One commenter claims that IT employee goals don’t fundamentally coincide with company goals in the way that happens with lawyers and sales professionals, and thus IT staff should naturally expect working relationships to only last as long as there is a happy overlap.

It does take a good deal of time, but I think in the long run, it’s worth it.

Why would you not do one of those… It could be a matter of personal priorities – if someone values a smaller town, doesn’t want the commuter lifestyle, wants to root down into a place rather than go place to place… you see how that would be a motivation to ask “Can I stay and grow?”

In my post I asked with a defensive tone: “Does staying have to be bad?” I think now I would expand on that and say, what advantages can staying put have for an individual? As a starter idea, I wonder if there’s a kind of industry leadership presence you can attain that way… This line of thought may not excite my techno-nomad (endearing term : ) friends, but I think it’s worth asking.

Thanks for the post!
-Daniel-

If someone offered me a million dollars a year to be a COBOL programmer, I would probably sell out for a year or two. On the other hand, I might take a pay cut if working with cutting edge technologies or in a team position (leadership) that I thought were going to substantially improve my career. Odds are good though that if you are smart enough to work with the technologies or skilled enough to work well with a team, you won’t need to take a pay cut, unless you take your initial inexperience due to learning being the penalty.

I believe in the long run most people are evaluating opportunities and estimating what their expected value of doing these are and trying to maximize these values. Sure, you take a knowledge hit with working with ancient COBOL codebases or something, so you need to hedge this opportunity cost with more money up front (since presumably what you are learning will be worth less in the future.)

I’m assuming, of course, that family structure and such are not an issue and that it’s fairly easy to change jobs and that the person is not risk-averse. I think that’s what WMMC was about — realizing that change is good because continually doing the same thing is more risky.

My perception of the 20% time is that Google employees are working on projects that Google owns when they get done with them. Then they get bonuses based on the value of these projects. Plus there’s the satisfaction of knowing that you made a sweet project.

So I guess my answer would be that you either pay higher for developers because they are less efficient with using older technologies and they need some reason to stay because they are less happy (the good ones might not anyway) or you foster a culture of learning, which from the developer’s and company’s perspective seems to be a win-win.

Thanks for the post!