When I was young, I wanted to stay away from the old large companies. When I crossed the 35 year threshold, they became the only one's I wanted to work for: every passing year made that desire stronger. Almost 40 now and finally working for one, I couldn't be happier - I could be making more, but not happier.
I'm 30 going on 31, and am currently doing that. I recently came from a start-up gig that worked me until I burned out, then laid off my whole team shortly after launch. I'm at a medium sized company that still does cool things, but doesn't force ridiculous deadlines on you and actually seems to care about the well-being of their employees. Most of the engineers have been there for 2-10 years; I've heard this should be a metric by which you determine your next position, but I hadn't realized just _how_ important that is until I got chewed up and spit out by a 'cool' startup.
Yeah, I'd say the majority of people I deal with have been there for 5+ years. The company promotes from within, so a lot of the vets are in some form of management or research by now. That was one clue that this was the company I wanted to work for. The other was just how real and truly comfortable everyone was working there.
Yes, I'm 35 and really feeling that pull these days. Currently working at a startup (it's 5 years old, so that moniker is debatable) and everyone around me is 25, being exploited 7 ways from Sunday because they don't care and are certain it's all gonna work out for them. And a lot of them were born into money anyway.
Crazy work hours, do more with less, etc etc. If something needs to happen, fuck you, drop everything and do it. Of course this is said in a sunny, positive, optimistic way but the reality is the same. I'm the only person on my "team" that should realistically have at least 3 people on it. Soul crushing. I just wanna work 9-5 or 9-6 or whatever and leave it at the office.
That's one thing I learned from the last tech boom -- if you want something long term and stable, look for it while everyone else is busy chasing IPO's and pitching start-ups.
I've spent most of my career (20+ years) working on or with startups. I loved that environment when it came to building my own startups; I loved diving in and working an insane amount of time to prove my ideas out; I loved networking in the evenings with investors and other startups; and I especially loved getting others excited about the product.
The truth is though is that wore me down. I ended up earning myself a chronic illness which severely slowed me down from the startup pace. I also have a family and as my kids grew, so did the time demands. I thought that my partners would understand, given I've put my life into everything I worked on, but that never materialized.
In the end, startup after startup, I've found that there's little room for sickness and especially a family. Sure, when you're young it's ok, but as you get older, or as your family ages, there is this idea of your family just has to understand that you have to do this to make all their dreams come true: founders say that family and health comes first, then try to persuade you that those really come second.
I really do understand where they are coming from. It's all a high pressure game with very little likelihood of succeeding. First to market matters more than not. Notice how many founders are either single or have marriage issues. Survival comes first for them.
I had to ask myself if that's really what I wanted. It turns out, all I really want to do is be good at what I'm working on, support my family, and have coworkers that I can enjoy being around because they value the same things. I found that in larger corporations that weren't about survival anymore. That's what informed my search most of all: the values of the peers I would be working with.
