Just 15-20 years ago, it was still the norm for people to spend their entire career with one company. In another 10 years, all of the people who came into the workplace with this being the norm will be gone. Corporations will be made up of 98% people who are rotating between companies for 2 years and then jumping. But corporations need lifers. They maintain the processes and cultural norms, are repositories of long term corporate history and knowledge, and offer a reliable way for executives to accomplish projects using information that cannot leave the corporation. Could being a lifer be a key discriminator for someone’s career in the future?
"But corporations need lifers" 🤔🤔🤔
Companies are too dumb to see the long term a lot of the time. I have a relative who works a pretty specific niche skilled trade and everyone at his company is 50+, in the next 10 years pretty much everyone will retire yet they are still too dumb to bring in some apprentices now to get some of the knowledge from these older guys who have been doing the job 25-30 years.
You could view this as companies will never take the long view, so will never value lifers, or you could view it as companies are about to get themselves trapped without any lifers and forced to give the few they still have whatever they ask for.
I don’t think it is true. There are always people who get paid a lot and they stay for a long time at a company and are valued. Corporates do not pay everyone the same as they don’t see every as equally important.
In 10 years software jobs will be like Uber drivers where corporations will have apps to ping you in to fix a bug and off you go to the next company.
Maybe for people who truly are just interchangeable software engineers writing code all day, but there still has to be at least some people who are working on projects that are meant to be key strategic discriminators for the company. You don’t want to rotate people in and out all the time because suddenly your strategic initiative pops up right across the street at your competitor, written by all the same engineers.
I imagine when 20-year CEOs are also present, it would be valued since market incentives cause this situation.
ChatGPT: We are the lifers in future. Not humans.
I think the pandemic and economic issues may create more lifers. Peoples may crave security after this thus spawing a new generation of lifers.
Why would you stay forever at a company when you could make more by jumping ship? You wanna stick at a company for 30 years making less than market rate but hope at your 35th year they realize you’re too valuable and give you above market rate? I’ll take the market rate or a little higher for 35 straight years and make more money that way. If lifers are guaranteed to become executives then there’s value in being at a company forever. But that’s not the case, many execs are external hires.
literally the only thing that keeps amazon from completely falling apart
yeah and we can also give all the devs free ponies and then give them 20 hour work weeks and they can all make 500k a year I haven’t ever seen an org with good enough documentation to replace staff who have long tenure.