10 ms·

That's why I'm always wary of people who hardly ever seem to stay anywhere more than a couple of years. There's valuable learning (and empathy too) in having t

by antod 3y ago

That's why I'm always wary of people who hardly ever seem to stay anywhere more than a couple of years. There's valuable learning (and empathy too) in having to see your own decisions and creations through their whole lifecycle. Understanding how tech debt comes to be, what tradeoffs were involved and how they came to bite later. Which ideas turned out to be bad in hindsight through the lens of the people making them at the time. Rather than just painting the previous crowd as incompetent while simultaneously making worse decisions you'll never experience the consequences of. Moving on every 18-24 months leaves you with a potentially false impression of your own skills/wisdom.

jvans 3y ago
> There's valuable learning (and empathy too) in having to see your own decisions and creations through their whole lifecycle. This is so true. It's extremely enlightening to watch a design go from design docs to implementation and then finally the maintenance phase. A lot of problems that could happen never do and some unexpected ones pop up along the way.
no_wizard 3y ago
>That's why I'm always wary of people who hardly ever seem to stay anywhere more than a couple of years Do have some empathy for when job markets or life make people move on. I'd like to stay at an employer for more than 1-2 years, but between the layoffs (avoiding them or getting laid off) or the need for a higher salary that often only comes from switching jobs, its not always possible to build tenure. Frankly its a big issue in the industry at large. I hate interviewing etc. but I'm not going to get paid 20% less because of it. I had to ride the job hopping treadmill for awhile, and I'd like to get off it just as much as you'd like to see people have more tenure. When I first started out though, I worked for 5 years at the same place until it was very clear I was going to cap out on being able to advance and merit increases of 3-5% a year aren't going to cut it.
- Aqua_Geek 3y ago
  Yep. Absolutely this. I get the frustration of people building fragile junk and bouncing before the house of cards falls, but I wouldn’t hold switching jobs every couple of years against a candidate when a significant difference in salary is potentially on the table. A 20% raise, compounded over a couple of switches, is massive. I got way more by switching jobs (after 4 years) than I was ever going to get by staying.
hinkley 3y ago
It definitely colors which questions I want to ask people. It is possible to avoid these traps, but then there are a lot of traps that we collectively have the wisdom to avoid but individually do not. I started taking things apart and putting them back together at a very young age. When I was a young man I was in a big hurry to get somewhere, and so I could walk into a brownfield project and slowly reconstruct and deconstruct how we got here, would I have made the same decisions with the same information, and how do I feel about this news. Not only was I not falling into the "1 year of experience 10 times" dilema, I got more like 3-4 years of experience 4 times in 10 years, by playing historian. My first almost-mentor left me with a great parting gift at the start of the dot-com era. He essentially convinced me of the existence of the hype cycle (in '95!), that we were at the beginning of one/several, he had seen previous ones play out, and they would play out again. Not cycles for new things, mind you, but cycles trying to bring back old things that had been forgotten. Like fashion. If anything it made me more likely to want to excavate the site. Going into the trap knowing it's a trap doesn't necessarily save you, but it does improve your odds. Of course it also makes you a curmudgeon at a tender age.
touisteur 3y ago
I am in a long-term-career place and it has its challenges (mostly no leverage on pay...) but the level of knowledge and expertise and proficiency of most people is astounding, allowing to do a whole lot with very little people, and to build on knowledge, experience and yes, lots of code and tooling too. Most everything you're thinking about in the domain, has been done at least twice, and you can pick people's brains on the most obscure but important topics and get a pretty good idea on the actual challenges. It can get hard to separate ideas from execution, to 'forget' about the pain of a horrible technical move that still managed to be a commercially success, or to forget the pain of a badly-timed big decision that exploded in your face.

by antod 3y ago

jvans 3y ago

> There's valuable learning (and empathy too) in having to see your own decisions and creations through their whole lifecycle. This is so true. It's extremely enlightening to watch a design go from design docs to implementation and then finally the maintenance phase. A lot of problems that could happen never do and some unexpected ones pop up along the way.

no_wizard 3y ago

>That's why I'm always wary of people who hardly ever seem to stay anywhere more than a couple of years Do have some empathy for when job markets or life make people move on. I'd like to stay at an employer for more than 1-2 years, but between the layoffs (avoiding them or getting laid off) or the need for a higher salary that often only comes from switching jobs, its not always possible to build tenure. Frankly its a big issue in the industry at large. I hate interviewing etc. but I'm not going to get paid 20% less because of it. I had to ride the job hopping treadmill for awhile, and I'd like to get off it just as much as you'd like to see people have more tenure. When I first started out though, I worked for 5 years at the same place until it was very clear I was going to cap out on being able to advance and merit increases of 3-5% a year aren't going to cut it.

Aqua_Geek 3y ago
Yep. Absolutely this. I get the frustration of people building fragile junk and bouncing before the house of cards falls, but I wouldn’t hold switching jobs every couple of years against a candidate when a significant difference in salary is potentially on the table. A 20% raise, compounded over a couple of switches, is massive. I got way more by switching jobs (after 4 years) than I was ever going to get by staying.

hinkley 3y ago

It definitely colors which questions I want to ask people. It is possible to avoid these traps, but then there are a lot of traps that we collectively have the wisdom to avoid but individually do not. I started taking things apart and putting them back together at a very young age. When I was a young man I was in a big hurry to get somewhere, and so I could walk into a brownfield project and slowly reconstruct and deconstruct how we got here, would I have made the same decisions with the same information, and how do I feel about this news. Not only was I not falling into the "1 year of experience 10 times" dilema, I got more like 3-4 years of experience 4 times in 10 years, by playing historian. My first almost-mentor left me with a great parting gift at the start of the dot-com era. He essentially convinced me of the existence of the hype cycle (in '95!), that we were at the beginning of one/several, he had seen previous ones play out, and they would play out again. Not cycles for new things, mind you, but cycles trying to bring back old things that had been forgotten. Like fashion. If anything it made me more likely to want to excavate the site. Going into the trap knowing it's a trap doesn't necessarily save you, but it does improve your odds. Of course it also makes you a curmudgeon at a tender age.

touisteur 3y ago

I am in a long-term-career place and it has its challenges (mostly no leverage on pay...) but the level of knowledge and expertise and proficiency of most people is astounding, allowing to do a whole lot with very little people, and to build on knowledge, experience and yes, lots of code and tooling too. Most everything you're thinking about in the domain, has been done at least twice, and you can pick people's brains on the most obscure but important topics and get a pretty good idea on the actual challenges. It can get hard to separate ideas from execution, to 'forget' about the pain of a horrible technical move that still managed to be a commercially success, or to forget the pain of a badly-timed big decision that exploded in your face.