Wow. Fifteen years in a single company.
It's a big old company though (one of the oldest in the field), and this is in broadcast engineering which is far more conservative. IME Peoppe in the Internet facing parts are far more flitty.
While some older engineers are happy to retreat into comfortably old technologies like cameras and microphones, there's plenty more who havve spent the time to learn about the trend towards IP. They are very valuable, in contrast to say a "generic" network engineer, because they understand the domain, they fundamentally know a 20ms outage on a network is catastrophic.
Technically, he's worked for several different companies. For a while he was working for a different company, but doing exactly the same work, with the same people, in the same building.
I don't think it will be easy to replace network engineers like him, who have been doing the job literally as long as the consumer internet has existed.
I think a lot of people leave as soon as their stock vests (3-4 years) and it’s obvious they are not on an upward track. And the few who got on to the upward tracks are set for life and have no incentive to leave ever. There’s no middle ground.
Either that, or find a company that does raises in line with what you’d get from moving. Netflix is famous for this (and has high retention), but there are other companies. The company I work for has a similar approach and I know I’m unlikely to make more at another company unless I move into finance, in which case see above.
Netflix has high turnover, about 15-20% depending on source.
Contributing my own anecdata here: I am familiar with current and past employees at Netflix who have told me personally that plenty of people are fired from Netflix because they don't jive with the culture, not necessarily because they are incompetent. That's not intended to be a remark about Netflix being a toxic company; on the contrary, I think Netflix is pretty self-aware about its "corporate values." But that means that engineers who could succeed at Google, Facebook, etc might not succeed at Netflix because the latter looks for a lot of self-direction and career ambition, not just competence.
Circling back to the point: I've seen some people slice off involuntary termination numbers when discussing attrition at tech companies, but I don't think that's appropriate. Sometimes people leave because they're intellectually or financially unsatisfied, and that would mostly comprise the ~7.5-10% that leave voluntarily. But if the bar for being fired is lower, it's probably useful to incorporate the involuntary departures, because there's an argument many of them would leave voluntarily even if not fired due to a culture mismatch.
I spent 9 years at one company - 7 years longer than I should have. After a 10K raise the first year and with 3% raises after that and bonuses slowly being cut, I only made $7K more in 2008 than I did in 2002. After that, I started aggressively job hopping - 4 jobs - and learning and over the next 10 years, I made over 60K more.
Now, I am looking to see what technology I should jump on and best case, I might be able to get $10K more over the next two years. I'm actually okay with that, I live a comfortable lifestyle.
I don't want to go into management and I want to stay hands on. My current position as a dev lead as about as high as I want to go and I would be fine being a strict individual contributor.
I'm in a conundrum whether to leave or not because the project hasn't shipped.
- If someone stays less than 2 years with a company something is wrong (the person, the company or the combination).
- If someone stays longer than 4 years with a company in the same job, without promotion, that person is probably not the 'manager' type.
Both situations just give you hints on whether someone matches the profile you are searching for, but switching companies after 3-4 years seems to be reasonable for people who want to get the most out of their salaries. Nevertheless, if someone got all his 'promotions' by switching jobs you should be wary of course.
We've lost some coworkers, always seemingly too soon. I've been to a couple of wakes, one for a coworker's wife.
I don't want to say we're like family, but we look out for each other. The year before the company rolled out 2.5x salary life insurance, someone started a crowdfunding campaign after a coworker's sudden death that raised over $50K in one day.
I know I've been here too long, but I'll miss it. I grew up here.
To be a single-digit employee, you had to start in the 70s -- i.e., 40 years ago. My friend -- I don't think it'd be appropriate to name him -- has "only" been there 30, which means he joined a healthy-sized Apple already 10 years into its life.
In 1994. Apple was on top of the world. They were the number one or number two computer seller and the PPC Macs were introduce and then Windows 95 happened.
It happens.