[icey]

The sweet spot that I've noticed seems to be around 3 years average. Anything more than that doesn't appear to make a difference in overall happiness levels. Lower than that and I start to have concerns.

This was a question I used to ask my consulting clients to get a feel for what sort of department I was going to be walking in to. The higher turnover places always had the worst development practices in place (or none at all, like a complete free-for-all), and the places with less developer turnover tended to have fewer people focused on guaranteeing themselves job security & more people focused on efficiency.

[saturn]

Yep, matches up with my experience pretty well. Around 2 or 3 years is a good sign that the place isn't a terrible place to work, and also that it's not full of make-work existence-justifying lifers.

A bad place to work can actually be fun for a while, if you have good coworkers. It can be a bonding experience, a rite of passage, friendships forged in the fires of mt doom etc. But indifferent management and ashen-faced zombie coworkers determined to cling to their mediocre jobs until they rot to death in their seats? It's a different type of poison, but just as deadly ..