I’ve just hit my 6-year anniversary at my current company. That may seem brief to some people, but it’s 3x longer than any of my previous ones. Recently, I’ve been reflecting on how I wouldn’t have had a chance to be the type of leader I am today if I had chosen to jump ship earlier in this journey.
At one of the early companies I worked at, I received my first ever promotion and raise. And I felt deflated by it. The measly compensation increase seemed practically negligible. To my manager’s surprise, I said, “I was so excited for this, but I was expecting much more.” She told me that in her experience, to really get a good pay bump, I would have to move from company to company throughout the course of my career. And I quickly found she was right.
From then on, I never stayed in one place for more than 2 years, cycling through 4 different companies in my mid twenties. It’s a tale that’s common for those of us in tech (especially prior to the recent phase where layoffs and hiring freezes have slowed down the pace of job hopping). I had been so upset to hear that early manager of mine telling me the honest truth: companies often will pay more to replace you, than they will to keep you, and there are usually companies out there with higher bands than the company you’re currently in.
So why does anyone stay at a company for the long haul?
Sometimes, you’re in the right place at the right time. I’d be lying if I said that hasn’t been the case for me. I joined my current company when it was 200 employees and watched it go public and grow to 2,500 employees.
Sometimes you’re really well supported by your company, your manager, or your peers. While riding this rocket ship, countless people around me saw my potential: rather than hire a leader above me, which they could have easily done, they intentionally let me grow into the leadership role I sit in today.
Not everyone is so lucky. Right now, there may be many who are staying because the market is bad. Some people have “golden handcuffs.” Some people have things going on in their personal life where they can’t afford to take risks.
But whether staying at a company is by choice or by force, what do people get by staying at a company for the long haul?
Over the course of these six years, I’ve learned a lot about:
- Seeing a team through multiple company phases
- Seeing a product itself through multiple life stages
- Seeing the evolution of people around me
Team changes through company phases
By the end of my “hopping” phase, I felt like I was learning the same lessons at each company. I was choosing similar companies at similar stages, and only sticking around long enough for them to be in that one stage. In my current role, I’ve had the opportunity to see real “change management” throughout extreme shifts in a product design team’s evolution.
First, we grew from 3 to 15 ICs and established our first Design Program Ops and dedicated Researcher roles. Then we hired a VP of Design who grew the team to ~60, including merging marketing design with product design, and building out a bigger Research team. Years later, I watched another massive transformation as the company “decentralized” design, separating each Design leader onto different product lines, reporting up to general manager SVPs of those products. I watched our Research team get entirely removed during a restructuring. I watched our little original Design System (which was really just a pattern library) turn into a real, fully-fleshed-out Design System with UI code, documentation, and accessibility experts.
Honestly, all of these transitions were painful. I thought I knew “growing pains” until I came here. But I also know I would’ve missed out on so much knowledge about these changes if I had I hopped onto the next thing after only two years here.
Product lifespan through diverse stages
I’ve never worked at an agency. I imagine it requires a completely different skill set and personality. It’s possible that you’re shifting from client to client as often as every week, or as infrequently as every six months. If you work in-house, you might switch teams or product lines, but generally speaking, you see a product through significantly more stages than someone at an agency. If you stay at that company for many years, even more so.
I’ve been around long enough to see products get shipped AND deprecated. I’ve redesigned an app, and years later, hired a whole team to redesign my own work. It was such a cool, odd feeling to show my team something I designed years ago, and think, “Wow, this is totally stale, and somehow I’m still here to see it reimagined, and brought back to life in a new way.”
Perhaps the following is too sentimental for the internet: we’re currently moving my grandmother, 82, into a nursing home down the street from us. My mom died when she was 46. It’s been interesting to get to know my grandmother through different stages of life, observing her personality evolving alongside her changing body and environment. It’s an intimacy we’ll never get with my mom, who will forever be 46.
I think about that idea of “intimacy” or “closeness” that you can get with a product that you’ve gotten to know over the years through different phases of its life. You know its glory, its potential, its ugly side, all at once.
The evolution of people around you
One of the reasons I became a manager was because I felt compelled to help other people grow in their careers. It’s hard to do that if you aren’t around long enough to see it.
I enjoyed watching a early-career designer move up multiple levels in our career matrix over the years together. I loved being part of interview panels where my peers in Product were interviewing for a new internal role on a different team. I watched in inspiration as one of my peers in Engineering moved from IC, to Manager, to Director just ahead of my own trajectory.
It feels sometimes like I get to be a unique kind of teacher who doesn’t just pass her students on to the teacher in the next grade every year, but who gets to move with them, and be there for cool milestones along the way.
Cheers to six years, HashiCorp.
