[JohnFen]

I sure did, as did most of the devs I worked with. For two reasons: first, that the only time you'd get a pay raise is by changing jobs and second, because lots of employers considered more than 5 years or so at any given job to be a yellow flag (because it's a potential indication that your skills aren't staying up to date.)

Even now, I rarely stay at a given job for more than 5 years or so. But that's mostly because I get bored and want to do something new -- and because my skills get stale and I want to use new ones.

[fruktmix]

The problem with this these days is that, even if you want to do something new, companies will not hire you because you lack work experience of what skills you want to obtain.

I heard that back in the days, if you knew coding you were hired. Today you have to know 10000 things.

[nosequel]

Leetcode wasn't a thing for my first 15 years. I got a couple of jobs just from a lunch or dinner and a couple of polite conversations.

[JohnFen]

Whether or not Leetcode is a thing now depends on where you're applying. I have yet to encounter it, personally. I suspect that's because I am not interested in working for FAANG-like companies.

[JohnFen]

That hasn't been my experience at all, honestly. But I also have the advantage of having decades of experience. It might be different for others.

[ecoquant]

This view is just absurd.

Anything related to the web was not even consider "coding". HTML monkeys got paid nothing. The idea a HTML monkey was doing engineering was a laughable idea. There were no python jobs when python was brand new.

Sure, a good C or Perl programmer had no trouble getting a job in 1994. There were so many less jobs though overall.

Then in 2000 the entire industry goes on life support for 2-3 years.

The good times are now.

[rzzzt]

And they just let you use the new skills and not assign work based on your existing experience (the "old skills")?

[JohnFen]

It's rare that a project requires nothing but new skills. Almost every project I've worked on has mostly used my existing skillset, with the addition of one or two things that are new to me. No employer has ever expressed a problem with that to me.