

Seven Years Is Too Long - lolindrath
http://lolindrath.com/2014/01/29/seven-years-is-too-long/

======
ChuckMcM
I cannot agree with this at all. Conflating duration with personal growth is
the problem here. People who get "comfortable" in a job and just keep doing it
for multiple years, those folks will find that all of a sudden[1] things have
changed and they don't have a job and they don't know what they want to do.
But that is because they stopped growing, not because they spent too long in
their job.

[1] "Sudden" to the person in the job but generally if you look for the signs
its pretty obvious when some part of the company is going away.

~~~
zb
I don't think he's saying that 7 years is too long in one job; he's saying
that it's too long between interviews.

------
Paul_S
Wish I could stay at one company for 7 years. Or at least one city. Grass is
greener and all that. I keep my cv updated even when at work, when deciding on
tech to use or books to read I often think about how they will fit into my
skills portfolio next time I have to job hunt. Feels really bad when I admit
it. I hope I can change my luck and stick around because I'm really not a
mercenary - I never started interviewing before leaving and I never treated my
work like a card-punching factory job.

Way ahead of the game when it comes to wearing a suit. I've been wearing a tie
all my career. And I used to work in games where it was highly inappropriate
(but people there are very acceptable of all kinds of eccentricities).

------
nilkn
If you just want to keep up to date on interviewing skills, make a habit out
of doing interview-style problems. I don't think you need to worry about
wearing a suit or writing on a white board. Careercup is a fairly consistent
source of interesting interview-style problems; I find myself perusing it
sometimes even when I'm not remotely interested in another job, because a fair
number of the problems are interesting in and of themselves and simple enough
to not take up much of your time.

There are also plenty of other sites, usually with a competitive edge, like
HackerRank or TopCoder. Doing problems like these really is not a waste of
time even if you're completely content with your job. While a lot of it may
seem like algorithmic trivia, you'll internalize it sooner than you might
expect, and then you'll start finding real-world uses for some of these tricks
and, more generally, your "mental overload" when thinking through a piece of
tricky code will gradually go down and down.

Re: interviewing frequently just for practice, that's great if you're in an
area with an abundance of tech companies. I think that could be risky if
you're in a city with just a few that you'd want to work at, though. You don't
want to bomb an interview at the only other company in your city you'd want to
work for just because you were rusty and used them for practice.

~~~
jobu
I couldn't disagree more. Interviewing is definitely a skill (beyond solving
interview problems), and like anything - if you don't do it often you will not
be very good at it.

~~~
nilkn
You're free to disagree, but I don't think you responded at all to the actual
point I made regarding "interviewing for practice" in a city where there are
only a small handful of companies that suit you. I never said or even implied
that interviewing itself isn't a skill.

~~~
jobu
So look outside your city or your comfort zone and interview with other
companies.

You may be an exceptionally charismatic person that can get any job you want,
and if so, you can ignore the blog post and my responses. Think about it
though, are you working at your dream job? Is there somewhere else you really
want to work? Wouldn't it suck to choke at that interview?

For me, part of the challenge with interviewing is remaining calm under
pressure (your future depends on how you answer the following question...).
After a couple interviews recently, I found it got a little easier to handle.

Interviewing is also a matter of selling yourself, and this is more than just
answering questions or solving problems - you also need to be asking your
interviewer good questions. If you lead them the right direction they can come
up with answers for why you're the best person for the job. (Asking the right
questions can also help you determine whether you really do want to work at a
company.)

------
jobu
This article strikes really close to home for me. The company I had worked for
nearly seven years laid off a bunch of people and I could see where things
were headed. Fortunately I've been doing mobile development and it's
particularly in demand right now, so I was able to land a new job in a few
months.

> _Interview at Least Every Other Year_ If you struggle to communicate under
> pressure like I do, then it's important to do this a _lot_ more often. My
> personal goal is a phone interview at least once a quarter and one or two
> in-person interviews a year.

I would also add another rule:

Don't apply to too many places at once. (Especially if you're currently
working!) Keeping up with the responses, doing the interviews, and solving
coding exercises can be a full time job in itself.

Edit:

The other thing I learned to do was to note all of the questions that I didn't
have an immediate, natural response for. Some of them I was able to think of
better answers later on that helped me in the next interview. Some I asked
other people to see how they responded, and I realized I hadn't always
interpreted the question correctly.

------
mmanfrin
Someone convince me that Big-O notation is useful anywhere outside of
interviews. Because I don't believe it is.

~~~
pjscott
I've run into plenty of cases where something was unacceptably, brokenly slow
for a handful of inputs, and I wanted to figure out why, and then I realized
"Oh, this bit of code is O(n^2) and it's running into a weird edge case with a
large n", and then fixed it. I've also run into cases of regular expressions
running in exponential time, which is always entertaining.

~~~
mmanfrin
Yes, but you saw code was not optimized, you didn't see the letters "O(n^2)"
in the code.

I'm not asking why _optimization_ is important, I'm asking about the notation
that only seems to appear in interviews.

~~~
lukeschlather
Big-o is about a specific class of optimization, and a theoretical
understanding of it is important.

It is important to distinguish between asymptotic optimization vs. i/o
optimization vs. code optimization.

I'd argue if you can't do the first one you're less likely to be able to
handle the next two. Yes, you can do it intuitively to some extent. However, I
think it's important to be systematic about it so we can have meaningful
conversations about it beyond "doing it this way is slow and if we do it this
way it's faster."

------
mooreds
Interesting look at how to stay relevant. As some other posters have noted,
duration != irrelevance. That is, you can be irrelevant to your field after
being at a company one year (if they have you doing mindless work that rots
your brain), or still relevant even after a decade, if you have challenges.

I particularly enjoyed his point about interviewing once in a while, as that
definitely sharpens skills that are not typically used in a job.

One thing I'd add is to keep your linkedin profile up to date all the time.
This can help you know the local companies as well as folks who will be good
to approach for a soft intro for interesting companies.

------
skywhopper
I will soon have been at my current job for eight years. Whether that's too
long or not depends on the flexibility you have in your job to keep growing
your skills and responsibility.

------
cachichas
you lost me at wearing a suit...

~~~
humanrebar
Did you not get his point or you were you not convinced it was a good idea?

~~~
alex_sf
I get his point and it's a solid plan in most fields.

But for the tech jobs most people want, it's a really bad idea to put a suit
on for a interview.

~~~
ama729
> But for the tech jobs most people want, it's a really bad idea to put a suit
> on for a interview.

Why? Are you saying that some company will give you a hard time because you
are wearing a _suit_? That would certainly be humorous.

Humorous as in "Haha, I have no intention to work in such a place, ever".

~~~
avmich
You'd probably be wrong. Cultural fit may be important, and you don't want to
get strange looks on an interview. At the same time the company still might be
quite good - as in "early Google"-like good.

------
kimonos
Great tips in here! Thanks for posting!

