What is wrong with frequent changing of jobs? It’s one of the easiest tools for increasing my compensation. The job market ideally should be so flexible you can switch to another company any time you want, no noncompetes.
Why care about quality or maintainability if you are gone in year or two anyway...
He works as a highly-skilled tech, at a major medical/scientific corporation. They have invested years of training in him, he brings them tremendous value, and they know it. He was just telling me how he used that value to negotiate a higher compensation package for himself. Not as good as if he swapped jobs, but he really has a sweet gig.
People who stay, take Responsibility for the code they write. They will need to face the music, if it doesn't work, even if they are not responsible for maintaining it.
They are also worth investing in specialized training, as that training will give great ROI, over time.
But keeping skilled people is something that modern management philosophy (in tech, at least) doesn't seem to care about.
Until corporations improve the quality of their managers; especially their "first-line" managers, and improve their culture, geared towards retaining top talent (which includes paying them more -but there's a lot more that needs doing), I can't, with good conscience, advise folks not to bounce.
I’m a founder for 10 people and this is the first thing we think about. Except for low performers; except that youngsters need a variety of experience to be proficient at life; except that the team is not performing well(1). 25% or 30% increases for half the workforce are frequent.
(1) The biggest remark from management coaches is that giving raises lowers employee performance, which I can fully witness in my company. It’s not even good for morale. I’m just happy that people exit the company fitter and with a girlfriend, even a kid and sometimes a permanent residency, but business-wise I’ve been as good as a bad leader.
I’m reaching the sad conclusion that employees bring it upon themselves.
My friend could double his salary, moving almost anywhere else, but he gets a lot of perks at his work, and is treated extremely well by his managers.
They just gave him a rave review, and that did more to boost his willingness to stay, than a 10% raise. He will still negotiate a better salary, but is more likely to be satisfied with less than he might have, if they tried to treat him badly.
Treating employees with Respect can actually improve the bottom line. They may well be willing to remain in difficult situations, if they feel they are personally valued.
I know this from personal experience. When they rolled up my team, after almost 27 years, the employee with the least tenure had a decade. These were top-shelf C++ image processing engineers, that could have gotten much higher salaries, elsewhere.
The problem is our current form of corporate culture. Employees don't feel like they matter, there efforts are a cog in a wheel. If you get a raise in this type culture, it only matters to the bottom line and there is no incentive produce because the employee is already unhappy in the first place.
Change your business culture and these problems will disappear, IMHO.
We also have a 401K match with an immediate vest.
If they would care then job hopping would not exist. If staying at s company would be more. Beneficial to your salary, why would you ever want to change company, if you are otherwise happy?
If your main motivation for working is to exchange your labor for the maximum amount of money possible, I don’t see how that is the positive outcome you think it is.
I personally wouldn’t leave my current job if another one for $100K more fell into my lap. But the “unlimited PTO” where the custom is to take at least 5-6 weeks off during the year not including paid holidays and it being fully remote is hard to beat.
I mean pretty much exactly what you said.
I apologize for being unclear.
Coming up with a neat API that turns out to be difficult to modify in the future, or limiting in ways you didn't imagine would when writing it is a good learning experience.
Or seeing how long a system can survive growing usage -- Maybe a simple hack works better than anyone expected because you can just pay more for RAM/CPU each year rather than rebuild into a distributed fashion. Or the opposite, maybe there's some scaling factor or threshold you didn't know existed and system performance craters earlier than predicted.
This is the root problem. None of the problems the GP pointed up were created by software developer.
Now, if you want to know the consequences, it causes an entire generation of people that don't really know what they are doing because they never see the long-term consequences of their actions. But again, it's not the software developers that are causing this, nor are they the ones that should fix it.