I& #39;ve realized an issue with job hoping in my own career with how I approach engineering design.

I had 2 jobs where I stayed for less than 2 years. This bias may not apply to everyone but I realize it in myself so it may help other people see it in themselves too

If you don& #39;t stay at a company long enough you don& #39;t have the ghosts of past trade-offs haunt you.

If you& #39;ve stayed in the same team/position you& #39;ll eventually have to fix your design in production. This is very humbling.

If you& #39;ve stayed at the same company you& #39;ll have past teams ping you occasionally to ask about undocumented code or unexpected behavior. This helps you write better docs/tests/comments for future developers

For the jobs that I left before being there 2 years I have no idea if the trade-offs we were making were the correct ones. I have no idea what important things we left undocumented. I don& #39;t know what unexpected thing broke or were hard to change.

Not knowing those things gives me a lot of [false] confidence in my abilities. Everything worked great while I was there so it must be great forever.

Obviously that& #39;s the wrong conclusion, but I have no way to learn from the long term mistakes.