Honest questions: what has that stability done for your career earnings? And what does that do when your boss decides you aren't needed anymore?

I ask because I tend to find that we are generally incentivized both to stay on the leading edge and to, if not running a consultancy, to be regularly moving on to new positions. And it is rare, to the point of IMO barely worth considering as a possibility, to find a company that won't get rid of you given half a chance if it makes short-term numbers better.

If your goal is to make as much money as possible, then you probably have to live in that mutually predatory environment, but if your goal is to have a more stress-free existence and feel like your work is actually helping people then there are alternatives.

I have little fear of being laid off at my company because they didn't even lay anyone off during the last recession. It isn't publicly traded, and has a very flat managerial structure, so the typical 80s-guy bullshit doesn't really fly here. We don't make software and get our revenue from selling ad space, we make real things for real people and we charge real money for them.

> but if your goal is to have a more stress-free existence and feel like your work is actually helping people then there are alternatives.

I've interviewed devs with over a decade of experience who clearly opted for a stress-free existence feeling like their work was actually helping people, and now here they are in their mid-40s looking for a job with an obsolete skillset and an obvious track record of not adapting to changes.

It's great that you lead a stress-free life in your 20s and 30s, but how do you expect to cope with the problem of being obsolete and useless and no better than a 20yo fresh out of college (and in some regards far worse) when you reach your 40s and 50s?

The guy sitting next to me at this company is in his 60s. Stability does not preclude learning new things.

When I see someone's resume who jumps from engagement to engagement I usually sort them out. Not a good sign. They learn on my cost and jump as soon as responsibility kicks in. These people have to make career somewhere else.

I mean, that's fine, but you also kinda gotta understand that that is exactly what the industry rewards. If somebody's there longer than two years, there is a very real chance that they have passed up at least one significant salary bump (up to a point, of course, it doesn't continue forever).

If you're offering 10%-a-year raises, etc., what you're saying makes sense to me, but otherwise people are going to leave because it's stupid and self-harming not to.

How do you square that circle?

Whats the cutoff for you?

This isn't an experiment that can be run both ways, but I find it seems to work. I've been here 13.5 years, starting from about 5 years of prior experience. Increases are irregular, but look to be about 7.3% compounded per year. Note that the earliest years of my career are excluded, which is when you'd expect to see the largest increase.

I've never seen layoffs. A person who regularly moves on is quite undesirable, because they would leave before being useful. It typically takes a year before we can really put somebody to use, and two years isn't uncommon.

Do such organizations really still exist?

Yup. My last job was at a large corp and one of my previous managers was in his late 50's, having been there since he graduated college. He was a bit of an exception, but we had many people in their 60's & 70's who had been there for decades.

I left after 15 years.

Yes. They're all over. They just aren't venture capital funded valley start ups.

Both major organizations I've worked in have had ridiculously low turn over and everyone I talked to in both had the assumptions of everyone being lifers. I only left the first because I was tired of doing maintenance on old technology and wanted to experience new dev.