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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.