Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

I'd rephrase that as simply knowing the trade offs, knowing in which conditions your solution is valid, and estimating how long these conditions will be present, and then estimating what's next, and then taking that into account when choosing a solution (and trade offs).

Some people are absolutely terrible at estimating change and pace. Some people don't see when it's time to involve higher ups, and some don't know when to do the inverse of that.

> Those who don't stick around usually assume that any mistakes they find in their new company were due to incompetence.

That's too general, but also not completely unfair.

> Similarly, people who have not stuck around for years have never been instrumental in doing difficult culture transformations, or fixing long term architectural problems.

Again, too general. Maybe you get hired for a transformation/migration/rewrite project, and basically you have a good chance to be hired as the Captain for the mighty Failship.

And now let's discuss how all of the aforementioned are discussed to death in [Project] Management 101, and all of the following are discussed to death in [People] Management 101, yet what you write is still valid as ever.

> It's truly unfortunate that the industry rewards those who don't tackle these kinds of difficult problems.

Industry is full of incompetent showmen, useless middle managers, and a lot of extremely biased, uncompromising, uncooperative, power-hungry completely regular but overstressed underloved normal guys/gals.

Yet society has a freak approach to freaks, because people think oh fuck them, why can't they just behave, but when I freak out, it's because reasons. And when Joe from IT is a social trainwreck then it's ostracization time!

> The legacy is an industry where the problems are ubiquitous: flavour of the month architecture, my way or the highway bullying, either process of the month or "pragmatic" (aka ad hoc) processes, absolute disrespect for coworkers (I'm the only one with an ounce of sense).

Yes, indeed. And this largely happens in other industrial sectors, but since change is slower there, these problems usually don't present themselves so acutely.

This was a small company though. I'm sure larger companies where mid-level management is in charge of hiring, the strategy of taking competing offers to your boss works well.

I have also seen many people not able to attain such compensation boosts as well - the market is fierce for developers here, where if you don't measure up to a certain level, it can be difficult. The number of extremely smart people I have encountered in the tech industry here dwarfs anywhere else I have been (although percentage-wise not as high as where I went to grad school, UIUC).

However, those who spend a couple of years here (or even one if you choose right) can take those benefits with them when they relocate away from the Bay Area in compensation and knowledge. I once worked with a junior developer who spent a little under a year in the Bay Area - he used the opportunity to level up his skills, and when he moved back to NYC after the company fired him, he got into a unicorn and boosted his compensation dramatically (went from $130k base to over 100% increase in total comp - a little less than half in equity) since he was able to take the skills he learned working in code bases of various qualities at the company (very strong to very weak) and apply the knowledge to companies that have no concept of such knowledge or thought processes.

Just food for thought - obviously many factors come into play in choosing what to do, foremost being personal situation.

One thing employers need to realize is that this is 95% of jobs. I'm not a developer solely for money. But I am a developer at your company mainly because of money. I would have to imagine that the vast majority of people are in the jobs they're in because of the money.