Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think longer tenures are as positive of a signal as you're making them out to be.

- You can essentially have 1 year experience repeated n times.

- People with very long tenures can have a narrower view of what software development is. By switching more often you get to be exposed to different domains, teams, managers, ways of working and in a way you can mentally abstract over them instead of learning the process of 1 specific company. At some point you get "better at the company" instead of better at software development.

- Staying at a place for a long time doesn't mean that you get to make important long term decisions. Getting to make important decisions doesn't mean that you're good at it.

- In a competitive dynamic market some of the people who don't switch are people who can't switch because they just aren't that good. Obviously not true for everyone but that's the group you're sampling from. If you think of it as having a bucket of balls to pull from at random, the bucket with the people with short tenures will contain some people that are flaky, unreliable, get bored too easily, are difficult to work with and can't keep a job etc. And the bucket of people with long tenures will contain some people that aren't good enough to land a new job, or who are essentially institutionalized.

And I'm not even arguiing that shorter tenures are better - you could make some arguments either way - I just don't think that making hiring decisions based on tenure is a good idea either way.

I think if every tenure is less than two years it's a red flag for a senior position. Anyone can get by for a year but if you're around for two you'll inevitably need to deal with conflict resolution and maintaining relationships and products.

If you can't stick around two years anywhere I'm prone to thinking you're someone who vomits a bunch of code and then leaves the team to pick up your mess. Or someone who can't provide critical feedback without sabotaging the relationship. Either is a no go for a senior position.

> If you can't stick around two years anywhere I'm prone to thinking you're someone who vomits a bunch of code and then leaves the team to pick up your mess. Or someone who can't provide critical feedback without sabotaging the relationship.

In another comment in this same thread you wrote:

> people tend to leave if they aren't getting promotions, growing responsibilities, etc.

So you already know that it's entirely possible that someone is doing great (doesn't vomit code that can't be maintained, doesn't ruin relationships) and still leaves a job after a year or two. So I don't get why you then assume the worst case when you see shorter tenures, that doesn't make sense to me.

I think you're both correct so to speak :)

If someone has 20 years of overall experience and only ever stayed at a company for one year, I will default to an orange flag and will have to ask lots of questions about that.

If someone has 20 years of experience and has only ever worked at one company, I will default to an orange flag and will have to ask lots of questions about it.

All of what you guys say can be true but doesn't have to be. The guy with only ~1 year tenures might have found awesome 20-50% salary increases by hopping around and made financially smart decisions to be able to have time work for him (compounding). He may also just be the dumb kid that's really not good at this and left a week before he would have been fired anyway each time. He switched to contracting at the end because "it raises less flags"

The guy with 20 years at one company might have only gotten promoted because he's at a company where long tenure gets you promoted but doesn't know much. A perpetual junior with 20 years of "experience". Or he lucked into an awesome company with a good internal promotion culture and long tenures overall, which also results in less opportunities to get promoted (you need someone to move on/away so that a spot frees up so to speak), got promoted every 3-4 years and is now at the end of what he can get to at that company and made the decision to leave.

Well, I can't stay in a place more than 3 months, because when I walk in, I am the best engineers they ever seen in their lifetime. I can produce code in 10x less than they do, I can replace the BA, while at the same time write specs, I did so many jobs in so many companies, and they don;t know it because I am very very humble, and I don;t like to show off. Then they ask me to do a noob job, or to work on the ugliest piece of spagetti code for few months, or they ask me to work with this Junior dev who got a shit mouth and likes to show off how much younger and vocal he is compared to me, and all of it is making me feeling like I don;t belong there, and that I am not valued for my uncommon talents ( I have 4 ) - and no matter how much effort I put in trying to help them, they won;t note that I can actually be much much more effective at helping them if they stop explaining me how to do my job - or pretending they know how to code - because they wrote a couple of Todo app in React for job interviews.

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