Never stay at a crappy job so it appears 'better' on your resume, when I am hiring I look only at what you worked on. Many candidates of higher caliber I interviewed bounced around.
Exactly right. The employer who rejected anyone who moved around a lot (usually 12 to 18 months, with a maximum stay anywhere of around 2 years) would exclude pretty much all the best people I know.
I suppose it depends what you're looking for. A lawyer firm or family medical practise might be looking for long term stability for the sake of their patients/clients. But for programming, and I assume that most of us on "hacker news" are programmers, you want passion, initiative and the ability to actually get things done.
It's a completely natural cycle to arrive somewhere new with a new project, full of passion, and to put a lot of work into it. After a while, around 18 months for me, you're sick of it and ready to move on. There is no point, either for you or the company, at pretending otherwise and sticking around just to clock up the hours. And what you really don't want is the "lifer" mentality.
The role of "permanent full time worker" is retrograde and disappearing fast. Perhaps it's better to cast out the concept entirely and start thinking purely in terms of contracts. I suspect that a large number of the best programmers already think like this and companies that can't adapt to that will simply miss out.
