For those who don't know, church hopping is a practice that some
Christians (I don't know about other religions) do to find a new local
congregation to attend. While it is sometimes necessary (for a
number of reasons) to do this, sometimes folks do it only because the
current church is not as exciting as it once was; there are a number of
good reasons that people leave a church and move on (don't agree with
Theology/practices of the church is one good one, but there are
others).
The quest is usually to find a church that is to find a place with
better music, a more exciting service, etc. What ends up
happening is that these people (these "church hoppers") bounce from
place to place to place. The types of "exciting" churches tend to
do more redistributing of parishoners instead of converting.
As someone testing the job market (still) and helping to find good
people in my current job, it seems that this same type of practice goes
on in the IT industry. When you are interviewing a candidate, you
can't get it out of your head that there is a reason why this person is
moving on. Of course you can ask and you'll get some kind of
sanitized response that will hint at the real, but it won't tell you
the real reason. You won't know that until at least a month after
you hired the person.
Interviewing a potential employer is even more like this. You
can't escape the fact that if you are applying for a position that
someone previously occupied that there was a reason they left.
You're not sure if they were just on the quest for more money/more
excitement or if they left for a really good reason and that you
shouldn't even think about going there...
Sometimes I wish we could set up a blacklisted company site where
people who are leaving their positions could report on why they left in
medium detail (for instance, "This company is too *@%^ cheap for me...
they wouldn't by me an MSDN Universal Subscription for my personal use"
or "my manager Brendan Tompkins is freaking moron and shouldn't be
allowed to manage developers." (BTW, apologies to Brendan for misusing
his name). If I could look a company up then I could use the info to
make a real decision instead of having to try to guess. Eric's questions help in this regard, but they don't solve everything)