Frank
Seventeen years ago I walked into what was The Medical Center of Central Georgia, then Atrium Health Navicent as a hardware guy who’d taught himself enough to be dangerous. I’m still there. That sentence alone will make some people in tech cringe, like I just admitted I’ve been treading water for nearly two decades.
Let me tell you what it actually cost me, and what it built that I couldn’t have gotten any other way.
The job-hopping argument is real and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. The data on salary growth favors movers. If you want to maximize your W-2 over a ten-year window, staying put is probably the slower path. I knew that going in, more or less, and I stayed anyway. That’s not virtue. That’s a choice with consequences, and I’d rather be honest about both sides of it than pretend I cracked some secret code that restless people are too impatient to understand.
Here’s what the restless people actually understand correctly: novelty is fuel. My brain loves it too. New problems, new tools, new environments, that’s where I feel most alive technically. Staying at one organization for this long means you will fight that pull constantly. There are stretches of work that are genuinely repetitive. Distribution list requests. Password resets that should have been automated three years ago. Tickets that look identical to tickets you closed in 2017. If you need constant fresh stimulation to stay engaged, long tenure at one organization is going to grind you down in ways that are hard to describe to someone who hasn’t lived it.
What I didn’t expect was how much the repetition would eventually turn into pattern recognition. After you’ve seen the same class of Exchange hybrid routing problem eight times over five years, you stop guessing. You go straight to the thing. That’s not the same as being smart. It’s closer to being calibrated. There’s a difference, and it took me a long time to understand which one I was actually developing.
The thing job-hoppers almost never talk about is organizational legibility. By the time you’ve been somewhere sixteen, seventeen years, people know how you work. Not just what you do, but how you think, what you’ll push back on, where you’ll dig in, when you’re in over your head and being honest about it versus when you’re in over your head and going quiet. You become readable to the people around you. That sounds unremarkable until you realize how rare it is. Most organizations are full of people who are still figuring each other out. When a crisis hits and someone needs to know who to call at 6 AM who will actually pick up and actually know the system, that person better be legible. I worked hard to be that person, and it took years to earn it, not weeks.
The flip side of that legibility is real and it stings. When you’ve been somewhere long enough, people stop asking you about certain things because they assume you already have an opinion. They also stop questioning your approach to those things, which is its own kind of trap. You can develop blind spots that nobody challenges because you’re the veteran. I’ve caught myself more than once defending a process not because it was still the right process, but because I built it and I knew it. That’s a bad reason. Long tenure without self-awareness produces people who confuse familiarity with correctness, and I’ve had to actively fight that in myself.
Here’s something the LinkedIn crowd will never put on a carousel slide: staying somewhere a long time means you will absolutely outlast some decisions you disagreed with, and you will eventually get proven right in ways that feel less satisfying than you expected. I’ve watched tools get purchased, deployed, and quietly abandoned. I’ve watched reorganizations that were going to change everything change nothing except the org chart. I’ve watched the same problem get renamed as a new initiative and funded accordingly. If you’re the kind of person who needs to win the argument in the meeting, long tenure is going to be a slow form of torture. You have to get comfortable being right on a delay.
I’m also not someone who naturally excels at superhuman patience or political discipline. I am skeptical by nature. I say what I think more often than is probably strategic. That combination, long tenure plus blunt opinions, can absolutely work against you in an institution that changes leadership every few years. New leaders want to establish credibility by changing things. If you’re the person in the room who keeps saying “we tried that in 2014,” you become an obstacle whether you’re right or wrong. Managing that dynamic is a skill I’ve had to develop almost entirely outside my natural inclinations.
What I’ve gained that genuinely can’t be replicated on a two-year engagement somewhere is depth of institutional memory. Not just technical knowledge, but the actual history of why things are the way they are. I know which systems have a painful migration story behind them. I know which processes have a political reason for existing that has nothing to do with efficiency. I know which relationships in the building took years to build and would break the moment the wrong person says the wrong thing. That’s not trivia. In a health system supporting over 162,000 employees, that knowledge prevents real failures. People don’t write job descriptions for it. They don’t put it in salary bands. But it matters every single week.
The honest accounting looks like this: I probably left real money on the table over seventeen years by not jumping. I also never had to spend political capital proving myself from scratch every eighteen months in a new environment. I never had to rebuild my internal network. I never had to re-earn trust with a new team. I spent that energy going deeper instead of wider, and I’m genuinely not sure which path creates a better technologist. I suspect it depends entirely on the person.
What I do know is that staying is not the passive choice people think it is. It requires you to keep growing in an environment that no longer has obvious structural incentives to push you. Nobody’s giving you a 90-day review that forces reflection. Nobody’s putting you on a new stack to see what you can do. You have to generate that pressure yourself, which is why I have a homelab full of projects I built because I needed something to be hard again.
Seventeen years at the same organization didn’t make me a company man. It made me someone who knows exactly what he’s built, what he’s traded away to build it, and what it would cost to walk away from it now. That’s not a cage. It’s just an honest ledger.
Most people never sit down and do that math. They’re already gone before the numbers come due.
