The Workplace Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for members of the workforce navigating the professional setting. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I was working in a company with more than 10.000 employees and some billions of revenues for approximately 16 months. Then I made a mistake and move to another company (>100k in personal) having in my mind to stay for at least 2 years. Unfortunately, it's extremely boring and I am thinking to go and work for a startup as the second member besides founder.
Would that be a career suicide? Should I mention my 6 months stay on my CV?
As a rule of thumb you can get away with one short stay somewhere without being perceived as a job-hopper, two in quick succession however will start to look like a pattern. A start-up may view things differently to an established company but it's still a gamble.
Leaving the 6 months off your resume is an option - unless you are specifically requested to provide a full employment history then you can leave off whatever you like but a random 6 month gap could carry just as much negative connotations as a 6 month employment stay somewhere and depending on how you planned on answering any questions as to what you were doing during those six months it could actually look worse of it seemed that you were trying to hide that employment.
If you are going to make the move to the startup then I'd just make it and leave the the 6-months on, you could explain that you weren't planning on leaving the corporate job so soon but that the startup came up and you felt it was a good move.
Imo, it cannot be the career suicide. Let's imagine the worst case for you, where your startup fails and you don't get any good experience from it. Even in this occasion you cannot worsen your current kase(knowledge, abilities, skills and experience), so if you don't gain anything from working on startup(and i'm sure, you will), you probably won't cause any damage to your current CV at all.
From another point of view, let's think about what you may lose and the probability that you lose it if because of missing the opportunity to work on the startup. The multiplication of those two gives you a mathematical expectation on what you get from actually joining it.
I'd personally recommend you to draw a Descartes Square to think of these decision since i don't know any detail about what work you are doing and what kind of job you are supposed to do in the startup as well as i have no idea about the startup itself.
Another recommendation would be to find a highly qualified person in your branch of work, who is neither connected with your job nor the startup, and ask them about their opinion on your particular case. It would be a good idea to ask your colleagues and friends about someone in the industry, you are working at reasoning it with "I want to ask how everything works in the industry besides my company" or you can actually state the exact reason in detail.
To sum up, do what you feel like doing, because you cannot significantly succeed doing something you do not like.
