For a managerial or leadership position? I can't say, to be honest, but what you say makes sense. Then again, I'd say long tenures as a SWE ought to be considered a positive too (or at least not a negative), but it isn't, so...
Seriously? This is absurd.
If he can describe how he was meeting his career goals while also staying in the same position for nine years, then there's no reason to avoid him.
But if he spent the last six years stagnating, it might be worth giving extra scrutiny to how up-to-date his skillset is.
I don’t care about personal development to the same degree as making money. That’s what the business is about after all.
What they'll do is see it as a red flag and dig into it and find out what the circumstances were. If they feel those circumstances are ok, then you're fine. If they feel they were not ok, then you'll get dinged.
Versus back when I started my career, it would have been a universally positive indicator, that would score you points over a "job hopper". Nowadays it seems the job hopper is in a better position.
Improve safety for the users. Preserve the sanity of the ops team. Start actually competing for our business instead of relying on relationships with politicians. That sort of thing.
Most often these hireworthy behaviors correlate with bringing value to the business, but sometimes the business's values need correcting.
I realize this is an abnormal perspective, but I think it's important.
I spent seven years at a company whose main talent was finding ways to sell software that nobody would use (fewer bugs that way). We would build relationships with politicians who needed to spend their budget in order to have it renewed next year at the same size, and sell them something that claimed to do whatever made them look good.
It took us lowly engineers a long time to find out what was going on, but one day somebody actually tried to use it and you could tell from the bugs that nobody before them had ever managed to make it work.
Corrupting politicians is profitable. It adds value to the business. Creating an R&D group to actually drive the industry forward? That's risky, and in the end, less profitable. But I respect the hell out of the people who managed to do it, business value be damned, and would hire them to smack me around from time to time if I were a CEO.
It's more along the lines of "Fred, you exceed all our expectations but we're worried that you haven't been keeping up with the trade skills in your area due to being in only one company and likely been way too cozy there to evolve your skills".
I would never consider someone staying at their current job for 5+ years a negative, unless it is accompanied by negative references from coworkers.
This is for the usual reason of not getting raises, so veterans tend to be very underpaid.
It’s not uncommon in my experience to hear engineers say they would view tenures of 2-3 years as a red flag for hiring other engineers, but the hiring managers who actually make the decision have always preferred short tenures of hopping around or staying at one place only if there’s a title change every ~2 years.
It is quite concerning to see so much knowledge about how things work walk out the door and it is miserable if something goes wrong and nobody left knows it existed. So I get why engineers view a year as hit and run.
But yes, companies seem to interpret staying a year or two as evidence of growth/a highly desirable candidate.
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpViLcTp64
Finally it was open sourced and is currently sold with the following warranty: “[…]driver alertness is necessary, but not sufficient, for openpilot to be used safely and openpilot is provided with no warranty of fitness for any purpose.”
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L3gNaAVjQ4&t=1903s | Ethereum startup story, George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets | Lex Fridman Podcast #132
2. https://twitter.com/jinglejamOP/status/1310718738417811459 | an EVM to OVM transpiler
He approached a couple members of my current team about the idea of open sourcing some infrastructure he worked on, and I think he was shocked to find that his efforts were not as appreciated as he thought. A bad copy of something better. He left shortly thereafter. I’m not sure if that was always his plan and he wanted to take some things with him, or if he was disheartened. But I know for sure that of he had left earlier he would have never heard that feedback and would have walked away feeling really good about his work.
For myself, I tend to want to know how we got here, wherever “here” is. I don’t need to have made a decision to learn from the consequences, but I do have to understand the decisions to some extent.
A lot of my old team at my previous company (tech-as-a-cost-center), including myself, left for Silicon Valley style tech companies or similar (tech-as-a-profit-center). All of us probably at least doubled our TC, some of us more (4x for me).
The majority of engineering organizations are quite terrible at recognizing and promoting engineering talent. They’re fine with letting even good engineers leave as the cost of doing business. Looking at just the tenure and making an assumption about the individual sounds ridiculously backward and that’s pretty poor engineering leadership imo.
At my previous job, I spent some of my evenings and weekends to build internal tools to help members of the organization be more efficient, saving certain people on the team dozens of hours of work per week. I largely did it because I wanted to learn libraries and tools we weren't using on a day-to-day basis.
Instead of allocating more time for me to work on these projects or to work on improving our developer workflow, my reward was being assigned some of the most mind-numbing projects imaginable, tasks that quite frankly an entry-level developer fresh out of a bootcamp could accomplish. That wouldn't bug me if inefficiencies in the workflow wasn't such a bottleneck to the entire team.
Disheartened, I (and many other senior devs) applied elsewhere. One of the strongest devs sent a scathing email to leadership before getting let go. I managed to land a position with a great company that lets me jam and nerd out on cutting edge technology.
Apparently long tenures denote being an expert beginner, 1 year of experience repeated 5 times instead of 5 years of experience, complacency, laziness, things like that.
Again, I don't agree with this personally, but this seems to be the prevailing attitude. People like you and I being a minority.
There seem to be exceptions - the chief one being if you stuck around at a top company versus a mediocre one, that doesn't ding you much.
(This is obviously orthogonal to your point about perceptions and attitudes, but I felt compelled to chime in.)
Increasingly, talking to friends and colleagues who are also SWEs, the leetcode interview process is also seen as daunting and a huge barrier that can make someone think twice about switching jobs.
I'd say a FAANG (or similar tech company) engineer is more likely to move - and be capable of moving - than someone at a non tech company.
There's a lot of truth to this, but the result is that the inertia effect acts as a form of retention for FAANGs. This has only increased since they are losing their ability to maintain anti-poaching agreements.
Base pay isn't FAANG competitive. But I get a decent percentage of new projects (7%), not all are successful though of course. It might fall short even with that factored in, but I've made enough such that I could have retired in my mid 30's if I didn't have kids.
I like what I do, I like who I work with, I get to work from home, and we have had a variety of projects over the years so things stay fairly fresh.
I might be able to make more if I landed a job at a hot new startup or FAANG. But I might also hate working there. Doesn't seem worth the bother given I'm pretty happy here.
Not the person you asked the question, but yes.
The most successful startups to IPO in the last 20 years include B2B companies like Service Now, Datadog, Crowdstrike, Workday, Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler etc. Count some others like MongoDB, AppDynamics, New Relic, Rubrik, Nutanix etc. These companies don't trend on Twitter, or are included in FAANG, but have had long periods of growth.
Many employees in those companies have stayed at those firms and have grown in their careers.
(Disclosure: I worked at AppDynamics for ~10 years).
so you increase your engineers' salaries according to the market rate and they stay for longer than 2 years?
I think a lot of people would like to work under you too, consider leaving your recruitment email here, they will be glad to stay for more than 2 years
If you want a company where merit is rewarded but taking your time is accepted as long as you dont whine each time a brilliant innovator is promoted, finding people who stay longer will yield you either innovators able to move upward quickly enough or solid maintainers who are satisfied specialising.
Job 1 (Years 1-2): 100k/yr
Job 2 (Years 3-4): 200k/yr
Job 3 (Years 5-6): 400k/yr
Job 4 (Years 7-8): 800k/yr
Job 5 (Years 9-10): 1m/yr
Not sure any dev using this approach would need to work after year 10!
I quadrupled my compensation recently coming from a non-tech/tech-as-a-cost-center company to a FAANGMULA level company. However I don't foresee experiencing another huge jump like that ever again in my career.
If you're going from one FAANG to another FAANG, what are the odds you're going make six figure jump in compensation unless you're also moving up the ranks while doing so?
When I hire, I'd like to keep them for at least 2-4 years for the company's sanity.
If I move again, I plan to stay at least five years for the reasons in this thread.
But employers sometimes forget that even current employees are still operating in the jobs market.
I spent 18 months in my first post-PhD job and in that time I drove consolidation of all of the tests (code base has acquired 6 frameworks over 20 years) into a single framework and got people actually writing new tests. I fixed parallel building which brought down the clean build time from 3 hours to 15 minutes. I did the work for a feature which was used as the major marketing selling point in that year. I got a very decent pay rise and bonus because of these things before I left.
It’s not like we are all working in a legacy codebase that never changes. I just don’t get it.
Even consultants swap clients often enough to where as far as work an impact goes it’s not more than a year usually.
Right now I'm just thankful where I am now. My compensation quadrupled coming from an investment bank. I actually suspect my compensation might actually be a bit lower than my peers at this company or those like it, relatively speaking, but at this point I don't care.
Combined with the fact that the work and project are super interesting, I could live with this compensation and title until I retire (in my late 30s now). I'm certainly in no hurry to put myself through leetcoding again, though to cover all my bases I probably ought to follow the principle of "a leetcode a day keeps unemployment at bay" sooner rather than later again.
But even if the delta remains, I'm just plain thankful*. The amount I'm earning now is jawdropping for my wife and I. When I was interviewing around, we were half-joking how awesome it would be if I could replicate those stories you see on Blind about people doubling their compensation. That it quadrupled instead is shocking.
* Probably not a popular thing to say in tech circles, but my wife and I are Christian, and suffice it to say we are mindblowingly thankful to God for this. I don't endorse prosperity gospel, but I'm now earning more than we know how to utilize. We've committed to using at least some of it for good causes - my first month's salary was given wholesale to a charity trying to rescue/resettle/support Afghan refugees.
But it has been corrupted. Demonstrating your thought processes, communication style, and problem solving approach is still a factor. But being able to quickly get the hyperoptimal solution in 20 minutes usually trumps everything else and often becomes the single make-or-break factor.
Total guess.
Since when was this a thing? I guess I was under a rock when it came to this :)
For that matter, I think Lyft, Uber, & Airbnb are capable of paying more on average than Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon at least. Or at least that's the impression I get on Blind.