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Commentary as of 1 hour of posting is fairly negative for this post. I don't see anything here that warrants such a harsh tone. The author is saying if you wan

Commentary as of 1 hour of posting is fairly negative for this post. I don't see anything here that warrants such a harsh tone. The author is saying if you want to get past being a pawn-like IC, then putting in the time to understand the business at a deeper level is beneficial. It takes time to do this, especially when you consider having to start over fresh each time, learn what it is people do at the company, how they organize, and so on. And to the author's point - the places I have worked and done interviews at have, in fact, looked at the timespan between jobs on the resume and concluded not to hire a candidate because they realized that after 1-2 years, the candidate would leave, making them a not very good investment. This is not unheard of, and it makes sense. As a result, the average employee turnover at these companies has been 4+ years. A corollary to the author's point is to take a look at some of the more prominent programmers you know - the ones who aren't founders of their own companies. How long do they usually stick with a company that they like? I can comment more on individual points but I'll leave it at this for the time being.

scarface74 6y ago
Let me tell you a story about the risk of not jumping ship as opportunities become available..... I started working in 1996. I got a job as a computer operator based on an internship I did the year before. It was my gateway to get into the Big City from the small town where I graduated from. I developed a system by myself as the only programmer that they used to create a separate department that double the size of the company. I left there after three years because there was nothing left to do and went to another company. I got a $33K bump between salary + bonus which was a lot for me back then. Over the next 8 years as my salary went up by a paltry 3% a year and bonuses were cut, I made a grand total of $4000 more in 2008 than I made in 2000. On top of that, I became an “expert beginner”. I soft skilled my way into another job in 2008, that paid only $7K more, but I knew I would be able to take advantage of the job to update my resume and hopefully survive through the recession. I muddled my way through the recession and when the company folded, I got another job relatively quickly in 2012 as a for what was all intents and purposes a mid level enterprise developer making about $10K more. But again, I was interested in building my resume. 2013 - $2000 raise 2014 - $1500 raise Of course by now I learned my lesson from my experience between 2000-2008 and I had learned how to do resume driven development and build a network. I changed jobs again and this time got about a $25K raise. I was now at the bottom of the (relative narrow) range of what a senior developer can make. 2016 - no raise Again, not being stupid enough to stick around, I left and had a choice between working at a non software company as a dev lead working on two greenfield projects - perfect resume building opportunity - or working as just another SASS CRUD developer. I chose the team lead position - with another $15K pay bump. A year and a half in, the company was bought out by private equity and they said that they “don’t want to be a software company.” Changed jobs again, in 2018, vertical move in pay (only about $5K), but by now, I had been exposed to “cloud consultants” and knew where the money was locally. I took a job where the newly minted CTO wanted to make the company “cloud native” and integrate more tightly with AWS. Once again, a perfect opportunity to gain experience and build my resume. I leveraged my theoretically knowledge about AWS, my experience as a team lead, got the job and got experience with all of the AWS fiddly bits. Over the next two review cycles (2019,2020), they kept me at market rates as I learned more and I was quite happy. Then Covid hit - with an across the board pay cut that wiped out my salary gains since getting the job because it was a “shared sacrifice”. A recruiter from BigTech emailed me about a fully remote role. Why wouldn’t I take a stab at it? Making “FAANG” money, fully remote, and in a low cost of living area. In none of the interviews, did my short tenure at jobs since 2008 come up and they made me an offer shortly after the interview.

scarface74 6y ago

Let me tell you a story about the risk of not jumping ship as opportunities become available..... I started working in 1996. I got a job as a computer operator based on an internship I did the year before. It was my gateway to get into the Big City from the small town where I graduated from. I developed a system by myself as the only programmer that they used to create a separate department that double the size of the company. I left there after three years because there was nothing left to do and went to another company. I got a $33K bump between salary + bonus which was a lot for me back then. Over the next 8 years as my salary went up by a paltry 3% a year and bonuses were cut, I made a grand total of $4000 more in 2008 than I made in 2000. On top of that, I became an “expert beginner”. I soft skilled my way into another job in 2008, that paid only $7K more, but I knew I would be able to take advantage of the job to update my resume and hopefully survive through the recession. I muddled my way through the recession and when the company folded, I got another job relatively quickly in 2012 as a for what was all intents and purposes a mid level enterprise developer making about $10K more. But again, I was interested in building my resume. 2013 - $2000 raise 2014 - $1500 raise Of course by now I learned my lesson from my experience between 2000-2008 and I had learned how to do resume driven development and build a network. I changed jobs again and this time got about a $25K raise. I was now at the bottom of the (relative narrow) range of what a senior developer can make. 2016 - no raise Again, not being stupid enough to stick around, I left and had a choice between working at a non software company as a dev lead working on two greenfield projects - perfect resume building opportunity - or working as just another SASS CRUD developer. I chose the team lead position - with another $15K pay bump. A year and a half in, the company was bought out by private equity and they said that they “don’t want to be a software company.” Changed jobs again, in 2018, vertical move in pay (only about $5K), but by now, I had been exposed to “cloud consultants” and knew where the money was locally. I took a job where the newly minted CTO wanted to make the company “cloud native” and integrate more tightly with AWS. Once again, a perfect opportunity to gain experience and build my resume. I leveraged my theoretically knowledge about AWS, my experience as a team lead, got the job and got experience with all of the AWS fiddly bits. Over the next two review cycles (2019,2020), they kept me at market rates as I learned more and I was quite happy. Then Covid hit - with an across the board pay cut that wiped out my salary gains since getting the job because it was a “shared sacrifice”. A recruiter from BigTech emailed me about a fully remote role. Why wouldn’t I take a stab at it? Making “FAANG” money, fully remote, and in a low cost of living area. In none of the interviews, did my short tenure at jobs since 2008 come up and they made me an offer shortly after the interview.