8 ms·

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

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.

arcticbull 7y ago
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.
- khazhou 7y ago
  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.
  - magashna 7y ago
    Try "cog in the machine"
    - HenryBemis 7y ago
      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.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    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." It's neutral, really.
  - ok_coo 7y ago
    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.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      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.
    - analognoise 7y ago
      There is totally something wrong with staying if you're underpaid. There are nice people everywhere. Go meet them, and take the extra to the bank.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  I usually stay for about 2 years, and move on if the work becomes boring.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    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.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      2 years is the millennial average [1] [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials-jobs-career-work-salary-quit-young-people-study-a8361936.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials-jobs-ca...
      - ShteiLoups 7y ago
        Don't we normally strive to be above average?
        ghaff 7y ago
        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.
        arcticbull 7y ago
        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 ;) [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3946085/switching-jobs-pay-boost/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3946085/switching-jobs-pay-boost/
- gnahckire 7y ago
  > 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.
- Stubb 7y ago
  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.
  - aledalgrande 7y ago
    You spend most of your waking hours at work...
    - Stubb 7y ago
      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.
- snsksnsbsnsn 7y ago
  In larger companies, switching teams is a good way to get out of one’s comfort zone and avoid taking a bigger risk.
- situational87 7y ago
  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.
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    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.
    - felixgallo 7y ago
      What if there were other jobs than tech jobs and people were forced into those.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      nah it’s real. The saying goes gotta change job verticals or job expectations at 40.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - ntetsuo 7y ago
    This is a self defeating bullshit statement.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  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.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I have seen this at other companies too. 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.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    The HR term for this is "salary inversion".
  - mandeepj 7y ago
    > 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
    - ctime 7y ago
      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.
- m0zg 7y ago
  >> shortcomings stop mattering as much 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.
- PragmaticPulp 7y ago
  > 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.
- d1zzy 7y ago
  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.
r00fus 7y ago
What about moving around in the same company? For large corporations, this seems like an inside-sales recruiting angle you would not want to miss. Microsoft I heard recommended workers career changes regularly (18m - 3y) within the org for this reason.
- sprashanth 7y ago
  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.
yardie 7y ago
> one should go elsewhere on a regular basis 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.
gwbas1c 7y ago
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.
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  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.
  - aledalgrande 7y ago
    I think the time it takes changes with the pace of development a company has.
d1zzy 7y ago
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.
- neves 7y ago
  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.
gringoDan 7y ago
This can be summed up in two sentences that stuck with me: "Stay and play. Or go and grow."
closeparen 7y ago
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.

arcticbull 7y ago

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.

khazhou 7y ago
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.
- magashna 7y ago
  Try "cog in the machine"
  - HenryBemis 7y ago
    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.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  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." It's neutral, really.
- ok_coo 7y ago
  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.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    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.
  - analognoise 7y ago
    There is totally something wrong with staying if you're underpaid. There are nice people everywhere. Go meet them, and take the extra to the bank.
WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
I usually stay for about 2 years, and move on if the work becomes boring.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  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.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    2 years is the millennial average [1] [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials-jobs-career-work-salary-quit-young-people-study-a8361936.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials-jobs-ca...
    - ShteiLoups 7y ago
      Don't we normally strive to be above average?
      - ghaff 7y ago
        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.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        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 ;) [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3946085/switching-jobs-pay-boost/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3946085/switching-jobs-pay-boost/
gnahckire 7y ago
> 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.
Stubb 7y ago
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.
- aledalgrande 7y ago
  You spend most of your waking hours at work...
  - Stubb 7y ago
    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.
snsksnsbsnsn 7y ago
In larger companies, switching teams is a good way to get out of one’s comfort zone and avoid taking a bigger risk.
situational87 7y ago
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.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  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.
  - felixgallo 7y ago
    What if there were other jobs than tech jobs and people were forced into those.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    nah it’s real. The saying goes gotta change job verticals or job expectations at 40.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ntetsuo 7y ago
  This is a self defeating bullshit statement.
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
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.
- asveikau 7y ago
  I have seen this at other companies too. 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.
- pkaye 7y ago
  The HR term for this is "salary inversion".
- mandeepj 7y ago
  > 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
  - ctime 7y ago
    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.
m0zg 7y ago
>> shortcomings stop mattering as much 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.
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
> 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.
d1zzy 7y ago
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.

r00fus 7y ago

What about moving around in the same company? For large corporations, this seems like an inside-sales recruiting angle you would not want to miss. Microsoft I heard recommended workers career changes regularly (18m - 3y) within the org for this reason.

sprashanth 7y ago
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.

yardie 7y ago

> one should go elsewhere on a regular basis 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.

gwbas1c 7y ago

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.

gherkinnn 7y ago
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.
- aledalgrande 7y ago
  I think the time it takes changes with the pace of development a company has.

d1zzy 7y ago

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.

neves 7y ago
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.

gringoDan 7y ago

This can be summed up in two sentences that stuck with me: "Stay and play. Or go and grow."

closeparen 7y ago

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.