Certain places place high value on domain-specific knowledge and trained employees. I work at a wholesale insurance company (middleman); we have over a hundred

Certain places place high value on domain-specific knowledge and trained employees. I work at a wholesale insurance company (middleman); we have over a hundred individual systems, some simple, some quite complex. Some of those systems can be maintained by any programmer that comes in. Others really shouldn't be maintained by someone who doesn't have good experience in writing maintainable code. But many projects require domain-specific knowledge---and not just to specific parts of and companies within the insurance industry, but _our specific company_. For a few years, we hired less experienced candidates with the hope of training them, because the talent in Buffalo NY is hard to come by (which could also be an outreach problem, but our last three hires were from out of state). Our team's consensus is that it takes approximately two years of experience with our systems to have a good, balanced grasp on them. Because of the small team size (five at our highest, two right now), we place great value on team members who have been around long enough to know the systems, the rationale and design decisions, history, etc. This relates directly to Peter Naur's concept of Theory Building.[0] We've had the past four candidates leave in ~2, <2, <1, and ~3 years. Because of the upfront training cost and distraction from the more experienced programmers (the two that remain at the company today), and in some cases the degree of maintenance problems ("technical debt") introduced, I consider three of them to be a wash: we're no better off having hired them than we would have been not hiring them. Possibly worse off. Because we have the tendency to lose employees at around two years, I'm no longer in favor of hiring more "junior" candidates---having to train in both domain knowledge _and_ general programming is too risky and hasn't panned out well. So hopefully we can hire programmers that can immediately get into the code from a general programming perspective, but it's going to take them quite some time to really understand what the systems are all about. I've been there for over eight years, and the last programmer that remains with me has been there for six months longer than me. One of our programmers transitioned to technical director, and has been there for over ten years. My supervisor dropped programming for project management responsibilities, and he has been at the company for nearly ten. Our sysadmin has been there for over ten. We just lost an employee that was there over ten years. We're a close group. Would I be making more money job hopping? Probably, yes. My point here is that the company I work for---the team I work with---values experience with the company, and so long-term employment history is attractive. [0]: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf