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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

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sam0x17

#1 item that should be there and is missing is:

"My first job will promote me and raise my salary when I "become" a senior dev"

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Yup! Easiest way to get a raise is to self-promote into a different company

It’s also a great way to receive an undeserved “senior” title

I've heard this a lot over the years, but honestly, as a hiring manager, I'm not going to waste my time with a candidate whose resume shows them hopping companies every year or two.

The average in this industry (startups) is ~2 years at best so that's a bit close-minded. A lot of startups don't even make it to the two year mark. 5 years is like a century.

At Google average tenure is 1.1 years, so looks like FANG is following the trend as well.

You're definitely missing out on the top 25% of the market if you only stick to people who (stupidly) stay in the same place with no diagonal upgrades for 3+ years.

Most people don’t work at startups.

We're on HN, friend ;)

When you start on a team, you produce negative value. On day one, you've already cost the company a significant amount just in recruiting, signing bonuses, and randomizing the other engineers who had to interview people for your position. Where I work, I would guess the break-even point is about six months to a year, so there's a good chance someone who leaves after like 1.5 years is still a net loss.

Maybe it's a good way to game the system, but don't expect the system to cheer for it. Also, if you run across someone who worked at a place for a year and they claim they completely rewrote and revolutionized a legacy system, blah, blah, etc. you should take that with a grain of salt, because of course that's what they would say. They're not going to tell you how they hustled out the door a month before the performance discussions because they knew the hammer was coming down.

Empirically, companies are very bad at evaluating this cost. If they weren't, upwardly-mobile job hoppers wouldn't exist because the previous company where they generate positive value would have increased their salary over the salary they could get elsewhere. In practice we see that the companies are reluctant to give raises, hiring costs are considered capex, and there are inefficiencies in salaries because frictions cause employees to stay in roles that are not financially optimal, meaning there's a premium to accepting the risk of moving jobs.

Yeah, if companies recognized this properly, they would incentivize employees to stay, and would avoid things like layoffs at all costs. Google used to do this in the early days when they believed their #1 resource was human capital. Then the suits came in...

Well you’re assuming that people who know how to game the system and earn money/collect titles are automatically in the top quarter of knowledge workers. I’d argue that knowing how to be a good software engineer has nothing to do with being good at interviewing, negotiating, and hopping jobs frequently.

The average FAANG tenure says nothing about the quality of those engineers. They might be good coders, but they have no experience with deploying, maintaining, and subsetting code. In other words, the vast majority of the field of engineering.

Companies were OK with “job-hopping” until they weren’t, i.e. the market turned in their favor.

Your average company will dump you at the drop of a hat if it means their "shareholder value" is improved. If you're lucky, you get a couple months of severance.

If the private sector wants loyalty and commitment, it needs to start by being loyal and committed to its employees.

"We are the family!" but till you are employed

There's an odd phenomenon where people become hiring managers and begin to think they're the sole authority on what other hiring managers care about, despite all evidence showing that it's an inconsistent, inexact science. Hard truth: if you're not a job-hopper, you have less varied experience of what it takes to get hired than those who are.

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