Never hire job hoppers. Never. They make terrible employees.

As much as I support job changing (see my other comments), it's perfectly fine to stay at the same job for 24 years (heck, why not 50?) if it's really good, you're constantly growing, and can demonstrate a rising skill curve throughout.

Your extreme suspicion of anyone who stays for so long reveals a more fundamental truth about the software industry: very few companies manage to keep employees happy and challenged for so many years.

If you read my other comments in this discussion, you will surely see that I am in fact very pro-employee.

I also am, however, very pro truth.

Anyone who tells you he can have employees with low or zero productivity, for whatever reason, as select members of a small, highly leveraged startup - is either lying to you, or will fail unless he's extremely lucky not to have such employees.

If your team consists of 3 senior developers, and one of them stops producing, your project will likely be pushed back a third or more over schedule. This can easily kill a startup, since if your idea has any merit at all (which is your only chance of success anyway), then you have ten other teams competing against you to launch first.

I totally agree that employees should be respected and cared for, and that a key employee leaving a startup is generally the startup's fault. However, if someone doesn't work out, he will be let go. Not just by the employer - his co-workers will call for his head, since his problems (whether he's to blame for them, or not) endanger the entire team.

How about this: Employers who don't give proportional ownership of the company to workers are terrible employers and living off of your sweat.

There is also the situation of someone that wants to code and not be a manger, if they continue to receive interesting projects, are rewarded with pay rises accordingly, I wouldn't say that these people have no ambition, even though they are not really moving up into management ranks.

> Everyone goes into a job hoping they will work out so well at the company as to have no incentive to leave... at least for 5-10 years. All this is even more true for the best employees, because the number of desirable employers drops off faster than the number of talented people. (The best people, who want only to work at the best companies, have what is in a way the most difficult kind of job search.)

This is a great comment. While part of working for a start-up is being willing to do work that is "below" you (e.g., doing operations and release engineering from time to time, because it has to be done even though you're a software engineer), at one point you have to ask yourself: suppose this company sinks or has a layoff, will I still feel that I've learned and moved my career forward in the mean time? If the answer is no, politely bring it up with the management first (perhaps they don't realize you're underused and not learning), and if no concrete steps are taken to improve the situation, find another position.

The reason to bring it up before looking (or at least before submitting your resignation and accepting a job offer from elsewhere) is not to be tempted to stay when given a counter offer. If there's a genuine desire to retain you long-term, they should have responded when you brought the issue up; otherwise, they just have a business-critical project they want you to finish and can then let you go.

I do have one comment to make: when selecting a job, don't select by thinking "which company will be the most stable and profitable?". Think, instead, "if all of these companies were to tank in a year, my stock becoming worthless, in which one would I have learned the most?". The "paradox" here is that the interesting working and continuous learning will make one feel engaged and fulfilled, leading them to stay longer and contribute more to the company, becoming less likely to be laid off and earning respect from coworkers and business partners, leading to employment opportunities in case of failure.

Compensation and the perception of a company (especially a start-up) as possessing a unique business idea can also cloud people's brains. A lesson I've learned is that if I can't decide between several offers, as they all seem the "same" (in terms of quality of the engineering team, technology used, culture, interesting-ness of their focus), I should pick the one that seems the least financially lucrative to be sure I'm not being "blinded" by the money.

Paul Bucheit's experience at Google (taking a paycut to join Google, despite being convinced they will fail) illustrates this. He didn't go in thinking "I will build my career and become rich here", he went in thinking "I will learn tons here".