I’m glad you managed to get things to work out and found a job you hopefully love and that compensates you well enough.

However, this sort of piece risks taking an anecdotal story and generalizing it beyond its validity. If you have multiple short stints at different employers, it will most likely stick out as a negative for prospective employers.

Employers invest a lot in a new hire. Hiring managers spend a lot of time defining the position, defining the sort of person they’re looking for, reviewing many resumes, winnowing to a short list, interviewing, discussing interview results until the best fit person is selected, and then onboarding the new hire. This time is taken away from productive activities these managers carry out in the normal course of their work when not working on hiring.

This is still worthwhile if the new hire is a good fit and stays for a long time. However, if the new hire leaves after a year, let alone a few months, the time invested by the managers is mostly wasted, since the new hire has little time to ramp up to high productivity for long enough to make up for the investment.

Thus, if you have one or more such short stints on your resume, your resume may never make it past the initial automated screening by the HR algorithm. If it does, HR and hiring managers may decide to not invite you to an interview anyway. If they do, expect to have to answer some pointed questions as to why you left so early from those positions, and why they should expect this time to be different.

In short, there is wisdom in the guidance given to young professionals to try and stick with each employer for at least 3 years, and that has little to do with loyalty. It has to do with showing that the prospective employer will get sufficient return on their investment in hiring you to make it worth their while.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should stay with an employer for years if there is abuse, harassment, or problems getting paid. In such cases you should absolutely take whatever action is needed to protect yourself, up to and including leaving that position as quickly as possible.

However, short of such extreme cases, it’s far better to work within the system to try and move laterally to a position that better fits your interests and abilities. To make that happen, look for an internal mentor who isn’t your direct supervisor, figure out what’s important to the company that you can get involved in, look for opportunities to learn and train yourself, etc. to make yourself valuable enough to the company that they’d rather move you to a better-fit position than risk losing you.

Be entrepreneurial, even as an employee, and you’ll likely enjoy your work and be properly compensated. If not, after spending 3 years there, you’ll at least be able to point out how you pursued opportunities to help your employer, which will make you far more marketable next time.