Technology

Well in my case I created a legacy by helping to unionize my workplace. I don't even care if I'm ever remembered for that, not many legacies can be beat

Man we've lost something along the way. When did our jobs become purely a means of money and contributing nothing to society.

I don't know man, I've always liked the idea of a project outliving me. Though for the sanity of future engineers I hope that is not the case. Today's solutions are usually just tomorrow's problems.

My legacy is my kids, and that’s time no company can take from me

Seriously, nobody is going to remember you. Like 3 generations down, you'll even be a tiny blip in your descendents world. Even most billionaires will be remembered through an encyclopedia entry and nothing else.

Your second paragraph tells you who you’re trying to find in your third paragraph: FAANG. Hiring 500 engineers and bragging about it something you can do when you’re just interested in shareholder value not customer experience.

I wouldn’t hire the guy in the article because I haven’t seen strong candidates come from FAANG and I’ve been very happy to lose the people I did to FAANG because they weren’t good engineers, they just knew how to leetcode and tunnel vision trivia.

It's not about having FANG in your job history. It's about switching companies three times in three years.

Where I work, we tend to lose money on new hires for an average of the first six months. That's time where not only the new engineer isn't very productive, but other engineers on the same team aren't very productive. They're sinking time into difficult conversations like "yeah you need to go back and redo the last two weeks of work — it's perfectly good code, but you used library X, and we decided four years ago to is use library Y because X has this rare edge case issue when combined with library Z which we also use...".

If someone only works with us for a year... we haven't made enough of a profit to cover the losses in the first half of their employment with us. If you want to work for us, we're not going to force you into a multi-year contract but we do want to be as confident as possible that you're going to stay here long term.

I wouldn't turn someone down for changing jobs three times in three years... but I would definitely ask what happened. And they better answer with something that will happen at my company.

I’m trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally

It takes, what, 10 minutes to read a resume? 30 minutes interview someone? Lets round that up to one hour to cover discussing two promising candidates with a colleague... it's still only 500 hours of work. Or 12 weeks. Obviously you also need to read all the resumes and do interviews with people who were turned down but over an entire career working in HR for a large company... 500 people isn't that many at all.

I've been practicing the mercenary method for about 5 years now. Since then I've significantly increased my salary and I've been a lot happier at work. That on top of learning to say "no" has improved my career life exponentially. NO loyalty. No unpaid overtime. No going above and beyond for a company that isn't going to return the favor.

they dont even pay enough for our loyalty lmao

Fuck your 401k, I can invest myself, thanks

You can't match your own contributions, though.

At the end of the day, software developers desire two things: An interesting technical challenge, and fair pay/benefits for the work done. If you can't provide either, you have a problem. Not the employee.

But eventually don’t you risk being unhireable with this sort of work history? We recently hired someone who had a similar work history and I remember that being very much a red flag when we hired them. Turns out the red flag should have been payed attention too since history is a good predictor of future behaviors.

As a hiring manager I would think twice about investing anything in an employee who jumps around THAT much. I mean I don’t blame you, I’ve had the same job for 23 years and I could be making a lot more money. But salary is not everything and I love my job. My mental health is very much an extra benefit.

Easier and more straightforward to get a position and salary promotion by way of hopping jobs than it is to do within the same company.

It's really sad that this is the state of things but it is how it is.

How do you even explain that during the hiring process? That's not even enough time to figure anything out

Industries promote this, especially the publicly traded ones, whether they realize it or not (I'm sure they do). It looks worse on a corporate balance sheet and subsequent earnings quarterly earnings report to pay someone 20% more than to hire someone at a new pay scale. It's absolutely insane that we've gotten ourselves to this point as a society, but here we are.

When I moved to Silicon Valley the HR guy at my company was an old hippie who looked out for people. He told me the silicon valley way to get a raises is to tell your company that you have decided to take another job because it pays more, and you don't want to leave, but you have personal obligations like your girlfriend being pregnant that mean you have to take a higher paying job. Then if they don't give you a raise you find a new job that will.

Yes, however recruiters see someone like this and see a great opportunity to fill their quota, so it all balances out.