Ask HN: What's it like to work in the same company for decades?
The longest I've been at a place has been 2.5 years. I find that I'm usually itching to get out around after the 2 year mark due to various reasons like boredom from doing mostly the same thing over and over, lack of change in environment, no new challenges, people I know having mostly left/transferred to better places.
85 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI did the whole 'big tech company' thing working as a coder for a couple of years right out of school, but hated all the politics and bull. In my small company I've always been kept busy and interested doing custom embedded systems work for various clients, and have enjoyed taking us from ancient hand build electronics processes to almost fully automated manufacturing over a twenty year period. It also helps that since I'm the boss, I don't have to put up with anybody else's crap :)
Do you sometimes find it lonely at the top? I hope leadership loneliness is somewhat blunted by having your father around for counsel.
My dad still has an office at the company and comes in a few times a week, I think mostly to get out of the house. So you're right, I often make use his council and advice.
The reasons I stayed are simple: I've learned a tonne, changed roles and responsibilities, interacted with many interesting characters, and continue to grow personally. No matter the tenure, if you aren't being challenged then your boredom will affect your performance.
Create new challenges that solve problems within your organization, and if that doesn't work by all means strike out for greener pastures.
Best of luck.
I just wouldn't recommend you do the same job for more than ~24 months.
I wish I could give perspective on working in the same job for decades but I’m only 7 years in. 34 to go and zero intention on changing employers or careers unless I have to.
You spend more time at work then anything else, perhaps tied with sleeping. More than with your spouse. More than with your kids. More than relaxing. Why not make work mean something? If work means something, you can't just do it for 40 years as a punch in, punch out. That sounds horrible.
I like attempting new challenges. The problem is that I often don't get to use the new skills gained while attempting those challenges. That's why I switch.
I’m also unusual because I spend less time at work vs home. I’m significantly out numbered amongst other workers in the US but when you travel abroad you realize many other places take a similar attitude. Employment is a means to an end. There’s no reason to accept that work is where you spend most of your time. Reframe your mindset and find a lifestyle where work does not define you and how you spend your time.
Most jobs don't allow you that freedom, nor do I think they have an obligation to.
Lots of people are academics, not in profession, but in spirit. Why would an academic go do physics for a fraction of the paycheck than they would doing analytics for a bank or trading firm? Because they can't not. That's not to say that their work is more important than family, but it's more than a means to an end. It's the work of their life.
From that perspective, if someone is not able to extract that level of fulfillment from whatever the situation is at their day job, then assuming they are just punching in the clock, or telling them to reframe their mindset, is a bit preachy IMO.
It would be selfish (and borderline irresponsible) for me to prioritize excitement and self-actualization at work over a comfortable, stable life for my family. That’s what holidays and hobbies are for.
You're not being rewarded for your success or your hard work in any meaningful way; you're not learning new things or barely keeping up with the status quo; you're forced to work with other individuals who do not care about the quality of their work, or the effect it will have on others, or do not offer enlightening conversation, views.
> collecting the check
The check is not keeping up with the ever increasing cost of living.
> People are so caught up in the rat race […] Career does not have to be the definition of success.
I don't want it to be. I want to be able to make enough to meet my (reasonable) life goals.
If your company is giving you meaningful work, compensating you well for it, and you would not find better on the market, then more power to you. Not all of us are so lucky.
1) I feel like I can effect more change with fewer barriers in a smaller company - the idea to goal conversion is much more condensed vs when I worked at IBM and the number of processes and approvals it had to go through.
2) If you are in small companies there is usually very little room for progression, smaller companies = smaller budgets - when I was an employee of these the only real way to get any kind of pay increase as experience increases was to switch companies.
3) Some of us enjoy the change, I loved the work I did at IBM but it was still mostly BAU work, there was very little scope for personal innovation over the long term. Sure you could switch departments quite easily and that was a huge benefit but back to point 1 - the innovation momentum is hard to keep up. At the companies I have been working at for the past 7 years, every day is different, every day is researching the next best thing or how to improve the current things we have with a view to squeezing out more performance, or decreasing costs. Sure I have some BAU work but it's mostly meetings and developer mentoring, hardly painful!
4) To your final point, I am lucky to be doing something I have always been passionate about - this isnt a rat race for me, its not about keeping up with others, my definition of success is how much I enjoy going to work in the morning and not having to fret the little things.
Depends on what the job is, how much that check is for compared to CoL, and how much I have going on at home.
I imagine if someone hated their job and didn't make enough money, they'd want change. I've been in both camps at different stages of my career.
Besides that, a person can do their job, collect a check and go home regardless of which company they work for, so why stick with a one that isn't satisfying? Why not see what the other options are and get a fuller perspective? The software world is huge, and you'll never experience it all working at the same company forever.
If I was sentenced to 40 years of randomly assigned work then I'd just clock in and clock out, but I get to do something I love at an exorbitant salary. With a taste of that I'm going fight for positions where I can do more of what I love and make more money. I don't really care about keeping up with people or prestige, I care about freedom.
I'd be making less than half of what I do now if I had stayed at my first job. This buys my freedom sooner.
There's nothing inherently wrong with either option.
You might not understand, but I think it would be worth to exercise empathy and try to understand it, instead of passing judgement. The OP is doing precisely this, not passing judgement and asking for help to exercise empathy.
Some things might suck, but if you have great managers, great benefits, and like the work you do, you might stick with it. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
But then, if you suck at what you do, definitely jump around often enough where people can’t figure out just how bad you suck.
Note: General “you” not specific “you”.
Why did i stay? i was the only dev for like 8 years, being responsible for your work and not being able to blame someone for legacy code is an eye opener.
it makes you love your craft even more, i joined to start a port, turns out this porting process never ends (I like improving my own code).
The other benefit is getting to know business and management. Usually they turn over less frequently, they love someone who actually is committed to the business and they can rely on.
The culture of a place that looks after people and has longer term employees is great. Less turnover means less interviewing, fewer clueless newbies that need training and fixing up after. My favorite project had 30 devs and 25 of us had been there for more than 5 years - no one need hand holding or did stupid things, we were super productive and everyone enjoyed a great time.
For some people it can be easier to get promoted by moving, I'd suggest the opposite - just start doing the job you want to do, usually no one will complain.
Finally you said people you work with moved on to "better places" is that grass is greener or you are always working for your second choice employers?
Oh - one last thing. If you have a family its great to have a steady work schedule and you can concentrate on looking after babies and not worry about extra job hunting stress. Find a place you like and enjoy the stability.
I have enjoyed it, for the most part. If you like the thrill or engagement or whatever other descriptor you want to use of smaller companies or startups, then it is definitely not that. What it has been is rock-solid stable, interesting, and good benefits and pay.
I've debated looking for another job several times, usually on crappy days, but I still come back to I've been at this company for a long time, I know how it works, I have many of the benefits of tenure (more vacation time is one, that managers and other groups give me more of the benefit of the doubt is another), and maybe a little bit of me being "boring." I don't want to change for the sake of change and I'm happy to go to work, do something I mostly like, get paid well for it, and then go home and live my life separate from work.
Hope that gives you some insight into why someone would stay at the same employer for so long.
I am curious what your pay is.
I feel like people get screwed if they dont change employers.
But I love working here, the company mission is very inspiring, and my coworkers are excellent. And my salary is enough that my needs are met. So I'm really not interested in keeping score.
I don't know if it's true that people get screwed if they don't change employers. I certainly don't feel screwed. Maybe I could make more if I went to work at one of the other large technology companies; that's certainly been something I've thought about. But I'm quite happy with what I am paid and feel like the downsides (real or imagined) of changing employers are not outweighed by the upside of a higher income.
Also, depending on when we respectively graduated from college, the starting salaries are different. Starting salaries for IT where I lived when I graduated were in the $40-50k range.
For what it's worth, by staying there you are leaving a serious amount of compensation behind, assuming your skills could find you another job. $225k would be $350k elsewhere, easily. Many of the MSFT lifers I know don't really have a skillset that would translate or be valuable elsewhere, due to their focus on their company. That's probably true of most cases where someone stays at a single firm for a long time.
By no means am I suggesting there's anything wrong with your worldview, just pointing out that in this industry, you are leaving serious comp behind by not shopping around. Your work after moving would probably be more enjoyable and interesting, too.
There’s only a 33% chance a job will work out. That is, that both you and the employer agree it’s a good fit after a year. So you are more likely to fail in a job change, and the odds get worse the more jobs you change.
Besides, you have an asymmetric opportunity, since you can interview, get an offer, and decline it if you don't like the new option. You don't need to quit before interviewing. In fact, that post-offer woo phase can give you a huge chance to get more information about the new gig.
You may be right, at least about the money, but I think you're missing the other side of it that I tried to express: I don't need more money. I don't even, really, want more money. What I do want is to do something mostly interesting--I don't have to optimize for interest--in the least amount of time. I like what I do for work, even if some days I don't love it, but I adore what my salary allows me to do outside of work.
Switching employers, looking for a new one, making those decisions...they all take time that I don't have to spend right now because my needs are quite nicely met where I am and, so far as I can tell, will continue to be met for a long time. I do side projects outside of work to keep practice in some skills that don't directly relate to my work and I have friends who are at other companies and are also my professional network if I ever do need another job.
tl;dr: I'm optimizing for contentedness, not income or interest, and that's the big reason why I've stayed at the same employer for almost two decades. My employer treats me well and pays me enough so I am content.
When it comes to base salary - sure you might get salary that's bigger than existing employees in same role. And then on first annual cycle they'll be in the same ballpark as you through combination of salary increase and annual bonus. That's because bigger companies usually look at "total compensation".
I guess if you play it right you might "inflate" pending RSUs and ask them to match it.
Though how much can you "inflate" it in the age when employeers too can go to glassdoor and check what that other company usually gives?
Made it through GFC, acquisition, etc.
In same company, have had engineering, product & managerial roles.
Right now transitioning back to engineering (my choice).
Why not move?
Well, company is keeping up with industry despite its size (Fortune 100), I have decent autonomy over what I work on and how I work, I’m compensated well above local market, and have seen 5-8% pay increases every year, along with generous RSU grants.
This effect of this has meant in less than 5 years now I will be mortgage free (in a housing market with 12x annual income multiple for house prices), and a financial buffer of a few years annual income
I could have been working for cooler or more exciting local startups, but wouldn’t have been even close to the financial position I am now in (I’m 38).
Work is enabling my independence and peace of mind.
Companies with tech departments (that will cater to this crowd) that are around that long tend to be maybe big, somewhat stable, somewhat largish revenue companies.
It is not the norm for people to stay that long at a company (tech company especially) these days. Lots of coworkers come in and eventually leave (by their own choice, sometimes not). You end up staying in touch with the ones that you like. You end up cherishing the people you work with, because some of them might have been there as long as you. You end up going to their children's birthdays, and celebrate holidays with them. They can be life friends once you share that amount of time with them.
Leadership drifts in and out. Passing the baton that often ends up diluting the company culture to a point where the business itself becomes its own organism, carried by its own inertia and making very clinical decisions about its own survival. Some of these decisions begin to weigh down on you. I guess it's true what they say, familiarity breeds contempt.
Some good things - you have a lot of time to design, implement, and deliver on projects. You can wind up with quite an eclectic portfolio of internal initiatives that you've delivered. Many of these can be quite fun. Benefits are good over that period of time. Many companies end up delivering benefits on a graded scale based on seniority. I'm up to 6 weeks of paternity leave if I ever want to use it.
Assuming you joined near the top of a payband, years of merit/cost of living increases can give you golden handcuffs. You get a lot of time to build wealth, but without careful planning you will not financially be able to leave. You become even more beholden, and less willing to leave over time. Victim of your own comfort? Actually, maybe not comfort. Inertia?
There's some thoughts. The people around you, and the company change over time.
In short, in a huge company there are challenges at all levels of the technology stack and that’s completely forgetting about areas like finance, marketing, business development, legal and HR.
It’s hard to get bored if you try to keep learning and challenging yourself every day.
I have worked with a lot of people who are primarily lifers at their company. My role has often been that of a change agent (outsider / consultant hired specifically because I’m an outsider).
One thing I have seen consistently is that the real power and influence sits with those with tenure. The older a organization the more critical tenured employees are to its operations.
Young people often think that they can gain influence or freedom to do what they enjoy by changing jobs and getting a better title, only to run into the “old guard” who refuse to accept change.
But there is another more reliable method. And this works in large organizations best, becoming a trusted influencer...trust comes from doing your work to the best of your ability and keeping a positive attitude.
Good leaders are often taught to find the influencers when joining a new organization. So the longer you stay, the more influence you gain. And influence gives you the ability to determine what you want to do. There tends to be a lot of turnover at the top and bottom of an organization. Making those in the middle very important.
This is so critical to established companies that they have all sorts of programs designed to retain people identified as important once they have gotten past the initial audition period. IBM and Intel are famous for their leadership development on both technical and management fronts.
If you want to enjoy the perks of being around a company for awhile, you need to go to bigger organizations or companies with mature management that are setup to facilitate this.
Some people want to work on new things / startups every other year. Nothing wrong with that. But when you have a company full of people like that, the culture isn’t going to be conducive to doing the things required to keep people around for the long term.
These companies are more famous for slowly and subtly purging their technical and management staff like after they are too old. Like over 40.
I'm in my late 20s, and I guess I would be considered a senior developer. Coming up on 8 years of JS/Node/Go Development experience. ONLY problem is, all of our software is utter trash. I have dozens of projects I maintain and I can't keep up with any of them. I'm constantly debugging or building a prototype, that, somehow makes it into production as a prototype.
I'm not paid amazingly. About 20%-40% below market. I have been promised the moon and it's pretty unlikely I will ever see half of the promises come to fruition. Especially since our projects are hitting critical mass. That is, nothing works and nothing can be fixed because of how massive the architecture is and how small the "team" is. I've been trying to move a DB from a server that is about 2 years past life span, for the last few months.
I declined a job as a lead developer/CTO. I absolutely annihilated the interview and the offer went from a front-end developer to running the whole team and potentially CTO. I don't think I am anywhere near ready for that. I never test, have no successful continuous integration projects (despite my best efforts to get people on board), and have basically no apps running at a high capacity.
I digress to the question itself. In tech, I would never stay at a job over a year or two. Unless I really jive with the team, am making adequate cash, and feel like I'm still moving forward. Yeah, I know, I'm a hypocrite. I regret it. I think I would even have been much happier if I quit my current job for like, two years, then came back after spending some time at a well established shop. But who knows really. My job is the wild west and it may have just made me more disgruntled to know how to do everything right, and still lack the time to do so.
Here are some reasons why long tenure sucks:
1. You get completely complacent. I spend a lot of time just messing around. Again, hypocrite, like, hey jackass, use that time to test. Ha, too complacent and if I even start setting up a test environment, someone will smell blood and task me off to prototype land. Don't get me wrong though, I spend a lot of time at home, off the clock, building random new crap for the company.
2. You get stagnant in hierarchy. Basically, they like me where I am at and they won't compromise that with any form of promotion.
3. You quit making relationships with coworkers. I'm fairly young, but I have been employed here longer than anyone else. I've seen thousands come and go. I stopped making much of an attempt to know anyone. Unless they're developers, of course.
4. Newer employees despise you. I make more than them. I look like I do less. Also, I get away with pretty much anything. Which, causes quite the rift.
5. Managers become overly confident in your skills. Example: I was tasked with building something like uber, by myself, in a single month. While maintaining my 12-15 other active projects. Let's just say, we didn't make deadline and also, I'm now proficient with quickbooks and several varieties of payment processors.
6. You get honey-potted into their culture. Everything is wrong here, and I know that. Despite how hard I try, I can't get it to change. Perhaps we're only successful because we cut every corner, or perhaps that's the only reason I'm not writing this from a beach in the Grand Cayman's. Bottom line, if you're at a company for ten years, you'll know the problems and the futility of trying to solve them.
Here are some reasons why long tenure rocks:
1. I don't have to EFFING interview. I hate it. I hate it, I hate it. I suck at interviewing unless I am in a very social and charismatic state. Something I&#...
Don't sell yourself short. Very few teams have the resources to hit every wish list item on every best practice and still keep up with incoming project requests. So as leadership, you're constantly in a state of balancing internal resources against external expectations/needs. With your current experience, you're intimately familiar with and recognize the dangers of always compromising on the internal resources rather than against external requests. Which gives you a lot to draw on as the team lead to ensure that isn't repeated at your new company. Running far too lean for far too long gives you incredible insight into both what "too lean" actually means for different aspects of the systems, and what failure modes occur when you pass that point. You'll be better prepared to know when to put your foot down or push back on something, as well as have an understanding of where you can be flexible or compromise when necessary while minimizing the risk of creating a dumpster fire.
Someone without your experience may not be as adept at that yet, and end up learning those lessons only after they're put in charge, at the expense of the team they're put in charge of.
At first it was great because there was (still is) so many greenfield projects and I had the autonomy to choose what I thought was best/would make the most gains for the company.
Now I'm early 40's, coming up on my second decade, and I've recently found out that the majority of the staff are paid more than me. I feel taken advantage of and undervalued, and I'm so fucking depressed that my complacency has walked me down this dead end street.
Trust me, if you're feeling like this now, leave. Nothing will change. Company culture is hard enough to alter, but it's impossible if you don't have the support of the CEO. I've fought against it for at least ten years and really have nothing to show for my efforts but a kick in the teeth.
The part that sucks is that very few people recognize it and the ones that do are rarely the ones that get to make the calls. The ones that do make the calls think any developer can do what I do. What I've seen happen several times, is the company decides to replace me with outsourced/cheaper development, and after an attempt to reason with them, I stay for a bit to help them move in that direction and then move on to another place. Invariably, they call a year or 2 later looking for help, not because I've planted some obscure code no one can understand but me, but because no other developers have the knowledge to form the necessary follow-up questions to the ever-changing specs handed down from the higher-ups before moving forward. They end up with systems full of incorrect assumptions that fail daily and tie up all the developer time being fixed. Now I can't help them because I'm working for a competitor. It's infuriating. Every company I've ever worked for I've wanted to make the best in the industry, but they've consistently been blinded by short-term goals, driven by unfounded hype to be "progressive", when all they needed to do was a few basic things better than the competition to take the majority of the market. Even when I get far enough to produce numbers to prove that point, they still want to do some wild shit no one is asking for, or they get bought out (because they start growing rapidly) by a venture capitalist company that just wants to do a quick flip.
The secret is to always be trying to learn enough to move the next new project. My goal everyday is to try to learn something new each and every day.
Good: you know the company politics. You know who to ask for anything, who not to trust, who you can joke with and who you can’t. You can talk back to higher-ups, tell them what you want to do rather than being told what to do, bend the rules a little or set your own rules. You can pull from prior experience - “I know you don’t think that estimate is right, but we did something very similar five years ago and it overran because of this same risk factor.”
Bad: you know the company politics. You’re embroiled in every stupid “this guy doesn’t like that guy!!” management issue. Unless you have remarkable self-control, it’s all impossible to stay out of. Also, people either come to you for every tiny matter because you know everything, or they see you as unapproachable and won’t talk to you when they really need to, forcing you to chase them. Either way, in total, RIP coding time.
Over that time, I've held countless different roles, starting as IC, moving into leadership roles; we've expanded product lines, expanded geographies for both production and development, evolved tech several times as well. I've worked in development, tech operations, manufacturing, and some cross-cutting roles. (I joined before AWS or public cloud computing was a thing; my group is now almost [98+%] entirely cloud-based.)
If we are able to continue to thrive as a business, I expect this might be the last place I work. I could retire now and we'd be OK, but with two kids in elementary school, I'm realistically way better off working another 10-ish years as I get plenty of PTO and a 4-week additional paid break every 5 years.
Same company, many different jobs (which seems to be a pattern of sorts in the other responses). Pay is OK; I could make slightly more at a FAANG (or at least at the FxAxG subset that have local offices), but I take pride in what we've built from essentially the ground up, love the LT I work on and a portion of the company's success is traceable reasonably clearly to what my group does and how well we do it. If we fail to thrive, it will be at least partly my fault.
Somewhat ironically, I didn't even want to join this company back in 2003; I was just at the worst job I'd ever held, essentially being bribed to keep a chair warm and do nothing for 6 months until some outsized bonuses got paid out. The day those bonuses hit, there was a line of people waiting to resign to the director of software. I think I was #6 that day and he was exhausted from hearing the same story. This company wasn't sexy, their tech was fairly weak, they didn't have the best reputation, but when I got into the interview process, I was blown away by the calibre of people working there and the vision of the CTO/CEO. I went from "I'll take anything because it beats getting paid well to do nothing" to "Hey, this is interesting!" and it's only gotten better since.
There are companies where people change often and then there are companies where people stay for long. There are companies where people who stayed long became stale (not moving in positions) and then those where they continue learning.
Also just for enjoyability, I prefer variety of tasks.
I try to work on greenfield projects where I have to research a new topic from scratch, which sometimes is exciting, but in the end it’s not the same, so I’ll likely not wait until the 6 year mark and I’ll jump ship sometimes this year.
I average 5% compensation growth (higher if you factor benefits), and aren’t compelled to move to a saturated, expensive market. Same employer doesn’t mean same role. I usually stick around in a particular thing for 2-4 years until recently, but now my scope is very broad.
End of the day you need to decide if you want to do the same role forever or if you want to evolve. If you want to be a senior programmer forever, staying in the same gig is my vision of hell.
The risk is that if you are forced to change employers by circumstance, you’re less attractive to employers, especially when you hit senior roles that aren’t executive.