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Comment by atty | Hacker News Reader

At my company at least, we definitely prefer longer average tenures over shorter ones. Very short stays (say less than 2-3 years) and many hops implies you’re more interested in filling out your resume and jumping to the next pay raise than you are in making any meaningful contribution to the work our team is doing.

I would never consider someone staying at their current job for 5+ years a negative, unless it is accompanied by negative references from coworkers.

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Do you give your employees substantial raises every year as an incentive to stay and not look for a job elsewhere every 2-3 years? I was able to increase my salary by 400% in the past 2 years by moving around. But that doesn't mean I haven't made a huge impact on the products I've worked on for 1 year each, because I did.

I'm curious about your definition of huge impact? (esp. given the timescales.)

We had a guy who made a huge “impact” alright. He left almost three years ago and we’re still trying to unwind the mess he made.

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.

look up people that can accomplish a lot in short period of time, at least less than half a year or <2years, like geohot, Alyssa Rosenzweig or Mike Blumenkrantz and more

Have no idea who the others are, but I remember geohot from the various HN threads discussing their self-driving project: a safety-critical piece of software with important parts implemented in Python and running on an Android phone. When the NHTSA started asking some questions about safety standards compliance, geohot cancelled the project.

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.”

If that's what your take away is from my comment to the parent, you are missing the point, so much

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

Another example for a 10x developer would be fabrice bellard. I've participated in this year's advent of code and usually needed dozens of minutes if not hours to solve examples. Then you see some of the videos from streamers on the leaderboard. they just quickly type out code. Sure, I hadn't practiced much and they had a lot of practice (doing AoC was my attempt of getting some), but they are definitely a two digit multiplier away from my performance. Of course, this doesn't directly translate to performance on the real job though, but there is a correlation I'd say.

Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpViLcTp64

Yep. I’m at just over double where I started 2 years ago by hopping twice.

~~Respect to your employer then, they're doing it right.~~ Edit: replied to the wrong person.

I don’t think you meant to reply to me as I am someone who must keep moving for raises.

You 4x'ed your TC in 2 years?

It's very possible.

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).

I’m sorry but it sounds like you’ve just been really lucky in where you’ve worked at.

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.

Couldn't agree more.

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.

What a pleasure it must be working with someone who think important work is mind numbing and great company let him "jam" on "cutting edge" stuff (which I always translate as "dead in two years because too boring eventually for the jammers")

People work somewhere to make money... shocker! Unless you're some sort of non-profit or a real pioneer in a certain field (SpaceX?), your employees will be there mostly for the paycheck. People aren't interested in making a meaningful contribution if they're building a rehashed CRUD app for the 15th time.

Where are you that 2-3 years is short? At any company I have been with, 3 years would make you an absolute veteran.

This is for the usual reason of not getting raises, so veterans tend to be very underpaid.

+1 for this. At six months At my current place I am in the top half of engineers for seniority and this has been one of the nicest places I’ve ever worked. At previous companies I’ve been in meetings where high level managers veto prospective hires the entire team wanted because they had been at their current company for “too long” where “too long” was 4 years without moving into management.

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.

I get why engineers hate it. I am on a team where at 2 months, if we become fully staffed at some point, I will be in the top half of seniority between resignations and transfers to new teams.

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.

It makes sense since such people have more diverse experience and more adaptive, agile. They could bring new perspective to the team. I would say balanced approach is better - part of long tenure applicants and part of the hopping ones.

Large traditional engineering companies have tenures like this. I joined a dev team working on CFD software and the average tenure was over 10 years. Made even less sense when by jumping I’m working on much less difficult code but getting paid a lot more.

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