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> It is, realistically, the smartest financial choice to invest in growing the people you hire instead of just throwing them away and hiring new ones every quarter. Absolutely, a capable person can contribute far more if they develop professionally especially when trust is built between employer and employee, with the caveat that this is specific to tech firms whose business model centers around developing a body of code and institutional knowledge to maintain it. But this is a minority of firms and thus what a minority of people experience. Most IT roles have a lot of churn. Contracting is a big one, but many roles in non-tech firms don't benefit much from highly skilled engineers because the software is not their core business. If you land in one of these roles, you'll likely have the negative experience many people talk about. Broadly put, the best jobs in a company are usually the ones critical to what the company does. If you're doing support work of some sort, yeah, you're easily replacable. On the bright side, it's good experience you can leverage to get a better position. The other problem is for everyone trying to become an engineer, most will fail, and the only way to know is usually to fail repeatedly, which is a miserable experience. If your management really is good at investing in their employees, it can be less painful as they can help you transition, but nothing can make trying really hard and failing a pleasant process. And since the quality of management is something like normally distributed, the bulk of people go through this with mediocre guidance. |