5 ms·

It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and af

It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation. It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?

kulahan 11mo ago
One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old company after a few years of floating around because I realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for me, even if the pay isn't massive. You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this customer when they're just going to take my offer to another dealership for a better deal?" Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly, because if you don't, you'll never get a customer.
- andrewmutz 11mo ago
  They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Everyone's kicking the can down the road and we're very soon going to hit points of "no one has experience (or are already working)". Someone needs to do the training. It doesn't seem like school and bootcamps is enough for what companies need these days.
  - kulahan 10mo ago
    People will remember this when they're more senior in their career.
- izacus 11mo ago
  The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching. What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.
  - knollimar 11mo ago
    What's the solution? Locking juniors in with contracts? Vesting cliffs?
    - eudamoniac 10mo ago
      Compete for talent. You can never compete with big tech salaries, and often you can't compete with their benefits either. But you can still compete in creative ways. The most obvious way that no one does is to promote people into lower hours worked; instead of a pay raise you give them every Friday off, for example. There are a lot of types of people out there motivated by a lot of different things than money.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >but instead invests that money in poaching. give a big enough raise and they won't want to be poached. You won't retain everyone, but your goal probably isn't to compete with Google to begin with. So why worry of the scenario of boosting a good junior from 100k to 150k but losing them to a 250k job? In some ways you will also need to read the room. I don't like the mentality of "I won't hire this person, they are only here for money", but to some extent you need to gauge how much of them is mission-focused and how much would leave the minute they get a 10k counter-offer. adjust your investments accordingly and focus on making something that makes money off that.
  - samrus 11mo ago
    Its the tragedy of the commons. These companies will think they are very smart for doing this, but theyll just foster a culture where there are no competent employees once the current seniors retire
dgunay 11mo ago
Why didn't companies just grant raises more aggressively? Was the ease of poaching engineers not a clear market signal?
- QuercusMax 11mo ago
  When I worked at a very small company we were extremely concerned about this, and so we paid people well enough that they didn't want to leave. All I can figure is that the bean counters just don't understand that churn has a cost.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    some places like Amazon operate around the churn. Keep everyone anxious and they won't try to collectively bargain nor ask for raises. They won't be around long enough anyways.
- izacus 11mo ago
  Same reason why companies don't pay everyone 10 million bucks a month. Where do you think the money comes from?
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Where do you think that money is going?
- robbiewxyz 11mo ago
  Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing. Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity. A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.
endemic 11mo ago
Funny, I was at my previous company almost exactly two years. They never even gave me a cost of living increase, much less a "raise." So I was effectively earning less each year. Change needs to happen from both sides if extended tenure is the goal.
ike2792 11mo ago
When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.
- parliament32 11mo ago
  This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions. I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already have" is.. a hard sell. What are you buying with that $20k exactly? 20% more hours? 20% more output? No? Then why are we spending the money? It's certainly possible to dance around it talking about reducing risk ("there's a risk this person leaves, which will cause...") but it's bogged down in hypotheticals and kinda a hard sell. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.
  - throwaway2037 11mo ago
    In my view, I have observed many good, underpaid engineers because they choose stability over higher pay. Most people are happy with slow and stead pay rises while working at the same company. Companies know this and pay accordingly. Only your top 1-10% of employees need more careful "TLC" to give higher raises and regular off-cycle feedback: "You're doing great. We are giving you a special raise for your efforts." You can mostly afford to lose the rest.
    - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      >You can mostly afford to lose the rest. I guess that's how we got here to begin with. We take a workforce and treat is as expendable instead of as a proper team. I suppose it will vary per industry but I can't imagine an other kind of engineering being comfortable just letting go of people mid-project because "we can afford to lose them".
semiquaver 11mo ago
People have been saying this for at least 30 years.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  40, that's around the time pensions were starting to be removed.
loeg 11mo ago
Arguably, the cross-pollination of developers moving around is good for employers.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  Good to minimize bus factor, bad when you want to innovate and expand your business. So I guess it's ideal for this slowing economy focused on "maintenance".
  - loeg 11mo ago
    No. Good in that developers are exposed to outside skills and ideas they wouldn't be by spending 10 years doing the same thing.
    - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      I don't think it's good or bad per se. Depends o ntje company needs and the individual desite. But as someone who originally wanted to be a specialist (or at the very leastT-shaped), I see a lot more problem in fostering specialists than generalists under this model. Sometimes you do just need that one guru who breathes C++ to come in and dig deep into your stack. Not always, but the value is irreplaceable.
      - loeg 11mo ago
        Yeah, definitely some drawbacks as well. I think you can develop some specialization despite hopping around relatively often, though it’s not the path I’ve chosen (average tenure of 6-7 years per employer).
- samrus 11mo ago
  Sure but there needs to be a balance with momentum. You cant keep losing institutional knowledge like that. I think we are heavily disbalanced towards too much churn
kentm 11mo ago
> It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation. I've started viewing developers that have never maintained an existing piece of software for over 3 years with skepticism. Obviously, with allowances for people who have very good reasons to be in that situation (just entered the market, bad luck with employers, etc). There's a subculture of adulation for developers that "get things done fast" which, more often than not, has meant that they wrote stuff that wasn't well thought out, threw it over the wall, and moved on to their next gig. They always had a knack of moving on before management could connect the dots that all the operational problems were related to the person who originally wrote it and not the very-competent people fixing the thing. Your average manager doesn't seem to have the capability to really understand tech debt and how it impacts ability to deliver over time; and in many cases they'll talk about the "rock star" developer that got away with a glimmer in their eye. Saw a post of someone on Hacker News the other day talking about how they were creating things faster than n-person teams, and then letting the "normies" (their words not mine) maintain it while moving on to the next thing. Thats exactly the kind of person I'd like to weed out.
asdfman123 11mo ago
You have cause and effect reversed. Companies stopped training workers and giving them significant raises for experience, so we started job hopping. Some genius MBA determined that people feel more rewarded by recognition and autonomy than pay, which is actually true. But it means that all the recognition and autonomy in the world won't make you stay if you can make 50% more somewhere else.
throwaway2037 11mo ago
> culture of job-hopping When using this phrase in this context, is your sentiment positive or negative? In my experience, each time I have a job offer for more money, I go and talk to my current line manager. I explain the new job offer, and ask if they would like to counteroffer. 100% (<-- imagine 48 point bold font!) of the time, my line manager has been simultaneously emotionally hurt ("oh, he's disloyal for leaving") and unsupportive of matching compensation. In almost all cases, an external recruiter found me online, reached out, and had a great new opportunity that paid well. Who am I to look away? I'm nothing special as a technologist, but please don't fault me for accepting great opportunities with higher pay. > Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee What exactly is meant by "invest" here? In my career, my employers haven't done shit for me about training. Yet, 100% of them expect me to be up-to-date all the time on whatever technology they fancy this week. Is tech training really a thing in 2025 with so many great online resources? In my career, I am 100% self-trained, usually through blogs, technical papers, mailing lists, and discussions with peers.
- shagie 11mo ago
  I'm unsure about how long your career has been. At Taos, there was a monthly training session / tech talk on some subject. At Network Appliance ('98-'09), there was a moderate push to go to trainings and they paid for the devs on the team I was on to go to the perl conference (when it was just down the road one year everyone - even the tech writers - went). At a retail company that I worked at ('10-'14), they'd occasionally bring in trainers on some thing that... about half a dozen of the more senior developers (who would then be able to spread the knowledge out ... part of that was a formal "do a presentation on the material from the past two weeks for the rest of your team.") However, as time went on and as juniors would leave sooner the appetite for a company to spend money on training sessions has dissipated. It could be "Here is $1000 training budget if you ask your manager" becoming $500 now. It could be that there aren't any more conferences that the company is willing to spend $20k to send a team to. If half of the junior devs are going to jump to the next tier of company and the other half aren't going to become much better... why do that training opportunity at all? Training absolutely used to be a thing that was much more common... but so too were tenures of half a decade or longer.

kulahan 11mo ago

One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old company after a few years of floating around because I realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for me, even if the pay isn't massive. You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this customer when they're just going to take my offer to another dealership for a better deal?" Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly, because if you don't, you'll never get a customer.

andrewmutz 11mo ago
They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  Everyone's kicking the can down the road and we're very soon going to hit points of "no one has experience (or are already working)". Someone needs to do the training. It doesn't seem like school and bootcamps is enough for what companies need these days.
- kulahan 10mo ago
  People will remember this when they're more senior in their career.
izacus 11mo ago
The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching. What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.
- knollimar 11mo ago
  What's the solution? Locking juniors in with contracts? Vesting cliffs?
  - eudamoniac 10mo ago
    Compete for talent. You can never compete with big tech salaries, and often you can't compete with their benefits either. But you can still compete in creative ways. The most obvious way that no one does is to promote people into lower hours worked; instead of a pay raise you give them every Friday off, for example. There are a lot of types of people out there motivated by a lot of different things than money.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  >but instead invests that money in poaching. give a big enough raise and they won't want to be poached. You won't retain everyone, but your goal probably isn't to compete with Google to begin with. So why worry of the scenario of boosting a good junior from 100k to 150k but losing them to a 250k job? In some ways you will also need to read the room. I don't like the mentality of "I won't hire this person, they are only here for money", but to some extent you need to gauge how much of them is mission-focused and how much would leave the minute they get a 10k counter-offer. adjust your investments accordingly and focus on making something that makes money off that.
- samrus 11mo ago
  Its the tragedy of the commons. These companies will think they are very smart for doing this, but theyll just foster a culture where there are no competent employees once the current seniors retire

dgunay 11mo ago

Why didn't companies just grant raises more aggressively? Was the ease of poaching engineers not a clear market signal?

QuercusMax 11mo ago
When I worked at a very small company we were extremely concerned about this, and so we paid people well enough that they didn't want to leave. All I can figure is that the bean counters just don't understand that churn has a cost.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  some places like Amazon operate around the churn. Keep everyone anxious and they won't try to collectively bargain nor ask for raises. They won't be around long enough anyways.
izacus 11mo ago
Same reason why companies don't pay everyone 10 million bucks a month. Where do you think the money comes from?
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  Where do you think that money is going?
robbiewxyz 11mo ago
Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing. Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity. A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.

endemic 11mo ago

Funny, I was at my previous company almost exactly two years. They never even gave me a cost of living increase, much less a "raise." So I was effectively earning less each year. Change needs to happen from both sides if extended tenure is the goal.

ike2792 11mo ago

When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.

parliament32 11mo ago
This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions. I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already have" is.. a hard sell. What are you buying with that $20k exactly? 20% more hours? 20% more output? No? Then why are we spending the money? It's certainly possible to dance around it talking about reducing risk ("there's a risk this person leaves, which will cause...") but it's bogged down in hypotheticals and kinda a hard sell. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.
- throwaway2037 11mo ago
  In my view, I have observed many good, underpaid engineers because they choose stability over higher pay. Most people are happy with slow and stead pay rises while working at the same company. Companies know this and pay accordingly. Only your top 1-10% of employees need more careful "TLC" to give higher raises and regular off-cycle feedback: "You're doing great. We are giving you a special raise for your efforts." You can mostly afford to lose the rest.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >You can mostly afford to lose the rest. I guess that's how we got here to begin with. We take a workforce and treat is as expendable instead of as a proper team. I suppose it will vary per industry but I can't imagine an other kind of engineering being comfortable just letting go of people mid-project because "we can afford to lose them".

semiquaver 11mo ago

People have been saying this for at least 30 years.

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
40, that's around the time pensions were starting to be removed.

loeg 11mo ago

Arguably, the cross-pollination of developers moving around is good for employers.

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
Good to minimize bus factor, bad when you want to innovate and expand your business. So I guess it's ideal for this slowing economy focused on "maintenance".
- loeg 11mo ago
  No. Good in that developers are exposed to outside skills and ideas they wouldn't be by spending 10 years doing the same thing.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    I don't think it's good or bad per se. Depends o ntje company needs and the individual desite. But as someone who originally wanted to be a specialist (or at the very leastT-shaped), I see a lot more problem in fostering specialists than generalists under this model. Sometimes you do just need that one guru who breathes C++ to come in and dig deep into your stack. Not always, but the value is irreplaceable.
    - loeg 11mo ago
      Yeah, definitely some drawbacks as well. I think you can develop some specialization despite hopping around relatively often, though it’s not the path I’ve chosen (average tenure of 6-7 years per employer).
samrus 11mo ago
Sure but there needs to be a balance with momentum. You cant keep losing institutional knowledge like that. I think we are heavily disbalanced towards too much churn

kentm 11mo ago

> It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation. I've started viewing developers that have never maintained an existing piece of software for over 3 years with skepticism. Obviously, with allowances for people who have very good reasons to be in that situation (just entered the market, bad luck with employers, etc). There's a subculture of adulation for developers that "get things done fast" which, more often than not, has meant that they wrote stuff that wasn't well thought out, threw it over the wall, and moved on to their next gig. They always had a knack of moving on before management could connect the dots that all the operational problems were related to the person who originally wrote it and not the very-competent people fixing the thing. Your average manager doesn't seem to have the capability to really understand tech debt and how it impacts ability to deliver over time; and in many cases they'll talk about the "rock star" developer that got away with a glimmer in their eye. Saw a post of someone on Hacker News the other day talking about how they were creating things faster than n-person teams, and then letting the "normies" (their words not mine) maintain it while moving on to the next thing. Thats exactly the kind of person I'd like to weed out.

asdfman123 11mo ago

You have cause and effect reversed. Companies stopped training workers and giving them significant raises for experience, so we started job hopping. Some genius MBA determined that people feel more rewarded by recognition and autonomy than pay, which is actually true. But it means that all the recognition and autonomy in the world won't make you stay if you can make 50% more somewhere else.

throwaway2037 11mo ago

> culture of job-hopping When using this phrase in this context, is your sentiment positive or negative? In my experience, each time I have a job offer for more money, I go and talk to my current line manager. I explain the new job offer, and ask if they would like to counteroffer. 100% (<-- imagine 48 point bold font!) of the time, my line manager has been simultaneously emotionally hurt ("oh, he's disloyal for leaving") and unsupportive of matching compensation. In almost all cases, an external recruiter found me online, reached out, and had a great new opportunity that paid well. Who am I to look away? I'm nothing special as a technologist, but please don't fault me for accepting great opportunities with higher pay. > Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee What exactly is meant by "invest" here? In my career, my employers haven't done shit for me about training. Yet, 100% of them expect me to be up-to-date all the time on whatever technology they fancy this week. Is tech training really a thing in 2025 with so many great online resources? In my career, I am 100% self-trained, usually through blogs, technical papers, mailing lists, and discussions with peers.

shagie 11mo ago
I'm unsure about how long your career has been. At Taos, there was a monthly training session / tech talk on some subject. At Network Appliance ('98-'09), there was a moderate push to go to trainings and they paid for the devs on the team I was on to go to the perl conference (when it was just down the road one year everyone - even the tech writers - went). At a retail company that I worked at ('10-'14), they'd occasionally bring in trainers on some thing that... about half a dozen of the more senior developers (who would then be able to spread the knowledge out ... part of that was a formal "do a presentation on the material from the past two weeks for the rest of your team.") However, as time went on and as juniors would leave sooner the appetite for a company to spend money on training sessions has dissipated. It could be "Here is $1000 training budget if you ask your manager" becoming $500 now. It could be that there aren't any more conferences that the company is willing to spend $20k to send a team to. If half of the junior devs are going to jump to the next tier of company and the other half aren't going to become much better... why do that training opportunity at all? Training absolutely used to be a thing that was much more common... but so too were tenures of half a decade or longer.