8 ms·

> Typically, I work for an employer for around 3 to 5 years. […] Then around the halfway mark or later, things sour for a variety of different reasons. Typicall

by atian 4y ago

> Typically, I work for an employer for around 3 to 5 years. […] Then around the halfway mark or later, things sour for a variety of different reasons. Typically, I will fall out with someone senior, like my line manager. It's normally over something mundane but definitely technical. This is a red herring. The fact you’ve carried it out this far to the 3-5 mark is extraordinary. Most people move every two years just to overcome this effect.

vultour 4y ago
This really depends on the company, in my experience people in corporate jobs tend to stay for a very long time.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  I think there might be a survivor bias at play here. What I saw when I worked at a big corporation was that there was an accumulation of people who stuck around, but there was also a constant churn of people who hated the culture and didn't last. I haven't counted, but I would guess that a decent majority of the colleagues I had over the course of my time here came from the latter group, even if most the people at any one time came from the former.
- hnews_account_1 4y ago
  In most companies the people who stick around will turn out to be the mediocre workers. Which is fine. Not everywhere needs to be staffed with the second coming of von Neumann’s. But the pattern is generally that competent people will leave unless you pay them enough to put up with shit. There is no shortage of companies in big metropolitan areas that will pay you better. In smaller areas, sure this pattern breaks and good workers may stay on to hold onto their job.
echelon 4y ago
> Most people move every two years In SF. In Atlanta we have 90+% retention at a five year mark.
- nielsole 4y ago
  That's less attrition than I would expect from retirement alone (falsely assuming age was equally distributed) 90%+ doesn't seem plausible
  - echelon 4y ago
    It's factual. If I had to guess, most folks at my last office were between the ages of 20 and 45. We only saw one retirement during my tenure. A few folks left to a local startup and did far worse than when our company IPO'd and 100x'd our options. I could name everyone that left and count them on my fingers. We collectively maintained a spreadsheet of Atlanta hiring dates and frequently compared our seniority against our colleagues based in SF. Most of us were in the top 5%, according to an internal employee registry API that could tell you your seniority rank.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  The whole point of staying in sfba rat race (at least to me) is getting exposed to a lot of different things working with a lot of different people/companies
  - echelon 4y ago
    I got to have a lot of internal transfers to further my learning. I got to build active-active systems that handled user sessions and core business APIs to the tune of 80,000+ queries per second. Caching layers, hand-optimized replication, eventual consistency algorithms, etc. Outages would cost millions of dollars an hour. I worked on one of the teams responsible for building a migration path from on-prem to cloud, getting workloads from bespoke containerization onto k8s, securing clusters, and developing automation around CI/CD. I joined an ML team to build product, did various frontend work, maintained important developer platform pieces... It's hard to enumerate it all. You can have a full tour of tech inside most big companies. And you can continue getting promoted and working up the comp ladder.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago

by atian 4y ago

vultour 4y ago

This really depends on the company, in my experience people in corporate jobs tend to stay for a very long time.

mumblemumble 4y ago
I think there might be a survivor bias at play here. What I saw when I worked at a big corporation was that there was an accumulation of people who stuck around, but there was also a constant churn of people who hated the culture and didn't last. I haven't counted, but I would guess that a decent majority of the colleagues I had over the course of my time here came from the latter group, even if most the people at any one time came from the former.
hnews_account_1 4y ago
In most companies the people who stick around will turn out to be the mediocre workers. Which is fine. Not everywhere needs to be staffed with the second coming of von Neumann’s. But the pattern is generally that competent people will leave unless you pay them enough to put up with shit. There is no shortage of companies in big metropolitan areas that will pay you better. In smaller areas, sure this pattern breaks and good workers may stay on to hold onto their job.

echelon 4y ago

> Most people move every two years In SF. In Atlanta we have 90+% retention at a five year mark.

nielsole 4y ago
That's less attrition than I would expect from retirement alone (falsely assuming age was equally distributed) 90%+ doesn't seem plausible
- echelon 4y ago
  It's factual. If I had to guess, most folks at my last office were between the ages of 20 and 45. We only saw one retirement during my tenure. A few folks left to a local startup and did far worse than when our company IPO'd and 100x'd our options. I could name everyone that left and count them on my fingers. We collectively maintained a spreadsheet of Atlanta hiring dates and frequently compared our seniority against our colleagues based in SF. Most of us were in the top 5%, according to an internal employee registry API that could tell you your seniority rank.
dilyevsky 4y ago
The whole point of staying in sfba rat race (at least to me) is getting exposed to a lot of different things working with a lot of different people/companies
- echelon 4y ago
  I got to have a lot of internal transfers to further my learning. I got to build active-active systems that handled user sessions and core business APIs to the tune of 80,000+ queries per second. Caching layers, hand-optimized replication, eventual consistency algorithms, etc. Outages would cost millions of dollars an hour. I worked on one of the teams responsible for building a migration path from on-prem to cloud, getting workloads from bespoke containerization onto k8s, securing clusters, and developing automation around CI/CD. I joined an ML team to build product, did various frontend work, maintained important developer platform pieces... It's hard to enumerate it all. You can have a full tour of tech inside most big companies. And you can continue getting promoted and working up the comp ladder.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago