Stop Sabotaging Your Career with Short Stints
staysaasy.com
staysaasy.com
Company loyalty is bullshit in my eyes. Even if you enjoy the project and you think you're making a difference and learning new things there's a cost that comes with that (time/money/energy etc.) The first and last goal for 99.999% of companies is to make money. My goal is exactly the same.
I love what I do and I've done is since I was a child. I do it in my free time as well, but as long as companies think it's easier to hire a new person on higher pay than to pay the same to a "loyal" employee I'm going to jump ship. Simple as that.
I got a 25% pay bump when I started at my new job this month. How many years should I have stayed at my previous job to get it? You can argue that I was underpaid when I started at my previous place, but I also got a 9% raise after my first year there (I asked for 10%). I've been constantly doing more and trying to improve things because I want to be proud of my work and not do half-assed decisions, but 25% they would never give me. I left after 23 months.
I founded my own small company last year. I'm the only person in it so far. Maybe if I see success in the future and I have to actually hire someone else I'll start thinking differently. Until then always remember this - companies don't have any loyalty to you (with small exceptions) and you shouldn't be loyal to them outside your contract.
My career has been long stints of at least a decade. Every company has failed. One failed because the main source of income was providing local sales and support for a software product, but the company owner was collecting licensing fees and not passing them on to the licensor until we needed to ask for help. This came undone when one day our client rang the supplier directly only to find that their licence had expired three years ago. We lost that gig, which meant about 60% of the income evaporated overnight.
How do I as a working stuff differentiate between the sleazy arseholes who are shady management like this guy, and the sleazy arseholes who are the ruthless successful types who will actually build successful companies?
Who do I give my “long stint” loyalty to? I am 50 so I only have two more long stints in me and nobody is hiring 50yo software engineers with a broad exposure to languages and environments.
Save the gospel sermons. Acknowledge that you got a good innings and none of it was due to you being innately virtuous as a human being.
As a working stiff, you don't want to differentiate between personality types. You are not making a friend. You are allocating a portfolio of resources (your team) towards investments. You have to learn how to compare multiple opportunities against one another based on your own career goals, as well as how to do your due diligence on the health of the company, the industry it is in, the competitive landscape, the organizational topology, really anything that you can research or think about which could help you predict what will happen.
And even then, you have to prepare for the unknowns. You have to be prepared to cut your losses if things don't work out, because despite your best efforts to do your research, you really don't know what things are like until you start working at a place. You should not stop your "interviewing" curiosity just because you begin a new role. You should continue observing, soaking in information, social interactions, situations, anything that helps you determine whether now that you're on the inside, you're honestly as confident that things will work out as when you started (things are always rosier before you start because you're getting the pitch).
50 is not too old to learn this skills, but it definitely makes things difficult. I was fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your perspective) enough to have to learn these things to survive in the first few years of my career, working at some really unsavory companies where I started fast and left fast. It sucked, but I am glad I figured it out then rather than later.
When you do long stints at companies, you risk not developing this intuitive sense for when things are going off the rails (or going really well) because you have not exercised it. I wish I could help you go back in time and make different decisions, because it always makes me so sad to read these stories. Good people end up getting screwed over.
I worked one job as PC support for a white box manufacturer. They were dabbling in telephony, even to the point of hiring engineers to build custom boxes to handle PSTN to VOIP conversion, leasing fibre from other companies to carry their call traffic. It was cute at the time, apart from the management who were all deadset focussed on saving pennies. Turn off the computer when you go home because those 20 cents a year it costs to run the thing in standby are extra profit!
I left that job, that company ended up becoming the third biggest telco in the country.
I signed up with another company that was already in the telco space but it turns out the CEO of this one was a clown, at one staff meeting shortly after Apple had released the iPhone 3G he held up the Nokia Navigator and said, “this is the future of phones, that Apple stuff is expensive crap.”
That company doesn’t exist anymore (it was bought for scrap value by the third largest telco in the country)
Take your former company for example. You see a couple examples of how they operate, but it does seem like frugality is an operating principle they hold dear. Is this a pennywise pound foolish mentality, or is it a mentality that follows from attempting to use resources efficiently to accomplish tasks and reduce waste?
Take a look at the latter. The CEO makes a bold proclamation about the future; is he a visionary who anticipates the unmet needs of the present that will served by the future, or is he being opinionated for its own sake?
Unfortunately, there isn't really enough information here to make a decision one way or another. You have to drill down both above and below to figure out what the company's overall story to their investors is. And you have to consider yourself one of them. You will be investing your time and your opportunity cost into them. Do you feel sufficiently sold? Always be asking this.
This reminds me of an old CTO I worked for that refused to hire anyone from a boot camp. And a CEO that turned multiple surfer candidates down because “they looked like a total stoner”. The term “24-monthers” is another example of this.
I think this simple surface level approach is lazy and ineffective. To hire great engineers, you have to put in the work to learn about and evaluate your candidates. Every person has their own background and story. Just because someone had some bad luck with their last couple startups doesn’t mean that they’re dumb or a bad engineer. It also doesn’t mean that they didn’t learn anything in their experience.
A big question to ask the candidate is why did they leave their last gig. It could be for the reasons the author mentions but there could be plenty of other reasons that are indicative of a high quality candidate. Again, as the hiring manager, you need to actually put in the work instead of making quick judgements on the surface.
And the final bit of “career advice” in this article’s conclusion is just silly. Almost no one leaves a company after 2 years because the “novelty” wares off. If the author took the time to ask they’d learn that people leave companies for a wide variety of reasons. Some good some bad. Grit for grit’s can turn into foolishness.
I know how to navigate multiple environments - and in fact get a charge out of it. I can pattern match across a larger range, I can tell what 'good' looks like with more points of view.
I've had to get really good at something in short periods of time, because of those new situations. That creates a mindset of growth and adaptation. I have had lots of opportunity to 'read people' because I've seen those actions, faces, emotions before - and know what numerous people did shortly afterwards. (eg: leave, sulk, sabotage, lead, etc). Yes, I may not be as great a 'subject matter expert' on a single topic - but I'm a great leader because of it.
People aren't chasing novelty, they're chasing money.
Of course an "engineering leader" focused on "hyper-growth" wants you to stick around. If you leave, that's a sunken cost, and now the company has to hire someone new, train someone new, and not promote someone new. Case in point: if you want people to stick around, you need to make it worth their time. Engineers leave because it's incredibly well-documented that job-hopping every ~2 years yields a pay raise that's materially higher (25-35%) than the average pay raise your typical high-performer earns (~5% or less yearly).
This goes hand-in-hand with typical gestapo-like practices in our industry that try to artificially prevent this kind of mobility to begin with: why is discussing salaries/bonuses so taboo? Why are interviews so difficult? Why are hiring practices so opaque?
> Leave enough places for these reasons and you’ll find you’ve seriously limited your opportunities and earnings over time.
The data quite literally shows the opposite.
This sounds a bit like HR propaganda.
I do agree that you can develop stronger skills by staying in a role longer. The problem is that as your value and productivity for the company grow rapidly, your salary and other compensation will not fairly grow with it, and you’ll get stonewalled, with meaningless title bumps and 3-5% raises.
A company that actually values you will give you 10-15% raises per year, and offer significant bonuses and equity awards.
If they don’t proactively try to retain you because they are unable or unwilling to afford that, then just leave. Do 2 year stints every time. You have to teach your employer that it costs significant increasing compensation every year to retain you, or else you will get that compensation in the open market.
This whole article should be completely flipped around.
It should say, “Employers, stop forcing talented workers into a situation where repeated 2-year stints is their only rational choice due to your failure to give significant regular compensation increases.”
Ah, if only the reason I left was a lack of learning novelty! In my experience, the 2 to 3 year timeline is how long it takes to get fed up with the job's flaws.
Examples of next level skills and how they helped him level up his career would have made this piece far more interesting.
Take a step back. A more objective fact is that most CEOs/CTOs reached their positions not because they optimized the two-year role jumping. It's either from a long tenure with a company or from founding a successful startup and got acquired.
Very rarely can one reach VP level by simply jumping around. One's past loyalty becomes a non-trivial factor for positions at that level.
My 2 cents.
"Stop sabotaging your career with long stints".
Very few developers are CEOs/CTOs. Even fewer have founded a successful startup or gotten acquired. Very rarely can one get a promotion or a raise by staying at one job for more than 3 years. The bigger your network is the more likely you will get an interesting job offer at a company where your past loyalty is irrelevant but your personal connection is.
My 2 cents.
I guess another way to phrase my understanding is that: if your (possibly unattainable) career ambition is to reach CTO level, you should know that in the past, very rarely is that achieved with 2-year job jumping.
If your goal is to get steady compensation growth, probably job switching can give you that. And that is also probably what most of people should do anyways.
Want developers to stick around and develop "next level skills?" Try to find a better approach than shaming them. Maybe make sure they actually get raises in line with their worth so they don't hop away for more money. And while you're spending more money, maybe spend some of that on training in those "next level skills" you value that seem so elusive.
As an employer What I care about is what you can do for me now. That’s it.
1) Regret minimization framework - Make decisions based on what will minimize the total regret you have at the end of your life (I find this effective because it's easier for me to accumulate evidence of things I definitely don't like than things I will always like).
2) Prefer mechanisms over good intentions - Hope is not a strategy; a process where every step makes sense which is applied consistently over time will eat hope for lunch any day of the week.
With that said, I think this post is absolute trash. No treatment is given to the reader's individual goals and distastes; no concrete mechanisms and strategies are given over hope and good intentions that ultimately don't fare any better than a coin flip. The author doesn't share their own experiences and how that would inform this post; nor do they give you any context on the expected audience. And yet, for some reason, the author feels qualified to give advice about what is and is not responsible for career success across differing roles, seniorities and industries that very well may have nothing in common. I think this kind of writing is irresponsible.
As one of my mentors told me, skill acquisition can only take you so far. You may reach a certain point in your career where for the purposes of your own growth, you'll have to run your own P/L line. You have to start taking risks, you have to start doing things that can fail. Getting one of these off of the ground is error prone and often ends in complete failure. That's fine. You'll just have to try again. As many times as it takes, depending on how bad you want it. And sometimes, in between, you have to do things more safer and established to set you up for success the next time you want to try to pull something off on your own.
Why doesn't the post talk about this? My guess is because the author of it doesn't really know as much about mentoring as they think. I have worked with and for people who have the same mentality of the author of this post, and I will just say that if you asked their reports, mentors or colleagues what they thought about this person's ability to develop and mentor well, it is not as rosy as that person's self conception.
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Head of product/engineering at a mid-sized enterprise SaaS company. Helped grow the company from <10 to >500 employees.
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Head of product/engineering at a mid-sized enterprise SaaS company is maybe comparable to PM/SDM/pushing senior manager at a BigCo or at a larger unicorn. Knowing actual C levels at large successful companies, I would say that when it comes to pathways towards C-levels at a larger private company or a public company, the author is no more qualified to comment than I am. This post is misleading to folks earlier in their careers. I would say it's actively harmful.
If you are learning frameworks just for the sake of it you'll have a hard time building something real.
Also when companies stop looking for an exact set of skills and frameworks that force you to stay on the hype cycle.
Can you imagine working with the person who wrote that?
I don't see anything here that warrants such a harsh tone. The author is saying if you want to get past being a pawn-like IC, then putting in the time to understand the business at a deeper level is beneficial. It takes time to do this, especially when you consider having to start over fresh each time, learn what it is people do at the company, how they organize, and so on.
And to the author's point - the places I have worked and done interviews at have, in fact, looked at the timespan between jobs on the resume and concluded not to hire a candidate because they realized that after 1-2 years, the candidate would leave, making them a not very good investment. This is not unheard of, and it makes sense. As a result, the average employee turnover at these companies has been 4+ years.
A corollary to the author's point is to take a look at some of the more prominent programmers you know - the ones who aren't founders of their own companies. How long do they usually stick with a company that they like?
I can comment more on individual points but I'll leave it at this for the time being.
I started working in 1996. I got a job as a computer operator based on an internship I did the year before. It was my gateway to get into the Big City from the small town where I graduated from. I developed a system by myself as the only programmer that they used to create a separate department that double the size of the company.
I left there after three years because there was nothing left to do and went to another company. I got a $33K bump between salary + bonus which was a lot for me back then.
Over the next 8 years as my salary went up by a paltry 3% a year and bonuses were cut, I made a grand total of $4000 more in 2008 than I made in 2000. On top of that, I became an “expert beginner”.
I soft skilled my way into another job in 2008, that paid only $7K more, but I knew I would be able to take advantage of the job to update my resume and hopefully survive through the recession.
I muddled my way through the recession and when the company folded, I got another job relatively quickly in 2012 as a for what was all intents and purposes a mid level enterprise developer making about $10K more. But again, I was interested in building my resume.
2013 - $2000 raise
2014 - $1500 raise
Of course by now I learned my lesson from my experience between 2000-2008 and I had learned how to do resume driven development and build a network.
I changed jobs again and this time got about a $25K raise. I was now at the bottom of the (relative narrow) range of what a senior developer can make.
2016 - no raise
Again, not being stupid enough to stick around, I left and had a choice between working at a non software company as a dev lead working on two greenfield projects - perfect resume building opportunity - or working as just another SASS CRUD developer. I chose the team lead position - with another $15K pay bump.
A year and a half in, the company was bought out by private equity and they said that they “don’t want to be a software company.”
Changed jobs again, in 2018, vertical move in pay (only about $5K), but by now, I had been exposed to “cloud consultants” and knew where the money was locally. I took a job where the newly minted CTO wanted to make the company “cloud native” and integrate more tightly with AWS. Once again, a perfect opportunity to gain experience and build my resume. I leveraged my theoretically knowledge about AWS, my experience as a team lead, got the job and got experience with all of the AWS fiddly bits. Over the next two review cycles (2019,2020), they kept me at market rates as I learned more and I was quite happy.
Then Covid hit - with an across the board pay cut that wiped out my salary gains since getting the job because it was a “shared sacrifice”.
A recruiter from BigTech emailed me about a fully remote role. Why wouldn’t I take a stab at it? Making “FAANG” money, fully remote, and in a low cost of living area.
In none of the interviews, did my short tenure at jobs since 2008 come up and they made me an offer shortly after the interview.