--- Julia Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Richard Baker wrote:
>
> > People move on. What's the mean time spent in a job in the software
> > industry: two or three years?
>
> In the mid-1990s in graphics, it was 18 months. At least, that's what
> someone at my husband's company determined when they were trying to
> figure out how to persuade people to stay longer than 30-36 months;
> turned out they were beating the curve.
>
> I don't have any more general or more recent stats.
My personal stats are 24 months, but that is due to long stays separated by
lots of short leaps. It is a less migratory population now that the bubble
burst. But it is also a much more educated population. There use to be way
too many liberal arts majors learning HTML and passing themselves off as a
software engineer.
Part of the 18 months number was the requirement to weed these people out.
They are surprisingly good at being convincing to HR people, but once they
get in the trenches they can not function. The simple fact that they got -1-
.com to heir them as a "Java Programmer" would mean that they could put it on
the resume and pester other .coms who were infinitely short handed.
Then of course the same people were the ones making "convincing sells" to the
VCs and getting funding for solving NP complete problems with a Turing
machine in 6 months.
The "convincing sells" that did not follow this model were generally followed
up quickly by an impossible schedule and a population of sub-rate programmers
(most of whom now work at Starbucks) developing very poorly factored code as
fast as their little fingers could type.
The result? Highly static systems which couldn't't keep up with the VC desire
to beat the funded entities of their competitors who also were developing
highly static systems.
The result? Recession.
Jan
Ah, the wonders of a narrow perspective.
=====
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Jan William Coffey
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