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.
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.
Depends on the job, but it would be a red flag for my career as projects usually last for at least a year.
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.
Depends entirely on what the job is.
Is the 42 year old a welder? Then 48 different jobs might mean they’re in super high demand and contract out to high paying, low time frame jobs.
Is the 42 year old a cop or a priest? Probably skips town a lot for… reasons…
Most any other job might just mean they’ve had an interesting life and like to try new things. Their broad experience might mean they’re great for what they’re currently doing.
Even if he’s a coder I wouldn’t be surprised. Also I spent 5 years as a consultant and worked fot 1 company in about 10 diferent companies doing different things, is that 10 differenr jobs?!
I would ask follow up questions to his statement
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.
“Cool, tell me about them. Sounds like an interesting life.”
why would i need an opinion on that?
If I’m a coworker in this situation I don’t care. If I’m a manager in this situation I just don’t bother training them on anything but the basics for the job.
Depending on the details, either “holy fuck that’sbadman” or “holy fuck rich”.
The weird thing is “confessing” about it no?
Yeah that’s a lot of information framing.
Just work your shift
Rookie numbers. Gotta pump those numbers up!
What’s wrong with that? If you only find 3 months jobs you end up that way. And if you sprinkle some 1 week jobs the count rises very fast.
My opinion is only that I’m not going to get attached, guy’s probably not going to be here long. That’s all.
By that age, I was into my third long-term job (> 5 years) and had had upwards of 16 short term ones - multiple part time ones at once, or some just for a few weeks or a couple of months here and there between the long-term ones etc.
48 doesn’t seem that unlikely - nor even an indicator that they will not be staying put for any length of time unless your job is a shitty one with a high turnover anyway.
