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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

If I look at someone's linkedin and all their positions have been for <2 years it's a major red flag.

How someone working somewhere for 2 years not valuable? 2 years into a position and I already have a laundry list of deliverables.

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.

I’m 18 months in to my current role. Strong performance reviews but promotion is based on tenure so I need to wait at least another two years to have a good shot. Or, I can go elsewhere and get the promotion (and remote work, which is what I really want).

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.

If you have that issue at every company you work for it's a red flag. If you've had 3+ jobs and they all have tenures of <2 years it's a red flag.

This is just not true.

How is it not? How does anyone join a company and make any significant contributions in less than 2 years? How do you even become a leader within a company in less than two years? You just throw out all the relationships you have built every 2 years? It is a red flag.

What do you consider a significant contribution?

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.

Thanks for this example because so many people have 2 to 3 year of experience in a position with great experience and stories.

I mean, I agree, personally. But my encounters in the wild while interviewing, plus comments on Blind, etc. would indicate the wider consensus is that short tenures are preferable to long tenures.

To whom? Maybe to recruiters who get a commission for every person they bring on?

Interviewing SWEs, hiring managers, etc.

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.

I work at one such "top company". Internal mobility is very, very easy and well-supported by the company (great business choice IMO). I am not sure if would even make sense to talk about "sticking around" at the company level. One can easily choose between 1x5yrs of experience, 5x1yr or anywhere in between.

(This is obviously orthogonal to your point about perceptions and attitudes, but I felt compelled to chime in.)

Isn't this just another way of saying that working for a mediocre company isn't a negative signal unless you stay there a long time?

you are saying like you are hiring

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

Outside of FAANG, do you frequently find candidates who stick around that long at companies?

Yes, there are still many. The reasons can be varied. A lot of times the person might just like where they are doing what they do. Or at least are not unhappy enough to experience the disruption of looking for a new job.

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.

the leetcode interview process is also seen as daunting and a huge barrier that can make someone think twice about switching jobs

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.

Anecdotally, I've worked at the same small company for around 15 years now.

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.

> Outside of FAANG, do you frequently find candidates who stick around that long at companies?

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).

For me too. And I DO hire.

How do you reconcile that as a red flag with the massive raises people get from moving companies? Are you basically looking for someone who would turn down doubling their salary?

Yes, I know I do consider it: will this guy believe there's a right to raise or will he instead accept there's a duty to perform ?

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.

So:

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!

It's just like Bitcoin :p

Is this really a thing?

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?

The parent was being sarcastic, it's not a real thing.

You have to be upleveling and counting on equity to grow but it is very much a thing.. check out levels.fyi

Not taking into equity for the purpose of discussion, but don't most SWEs top out at some level of "Senior SWE" title?

Well, if I think the person is just job hopping for salary and will only stay six months, then I'd pass them over. Or offer a six month contract if we really need them.

When I hire, I'd like to keep them for at least 2-4 years for the company's sanity.

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