That's why you shouldn't hire "good, ambitious people." I jest, but really. Sure startups want that ambition, but not run of the mill companies. I've worked at a few mega financial firms and what they really want are mildy competent drones that are prepared to idle in their carrier working 9:30-4:30.

You see, the problem with "good, ambitious people" is they want to (1) keep learning new things, (2) work on projects that expand their expertise, (3) continue on a monotonously increasing career trajectory. Sadly 85% of the coding out there is more like "IT" and keeping the lights on, fixing the CRUD apps, etc. Ambitious people are a major flight risk at such companies, and worse, they might bring in some new tech or complicated patterns that the drones that replace them don't understand, and then the firm has to chuck that code and go back to the former, easier to understand but far less performant code. I've seen it happen several times.

>> In general, you can expect all the good ambitious people to leave.

"The thing about this place... Everyone with get-up-and-go has already got up and gone"

I've had this exact conversation more times than I care to remember. Not only does upper management not care but they probably told him off (as they did me) for not sacrificing his integrity and reputation to BS you into staying with promises they knew he couldn't deliver.

I brought up the topic of raise with one of my previous bosses, and he promised to check with the higher-ups.

Some time later, he honestly told me: "The only way they would give you a raise is to prevent you from leaving. At that point, if you already went through the trouble of getting another offer, you might as well leave." Several months later, I did. Money wasn't the only factor -- the big new project I was hired for got finished -- but it was a major one, they were underpaying me pretty badly.

I have always thought this. It can take up to 6 months to get properly up to speed on a large project. So for those 6 months you are maybe averaging 50% productivity. That's basically 3 month salary a company is loosing by swapping staff. How many people get offered that sort of month to stay?

But then the code monkeys have won.

I worked for a major institution's engineering group where we formally asked "We're getting recruited all the time for more, will you raise comp to market to prevent people leaving?" Answer, "No." Annual attrition was 25%. At a recruiting/replacement cost of ~$40K, raises would have made more sense, but then managers would have failed to wield their power to "constrain their budget."

Logic need not apply.

It reminds me of an essay that Joel wrote.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html

Basically he points out that heavy use of methodology will get you guaranteed results. But that result is of very mediocre quality.

I turned down a job offer because it was about 10% below what I wanted. Four months later I saw the company complaining that they still hadn't filled the spot - I wonder if they think they made the right choice in refusing to negotite. (Probably they do, and they continued to do so with other candidates).

I keep seeing the same ad for a job that I was contacted about a few months back. I refused to do their hour and a half hacker rank challenge on the basis that is nothing like how I work on a day to day basis, and I have examples of real work online if they need to see that I can code.

I agree with that. Anyone who is actually good and ambitions would never realize that because they know it isn't true.

Maybe I am overstating a little, but all the works we see as great required staying power. Apollo was a ten year program. The Manhattan Project took 6 years to develop the bomb. Firefox took 2 years to exit beta, and the iPod took several years to pick up steam. and Tesla has been going 12 years, Space X 13.

It's not that you achieve nothing in a year tenure, but can you really accomplish anything great? Can you think of any good examples of people who showed up January 1st, changed the world, and left by Christmas?

If all long projects were great you would be right, unfortunately duration as a predictor does not positively contribute to greatness.

chrome v8 was built in 2 years: 2006 to release in 2008

Accomplish for whom is the question.

The money comes from different pools for those, though.

To me this is a sign of organizational dysfunction that the money can't be moved from one pool to another.

All money is money - 50 Cent

I'm feeling lucky:

  50 Cent Talks Bitcoin: 'All Money Is Money' | | Observer
  observer.com/2014/12/50-cent-talks-bitcoin-all-money-is-money/
  Dec 22, 2014 - 50 Cent is happy he took Bitcoin for his album
  Animal Instinct, because "all money is money."