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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Seems very difficult to gauge quantitatively. I've changed jobs at year 2, 12, and 19. Each time, what I was interested in to make my next job better had changed based on my age as well as my accrued experience at the different jobs. And there's the fact that for someone like myself, I'm guilty of moving the goalpost. I honestly have a great job right now. Bit as I get used to that, then new things bug me.

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This.

I loved my first job. Every thing about it. But looking back in hindsight, it was a vanity project of the ceo, and was never going to recoup the manpower investment. Requirements and goal posts were ever-shifting. I was too naive to even perceive role status and did little or nothing concrete to forward my career except turn out (quality) code.

I loved it.

I would be frustrated to distraction if I were in that position now.

Great point. My first programming job in college was for a little boutique software company in town. My boss would walk into my office at noon, describe some software, and ask if I could have a PoC by 4 so he could drive over to the client and hopefully get a check to build. Now, something like that would drive me nuts, but at the time I didn't know better and it was exciting.

The one consistent thing in my career is I don't tolerate jobs that have too little work to do. I've had 2 jobs at various points in my career where was I told to just hang out for extended periods of time, and in neither case did I make it a year working there.

I've often found that the thing that made me take a new job was the change that I wanted and failed to make in the old. In fact, often enough I misjudged the new org in the interview and they had the same problems but I ended up being the force for the change that I wanted to see.

For some odd reason, it always seems like getting that inertia is easier at the next job than the current one.

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