5 consecutive jobs on my resume:

1 year: Student software dev job working for the university I attended while in school. Couldn't continue it even if I wanted to.

1 year and 3 months: Game producer for a small game publisher that got some bad luck (and a few bad decisions in hindsight) with a few game releases, and the parent company shut it down.

1 year and 1 month: Lead developer at a tiny app development startup where after a while it became clear the board members funding the company didn't know anything about apps and the executive producer didn't know anything about proper marketing or making sure the product made had an audience (but that became clear a little too late to do anything about it). The apps we made were perfectly good quality, but didn't find an audience. Board members eventually pulled the plug after the fourth app release.

1 year and 2 months: worked as a developer (and project manager/dev on one game) for a company that was doing incredibly well when I joined, but had a string of struggles for the following year after. I was part of a major layoff after a big release when the client decided to stop most of the funding. I could tell things weren't going well with the main client, but it kept looking like maybe we were a month or two out from landing a sweet development contract for various large opportunities to work on a big game for a publisher (none of which ended up panning out), so I stuck around just in case. They never did.

0 years and 9 months: worked as a contractor for a consulting company at a small marketing department at an insurance company, mainly just me and a lead developer. One day the lead developer got fed up with his ideas not being used and walked out and started his own company shortly after. The marketing head at that point decided to do something else with the project and didn't need me anymore so my contract suddenly ended.

Next job: 6 years. Joined the company and a few months later they announced getting bought by a major corporation. The merger started and everything started getting shittier, a couple major layoffs happened, people kept leaving on top of that, but I decided to stay, in part, because "I have so many short stints on my resume, I need something longer, I should stay at least 2-3 years!" At 3 years, the large corporation we merged with posted nothing but losses every quarter for 2 years, raises were pretty much nonexistent, the bonus I was hired with got taken away during the merger, and our department had about a third the employees it had when I started...but then the pandemic happened, and they had already closed down our office space, so I was already fully remote, didn't have to deal with any uncertainty about being forced back into the office, so I stayed even longer than I should have.

So I've had short stints 5 times in a row, always being laid off for nothing that had to do with my performance or capabilities, and that led to me staying way too long at a shitty job to make up for it.

A long stint that almost wasn't, btw, as during one of those major layoffs after the first year, as I found out I was on one of the big layoff lists, until a few people quit before it happened and my boss could lay off less people as a result.

Been at my current job for a year, and so far it's been doing well and they've had 5 straight years of rapid growth, but we'll see. I sometimes joke that I'm the Ted McGinley[1] of software companies.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4549382