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Comment by PheonixPharts | Hacker News Reader

> It's been my experience that people generally produce their best work after the first year.

This is a strange sentiment based on my experience.

I leave most jobs after a year because they get boring. I've never not shipped a fairly important project in the first 6 months of employment. After a year nearly every place I've been at has been struggling to find that next thing for me to do since I've finished all the projects they had in the backlog when hiring.

My experience is that at most orgs the one year mark is when coasting begins and I personally find coasting incredibly boring.

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You wrote it now you have to support the decisions you made and if you know you are going to have to deal with something in the future you will take the time to account for it but if you never see past a year you will never learn what really worked

Shipping is important, but what’s just as important is learning the impact of what exactly you shipped and how you shipped it. In software this is often done by operating and modifying the system in a series of experiments over time, including observing the relationship between the product and the organization that produces and maintains it, gaining insight into the delivery of software at scale.

For many of us, what we learn in meaningful stretches at companies, is a kind of capital that we leverage to gain access to opportunities that take our career in the direction we want to go.

If I may speculate, perhaps you are overqualified for the jobs you describe. Or, perhaps you love creating new things but not maintaining and augmenting existing things (which is fine, but just like short stints, is a quality that many hiring managers, especially at established companies, view as a negative. You could be an amazing serial startup 0 to 1 person though).

Of course it's easy. Creating features is the easy part of SWE. Supporting your features over years of changing requirements and refactorings is the hard part.

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