
Ask HN: What's it like to work in the same company for decades? - SenHeng
The longest I&#x27;ve been at a place has been 2.5 years. I find that I&#x27;m usually itching to get out around after the 2 year mark due to various reasons like boredom from doing mostly the same thing over and over, lack of change in environment, no new challenges, people I know having mostly left&#x2F;transferred to better places.
======
techsupporter
I've worked for the same company, a large technology firm, for a little under
twenty years starting in my early 20s. I've changed jobs inside that company
four times and changed locations three times. The ability to change jobs but
not employers has helped a lot.

I have enjoyed it, for the most part. If you like the thrill or engagement or
whatever other descriptor you want to use of smaller companies or startups,
then it is definitely not that. What it has been is rock-solid stable,
interesting, and good benefits and pay.

I've debated looking for another job several times, usually on crappy days,
but I still come back to I've been at this company for a long time, I know how
it works, I have many of the benefits of tenure (more vacation time is one,
that managers and other groups give me more of the benefit of the doubt is
another), and maybe a little bit of me being "boring." I don't want to change
for the sake of change and I'm happy to go to work, do something I mostly
like, get paid well for it, and then go home and live my life separate from
work.

Hope that gives you some insight into why someone would stay at the same
employer for so long.

~~~
robertAngst
>get paid well for it,

I am curious what your pay is.

I feel like people get screwed if they dont change employers.

~~~
techsupporter
Since you asked, and I believe in transparency: Inclusive of stock and cash
bonus compensation, my W2 says I was paid a little over $225k in 2018. The W2
I received for my first year of employment says I was paid a little over $60k
in that year.

I don't know if it's true that people get screwed if they don't change
employers. I certainly don't feel screwed. Maybe I could make more if I went
to work at one of the other large technology companies; that's certainly been
something I've thought about. But I'm quite happy with what I am paid and feel
like the downsides (real or imagined) of changing employers are not outweighed
by the upside of a higher income.

~~~
fierro
where is this job located, that matters a lot in evaluating if you "got
screwed" by being at total comp 225k after 2 decades. For comparison, 175k was
my total comp at Bay Area job out of college.

~~~
techsupporter
I live in Seattle, though that’s not where I first started with my employer,
so that may skew the numbers.

Also, depending on when we respectively graduated from college, the starting
salaries are different. Starting salaries for IT where I lived when I
graduated were in the $40-50k range.

~~~
staticcaucasian
Your answers read exactly like most of the people I know at Microsoft. I think
to a certain extent companies with high average tenure produce cultures where
people become risk-averse and reinforce these values through statements like
your own.

For what it's worth, by staying there you are leaving a serious amount of
compensation behind, assuming your skills could find you another job. $225k
would be $350k elsewhere, easily. Many of the MSFT lifers I know don't really
have a skillset that would translate or be valuable elsewhere, due to their
focus on their company. That's probably true of most cases where someone stays
at a single firm for a long time.

By no means am I suggesting there's anything wrong with your worldview, just
pointing out that in this industry, you are leaving serious comp behind by not
shopping around. Your work after moving would probably be more enjoyable and
interesting, too.

~~~
joewee
I don’t know about this math. What if you change jobs and hate the new job?
How do you put a dollar value on months wasted working at a place that’s not a
good fit for you.

There’s only a 33% chance a job will work out. That is, that both you and the
employer agree it’s a good fit after a year. So you are more likely to fail in
a job change, and the odds get worse the more jobs you change.

~~~
staticcaucasian
That's not how that math works, _at all_.

Besides, you have an asymmetric opportunity, since you can interview, get an
offer, and decline it if you don't like the new option. You don't need to quit
before interviewing. In fact, that post-offer woo phase can give you a huge
chance to get more information about the new gig.

~~~
joewee
Time has value. And interviews only give you a partial view of your ultimate
working situation. But you and I are looking at this from totally different
perspectives, I have no interest in convincing you I’m right. My experience is
that if money is really what you want, you should start a business. As a owner
you will earn more but must deal with instability. If it’s stability you want,
you get a job. That’s the trade off I and many other entrepreneurs often
consider. So job hopping to make a few extra K is a waste of time. Why job hop
when you can do your own thing and double your income? Seems like someone
that’s afraid to commit either way.

------
joewee
The longest company I worked for was one I built. And I probably should have
quit earlier. ;)

I have worked with a lot of people who are primarily lifers at their company.
My role has often been that of a change agent (outsider / consultant hired
specifically because I’m an outsider).

One thing I have seen consistently is that the real power and influence sits
with those with tenure. The older a organization the more critical tenured
employees are to its operations.

Young people often think that they can gain influence or freedom to do what
they enjoy by changing jobs and getting a better title, only to run into the
“old guard” who refuse to accept change.

But there is another more reliable method. And this works in large
organizations best, becoming a trusted influencer...trust comes from doing
your work to the best of your ability and keeping a positive attitude.

Good leaders are often taught to find the influencers when joining a new
organization. So the longer you stay, the more influence you gain. And
influence gives you the ability to determine what you want to do. There tends
to be a lot of turnover at the top and bottom of an organization. Making those
in the middle very important.

This is so critical to established companies that they have all sorts of
programs designed to retain people identified as important once they have
gotten past the initial audition period. IBM and Intel are famous for their
leadership development on both technical and management fronts.

If you want to enjoy the perks of being around a company for awhile, you need
to go to bigger organizations or companies with mature management that are
setup to facilitate this.

Some people want to work on new things / startups every other year. Nothing
wrong with that. But when you have a company full of people like that, the
culture isn’t going to be conducive to doing the things required to keep
people around for the long term.

~~~
purplezooey
_IBM and Intel are famous for their leadership development on both technical
and management fronts._

These companies are more famous for slowly and subtly purging their technical
and management staff like after they are too old. Like over 40.

~~~
gazarullz
Interesting assertion, do you have any facts to back it up ?

~~~
obeone
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2018/09/18/the-ibm-
ag...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2018/09/18/the-ibm-age-
discrimination-lawsuit-will-shed-light-on-this-harrowing-trend/#1580ceb65ce1)

------
bronco21016
I don’t understand view points like this. Why the constant itch for change?
What’s wrong with just going to work, doing your job, collecting the check,
and going home? People are so caught up in the rat race and keeping up with
each other. Career does not have to be the definition of success.

I wish I could give perspective on working in the same job for decades but I’m
only 7 years in. 34 to go and zero intention on changing employers or careers
unless I have to.

~~~
brianwawok
> What’s wrong with just going to work, doing your job, collecting the check,
> and going home?

You spend more time at work then anything else, perhaps tied with sleeping.
More than with your spouse. More than with your kids. More than relaxing. Why
not make work mean something? If work means something, you can't just do it
for 40 years as a punch in, punch out. That sounds horrible.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I find meaning in having enough resources that my partner and kids are happy,
regardless of the challenge or enjoyment of the work I do.

It would be selfish (and borderline irresponsible) for me to prioritize
excitement and self-actualization at work over a comfortable, stable life for
my family. That’s what holidays and hobbies are for.

~~~
farresito
I think it's fine to have a bit of selfishness in your life. I'm not saying
that you need to make very irresponsible decisions, but if all your decisions
are made based on what others need, you end up living for others.

------
rb808
I've done a bunch of 2 years, a 5 year and an 8 year. Staying longer at a
place you like is great. I don't believe there are no new challenges, after a
few years you have more knowledge and authority to do the major work on a big
system. Choose an area you like and work on it - maybe the front end or the
back end tuning, or build pipeline, or monitoring - there are a million things
that need doing. Alternatively you get to choose on refactorings, rewrites,
and new architecture. I think you have to be honest and confident enough to
say you want to do it, or often just start doing it. If you're the new guy on
the team you can't really do that, the guys who've been around can.

The other benefit is getting to know business and management. Usually they
turn over less frequently, they love someone who actually is committed to the
business and they can rely on.

The culture of a place that looks after people and has longer term employees
is great. Less turnover means less interviewing, fewer clueless newbies that
need training and fixing up after. My favorite project had 30 devs and 25 of
us had been there for more than 5 years - no one need hand holding or did
stupid things, we were super productive and everyone enjoyed a great time.

For some people it can be easier to get promoted by moving, I'd suggest the
opposite - just start doing the job you want to do, usually no one will
complain.

Finally you said people you work with moved on to "better places" is that
grass is greener or you are always working for your second choice employers?

Oh - one last thing. If you have a family its great to have a steady work
schedule and you can concentrate on looking after babies and not worry about
extra job hunting stress. Find a place you like and enjoy the stability.

------
silveroriole
Not decades but ~8 years...

Good: you know the company politics. You know who to ask for anything, who not
to trust, who you can joke with and who you can’t. You can talk back to
higher-ups, tell them what you want to do rather than being told what to do,
bend the rules a little or set your own rules. You can pull from prior
experience - “I know you don’t think that estimate is right, but we did
something very similar five years ago and it overran because of this same risk
factor.”

Bad: you know the company politics. You’re embroiled in every stupid “this guy
doesn’t like that guy!!” management issue. Unless you have remarkable self-
control, it’s all impossible to stay out of. Also, people either come to you
for every tiny matter because you know everything, or they see you as
unapproachable and won’t talk to you when they really need to, forcing you to
chase them. Either way, in total, RIP coding time.

------
moodyjm51
I've been working at the same place since December 1984. I am working at
Kennedy Space Center. I have worked for 5 different contractors and on about
20 different projects. I have basically been a mainly a system administrator
for an Alpha Micro AMOS, OS-9, Apollo DomainIX, SUN Solaris, various linux
systems and for the last 20 years Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, 6 and 7. I
have administered individual workstations, servers, clusters, SAN systems.

The secret is to always be trying to learn enough to move the next new
project. My goal everyday is to try to learn something new each and every day.

~~~
WWLink
-grin- I get the impression you've played around with fortran 77 scripts before. (I sometimes work on software older than I am lol)

------
otoburb
I've been at my current company for over a decade. The company has changed a
lot over the years, going from a large public company when I joined, to
private, back to public again recently.

The reasons I stayed are simple: I've learned a tonne, changed roles and
responsibilities, interacted with many interesting characters, and continue to
grow personally. No matter the tenure, if you aren't being challenged then
your boredom will affect your performance.

Create new challenges that solve problems within your organization, and if
that doesn't work by all means strike out for greener pastures.

Best of luck.

~~~
yeutterg
Sounds like Dell. No matter, glad you were able to survive through the reorgs.

------
deanmoriarty
At the 5 year mark, I started developing a sense of jealousy towards the new
people: I am envious that they come in and are overwhelmed with all our
technology stack and they spend months learning it, and you can see their
knowledge of the system grows day by day, whereas for me it reached a plateau
since I already know how all those systems work, for the most part.

I try to work on greenfield projects where I have to research a new topic from
scratch, which sometimes is exciting, but in the end it’s not the same, so
I’ll likely not wait until the 6 year mark and I’ll jump ship sometimes this
year.

------
airstrike
I don't think working in the same company for decades is really an issue.

I just wouldn't recommend you do the same _job_ for more than ~24 months.

------
chomp
Bit of a rambling reply, speaking from experience.

Companies with tech departments (that will cater to this crowd) that are
around that long tend to be maybe big, somewhat stable, somewhat largish
revenue companies.

It is not the norm for people to stay that long at a company (tech company
especially) these days. Lots of coworkers come in and eventually leave (by
their own choice, sometimes not). You end up staying in touch with the ones
that you like. You end up cherishing the people you work with, because some of
them might have been there as long as you. You end up going to their
children's birthdays, and celebrate holidays with them. They can be life
friends once you share that amount of time with them.

Leadership drifts in and out. Passing the baton that often ends up diluting
the company culture to a point where the business itself becomes its own
organism, carried by its own inertia and making very clinical decisions about
its own survival. Some of these decisions begin to weigh down on you. I guess
it's true what they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

Some good things - you have a lot of time to design, implement, and deliver on
projects. You can wind up with quite an eclectic portfolio of internal
initiatives that you've delivered. Many of these can be quite fun. Benefits
are good over that period of time. Many companies end up delivering benefits
on a graded scale based on seniority. I'm up to 6 weeks of paternity leave if
I ever want to use it.

Assuming you joined near the top of a payband, years of merit/cost of living
increases can give you golden handcuffs. You get a lot of time to build
wealth, but without careful planning you will not financially be able to
leave. You become even more beholden, and less willing to leave over time.
Victim of your own comfort? Actually, maybe not comfort. Inertia?

There's some thoughts. The people around you, and the company change over
time.

------
sokoloff
I've been at the current job for almost 16 years now, joining when we were
about 90 people and now we're at over 15,000. We're a manufacturing company
that started out without in-house manufacturing, then added a few of our own
factories, then bought some other companies in our space (some of which had
factories, some of which are entirely outsourcers).

Over that time, I've held countless different roles, starting as IC, moving
into leadership roles; we've expanded product lines, expanded geographies for
both production and development, evolved tech several times as well. I've
worked in development, tech operations, manufacturing, and some cross-cutting
roles. (I joined before AWS or public cloud computing was a thing; my group is
now almost [98+%] entirely cloud-based.)

If we are able to continue to thrive as a business, I expect this might be the
last place I work. I _could_ retire now and we'd be OK, but with two kids in
elementary school, I'm realistically way better off working another 10-ish
years as I get plenty of PTO and a 4-week additional paid break every 5 years.

Same company, many different jobs (which seems to be a pattern of sorts in the
other responses). Pay is OK; I could make slightly more at a FAANG (or at
least at the FxAxG subset that have local offices), but I take pride in what
we've built from essentially the ground up, love the LT I work on and a
portion of the company's success is traceable reasonably clearly to what my
group does and how well we do it. If we fail to thrive, it will be at least
partly my fault.

Somewhat ironically, I didn't even want to join this company back in 2003; I
was just at the worst job I'd ever held, essentially being bribed to keep a
chair warm and do nothing for 6 months until some outsized bonuses got paid
out. The day those bonuses hit, there was a _line_ of people waiting to resign
to the director of software. I think I was #6 that day and he was exhausted
from hearing the same story. This company wasn't sexy, their tech was fairly
weak, they didn't have the best reputation, but when I got into the interview
process, I was blown away by the calibre of people working there and the
vision of the CTO/CEO. I went from "I'll take anything because it beats
getting paid well to do nothing" to "Hey, this is interesting!" and it's only
gotten better since.

------
cosmez
I've been working for the same company for 12 years, same role, same position.

Why did i stay? i was the only dev for like 8 years, being responsible for
your work and not being able to blame someone for legacy code is an eye
opener.

it makes you love your craft even more, i joined to start a port, turns out
this porting process never ends (I like improving my own code).

------
zedgerman
I’ve been at my current company since 2005. I’ve changed disciplines twice,
business groups (1000s of employees) three times, teams four+ times, roles at
least three times (IC, Tech Lead, Manager). Many smaller re-orgs occurred in
between and a few too many office moves.

In short, in a huge company there are challenges at all levels of the
technology stack and that’s completely forgetting about areas like finance,
marketing, business development, legal and HR.

It’s hard to get bored if you try to keep learning and challenging yourself
every day.

------
viraptor
You'll probably find people working in one company for a long time where the
company is large enough to swap roles internally. I've worked with people who
did 30+ years in the same corp, but the environment obviously changed a lot.

------
mproud
Often times, cozy.

Some things might suck, but if you have great managers, great benefits, and
like the work you do, you might stick with it. The grass isn’t always greener
on the other side.

------
oldtimeythrower
Coming up on the dawn of my fourth decade with the same company. By all
measures, I've been compensated handsomely as the company grew.

It only worked because of growth: both of the company and of my personal
development at every stage in the growth. It's been like changing companies
4-5 times, but with no risk of getting into a situation I regretted. And a lot
of my peers jumped at 10% raises or minor status improvements, and fell
behind.

If you can hit the right company in the right market at the right time in its
growth, prove yourself valuable and acquire equity, you will find many
professional challenges that will far outweigh job-hopping for short term
bumps. Take risks on this if you are under 30.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of growth and health of the company
though. FAANGs get all the joy from eager 22-year-olds and antsy 25-year-olds,
but at some point each of those companies were 200 or 500 or 1000 person
companies--when it made a lot more sense to join.

My advice: pick a small, promising company in a field that holds risk but will
still be relevant 30 or more years from now, and build your career there.

------
svsucculents
10 years and looking for an out. One thing to be aware of is that long stays
are probably better with a large company with a slower rate of change. Staying
at a small company for a long time is riskier in that you end up becoming more
of a generalist, become the goto and the goat and are in real danger if the
company changes leadership late in the game. Find that as an older individual
trying to get back into a 9-5 workplace after 10 years in a specialized
environment (doing everything) does not translate well to the current market.

~~~
Gustomaximus
I like the generalist route and have always avoided roles that lock me into a
specialty. I'm marketing so maybe that changes by industry but I feel this is
better for future employment as you you have multiple roles you can go into.
As long as you are knowledgeable in said area the interview should bring that
out.

Also just for enjoyability, I prefer variety of tasks.

------
kgwxd
I haven't worked at the same place, but in the same industry since 2001, doing
almost exactly the same work for each place I've been. Having so much domain
knowledge is extremely useful. I'm not a great developer but it sets me apart,
very far apart in my opinion.

The part that sucks is that very few people recognize it and the ones that do
are rarely the ones that get to make the calls. The ones that do make the
calls think any developer can do what I do. What I've seen happen several
times, is the company decides to replace me with outsourced/cheaper
development, and after an attempt to reason with them, I stay for a bit to
help them move in that direction and then move on to another place.
Invariably, they call a year or 2 later looking for help, not because I've
planted some obscure code no one can understand but me, but because no other
developers have the knowledge to form the necessary follow-up questions to the
ever-changing specs handed down from the higher-ups before moving forward.
They end up with systems full of incorrect assumptions that fail daily and tie
up all the developer time being fixed. Now I can't help them because I'm
working for a competitor. It's infuriating. Every company I've ever worked for
I've wanted to make the best in the industry, but they've consistently been
blinded by short-term goals, driven by unfounded hype to be "progressive",
when all they needed to do was a few basic things better than the competition
to take the majority of the market. Even when I get far enough to produce
numbers to prove that point, they still want to do some wild shit no one is
asking for, or they get bought out (because they start growing rapidly) by a
venture capitalist company that just wants to do a quick flip.

~~~
cced
Why is it that an employer can let a developper go only to need to call them
later and ask questions? Do you think this a documentation issue?

~~~
kgwxd
The questions aren't usually about things I left behind, though that does come
up and documentation could help that. They're usually looking for someone to
build out a new integration with a big customer that has to be done right the
first time, quickly, or risk loosing the customer to a competitor. Outsorced
dev teams with high turnover and little domain knowledge just can't pull that
off, a fact many places learn too late.

------
Spooky23
I’ve worked for the same employer for almost 20 years now. Although I
interview externally every few years, for the most part it’s been a great
experience.

I average 5% compensation growth (higher if you factor benefits), and aren’t
compelled to move to a saturated, expensive market. Same employer doesn’t mean
same role. I usually stick around in a particular thing for 2-4 years until
recently, but now my scope is very broad.

End of the day you need to decide if you want to do the same role forever or
if you want to evolve. If you want to be a senior programmer forever, staying
in the same gig is my vision of hell.

The risk is that if you are forced to change employers by circumstance, you’re
less attractive to employers, especially when you hit senior roles that aren’t
executive.

------
aprdm
I am at the same company for a year now and I want to stay for the rest of my
career, a lot of people work here for their whole career and 30+ years isn't
unheard of.

The company is one of the global leaders in its segment, treat their employees
very well, pays very well (probably less than FAANG or your SF startup ;) )
and gives me a lot of autonomy and opportunities to practice leadership.

I don't see why I would want to change companies. I've worked in seven
companies before this one (startups, big companies) and usually left around
the 2y mark. This one hits all the check boxes (work environment, work/life
balance, technical challenges, perks, good pay). I can certainly see why
people stay here for a long long time.

------
watwut
The key is company that allows you in house change. So, when you get bored or
are not learning anymore, you can negotiate different team or task. Or maybe
just smaller shift in responsibilities. The advantage of doing that is that
you know what you go into, so you can choose what exactly you want.

There are companies where people change often and then there are companies
where people stay for long. There are companies where people who stayed long
became stale (not moving in positions) and then those where they continue
learning.

------
jordan801
I'm coming up on a decade. I didn't start as a software engineer, but that's
what I grew into. Every couple of weeks I start to think to myself, what am I
doing here? And actually, part of posting this is me hoping someone will be
like, yo, do this, or that.

I'm in my late 20s, and I guess I would be considered a senior developer.
Coming up on 8 years of JS/Node/Go Development experience. ONLY problem is,
all of our software is utter trash. I have dozens of projects I maintain and I
can't keep up with any of them. I'm constantly debugging or building a
prototype, that, somehow makes it into production as a prototype.

I'm not paid amazingly. About 20%-40% below market. I have been promised the
moon and it's pretty unlikely I will ever see half of the promises come to
fruition. Especially since our projects are hitting critical mass. That is,
nothing works and nothing can be fixed because of how massive the architecture
is and how small the "team" is. I've been trying to move a DB from a server
that is about 2 years past life span, for the last few months.

I declined a job as a lead developer/CTO. I absolutely annihilated the
interview and the offer went from a front-end developer to running the whole
team and potentially CTO. I don't think I am anywhere near ready for that. I
never test, have no successful continuous integration projects (despite my
best efforts to get people on board), and have basically no apps running at a
high capacity.

I digress to the question itself. In tech, I would never stay at a job over a
year or two. Unless I really jive with the team, am making adequate cash, and
feel like I'm still moving forward. Yeah, I know, I'm a hypocrite. I regret
it. I think I would even have been much happier if I quit my current job for
like, two years, then came back after spending some time at a well established
shop. But who knows really. My job is the wild west and it may have just made
me more disgruntled to know how to do everything right, and still lack the
time to do so.

Here are some reasons why long tenure sucks:

1\. You get completely complacent. I spend a lot of time just messing around.
Again, hypocrite, like, hey jackass, use that time to test. Ha, too complacent
and if I even start setting up a test environment, someone will smell blood
and task me off to prototype land. Don't get me wrong though, I spend a lot of
time at home, off the clock, building random new crap for the company.

2\. You get stagnant in hierarchy. Basically, they like me where I am at and
they won't compromise that with any form of promotion.

3\. You quit making relationships with coworkers. I'm fairly young, but I have
been employed here longer than anyone else. I've seen thousands come and go. I
stopped making much of an attempt to know anyone. Unless they're developers,
of course.

4\. Newer employees despise you. I make more than them. I look like I do less.
Also, I get away with pretty much anything. Which, causes quite the rift.

5\. Managers become overly confident in your skills. Example: I was tasked
with building something like uber, by myself, in a single month. While
maintaining my 12-15 other active projects. Let's just say, we didn't make
deadline and also, I'm now proficient with quickbooks and several varieties of
payment processors.

6\. You get honey-potted into their culture. Everything is wrong here, and I
know that. Despite how hard I try, I can't get it to change. Perhaps we're
only successful because we cut every corner, or perhaps that's the only reason
I'm not writing this from a beach in the Grand Cayman's. Bottom line, if
you're at a company for ten years, you'll know the problems and the futility
of trying to solve them.

Here are some reasons why long tenure rocks:

1\. I don't have to EFFING interview. I hate it. I hate it, I hate it. I suck
at interviewing unless I am in a very social and charismatic state. Something
I've been trying to perfect. My mind works better with logic puzzles and
overcoming obstacles than it does with explaining my love/hate relationship
with NPM.

2\. I don't have to worry about employment. Unless of course the company goes
down in a fiery mess of runtime errors.

3\. I can pretty much take time to learn whatever the heck I want. I know AWS
Infrastructure, Accounting Software, pretty much all of Google's APIs,
Currency APIs, hell, I've even dabbled with crypto currency APIs. A metric ton
of front-end frameworks and libraries. I couldn't learn any of this if I
worked at a assembly line shop.

At the end of the day, I just worry that I'm going to be Cinderella at
midnight. Will I be hire-able, being a jack of all trades master of literally
nothing. Will I have to accept a novice position? Who knows. For now, I'm just
some Brogrammer.

~~~
ryall
Honestly, get out now. Your story resonates strongly with me because it's
basically my story word for word. Except I started as the only
developer/operations guy and now I'm managing a small team.

At first it was great because there was (still is) so many greenfield projects
and I had the autonomy to choose what I thought was best/would make the most
gains for the company.

Now I'm early 40's, coming up on my second decade, and I've recently found out
that the majority of the staff are paid more than me. I feel taken advantage
of and undervalued, and I'm so fucking depressed that my complacency has
walked me down this dead end street.

Trust me, if you're feeling like this now, leave. Nothing will change. Company
culture is hard enough to alter, but it's impossible if you don't have the
support of the CEO. I've fought against it for at least ten years and really
have nothing to show for my efforts but a kick in the teeth.

~~~
svsucculents
Almost every small company with the sole survivor has this story. You know
where all the bodies are, have done everything once and then discover some
uncomfortable truths. You are right to get out in your early 40s. Don't wait.

------
zachsnow
Not quite the timespans some folks have mentioned, but I’ve been at my company
6-7 years. I helped start it, and it was recently acquired. It’s still super
fun to work on. That’s enough for me.

------
robodale
I worked for a company for 10 years. Never doing that again. My works history
is 5 months, 1.75 years, 1.5 years, 10 YEARS, 1.75 years, 6 months (will be
leaving asap).

~~~
stockkid
what didn't you like about working for the same company for 10 years?

~~~
mproud
Or maybe they liked the 10 years job but knows they won’t be working for 10
more years.

~~~
robodale
Ideally, yes...I don't want to be working full time in 10 years. A few more
~year long gigs, and I'll likely put myself out to the 1099 pasture.

------
JustSomeNobody
If all you do is simple crud web apps then sure, jump around a lot because it
takes a week to learn the domain. If you’re in some industry where it takes a
couple years to learn the domain, stay longer and actually contribute.

But then, if you suck at what you do, definitely jump around often enough
where people can’t figure out just how bad you suck.

Note: General “you” not specific “you”.

~~~
sys_64738
Big companies re-org often so bad employees often get re-org’d around so they
can start afresh each time. Some people develop this as their primary skill.

------
Graham24
after 25 years, it's institutionalising.

------
mdgrech23
lol I love that the comment section is blank. I think it's reflective of how
long our generation (assuming most people reading this are 20-40 or so), and
in particular people in our industry normally stay in jobs which aligns w/ the
two year marker the OP mentioned.

~~~
technothrasher
I often feel like a throwback to another time, as I've worked in the family
business for 25 years now. I've taken the company over from my retired father
who started it 48 years ago, and my teenaged son is now working there part
time on the assembly line.

I did the whole 'big tech company' thing working as a coder for a couple of
years right out of school, but hated all the politics and bull. In my small
company I've always been kept busy and interested doing custom embedded
systems work for various clients, and have enjoyed taking us from ancient hand
build electronics processes to almost fully automated manufacturing over a
twenty year period. It also helps that since I'm the boss, I don't have to put
up with anybody else's crap :)

~~~
otoburb
>> _It also helps that since I 'm the boss, I don't have to put up with
anybody else's crap :)_

Do you sometimes find it lonely at the top? I hope leadership loneliness is
somewhat blunted by having your father around for counsel.

~~~
technothrasher
No, I actually have some good long term employees working for me whom I admire
and trust. So I don't actually pull the "I'm the boss" trump card too often;
typically just when _somebody_ has to make the decision. It usually feels like
a team working together rather than a bunch of people working "for me".

My dad still has an office at the company and comes in a few times a week, I
think mostly to get out of the house. So you're right, I often make use his
council and advice.

