Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?

Sounds like you’re in the perfect place, changing will almost certainly put you in a worse position. Don’t worry, enjoy life and try to grow as an engineer outside of your work if that is what you desire.

What about grow as an engineer with a hobby and you're golden?

Yes, but because it was a toxic work environment.

If I was in your position I would not be concerned, I would be happy.

"Not growing" is subjective, the things I "grew into" 10 years ago are not relevant today.

Yes, promises of promotion that never happened despite taking on more and more responsibility and delivering. It was my first job out of school and in my naivety, I believed my results would speak for itself and office politics didn't matter. I probably stayed about 2 years too long until I finally started applying to other jobs out of frustration and got a substantial pay raise.

I was in the exact same experience (and I'm also very risk averse), and I would say yes and no. Like most things it's complicated. But to keep it short I most certainly grew the most in my career – meaning in engineering, people, presenting, everything – by taking the plunge with a new role and the challenges it brings. You're forced to learn and adapt and taken out of your comfort zone.

I think even in a great company you are going to hit a ceiling that is hard to grow past even if the opportunity is there – there's politics, there's other priorities, there's always something that will get in the way. I found swapping job was the only way to "push reset" on that side of things enough to have that rapid burst of growth.

What I've very slowly learned is things tend to work out. If you've got some savings built up and not too much in the way of hard responsibility, I'd explore the option.

  > Did you regret staying at a job for too long?

Almost always

I don't regret staying at my last role for 5 years but I do regret not spending more time looking and getting a better understanding of my value on the market while I was employed there. I wasn't underpaid but I certainly could've been positioned better to leave when I finally decided to. This is all recency bias of course but relearning how to interview was a difficult and humbling experience.

Decade? I regret staying in my first job for two years instead of one.

sounds like you made what most ppl seek and probably grown enough as an engineer as to invest more in yourself. like pickup new 'hobbies' or meet interesting ppl

Every next company hires you for your particular expertise that you are able to apply from day one. None of them are interested to invest in your growth. You do it on your personal time.

Unless you’re very lucky - typically it is not a smart choice to stay longer than 2-4 years at 1 tech company. In current situation.

People who stay longer only encourage employers to keep old salaries as is while buying new workforce for the market price.

“… but I’m starting to be concerned that I’m not growing as an engineer.“

What are you looking to grow into? What is growth to you?

What’s your general outlook around what you hope to get out of this?

I don't think you have reason to be concerned. I concur with the comment about growing as an engineer as a hobby, but you're living the dream.

I stayed at a job too long but was in a different industry and making 59k in a high COL area and I was living in pest infested shithole. When I got laid off I pivoted to computer science. I don't regret staying because I am where I am now as a result - but I do regret not being able to leave on my own terms.

I actually came back to a place that I used to work at before taking a year long “break” to work on some freelance stuff (and moving to the city etc.), I regret it.

I got to work on some new things and met some new colleagues which was nice, but returning to a heavily abstracted monolith and a DB schema that doesn’t spark joy makes me want to do literally anything else. The people are nice and thankfully it isn’t a toxic work environment, but there are definitely disagreements and practices that I don’t agree with and that won’t change due to any changes just introducing more inconsistency into said platform.

Working on it tanks my velocity, which also tanks my morale, when trivial changes take hours and I’m never sure whether things will work the way I hope. I hate the type of project.

That said, it’s less about a particular workplace and more about greenfield vs brownfield projects, I bet some people thrive on maintenance projects, but I’d at least want to maintain a project started in the last 5 years or so, or at least something tastefully divided into multiple separate modules that don’t make my CPU hit 97C when compiling it and trying to run it locally. Oh and a DB that I can run locally in a container, ideally with data seeding from day one, being able to do that with projects that use PostgreSQL does spark joy and I can test possibly breaking migrations as much as I want.

> I’m starting to be concerned that I’m not growing as an engineer

In general, to keep your mind healthy, it is recommended to continously challenge yourself and learn.

You could do this outside of work hours. Is that an option for you?

Yes, stayed in the same place for 6 years, for no discernible reason other than I thought my opportunity was going to come, it never came, there were multiple changes in leadership and in the end the group i was in was dismantled and I could have been laid off (there were large layoffs just a couple weeks after I left).

So I'd definitely recommend staying sharp, looking at the market and moving when you think there isn't space for you to grow or change. Don't let your career stagnate with the business.

Absolutely. I wasted 6 years writing C++ and being miserable.

My advice: ride it out until something truly better/objectionable comes up. Growth is probably not best found at work, anyway.

I was in a similar position and left. I don't regret it, but I also didn't have a good balance. That place turned me entirely sour, I regret not leaving or addressing the building resentment earlier.

Now I don't have the social capital I had. I have to pass all these little interpersonal tests all over again, and I have no spoons.

I've been "at the same job" for almost 15 years but the company been sold three times, fully bankrupt once, almost broke many times, grown to over 500 staff, layoffs to less than ten, IPO'd/re-privatized, etc

Anyway I haven't interviewed in a while!

I did the opposite - since college I've job hopped quite a bit between startups, SMBs, and the smaller end of public companies. Salary varied from ~100k to ~190k. Got laid off last year which I do attribute to being one of the newer employees.

I do feel like I would be in a better place if I had stuck around longer in some of these positions, but it's hard to tell at the time! Each change was to a better and higher paying job. I do feel like I got a good perspective on the industry but I hear about people who were my peers getting into management, getting into staff or distinguished engineer positions, assume they are having all their options vested, and they are probably ahead of me financially.

My understanding is that to make "real money" i.e. what a manager at a car dealership makes, or 300k+, the reliable paths are either getting hired at the google/netflix/openai/apple type companies, getting into management pretty much anywhere (check BLS.gov. Average salaries for managers even in older industries are above what a staff engineer at e.g. Pagerduty or Onesignal probably gets), or getting a good amount of stock options at a low cost basis and eventually getting to cash them out.

This does not answer your question exactly but to that point I would say hop on linkedin and talk to some recruiters, keeping your skeptical hat on for everything they say. A good manager of someone who's been productive for 8-10 years is not going to be surprised or annoyed that they try and see what the market is.

One last point, tech is especially sensitive to the fluctuations of interest rates. We are all subject to the whims of Jerome and depending on what he does in the coming months, the market for engineering talent may look much different next spring than it does now.

Nope. I follow a very simple rule: you should be earning, learning, or leaving.

It depends what stage in your career you are in, generally. Job hopping early on is a good way to raise your salary and get a wide range of experience. For more senior positions, where your projects are measured in months to years instead of sprints, staying longer is a good thing (imo). But either way, a decade is longer than I have stayed in any place - and had both regret for leaving a former employer _and_ regret for not having done so sooner. No silver bullet answer to that question :)

Then you've won the lottery, for now. Congratulations!

It will be more difficult for you to find your next job because your position slowly morphs around you rather than what the industry is looking for. You should have a much higher emergency fund than normal for that case - you will have to retrain on your own dime when you decide to move on (or the company decides it's time for you to move on against your will, or the company changes to a culture you hate.)

You will likely need to take a step back in your career at that point, but you've already had the job for a decade and the difference between 8 and 16 years is the same at this point. That, and this is the worst tech job market since 2008, maybe 2001.

I stayed for about a decade but moved out of engineering to PM and then to technical marketing, it was a mixed feeling. One one hand being for so long at the same company did not help me financially that much on the other hand changing jobs into totally new domains was not as difficult if I would have jumped companies.

I have mostly had the opposite experience (quit jobs too early) because at the time I didn’t understand how many firms are mismanaged, disorganized, or just plain hostile to common sense.

And so if you have a solid job with people you enjoy working with, and management that doesn’t drive you insane, I’d be pretty hesitant to job hop unless you’re absolutely certain that the new firm will be better. There are many many ways to grow and educate yourself while still holding the same job - have you exhausted those yet?