yes, easier said than done, but so is advancing along a company’s career path.
a) Contracting definitely requires huge amounts of communication - you need to constantly ramp up on new areas, and handover to people once you are done.
b) A contractor who can only provide a single headcount is extremely limiting, and will get treated like a capped IC.
"When I started my second job search, I was worried that the short tenure in the job I was trying to leave would be a turn-off to perspective employers. In reality, however, it wasn’t a big deal- people asked about it, but seemed satisfied with my 20 second summary and then moved on to other things."
Alternatively, you can simply leave your new position off your resume and not talk about it in the interviews at all. There is nothing wrong with saying "My last gig was a software engineer at Stripe. I left there to focus on looking for a better fitting opportunity".
There is no need to have your resume be a complete record of your employment. In fact, such resumes are often less desirable because they are long and don't highlight any specific strengths. Instead, make your resume highlight your most relevant and best accomplishments.
I've only been a professional for 10 years, but I am already condensing my resume, removing descriptions from my first few jobs. I imagine that as time goes on, I will even group jobs together like "2010 - 2015 - Software engineer at Companies A, B, C" to keep my resume a nice, neat one pager, and focus on the more important things I have done recently. Like the OP, I've also quit two jobs shortly after I stared them during my career and those are definitely not on the list - its simply not relevant.
1. Background check companies usually only contact the positions you list to verify your dates of employment and title. They probably won't contact a job you don't let them know about.
2. If it helps you sleep at night, you can still fill out the background check form accurately, but leave stuff off your resume / not talk about it in the interview. Again, there is no rule that you need to talk about every job you have ever had in chronological order on your resume or in the interviews. As long as there is nothing untrue, or some sort of strange conflicts of interest, you are totally welcome to omit things that aren't relevant.
3. In the rare, extremely unlikely chance that you have to explain yourself, it seems perfectly acceptable to say "I've only been at this job for a few weeks. I am not sure I am going to stay longer, so I didn't think it was relevant".
If you are interviewing for the CIA, then definitely list every job. If it's a normal tech job, people simply don't care. Fill your precious chance to impress your interviewer with things that are actually impressive.
Completely different type of work, but I once quit a new job at a factory after two days. First day, I arrive early to fill out the paperwork and watch the HR job safety video. Video finishes and I wait for the HR person to return. After a few minutes, I go look for her, but can't find her so I go back to the video room.
Eventually someone else (upset) comes in and tells me that I'm supposed to be working rather than sitting there. I tell him I'm waiting for the HR lady to come back. "She went home for the day." Okay, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. Guy gets even more upset, takes me to the back room, points at one of the other workers, tells me to do what he's doing, and then I never see him again.
The only time anyone talks to me is (a) to tell me every couple hours I'm doing something wrong, (b) tell me it's break time, and (c) to shout at me for coming back from break two minutes early. (c) was my supervisor, and that was the only contact I had with him. When the second day was just like the first, I decided I didn't need that job.
I don't know. They never gave me any training, never told me what the product was or who they were selling it to. It might not seem possible to not know the industry, but I responded to a job ad, so all I knew was the address and the name of the company. I posted a longer version on my website: https://lancebachmeier.com/trivia/bad-job.html
I quit a job before even starting. They called me and told me that they had decided to pay me a good chunk less than we had agreed upon. I was in the last days of my two weeks notice for my current job. I had no option. Except that... five minutes later, my current boss made a counter-offer. And ten minutes later it was me who called those charming people to apologize for the inconvenience.
After what they had done, it was a surprise how bad they took it. Very serious threats to my future employability and well being. I really suffered during the whole call, trying not to laugh and keep it professional.
It was also a hardware company. I worked for another hardware company later. Not sure if there are other kind of hardware companies there in the Valley. But for me, there's a clear rule: never work for another hardware company.
Given their behavior, sounds like you dodged a bullet anyway, but this is also a good time to point out if you're job hunting while already employed, you should never give in your notice at current co until you have a signed employment contract from the new one.
No idea what happens where you live, but in Spain, a signed job contract is not worth the paper it's written on. They could just fire me the first day (there's always a "test period" during which they can do it no questions asked).
We operate with some good faith assumptions. Actually it's the only time that such a thing happened to me.
I didn't care about offices, they were nice in the other place that I worked years later. It's the lack of software engineering culture.
They followed the "flag oriented programming" paradigm. The company tanked a few months after I left anyway, so no bad feelings. Edit: I meant the other hardware company. The we-dont-honor-contracts one I guess it's still there making the world a nicer place.
I once quit a job after 6 weeks. From the day I started (when I saw my boss for about 30 seconds, was not given a computer or any information about how to get started/set up), it was clear things were not going well. The team I was joining had mostly disbanded (a mix of fired, left for greener pastures, or transferred to another region). As a result, there was no institutional knowledge, just as my team was put in charge of handling an immense new project.
I could see that in the best case, I would be there long enough to get up to speed on my position, just in time to leave. That wouldn't do a service to the company, so I gave my notice after 6 weeks.
To my boss' credit, he offered that I could stick around for a while until I found my next gig. Looking back, I guess this served his interests also — it would have been hard for him to recruit for this position if a newly-arrived team member left so quickly, following on the heels of several other departures.
I quit one after two weeks once. It was a small-to-medium consulting company that talked a great game in their interviews and then turned out to be a complete clown show.
After two weeks I was panicking over things like customer Hipchat meetings in which participants were using other channels to mock the customers (not shared with the customers, of course) with porn clips.
I noped out of there after two weeks. They gave me puppydog eyes and made all sorts of promises but...nope. Just, nope.
Was the consulting company named after a type of gem stone? I had an eerily similar experience, that I also left after two weeks. The weirdest part of it all was the manager who was part of it all. She used to send a group chat saying she was going to take a nap, close her office door, turn the lights off, and lay down on the floor to sleep for a few hours.
What really did it for me was when we all went out for someone's "birthday" (it wasn't their birthday, the team had put cards in at a few restaurants with different dates for their birthdays to get free stuff, whatever, the restaurants don't care, but it was just weird) and most of the team berated a guy who was trying not to drink so he didn't order a beer. You could tell the guy was uncomfortable, and they just kept goading him for the entire 2hr lunch.
After a week and a half I called back a company I had turned down for this one and asked if they would still take me. Started there the next Monday. That was 10yrs and 2 jobs ago, and easily the best decision I had made for my career.
I realized a few days into my current job that it was a bad fit for me. Unfortunately I'd have to pay back the $10k relocation package if I left, so I decided to stick it out.
Last year I interviewed with a company and was ready to take the job but I had drinks with the manager and decided it was too much of a brogrammer shop for me. Looking back, if I had taken the job, I would have worked with friends, the brogrammer aspect wasn't as bad as I thought, and I'd be planning my retirement after 3 years of work.
Sometimes you just never know. It does pay to do your due diligence though. Same thing with buying a house. Big changes, like jobs or living arrangements, demand adequate investigation.
> Unfortunately I'd have to pay back the $10k relocation package if I left, so I decided to stick it out.
For the future, this kind of stuff is very easy to negotiate with the new company, and should definitely not be the thing holding you back. E.g. "you would have paid relocation for me but I'm in the same city so help me pay back my current company for it instead".
Not necessarily, but worth a try. Had to turn down an offer from a prospective employer due to a company unwilling to help with this, ended up burning alot of my and their time for no good reason and it was made clear early in the process this was needed.
Readit News
A few years ago, I was looking for a new job after being laid off. I had two competing companies to choose from, and chose the one that sounded like it would be more exciting. After about five months, though, I was miserable and called the other company to see if they'd still take me; they did, and I've been happily working here since.
But after I announced my departure, a few engineers from other teams came up and told me they wished I'd let them know before quitting, since they would have been glad to have me on their team instead. They knew the reasons I was feeling frustrated, and felt confident that those issues were either not a problem on their team, or were at least being worked on. I still kind of wonder how true that was, and what would have happened if I'd made the switch internally, instead.
Anyway, that was kind of a long and boring story - two whole paragraphs! - but I think this was probably the one of the more valuable parts of OP's post. An internal team change is often a lot less stressful and less risky than going to a different company.
You know I know folks who've actually taken these kind of opportunities and sometimes it works, but other times it results in a) you finding out there are problems with the transfer (headcount or manager blocks transfer) and b) being distracted from getting out of your current situation.
It's 20/20 hindsight, for sure - but I like to think of opportunities missed as simply "outside my light-cone". How likely was it you would have broadcast your departure early?
That's always a judgement call on your part. Were your problems just with your part of the management tree, or were they more systematic with the company? If it's the former case, switching teams might help. In the latter, best to get a fresh start and new perspective. Most people feel a bit of exceptionalism when it comes to their team being not like the others, without knowing what your particular issues with your current situation are. In my personal experience "if only you'd have let me know beforehand" comes more from a place of self-interest in finding/retaining talent than necessarily interest in the other person's career.
What people say they will do for you after you've already said goodbye and what they'll do when you just ask for change are often very different things.
It's one of the reasons they say not to take the counter-offer. Because one day while you're brushing your teeth you realize that if they could cough up that much money or control when you tried to quit, why hadn't they factored that into your previous review, when half as much might have prevented the situation in the first place?
Biggest downside is economic; can't negotiate new pay when changing teams by policy and you've gotta build a new case for promos/etc. People who have changed companies 2-3 times are likely making significantly more money than I am. I try to keep it in mind that I'm paying for quality of life by staying, so I need to get my money's worth or it's not worth it.
Some recent Apple threads seem to support the idea that there was intense internal competition and lower overall compensation at Apple, compared to other tech companies of similar caliber.
This statement really nails it. If you change teams and are still unhappy you can always quit. If you quit without having changed teams and then hate your new job, you might not be able to go back to your previous company (but new team). I think it's general good practice to give another team a change before you leave the company if you're on the fence. If you know it's a company problem, bail, but if you think it could just be your team, give it a shot.
Maybe it's just me, but I like to minimize the amount of decisions I make that I cannot undo.
That's not to say they're a bad option, but it still seems like you've gotta jump to a different company to maximize earnings.
Some companies will flat-out refuse to negotiate in this way as a matter of policy, and some will really appreciate you giving them the opportunity to bid to keep you; it really depends on the company and their comp strategy. I think as long as you're earnest about the conversation and don't try to run a bidding war, most companies won't burn bridges with you over a round of negotiations in this fashion.
A few years ago I started a job where, within the first week or two, I had serious enough doubts about whether or not it was going to work that I spoke to my manager and said that I wanted to leave (even though I had nothing else lined up). He was really good about it and after we talked I decided to make more of a go of it, but it was the wrong decision and I've always regretted it.
In the end I stayed for 8 months and was miserable and frustrated for the entire time. This was, I think, a contributory factor (though by no means the only factor) to the breakup of a relationship that I valued very deeply, and that I have also always regretted the end of. The end of that relationship was really the final straw: the moment I realised I needed to bail, and that I should have bailed long before.
I still I didn't have anything definite lined up, although I did have three options on the table. In the end I chose one of them and started after taking a month off to recover. Even had I left at the beginning, I don't think I'd have struggled for work though.
Every situation is different, and staying is not always the right thing to do especially not - as was the case in my situation - where the cultural and ways of working gulf is so large. I have no awkward explaining to do about my CV but there are sometimes more important concerns in life.
(I've omitted a lot of specifics because I don't want to name either the organisation involved, or impugn the people either - many of them were great. There was certainly nothing unpleasant going on of the sort we've seen discussed a few times recently on HN. It was simply a case of an unresolvable culture clash. The commute was also a horrible slog - anything between 60 and 90 minutes each way even on a motorcycle, and I hadn't realised how exhausting that amount of riding every day would be.)
If you have a 45 minute commute which is allegedly "normal". It's an hour and a half. I would add another hour to that to make that a true door-to-door figure, i.e. from the time you decide to get ready (past breakfast/morning coffee) to when you're actually productive at your desk. Same in the evening from the time you shut work to when you're back home.
If you sleep 7 hours a day, you have 21 waking hours. You're spending 15% of your time (2.5 hours) on a commute. That in my opinion is a lot of waste.
My point being most people seriously underestimate the cost of the commute. It's almost like saying you have to work at least 2.5 more hours a day but you won't be paid for it.
I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the past, but I decided I'd try to do things differently by cramming leetcode and chasing that fat FAANG pay check. Now I'm kicking myself, this is what happens when you follow money over passion. The silly thing is I'm fine financially, yet I lusted after a job with technology I'm not interested in working on just for the lure of the almighty dollar.
I saw an anecdote a few years ago about a hiring manager basically saying, "If you worked happily for a small startup, you will most likely be unable to put up with the bureaucracy of a large enterprise from now on"
I've often wondered how much truth there was to that statement.
With a larger company you will typically find they have already hired specialists to handle very specific tasks. You can always do some things but more often than not the rigor of corporate structure says "If you need anything done in dev ops, please speak to _Bob_ and he will sort it out".
Jumping from the challenge of constantly adapting to different tasks to being there to only do a single 'role' can be quite jarring.
That's just the reality of senior IC engineering positions. At some point, there's a limit to the amount that you can contribute by sheerly by your own work - to have a bigger impact, you'll need to need influence/improve/impact others
BUT, I've met a few people where that is not always true. They tend to be people that can come up with unique solutions to difficult problems that are actually useful in the long run. They tend to be people that have PhD's and thrive in that type of work (and are actually good at it, while also being able to work as a team).
This policy was eventually dropped, thankfully, but among some managers I feel like the attitude has remained.
Gee it's too bad you saved everyone on the team 8 hours of work a week because you only got 80% as much work done as they did (ie, we're actually punishing you for making everyone else more productive by comparing you to the yard stick that you just changed).
Individual contributions are necessarily easier to measure and easier to attribute than force-multiplication or communication, so it's going to be easier / less work for managers to pull them out at review time.
Sadly, that means that you need to highlight your own work (in a vaguely PR/Marketing) way that you don't have to for individual contributions.
That means that you both have to communicate well to other engineers "look at this easy way to save 10% of your time", but also communicate the effects of that to management so they'll a) reward you for it and b) invest in making it happen.
None of that is "easy".
b) A contractor who can only provide a single headcount is extremely limiting, and will get treated like a capped IC.
Alternatively, you can simply leave your new position off your resume and not talk about it in the interviews at all. There is nothing wrong with saying "My last gig was a software engineer at Stripe. I left there to focus on looking for a better fitting opportunity".
There is no need to have your resume be a complete record of your employment. In fact, such resumes are often less desirable because they are long and don't highlight any specific strengths. Instead, make your resume highlight your most relevant and best accomplishments.
I've only been a professional for 10 years, but I am already condensing my resume, removing descriptions from my first few jobs. I imagine that as time goes on, I will even group jobs together like "2010 - 2015 - Software engineer at Companies A, B, C" to keep my resume a nice, neat one pager, and focus on the more important things I have done recently. Like the OP, I've also quit two jobs shortly after I stared them during my career and those are definitely not on the list - its simply not relevant.
1. Background check companies usually only contact the positions you list to verify your dates of employment and title. They probably won't contact a job you don't let them know about.
2. If it helps you sleep at night, you can still fill out the background check form accurately, but leave stuff off your resume / not talk about it in the interview. Again, there is no rule that you need to talk about every job you have ever had in chronological order on your resume or in the interviews. As long as there is nothing untrue, or some sort of strange conflicts of interest, you are totally welcome to omit things that aren't relevant.
3. In the rare, extremely unlikely chance that you have to explain yourself, it seems perfectly acceptable to say "I've only been at this job for a few weeks. I am not sure I am going to stay longer, so I didn't think it was relevant".
If you are interviewing for the CIA, then definitely list every job. If it's a normal tech job, people simply don't care. Fill your precious chance to impress your interviewer with things that are actually impressive.
Eventually someone else (upset) comes in and tells me that I'm supposed to be working rather than sitting there. I tell him I'm waiting for the HR lady to come back. "She went home for the day." Okay, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. Guy gets even more upset, takes me to the back room, points at one of the other workers, tells me to do what he's doing, and then I never see him again.
The only time anyone talks to me is (a) to tell me every couple hours I'm doing something wrong, (b) tell me it's break time, and (c) to shout at me for coming back from break two minutes early. (c) was my supervisor, and that was the only contact I had with him. When the second day was just like the first, I decided I didn't need that job.
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After what they had done, it was a surprise how bad they took it. Very serious threats to my future employability and well being. I really suffered during the whole call, trying not to laugh and keep it professional.
It was also a hardware company. I worked for another hardware company later. Not sure if there are other kind of hardware companies there in the Valley. But for me, there's a clear rule: never work for another hardware company.
No idea what happens where you live, but in Spain, a signed job contract is not worth the paper it's written on. They could just fire me the first day (there's always a "test period" during which they can do it no questions asked).
We operate with some good faith assumptions. Actually it's the only time that such a thing happened to me.
I imagine there are exceptions to this rule (Nvidia).
They followed the "flag oriented programming" paradigm. The company tanked a few months after I left anyway, so no bad feelings. Edit: I meant the other hardware company. The we-dont-honor-contracts one I guess it's still there making the world a nicer place.
I could see that in the best case, I would be there long enough to get up to speed on my position, just in time to leave. That wouldn't do a service to the company, so I gave my notice after 6 weeks.
To my boss' credit, he offered that I could stick around for a while until I found my next gig. Looking back, I guess this served his interests also — it would have been hard for him to recruit for this position if a newly-arrived team member left so quickly, following on the heels of several other departures.
After two weeks I was panicking over things like customer Hipchat meetings in which participants were using other channels to mock the customers (not shared with the customers, of course) with porn clips.
I noped out of there after two weeks. They gave me puppydog eyes and made all sorts of promises but...nope. Just, nope.
What really did it for me was when we all went out for someone's "birthday" (it wasn't their birthday, the team had put cards in at a few restaurants with different dates for their birthdays to get free stuff, whatever, the restaurants don't care, but it was just weird) and most of the team berated a guy who was trying not to drink so he didn't order a beer. You could tell the guy was uncomfortable, and they just kept goading him for the entire 2hr lunch.
After a week and a half I called back a company I had turned down for this one and asked if they would still take me. Started there the next Monday. That was 10yrs and 2 jobs ago, and easily the best decision I had made for my career.
Last year I interviewed with a company and was ready to take the job but I had drinks with the manager and decided it was too much of a brogrammer shop for me. Looking back, if I had taken the job, I would have worked with friends, the brogrammer aspect wasn't as bad as I thought, and I'd be planning my retirement after 3 years of work.
Sometimes you just never know. It does pay to do your due diligence though. Same thing with buying a house. Big changes, like jobs or living arrangements, demand adequate investigation.
For the future, this kind of stuff is very easy to negotiate with the new company, and should definitely not be the thing holding you back. E.g. "you would have paid relocation for me but I'm in the same city so help me pay back my current company for it instead".