“Yeah, he turned down our bullshit offer to take a job that paid 20% more.”
I’m calling bullshit. I work in tech and people leave companies “in short order” all the time for all sorts of reason. It’s not career suicide.
How are you going to “lose all your contacts” at that firm? You were there a month. How deep can any of your contacts be beyond “I think I kinda remember that guy”.
So what if your last place hates you if you love the job you left it for and stay there 10 years?
Some companies are petty regardless. I had offers from a couple of companies that I didn’t accept. Company A didn’t make me an offer until 3 months after I had already accepted another position and got promoted and Company B, I just didn’t accept (although they tried really hard) because I had just accepted a 12 month contract that turned out to be really cool (and a better lifestyle choice). A year or so later I decided I made a mistake joining my current company and reached out to see if those other companies had positions open. They never returned my calls. I don’t know if it was because they didn’t have an opening or they were bent out of shape that I didn’t accept their offer. But fuck them. I interviewed in good faith and didn’t lead them along. If company A wanted me so badly, they shouldn’t have sat on my offer for 4 months and Company B, well they had fired me when I worked for them like ten years prior so fuck them too. What was I supposed to do? Accept all three jobs?
People have short memories. I can’t remember the names of the clients I had 6 months ago, let alone people I interviewed.
You aren’t as important as you think. Look, if you were so well known in your industry that people actually paid attention to your comings and goings, you probably don’t have to worry about finding a job. But people in “tech” always seem to have an inflated sense of their “rep” on the job market. Other than a few standouts, programmers barely have a rep within their own company. Mostly they are just nearly anonymous “staff” or “resources” that get assigned to a project based on their skills profile. It’s a commodity industry. That’s why I constantly get spammed by headhunters with unpronounceable names who work for headhunter firms with weird acronym names, encouraging me to apply for jobs where my only qualification is some out of context keyword on my resume.
Yes, if you were a jerk or incompetent at your position, then that might hurt you. But chances are, the only person who would be bent out of shape if you left suddenly is your direct manager. And if he can’t get over it, fuck him.