Ask HN: Are you a “lifer”? If so why?

[leet_thow]

I started at a mid-cap household name company at the start of the pandemic and don't see myself leaving of my own accord until I retire for a few reasons:

1. Work is fully remote

2. We have excellent work / life balance

3. Company's stock has weathered this years storm

4. Interviewing is a horror show best avoided, besides...

5. Job market is weakening with no recovery in sight

6. I'm in my early 40s

7. Startup success (which I've had previously as an early employee) is going to be rare in the coming years

[neilv]

I suspect that a lot of people would be happy to be a "lifer" in the right situation. (Good company, good work, good colleagues, good respect, good TC.)

A barrier is that situation doesn't occur often. I think it could, but not many companies seem to be run that way. The stereotypical tech company, for example, seems to be driven by growth at all costs, and there's a kind of mercenary thinking by both company and employees, towards each other. Which is intertwined with the weird dynamic in which folk wisdom is that companies will pay more to hire someone than they will to retain.

Another barrier is that a worker opting out of this -- to go to a mythical modest little oasis company run by a CEO with a heart of gold who will live forever -- can be difficult, due to the large number of high-TC other workers in the field. In the US, if a worker is making relatively a lot less than others, they're at a disadvantage for housing, healthy living in various ways, opportunities for their children, etc.

So even lifer-inclined people will be motivated to play along with our current situation of chasing FAANGs, hierarchies of people all targeting promo criteria and metrics rather than company and team success, job-hopping whenever the right bump of TC and title comes along, rehearsing for fratbro interview rituals, etc. (Maybe with a bust cycle of a lot of VC exit schemes, we'll start to get better, but a lot of workers and companies have known nothing else, and there's a lot to unlearn.)

[duped]

> good TC

Not to get too mopey but I went through the phase of "sell out and do things that make me unhappy and stressed for more money" a few years ago and while it put me in the position I am today financially, it came at great personal expense. I lost friends and partners by moving, lost years of close contact with family late in their lives, and the stress put a physical toll on my body and mental toll on my psyche.

I think we're quite naive at a young age - our eyes glaze over at the massive amount of money we can make but don't value the non-monetary cost. Your youth is finite and you don't know what you've missed until it's gone.

[serial_dev]

> companies will pay more to hire someone than they will to retain

It's painfully true very often.

I worked on a team where I was one of the most proactive people on the team and was one of the top performers (well, at least IMO).

I joined the company with an already relatively low salary because in the middle of covid shutdowns, the the startup I worked for didn't look stable enough, so I joined the bigger company even if their offer was the same as my previous salary.

After almost two years later, I asked what can I do and what's the process for salary increase, they told me that "sure, we can raise your salary"...

BUT:

* the company only raises salaries once a year, and that comes next year April, so I'll have to wait 7 months

* usual increase is 5%, if I'm very lucky, I might get 10%

* this increase is not given every year, so if I get it this time, I'll have to wait two more years for my next 5-10% raise

* I'll have to go through a long evaluation process with HR, which means lots of extra meetings spent begging and explaining that I'm actually pretty good

They think this is all acceptable while I had multiple offers with very little negotiation, all offering me 20%+ increase.

In the end, I got a 50% increase and on top of that a significant amount of stock options from a company that really has a potential to grow and go public.

Yeah, I can't be a lifer with those conditions.

[KineticLensman]

> I suspect that a lot of people would be happy to be a "lifer" in the right situation.

I twice stayed in a specific company for more than ten years (11 and 13 respectively). In both cases I left (retired in the second example) because the company concerned had changed around me. I'd also gone native with the customers, and was seen internally as a domain expert. I enjoyed this, but it meant that I began to be firewalled away from internal strategic decision making to avoid conflicts of interest. This in turn reduced my visibility to senior decision makers, and thus promotability.

[mcv]

> I suspect that a lot of people would be happy to be a "lifer" in the right situation. (Good company, good work, good colleagues, good respect, good TC.)

Exactly. I think I could be a lifer in the right circumstances, but I'm not and probably never will be. I think I could have been a lifer at my second job; it was in many ways a great place, but eventually I realised I didn't like the content of my work much, I was constantly doing the exact same thing for a new customer, and all the interesting stuff was being done by new hires. It was time to leave.

48 now, and I'm currently at a project where I think I might stick around for a while, but it's undoubtedly going to end some day, and then I'll find something else again.

[kqr]

> A barrier is that situation doesn't occur often.

Also, unfortunately, that "this, too, shall pass". At one point in my life I was in a situation where I would consider staying, if not for life, at least a very long time. Then for external reasons, much of management was replaced and while at first it seemed fine, eventually I ended up going somewhere else.

[novok]

IMO your most likely to find 'lifer' types at a FAANG than many others. Job-hopping usually stops becoming an easy promo system once you've hit staff anyway.

[bigmattystyles]

Forgive my ignorance, what is TC?

[mikeortman]

Lifer until the benefits that matter to me disappear.

I can't stress how much #6 impacts what makes someone a 'lifer'. By the time you are in 35+ and you've been in tech your entire career, you lean a few important life lessons that you witness the less experienced (both career and life) do all the time.

The bar of compensation is almost always goes up as you progress early in your career. You get used to your standard of living. Next thing you know, you want more money. Getting a promotion or new job that bumps your income, that standard of living naturally goes up. It's hard NOT to go on fancier vacations, upgrade your Honda to a Porsche, hire landscaper/housekeeper/dog walker, buy a bigger house, etc. Eventually, you run into a situation that throws a wrench in disposable income and you have to lower that bar. Then you realize money isn't the most important thing in your career. You learn that the difference between a total comp of $150k to $250k isn't as life changing compared to going from $75k to $150k, so what is the purpose of fighting for more?

When you are 35+, job stability is super important. You might have a family, a hefty savings/retirement account, etc. Whats most important is that work/life balance and not that RSU grant next quarter. Once you find a company that makes you comfortable, and you reach a level of seniority that isn't overwhelming/stressful, stay.

[dang]

I cringe to think of myself as a "lifer" but I've been doing this for 10 years so draw your own conclusions.

Above all, the thing that makes me stay is having creative control and freedom over how I do my job. I've done enough things to know how rare that is, and how frustrating it is not to have it, and what a blessing it is to have the trust of the people I work for and with. It's so important to me that I feel it as a different baseline state in my body.

[sixstringtheory]

Wow, don’t think I’ve seen a comment from you as not-a-mod! But what’s so cringe about lifering? After having jumped from job to job every few years, I’m so tired of doing the first couple years of a job over and over and over. I’d rather get deeper into a product, build deeper automation and analysis, participate in building more of the culture. Maybe that doesn’t happen in practice and tech churn still keeps people on a hamster wheel of constant rebuilding, I wouldn’t know :/

But hey, thanks for all the great work here!

[modeless]

I hope they pay you very well. The value YC has gotten from HN has got to be immense and I imagine that without you HN would be a very different place.

[edanm]

Wow, an honest and interesting take. Moderating (managing?) HN seems like a dream job in many respects, I can imagine many people being super envious of your position. It's funny to think that you "cringe" about thinking yourself as a lifer in this position, I'd be hanging on to this job with everything I've got :)

I do understand your feeling though, even the funnest situation can at some point stop letting you grow as a person, which is why a job you can also grow in is crucial. That and the creative control / independence you mentioned are both very important IMO.

Side note: many people seem to misunderstand why tech companies tend to seek growth. One of the reasons, even in non-startup companies, is that companies that grow mean growth opportunities for employees, which means better employees and keeping your good employees. Companies that don't grow tend to eventually lose their best employees, because there's literally no room for growth in their job.

[thryowayway]

There is a joy associated with acquiring a high value product. There is a different and greater joy associated with acquiring a high value product which is made be people that have fully enjoyed making that product. From what I can gather you were not alone but made an outsized contribution to this product (HackerNews), and while I can’t know your experience, it sure seems that there was a lot of joy experienced in its making. I’m happy we can both be served by this equilibrium :)

[zxcvbn4038]

Things can change very suddenly - new person joins who makes everyone miserable, company goes in a new direction, market changes or sours on company, advertising snafu, etc.

Great that you are happy where you are but my advice is to keep your skills fresh and push yourself to learn and experiment with things in your personal time - if you do not the opportunity to do so at work.

I just finished interviewing people for an SRE position and it was just staggering the number of people who could be described as having been in the room when someone else did something but could not talk about any aspect of what was done in detail. Several people I interviewed had gotten into Java coding in the 90s but had done nothing to grow their skillset since. One person spent three years manually making S3 buckets in the AWS GUI - no effort to learn the cli, cloudformation, or terraform - just came in every day and waited for Jira tickets telling him to make buckets. You don’t want to be any of those people when the time comes.

[mancerayder]

Unfortunately salaries rot. Like vegetables in the fridge. I've been doing this a long time, I can assure you that most if not almost all companies let your salary go through attrition by itself with inflation, while new hires get paid market rates.

You can observe this as a manager, when you can see the salaries of people and watch the pay inequity get worse and worse to punish people who have been there a while.

I don't know what mechanism causes this, but it's likely related to leverage: when you don't work there, you have leverage to ask for more. Now that you're there, especially if you are loyal, they have the leverage unless another offer comes along.

[NoGravitas]

> Unfortunately salaries rot. Like vegetables in the fridge. I've been doing this a long time, I can assure you that most if not almost all companies let your salary go through attrition by itself with inflation, while new hires get paid market rates.

This is one reason that co-workers should absolutely talk about their salaries. Especially when management tells them not to. This is one of those problems that has a known solution, which is collective bargaining. It's just that every programmer thinks they're a special 10x snowflake and that they're going to lose out on their good-boy treats if they don't compete with their co-workers.

[JeremyNT]

I'm maybe a lifer like the OP. Similar age, some similar concerns. I haven't really decided yet, but my motivation to put myself back on the market has dramatically declined.

I've been... OK to let my salary rot a little. I think it's an implicit part of the lifer "bargain."

I've found, though, that you can sometimes get a correction by talking to management about market rates and where your salary stands (without making any implied threats or anything, just raising the concern).

The HN mindset is that, if you want more money, you need to switch jobs. But you can't get what you don't ask for, and if you're a strong contributor, you might be surprised at how responsive your management can be. A long term employee brings their own form of value that management may well recognize.

A disclaimer here is that I work in higher ed, where programmer salaries will never be competitive with for-profit tech companies. This is kind of a given. But I have observed that I can at least keep my salary commensurate with jobs at other institutions.

[TheCondor]

wanting to work there hurts your value. That’s just logic, if you are happy and want to be there, they don’t have to work as hard to keep you.

Smooth operations do too, if your group is running like a top and doesn’t need a lot of attention, then it typically doesn’t get the attention. Good managers will point that out and try to reward that but it fades.

IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc.. have all come up with different strategies to rank people, they tend to be disliked by many and often create incentives to be less than the best teammates. It’s hard. It’s very hard.

[marktangotango]

The phenomena been written about as "Who moved my cheese?" A lot of people value comfort and reliability over chasing higher salaries and more reward. But the "cheese" gets depleted over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F

There's also an aspect of the "Dead Sea Effect". The people who stay and settle for the below market salary also tend to be the less talented and/or motivated. I've seen this and done this. In low performance teams and organizations it's easy to "rest and vest" and keep a good work life balance.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

[JohnBooty]

Skills rot too. Any company may let us go at any moment, for reasons that might be entirely outside our control.

Any developer should have a plan for this and it has to involve keeping one's skills reasonably current. In my experience this has been extremely difficult to do while sticking with a single company for an extended amount of time. Though certainly it can be possible, I don't think it's the norm.

[myth_drannon]

It's just basic math. You can't increase salaries up to the market rate for all 10,000 employees. Most employees will stay and accept 3% yearly increases and only few will leave and then the company will pay higher salary for the newly hired employee. #replaced employees < #lifers.

[roland35]

I think people make the mistake of thinking that 100% retention is even desirable. The company isn't paying me what I am _worth_, they are paying me what I am _worth to them_. If my unique combination of skills is a better fit and more valuable to another company, then it is more worthwhile for me to move on and it is not worth my old company to pay me above what they can afford for the role. Plus some turnover and fresh ideas are always healthy.

Just look at baseball teams. Could the Cleveland Guardians have paid Francisco Lindor what his market rate was? Maybe, but it would have blown up the budget for the rest of the team. So he was traded to New York for some cheaper, younger (and less skilled at present) players which fit the team's plan. Win-win in this case, obviously there are many bad examples too!

[vineyardmike]

> You can observe this as a manager, when you can see the salaries of people and watch the pay inequity get worse and worse to punish people who have been there a while.

If you’re the manager… do you let this happen intentionally? Why not fight it?

I constantly hear how people want to retain their employees since it’s cheaper than new hires. Why not take actions to reward the loyalty?

[throwawaysleep]

Yeah, I don't see how you could be a lifer without having your standard of living collapse compared to peers over time because of that. If you want market rate, you must move.

Heck, I don't get the incentive to really work all that hard for your employer because of it. You are leaving anyway.

[snowwrestler]

The reverse of this is that if you find a place that does keep their salaries up with the market over time, then you might have a good opportunity to be a long-term employee if you want to.

It's not like it is hard for employees to check their salaries against the market these days. Aside from the websites and local communities that exist for this purpose, you can apply and interview at other jobs to see where the offers come in.

[JohnBooty]

Skills rot too. Any company may let you go at any moment, for reasons that might be entirely outside your control. Any developer should have a plan for this.

[Dave3of5]

I'm the opposite (a non lifer ?). The problem I've had is that most of the places I've been at didn't promote but rather got you to take on more work and responsibility even though you've not been paid for it. That means when I was a junior I was doing a mid levels job, mid level I was doing a seniors job, senior I was doing a principles job.

How do I know this? Because when I interviewed and moved position I got the promotion easily off of the back of explaining what I was doing day to day.

I guess the summary was I haven't worked at places that actually promote at pace.

I'd also never started with a high salary for example my first programming job was in a big famous city at £15k ($18k) per year salary. Couple that with very low yearly pay increases that meant the only way to get a reasonable pay increase was to move jobs often.

I've now got into this as a habit to move jobs more often.

That's not to say I haven't been at a single job for a good amount of time, I've managed to stay at 2 jobs almost 5 years each. I also don't job hop every year my average tenure is just under 3 years.

Although I do admit I now enjoy moving:

“A person needs new experiences. It jars something deep inside, allowing them to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

[throwaway2037]

Definitely, you will be paid more with careful, selective moves. I have mentioned it in previous posts: The key is to find the maximum "move rate" (considering local cultural/social/profession factors). Move at that rate or just below it to maximise your economic return. Another dumb thing: It is so much easier to get a pay raise or promotion by moving. When you are leaving, a bunch of lame middle managers play the loyalty card or worse offer "soft" promises of future pay rises and promotions. Tell them to GTFO. And don't do exit interviews. Those only benefit the org -- nothing for you. If absolutely necessary, play sick on the day of the exit interview (have done it before!).

Plus, people who move more are more adaptive to new environments because (1) experience from different org and (2) forced to adapt to new org. The lifers in my experience are mostly comfortable, (somewhat) coasting, trying to navigate the politics. I have no issue with lifers. Most are focused on the good life outside work (family, friends, etc.) I respect that. Each time I change jobs, I try to find one lifer/long-termer, so I can get the "house view" when I need it. Then I can better judge if "that hill is worth dying over". :)

[hakfoo]

I work for a low-profile fintech, 100% remote, since 2018. I see no particular need to move elsewhere.

I appreciate that it's a task that actually has real customers and revenues, in a firm that's about 20 years old and showing profitability and growth. It doesn't look like there's signs of "oh, the acquisition we were building towards vanished and we ran out of runway, kthxbai, grab a few logo T-shirts on the way out." In particular, I like the spot I'm currently at because it's sort of the firm's core competence, so I'm in the centre of real value generation.

It also keeps me well away from front end, which I should not be allowed near due to a personal design sense that is, at best, Soviet.

I could probably make more money elsewhere, but I hate interviewing and tooting my own horn. I only grudgingly left my last position (10 years on) when it became abundantly obvious the firm was in terminal death throes. They were clearly in a "how much do you need electricity" phase of operations. I brought in a pizza for lunch for my team, and there was a distinct "I haven't eaten in three days" vibe coming from some of them. When I left, they had shorted me at least 9000 USD in unpaid salary.

[JohnDeHope]

Yes I am a lifer.

I prioritize personal investment and social engagement over raw salary income. I could find a better paying job tomorrow, within my current company. I like being up to my elbows in the business problem, and the best way to get a seat at the table is to have been around long enough to earn it.

My spouse and I both work at the same company, which greatly increases the sticky-ness of it for me. I can book family meetings with them from within my work calendar. That's worth a lot.

I've spend 15 years ingratiating myself across multiple teams, and multiple larger organizational slices. I have a lot of contacts to fall back on. If I needed a new job tomorrow, I could find one within the company, without having to go outside.

A lot of your items are "of the moment" and could change tomorrow. I wouldn't bank on them remaining stable.

[screwturner68]

I'm a lifer my self (21 years so for). The thing is I'm not even close to senior, we have lots of guys with 30+ years sitting at the head of the table. The biggest problem I see is with the older lifers not wanting to leave, not carrying their weight, not keeping up with changes and doing the bare minimum required of them. They are a wealth of knowledge, knowledge about things we haven't seen in a decade or more. I understand why they stay, they are paid very well and not much is expected of them but they are also 70+ years old with full pensions & 401Ks doing the job that a college grad could do. To me it's not fair to the young guys who we should be training and mentoring, instead a guy in his late 40's is the youngest guy on the team....sorry for my rambling but the point I'm trying to get to is longevity shouldn't be the reason you are at the table, it should be about what you bring to the table. That said like you having a wealth of contacts is invaluable -who needs to open a ticket when you can call the developer who you've known for a decade or more and who's happy to take your call.

[saagarjha]

Curious what kinds of things you're booking on your work calendar? I can see blocking off time but I'm not entirely sure I would be comfortable putting any details for family meetings on my work calendar…

[fullstackchris]

Point 5 is painfully misled and I'm getting real sick of seeing this trope over and over again. Just because we are witnessing some layoffs of absolutely rediculously foamed over billion dollar tech giants in no way reflects the software job market at large.

Unless, all you read all day is the same crap that everyone else reads all day, then yes, you would be led to beleive that 'the end is nigh' for software engineers.

Great site tracking all the layoffs: https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

[fcatalan]

I work at an 800 year old institution. I have been here for 20 years. My wife works here too.

Salary isn't great in global terms, but puts us within the top 20% national household incomes. Enough no not really care about money.

We work 35 hours per week, pretty flexible schedule, about half from home and have more vacation days than we know what to do with.

The work is a bit monotonous and the office politics terrible, to the point of giving us depressing "golden cage" feelings sometimes, but when we take a peek outside, it doesn't look better than what we have. So we'll probably stay for the next 20 years.

[fergie]

> 800 year old institution

> The work is a bit monotonous and the office politics terrible

> but when we take a peek outside, it doesn't look better than what we have. So we'll probably stay for the next 20 years.

Hello fellow university employee! :)

[justahuman74]

> 800 year old institution

is this a university?

[drewg123]

One of the things I'm seeing in your post is basically a lack of negatives. But what about positives? Do you actually like your job? If not for that list, would you stay or be out the door in a heartbeat?

I'm a lifer at Netflix (coming up on 8 years), and I have a lot of the same lack of negatives (remote, good work/life balance, early 50s, etc). But more than any of those, I stay because Netflix gives me an opportunity to work on things I'm passionate about (network performance and CPU efficiency) and allows me to work on them in the open source OS that I love (FreeBSD), and allows me to contribute that work to the community. I like and respect my colleagues, and I feel like I'm liked and respected as well. Its the best job I've ever had, by far and I feel incredibly lucky. So I just can't imagine leaving until / unless something changes.

I'm not wearing blinders, so I do talk to recruiters regularly. But either the jobs just don't interest me, or they can't match the Netflix top of market, or they don't allow remote, etc.

[rcarmo]

I thought I was a lifer back when I worked in telco. I had a 10+ year career when Vodafone 360 happened (look it up, Vodafone tried to invent their own iPhone/Android ecosystem atop LiMo - unsurprisingly, it did not end well) and everything I had invested in career-wise became meaningless overnight and turned into the longest, hardest slog of my life (I spent 2 years trying to fix what I could of it).

Then I moved into a local telco and spent a few more years there until it was acquired by a buy-and-hack operation that is still trying to sell the pieces, and I moved to my current employer.

It has been seven years now, and every couple of years something major happens and I end up moving internally, sometimes on my own but lately because I'm asked to follow someone into a new org to rebuild it.

I'm in my 50s now, am fully remote, match most of your list (except I have a 4-6 hour offset from most of my team), and yet I don't really feel like a lifer because I want to do stuff that I find _gratifying_, and most of the tech industry is just running around after shiny things without considering the outcomes.

So every now and then I sit down and talk to people to assess what I should be doing next.

Right now, _everyone_ is telling me to stick it out given the current situation, but the engineer in me is itching to do different things - stuff that I might not be able to do in the current context, no matter how "comfortable" it is.

But the main point I would like to make is that you should be aware the world moves without you, and the situation may change drastically in only a few weeks.

[jupp0r]

> Job market is weakening with no recovery in sight

What are you talking about? Unemployment is at historic lows, the job market hasn't been this good in a long time. Sure, some ad-revenue based companies are laying off some workers, but the market is great.

[ok_coo]

The org I work at has existed for over a hundred years. It's probably not going away for the foreseeable future. The work, my coworkers, the perks and work environment (low stress) are all great. The only thing that's not at a high-level is the compensation.

Sometimes I think about getting a new job for a pay bump, but I'm not sure I could compete at a "real" tech company anyway, I'm just a regular/average dev and I almost left the field entirely after I burned out from my previous job.

So, that said, I might end up a lifer (already in my 40s). I love my job but I know the circumstances can change at any point if I get a new boss or the work climate changes.

I don't think I'd want to stay until retirement at a regular ol' company or corporation where I'm making someone else rich.

Just my 2c.

[sam_goody]

I spend most of my day as a volunteer for a youth group.

I have been working here for the past 14 years, and hope to be lifer.

Practically, there are many reasons that this may stop - I don't get paid and may need more working hours elsewhere, they may suggest I retire (am already a grandfather), etc.

I also have been programming part time for longer than that and hope that continues as well.

I recommend that anyone who could, to take on a do-good project and consider it your main occupation [even if it only gets an hour a day], and then go lifer on that.

[theshrike79]

My longest stint in a single company was 9.5 years, it started as a small software consulting company and was bought by a government-controlled telecom/software company.

The merger went surprisingly well and they brought in some good processes (and some bad), but mostly we were left alone to do our thing.

At a point I saw that they didn't have a big enough support organisation personnel-wise. I had to organise team events, manage sick leaves, do 1:1's with my team, be an architect, a salesman and a software developer in one.

In short, eventually the compensation didn't match the stress of the job.

I found a job through a friend in a multi-national mobile games company and left on good terms.

The gaming company spent what equaled to a "large project" in my old company just for audience testing unreleased games. Marketing budgets amounted to the yearly turnover of my old company. My pay doubled from what I used to have in a few years and my first bonus was bigger than all the bonuses I received in the past 10 years in my previous job put together. And I got actual stock options for the first time.

Money doesn't make you happy, but hoo boy it's nice to get it - and it makes the tiny inconveniences easier to take (like having early morning/late evening calls to the other side of the planet).

[allthecybers]

I'd like to be a lifer, or as close as possible to a lifer in today's economy.

Like the OP I'm embarking on my 40s. I'm into my sixth year at a FAANG. Staying at the same company probably made me miss out on some of the career and salary growth of the last several years, but I work in a specialized technical niche that I really enjoy and have a good manager and team.

Part of my motivation for staying is the economy, but the other part is just being a senior team member with a significant amount of subject matter expertise, trust and autonomy. Being able to set boundaries around work/life balance and role scope is super valuable to me.

My spouse and I joke that FAANG life is as hard as we want to work, so we might just stick it out until we are ready to semi-retire and then work on something more low key.

[kashyapc]

Like dang[1], I too cringe to see myself as a "lifer" but here I'm: I joined Red Hat when I was 23. Now I'm 37. So I've been at it for 14 years (and still ticking).

In those 14 years, I've moved continents, changed citizenship, changed dramatically as a person (I hope for the good). So far I've managed to keep the freshness at work (modulo the difficult times). Red Hat's engineering culture fits me like a glove.

The ability to give direction to my own work and the culture are the big factors that keep me in. I'm sure I'm losing out on some better compensation elsewhere, but there are other variables that matter to me. Also, I've been a remotee for the last 8 years.

So far I've been responding to recruiters with "Thank you for reaching out. I'm gainfully employed, I wish you best of luck in your search." As a wonderful colleague of mine once said, "but my umbilical cord isn't tied to Red Hat, though". :-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33797196

[pram]

Actually COVID ruined my lifer plans, it absolutely demolished my previous company. Resulted in insane/pointless re-orgs and just killed the culture. It became so unpleasant I followed my current manager elsewhere.

It's experiences like this that make me question the wisdom of staying in a place for a decade. It's hard to see things you enjoyed wither away and die.

[g051051]

> don't see myself leaving of my own accord

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You could do everything right, and the environment changes, or financial issues hit, or you get bad managers.

I worked at a company for 22 years. In the early 2010's I transitioned to full-time WFH and did that for 7 years. Then new management came in, they rebuilt the office as open-plan, a bunch of Agile cultists took over, and they summarily cancelled all WFH. Then the organization ground to a halt, crushed into immobility by Agile. Then they laid off my entire division, new hires to senior managers, about 300 people.

So, in the space of just a few years, it went from a fantastic place to work, to a miserable place to work, to not wanting me around. Absurdly, they paid (and are still paying) a huge amount of money to go away because 22 years got a great severance package, and I'd been there long enough that they're on the hook for "retiree" benefits.