[gambiting]

Is that....weird? My coworker has worked here for 25 years now, and he's still "just" a programmer, was never interested in taking a managerial/lead position. There's plenty of programmers who have 10~20 years of seniority here. And it's a games company, so it's not like these people work on some archaic systems - major, triple A releases everyone heard about.

[isostatic]

At my company anyone here less than 10 years is a newbie. You're not an old timer until you reach 30 years, and a few grandees make it to 50.

It's a big old company though (one of the oldest in the field), and this is in broadcast engineering which is far more conservative. IME Peoppe in the Internet facing parts are far more flitty.

While some older engineers are happy to retreat into comfortably old technologies like cameras and microphones, there's plenty more who havve spent the time to learn about the trend towards IP. They are very valuable, in contrast to say a "generic" network engineer, because they understand the domain, they fundamentally know a 20ms outage on a network is catastrophic.

[toomanybeersies]

My father is a network engineer, and has more or less been working in the same company for over 30 years now. He started as a radio technician out of high school, and transitioned into internet networking in the early 90's.

Technically, he's worked for several different companies. For a while he was working for a different company, but doing exactly the same work, with the same people, in the same building.

I don't think it will be easy to replace network engineers like him, who have been doing the job literally as long as the consumer internet has existed.

[ryandrake]

I would say it’s unusual. Most places I’ve worked, it was more or less a bimodal distribution: lots and lots of people with tenures of less than 5 years, a bunch execs and highly paid in-crowd folks who were there for 15+ years, and a vast emptiness of people with 5-15 years in company.

I think a lot of people leave as soon as their stock vests (3-4 years) and it’s obvious they are not on an upward track. And the few who got on to the upward tracks are set for life and have no incentive to leave ever. There’s no middle ground.

[senatorobama]

Yes, because it's common knowledge to change companies every ~3 years to get a 20%+ salary increase instead of a miserly 0-10%.

[danpalmer]

When you make enough, making more money means less to you and you care much more about the workplace, the people, the mission.

Either that, or find a company that does raises in line with what you’d get from moving. Netflix is famous for this (and has high retention), but there are other companies. The company I work for has a similar approach and I know I’m unlikely to make more at another company unless I move into finance, in which case see above.

[dsacco]

> Netflix is famous for this (and has high retention)

Netflix has high turnover, about 15-20% depending on source.

[coryfklein]

Everything I have heard has been anecdotal and contradicts this. Do you happen to _have_ the source for your information? I admit I don't for mine.

[dsacco]

Sure. Netflix's Chief Product Officer, Neil Hunt, has provided the 15% statistic directly in interviews. There are a few places you can find him saying this, but the first one I found by searching was this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/netflix-redefined-american-co.... Other estimates (typically by employees self-reporting) put it at about 20%. Keep in mind about half of those are involuntary departures. Personally, I think that involuntary departures are a meaningful measure when we're talking about employee retention, but there are reasonable arguments to the contrary. More pertinently, Netflix's culture is somewhat unique among tech companies of its size in that it fires very quickly.

Contributing my own anecdata here: I am familiar with current and past employees at Netflix who have told me personally that plenty of people are fired from Netflix because they don't jive with the culture, not necessarily because they are incompetent. That's not intended to be a remark about Netflix being a toxic company; on the contrary, I think Netflix is pretty self-aware about its "corporate values." But that means that engineers who could succeed at Google, Facebook, etc might not succeed at Netflix because the latter looks for a lot of self-direction and career ambition, not just competence.

Circling back to the point: I've seen some people slice off involuntary termination numbers when discussing attrition at tech companies, but I don't think that's appropriate. Sometimes people leave because they're intellectually or financially unsatisfied, and that would mostly comprise the ~7.5-10% that leave voluntarily. But if the bar for being fired is lower, it's probably useful to incorporate the involuntary departures, because there's an argument many of them would leave voluntarily even if not fired due to a culture mismatch.

[senatorobama]

How do you plan to move into finance?

[mstibbard]

I think where he said "see above" he was indicating he had no desire to go into finance due to "the workplace, the people, the mission"

[emodendroket]

Doesn't that become difficult after a while? I'm gradually finding fewer places are even able to match what I'm making, let alone give me a 20% raise.

[scarface74]

Yes. Definitely.

I spent 9 years at one company - 7 years longer than I should have. After a 10K raise the first year and with 3% raises after that and bonuses slowly being cut, I only made $7K more in 2008 than I did in 2002. After that, I started aggressively job hopping - 4 jobs - and learning and over the next 10 years, I made over 60K more.

Now, I am looking to see what technology I should jump on and best case, I might be able to get $10K more over the next two years. I'm actually okay with that, I live a comfortable lifestyle.

I don't want to go into management and I want to stay hands on. My current position as a dev lead as about as high as I want to go and I would be fine being a strict individual contributor.

[senatorobama]

When you job hopped - did you wait for projects to be complete before you left to a new job? Did you have to ship?

I'm in a conundrum whether to leave or not because the project hasn't shipped.

[scarface74]

Would your company be in a conundrum to let you go because you had a mortgage to pay?

[emodendroket]

Don't worry about that. There's never a good time to leave and you'll always feel like you're leaving at a critical time.

[senatorobama]

Wow.. this cleared a lot of anxiety for moiye.

[emodendroket]

Yeah, precisely. It seems like "the next level" gets a lot more like management and involves less writing code and I don't know that that is really for me.

[zylent]

Quality of life is much more important than pay past a certain point.

[saiya-jin]

In western Europe, you do this couple of times (not as external consultant of course, but as perm employee), and you get semi-permanently branded as unreliable and unstable. For good reasons. I can see reasoning for this and it makes sense to me (i did it couple of times myself when younger, wouldn't' do that now). In growing economies, or where there isn't enough experienced IT people this isn't valid though.

[JepZ]

From my own experience:

- If someone stays less than 2 years with a company something is wrong (the person, the company or the combination).

- If someone stays longer than 4 years with a company in the same job, without promotion, that person is probably not the 'manager' type.

Both situations just give you hints on whether someone matches the profile you are searching for, but switching companies after 3-4 years seems to be reasonable for people who want to get the most out of their salaries. Nevertheless, if someone got all his 'promotions' by switching jobs you should be wary of course.

[ecshafer]

3 to 4 years is a good amount of time to switch, but I think 5 to 6 is probably better, it you have a good fit with a company. 5 to 6 years is the normal amount of time to 100% vest company 401k contributions, and any stock options. Leaving early can be a lot of money on the table.

[emodendroket]

I've seen a pretty wide spread of vesting schedules.

[emodendroket]

It's my understanding that in a lot of tech hub cities the average tenure at a company is only like two years.