Similar camp here, long career and many different roles. Stuck at some places longer than others but surprisingly found little correlation between tenure at a p

Similar camp here, long career and many different roles. Stuck at some places longer than others but surprisingly found little correlation between tenure at a place and promotion. At one early job I was promoted into a much bigger role after six months, and at a few places I stuck around 3ish years with nothing to show for it (despite otherwise being productive and well liked). One more thing I would add: promotion at a company is very random but hugely impactful across a career. My current company is filled with relatively young engineers, but many of them got promoted during the time when the company was small and now manage massive teams at a publicly traded company while still relatively inexperienced. Early in my career I got quickly promoted to a reasonably high level role... but the company went under. Had that company been as successful as my current one who knows what type of role I might be in today. I have another friend that joined a massive company hoping to just blend in and have time for other project: 2 years later they've had multiple promotions and are now very well compensated and a much higher level. This same person struggled to get any promotion in a much smaller company they worked harder for and had a much higher impact on. Some people join an early stage startup and end up a C-level at a well known company, and a very similar person can join and early stage startup that disappears and they end up taking a senior software engineer role for their next gig. All of this to say, long-term commitment can have wildly divergent rewards that all boils down to being in the right place at the right time.