Same with the word "poaching". Offering somebody a better job is not property theft.

That is, I want people who have dealt with a reasonable lifespan of a product and been responsible for multiple stages of growth. Thus, if you've had 5 different jobs in the past 5 years I would look at that as a real negative (one reason being that given how difficult hiring is I want to invest in someone who is going to stay longer than 6 months or a year). However, if you spent an average of at least maybe 2-3 years at different companies (and perhaps a much shorter term stint at one company for whatever reason), I wouldn't look at that negatively at all.

There are plenty of folks out there who are even less lucky than I was. Folks who were lured into a shitty job early in their career before they had the experience to know better. Folks who just got unlucky and ended up working at places that seemed fine from the outside but were hell holes on the inside, or turned into hell holes due to mismanagement or reorgs or culture shift or what-have-you. Those people shouldn't be punished for making the rational choice to go somewhere else.

Additionally, people don't usually work just for a specific company, they work on a team as part of an org within a company. And sometimes changes in a company mean that teams get changed or eliminated. That can happen for a lot of reasons independent of the quality of the work of the team, but when it does it can often put people in a tough spot, in the best case they will have to go on a job hunt internally, but often times (especially in hot tech markets like SV) if one is doing that it makes sense to also cast a net outside the company as well.

Asking people to spend 2-3 years at a company without any knowledge of what the conditions were like there or the reasons for someone to switch jobs is pretty silly. In fact it could be an indication of a lower quality employee. When conditions go south the people who have the highest intrinsic motivation to do good work and the people with the best skillsets are precisely the ones who are more motivated to leave and can more easily find a new job. People who just cash paychecks and have mediocre skills are going to hang on to whatever job they have for as long as they can.

Additionally, if a company is worrying excessively about holding on to employees, worried that they might be "too flighty" or what-have-you, that is kind of a red flag for me. If they don't have the confidence that they can convince someone to stick around then maybe they are expressing a subconscious judgment of the poor working conditions (or lack luster compensation) there.

Ultimately, the resume is a very weak form of recommendation for or against any particular individual, in my opinion. I've seen people with very strong resumes who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. I've seen people with patchy or "weird" resumes, no CS degree, sometimes no college degree whatsoever who were top tier developers worth their weight in gold. Your screening and interview process needs to be good enough to be able to provide a reasonably trustworthy result even without a resume, if it's not then it's a failure. If it is, then it's comparably easy to make a decision on someone with lots of short stints.

Also, I find this whole discussion a bit odd in a couple ways. For a lot of big companies (like Amazon and Google) the average tenure is only about 1 year, and people here are drawing attention to 1 year as some sort of red flag duration, when in reality it's super common for a lot of devs at a lot of companies. Another is that I don't see people being concerned about overly long periods of employment at the same place. To me that's potentially a red flag too because it might indicate someone doesn't have the sort of job prospects necessary to get hired elsewhere. Though, again, you do need to always rely first and foremost on the in person interview.

Someone's resume might raise questions but it's unprofessional to fill those questions in with prejudices, you need to answer those questions with data from phone screens, homework assignments, in person interviews, etc.

Why? Because the only way to for a working professional to accumulate a "reasonable lifespan" of product knowledge is to anchor themselves to one company? That seems incredibly short-sighted thinking given the changing dynamics of the workplace from remote workers to an increasingly freelance economy where people can work for disparate organizations and still accumulate knowledge, skills and capabilities that you might still find valuable if you weren't looking at arbitrary numbers like how long a person has spent with the same company name in their email signature.

Is it a good way? Sure.

Is it the only worthwhile and relevant way? Mmmmmprobably not.

I'm saying if it takes 6 months to train a worker to productivity, it's not unreasonable for a company to reject someone who's had 5 jobs in 5 years.

Initially I replied thinking you were talking about getting training in a specific set of tasks or platform, you mentioned "Product X".

But it seems, now you're talking about training a worker "to productivity", which is a bit more oblique and not as specific of a regimen against what you initially posited-on this I have somewhat of an easier time giving you the concession.

Let me just ask, before going further: which position are you taking? Training an employee to use a specific tools set that we've established isn't widely used, or training an employee to be most effective and productive day to day?

Or have I misunderstood you altogether?

You're in a smaller city, and when you run job adverts, you only get a handful of applicants who can code and they're mostly Javascript+Windows guys (that's what the other big employers in town use).

So you'll have to train them on new languages, new problems, new conventions, new tools, new platforms, new build systems, new ways of debugging, new quality standards, and so on.

Initially they'll need to spend a bunch of time developing those skills - which means they need the attentions of your existing team members - and their early code will reflect their inexperience. I know my early code did! It won't be until they've spent quite a while working on the new system that their productive contributions will outweigh the sunk costs of their training.

> So you'll have to train them on new languages, new problems, new conventions, new tools, new platforms, new build systems, new ways of debugging, new quality standards, and so on.

I would scour the country for embedded engineers of any stripe before I would hire JavaScript or Windows devs for an embedded role. Hell, I would even hire freshly-minted EEs for that role before I would hire those experienced engineers.

For the record the average tenure in the Bay for a software engineer is 2 years. So your "at least" is the average.

I left my previous employer on very good terms and on the way out made it clear that I liked working there and all it would have taken to retain me was to adjust my comp up to market rate. They looked at me as if I just escaped the lunatic asylum.

Not strange at all. The company is willing to sacrifice employees to send the message that people are replaceable and will be let go if they demand salary raises.

It's a way to keep salaries from growing.

> They looked at me as if I just escaped the lunatic asylum.

Good old gaslighting. You get the same look from managers even in high turnover company.

Makes sense when you think about it from a business perspective. Some people like running lifestyle businesses. These businesses won't make anyone rich, but one can carve out an economic niche regardless. That niche is predicated on being willing to accept less comp than the broader market pays.

My last job was just such a compromise, and, I gotta tell you, if they had listened to me when architecting their new ecomm platform, I'd still be working there, not moved on for $20k more comp.

Corporate feudalisms are actually really nice when you're living in the castle, not working the fields.

If you look into the history of a company (e.g. by looking at how many users in the issue tracker are no longer in the company etc.), it's usually quite obvious when there's a systemic problem - the employee turnover is high. The management is interested in saving money by looking at the market and trying to hire at or just below the average compensation levels. In their eyes, it's cheaper to bring a new employee to the team (and there's always some fresh meat on the shelves of the job market) than to pay the current (experienced) employee more. And in the short term, they're probably right. But in the medium to long term, this approach tends to have a cumulative effect resulting in high employee churn rate.

The problem? Software development is not fast food industry. You can't have high employee churn rates without it manifesting somewhere. But pointing out exactly where and how is not easy (linking causation and effect in a discipline involving multiple people across multiple years is not trivial), especially when you need to link it to the bottom line (the market state and marketing efficiency will mess with your analysis... not that you typically even have access to the financials as a run-of-the-mill employee) and even if you do, there is no reason to expect that you would be able to effectively bring these findings to the management (such work would probably be seen as you overstepping the bounds) or that the management would change the processes responsible (that would be expensive). It's an uphill battle. When you are in a company with high employee turnover, there's typically not much you can do other than to start looking elsewhere. These types of companies will have problems (lower level of respect/loyalty, higher level of product defects, lower productivity, higher technical debt), it's best to leave them as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

If this were true nobody would hire contractors on a short time (less than a year) basis.

I try to impress upon younger workers that in the vast majority of cases, employees owe their managers nothing. Too many young employees get trapped into thinking, "yeah, the company is uncaring, but my boss is awesome". They don't have the life experience to inform them that no matter how awesome their boss is, it is extremely unlikely they have no external pressures to trim staff whatsoever.

The rare cases are those bosses who own the company outright, and make it plainly obvious with how they compensate and treat employees over time (2-3 years of consistent, first-hand observed behavior) that they plan retention over the long term. Or you're part of a worker co-operative or similar stability-promoting arrangement. Okay, then I'll grant you that you might afford the luxury of developing a less self-interested, short-termism strategy. It's not all sunshine and roses on that side of the fence, either; plenty of criticism from market fundies that such arrangements are only possible in sclerotic, uninnovative, inefficient, dullard organizations (I happen to disagree with the fundies on this point, but that's a discussion for another time).

Now, its been about 4 years since and the company has grown to be about 60-70 employees and I am yet to get a raise, the company still doesn't match 401k etc. I hope the stock pays off eventually, if the company does well, but I am not sure if or when or how good that will be. Reading articles like this or articles that mention salaries that people are offered in other companies, I am beginning to think if "job hop" is probably the way I should go, even though the work environment is fairly good and I have enjoyed my time here.

You're getting ripped off. Quit.

You should expect big raises as you climb up your first 4-6 years but I don't think this advice holds generally.

Because companies benefit from this form of asymmetry and others, e.g.:

- The company can hire many employees but employees cannot work for multiple companies at the same time

- The company knows salaries of all employees and does market research but employees are recommended not to share and compare their salaries

- The company can offshore work but employees cannot.

As a temporary US worker, hopping to a new job is too risky. Will I get fired at a new job?, I need to get a job fast or leave the country.

Also, there's a lot of uncertainty over what happens if your employer started a green card process, and you want to switch jobs.

For instance, my cousin works at Samsung and although he is pretty much a highly paid slave, he is better off than most Koreans...

I don't know if it's right to act entitled. After all, we are receiving money in exchange for our time. If one is not happy with it, then wayne gretzky it.

The incentives guide behavior. I'm not offering a solution, just the observation.