I've worked for the same company, a large technology firm, for a little under twenty years starting in my early 20s. I've changed jobs inside that company four times and changed locations three times. The ability to change jobs but not employers has helped a lot.

I have enjoyed it, for the most part. If you like the thrill or engagement or whatever other descriptor you want to use of smaller companies or startups, then it is definitely not that. What it has been is rock-solid stable, interesting, and good benefits and pay.

I've debated looking for another job several times, usually on crappy days, but I still come back to I've been at this company for a long time, I know how it works, I have many of the benefits of tenure (more vacation time is one, that managers and other groups give me more of the benefit of the doubt is another), and maybe a little bit of me being "boring." I don't want to change for the sake of change and I'm happy to go to work, do something I mostly like, get paid well for it, and then go home and live my life separate from work.

Hope that gives you some insight into why someone would stay at the same employer for so long.

The longest company I worked for was one I built. And I probably should have quit earlier. ;)

I have worked with a lot of people who are primarily lifers at their company. My role has often been that of a change agent (outsider / consultant hired specifically because I’m an outsider).

One thing I have seen consistently is that the real power and influence sits with those with tenure. The older a organization the more critical tenured employees are to its operations.

Young people often think that they can gain influence or freedom to do what they enjoy by changing jobs and getting a better title, only to run into the “old guard” who refuse to accept change.

But there is another more reliable method. And this works in large organizations best, becoming a trusted influencer...trust comes from doing your work to the best of your ability and keeping a positive attitude.

Good leaders are often taught to find the influencers when joining a new organization. So the longer you stay, the more influence you gain. And influence gives you the ability to determine what you want to do. There tends to be a lot of turnover at the top and bottom of an organization. Making those in the middle very important.

This is so critical to established companies that they have all sorts of programs designed to retain people identified as important once they have gotten past the initial audition period. IBM and Intel are famous for their leadership development on both technical and management fronts.

If you want to enjoy the perks of being around a company for awhile, you need to go to bigger organizations or companies with mature management that are setup to facilitate this.

Some people want to work on new things / startups every other year. Nothing wrong with that. But when you have a company full of people like that, the culture isn’t going to be conducive to doing the things required to keep people around for the long term.

I don’t understand view points like this. Why the constant itch for change? What’s wrong with just going to work, doing your job, collecting the check, and going home? People are so caught up in the rat race and keeping up with each other. Career does not have to be the definition of success.

I wish I could give perspective on working in the same job for decades but I’m only 7 years in. 34 to go and zero intention on changing employers or careers unless I have to.

I've done a bunch of 2 years, a 5 year and an 8 year. Staying longer at a place you like is great. I don't believe there are no new challenges, after a few years you have more knowledge and authority to do the major work on a big system. Choose an area you like and work on it - maybe the front end or the back end tuning, or build pipeline, or monitoring - there are a million things that need doing. Alternatively you get to choose on refactorings, rewrites, and new architecture. I think you have to be honest and confident enough to say you want to do it, or often just start doing it. If you're the new guy on the team you can't really do that, the guys who've been around can.

The other benefit is getting to know business and management. Usually they turn over less frequently, they love someone who actually is committed to the business and they can rely on.

The culture of a place that looks after people and has longer term employees is great. Less turnover means less interviewing, fewer clueless newbies that need training and fixing up after. My favorite project had 30 devs and 25 of us had been there for more than 5 years - no one need hand holding or did stupid things, we were super productive and everyone enjoyed a great time.

For some people it can be easier to get promoted by moving, I'd suggest the opposite - just start doing the job you want to do, usually no one will complain.

Finally you said people you work with moved on to "better places" is that grass is greener or you are always working for your second choice employers?

Oh - one last thing. If you have a family its great to have a steady work schedule and you can concentrate on looking after babies and not worry about extra job hunting stress. Find a place you like and enjoy the stability.

Not decades but ~8 years...

Good: you know the company politics. You know who to ask for anything, who not to trust, who you can joke with and who you can’t. You can talk back to higher-ups, tell them what you want to do rather than being told what to do, bend the rules a little or set your own rules. You can pull from prior experience - “I know you don’t think that estimate is right, but we did something very similar five years ago and it overran because of this same risk factor.”

Bad: you know the company politics. You’re embroiled in every stupid “this guy doesn’t like that guy!!” management issue. Unless you have remarkable self-control, it’s all impossible to stay out of. Also, people either come to you for every tiny matter because you know everything, or they see you as unapproachable and won’t talk to you when they really need to, forcing you to chase them. Either way, in total, RIP coding time.

I've been working at the same place since December 1984. I am working at Kennedy Space Center. I have worked for 5 different contractors and on about 20 different projects. I have basically been a mainly a system administrator for an Alpha Micro AMOS, OS-9, Apollo DomainIX, SUN Solaris, various linux systems and for the last 20 years Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, 6 and 7. I have administered individual workstations, servers, clusters, SAN systems.

The secret is to always be trying to learn enough to move the next new project. My goal everyday is to try to learn something new each and every day.

I've been at my current company for over a decade. The company has changed a lot over the years, going from a large public company when I joined, to private, back to public again recently.

The reasons I stayed are simple: I've learned a tonne, changed roles and responsibilities, interacted with many interesting characters, and continue to grow personally. No matter the tenure, if you aren't being challenged then your boredom will affect your performance.

Create new challenges that solve problems within your organization, and if that doesn't work by all means strike out for greener pastures.

Best of luck.

At the 5 year mark, I started developing a sense of jealousy towards the new people: I am envious that they come in and are overwhelmed with all our technology stack and they spend months learning it, and you can see their knowledge of the system grows day by day, whereas for me it reached a plateau since I already know how all those systems work, for the most part.

I try to work on greenfield projects where I have to research a new topic from scratch, which sometimes is exciting, but in the end it’s not the same, so I’ll likely not wait until the 6 year mark and I’ll jump ship sometimes this year.

I don't think working in the same company for decades is really an issue.

I just wouldn't recommend you do the same job for more than ~24 months.

Bit of a rambling reply, speaking from experience.

Companies with tech departments (that will cater to this crowd) that are around that long tend to be maybe big, somewhat stable, somewhat largish revenue companies.

It is not the norm for people to stay that long at a company (tech company especially) these days. Lots of coworkers come in and eventually leave (by their own choice, sometimes not). You end up staying in touch with the ones that you like. You end up cherishing the people you work with, because some of them might have been there as long as you. You end up going to their children's birthdays, and celebrate holidays with them. They can be life friends once you share that amount of time with them.

Leadership drifts in and out. Passing the baton that often ends up diluting the company culture to a point where the business itself becomes its own organism, carried by its own inertia and making very clinical decisions about its own survival. Some of these decisions begin to weigh down on you. I guess it's true what they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

Some good things - you have a lot of time to design, implement, and deliver on projects. You can wind up with quite an eclectic portfolio of internal initiatives that you've delivered. Many of these can be quite fun. Benefits are good over that period of time. Many companies end up delivering benefits on a graded scale based on seniority. I'm up to 6 weeks of paternity leave if I ever want to use it.

Assuming you joined near the top of a payband, years of merit/cost of living increases can give you golden handcuffs. You get a lot of time to build wealth, but without careful planning you will not financially be able to leave. You become even more beholden, and less willing to leave over time. Victim of your own comfort? Actually, maybe not comfort. Inertia?

There's some thoughts. The people around you, and the company change over time.

I've been at the current job for almost 16 years now, joining when we were about 90 people and now we're at over 15,000. We're a manufacturing company that started out without in-house manufacturing, then added a few of our own factories, then bought some other companies in our space (some of which had factories, some of which are entirely outsourcers).

Over that time, I've held countless different roles, starting as IC, moving into leadership roles; we've expanded product lines, expanded geographies for both production and development, evolved tech several times as well. I've worked in development, tech operations, manufacturing, and some cross-cutting roles. (I joined before AWS or public cloud computing was a thing; my group is now almost [98+%] entirely cloud-based.)

If we are able to continue to thrive as a business, I expect this might be the last place I work. I could retire now and we'd be OK, but with two kids in elementary school, I'm realistically way better off working another 10-ish years as I get plenty of PTO and a 4-week additional paid break every 5 years.

Same company, many different jobs (which seems to be a pattern of sorts in the other responses). Pay is OK; I could make slightly more at a FAANG (or at least at the FxAxG subset that have local offices), but I take pride in what we've built from essentially the ground up, love the LT I work on and a portion of the company's success is traceable reasonably clearly to what my group does and how well we do it. If we fail to thrive, it will be at least partly my fault.

Somewhat ironically, I didn't even want to join this company back in 2003; I was just at the worst job I'd ever held, essentially being bribed to keep a chair warm and do nothing for 6 months until some outsized bonuses got paid out. The day those bonuses hit, there was a line of people waiting to resign to the director of software. I think I was #6 that day and he was exhausted from hearing the same story. This company wasn't sexy, their tech was fairly weak, they didn't have the best reputation, but when I got into the interview process, I was blown away by the calibre of people working there and the vision of the CTO/CEO. I went from "I'll take anything because it beats getting paid well to do nothing" to "Hey, this is interesting!" and it's only gotten better since.

I've been working for the same company for 12 years, same role, same position.

Why did i stay? i was the only dev for like 8 years, being responsible for your work and not being able to blame someone for legacy code is an eye opener.

it makes you love your craft even more, i joined to start a port, turns out this porting process never ends (I like improving my own code).

I’ve been at my current company since 2005. I’ve changed disciplines twice, business groups (1000s of employees) three times, teams four+ times, roles at least three times (IC, Tech Lead, Manager). Many smaller re-orgs occurred in between and a few too many office moves.

In short, in a huge company there are challenges at all levels of the technology stack and that’s completely forgetting about areas like finance, marketing, business development, legal and HR.

It’s hard to get bored if you try to keep learning and challenging yourself every day.

You'll probably find people working in one company for a long time where the company is large enough to swap roles internally. I've worked with people who did 30+ years in the same corp, but the environment obviously changed a lot.

Often times, cozy.

Some things might suck, but if you have great managers, great benefits, and like the work you do, you might stick with it. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

Coming up on the dawn of my fourth decade with the same company. By all measures, I've been compensated handsomely as the company grew.

It only worked because of growth: both of the company and of my personal development at every stage in the growth. It's been like changing companies 4-5 times, but with no risk of getting into a situation I regretted. And a lot of my peers jumped at 10% raises or minor status improvements, and fell behind.

If you can hit the right company in the right market at the right time in its growth, prove yourself valuable and acquire equity, you will find many professional challenges that will far outweigh job-hopping for short term bumps. Take risks on this if you are under 30.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of growth and health of the company though. FAANGs get all the joy from eager 22-year-olds and antsy 25-year-olds, but at some point each of those companies were 200 or 500 or 1000 person companies--when it made a lot more sense to join.

My advice: pick a small, promising company in a field that holds risk but will still be relevant 30 or more years from now, and build your career there.

10 years and looking for an out. One thing to be aware of is that long stays are probably better with a large company with a slower rate of change. Staying at a small company for a long time is riskier in that you end up becoming more of a generalist, become the goto and the goat and are in real danger if the company changes leadership late in the game. Find that as an older individual trying to get back into a 9-5 workplace after 10 years in a specialized environment (doing everything) does not translate well to the current market.

I haven't worked at the same place, but in the same industry since 2001, doing almost exactly the same work for each place I've been. Having so much domain knowledge is extremely useful. I'm not a great developer but it sets me apart, very far apart in my opinion.

The part that sucks is that very few people recognize it and the ones that do are rarely the ones that get to make the calls. The ones that do make the calls think any developer can do what I do. What I've seen happen several times, is the company decides to replace me with outsourced/cheaper development, and after an attempt to reason with them, I stay for a bit to help them move in that direction and then move on to another place. Invariably, they call a year or 2 later looking for help, not because I've planted some obscure code no one can understand but me, but because no other developers have the knowledge to form the necessary follow-up questions to the ever-changing specs handed down from the higher-ups before moving forward. They end up with systems full of incorrect assumptions that fail daily and tie up all the developer time being fixed. Now I can't help them because I'm working for a competitor. It's infuriating. Every company I've ever worked for I've wanted to make the best in the industry, but they've consistently been blinded by short-term goals, driven by unfounded hype to be "progressive", when all they needed to do was a few basic things better than the competition to take the majority of the market. Even when I get far enough to produce numbers to prove that point, they still want to do some wild shit no one is asking for, or they get bought out (because they start growing rapidly) by a venture capitalist company that just wants to do a quick flip.

I’ve worked for the same employer for almost 20 years now. Although I interview externally every few years, for the most part it’s been a great experience.

I average 5% compensation growth (higher if you factor benefits), and aren’t compelled to move to a saturated, expensive market. Same employer doesn’t mean same role. I usually stick around in a particular thing for 2-4 years until recently, but now my scope is very broad.

End of the day you need to decide if you want to do the same role forever or if you want to evolve. If you want to be a senior programmer forever, staying in the same gig is my vision of hell.

The risk is that if you are forced to change employers by circumstance, you’re less attractive to employers, especially when you hit senior roles that aren’t executive.

I am at the same company for a year now and I want to stay for the rest of my career, a lot of people work here for their whole career and 30+ years isn't unheard of.

The company is one of the global leaders in its segment, treat their employees very well, pays very well (probably less than FAANG or your SF startup ;) ) and gives me a lot of autonomy and opportunities to practice leadership.

I don't see why I would want to change companies. I've worked in seven companies before this one (startups, big companies) and usually left around the 2y mark. This one hits all the check boxes (work environment, work/life balance, technical challenges, perks, good pay). I can certainly see why people stay here for a long long time.

The key is company that allows you in house change. So, when you get bored or are not learning anymore, you can negotiate different team or task. Or maybe just smaller shift in responsibilities. The advantage of doing that is that you know what you go into, so you can choose what exactly you want.

There are companies where people change often and then there are companies where people stay for long. There are companies where people who stayed long became stale (not moving in positions) and then those where they continue learning.

I'm coming up on a decade. I didn't start as a software engineer, but that's what I grew into. Every couple of weeks I start to think to myself, what am I doing here? And actually, part of posting this is me hoping someone will be like, yo, do this, or that.

I'm in my late 20s, and I guess I would be considered a senior developer. Coming up on 8 years of JS/Node/Go Development experience. ONLY problem is, all of our software is utter trash. I have dozens of projects I maintain and I can't keep up with any of them. I'm constantly debugging or building a prototype, that, somehow makes it into production as a prototype.

I'm not paid amazingly. About 20%-40% below market. I have been promised the moon and it's pretty unlikely I will ever see half of the promises come to fruition. Especially since our projects are hitting critical mass. That is, nothing works and nothing can be fixed because of how massive the architecture is and how small the "team" is. I've been trying to move a DB from a server that is about 2 years past life span, for the last few months.

I declined a job as a lead developer/CTO. I absolutely annihilated the interview and the offer went from a front-end developer to running the whole team and potentially CTO. I don't think I am anywhere near ready for that. I never test, have no successful continuous integration projects (despite my best efforts to get people on board), and have basically no apps running at a high capacity.

I digress to the question itself. In tech, I would never stay at a job over a year or two. Unless I really jive with the team, am making adequate cash, and feel like I'm still moving forward. Yeah, I know, I'm a hypocrite. I regret it. I think I would even have been much happier if I quit my current job for like, two years, then came back after spending some time at a well established shop. But who knows really. My job is the wild west and it may have just made me more disgruntled to know how to do everything right, and still lack the time to do so.

Here are some reasons why long tenure sucks:

1. You get completely complacent. I spend a lot of time just messing around. Again, hypocrite, like, hey jackass, use that time to test. Ha, too complacent and if I even start setting up a test environment, someone will smell blood and task me off to prototype land. Don't get me wrong though, I spend a lot of time at home, off the clock, building random new crap for the company.

2. You get stagnant in hierarchy. Basically, they like me where I am at and they won't compromise that with any form of promotion.

3. You quit making relationships with coworkers. I'm fairly young, but I have been employed here longer than anyone else. I've seen thousands come and go. I stopped making much of an attempt to know anyone. Unless they're developers, of course.

4. Newer employees despise you. I make more than them. I look like I do less. Also, I get away with pretty much anything. Which, causes quite the rift.

5. Managers become overly confident in your skills. Example: I was tasked with building something like uber, by myself, in a single month. While maintaining my 12-15 other active projects. Let's just say, we didn't make deadline and also, I'm now proficient with quickbooks and several varieties of payment processors.

6. You get honey-potted into their culture. Everything is wrong here, and I know that. Despite how hard I try, I can't get it to change. Perhaps we're only successful because we cut every corner, or perhaps that's the only reason I'm not writing this from a beach in the Grand Cayman's. Bottom line, if you're at a company for ten years, you'll know the problems and the futility of trying to solve them.

Here are some reasons why long tenure rocks:

1. I don't have to EFFING interview. I hate it. I hate it, I hate it. I suck at interviewing unless I am in a very social and charismatic state. Something I've been trying to perfect. My mind works better with logic puzzles and overcoming obstacles than it does with explaining my love/hate relationship with NPM.

2. I don't have to worry about employment. Unless of course the company goes down in a fiery mess of runtime errors.

3. I can pretty much take time to learn whatever the heck I want. I know AWS Infrastructure, Accounting Software, pretty much all of Google's APIs, Currency APIs, hell, I've even dabbled with crypto currency APIs. A metric ton of front-end frameworks and libraries. I couldn't learn any of this if I worked at a assembly line shop.

At the end of the day, I just worry that I'm going to be Cinderella at midnight. Will I be hire-able, being a jack of all trades master of literally nothing. Will I have to accept a novice position? Who knows. For now, I'm just some Brogrammer.

Not quite the timespans some folks have mentioned, but I’ve been at my company 6-7 years. I helped start it, and it was recently acquired. It’s still super fun to work on. That’s enough for me.

I worked for a company for 10 years. Never doing that again. My works history is 5 months, 1.75 years, 1.5 years, 10 YEARS, 1.75 years, 6 months (will be leaving asap).

If all you do is simple crud web apps then sure, jump around a lot because it takes a week to learn the domain. If you’re in some industry where it takes a couple years to learn the domain, stay longer and actually contribute.

But then, if you suck at what you do, definitely jump around often enough where people can’t figure out just how bad you suck.

Note: General “you” not specific “you”.

after 25 years, it's institutionalising.

lol I love that the comment section is blank. I think it's reflective of how long our generation (assuming most people reading this are 20-40 or so), and in particular people in our industry normally stay in jobs which aligns w/ the two year marker the OP mentioned.