I think it's very different in other fields. Software developers (especially in the Bay Area) seem to switch jobs fairly often and it's definitely an accepted practice. Other fields expect you to keep a job for a far longer time.

If your job sucks, and you're not learning shit, you should leave ASAP. Then, when your next employer says

"I see you left your last job after only three months, what's up with that?"

You can respond:

"Honestly, my job sucked, I wasn't learning shit, and I thought it was bad for my career, but this place seems different"

And this so called "blemish" is an advantage.

I get what your saying, but I think if you have the balls to leave because your not learning enough, no decent employer is going to look at that as a bad thing, and if they do, you should keep searching anyways.

Edit: The difference in other fields is it is harder to find a new job, but if you were good, this probably wouldnt be a problem anyways

I'll go even further and say it also differs by economic climate.

Take today's environment. Companies can't fault people for leaving their first job when they might've landed it only after several months of searching. Chances are that job isn't a good fit for the candidate, but if you're a new grad you have to pay those loans somehow.

Specifically, what you quoted says leaving your first job quickly. Obviously, "quickly" is industry-specific and the difference is in the results you produce.

In something like a biomedical lab, as a first job fresh out of university you're likely going to be something of a lab assistant, doing grunt work as you learn the ropes and work with an experienced team who has been doing this for decades. The accomplishments section of that job are likely going to be incidental with things such as "improved accuracy of testing by 58% in the first three months; reduced sample contamination from an average 1 in 23 to a notable 1 in 287 through an innovative workflow" (and bonus points if you translate that into specific business value such as cutting trial times by 9 months with an estimated savings of $15M). Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but you barely got your feet wet and any job you move to is going to be more of the same.

In a software startup, you can be doing anything and everything as a first job and, if you're an accomplished hacker with passion and have been building things in your spare time, your accomplishments will have a lot of incidentals but will be overshadowed by things such as building the product from scratch, launching it, and scaling the production environment to handle 10M paying users with peaks of 50K simultaneous users. Switching jobs at that point can be chalked up to "did something awesome, handed the project off to an experienced team for continued development, and looking for the next challenge".

Of course, there's still something to be said for being tenacious and fighting through the drudgery of ongoing maintenance. It's amazing how much you learn about how you ought to have built something when you are required to continue to grow and iterate on what you built. It's not something that someone will necessarily learn as part of their first job unless they stay with it for a while.

I actually thought a 2-year stay at a software job was a long time. In my experience, staying beyond that was pointless. After 2 years you've mostly learned everything you can learn from that position, and I've never received a raise more than 5%, so I always had to look elsewhere for better pay and new opportunities and technologies to learn. If there are companies that go out of their way to retain their software engineers, I've never been fortunate enough to work for one.

I had a 'mentor' at an early employer tell me that my first job should be like a marriage, and that fidelity was important. That piece of advice came to epitomize why I was looked for a different job.