Do the arithmetic once and it changes how you think.
You will work for something like forty years. The average time in one job is closer to three. Even the good runs, the ones people speak about fondly for the rest of their lives, tend to be five or six.
So your career will contain somewhere between eight and fifteen employers, and every single one of them will end.
Some will end because you found something better. Some because the funding did. Some because a reorg you had no part in moved your team under someone who does not value what you do.
None of that is cynicism. It is just the shape of the thing.
Which means the question worth asking about any job is not only what does it pay and is it interesting. It is what does it leave me with when it ends.
Skills that transfer, or skills that only work inside this one codebase.
People who would take your call in five years, or a Slack workspace you lose access to on your last day.
Work you can describe to a stranger, or work so tangled in internal context that it becomes one vague line on a CV.
Some jobs make you more employable every year you stay. Others quietly make you less so, while paying well enough that you do not notice until you start looking.
Be honest with yourself about which one you are in right now.
None of this means treating your employer as disposable. Do the work properly. Care about the outcome. Be someone people want back. That loyalty is real and it pays, mostly through the people who remember you.
Just do not confuse the company's timeline with yours.
Your company is optimising for this quarter. You are running something that has to last decades, through technology shifts nobody has named yet.
Build the portable things. The judgment, the relationships, the reputation for being straight with people.
Those go with you through every door you walk out of.
– Asael Shinder
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