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
Did you switch the keycaps for your r’s and t’s?
Tbf it’s very hard to type on my phone. The keyboard is tiny and I always make mistakes. I don’t even care anymore lol
besides I’m old and typing in my bed at night I can’t see much haha
I’m not going to fault anyone for typos. I fight my phone’s autocorrect all the time, but it was odd that just those two letters were transposed
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.
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.
Make friends with the guy. He’s got some some stories. True or not, he’s got some stories.
Oh got stories. It be easier to tell you what I haven’t done, then to list what I have done for work.
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.
The weird thing is “confessing” about it no?
Yeah that’s a lot of information framing.
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.
That the person probably won’t stick around for long. I’d still give them a fair chance, but if they up and quit one day out of nowhere I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m not in charge of the hiring though, so I just work with whoever I’m told to work with.
That’s going to depend a lot on context. Did he travel the world for five years, working a different temporary job at each stop? Or did he repeatedly get fired for pissing in the boss’ in-tray?
If it’s the last one, I’m bringing my lunch to work to watch the show as the boss gets pissed.
Maybe he worked a few years at a temp agency?
I’d say it is none of my business what they did for employment prior to where they are now and stay out of their life.
“neat.” then I go back to doing my job
My opinion is only that I’m not going to get attached, guy’s probably not going to be here long. That’s all.
I would assume they were exaggerating and/or were a consultant at some point.
My DIL had at least that many by age 26. Now she makes more than i do, so… 🤷
