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Comment by factorymoo | Hacker News Reader

> " with zero ability to think through long-term consequences"

The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1]. You need to say that what you care about is long term, but that's now how we're compensated (read: incentivised). Plus you're not there to see it anyways so there are really very little incentives to think long term.

[1] some googling but couldn't find a great source for this. Though it matches what I've observed in the industry.

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Yeah that is a good point. Short-term thinking and short tenures are incentivized. The short average tenure in tech is just crazy to me, considering that onboarding takes forever compared to most industries, and how expensive the hiring process itself is. Nonetheless, companies hate giving existing employees raises despite how much it helps retention.

Well another way to think about it is that onboarding new folks is the only way to really check if your following a sane software development practice.

If it takes folks more than a few months to onboard, you probably have too many rules, standards or other processes that are pointless. There a multiple exceptions but if you can’t onboard folks fast your management team is either incompetent or they don’t pay developers enough to care who learns.

> onboarding takes forever compared to most industries,

What? If you mean other industries where people are called engineers is used then I'm pretty sure that getting up to speed in another industry and becoming familiar with the unspoken, unwritten, unconscious rules that make the product possible must take at least as long as in any kind of software based company. Not to mention that there are often lots of constraints regarding what may and may not be done with hardware exposed to the public.

Other engineering professions have standards and licenses to streamline a lot of the technical ins and outs. Even within the same domain of software, the tech stacks and methodologies can different very radically. And you're often not just hiring mid+ level folk just to code.

The idea of switching jobs every year and going through the usually grueling tech hiring process is exhausting to me. However, it’s mostly juniors in Silicon Valley doing this. I would also be wary of hiring anyone jumping ship every year unless they’re not senior.

> The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1].

Note that individuals who switch jobs often inherently will figure in a higher number of tenures that you’re taking the median of here. This means the majority of software engineers will actually have a longer tenure.

So what we should be looking at is the median number of tenures, not the median length of tenures? How would one weight the latter by the former to get a more robust measure of tenure length?

Well, what do you want to ascertain? In any case you won’t capture the long tail of long tenures, because you don’t know how long current tenures will extend into the future. What you could measure is the median current seniority of tech employees (how long they are in their current job), which would be a lower bound for the median of (eventual) tenures of current employments.

Jobs Georg, who has changed jobs 10,000 times in the last three years, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

Depends how you sample. If you look at all current employees, and ask how long they were in their previous job, i don't think it does.

That will also skew towards shorter tenures, (a) because shorter tenures tend to occur earlier in a career rather than later (so a previous tenure is more likely to have been shorter), and (b) when you’re sampling at a random point within a career, you’re more likely to hit a long tenure within that career, which conversely means that the previous tenure (or more generally, any of the past or future tenures) will more likely be shorter than the current one in that career.

It does not match what I’ve observed in the industry.

Also kind of insane. 1-2 years? In any large codebase or platform, it takes a year to become familiar with and touch a decent portion of it. Also, talk about never having to live with the concequences of decisions you've made in terms of long term support and maintenance. But I guess these are all rockstar developers doing the hopping around so that's not really their concern is it.

It's usually closer to 2 years than to 1.

I would say it's better to do 2-3 years early on as a young employee. Older, more experienced tech people tend to have longer tenures as they gain years of experience.

1-2 years for first few years in the industry, possibly a decade. Older employees tend to stay much, much longer.

>Older employees tend to stay much, much longer.

A lot of things probably going on there.

- Personal/family situation probably favors stability over mobility

- May already make pretty good comp so jumping for something better is less incentivized

- Value is more in making connections and using internal networks than banging out code, biasing towards longer term.

> Value is more in making connections and using internal networks than banging out code, biasing towards longer term.

bingo. it's about finding the right people and building them solutions.

my boss used to fly into different offices early to make time to see different people and just ask them pain points. buy coffee and donuts for the different team and pick their brains for things that needed solutions. a couple times he had them just show him and walk through stuff.

many of our deliverables and projects came out of that, and we became dedicated git-r-done staff.

The one~two year turnover is usually for employees that can easily come and go. Key individual contributors for instance often stay for far longer, forgoing more lucrative options to keep working on an environment that fits them.

Losing people in these positions will hurt a lot more than the average engineer/sales moving on after a short stint.

> The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1].

Mostly only true in Silly Valley.

In non-tech hubs, the tenures tend to be longer.

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