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Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't stayed at any single position for at least a year, then odds are you haven't developed some skills crucial for your job.

Sure, you can move a mountain in 3-6 months, I've seen such people. Most of them will move the mountain to a wrong place, and won't stay to help bring it back at the desired one. They will just go, leaving chaos back, totally unaware of the mess they created. Or they will move the mountain to the correct place, but will do it in such a way, that no-one is able to maintain, improve, or fix the mountain.

Leaving before a year or two, means you never owned your mistakes. You never tweaked your engineering intuition for teamwork, reliability, or maintainability.

Hey, you might be brilliant, but that's not what engineering is about.

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You are basically saying big work doesn't ever get done in 3-6 months of someone joining a team, or its so remarkably rare that you would rather completely write off the rare case (who sits at the opposite spectrum of what you wish to weed out) than risk hiring a basket case.

Mountains don't ever get moved, the problem gets planned properly or it doesn't. Testing takes forever but development along a single trajectory is always fast.

There is no rare case at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Significant contributions aren’t a settled thing after six months. There always are loose ends to tie, things to reflect upon or unforeseen evolution forcing you to come back.

The issue with people leaving after six months is not that they might not have made a significant contribution in these six months. It’s that they never had to live through the consequences of what they did. It’s not a deal breaker but it’s career limiting because I very much want to hire people who know how to deal with things not going to plan and able to own their work. That’s why experienced people are paid more after all.

I’m equally suspicious of people with ten years of experience who can’t explain to me when something they were working on went wrong and what they did to fix it. It’s nearly impossible to work ten years on major projects and not having something blowing up on you at some point.

> That’s why experienced people are paid more after all.

They are paid to stick around? I thought good people would produce work that was well thought out enough to not require endless amounts of "maintenance".

They are paid better because they know what they are doing and they know what they are doing because they have been through it and experienced what should and should not be done.

How do you know how much maintenance your work actually needed if you never stuck out long enough to witness it?

Because its stable and there's no more serious feature requests. If the job description is no longer applicable then I think its fair to consider that a reasonable resignation moment. The employer can change the job requirements as much as they like, but no hard feelings if I'm no longer signed on for what you demand today.

I agree more with peteradio.

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