
Stop Sabotaging Your Career with Short Stints - gmays
https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/06/16/Stop-Sabotaging.html
======
_hao
Almost all jobs I've changed I've changed for a very simple reason - money!
I'm a mercenary. I work for money.

Company loyalty is bullshit in my eyes. Even if you enjoy the project and you
think you're making a difference and learning new things there's a cost that
comes with that (time/money/energy etc.) The first and last goal for 99.999%
of companies is to make money. My goal is exactly the same.

I love what I do and I've done is since I was a child. I do it in my free time
as well, but as long as companies think it's easier to hire a new person on
higher pay than to pay the same to a "loyal" employee I'm going to jump ship.
Simple as that.

I got a 25% pay bump when I started at my new job this month. How many years
should I have stayed at my previous job to get it? You can argue that I was
underpaid when I started at my previous place, but I also got a 9% raise after
my first year there (I asked for 10%). I've been constantly doing more and
trying to improve things because I want to be proud of my work and not do
half-assed decisions, but 25% they would never give me. I left after 23
months.

I founded my own small company last year. I'm the only person in it so far.
Maybe if I see success in the future and I have to actually hire someone else
I'll start thinking differently. Until then always remember this - companies
don't have any loyalty to you (with small exceptions) and you shouldn't be
loyal to them outside your contract.

------
manicdee
How about people stop pulling the ladder up behind them when they reach
management levels of “success”?

My career has been long stints of at least a decade. Every company has failed.
One failed because the main source of income was providing local sales and
support for a software product, but the company owner was collecting licensing
fees and not passing them on to the licensor until we needed to ask for help.
This came undone when one day our client rang the supplier directly only to
find that their licence had expired three years ago. We lost that gig, which
meant about 60% of the income evaporated overnight.

How do I as a working stuff differentiate between the sleazy arseholes who are
shady management like this guy, and the sleazy arseholes who are the ruthless
successful types who will actually build successful companies?

Who do I give my “long stint” loyalty to? I am 50 so I only have two more long
stints in me and nobody is hiring 50yo software engineers with a broad
exposure to languages and environments.

Save the gospel sermons. Acknowledge that you got a good innings and none of
it was due to you being innately virtuous as a human being.

~~~
yowlingcat
I am sorry to hear that this happened to you. I have heard and witnessed many
stories like this from my friends, and it is for this reason that I have
always been wary about long stints. Companies exist to make money, not to
manage your career. As you found out, at the end of the day, no one will look
out for your career but you. I think posts like this are fundamentally
irresponsible and a little bit psychologically manipulative.

As a working stiff, you don't want to differentiate between personality types.
You are not making a friend. You are allocating a portfolio of resources (your
team) towards investments. You have to learn how to compare multiple
opportunities against one another based on your own career goals, as well as
how to do your due diligence on the health of the company, the industry it is
in, the competitive landscape, the organizational topology, really anything
that you can research or think about which could help you predict what will
happen.

And even then, you have to prepare for the unknowns. You have to be prepared
to cut your losses if things don't work out, because despite your best efforts
to do your research, you really don't know what things are like until you
start working at a place. You should not stop your "interviewing" curiosity
just because you begin a new role. You should continue observing, soaking in
information, social interactions, situations, anything that helps you
determine whether now that you're on the inside, you're honestly as confident
that things will work out as when you started (things are always rosier before
you start because you're getting the pitch).

50 is not too old to learn this skills, but it definitely makes things
difficult. I was fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your perspective)
enough to have to learn these things to survive in the first few years of my
career, working at some really unsavory companies where I started fast and
left fast. It sucked, but I am glad I figured it out then rather than later.

When you do long stints at companies, you risk not developing this intuitive
sense for when things are going off the rails (or going really well) because
you have not exercised it. I wish I could help you go back in time and make
different decisions, because it always makes me so sad to read these stories.
Good people end up getting screwed over.

~~~
manicdee
How do you do due diligence though?

I worked one job as PC support for a white box manufacturer. They were
dabbling in telephony, even to the point of hiring engineers to build custom
boxes to handle PSTN to VOIP conversion, leasing fibre from other companies to
carry their call traffic. It was cute at the time, apart from the management
who were all deadset focussed on saving pennies. Turn off the computer when
you go home because those 20 cents a year it costs to run the thing in standby
are extra profit!

I left that job, that company ended up becoming the third biggest telco in the
country.

I signed up with another company that was already in the telco space but it
turns out the CEO of this one was a clown, at one staff meeting shortly after
Apple had released the iPhone 3G he held up the Nokia Navigator and said,
“this is the future of phones, that Apple stuff is expensive crap.”

That company doesn’t exist anymore (it was bought for scrap value by the third
largest telco in the country)

~~~
yowlingcat
Somewhat tautologically, by doing due diligence over and over.

Take your former company for example. You see a couple examples of how they
operate, but it does seem like frugality is an operating principle they hold
dear. Is this a pennywise pound foolish mentality, or is it a mentality that
follows from attempting to use resources efficiently to accomplish tasks and
reduce waste?

Take a look at the latter. The CEO makes a bold proclamation about the future;
is he a visionary who anticipates the unmet needs of the present that will
served by the future, or is he being opinionated for its own sake?

Unfortunately, there isn't really enough information here to make a decision
one way or another. You have to drill down both above and below to figure out
what the company's overall story to their investors is. And you have to
consider yourself one of them. You will be investing your time and your
opportunity cost into them. Do you feel sufficiently sold? Always be asking
this.

------
hypewatch
> 24-monthers never deeply learn how things work. They’ll typically add value
> to a new company by carrying a collection of things they’ve seen before and
> shallowly applying them to similar problems.

This reminds me of an old CTO I worked for that refused to hire anyone from a
boot camp. And a CEO that turned multiple surfer candidates down because “they
looked like a total stoner”. The term “24-monthers” is another example of
this.

I think this simple surface level approach is lazy and ineffective. To hire
great engineers, you have to put in the work to learn about and evaluate your
candidates. Every person has their own background and story. Just because
someone had some bad luck with their last couple startups doesn’t mean that
they’re dumb or a bad engineer. It also doesn’t mean that they didn’t learn
anything in their experience.

A big question to ask the candidate is why did they leave their last gig. It
could be for the reasons the author mentions but there could be plenty of
other reasons that are indicative of a high quality candidate. Again, as the
hiring manager, you need to actually put in the work instead of making quick
judgements on the surface.

And the final bit of “career advice” in this article’s conclusion is just
silly. Almost no one leaves a company after 2 years because the “novelty”
wares off. If the author took the time to ask they’d learn that people leave
companies for a wide variety of reasons. Some good some bad. Grit for grit’s
can turn into foolishness.

------
czbond
I have reached the opposite conclusion of the author. By having more exposure
to more: teams, people, problems, industries, architectures, business issues,
operating environments, etc I believe I am more mentally agile, decisive,
confident of probabilistic outcomes than someone who has stayed at the same
place for years.

I know how to navigate multiple environments - and in fact get a charge out of
it. I can pattern match across a larger range, I can tell what 'good' looks
like with more points of view.

I've had to get really good at something in short periods of time, because of
those new situations. That creates a mindset of growth and adaptation. I have
had lots of opportunity to 'read people' because I've seen those actions,
faces, emotions before - and know what numerous people did shortly afterwards.
(eg: leave, sulk, sabotage, lead, etc). Yes, I may not be as great a 'subject
matter expert' on a single topic - but I'm a great leader because of it.

------
dvt
> I’m not saying you should stay with any given job. There are bad roles and
> bad bosses and everything in between. And skill diversification is
> important. But every job has problems. If you’re leaving because you’re
> chasing novelty or avoiding tackling your company’s challenges, you’ll start
> over in the cycle.

People aren't chasing _novelty_ , they're chasing _money_.

Of course an "engineering leader" focused on "hyper-growth" wants you to stick
around. If you leave, that's a sunken cost, and now the company has to hire
someone new, train someone new, and not promote someone new. Case in point: if
you want people to stick around, you need to make it worth their time.
Engineers leave because it's incredibly well-documented that job-hopping every
~2 years yields a pay raise that's materially higher (25-35%) than the average
pay raise your typical high-performer earns (~5% or less yearly).

This goes hand-in-hand with typical gestapo-like practices in our industry
that try to artificially prevent this kind of mobility to begin with: why is
discussing salaries/bonuses so taboo? Why are interviews so difficult? Why are
hiring practices so opaque?

> Leave enough places for these reasons and you’ll find you’ve seriously
> limited your opportunities and earnings over time.

The data quite literally shows the opposite.

------
ouid
>The biggest earnings come from building and growing with a winning company.

This sounds a bit like HR propaganda.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Yeah when I read that passage I realized the article is no good.

I do agree that you can develop stronger skills by staying in a role longer.
The problem is that as your value and productivity for the company grow
rapidly, your salary and other compensation will not fairly grow with it, and
you’ll get stonewalled, with meaningless title bumps and 3-5% raises.

A company that actually values you will give you 10-15% raises _per year_ ,
and offer significant bonuses and equity awards.

If they don’t proactively try to retain you because they are unable or
unwilling to afford that, then just leave. Do 2 year stints every time. You
have to teach your employer that it costs significant increasing compensation
_every_ year to retain you, or else you will get that compensation in the open
market.

This whole article should be completely flipped around.

It should say, “Employers, stop forcing talented workers into a situation
where repeated 2-year stints is their only rational choice due to your failure
to give significant regular compensation increases.”

------
cellularmitosis
> By that time the kind of learning novelty people are used to isn’t there. By
> 16 months they’re restless. By 24 months they’re gone.

Ah, if only the reason I left was a lack of learning novelty! In my
experience, the 2 to 3 year timeline is how long it takes to get fed up with
the job's flaws.

~~~
war1025
Eight years into my current gig, posts like this make me wonder whether I'm
just particularly easy going, or if I've landed on a rare job that is pretty
much stress free.

------
JamesBarney
The premise was intriguing but there was no there there.

Examples of next level skills and how they helped him level up his career
would have made this piece far more interesting.

~~~
Aaronstotle
I agree, I wish he would have fleshed up what these "next level skills" look
like. More importantly, how that leads to a pay raise; The reason people job
hop is that it's the fastest way to get a 30-40% pay-raise.

------
Antoninus
Interesting but the author doesn't attempt to convince the audience why his or
her theories are correct. Almost like they haven't convinced themselves and
wanted to fill in blog space.

------
troughway
Commentary as of 1 hour of posting is fairly negative for this post.

I don't see anything here that warrants such a harsh tone. The author is
saying if you want to get past being a pawn-like IC, then putting in the time
to understand the business at a deeper level is beneficial. It takes time to
do this, especially when you consider having to start over fresh each time,
learn what it is people do at the company, how they organize, and so on.

And to the author's point - the places I have worked and done interviews at
have, in fact, looked at the timespan between jobs on the resume and concluded
not to hire a candidate because they realized that after 1-2 years, the
candidate would leave, making them a not very good investment. This is not
unheard of, and it makes sense. As a result, the average employee turnover at
these companies has been 4+ years.

A corollary to the author's point is to take a look at some of the more
prominent programmers you know - the ones who aren't founders of their own
companies. How long do they usually stick with a company that they like?

I can comment more on individual points but I'll leave it at this for the time
being.

~~~
scarface74
Let me tell you a story about the risk of not jumping ship as opportunities
become available.....

I started working in 1996. I got a job as a computer operator based on an
internship I did the year before. It was my gateway to get into the Big City
from the small town where I graduated from. I developed a system by myself as
the only programmer that they used to create a separate department that double
the size of the company.

I left there after three years because there was nothing left to do and went
to another company. I got a $33K bump between salary + bonus which was a lot
for me back then.

Over the next 8 years as my salary went up by a paltry 3% a year and bonuses
were cut, I made a grand total of $4000 more in 2008 than I made in 2000. On
top of that, I became an “expert beginner”.

I soft skilled my way into another job in 2008, that paid only $7K more, but I
knew I would be able to take advantage of the job to update my resume and
hopefully survive through the recession.

I muddled my way through the recession and when the company folded, I got
another job relatively quickly in 2012 as a for what was all intents and
purposes a mid level enterprise developer making about $10K more. But again, I
was interested in building my resume.

2013 - $2000 raise

2014 - $1500 raise

Of course by now I learned my lesson from my experience between 2000-2008 and
I had learned how to do resume driven development and build a network.

I changed jobs again and this time got about a $25K raise. I was now at the
bottom of the (relative narrow) range of what a senior developer can make.

2016 - no raise

Again, not being stupid enough to stick around, I left and had a choice
between working at a non software company as a dev lead working on two
greenfield projects - perfect resume building opportunity - or working as just
another SASS CRUD developer. I chose the team lead position - with another
$15K pay bump.

A year and a half in, the company was bought out by private equity and they
said that they “don’t want to be a software company.”

Changed jobs again, in 2018, vertical move in pay (only about $5K), but by
now, I had been exposed to “cloud consultants” and knew where the money was
locally. I took a job where the newly minted CTO wanted to make the company
“cloud native” and integrate more tightly with AWS. Once again, a perfect
opportunity to gain experience and build my resume. I leveraged my
theoretically knowledge about AWS, my experience as a team lead, got the job
and got experience with all of the AWS fiddly bits. Over the next two review
cycles (2019,2020), they kept me at market rates as I learned more and I was
quite happy.

Then Covid hit - with an across the board pay cut that wiped out my salary
gains since getting the job because it was a “shared sacrifice”.

A recruiter from BigTech emailed me about a fully remote role. Why wouldn’t I
take a stab at it? Making “FAANG” money, fully remote, and in a low cost of
living area.

In none of the interviews, did my short tenure at jobs since 2008 come up and
they made me an offer shortly after the interview.

------
dilly_li
I agree with the thesis of this post.

Take a step back. A more objective fact is that most CEOs/CTOs reached their
positions not because they optimized the two-year role jumping. It's either
from a long tenure with a company or from founding a successful startup and
got acquired.

Very rarely can one reach VP level by simply jumping around. One's past
loyalty becomes a non-trivial factor for positions at that level.

My 2 cents.

~~~
owyn
How about the opposite thesis?

"Stop sabotaging your career with long stints".

Very few developers are CEOs/CTOs. Even fewer have founded a successful
startup or gotten acquired. Very rarely can one get a promotion or a raise by
staying at one job for more than 3 years. The bigger your network is the more
likely you will get an interesting job offer at a company where your past
loyalty is irrelevant but your personal connection is.

My 2 cents.

~~~
dilly_li
Thank you for the argument. Indeed I haven't thought about the fact that most
people will not reach management level, not to mention VP or CXO level.

I guess another way to phrase my understanding is that: if your (possibly
unattainable) career ambition is to reach CTO level, you should know that in
the past, very rarely is that achieved with 2-year job jumping.

If your goal is to get steady compensation growth, probably job switching can
give you that. And that is also probably what most of people should do
anyways.

------
drewcoo
What whiny garbage!

Want developers to stick around and develop "next level skills?" Try to find a
better approach than shaming them. Maybe make sure they actually get raises in
line with their worth so they don't hop away for more money. And while you're
spending more money, maybe spend some of that on training in those "next level
skills" you value that seem so elusive.

------
classics2
Nobody cares how long you worked for your last employer, even if an hr drone
says it.

As an employer What I care about is what you can do for me now. That’s it.

------
yowlingcat
You know, Jeff Bezos is in the news nowadays for a lot of reasons, and not
always ones that look very savory to the world at large. But he is also famous
for a couple of conceptual and organizational frameworks at Amazon that I
think are applicable to questions this blog post tries to answer:

1) Regret minimization framework - Make decisions based on what will minimize
the total regret you have at the end of your life (I find this effective
because it's easier for me to accumulate evidence of things I definitely don't
like than things I will always like).

2) Prefer mechanisms over good intentions - Hope is not a strategy; a process
where every step makes sense which is applied consistently over time will eat
hope for lunch any day of the week.

With that said, I think this post is absolute trash. No treatment is given to
the reader's individual goals and distastes; no concrete mechanisms and
strategies are given over hope and good intentions that ultimately don't fare
any better than a coin flip. The author doesn't share their own experiences
and how that would inform this post; nor do they give you any context on the
expected audience. And yet, for some reason, the author feels qualified to
give advice about what is and is not responsible for career success across
differing roles, seniorities and industries that very well may have nothing in
common. I think this kind of writing is irresponsible.

As one of my mentors told me, skill acquisition can only take you so far. You
may reach a certain point in your career where for the purposes of your own
growth, you'll have to run your own P/L line. You have to start taking risks,
you have to start doing things that can fail. Getting one of these off of the
ground is error prone and often ends in complete failure. That's fine. You'll
just have to try again. As many times as it takes, depending on how bad you
want it. And sometimes, in between, you have to do things more safer and
established to set you up for success the next time you want to try to pull
something off on your own.

Why doesn't the post talk about this? My guess is because the author of it
doesn't really know as much about mentoring as they think. I have worked with
and for people who have the same mentality of the author of this post, and I
will just say that if you asked their reports, mentors or colleagues what they
thought about this person's ability to develop and mentor well, it is not as
rosy as that person's self conception.

------
mnm1
In my current company on year seven, I've definitely learned more on this job
than the previous seven years where I worked at over a dozen companies. It's
not even business specific. It's about how to build software that doesn't need
to be rewritten every few years, that can be used, maintained, updated, and
added to for at least a decade or two and that runs reliably for all that
time. And how to develop shit software that doesn't do any of the above by
corollary. Most of the things I've learned are simply not issues that arrive
after a year or two. So I agree completely. People that don't have at least
one long stint as a senior engineer often did not know how to develop software
that will live and be maintainable for years because they never developed such
software before in their lives.

------
yowlingcat
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=staysaasy](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=staysaasy)

```

Head of product/engineering at a mid-sized enterprise SaaS company. Helped
grow the company from <10 to >500 employees.

```

Head of product/engineering at a mid-sized enterprise SaaS company is maybe
comparable to PM/SDM/pushing senior manager at a BigCo or at a larger unicorn.
Knowing actual C levels at large successful companies, I would say that when
it comes to pathways towards C-levels at a larger private company or a public
company, the author is no more qualified to comment than I am. This post is
misleading to folks earlier in their careers. I would say it's actively
harmful.

------
ablanco
In my point of view, most programming stacks are as hard as understanding the
context they are planned for. Eg, It's much easier to learn a new JavaScript
novelty ui framework knowing exactly where this piece you're writing will fall
into. If you know the bounds of something it's easier to fill in the gap.

If you are learning frameworks just for the sake of it you'll have a hard time
building something real.

------
scarface74
Well as soon as companies stop having a policy that no matter what current
employees only get 4% raises while they bring new people in at market rates,
I’ll stop looking for greener pastures. Salary compression and inversion are
real.

Also when companies stop looking for an exact set of skills and frameworks
that force you to stay on the hype cycle.

------
motohagiography
So, if it were true as the author says that "24-monthers" never develop the
next level skills in the company, would it not also be true that the people
who did in fact stay longer would have also become managers who didn't
hemorrhage staff every 18-24 months?

------
bdefore
In the sidebar: "A guide to leading product and engineering teams through
hypergrowth. We've scaled teams from $0-100M in ARR, and learned our lessons
the hard way so you won't have to."

Can you imagine working with the person who wrote that?

