Other than working for my own two startups a long time ago, my current job is 4 years. I think one should go elsewhere on a regular basis just to see something different. No matter how fun the work might be, it can still become too routine or similar.
It's a weird thing to say but the longer you've been at a company the more you're "part of the furniture" and your shortcomings stop mattering as much to your co-workers because you're, well, part of the furniture. If you want to grow and push yourself you're going to need some new coworkers. It may be uncomfortable but it's worth it in the long run. That's not to say it's a guaranteed win. As all things, it's a risk.
The compilers group might be better, but when I was working in the IMG division at Apple 10 years ago, the yearly raises were barely enough to keep up with inflation.
People who had been there 10 years were only making a little more than I did fresh out of school. I also think a lot of people at Apple are part of the devoted, they used Macs their whole life and were living the dream by working at Apple, and HR took advantage of them.
Of course HR said "we pay the industry standard" but later on Apple was convicted of industry wide wage fixing.
So if anything, you should leave Apple just for the pay raise. When I moved to NYC, having Apple on my resume opened a lot of doors and the finance industry more than doubled my pay.
The last 10 years have seen substantial increases in big tech company wages. The tech companies have increased compensation for senior and established folks too, but sometimes the new grads and new hires are riding the biggest wave. Switching jobs can also produce a similar boost if you are caught in this scenario.
> People who had been there 10 years were only making a little more than I did fresh out of school.
Please, please do not spread news like this. It can't be true at all. Do you think they had zero vested stock? I know a software engineer at Apple - he has made about 1 million dollars just from stocks - some were awarded and some were bought from his savings
What he is saying is true for many, many people at Apple that worked from the mid 2000's onward.
If you read his post, said he was there 10 years ago in 2009. If you recall, this was during peak recession and at that time Apple was seemingly driven by a culture of ruthlessness that was probably a result of events earlier in the decade (before Steve Jobs came back, when the company was nearly insolvent). Apple was _cheap_ (and still is, in probably terribly shortsighted ways) and would take advantage of anyone and anything they could to save money. Depending on your department, this could mean low wages, no stock, no investment in tooling and equipment, whatever they could get away with.
I started working there in 2012 and worked with a good number of folks that had to put up with absolute hell before iPhone launch (which totally changed the company, for the better). I was really there to do was clean up tech debt bought on by poor planning and shoestring budgets. It seemed like most of the "old timers" were barely making livable silicon valley money and many had tails of Apple managers doing totally shady things like making promises of equity, only to have it denied later (and nothing was on paper). They still stuck around for god knows what reason. I stayed around until my initial equity grant ran out and moved on to greener pastures.
> If you read his post, said he was there 10 years ago in 2009. If you recall, this was during peak recession and at that time Apple was seemingly driven by a culture of ruthlessness that was probably a result of events earlier in the decade (before Steve Jobs came back, when the company was nearly insolvent).
I think we should be fair and point out that unlike basically every other major tech company in the Bay Area, Apple didn't lay any one off in the 2008-2009 recession.
They were conservative, yes, and flush with cash they used to make a number of big strategy acquisitions in the period IIRC.
Stock grants only pay off big (beyond the grant itself) if the stock rises a lot. Once that rise is locked in, it isn’t exciting anymore (and indeed, can go negative).
I can't tell if you mean "part of the furniture" is good or bad.
I've been at several places, usually in the 3-5 year range. But at this exact moment, I'm a bit envious of people who have been at the same company for 8-10 years, and get to enjoy mastery over the system, organization, etc.
Trying new things is fun, but it can be a drag always playing catchup.
Having been at my current org for 8 years, I have to say that it's difficult to fully grasp the politics of a place if people only plan on staying for 1-3 years at a time.
I've also become more and more effective at quickly diagnosing problems and creating solutions taking into account the people, politics, tech, etc. involved. Tech is only one aspect of our jobs. A lot of time it's the easiest part.
Why would I stay this long at a job? I love the people in the dept I work in. The best team and job environment I've ever had. The drawback to staying a job this long is that, yes, you will probably be underpaid compared to market rate. Life is full of trade-offs and everyone will have to decide if it's worth it. For now, it is for me, but that might change in the future. If I get a new boss or the president of the org changes and he's terrible... /shrug maybe I'll move on. But life is short and if the position is good there's nothing wrong with staying IMHO.
The move I see a lot of people in my org pull is leaving, getting that pay bump, and then coming back to the same org with a lot of newly learned knowledge + those extra pay bumps.
Per Collins: "If you describe someone or something as part of the furniture, you are suggesting that they have been somewhere such as their place of work for such a long time that it is hard to imagine that place without them."
Through the years I have noticed that (most) permanent employees build a bubble around them. They stop working for the end-customer but they end up working for themselves. Create a comfort zone and then build amoat with crocodiles around it. Some people (like the author) wake up from this slumber and change this. The £€¥$ may be good, but work stops being excited. I used to change companies every 4-5 years just because of that. After the 1st-2nd promotion you are part of the "political" landscape and need to join a clique or another.
(Imho) 7 years is a long time to be working on the same topic, in the same company, moving only vertically.
> If you want to grow and push yourself you're going to need some new coworkers.
I don't think it's necessarily that clear-cut. Some individuals are capable of pushing themselves. Those who can't, may have managers who are able to. Or, perhaps they rotate to work on a different project or problem space.
One dosen't necessarily need to leave a company to experience change or extraordinary growth. Granted, the extra push/pressure may assist a bit.
Also perfectly reasonable to grow and push yourself through hobbies and side hustles. I fine with my work, but it's primarily a way to pay the bills and give me the freedom to explore unrelated things.
Really depends on what you're after. It's possible to make career choices to optimize work-to-pay ratio vs. attempting to optimize pure pay or other items.
> your shortcomings stop mattering as much to your co-workers because you're, well, part of the furniture
Depends on the company culture. I've worked places where wins were quickly forgotten, but mistakes were held against people forever. The longer you worked there, the more you became known for your past mistakes. New employees arrived with a clean slate and therefore were more trusted than past employees.
Obviously, it's a toxic situation. The smart ones sit in the background and only surface when they can be the hero to fix other people's mistakes. Over time, the company loses the doers and risk takers.
So maybe becoming part of the furniture isn't such a bad thing.
While that's true, your strengths stop mattering as much to your coworkers and managers as well, so eventually you run out of steam promo-wise. So unless I'm on a tear in the career department, I rarely stay more than 2 years on any given team anymore.
I agree with this approach particularly at the start of one's career but I will add that once you find a problem space that you really want to advance the state of the art in, then you better get ready to spend a decade or more studying it. Sure, it's possible to pursue this even by changing jobs, but it is MUCH harder in that case, advancing the state of the art in computer technology is something that very few places in the world have a business need for and the resources to pay people to do that so I think it's much more likely to spend a lot more years in a single place to pursue such a goal.
In all of the hiring that I’ve been a part of, this would be considered an absolutely huge red flag if it couldn’t be well justified, on the very slim chance you were given a chance to justify it.
It suggests you were a poor fit for those positions. If your whole resume suggests this, then you’re most likely a poor fit for the position you’re being considered for, which is most likely related to your experience.
I think that proving you can grow in a position is the best way to get good compensation and projects. Demonstrating that you’ll just check out means you’ll never grow or be given anything long term.
>huge red flag if it couldn’t be well justified, on the very slim chance you were given a chance to justify it.
Good lord. Are you a "we're a family here at [business]" kind of guy? The justification is obvious: money. When businesses start giving > 60% pay raises at year 2, then you can give some weight to your "poor fit" theory. Until that magical world exists, anyone who doesn't hop while the hop is actively rewarded should be the red flag.
It sounds like you hold a grudge against people who would rather switch companies after 2 years than sacrifice large amounts of money out of some misplaced sense of loyalty.
Loyalty? Thanks for the laugh, mate. Nope, it's just dollars and cents.
It sounds like you think employers should be happy to be somebody's stepping stone and eat the cost and man-hours of hiring a new employee to replace them before they've even contributed enough to break even on their own hiring expense. Funny how hiring managers somehow don't think being stepped on is a good deal; gosh, I wonder why?
I interviewed someone recently who actually said “I usually get bored after a year and leave” in the interview. I don’t necessarily mind that, in a contractor but in a complex environment where it takes 6 months for people to hit their stride, why would I bother investing any time in such a person?
2 years seems too short. IMO you start looking less valuable at some point because anyone looking to hire you knows you're going to bail in 2 years, which may reduce their willingness to invest.
Wow. That just seems weird to me -- but I've only had two jobs in the last 16 years.
Both my mother and her father worked at the same place (a General Electric appliance factory) for most of their lives. My grandfather was there on day one and remained until he retired. My mother started there ~20 years after he did and was there until the day they shut down. I know of one man who worked there for 44 years!
Switching jobs every two years seems so foreign -- and somewhat "suspicious" -- to me.
"According to the survey, millennials who work in large, private-sector organisations have lost faith in the ethics of these organisations over the last year."
The last year? I think the rot set in during the Thatcher/Reagan era. Corporations showed they had no loyalty to their employees so they shouldn't be surprised when their employees respond accordingly.
Staying at a company a long time isn't intrinsically and self-evidently better. For instance, switching jobs every 2-3 years will both maximize your salary and allow you to diversify your equity compensation (for more irons in the fire) [1].
Staying at a job for a while is a means, not an ends, and as such not necessarily something to optimize for.
Myself having 0 felonies makes me below average (as 8% of Americans have at least 1 felony), and I don't see myself striving to be above average in this category ;)
I'd certainly hesitate applying an average across a broad demographic to presumably well-paid and well-educated professionals in a technical field. As others have noted, if someone has a resume of 2 year stints for no particular reason, I assume that pattern will continue. If they bring something special, that may be fine. But I'll factor the likelihood they'll be gone in 24 months into my decision making.
This is fine advice as long as you're under 35 or so, after that you become completely unhireable in many tech companies so you better hang on somewhere.
I've been seeing this "you can't find a job after 35/40/45" meme on HN pop up frequently. This literally can't be true: our economy would have collapsed by now if a large fraction of our population were forced into retirement at 40. If everyone became unemployable at 40, 1/3 of the population would be supporting the other 2/3. Yet instead we see low unemployment.
I don't doubt that age discrimination in tech is real, but I'm pretty sure comments like this are way overstating it.
I think, like many things in life, there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. The advantage, like you said, is to not get stuck doing the same thing for too long. Although I'll notice that when working in large companies you can move to different teams that work with completely different technologies so there's no strict requirement to change the company because of that.
One of the major drawbacks with changing jobs too often is that certain problems simply require very long time to obtain the expertise to make significant improvements to the state of the art of that problem space. To give an extreme example, if you look at the scientists winning Nobel prizes, they spent their entire lives dedicated to pursuing the answer to one question. Working in tech may not require an entire life dedicated to one problem, but it can easily require a decade or more to become an expert in a problem domain.
Not to mention, getting a comfortable hold on the internal tools, procedures, APIs, etc of some of the larger tech companies can take years, that's even before you start learning to become a domain expert.
And changing teams will make you better at your company since you will see problems from a new point of view. And also expand your network inside the company, always oiling the company gears.
I jumped around jobs A LOT when I was early in my career; 10 years into my career I hardly stayed at a job longer than 2 years.
There's something to be said for sticking with something long enough to see it through its lifecycle. In my case, I've been at my job for almost 9 years. You'd be surprised at the amount of novelty that comes with major refactors.
(That being said, it's finally time for me to change jobs.)
IMO: I think a good career has a healthy mix of both long and short stints.
I’ve made the same observation. It takes time for all of the implications of a choice (code or otherwise) to manifest themselves. And it’s these long term effects that make for valuable lessons.
ex-Microsoft, this is not necessarily true.
Managers I knew see changing <2yrs in as not great. Then again, switching orgs is essentially changing companies without a different Company name. Companies that hire >10k engineers cannot be a monoculture imo. In MS, different orgs might as well have been different companies - none of the orgs trusted the other org's hiring standards and made internal candidates go through full interview loops.
There are a few reasons to consider a more long-term orientation:
You want to develop architecture/design skills. The feedback cycles on these things are really slow. If you’ve never seen how your decisions fared years down the line, I’m not sure I trust you to make decisions today. Especially if I will be here to live with them and you won’t.
You want mastery. This depends on how much custom / NIH stuff your employers have. Mine has a lot. I feel I’m just starting to hit my stride on knowing what’s out there, when to use it, its undocumented quirks, what level of support to expect and how to make a bug report actionable, etc. It’s satisfying to operate at a level where this stuff doesn’t get in the way anymore. I don’t want to go back to it just because.
The employer does have to return the favor, though. Standard equity compensation is highest in the fourth year (all the refreshers stack), so there’s incentive to stay at least that long. And managers need to recognize your growing capability and reward you with harder problems. I definitely would not continue doing the kind of work I did in the first year over and over.
This may be hard to do if your healthcare is tied to your job. I worked at one firm for 7.5 years. Got the itch to leave and took 2.5 years sailing. Landed another job in another continent. I have the luxury of being healthy and working in an in-demand industry. I've asked colleagues why they don't leave and it's usually tied to family commitments, health, or limited prospects.
This is somewhat random, and I have no idea what OPs motivations are for the timing of this, but as a general rule, in the US at least, you should always try and arrange for your last day to be the first of the month. That way you get a months healthcare on your existing insurance before having to start COBRA payments or have some alternate arrangement.
And if you have much saved up vacation, and plan to have a gap between jobs (or a lower-paying job), wait until Jan 1. Then the lump vacation payout is taxed less.
“I’d like to branch out more and try learning something new. (I’ll explicitly acknowledge that my freedom to do so is a form of privilege.)”
Why must you explicitly acknowledge that? Religion is usually a private matter which people largely keep to themselves.
It’s astounding how widespread this one has become, that a person can’t feel comfortable saying “I’d like to try new things” without having to decorate it with a statement of religious commitment.
I read that as an acknowledgement of the privilege to be able to easily find another job since he has sought after skills. Many people could not dream about quitting their job to "branch out".
I don’t think you did overlook anything, as that’s how I understand it. But I also get the point of the parent. I don’t understand why it has become so common to half-apologise or disclaimer the things that may be easier for you than others. I don’t see these same disclaimers when people talk about eating at a nice restaurant, taking a flight, being warm in bed, drinking clean drinking water, or not starving.
For me, it’s redundant. Some people have more access to greater abilities than everyone else, and some people will be able pay their way to a more comfortable life than others, but it doesn’t mean we should have to provide recognition of that on behalf of everyone that can’t.
It is redundant, but for some vocal subset of the online population it doesn't go without saying. These kinds of decorations preempt comments dismissing a commenter's opinion as being privileged; for whatever reason, acknowledging one's privilege seems to avoid those kinds of comments.
It's redundant and unnecessary (and redundant), but costs very little and avoids (some) pointless internet arguments. That's why I think these disclaimers are a trend right now.
I’ll explicitly acknowledge that my freedom to do so is a form of privilege.)”
It’s called a humblebrag, it’s a form of virtue signalling. Being really in everyone’s face about how you have much more humility than them. Making sure they know you’re not only richer than them but a better person too.
What puzzled me about that quote was why it was a “privilege” to learn something new. It would seem that anyone can do that, unless perhaps if you are desperately poor and living hand to mouth.
Religions enforce the use of custom language upon others. Here, “privilege” holds special meaning, the definition of which is established and disseminated by authorities of a specific belief system (Intersectionalism, in this case).
In order to discover the meaning, you have to consult a priest of the religion. This differs from an evidence-based system, where anyone can discover meaning on their own using universally-available tools. No appeals to an authority are required.
If you leave within 2 years you never have to experience the long term effects of your decisions so there are a lot of valuable things you never learn.
That's not true of the Facebook people I know. They include some of the best engineers I've ever met. (No other connection to Facebook, just a personal judgment based on their externally visible work.)
More generally I find that different people work effectively at different timescales. Some of the big movers in the industry have achieved phenomenal things by focusing on one problem for decades. Definitely true for databases, which is what I work on.
Boring isn't a bad quality for an engineering organization. Chasing trends and doing "cool" things and trying to be clever tends to not create good long term engineering products.
Could you give some examples of the outward practices? As it is, your comment require the reader to have the same mindset as you, which will not give the variety of perspectives you’re probably looking for.
Out of all the computing devices I've ever owned, the Apple devices are by far the longest-lived (and longest-supported) ones. I still use my 2007 MacBook, my 2012 MBP, and my iPhone 6S. The 2nd gen iPad still does its job fine.
These things are not disposable. Each item in the list above has had battery replacements. The 2007 MBP, I bought a 3rd party pack. The 2012 MBP was replaced free-of-charge at an Apple store. The 6S got a new battery for $29.
When I do decide to get a newer phone, I'll hand in my old one at that time. I'm sure they don't just chuck it into the wastebasket.
While I agree on longevity of iOS devices, I also have 2007 MacBooks (both Pro and not).
They can't get latest OSX, without latest OSX you can't get iTunes that supports iPhone X.
Bootcamped Windows 7 on the same machine gets latest iTunes capable of interacting with iPhone X.
It's curious that you hand your phone back to them, especially since you paid for it without the benefit they'd get being factored in. I doubt they would have better use of it than giving it to someone who needs a phone, even an old one, such as a child, or even selling it online.
When it comes time for me to upgrade, the phone will probably be worth $30 or so. Maybe I’ll Gazelle it instead. Or if some carrier is offering a trade in deal, use that. Or, most likely, I’ll keep it as a pseudo-iPod
My point is more that I won’t just toss it in a trash can. Reusing it or recycling it is easy.
This is a tricky tradeoff. Making products disposable can also allow different manufacturing choices that lead to less material being used up front or a more robust structure for the same material cost resulting in a lower failure rate, or lighter products and hence reduced impact from shipping. If the failure rate is low enough, those factors can beat out repairability and result in a product with lower environmental costs and resource usage on net.
This is a rare situation, but for small items with low failure rates and usable lifetimes of at least a few years, it can definitely happen.
Uh, they just released $250 disposable ear buds. They replaced a trackpad that replaceable batteries that worked fine with a new model that has a non-replaceable battery.
Apple seems particularly responsible for driving the demand for "truly wireless" ear buds as a status symbol.
That applies to almost anywhere you work. I've had to discuss "is this ethical" in my job before.
The difference is that, when you work for a company that isn't a household name, you don't know the ethical issues walking in.
Related:
I once took a non-military contract with Foster-Miller. I couldn't find out much about the company, but while I was there, I saw a cute robot driving around the parking lot like a toy car. Turns out it was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON
Not really. I have to trust that those people are doing the right thing given the situation and details that I'm not fully informed about, just as they trust that I'm doing the right thing in my business area.
Once I lose that trust (faith?), then it's time to move on.
