I would never have increased my from $68k to $115k in 5 years.I probably would've been somewhere at like $80k right now at best if I was didn't switch jobs twice.
If it means some hiring manager is going say some snarky opinion, then yes I'll take my extra money.
Everybody makes serious mistakes that don't show themselves for years. Those who don't stick around usually assume that any mistakes they find in their new company were due to incompetence. Similarly, people who have not stuck around for years have never been instrumental in doing difficult culture transformations, or fixing long term architectural problems.
It's truly unfortunate that the industry rewards those who don't tackle these kinds of difficult problems. The legacy is an industry where the problems are ubiquitous: flavour of the month architecture, my way or the highway bullying, either process of the month or "pragmatic" (aka ad hoc) processes, absolute disrespect for coworkers (I'm the only one with an ounce of sense).
Yep, I'm happy to take the discount on the developer who is humble, knows how to navigate political mine fields, knows how to recover from mistakes, knows how to refine techniques and processes, etc, etc. I'm also happy to take the odd "rock star" if they are actually good enough, but I'd never build an entire team of them (willingly).
It can accelerate your growth and pay substantially if you are doing it for the right reasons. I would never fault anybody for doing so without discovering why they moved.
Once you hit the job that really really suits you (say you like algorithms and this job occasionally needs some), you are less likely to move no matter how experience you are already. While you are on positions that are meh to you, you are more likely to want change soon.
Of course you don't want company stucked with only people who are new there nor only with people who never worked elsewhere. But then again, company should have idea about which position requires more stability or how many of each type is there already and factor that in into decision process.
Yep. However I'd say it's less of an industry thing and more of a generational thing that you can see that from customers all the way on up to C-level people and out.
Perennial favorite ISP Sonic.net is a great example. They're giving away free basketball tickets, free service (6 months!) to customers who are referred via NextDoor, additional discounts for new subscribers, etc. Existing customers get told to pound sand and complimentary rate hike. Other ISPs do this as well, but it's funny to see the supposedly good guys succumbing to the idea that loyalty is worthless.
CEOs, of course, get tasked with propping up short-term profits and get showered with cash when their short-sighted efforts fail (ex: Yahoo, HP). Of course this isn't particularly new either as Gordon Gekko style corporate raiders have been around for decades.
I call this the "one year of experience, ten times" phenomenon.
As a side note, I always find funny reading "Our team has 20 years of combined experience in ..." as if a two people team with 10 years each was the same thing as 20 people with one year each.
Moving to different employers means you get a wider experience of different technologies.
In my experience, you learn very different things in every workplace. Could be a different language or framework. Could even just be a different team arrangement or workflow.
Bottom line is this: if you feel like you're not learning and growing in your current environment, why stay? Better yet, why would anyone expect you to stay?
There's a steep initial ramp of learning that can readily plateau out if someone is complacent or actively disinterested in learning new things.
Then I moved to a much larger software market, and I have been job hoping more than once once a year, but because the teams and companies themselves have no notion of long term ownership, preferring instead to cut whatever corners to get the thing right now done most quickly, without regard for the future.
I'd rephrase that as simply knowing the trade offs, knowing in which conditions your solution is valid, and estimating how long these conditions will be present, and then estimating what's next, and then taking that into account when choosing a solution (and trade offs).
Some people are absolutely terrible at estimating change and pace. Some people don't see when it's time to involve higher ups, and some don't know when to do the inverse of that.
> Those who don't stick around usually assume that any mistakes they find in their new company were due to incompetence.
That's too general, but also not completely unfair.
> Similarly, people who have not stuck around for years have never been instrumental in doing difficult culture transformations, or fixing long term architectural problems.
Again, too general. Maybe you get hired for a transformation/migration/rewrite project, and basically you have a good chance to be hired as the Captain for the mighty Failship.
And now let's discuss how all of the aforementioned are discussed to death in [Project] Management 101, and all of the following are discussed to death in [People] Management 101, yet what you write is still valid as ever.
> It's truly unfortunate that the industry rewards those who don't tackle these kinds of difficult problems.
Industry is full of incompetent showmen, useless middle managers, and a lot of extremely biased, uncompromising, uncooperative, power-hungry completely regular but overstressed underloved normal guys/gals.
Yet society has a freak approach to freaks, because people think oh fuck them, why can't they just behave, but when I freak out, it's because reasons. And when Joe from IT is a social trainwreck then it's ostracization time!
> The legacy is an industry where the problems are ubiquitous: flavour of the month architecture, my way or the highway bullying, either process of the month or "pragmatic" (aka ad hoc) processes, absolute disrespect for coworkers (I'm the only one with an ounce of sense).
Yes, indeed. And this largely happens in other industrial sectors, but since change is slower there, these problems usually don't present themselves so acutely.