And this 3 years is kept up artificially - companes like Meta or, as a colleague of mine who works there now, Github / Microsoft, offer stock packages that they can only use after four years. It's a pair of golden handcuffs; they would move on a lot faster I'm sure if it wasn't for that + the wages offered.
Having Microsoft or Google or Meta on your CV is a very valuable thing to have, regardless of what you actually did there, because they're still perceived as having high standards.
It doesn't help that, for a certain slice of the software industry, staying in a position for 18-24 months has almost been normed. If it's unlikely that your hire is going to be there for more than a couple of years, why on earth would you "invest" in them. It's not like you'll get a return on that investment.
>3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry.
That's a rather SV-centric view. Otherwise 5-10 years (or longer) is quite normal, including in tech. At many companies, a bunch of 3 year stints for a job candidate is something of a red flag.
The people I've seen add the most value and be the most productive are always the ones with the longest tenure. Because they know the software backwards and they know the domain too.
5 year periods don't affect employee compensation packages. Most people in tech last at a company for 2 years. Most cliffs are at the 4 year mark. META has dumped harder than most of the other Big Tech companies over the last year, but it's also the newest and has more growth priced in than the others who have been around for longer.
If we look at YTD:
- MSFT: -19.68%
- GOOG: -21.67%
- AMZN: -29.02%
- AAPL: -13.93%
- META: -49.91%
You're losing money on your compensation package anyway. If your base salary is high enough at META (given cash on hand), then it can offset losses at most of these other companies. That said, META is probably most poised to suffer from a brain drain because of its relative stock performance. I still don't think it's going to lead to any sort of talent crisis (unless this triggers an exodus of senior talent holding the company's infra going or some other cultural factor.)
I'm always so impressed with how long MS is able to keep employees. I see so many 10-20+ year vets. I know a ton of people who have left and gone back as well.
I think it's a very millennial thing but I've barely gone past 3 years somewhere. Half our careers our salaries were controlled by 2008 and you had to job hop to get more money.
I think a lot of this is because employee turnover in the software industry is much higher than for most professions.
An accountant, lawyer or architect can reasonably be expected to stay with the same firm for a decade or longer, often their entire career. It makes sense under that context for employers to invest more in long-term skills.
Whereas, once you get to the heart of Silicon Valley, it's not unusual for people to jump employers every 6 months. That's maybe not the rule. But even Google and Microsoft has turnover rates that imply a half-life of no more than a few years for the average employee. The economics of long-term re-training just doesn't make sense.
Is this the worse thing in the world though? It allows savvy workers to continuously jump around companies and continuously re-negotiating higher compensation packages. That helps to make sure that workers are paid at or near their market value. In a way that doesn't work in the accounting industry, because future employers would look down at your resume history.
They're up to 1.1 years now? Wow! They were at six months for developers for most of the time I was working there (2006-2010). At three years, I was in the top 25% of seniority ("old farts").
By comparison, Overstock.com averaged five years for developers between 2010-2013.
When I moved to the PNW, it was for Amazon, and during my interview loop, I asked everyone, "How long have you been at the company?" They all had pretty much the same answer: three months, five months, eight months, and some that had been there for a few years.
But I decided to get out of Dodge and interviewed at Microsoft, and I asked everyone the same question. The responses were shocking to me: five years, ten years, 12 years, 22 years. One person even told me that he hadn't been with the company very long: only 18 years. And he wasn't being coy.
I've been at Microsoft for more than ten years, and I still feel like the new guy. I started at the tail end of the Ballmer days, and I'm sure it was a real grind back then, but I'm glad to see a company that -- in my experience -- treats people well enough that they'll stick around.
Four years down the line, do you want companies looking at your CV and seeing you change jobs every 10-12 months? How good an investment are you as a hire if you're going bail shortly after you're up to speed and a productive member of the team?
Just to second derefr's point, that's 6+ years where you MUST stay at that job and your employer knows they don't have to keep you happy. I've heard more than a few stories about this being publicly discussed when deciding who works on some unrewarding slog. Imagine spending the better part of a decade knowing that if you want to do more than, say, Sharepoint upgrades you'll have to do it in your own time.
While this is obviously a way-way outlier, 10-25 years is not that rare (including in more traditional technology companies) and I'm not really sure 2-3 years is the norm in a lot of places.
Having Microsoft or Google or Meta on your CV is a very valuable thing to have, regardless of what you actually did there, because they're still perceived as having high standards.
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