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> Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.

Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.

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I don’t think common sense suggests that at all. It’s like saying that the US armed forces requires soldiers with many specialized skillsets (which is true) so clearly it should recruit to every individual role and post separately.

A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.


Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.

The armed forces have a service commitment of several years (if I read this correctly, US Army is 8 years). People will sometimes change jobs within months.

They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.


People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.

One of the biggest changes since then is that there are companies that a different scale of revenue per employee ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28google%2C+meta%29+re... ) and pay accordingly.

While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).

That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.

In the 90s I was making $50k/year ($50k '95 -> $109k '26 https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ).

The companies where people used to work a decade or two or three are still there and in many cases, largely unchanged.


This is so out of touch

There are companies out there where managers, mechanical engineers, marketing, and all the other non-technology roles work at for a decade or two. It's the software developers and IT people who switch jobs after two years working there.

What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal

If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.

Here are the stats for tenure: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf

Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.

Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.

I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.

Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?




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