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Okay, but if my resume is a concern let's talk about in the first interview. I can't exactly rest and vest for 2 years when the company is running out of money. I had the bad luck of this happening 3 times in a row.

Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half, switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most of us.

I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3 years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to do quality work, you really should just stay there instead of chasing slightly more money.

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After my dates of employment I will parethetically add (bankrupt) or (shutdown) to indicate that it wasn't related to me personally. My best job was 18 months.
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Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short stints on my resume while I was interviewing for DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't dedicated or trustworthy.

He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives doing the layoffs got removed by the board.

So I left and got to add another short stint at a company run by craven morons to my resume :)

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I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with any assertion that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.

There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.

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If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may have spent 15 minutes on it.
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It was actually a round with the CEO.

I don't feel disrespected or anything, just feels weird to spend that much time interviewing someone.

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Reminds me of the 6 interview gauntlet I dealt with when interviewing with Hashicorp[1] years ago.

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[1]: <https://blog.webb.page/WM-025>

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Excessive amounts of interviews is more likely they were not enthusiastic about him but didnt have anybody else better and were stringing him along until they found somebody else.
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I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time. Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable to the company.
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Yeah, I've seen someone get strung along and then finally hired. What happened was that it was a bit of a downturn so there was a limit to the hiring. Another dept somehow convinced the division head that their role was more urgent, so our department was left without approval even though we wanted the guy. It was a poor job market so he didn't land anywhere else even though it was a few months before the approval finally arrived. Everyone felt kind of shit about it. The guy was quite jittery to start with.

That sounds like it was a terrible place, but it was a good department in a somewhat hard nosed company. He ended up staying there 10 years.

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It’s going to blow your mind that many processes at many businesses are horribly inefficient and waste buckets of human time.
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> If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes.

Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would have specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's time putting them through full rounds of interviews?

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if you were an experienced/mature tech employee you should probably know that there are real HR reasons why companies are strongly advised not to give too much information in a rejection email. there is only ever downside. your reaction here is a potential red flag.

i'm sympathetic to you, it sucks, why cant we all be nice to each other, and my answer to that all is lawyers.

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It could also be that they might be sued for stating the real reason so they went with something that would be dismissed if it went to court.
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This is the reason. If they make any statement you could contest it in court, so they don't make any statement
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> … specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well …

Takes time away from the day job and other candidates.

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