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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that feels like jobs that are good enough to warrant a 2-3 year tenure are actually rare?

I'd say tenures in the 1-2 year range should be considered normal. However, I agree that less than a year feels short. But honestly, that sort of implies that the average job is worth sticking around for a year or longer. Putting it that way, even that claim seems a bit shaky.

In reality, I think good leaders and teams are pretty unusual. Most people are just good at dealing with bad ones or living in denial of them.

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I’m on year 15 with most colleagues in the 5-15 range, some approaching 20. I wouldn’t say someone can’t contribute at all initially, but I’d say the first year I expect any new hire to be almost net negative (in the sense that while their output is good, it’s often with a lot of support that takes time from more senior colleagues).

If I was suspecting someone wouldn’t stay say 3 years, I’d definitely not hire them at all.

> I’m on year 15 with most colleagues in the 5-15 range, some approaching 20.

That doesn't counter their theory though, since people (presumably) won't tend to stay at jobs that aren't worth staying at. Sooner or later everyone finds their way to a job worth staying at and becomes another example of survivorship bias.

The biggest factor is presumably the company itself, some are much more successful and generous as a result while others struggle more and share the pain. But also within a company, there can be a counter-effect where making some jobs better causes more crappy jobs, for example if you're constantly pushing the less fun and career-dead-ending stuff onto the new guy while the senior people with all the political sway take the fun, cutting-edge, etc new tasks.

the last two roles ive been in honestly expect real contributions beginning about the 6th week, and tbh I thought that was late. where are you finding places where you can be net negative for an entire year?

A year sounds extreme for being net negative, but I have a somewhat similar experience in a mixed hardware/software company. There's so much domain-specific knowledge that takes most people a long time to ramp up in. You haven't truly arrived unless you've ramped up and seen a full product cycle. That takes years, because hardware is slow to iterate.

anything infrastructure

I don’t get it. What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not 2-3 years? What happens at 2 years that makes you want to do the job before and not want to do it after?

If you never like your job I don’t think switching every 2 years helps. And if you are in it for the paycheck, 4 is usually optimal.

Personally, I found whether I’m having a good time depends on the team and the project. And usually one or the other changes periodically.

> What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not 2-3 years?

A 4% raise.

Management are idiots and will only give out small single digit percentage point raises while jumping companies will result in 20+% raises. The longer you stay with a company the further your salary falls behind.

This financial dictate means that your max tenure at a company should be 5 years--and definitely not even that long without a REALLY good reason.

It's also pretty frequent at larger companies that new hires (even those at a level lower) will get higher comp than tenured employees.

Many of these same companies also have very difficult promo processes, requiring you to effectively "got to trial" and defend why you should be promoted.

This exact scenario has occurred with multiple co-workers of mine (most have now left, the rest are actively interviewing:

If, after the months of preparation for promo you "got to trial" and do so successfully, you may find a newly hired, less experienced, lower leveled co-worker with no experience with any of the internal processes or tooling makes 25% more than you.

When companies behave this way, what's the incentive to stick around?

Yeah. If companies want people to stay, they should just pay for it. Pay more, give better and frequent raises, offer more benefits, more everything. Then people won't want to leave for the other companies offering better compensation. It's very simple.

Any "red flag" talk is just companies trying to disincentivize employees from effectively negotiating better compensation for themselves. They're trying to eliminate employee BATNAs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

Lots of tech companies give a stock grant that vests over 4 years. Then each year an additional “refresher” grant that also vests over 4 years. So your comp increases each year because of the stacking grants (a lot better than 4%) then drops a lot after year 4 when the initial grant expires.

Obviously many circumstances can change the equation.

Idk, I got a ~400% raise over 3 years as I showed I was more valuable than my comp and got the right ears to listen to that, with help of a V-level who recognized it. I’m not saying that will be everyone’s experience, but its odds become much more favorable for people hopping startups with smaller overall org charts

Is it possible that, given the information your employer has, they can determine you are worth no more than a 4% raise? While, on the other hand, the prospective new employer does not have the same information (the experience of actually being your employer) and risks a 20% premium? In the end, maybe the market is actually operating efficiently?

In a typical company, raises are budgeted based on a company-wide assessment of how much people "should" get. So even if your manager is sure you're worth 20% more, you simply can't get a 20% raise without some exceptional justification.

How exactly are you measuring impact such that you think you have it characterized with 4% error bars?

For me, it's the fact that roughly 1 year seems to be the average cutoff point for how long I can tolerate doing something that feels meaningless to me and otherwise doesn't bring me any financial advantage that would allow me to duck out of the game altogether.

Have you considered the possibility that with a 1-2 year time horizon, you're more or less setting yourself up for exactly the series of meaningless jobs with limited financial upside that you're seeing as the reason for your time horizon?

No one leaves a job that’s interesting & lucrative. How many companies make it a priority to make jobs interesting & lucrative? Very few.

But you expect the next job to be just as meaningless.

So changing does nothing to address your stated problem.

Variety is good regardless. It's refreshing.

Variety also tends to bring financial advantage, increased skills and exposure to new knowledge, a larger personal network in the same time, and if most (but not all) jobs are unsatisfying, variety gives you more chances to eventually find one that's the exception worth staying with.

Perhaps you're choosing the wrong jobs, as suggested by the article?

> I don’t get it. What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not 2-3 years?

Frequently, a vesting cliff.

May I ask: Why do you think 4y is optimal for pay increase?

For me, I would swap anyway after 2y for the below reasons but I've found that optimal for income...

Year 1:

* You're learning a lot

* You're on significantly more money and better benefits than before

* You can plausibly believe that all the cultural/structural issues you have will be solved in the next 12m

Year 3:

* None of the above. You're learning very little, you've gotten cost of living raises or a little above but not the 20% + a job change should bring, you realise now the business has no intention of dealing with it's issues. You will just have to live with them...

1-2 years can happen due to changes like your manager changes, large number of your team mates leave, company gets acquired. Such circumstances can bring about major changes to culture/environment/scope.

I was at my last job for 6 years and I've been at my current job for 4 years with no plans on leaving anytime soon. It's a little insane to me that anyone would consider leaving their job after 1-2 years without something being horribly wrong about the work environment. It takes a year for me to even feel moderately productive in a new environment. Job hopping ever year or two seems like doing the worst part of employment over and over again. It makes no sense to me.

I will agree that a lot will depend heavily on individual circumstances. I remember joining a group that seemed like a match, but rather quickly turned out not to be. It was only due to the economy at the time that I could not get out faster. In my case, my mental health was worth more than worrying over anomaly in my resume.

They do it because employers are too averse to increase salaries, and job hopping is sometimes the only way to get raises.

It is a game of perverse incentives.

You’re looking at this backwards. Understandably so, but still backwards.

There’s no platonic “considered normal” there’s employee and employer incentives and how they play out in combination.

If there’s a high probability that you are going to think my team is bad and not worth sticking around for, why would I want to hire you?

I kept people for decades, and they didn't actually make that much, compared to others in similar positions.

When they finally wound up our department, the person with the least tenure had over ten years.

Good managers are worth their weight in gold.

I’ve stayed at every previous professional job I’ve had for 3+ years. One was ~6, but probably should have been 4. One was ~3 and ran out of funding, otherwise I probably would have stayed much longer. One was ~5 and definitely should have been 4. My current job is approaching 2 years, and I can’t foresee ever wanting to leave it.

I think jobs that are good are pretty rare (my current one really stands out here). But among “good enough”, I think staying longer can be valuable depending on what you value, what you’re looking to get out of a longer tenure (and how motivated/positioned/stubborn you are about getting that), and just plain how “good enough” it is.

The 6 year job should have been 4 because my potential and existing skillsets were outgrowing the scope of the job, with no business reason for room to advance. The 3 year job I would have stayed at longer fostered tremendous professional growth for me, and erased significant comp disadvantages I’d accrued before it. The 5 year job which should have been 4 didn’t produce such tremendous growth, but did produce several surprising opportunities to grow in areas I’d never anticipated, and it further erased some comp disadvantages; it should have been a year shorter due to burnout and various incompatibilities that grew over time.

My current job is wonderfully meaningful to me and has almost all of the right balances (for me) of potential and real impact on a global scale, responsibility and agency, life balance. In short it’s the closest thing I could describe as a dream job. This I agree is rare, and I think the set of things which could make a given job fit that kind of role in someone’s life will vary wildly person to person.

But for “good enough”, the prior jobs I’ve had largely lasted as long as they did because I focused (albeit imperfectly) on only having jobs that are high on the “good enough” scale, to the extent I have that option. I optimized for wanting to stay long term, even before I realized that’s what I was doing.

I’m certainly leaving figurative money on the figurative table, and probably many other nice things I haven’t considered important. But I don’t want to work anywhere I won’t want to work when some arbitrary timer reaches zero.

It depends what your goal is - there are some contributions you can make at an employer on day 1. There are other contributions that demand deeper understanding of more things.

If you're joining the best self-driving-car company because you want to see self-driving cars halve road deaths in the United States - you're not going to achieve that in 1-2 years :)

> Am I the only one that feels like jobs that are good enough to warrant a 2-3 year tenure are actually rare?

If good teams and good leaders are rare, you might want to re-examine your company selection process.

In my experience, it's easy to find bad jobs if you just let the winds of the industry carry you around from job to job. Bad companies always have high turnover, which means they're always hiring. They may even pay above market because that's the only way they can continue bringing people in to replace everyone who's leaving.

The good jobs are often more selective about their hiring. Many of them may not even post public listings. Going through a network is much more efficient for selecting into the good companies.

Having worked in SV for a while and talked to many within SV... Good teams and leaders are rare. Most are garbage. Most people are just worked to death and have crazy ambition/work ethic to make stupid shit happen.

There's no good way to find good teams/leadership. Often people just follow the person that has given them the most favor in their career. It doesn't mean that the manager is a good manager or a good leader - it just means that they're going to treat a particular person favorably. This is a very important distinction.

I can count on one hand the amount of good leaders/managers that I've interacted with in SV and I've interacted with hundreds. It is a toxic place.

> it's easy to find bad jobs if you just let the winds of the industry carry you around from job to job

Can confirm. If you're young and inexperienced it's easy to fall victim to recruiters who talk a good game. If you're older and can see through these, you can at least make a choice: do I need to take a job quickly for financial or other reasons? If so, you can find a lot of offers, but don't pretend these are going to be jobs you'll love. At the very least, go ahead and ask for the above-market rate. They worst they can do is say they don't have the budget.

Ideally, you'd work a must-take position just long enough to get back on your feet while you hunt for the job you want. It will probably going to leave a short tenure position on your resume if you do that.

Finding a job in this industry has never been especially difficult. Finding a job that you'd be willing to settle into for 3+ years is hard.

This sounds true. Could you point out some features of a hiring process we can look out for for signs of good teams/leaders? Number of interviews, time it takes to complete the process, kind of questions they ask, etc?

I don't understand how many people can have an impact over a 1-2 year period at a company. That's not nearly enough time to build relationships or see the long term results of your work

At the web dev startups I have worked at I was able to hit the ground running (okay, maybe like 2 weeks of training). If you know the UI & server frameworks most companies aren’t doing anything complicated from a business perspective. Half of them are crud with layers

I think this is the key here: anything that’s crud with layers is the same job. Of course you can be productive within a year if what you are doing is literally the same job.

Sadly this is too common. But what about proper changes of job? Going from embedded to game dev to web to HFT to Ai? Do people not do this kind of switch at all when they say “I just work 1-2 year stints”? That sounds like a pretty dreadful career to swap one crud gig for another, never really knowing a domain deeply.

>But what about proper changes of job?

while I did switch like the ones you mentioned

then I don't agree with you calling it "proper"

I'd call it: making yours life harder due to curiosity.

I guess. But on the other hand I guess in the last decade of web dev just trying to stay afloat in the sea (or tire fire, depending on your perspective) of web dev frameworks and tooling is a full time job and career.

To some that’s probably also something that’s intellectually satisfying.

They all think what they’re doing is magic and impactful but “crud with layers” is IT

I think you're looking at things backwards. The questions you should be asking are how likely is it that any employee who joins a random new company feels as though they can have an impact on that company and how likely is it that they'll be compensated at market rates over a period longer than a year? I'd say the chances are generally pretty low. Therefore, a short tenure should be the average case for a rational employee. Don't kill the collective messenger.

> Therefore, a short tenure should be the average case for a rational employee.

Is rational the same as “maximizing career income”?

I just feel it’s hard to give up domain knowledge in one thing (say insurance or flight scheduling or whatever) that you aggregate, to be a complete rookie in some other business.

Software skills are the easy bit. It’s the domain knowledge that takes time.

Rational employees want to feel good at their job, intellectually challenged, and appreciated for what they do. That involves financial compensation but I think it’s far from the major driver.

Perhaps there are two major categories of devs: those that have broadly applicable skills (say web development) but no really deep domain knowledge or interest. They can write crud for insurance year 1 and crud for food delivery year 2 and continue that way forever while making good salary jumps each year. To those it seems almost like a bad idea to grow too fond of the details of insurance, as it would hinder their careers.

On the other end of the spectrum you have devs that aggregate lots of domain knowledge in some narrower field. They might switch jobs every 10 years but when they do they almost have to go to a competitor in the same industry because otherwise they throw away too much domain knowledge. The only way they can capitalize is by selling that knowledge.

I used to feel similarly. But (most) businesses today can barely see beyond the next quarter. We're always cutting corners, we're always up against insane deadlines that started as estimates, etc.

I'd care a lot more about the long-term effects of the code that I write and the systems that I build if I was given ample opportunity to actually engage with long-term planning. But I'm not, so I care less about what impact I have a year or two from now with each passing day.

It really depends on how you define impact. After joining my more recent team, I had some manual labor thrown my way. Me being me did what I thought a reasonable person should do in those circumstances: automate what I could. As a result, time spent on manual labor was cut by a ridiculous amount. I almost don't get why no one did it before me..

In my career so far, it is not uncommon to see low hanging fruits like that, but then I mostly worked in banking ( which is its own little world ).

My point is, you can do a lot in 2 years depending on what you are looking for.

Depends on what your work is. There’s a lot of stuff you can ship on a short timescale with tons of “impact”. You can’t directly see the results of long-term plans, but you can definitely lay the groundwork and watch people execute on it from outside the company.

If you hire a John Carmack or Jeff Dean (or equivalent) and they can't make a difference in your company within 2 years, your culture is broken and needs to be fixed first.

John Carmack founded id Software in 1991 and stayed until 2013. Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is still there. These are not the kind of people we talk about when one asks "Is two year too short to be a tenure?"

If Carmack or Dean were unable to make an impact after 2 years despite their exceptional skillsets, they probably wouldn't have stayed as long. If your culture doesn't let top performers, well, perform, then why would they waste their time in a place where their contributions can't reach a level of impact that can justify paying them what they're worth?

99.9+% of devs don't come close to the skill of those two

Impact? I've had projects get cancelled when I was less than six months in. Often there's no space for impact.

I do Rails/React work and everything is becoming more or less the same thing with the same problems to work on regardless of the job so I'm able to hit the ground running almost immediately.

This almost certainly depends on the size of the company.

Two years is plenty of time to make an impact at a startup.

LOL, you probably never heard of Meta or Amazon where not having an impact in the first 6-12 months will get you PIPed...

You don't build relationships, you solve the problem you were hired to fix.

Companies don't hire employees to be a preschool playpen for adults. They hire them to do work.

I believe this attitude goes hand-in-hand with the idea of jumping ship every few years. As an employee, your impact only extends as far as the projects handed to you. You offer no growth potential to an employer.

Similarly, management that only looks for this is offering no reward for better, and deserves the attrition they'll see.

There are roles and companies where growth is both valuable and rewarded. I think it has to be an org where the technology is the product, and not a cost center (necessary, but not sufficient). I think you really have to be paying attention to know what type of org you are in. Taking this attitude up-front at any new job, you may not even see the opportunity.

It's the job of management to manage. If your doing their work for them then you're helping the company fail.

Binning everything that I said as "management" is basically demonstrating my point. This attitude is a self-reinforcing pigeonhole.

Very senior/staff/principal developers manage, too. They just don't manage direct reports.

At least at big companies, fixing problems often requires good cross team relationships.

Great, something for management to do.

If you can manage your own relationships then you don’t need nearly as many managers. That’s more money for you!

Sadly how many managers there are seems to have very little connection with how many are needed. If there are a lot of managers with nothing to do, they're not going to just disappear, and sadly the main way they can make themselves look busy is by wasting your time. (And I can't really blame them; I'd do the same in their place).

And yet I'm always paid more than lifers at a company. Funny how that works.

Sometimes the hardest problems to fix involve building relationships first.

Sounds like the management should be fired and replaced with people who are more interested in doing things instead of protecting territory.

I don't mean friendships, I mean working relationships like "who is a specialist in X", "who knows what work is coming down the pipe", etc.

Or, it's your turn to plug the hole in a dike.

Another aspect is early career moving around a lot gets you exposed to tons different ideas and approaches, which is crazy valuable.

Ultimately you know it’s like both things can be valuable.

A bunch of 1-2 year stints might quickly help you identify the patterns if things they work well generally abd what doesn’t.

Meanwhile a 5+ year stint will give insight into how a company maintains things and adapts and can also teach valuable lessons.

I’ve averaged about 5 years over three jobs.

My current one was going pretty well for a year, but COVID stuff and life craziness made it less enjoyable for the next year after a re-org.

I waited another year and tried switching teams at the company and while it started rough I feel like I might find a groove that will get me a couple of years.

After that I might go look for something else.

Sometimes there is a good year followed by a bad year followed by three good years. If you leave after that first bad year you might just jump to another good year bad year cycle and in the end have less good years if you just stayed five years at each place.

When I stop learning, I leave. I might stick around longer for extra compensation, but there’s not usually an incentive retention. I often don’t want to leave, but I have to keep my skills sharp & I don’t want to slowly become irrelevant because there’s limited opportunity to try new things.

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