Nearly 24 years with a single employer. How many programmers can claim that these days?
My understanding is that there was a big cultural change in theory of management during the corporate raider era of the 1980s. Before, lifetime employment was common; employee loyalty was matched by defined-benefit pensions and the implicit commitment that you'd be kept on until retirement unless you did something terrible.
Corporate raiders, though, found that they could make a lot of money by buying a company and, among other things, ignoring all the implicit commitments. So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. Getting rid of all that knowledge and loyalty might have long-term costs, but that didn't matter to corporate raiders, because they'd quickly sell off the company. Managers everywhere eventually adopted these tactics, both because it helped fend off corporate raiders and because narrow-focus financial evaluation of everything became the dominant management paradigm.
Now it's up to each worker to ensure that they stay marketable, and there's no particular incentive to stay around. Indeed, the incentives are often negative. At most places it's easier to get a raise if you move. And too many companies are stuck in legacy technology stacks; if you stay, you'll eventually become unemployable.
So I'd rather ask how many tech companies have programmers confident that their employer will stick with them until 67? Damned few, I'd guess.
It’s really sad to see 1000s of years of people’s work and toil washed away this way. Really drives home that nothing we do in this field has any meaning certainly not permanence.
This is still taught today in business schools.
When you take over a company, the first thing you do is fire a bunch of people. The market sees it as cutting costs, so the stock goes up.
It doesn’t matter who the people were or how essential to the company they were. This is simply a fundamental part of the theory of “business” as taught in top management courses.
The tiny (usually temporary) stock boost secures your employment for the the next six months. This buys you time to figure out how to run/fix the company.
So now our sales targets are higher than both combined (AFAICT), and we don't meet them at all. Since we're a "team" now they distribute the layoffs equally across the "team".
Not sure where these sales targets come from since we aren't publicly traded. I just feel we're being setup to fail.
Anyway, people are leaving in droves (2 best salesmen left, engineering is a revolving door) since our formerly generous performance based bonus is going away.
I am the only full-time left on my project, the rest are contractors (since we have a hiring freeze, but a large budget left over for contractors for some reason). They literally cannot do releases without me. And after asking for a raise to reflect that I'm managing 3 contractors instead of coding (the former lead left), I got scoffed at and told that there was a hiring freeze (that's not a promotion freeze, but ok, except you have 100k/year freed up from the last guy that left...), and that my project isn't under as much pressure as the other projects so no. Come back to me in a year and we'll talk.
Yeah ok. Wait a year for maybe 5%. Or jump ship for an easy 20%. And no managing/lead responsibilities. Go pound sand.
The company is clueless about keeping talent. No one mentions the massive churn at company update meetings. They just go "wow, didn't meet the sales targets... gotta work harder guys! Look at all these cool initiatives we're gonna do next year!"
I keep hearing the word death spiral among coworkers. Yep.
/rant.
Though EE (RF, Microwave, Antennas to be exact) still has the respect for the gray beard.
The record for my employer is 60+ years; a machinist who started at 18 and still working into his late 70’s as he enjoys it.
Now the age distribution is log-normal with 5 years average experience. Was just given a 25% retention bonus yesterday, which is unheard of. They are scared of the old people leaving, and rightly so.
The millennia’s job hop like crazy, and in my field there is a lot of institutional knowledge built up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen (inventor of the BBS and author of xmodem) is one, at 44 years for IBM. I knew a very small numbers of career Allstate folks at over 40 years.
The departments looking after things like websites think 5 years with the company is a long time.
The department I'm in tends to be lifers - I personally know two people who have made 50 years, a few more at 40. Certainly if you're under 10 years you're new.