4 ms·

Nearly 24 years with a single employer. How many programmers can claim that these days?

by kevsim 8y ago

FigBug 8y ago
I think it's common in smaller cities, there just aren't many jobs to jump to. My city is population 360,000. I had my first job in 2001 and I know several devs that are still there. My wife, electrical engineer, not dev, has also only had one job.
ricardobeat 8y ago
None since they all became managers after year 5 :)
- user5994461 8y ago
  Well, excluding the ones who were kicked out and replaced by younger folks, cheaper and less caring about working conditions.
- broken_symlink 8y ago
  At my previous employer we had people on our team who were up there in age who were still programmers. One of them said he tried management but he's definitely not a people person and doesn't like playing politics. He said it went horribly for everyone involved, him, his team, his superiors. He went back to just coding and said he'll never do management again. Technically, he's very proficient, and as a new grad myself, he was always my go to for design questions.
wpietri 8y ago
I think the better question is: how many employers can claim that these days? My understanding is that there was a big cultural change in theory of management during the corporate raider era of the 1980s. Before, lifetime employment was common; employee loyalty was matched by defined-benefit pensions and the implicit commitment that you'd be kept on until retirement unless you did something terrible. Corporate raiders, though, found that they could make a lot of money by buying a company and, among other things, ignoring all the implicit commitments. So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. Getting rid of all that knowledge and loyalty might have long-term costs, but that didn't matter to corporate raiders, because they'd quickly sell off the company. Managers everywhere eventually adopted these tactics, both because it helped fend off corporate raiders and because narrow-focus financial evaluation of everything became the dominant management paradigm. Now it's up to each worker to ensure that they stay marketable, and there's no particular incentive to stay around. Indeed, the incentives are often negative. At most places it's easier to get a raise if you move. And too many companies are stuck in legacy technology stacks; if you stay, you'll eventually become unemployable. So I'd rather ask how many tech companies have programmers confident that their employer will stick with them until 67? Damned few, I'd guess.
- marktangotango 8y ago
  This still happens today, living through it now. This company was raided/bought recently with an immediate 7% layoff. More to come as they push all acquired business units to jump from 18% margin to 40% margin in a year. Legacy black boxes no one understands now, let alone when they RIF another 2000 people. It’s really sad to see 1000s of years of people’s work and toil washed away this way. Really drives home that nothing we do in this field has any meaning certainly not permanence.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. This is still taught today in business schools. When you take over a company, the first thing you do is fire a bunch of people. The market sees it as cutting costs, so the stock goes up. It doesn’t matter who the people were or how essential to the company they were. This is simply a fundamental part of the theory of “business” as taught in top management courses. The tiny (usually temporary) stock boost secures your employment for the the next six months. This buys you time to figure out how to run/fix the company.
  - 0xfeba 8y ago
    Similarly, my private company promoted some person horizontally, then they decided to merged two dpts together. My excellent performing one, and a larger poor performing one. We always exceeded our sales targets, they hadn't met theirs in 8+ years. So now our sales targets are higher than both combined (AFAICT), and we don't meet them at all. Since we're a "team" now they distribute the layoffs equally across the "team". Not sure where these sales targets come from since we aren't publicly traded. I just feel we're being setup to fail. Anyway, people are leaving in droves (2 best salesmen left, engineering is a revolving door) since our formerly generous performance based bonus is going away. I am the only full-time left on my project, the rest are contractors (since we have a hiring freeze, but a large budget left over for contractors for some reason). They literally cannot do releases without me. And after asking for a raise to reflect that I'm managing 3 contractors instead of coding (the former lead left), I got scoffed at and told that there was a hiring freeze (that's not a promotion freeze, but ok, except you have 100k/year freed up from the last guy that left...), and that my project isn't under as much pressure as the other projects so no. Come back to me in a year and we'll talk. Yeah ok. Wait a year for maybe 5%. Or jump ship for an easy 20%. And no managing/lead responsibilities. Go pound sand. The company is clueless about keeping talent. No one mentions the massive churn at company update meetings. They just go "wow, didn't meet the sales targets... gotta work harder guys! Look at all these cool initiatives we're gonna do next year!" I keep hearing the word death spiral among coworkers. Yep. /rant.
wglb 8y ago
Not very many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen (inventor of the BBS and author of xmodem) is one, at 44 years for IBM. I knew a very small numbers of career Allstate folks at over 40 years.
- isostatic 8y ago
  My company employs modern website jockeys, but also traditional broadcast engineers. The departments looking after things like websites think 5 years with the company is a long time. The department I'm in tends to be lifers - I personally know two people who have made 50 years, a few more at 40. Certainly if you're under 10 years you're new.
madengr 8y ago
I’m an EE with 22 years at the same employer; first job out of grad school. Working until 67, I could be there 42 years, and I probably will be. This is an old school defense contractor. Though EE (RF, Microwave, Antennas to be exact) still has the respect for the gray beard. The record for my employer is 60+ years; a machinist who started at 18 and still working into his late 70’s as he enjoys it.
- astura 8y ago
  I worked at an old school defense contractor where tenure was measured in decades. :)
  - madengr 8y ago
    My employer had a sharp bimodal age distribution. I was hired during the defense layoffs of the mid 90’s, and was smack in the middle of that distribution, until the wave of retirements. Now the age distribution is log-normal with 5 years average experience. Was just given a 25% retention bonus yesterday, which is unheard of. They are scared of the old people leaving, and rightly so. The millennia’s job hop like crazy, and in my field there is a lot of institutional knowledge built up.
microtherion 8y ago
Coming up on 20 years at a FAANG.

Nearly 24 years with a single employer. How many programmers can claim that these days?

by kevsim 8y ago

Nearly 24 years with a single employer. How many programmers can claim that these days?

I think it's common in smaller cities, there just aren't many jobs to jump to. My city is population 360,000. I had my first job in 2001 and I know several devs that are still there. My wife, electrical engineer, not dev, has also only had one job.

ricardobeat 8y ago

None since they all became managers after year 5 :)

user5994461 8y ago
Well, excluding the ones who were kicked out and replaced by younger folks, cheaper and less caring about working conditions.
broken_symlink 8y ago
At my previous employer we had people on our team who were up there in age who were still programmers. One of them said he tried management but he's definitely not a people person and doesn't like playing politics. He said it went horribly for everyone involved, him, his team, his superiors. He went back to just coding and said he'll never do management again. Technically, he's very proficient, and as a new grad myself, he was always my go to for design questions.

wpietri 8y ago

I think the better question is: how many employers can claim that these days? My understanding is that there was a big cultural change in theory of management during the corporate raider era of the 1980s. Before, lifetime employment was common; employee loyalty was matched by defined-benefit pensions and the implicit commitment that you'd be kept on until retirement unless you did something terrible. Corporate raiders, though, found that they could make a lot of money by buying a company and, among other things, ignoring all the implicit commitments. So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. Getting rid of all that knowledge and loyalty might have long-term costs, but that didn't matter to corporate raiders, because they'd quickly sell off the company. Managers everywhere eventually adopted these tactics, both because it helped fend off corporate raiders and because narrow-focus financial evaluation of everything became the dominant management paradigm. Now it's up to each worker to ensure that they stay marketable, and there's no particular incentive to stay around. Indeed, the incentives are often negative. At most places it's easier to get a raise if you move. And too many companies are stuck in legacy technology stacks; if you stay, you'll eventually become unemployable. So I'd rather ask how many tech companies have programmers confident that their employer will stick with them until 67? Damned few, I'd guess.

marktangotango 8y ago
This still happens today, living through it now. This company was raided/bought recently with an immediate 7% layoff. More to come as they push all acquired business units to jump from 18% margin to 40% margin in a year. Legacy black boxes no one understands now, let alone when they RIF another 2000 people. It’s really sad to see 1000s of years of people’s work and toil washed away this way. Really drives home that nothing we do in this field has any meaning certainly not permanence.
reaperducer 8y ago
So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. This is still taught today in business schools. When you take over a company, the first thing you do is fire a bunch of people. The market sees it as cutting costs, so the stock goes up. It doesn’t matter who the people were or how essential to the company they were. This is simply a fundamental part of the theory of “business” as taught in top management courses. The tiny (usually temporary) stock boost secures your employment for the the next six months. This buys you time to figure out how to run/fix the company.
- 0xfeba 8y ago
  Similarly, my private company promoted some person horizontally, then they decided to merged two dpts together. My excellent performing one, and a larger poor performing one. We always exceeded our sales targets, they hadn't met theirs in 8+ years. So now our sales targets are higher than both combined (AFAICT), and we don't meet them at all. Since we're a "team" now they distribute the layoffs equally across the "team". Not sure where these sales targets come from since we aren't publicly traded. I just feel we're being setup to fail. Anyway, people are leaving in droves (2 best salesmen left, engineering is a revolving door) since our formerly generous performance based bonus is going away. I am the only full-time left on my project, the rest are contractors (since we have a hiring freeze, but a large budget left over for contractors for some reason). They literally cannot do releases without me. And after asking for a raise to reflect that I'm managing 3 contractors instead of coding (the former lead left), I got scoffed at and told that there was a hiring freeze (that's not a promotion freeze, but ok, except you have 100k/year freed up from the last guy that left...), and that my project isn't under as much pressure as the other projects so no. Come back to me in a year and we'll talk. Yeah ok. Wait a year for maybe 5%. Or jump ship for an easy 20%. And no managing/lead responsibilities. Go pound sand. The company is clueless about keeping talent. No one mentions the massive churn at company update meetings. They just go "wow, didn't meet the sales targets... gotta work harder guys! Look at all these cool initiatives we're gonna do next year!" I keep hearing the word death spiral among coworkers. Yep. /rant.

wglb 8y ago

Not very many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen (inventor of the BBS and author of xmodem) is one, at 44 years for IBM. I knew a very small numbers of career Allstate folks at over 40 years.

isostatic 8y ago
My company employs modern website jockeys, but also traditional broadcast engineers. The departments looking after things like websites think 5 years with the company is a long time. The department I'm in tends to be lifers - I personally know two people who have made 50 years, a few more at 40. Certainly if you're under 10 years you're new.

madengr 8y ago

I’m an EE with 22 years at the same employer; first job out of grad school. Working until 67, I could be there 42 years, and I probably will be. This is an old school defense contractor. Though EE (RF, Microwave, Antennas to be exact) still has the respect for the gray beard. The record for my employer is 60+ years; a machinist who started at 18 and still working into his late 70’s as he enjoys it.

astura 8y ago
I worked at an old school defense contractor where tenure was measured in decades. :)
- madengr 8y ago
  My employer had a sharp bimodal age distribution. I was hired during the defense layoffs of the mid 90’s, and was smack in the middle of that distribution, until the wave of retirements. Now the age distribution is log-normal with 5 years average experience. Was just given a 25% retention bonus yesterday, which is unheard of. They are scared of the old people leaving, and rightly so. The millennia’s job hop like crazy, and in my field there is a lot of institutional knowledge built up.

microtherion 8y ago

Coming up on 20 years at a FAANG.