Every time on an interview (the job kind, not the becoming famous one) I get this question: why did you spend only 18-24 months at that place? (Mostly unspoken question: “where is your loyalty?” Mostly unspoken counter-question: “remind me, when was your last layoff?” See, we better not go there, so we don't.)
But is that really that short of a time? Let’s say you work 200 days a year. We talk about 3-400 days.
Four. Hundred. Days. 3200 hours. (Minus coffee and meetings. One of these is mostly optional.)
If you want, you can get an ungodly amount of things done. Of course, the place also needs to both want and let you. If not, the real question would be: what took so long?
The title is from a talk made by one of my favorite speakers, Michael Lopp (aka Rands). Speaking about engineers, he said: “right now, whether you know it or not, you are 3 years away from your next gig”. Engineers like to understand things and when we are done with that, we get bored. (full talk in the comments)
This talk was 11 years ago.
Do you know what we also had 11 years ago? A much calmer, somewhat slower world. Things took more time.
Today, a team of 2 can do more in a month than a team of 20 could do 11 years ago. Although I have a suspicion that may be true today too, depending on the people 😛
What other things like this do we hold on to as unquestioned truth?