Employment stability like that did not exist in the 19th century (in the US because of lack of industrialization - most people were engaged in agriculture; in industrial Britain factory workers would literally starve to death because of regular layoffs). It did not seem to exist in the US in 1900-1920 (at least that's the impression I got from reading _The Jungle_) or in the 1930s (Great Depression), and kind of disappeared with Reaganomics and the start of offshoring in the 1980s. So job stability seems like a brief state of things that lasted from the end of WWII to the end of the 1970s.

I don't think that job exists any more. Or if it does, there are fewer and fewer of them out there.

I have a reasonably well-paid, low-stress developer job working on a product I believe adds value. But I don't get to go home and just switch off: I get emails at all hours of the day and night, and if the service goes down at 4 am (which has never happened yet) then I need to deal with it.

I'm not sure there are many jobs that pay middle class wages but only require 9-5/M-F levels of responsibility.

What is the real history of employment stability? I mean I can imagine that a Blacksmith was probably safely a Blacksmith for life back in the day, but is even that really true? And that's for identifiable trades, which it seems were not even easy to get trained into. So maybe the reality is that employment for most people has always been precarious?

Hasn't tech merely brought this instability to a social class that was exempted from it for the latter half of the 20th Century?

Would love to know more from someone who has some grounding in this.

These two sentances seem contradictory. If you have a large savings / retirement, don't you have a LARGER parachute / less stress looking for a job? I mean unless yeah you've gone so far on the hedonistic treadmill that you can barely afford your month to month bills.

I don't know, I've never been out of a job for more than like 2 months of actively looking, I think software developers are way to paranoid about job hunting.

Is it? I'm not sure the world would be a better place if you were, say, negotiating for your job every morning that you come into work for, or if your apartment would get reassigned to the highest bidder that's willing to pay for it today.

Stability is often far more valuable than perfectly optimizing some supply-demand curve. The advantages of stability are why corporations form, why multi-year contracts are signed, and why unions exist.

I grew up lower middle class - first to graduate college in my family. Dad could never hold down a job for long. It was a very pressing need for me, for a long time, and still is, to be able to keep gainful employment.

I’m at a stage in my career now where I should not worry about that - I’m skilled enough that if I put in the 3-6 months of leetcode practice I can probably land whatever job I really want. So therefore, my skill and career experience should theoretically land me “stability” and should no longer be the goal - but I resonate with folks that do share that goal. I think upbringing and seeing others not be able to hold a job, let alone a dream job, brings out some conservative sides to folks.

I don’t know your story, but most of my friends that did startups for a long while out of college were almost all from wealthy families. That just never really felt like an option for me.

I disagree, I think it's a wrong path, because it devalues really deep expertise. It seems to me that people do not want to be experts anymore, precisely for this reason. Dabbling in many different things is seen as a path to success. But I think this culture is missing out on something.

By the way, good social security or basic income can be seen as insurance to switch jobs without too much risk, too.

I realize I speak from a privileged position as a software developer. But never since the first day that I stepped into an office as a professional software developer in June of 1996 did I “plan a future” with a company.

My plan was always to use where I worked as a stepping stone for my next job. I spent my first two years saving money and building my resume. I have spent most of my career “with my running shoes on”. Meaning I’m always prepared for a layoff or to leave when the pay/bullshit ratio is going in the wrong direction.

My employer owes me nothing besides to pay me for the hours I worked. When that arrangement isn’t working for either of us, we both have agency and the ability to terminate that arrangement.

> Unless it is another economical crisis and nobody is hiring?

I lived through both the 2000 crash and 2008-2011. The 2000 crash wasn’t bad if you had both skills and was working in many major cities in the US as just a regular old enterprise developer working for profitable non tech companies.

2008 was worse. But as a developer, you could find a contract somewhere if you had a network.

Pretty sure that’s wrong. Tenure in job is near an all time high in America. Boomers were the job hoppers.

Or they need to maintain their income to continue their lifestyle.

I am not particularly passionate about my job as a sysadmin. I don't hate it, but it would be nice to just spend all day skateboarding or playing Starcraft.

But, I have aging parents to take care of. Housing prices have skyrocketed around me. This is what I need to do to maintain a certain level of security, and indeed luxury, for myself and my close family.

And this isn't weird.

Go back 3-5 generations to when half of the population was employed in agriculture. Was everyone passionate about cows? Potatoes?

The reality is, I have a better shot at following my passion by trying to get into FAANG and working there for 10-20 years so that I can then pursue the things that I am personally passionate about.

Being an excellent employee?

I understand your point, but I actually have been doing this for about 10 years now, and I consistently have improved my "career trajectory" by switching jobs when I start to feel that my coworkers are overachieving and throwing me under the bus. I look at it like a forcing function to switch jobs and get a raise.

I already had a decade of pre-work experience just from being a lifelong hacker, so it's not like I'm relying on my job to learn new technology. I don't have a fear of falling behind. If anything, I've noticed a huge decrease in SWE competence over my time in industry.

Some of my most "successful" friends at FAANGs are bad developers that just devote more time to playing the system than I am willing to do. I find the social con-man stuff to be really draining and I hate doing it. I also hate interviewing, which limited my career more than I'd care to admit.

Also, I've opted to not support a family or carry a mortgage. I'm doing something similar to FIRE. I'm hoping to be FI with a total of 15 years as a tech employee.

"But do you really hate working so much that you would sacrifice having children!?". Yes. Very yes.

It's also likely that tech workers are "overpaid" right now, as we're compartmentalizing more work, lowering the skills required to join tech companies, and remote work is now the norm. It's a race to the bottom, and I want out as soon as possible.

That's unfortunate. Unless you're already rich, finding stable employment that pays well and reliably is an important goal to have. The opposite would be volatility, and that's not really good for much. There's something said against keeping the exact same job for 5-10 years perhaps, but securing a reliable is the only thing I care about when I'm an employee or contractor. Tech doesn't really have much virtue when you don't have that.

Yes - but so does not moving jobs. I have several friends who played the big company game, got to a senior level and then got ditched. Their problem? Well - they got shafted and emptied out at peak expense time; mortgage, kids, divorces etc, they got emptied when they were still 15 years short of thier retirement target, and their CV's are mono-corporate.

This made finding work very challenging.

In olden days you could say confidently that if you got to director level in a big company in the UK you were set. There was a job for life at a very nice salary if you wanted it.

Hopefully 0 times. Major changes in your life (like changing jobs, or moving cities, or making large purchases) always require some consideration.

>human ability is not really allocated all that well when you're bonded to an employer without cheaper switching costs.

You're overstating the case especially in market economies. If anything, the issue is more prevalent if your employer is the government, as the government tends to overpay for labour and is slow to adjust if conditions change (i.e. very hard to let people go for any reason).

Having said that, there are problems with movement being too liquid. That is, you lose institutional knowledge if your company (or government department) has a too high of a turn-over rate, which leads to lower quality products/services.

>how many startups never happen because the right people are unable to manage the personal risk of leaving defined employment?

And rightly so. Startups are an incredibly risky endeavour and they always will be. This is why founders tend to be younger, rather than older. If you have dependents and responsibilities you have to think twice about making a high risk bet. I don't know if you want to actually incentivize people to make more high-risk bets.

Except that you only needed one person to find a better job back then. The problem with now is that you need two people two find better jobs simultaneously.

This was blocking people from moving when better opportunities pop up. I suspect this is more responsible for the Great Resignation than anything else. Once one person of a couple loses their job and has to start a job search, there's no longer anything slowing down the other from taking a better offer even if you have to move.

Stats on that?

The norm for most people used to be to work for the same company most of their career (if not all of it) and retire from there with a pension.

Nowadays most people change jobs every couple years.

If you are one of the right sort of people, with the right skills...yes. Many people with degrees never successfully transition into being a full fledged member of the professional class. That is much, much worse than before and the cost of failure is much, much higher than before outside of tech.

2017-2018 are the high point of this particular economic cycle and we are at full employment but that does not mean people have succeeded at the level they have in the past.

> I work at a VC firm and every company struggles with hiring enough talented people. I don't know many, really any, people who are moderately skilled and unable to find work in this environment. That could change if there's a big macro swing.

Can I find work? Yes.

Have I plateaued at my current level of pay and everyone wants to try to pay me 20% less if I change jobs? Yes.

It isn't just "Can I find another job?" but "Can I find a comparable job with the same work life balance, benefits, and financial compensation?"

That is the real fear with the lack of job security for mid-level professionals as they age and don't move into management. Paycuts, relocation to cheaper regions, or work/life balance cuts have to be taken to some degree.

Sure, I'm posting on HN but it is mainly because I work 10+ hour days, 5-6 days a week. I have to break that up somehow.

That simply isn't true or realistic for a large amount of people.

... Isn't that sort of the point? Should we be designing our society around people getting into an industry for its own sake? Bare minimum, for jobs that are going to go away or be depleted, it seems like pretty solid market economics (and I'm not into capitalism) that reduced demand for labor in a job should most affect the people least committed to that job.