Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long? I have been with my employer for almost a decade. It’s my first job out of college. I’m wfh in a medium cost of living area. My salary is 140k and work life balance is great. I’m very risk averse and feel very comfortable in my position but I’m starting to be concerned that I’m not growing as an engineer. I’m wondering if anyone here was in this position and wants to share their experience. |
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I had to leave in order to protect my career.
I left a great job where I was well liked for a small raise. The new job sucked and everything went downhill.
Unless it's a giant leap in pay, stay where your at
Also, it's totally healthy to outgrow your employer and/or role. Nobody talks about this, but its true. (Why do you think the corporate ladder exists?)
Personally, I tend to have a shelf life of about 7 years at most companies. Which is a long time in this industry; they typically change a lot versus when I join. Usually I decide I want to work in a different domain after that time. The first 9 years out of school I was pure backend work, then I pivoted to compilers/low-level dev because I hated Rails so much, and now I'm eyeing full stack/indie dev.
Keep in mind it's a bad market for employees right now, so be patient in the search process. Good luck.
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 have stayed too long when things were crummy. They didn't start crummy; they became crummy as things changed. (Companies are only good to work for until they're not. Just about nowhere is good forever.) You can tell when things have become crummy, but you can remember that it used to be good, and so you're tempted to ride it out. Do that, but only for a few months. After, say, 3 to 6 months of no improvement, it's time to have your resume hit the street.
On the other hand, if you have good pay, good people, and good working conditions, think hard before you leave that. It's not easy to find a place that will be an improvement. My advice would be to ride that out as long as it keeps being good (but see previous paragraph).
Specific advice:
Are you concerned that you're not growing, or do you feel that you're not growing? That is, is this a head issue, or a heart and gut issue?
If you feel that you're not growing, if you feel that you need to be doing more for your own sense of satisfaction on the job, then go to your boss, and tell him/her/other that you feel that you need more responsibility.
On the other hand, if it's not bothering you at a gut level, if it's more a "should" or expectation that you think other people have for you, then maybe take a look at what you can actually do now. Are you really not better than you were a decade ago? Five years ago? Do you still write the same bugs you did then? Do you still get stumped by the same questions you did then? Can you handle bigger designs than you did then? Are you really not growing, or are you just not seeing that you've grown?
It's really easy (especially on HN!) to see "yeah, I started Facebook at 19" or whatever, and feel that at 30, I should be able to do more than I can. But that's not a realistic standard of comparison, and not a realistic expectation to put on yourself.
First, I regret being naive. I grew up with the idealistic notion that if you are loyal to a business, they will be loyal to you. Reality: businesses actually ran like this are nearly extinct. Either way, when it comes to money, you can’t really trust people in a business arrangement to look out for you. Also, as I am now over-the-hill, I’m finding that someone with a long tenure and experience at one place is a liability. Bean counters want to replace you with someone cheaper and more expendable. Younger employees think you should retire and get out of their way (buddy, god willing I still have several decades to go and I’m not even sure I will be able to retire). Prospective hires think you have years of baggage and bad habits (which is likely true).
Second, I regret sacrificing the prime of my health and time eating shit at places I didn’t like for extravagant promises of equity. Equity is good and worth working for, but only if it’s worth the price you must pay today. Others may disagree, but I have found it’s not worth living in hell for the next 3-10 years even if that could potentially net me millions. And of course, there are no guarantees. The world could end, I could die any moment, or the company could go tits-up. My first startup experience netted me only $2000 for 12 years and a lifetime of regret… particularly over preferring to keep working rather than spending time with my father who later died.
Third and finally, I regret surrendering to my poor self esteem. I’m a college drop out, a nobody from a nobody town, working at small to mid sized businesses, and I think I’m merely ok at what I do. No one in their right mind could or should hire me. The job I recently left paid a very good salary, full remote, I had 10 years of seniority, I had lots of respect and could throw my weight around, all I had to put up with was incompetence and nightmarish stress. Since I have no self esteem, I felt I deserved that trade. It’s been eight months since I left, and I’m struggling to rebuild my confidence and control my anxiety.
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?
People who stay longer only encourage employers to keep old salaries as is while buying new workforce for the market price.
This is the fact from vast majority of all people I know in the industry — you only get substantial raise when you switch companies. Unfortunately.
I only saw people regretting staying for too long when they whined about the job for years before actually leaving
As an "intern" I found myself at a very small company - literally just my boss, his son, and me. I was the only programmer. I loved the autonomy that came with being the only one who knew how to write code, and they were in desperate need of it. There was a lot to do, and they had a dream I believed in. I worked there - sometimes I even slept there I worked so late - for five years. They ended up giving me a salary of 48k per year (in 2006) and no healthcare or benefits. I worked every weekday and most weekends, lost contact with friends and family, and ate terribly because I wouldn't even take time to try and make healthy food. Spent those five years cramming shitty fast food down my throat every day.
There are several warning signs that are hopefully plain as day to people reading that.
1) an "internship" should be tightly directed learning under a mentor. If you are the only software engineer at your "internship" what they are really looking for is free labor.
2) No software engineering job should pay 48k in America.
3) No full time job should go without health insurance.
4) Under no circumstances should a person work 60-80 hour weeks, but particularly under that horrible pay and no benefits.
I stayed because I felt a misguided sense of loyalty to them, and because their desperation to make their small business work meant that I got a huge and diverse array of systems that I got to build, and I got full autonomy to build them. There was something deeply addicting about that: addicting enough that I didn't even think about how my finances were crumbling and I hadn't seen a doctor in half a decade.
I finally woke up from my addiction when I started encountering health problems and couldn't see a doctor.
After a lot of soul searching, I left - and instantly upon finding a new job realized just how badly they had abused my naivete and sense of loyalty. I make many multiples of that income now, but I will never regain the lost health, lost friendships, and years of earning potential.
My advice to people is that, no matter how fun the work involved in the job ITSELF is, you need to still take an honest assessment on a regular basis about whether it is worth it. Even a very fun and fulfilling job can be killing you, or underpaying you, or distancing you from your family and from other opportunities.
In your situation, you are earning a reasonable wage and it sounds like you are not being stretched thin by it. Feel free to look around, but I don't see your situation as dire or necessarily in need of change.
I don't think people can realize how bad the "inglorious" side of software engineering can be. That isn't to say don't look and see if you can find better, but recognize that you are already in a great situation. And also one where you can either comfortably look for a new job or do your own side projects to learn and grow in ways your job might not be providing.
It sounds like you found a good situation, and hopefully you're also taking good care of your health, and pursuing a life partner and family if you think you might want that. For sustainability and/or personal development, can you find a way to grow as an engineer, and also (not the same thing) keep LinkedIn-marketable keyword skills, while remaining at your current place?
Or, by "grow as an engineer", do you mean you want to maximize your monetary wealth? If so, the most common way to do that has been to get a FAANG job. (Though that's being shaken up right now, with lots of layoffs. Also, the gatekeeping tends to be snooty and rooted in class, so being almost a decade at a much lower-paying job isn't going to help, unless it's in a niche they think is prestigious, like university research.)
I should have either moved into other roles, or left the company somewhere around 5 years earlier, when I started feeling impending doom.
Yes I regret being with HP for 15 years; I had a lot to learn to be marketable again after being there for that length of time. But since I'm working toward retirement now, I will probably try to stay as long as I can where I am.
Leave early if possible. And just don't think they are your friends. They even didn't say thank you.
You might also regret leaving a great work life balance company and a boss who treats you well.
Slightly OT: don't underestimate the importance of having a good boss. 99% of the time, you either love or hate a company purely based on the individual person you directly work for.
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 left after internal changes started demoting my team to support and maintenance, HIPPO and all that. I don't regret staying there for how long I did: I gained a width of non-company-specific experience to find other positions. And turns out, I left at the right time, too: company was involved in a political scandal and my former coworkers are now officially "application configuration specialists" instead of "developers".
TIL.
If I find myself thinking “man I could have made a unicorn startup”, I pivot that internal monologue into “how might I start to build a unicorn startup”. In my opinion, the hard thing is listening to that internal monologue and really listening to what it is saying.
(“deep thoughts, by Jack Handy”)
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?
Despite that, I'll probably do it again at some point because I don't learn lol
It sounds like you have a pretty good situation apart from your goals to grow as an engineer. You might consider adding something, e.g. taking or teaching a course, joining or starting a group focused on learning, helping with an open-source project, volunteering to build a system for a local non-profit, etc.
I’m wfh in a medium cost of living area. My salary is 140k and work life balance is great.
But be vigilant that the current job isn't a 'shrinking pond'. At least ensure you have 'up-to-date' skills. I would say 'in-demand' skills, but that seems like an oxymoron in today's market.
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.
but if you like the job, you could stick with it, so long as you also learn new stuff you could a[[ly should the need come for change.
There is experience to be gained from seeing a codebase and business evolve over time that can't be replicated by switching jobs.
Plus, you never know what a new job will be like. I ended up with a worse job 50% of the time I hopped.
I'd prioritize comfort and wlb more than anything else.
Anyway I haven't interviewed in a while!
I'm also very risk averse. I prefer being reasonably well known and trusted by the wider engineering staff here. I'm happy with where I am and have no intent of leaving. I mostly bring this up as a counterpoint to the people that say you can't have a good job by staying at the same place. Different places are different. Some of them are quite good. If you have a good thing, be willing to hold onto it.
With respect to not growing as an engineer, have you considered asking to switch teams or departments? I've shifted twice and each time led to a new set of challenges, but building upon my understanding of our systems.
2.5x in 10 years is about a 10% annual raise. I've always had great performance reviews but never broke 10%. I'm at 3x salary over 8 years, but almost all of that gain came from switching jobs.
So a lot of people end up job hopping because internal raises are rarely competitive. That and a lot of companies are poorly managed and it gets old after a few years.
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.
The worst part is that it didn't matter. The game was so far off the rails that it never shipped. They closed down the studio soon after. They closed most of the company's offices with a year of the studio closing. 2-3 years after that, the company was completely defunct.
No employer has ever asked me to work that hard again. I would quit on the spot if they did. Life's too short.
There’s always someone who has a worse situation than you. It doesn’t mean yours gets “better”. Burn out is a valid thing at many job stress levels.
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.
But this is my 5th job out of college and the longest I've been in a single job. When I hit my 4year mark, I started to think that the grass is greener on the other side and looked for opportunities here and there.
A few years in and I didn't find the right place that would make me jump ship. I have high standards and I can spot redflags based on past experiences in jobs in multiple countries.
I also found out that after I got older and accrue more responsibilities outside work, my job became a much smaller focal point of my life.
I'd rather be employed in an okay place, being paid a competitive enough salary (75% in the curve), and have opportunity to learn new things in the job and out, even if I don't love the field. As opposed to try a new job and risk being put in a toxic work environment and lose the balance I have now.
If you are not growing as an engineer, going to a new job might not help you and could be detrimental. It's much better to learn new things while you have the time to do so. Find an area you want to learn more, try new projects or courses, and have fun at your own pace.
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.
I wonder if staying for long stints looks bad to future employers and hiring managers. I do think the predictability hampers my drive to practice leetcode, build tech side projects, and practice interview questions.
On the positive side, I like being a subject matter expert and diving deep into a tech stack and code base and knowing it inside and out.
Do I regret it? I don't. The stability has given me time for non-tech hobbies and projects as well as the time needed to have a family.
It's a little tougher at my age and with a family to spend a lot of time on technical side projects but I make time for it. That would be my recommendation to you for concerns about personal growth.
But if you have a good stable job, why would you leave? It sounds like you make good money and have good balance. What is the point of growing as an engineer if it's not applicable to your job or a future job you want?
Just enjoy your good job until it turns bad, or until the tech would get so outdated as to make finding another job harder.
- that place ran out of money after 1.5 years
- back at the original place, but got bored after 6 years
- let a recruiter talk me into a potentially more interesting place even if it paid less, left before hitting the 4-month mark for 2x more money
- left after 2+ years because the boss was a ginormous asshole and I was colleagues with Hamas (UN)
I regret step 3. As I was leaving there, a colleague asked me, bewildered: "why don't you just do side projects if everything's so easy and you're so bored?" And he was fucking right. I'd be done with work by noon Tuesday and then go tinker on some open source thing on Github or write on Medium or saw stuff at the country place. And so much more money would roll right in every year.
> Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
I once worked for a company that had hired mostly people straight out of college. When the company faltered, they started looking for new jobs and were shocked at how much they were underpaid for their positions. But the company had a cool culture so it never occurred to them to test the market.
I almost never switch jobs for money, and for much of my career I've been underpaid. Which is OK. I have other priorities and accept it.
Even so, I'm on my 5th job in 25 years and my current position is the one I've held for the longest.
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.
Will be 9 years in December. I've been promoted three times and have the highest official position that an IC can have at this company.
LCOL area, $150-175k / year depending on bonus, fully remote, devil I know, good FTO policy and work/life balance, etc. Even some equity (that seems to have a lower-and-lower expected value as the years pass, but that's another story). Lousy health care insurance but apart from that they take pretty good care of us.
I don't have advice to offer, just echoing your concerns and adding a question: have you seen a drop off in recruiting emails / requests on linkedin that started around year 6-7 and got worse from there?
Around year 5 I was getting a dozen or more emails and linkedin messages a week. Now I get maybe one every two months, usually Contract or C2H offers at that.
Unclear if this is just the state of the market, my excessive time at a single company, the keywords / skills in my linkedin becoming stale - all of the above? I've tried to keep my resume / linkedin current with promotions, descriptions of what I'm working on etc. - nothing seems to help.
Would be curious to know what the experience of others are with >=6 years at the same place.
(Side note: I talked to a recruiter a few month ago who was telling me they lost clients left and right. Clients were mostly telling them they don’t have any issues finding talent on their own anymore)
In the first case (you can't leave because of stability) i would consider to sneak into grey areas of your company where you can indroduce something new (new build system, refactoring and whatever), it will require more effort than usual and depending on the company is not 100% sure thy will reward you for this (consider the reward to be the task itself), this way can grow by applying those skills to real life problem, if you don't have obligations i may say, leave and find something else but keep in mind that in 99% of the companies you will find the same situation.
Anyway, side projects/blogging is what i would advice in every case, just a disciplined 30 mins a day makes the differece.
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.
In 2011 the hotness was "puppet", coming from cfengine, so I spent time learning puppet, it's quirks and desired ways of working.
Then I "grew" into using Chef instead, being similar but very different.
Then I went to a company that had to start fresh, in a predominantly Windows environment, I tried "round-hole, square-peg"-ing chef into the situation. That failed and I found myself working with SaltStack (as its windows story, while slow, was workable).
Then Ansible became the defacto standard. For a long time I felt like I had stalled as an engineer because I did not pick up Ansible.
I returned to industry never having acquired those skills, but now almost nobody is using Ansible, it's all kubernetes, helm and if you're really new: NIX.
For 6 years I used SaltStack and felt like I wasn't growing, because the treadmill kept going without me. Turns out, I never needed it, I could just jump on the train whenever I needed.
See also: Linux administration pre vs post systemd. (and linux administration in general since everything is kubernetes based nowadays).
If the company values your work (not just by giving you an appropriate salary, but also acknowledging that you're a valuable asset and not just arbitrarily replaceable), gives you enough freedom and your colleagues are cooperative and nice to work with, why leave? You probably wouldn't leave your partner just because you've been together for a too long time, would you? ;-)
Sound advice, caveat that (for so many reasons) a shop that feels right and _stays that way_ is increasingly rare and precious.
However, the company I was at for a very long time did not significantly reward me for my loyalty. Just small annual raises, that's it. Like any workplace, there were problems and annoyances that did not go away. No place is perfect, after all.
I have changed jobs twice since then, and it's been a big upgrade both times. I thought it couldn't be better, but it got a lot better somehow. I've been very fortunate, and I was able to negotiate very hard from a position of strength.
If I could go back I would have changed jobs a couple more times.
However, if you have good domain knowledge and relationships, you might be in a good position to stay, and get into management, move around, etc. If you get laid off, you're get a pretty good severance (10 years * 1 month salary maybe).
If you look around at senior management, you'll probably see a bunch of people who have been there 10, 15, 20 years and know everyone and everything... maybe try to be one of those. That's not something you can get with the job hopping strategy.
No, I stayed with one employer for almost a decade, until the product was "done."
I was able to get into more interesting technical challenges, and had a lot more satisfaction, as a result. There was no way I could get to the deeper (and more satisfying) points if I hopped out after 2-3 years.
THAT BEING SAID: No job is perfect, and I had quite a few frustrating moments. If I had changed jobs, would I have liked the new job more? There's no way to know! I can only state that I've taken two very horrible jobs, and left quickly. I wouldn't want to take the "this is awesome, but can I do better" risk when I already have a good thing going.
At the same time, that salary is not bad for a lower cost of living area, so if it is stable and low-stress, that doesn't sound too bad.
I'd say that the question is whether or not growing as an engineer is a goal in your life, or if you are happy just working at your decent job, and then living your own life outside of work?
In retrospect, me unhappy + them unhappy = time to actively seek moving (which they'd still support back then); I stayed into a spiral of feedback => motivation => productivity => ... eventually I was laid off. I can't know how moving would have worked out but I regret not trying. [OT: and other passivity, not taking feedback seriously enough, sticking to WFH despite evidence it was challenging for me.]
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.
Honestly, sometimes Ansible or even Docker Swarm or something like Docker Compose are nice to use because they’re a better fit for a problem than one of the “mainstream” solutions (e.g. Kubernetes is great but has complexity to manage, unless you can pay someone else to provide a cluster for you).
Sadly, none of that matters when you’re looking for a job and the latest mainstream technologies reign supreme then.