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Why Programmers Shouldn’t Stay in One Company for a Long Time
At least in their first ten years
Recently I was talking with one of my programmers who joined my company two months ago. He has joined as a junior programmer, and he never stays in a company for more than one and a half years.
He is not alone. Most of the good programmers I have seen leave their jobs after 1–3 years unless they are the company's shareholders.
There are many reasons why developers do that, and it’s very normal. We will talk about why developers do that, but let’s see some statistics on how normal they are now.
Statistics
It was not long ago when an employee spent their entire life in a company. But things have changed now. It’s easier to find a new job now.
The scenario is still the same in some sectors. But in the technology world, it’s almost impossible to think that programmers/developers will stay in a job for more than 10–15 years.
You can find some cases where a programmer is in a job for ten or more years. But if you ask a programmer who has been in the industry for less than five years, most of them will say they are not interested in staying in a job for a long time.
Using Hackerlife, I made a graph that shows the data collected from more than ten thousand software engineers who live in San Francisco. The graph shows the median tenure of a programmer in some tech giants.
The visualization above focuses on large corporations. Almost 50% of the programmers of these large corporations leave in two years, and 75% leave around three to three and a half years.
Whereas the average tenure of other industry professionals is 4.2 years, this is very low. And the tech giants are actually more capable of keeping the programmers. The scenario is much worse in startups and medium-level tech companies.
My experiences with programmers
I have met many programmers during interviews as a recruiter. I always ask about…
