I am almost 40, and over my career have had exactly one job that I stayed at for longer than 2 years. I stayed at that job for 5 because they provided yearly evaluations and good raises, paid educational reimbursement and actively promoted from within. All of the other jobs where you started was where you essentially stayed. If you got a raise generally it was essentially C.O.L.

If you pay people well, make them believe that there is a future for you at the company and that hard work is noticed and rewarded, people will stay longer. For the most part, companies don't and that's the reason a large number of technology workers have become mercenaries when in comes to employment. We go in, do a job and are constantly looking for the next step up. I would love to find a long term job, but at my age, it needs to be somewhere that I believe I will be valued and rewarded for sticking around.

On a side note, there have been many times a recruiter has called me, and offered an insulting wage for a position that requires 5+ years of experience. The companies offering these low wages are the ones saying we cant find anyone to hire and complaining about the youth of today's work ethic.

I'm somewhat north of 40. I stayed longest at the company I started, riding it up, and unfortunately, down. I was the proverbial last one out, and yes, I did turn off the lights.

>On a side note, there have been many times a recruiter has called me, and offered an insulting wage for a position that requires 5+ years of experience. The companies offering these low wages are the ones saying we cant find anyone to hire and complaining about the youth of today's work ethic.

This. I have recruiters call me up frequently after doing a basic scan on linkedin, looking for HPC people, or other specific things I've done. They send me emails telling me how wonderful things are on the other side, and how they are seeking people with lots-o-experience (™). Then they talk compensation rates that don't match the other aspects.

Or the ones wanting me to contract to hire. Sure, but if you can't afford the salaried rate, you really can't afford the contract rate, which prices in my risk in accepting this.

I don't see how they're synonymous, that's explained better by the idea that they don't want to do the actual work.

If you're working on your internal crud enterprise app, no amount of training's going to magically change what needs to be done, or the almost certain fact that it's better to stick with the existing tech it's built on.

I think may of us go freelance/job hop because ultimately we get bored of a code base and the basic challenges, the fundamental requirements of an app simply don't change much.

Most devs, in my experience, are team players. They'll get the grunt work done. But if you ask them to do grunt work for even five years, you're making a big ask.

You might need to pay more to price in the pay cut they'll need to switch gears or the year off they'll need to retrain themselves on related open source side projects.

That being said, there are lots of engineers who get comfortable and shy. You can fill up all your desk chairs in your office eventually. You just won't have a well trained workforce, which is bad for everyone involved.

This, again, reads like a bunch of people who don't want to do their actual job.

What exactly does 'retraining on related open source projects' even mean?

It either works, or it doesn't. Unless you're working in the schizo world of JavaScript, tech, in reality, doesn't change a massive amount in the space of 5 years.

I know. My tenure at my last few jobs was 2 years, 1 year, and now I just hit my one year anniversary at my current employer and am bored out of my skull (they stuck me on legacy maintenance). So, I'll be moving on soon.

I'm 38, I really do want to settle into someplace and stop hopping around, but I'm also not willing to allow myself to stagnate and become unemployable after you decide to "green" your workforce 5-10 years down the line.

Provide me with growth opportunities, challenging problems, creative freedom, reasonable pay increases, and I'll stick around. But alas, I haven't found a company willing/able to do that yet.

That is a very good point. I daresay that the engineer who is continually seeking excitement via jobhopping is not as common as the steadfast engineer, possibly with family obligations, who just doesn't want to be laid off at 52 with no knowledge of what has happened in the development world in the last 10 years.