Social norms and conventions have significantly shifted since then. It is now entirely acceptable for executives to pay themselves several hundred times the average worker compensation[1]. There is no longer any real cost, reputational or otherwise, for optimizing for your personal gain So you might as well get yours, and fuck everyone else. Sure, some people with "Sanders 2016" bumper stickers will whine on Reddit about you, and maybe they'll even get together and yell at some buildings until they collapse due to a combination of in-fighting and tear-gas. But for the most part, you'll just shrug, order another round of layoffs, and think about how much your RSUs will appreciate in the inevitable stock price bump.

And if you're truly concerned about reputational risk, and can't reconcile that some people in society will still think you're a "bad person" for this, and the thought of being a bad person causes too much discomfort for your liking, then you can literally compare them to Hitler and find a sympathetic audience.[2]

I have to imagine -- and yes, I literally have to imagine, because I don't have any quantitative evidence and don't pretend otherwise -- that this is essentially a sociopath mindset (perhaps best explained by the Gervais Principle[3]) that then trickles down at every level of most professional organizations. When you're optimizing for your personal gain, you don't have a lot of time to consider things like "empathy" or "fairness." This is unfortunate to those disposed to such personality traits like the OPs father, because they essentially get eaten alive in the modern American workplace. At many professional organizations, the approach is binary. If it's not "fuck you, got mine" then it's "fuck! you got mine."

HN is known for having a significant population of those who that there is nothing wrong with this, and if the most productive members of society happen to be sociopaths, then they should be rewarded as such as their productivity is what drives the human race forward. But what's unfortunate to me is that this means some of our society's most brilliant and productive people will essentially get marginalized in their professional (and indirectly, their personal) lives, not because they lack some level of competence, self-reliance, productivity, etc, but because they're incapable of embracing a sociopathic mindset to professional advancement.

I have no problem with those who want to make their fortunes in any way possible, so they can retire to Galt's Gultch with their fortunes. I suppose I only question why they're so hell-bent on having only assholes for neighbors.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/opinion/the-outrage-constr...

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/25/t...

[2] http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/the-rich-strike-back-1...

[3] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

In my experience, people who believe in the totally individual focused system, see anyone who doesn't as not being tough or focused enough to survive the realities of highly competitive environments.

The dominant industry here will always be Hollywood, where the price of failure can be literally devastating. If your startup fails in the Bay Area, it's not too hard to become a line engineer at another company. If your hedge fund fails in NYC, it's not too hard to get another job at another fund, PE firm, or commercial bank. In some cases, these "failures" are looked at as badges of honor, and likely gave you a lot of hands-on experience you can directly apply to your next job.

But if you fail in Hollywood, you're looking at however many years lost of your life, when you were making no appreciable money as a bartender or barista, with likely no applicable skills to any other industry. I found it amusing the OP described LA rent as affordable -- which by NYC or SF prices, it definitely is! -- yet LA also has the worst income/rent ratio of any city in the US, by far[0]. This is not due to rent being too high, but due to income being too low, because everyone here is broke while they're trying to write screenplays and go on auditions.

It's really hard to live here without having friends involved in the entertainment industry, so in other words, it's really hard not to see this up close. And even if your friends work on the production or post-production side, it's not much better. At least you have a steady salary, but you're probably also working for a huge megacorp studio that literally embodies every single Office Space cliche. Or you're working for a production or post-production vendor that has to jump through ridiculous hoops and work ridiculous hours to get business from said studios. And while that steady salary is nice, it's still not nearly enough if you want to ever actually do own property some day.

So, I wonder how much of that also tempers the goals and dreams for LA startup entrepreneurs. I know it's something I think about often.

[0] http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-668...

That said, I don't think there's a failure stigma attached to startup life in LA the way there is to acting or writing. If you're pushing 35 as an actor and you haven't caught a big break, you're seen as damaged goods -- and you've got a resume with 10+ years of food service on it. Not a fantastic place to end up. But if you tried and failed at a startup or two, and you have marketable skills? Very different story. Fox, Disney, etc., will probably hire you. So will other startups. So will Activision or various other game companies, if you have the stomach for that lifestyle.

To your point, though, life at those big companies isn't much like life at Google or Facebook. That's because they aren't tech companies, and tech is a side business for them. In some companies, and in some divisions, life can downright suck. But some of those companies are making bigger commitments to tech, and life as an engineer at Disney (depending on the department) can be pretty solid and well compensated. But if doing a few years at a BigCo while you figure out your next move is "failure," it's a much softer and kinder failure than that which awaits Hollywood hopefuls who never quite make it.

On a semi-related note: the key to Hollywood is relationships. It's like DC in that regard. People who come to town with preexisting relationships have a significant advantage. People who don't will need to forge them somehow. While that's not trivial, it's not impossible.

As the tech scene grows and matures, so too will access to fellow tech workers, financiers, etc. One of the reasons I'm optimistic about LA is that its tech scene is starting to become self-sufficient, i.e., almost ready to become an independent ecosystem and industry, apart from entertainment or media. It'll always be to the LA tech scene's advantage to maintain ties there. But sooner or later, you'll be able to live and enjoy LA as an engineer without having to play the Hollywood game.

Aerospace in LA used to be a lot bigger than it is now. A lot of companies migrated out or downsized over the years, though to your point, some of the more exciting ones are still around. I'd certainly consider it a real possibility for anyone interested.

It's kind of a different world, though. You don't generally see a lot of crossover between aerospace and the startup scene in LA. That's not to say it can't happen, that it doesn't happen, or that more cross-pollination shouldn't happen. Just that a lot of the skills required in aerospace are domain-specialized. Great space to be in, however, if you want to specialize. A good friend of mine spent most of his career at JPL, worked on navigational software for the Mars rover missions, etc. He was coding at the assembly level for most of that time. Which is super cool for people who are interested, and perhaps less so for people who aren't. If one has inclinations in that area, it's a fascinating place to be.

I would echo the comments nearby that the LA tech scene is not all Hollywood. Sometimes Hollywood has a hard time seeing outside itself. To me, the universities have a significant presence in the tech scene here (Caltech, USC, ISI, UCLA, UCI).

I didn't mean to imply that the LA tech scene is "all Hollywood," but rather, that Hollywood and the LA tech scene overlap in many ways, and that Hollywood has a way of being near-unavoidable in the upper echelons of the LA business community. That's not to say it's totally unavoidable -- and for that matter, not to say it needs to be avoided -- but it's obviously very influential in the city. A lot of that influence stems from the fact that Hollywood is a major financial hub for new investment, be it in tech or in other domains. As I mentioned, that influence will wane in direct proportion to the degree that the startup scene in LA grows and develops its own financial ecosystem. (That's starting to happen, although, as the article mentions, it's by no means complete just yet.)

I didn't mean for my comment to be too focused on Hollywood, but in going back and rereading it, I can see how I gave that impression. In retrospect, I should have phrased it differently.

LA is incredibly diverse, despite people harping on about Hollywood. You can work in this town and never even care "the industry" is here. It becomes background noise. This is also why LA will never be defined by "Silicon Beach." People on the east side don't go west. (For good reason, I might add. Your life will be one hellish commute after another)

Hollywood is the #6 industry in LA by output. #1 is real estate.

In terms of employment, the government is the largest employer, followed by universities (UCLA/USC), medical (Cedars-Sinai/Kaiser) and then Fox (the #7 employer).

Really ? Is that the only state like that, and why is it so in California?

Ultimately I just remember struggling so much with... "identity," if that's the right word for it. Penn basically ended up disproving everything I thought I knew about myself when I was 18. I thought I was a "high achieving" individual, then I was suddenly very average. I thought I was someone that made friends easily, then I found myself on a campus with 11,000 undergrads yet basically felt like I had no friends. I thought my ethnicity was irrelevant because I we now lived in a post-racial America (hah!), but it seemed like so many organizations there defined themselves by socioeconomic or racial lines. I thought I was good at programming, yet I felt so completely lost in my comp sci classes.

It was pretty harrowing feeling like everything I thought I knew about myself was false, and I couldn't figure out what was true, and I was still expected to achieve at a very high level while I was figuring it out. The OP's anecdote about going to Wawa really hit home, because I remember almost literally the same thing happening to me, and that's all it would take to feel like nothing made sense anymore. Am I really the kind of person who doesn't have a single fucking friend out of 11,000 undergrads that would take a 10 minute break to grab a sandwich?

The OP seemed to blame Penn as an institution, and I do think these selective universities could do more to recognize that some of their students will basically feel like they've been abruptly thrown into a crucible, and it's not always painless to adjust. The OP advocates things like publishing suicide rates, but I think that's just another way of advocating, "please tell everyone they don't need to pretend everything is great, because I've felt fucking miserable sometimes and I don't think I'm the only one."

There was a guy in my freshman dorm that basically did "crack" and abruptly withdrew for the semester, and I just remember everyone just kind of smirking about it. "Yeah, Sean went nuts or something. Was spazzing out over a midterm and then next thing I know, all his stuff's packed and he's gone. Guess he couldn't hack it."

I didn't smirk. I just remember feeling sad and wishing Sean had said something to me. Feeling overwhelmed apparently meant "going nuts." Was that fair? That didn't seem fair. I don't think Sean would have thought it was fair either. Maybe we could have gotten a sandwich at Wawa and talked about that.

Some examples off the top of my head:

- A healthy 24 year old software engineer is making $75,000. This means he doesn't qualify for any of the tax subsidies by buying insurance on the exchange. He wants to avoid the $2,500 penalty for being uninsured, but every plan on the Covered CA will cost more than that over 12 months. Perhaps his best option is to buy an individual policy for catastrophic coverage only.

- A small business isn't sure whether it's optimal to insure their employees, or just give them a cash "bonus" and tell them to buy their own policy on Covered CA (similar to what Trader Joe's announced they're going to do with their part-time employees).

- Purchasing insurance on Covered CA is limited only to certain enrollment periods (this is perhaps the biggest misunderstanding, as I've seen various media personalities ask "why wouldn't healthy people just wait until their sick, and then get insurance?" countless times). However, there are exceptions for a life-changing event. Thus, a person who is laid off (thus counting as one of those life-changing events) would like information on whether their best option is to pay for COBRA or buy a policy on Covered CA.

Basically the ACA is complex, but it does turn health insurance into a much more structured and transparent market, which lends itself well to applications like SimplyInsured. Otherwise, what could any sort of system do for my third scenario, for example? All anyone could advise to have them stay on COBRA because they'd probably get screwed by letting it lapse and then trying to get an individual policy.

We've built software to normalize despite that - check us out!

If you're desperate enough, sabotaging yourself to qualify for a need-based social program eventually becomes the objectively optimal thing to do. This is the first I've heard of that sabotage extended all the way to intentionally getting AIDS and intentionally not seeking treatment, though.

Typically these stories can be dismissed for the anecdotes they are. I have a handful of right-winger friends who love sending me some article from the Wichita Star or something where some woman got promoted at her job, lost her Medicaid benefits, so she quit her job, and now gets even more benefits, or something, and RAAAR $16 TRILLION IN DEBT WE'RE ON THE ROAD TO GREECE MAKERS TAKERS SMALL BUSINESS THIS COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL.

No, this country has decided it's beyond the state's responsibility to provide food, shelter, and medicine to everyone. Instead, various state and local programs only provide it those things to a fraction of the people who need it, usually based on some seemingly well-intentioned criteria. And then some people have the kind of lives where being a homeless prostitute without AIDS is worse than having a roof and having AIDS, so they decide to do that.

You can accept that any program like this will induce morally hazardous behavior in some people, and look for objective information vs. sensationalized anecdotes to see if that program needs reform. You can also realize any need-based program will almost always introduce said morally hazardous behavior, and the problem is that we underfund these programs so that they need this need-based criteria to begin with.

Or you can push to eliminate all these programs because you think they turn everyone into lazy welfare AIDS-seeking moochers, and the good news for you is there's already a political party in the US that pretty much supports all that.

So let me get this straight ... for thousands of years, support for the needy was provided by local religious institutions and local efforts. People gave alms, etc to their local church and then the church rendered assistance. Essentially, the community helping itself. Neighbors helping neighbors, albeit indirectly to preserve dignity.

Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related to religion needs to be eradicated, so we can't keep doing things the way we used to. Now we tax the shit out of anything that moves and dispense assistance on a federal level, from Washington DC, thousands of miles away, by some faceless bureaucrats. How deranged do you have to be to think that's an improvement?

Guess what? The poor and needy were provided assistance long before the welfare programs came to the fore in the 20s and 30s. They were provided assistance through private channels, through their community. Unfortunately, due to taxation to provide for similar programs on a federal level, quite a few of those channels have dried up. Unfortunate indeed.

Nope, they just nail them with a tax audit. Power corrupts regardless of who wields it.

Also, I wasn't proposing theocracy. Read what I wrote again. You weren't paying attention.

Are you one of those people who support the NSA? I really didn't think I'd meet one on HN.

No, for thousands of years, we had an economic system in which the needy who were physically able to work were likely to be able to do work in the most common jobs available (largely, barely-better-than-subsistence farming), where the needy that weren't able to work might get some support from religious institutions (not necessarily local), individual authorities or, where it existed, the state, or elsewhere, but mostly just suffered and died. (And were often criminalized.)

Evolutions of property arrangements (including those that enabled capitalism), population density, and industrialization eliminate the easy access to basic work in the developed world (in exchange for more productive work where work was available) before much changed in the way that the "needy" were treated.

> Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related to religion needs to be eradicated, so we can't keep doing things the way we used to.

Neoliberalism [1] is not particularly concerned with religion, pro or con, nor does it generally support replacing private charity with public social support (it generally opposes public social support, and isn't particularly enthusiastic about private charity, though forced to choose between the two -- or just as a convenient way of selling opposition to public support -- neoliberals will back private charity, including religious.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

    for thousands of years, support for the needy was provided
    by local religious institutions and local efforts.

    Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related
    to religion needs to be eradicated

    Now we tax the shit out of anything that moves 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Mariginal_Tax_R...

"No, this country has decided it's beyond the state's responsibility to provide food, shelter, and medicine to everyone." - this does seem to be true, and I view this article as a criticism of this decision, not as a criticism of the programs these people are seeking to get benefits from.

I think this story highlights the absurdity of not having unqualified assistance for housing, food, and healthcare. If people take this as a reason to eliminate these programs, well... I'm sure people will view it that way - well, I don't know what to say about it. I mean, I can at least agree with this: "THIS COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL."

I would put forward another criticism of need based programs which is positive, and has recently been made with increasing frequency. This argument is that the nature of many programs induces dependence among the recipients; the principal example of this being US federal disability benefits. These benefits can be permanently forfeited if the recipient earns more than a given amount over a certain time frame, which forces the recipient to consider trading in a long term cash flow (disability benefits) for greater income with uncertain future prospects (a job). The result is that many people with difficulty working, who could do some limited work are disincentivized from ever taking a job; this is especially apparent during recessions. [ http://economics.mit.edu/files/7388 ]

The other problems you can have when you begin to hand out government aid are moral ones, which you may agree with. Those who are lazy and collect benefits get to take from those who work hard; even more troubling is that the workers have no way to force the slackers to do anything, while the slackers can use regulation and taxation to manipulate the workers. This argument does not address people who are unable to support themselves.

What I don't understand is why we don't have programs (say unemployment benefits) where when you finally get work, the money you earn above the cut off replaces need based compensation dollar for dollar until you're free of the system. It makes no sense to cut people off the soon as they get a job when the job pays less than the program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Oh, man.

When it comes to my natural reaction to this, the words 'strong and visceral' doesn't even do justice.

It took me a really long time to understand why I had such a deep-seated loathing for phrases like that. Think of some absurd scenario where someone asks you to cause harm to yourself, so they can benefit in some way, and that's how I would respond. I basically translated these requests to something like, "can't you just shoot yourself in the foot, so I can sell your toes?" and reacted accordingly.

This post provides some good examples -- explained in a much more objective and rational manner than I've been able to -- of the cost, and why this bothered me so much. In general though, if engineers have to spend a lot of time mitigating "can't you just...?" then I think it may point to a more systemic problem in the organization. Namely, the business units are so disconnected from engineering they don't even realize the costs of what they're asking for, and the engineers are so disconnected that they reap zero benefit from whatever business goal is going to be accomplished by this.

I'm actually okay with shooting myself in the foot to sell my toes every once in awhile. I just don't want to do it if everyone else is going to make money from selling my toes except me, and they don't care about giving me time to rebuild my foot afterwards.

If it's something small, then maybe just code it up quick in a branch named after the PM-Feature (so you can keep track). Then ask them to validate the requirement before you merge it in (hopefully you can help with this). At least this way they know that you aren't being lazy etc.

Next time that PM asks for something "simple", do a quick branch list of invalidated feature requests.

I don't think it's just that they're disconnected - some of the orgs I've been in - they simply do not care, and never will, even if they completely understand the "costs". Why not? Because they don't have to pay it. It's not coming out of their budget, the 'costs' of higher support later on don't affect anyone who's making the decision right now, and damnit, we have to get this out now or we'll lose marketshare!

This is a toxic division, and seems to be more prevalent at companies that do not see themselves as software-based companies. Yammer is all tech - Yammer couldn't have existed 30 years ago, but plenty of more traditional companies still see software as something divorces from their main business.

"Making something work is pretty easy. Making sure it never fails is the hard part."

In software you get this at all levels, including in the freelance/consulting world - people have no clue of the costs of what they're asking for so when they can't even make bad guesses, they go with "how hard would it be..." for a big feature request or "can't you just..." for what they see as a small one.

I always prefer honesty over this - if you have no idea about even estimating the cost for some feature, just ask "How much will it take and how much will it cost to... ?", don't fuddle around with the "how hard...", "can't you..."... these are just weasel words for when you need to overwork and underpay someone because you really know you need something done yesterday and with almost no budget, but you really need it so maybe someone will just shoot himself in the foot to make it work for you if you ask nicely enough :)

"How much will it take and how much will it cost to... ?" condenses down to "how hard…". You can tell they're functionally equivalent because you can give the exact same answer to both.

"Can't you just" is a whole different story, granted.

Now, these ideas may often be very wrong, and may be in fact so wrong that "no clue" is the best description, but its not, for the most part, dishonesty when people act like they have some general expectation of the cost.

Draw them a picture and have the discussion - frequently.

My favorite was probably the following:

“Can you just...”

no.

There is a lot of "affordable" ($400K to $600K) single family homes in the San Fernando Valley, or towards Orange County, so I had a lot of coworkers buy homes in those areas. If you work in Venice, a house in Torrance is about a 45 minute commute by car. I know this will sound absurd to a lot of people in HN, but if you told a Los Angelan your commute to work was 45 minutes each way, they would say "that's pretty good."

However, if you bought a home in Torrance and live there and a company in downtown LA wants to hire you, even though you're only driving about another 8 miles or so, your commute will probably explode close to an hour and a half, and at least one day a week there'll be some clsuterfuck of an accident on one of the freeways, and you'll have the lovely experience of leaving your house at 8:00am and somehow still being late to your 10:00am stand-up meeting. Fun times!

So I saw home ownership cause former coworkers limit their economic mobility to within one section of one city. For them, it was an option to simply wait until a desirable job opened up in the areas with a bad-but-not-intolerable commute, or they were able to mitigate commutes by negotiating flexible hours with their employers (e.g. working 7am to 3pm, or 11am to 8pm, or only coming in 2-3 days a week, etc).

I recognize Los Angeles' traffic is about as bad as it gets as far as a home ownership "anchoring" someone, but if home ownership causes a reduction in mobility for professionals in a high-earning and high-demand field, I can only imagine the kind of impact it has on the rest of America.

I don't think most people in America suffer in quite the same way. Ok, the NYC area can be that bad but most people use mass transit. Maybe there's room to make the roads even wider in CA?

Seriously, the problem is self-inflicted and was easily avoidable with some better urban planning 4-5 decades ago.

LA has great transportation bones and layouts (http://www.humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-...), but it cannot densify, so it's stuck at a bad level of too dense for cars to work well but not dense enough to be primarily transit based. Metro LA is denser than metro Boston, SF, or Chicago.

Malarkey. I live in LA & I don't know a single person who would say that.

Great. Have fun stashing your cash under your mattress. Or maybe you'd rather just have gold bars, but I hear those aren't as valuable as they used to be these days[0].

This is nonsense. Fractional reserve banking[1] has existed for literally centuries. Based on the concept that "not all depositors need their money at the same time" and "most creditors pay back their loans," a bank can give out loans in excess of the cash they have on hand.

Naturally, this isn't full-proof. Banks can make too many loans, and too many of those loans go bad, and not actually have any money when depositors want their money back. This possibility used to end up being self-fulfilling -- if you thought your bank was at risk of not having enough money to repay your deposits, then you'd immediately withdraw your money, and if everyone did this, then they really would likely not have enough money to pay back your deposits.

You'd have fractional reserve banking even if the currency was anchored to some sort of asset like gold. I'd urge anyone to try and imagine a world where banks were required to have 100% of what they loaned out backed in full by deposits. Credit would be extremely tight. Almost any successful business -- internet startup or otherwise -- starts with some credit, and you'd basically be throwing a huge roadblock into any brilliant but capital-intensive idea. Did you invent an amazing prototype and now want to get a loan so you can build a factory and crank out and sell your new invention? Well, guess you have to wait until a bank has enough in deposits to loan out, of which they'll probably charge you usurious interest rates, since they can't tolerate any risk of eventual default because that could bring their below 100% of deposits.

In lieu of requiring banks to cover 100% of loans with deposits, in the the US we have things like FDIC insurance, and we had laws like Glass-Steagall, to minimize the chance of bank runs and bank defaults happening, and to mitigate the impact when it does. I'm sure all the resident HN Paulbots are already furiously pounding away at their keyboards ready to blast my naivete about fiat currency, government manipulation, inflation, Ben Bernanke being the spawn of Satan, Too Big to Fail, etc. To me, those are separate from the OP's point, which attacks fractional reserve banking as some sort of Great Lie that needs to be expunged.

[0] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/dead-ingot-bounc...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking

Easy DNS charges $19.95 CAD/yr for its basic package of DNS services for a domain. Amazon's Route 53 charges $0.50 per month, or $6.00 USD/yr. Given the OP claim to be "traditionally anti-big government, pro-free market, pro-capitalist whack jobs," they are offering a service 3x more expensive than a comparable service US company. Maybe EasyDNS has some extra goodies that Route 53 doesn't to justify the higher price. Either way, that is what drives Mr. Smith's invisible hand, and acting like US states enforcing their 6% or 8% or even 8.75% sales tax is some sort of game changer is absurd.

The OP seems to woefully misunderstand that this is not a new tax. This requires any internet business with over $1 million in sales -- which I'm guessing doesn't apply to a lot of startups whose founders/employees read HN, btw, mine included -- to collect any applicable state/local sales tax at the point of sale, just like pretty much every local business. And if these businesses are getting squeezed by internet retailers, I'm guessing it has nothing to do with sales tax. Recently I needed a DisplayPort/DVI adapter, and impatiently went to Best Buy, where the only one I could buy was $30. Then I saw this one on Amazon for $4.95 on Amazon -- http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003BHHIA4 -- promptly ordered it, and returned the Best Buy one, even though Amazon sales tax meant I actually paid $5.45. Best Buy is getting destroyed because retailers can sell similar products at a 84% discount, and that would still be true if it was only a 78% discount.

So, to the OP and all the other people I've seen on HN lamenting that this bill is akin to exhuming Adam Smith's corpse and urinating on it: can we please stop acting like this is the end of the world? Making sweeping states predicting economic outcomes without practical considerations (e.g. many internet retailers have a pricing advantage that dwarfs sales tax) and human responses (an effective 6-10% increase on purchases -- 'effective' because this is a tax they should have been paying anyway -- is not really accomplishing much. There are times to get infuriated about the government fucking up the free markets and disincentivizing capitalist innovation and production, but I don't think this is one of them.

Likewise, unless you're a completely static individual, your own preferences will change. You might not mind a completely chaotic startup environment at age 26, but you might be over it by age 31. So given all that, over a five year period, what's the likelihood that you and and your company will evolve into being as good of a fit in Year 1 as it was in Year 5? Pretty damn unlikely.

Given this paradigm, the two errors most companies make are:

1) Treating this phenomenon as "disloyalty." For a lot of companies, it's not acceptable to say, "the company went one direction, I went another, let's stop dating and just be friends." Good companies understand this happens, treat their former employees like alumni, and a lot of good things can come out of "just being friends" (e.g. that former employee recommending to others they work at the company). Bad companies act butthurt and whine that Generation X/Y are a bunch of ungrateful 'job hoppers.'

2) Having stupid policies for those that continue to be a good fit through Year 5 and beyond. If a former employee ever says of a previous employer, "I liked it there, I just got a way bigger salary increase at my new company" or "I liked it there, but after I was promoted to Senior Engineer, the only real way to advance was through management/business," then that company lost a software engineer over something completely controllable. I see so many companies locking themselves into 2.7% annual cost of living raises for their current employees while they offer 20% more to new hires, and then complain "it's so hard to find good engineers." Well, no shit.

The OP has essentially managed to set parameters with his current employer where he's essentially in control on how his job will evolves, so he can ensure it evolves organically with his preferences, which is probably why he likes working there so much. But in lieu of having every engineer negotiate such a framework with their employers, it'd probably be a lot more effective for those employers to recognize that this "Year 5" phenomenon happens, and adjust accordingly (ie. not holding it against employees who no longer feel like a good fit, and compensating those who continue to be a good fit and produce)