Generally, a long tenure in a job or office is a bad thing – too much time in one place, without enough exposure to other people and practices. It’s a stagnant pool, as against the more vigorous environs of rushing waters. Most people see this, and understand this, easily. They move willingly from one position to another, in one organization to another, as part of a longer career. In fact, talented Americans expect to move from company to company.

Often, employees (public or private), don’t realize that when they say they’ve been in the same job for thirty years’ time, they may be offering an implicit line of self-criticism. After all, having been there so long, why haven’t they done better for their employers or the public? All those years, and yet the product’s still shoddy, or the service is still poor. That doesn’t redound to a tenured-employee’s credit; it’s proof only of his mediocrity.

This is how tenure is a curse.

(In rare cases where an organization’s excellent, of course, this needn’t apply.)

If it should be true that boasts of tenure are empty or are counter-productive, then why does one hear those boasts so frequently?

There are two key reasons. First, some tenured employees are so insulated and cosseted that they’re simply ignorant of what the wider world thinks about tenure, or a dozen other things. They don’t know, so to speak, what they don’t know.

There’s a second reason some employees harp on tenure, despite the bad reception that those claims have with most people. It’s because they’re not concerned about most people, but only a much smaller audience that does care about tenure. These employees have sized up their situations, and have concluded that it doesn’t matter what most people think, as long as a core audience hears what the core audience wants (or needs) to hear.

So, the claim of tenure isn’t intended for everyone (about whom the employee doesn’t care), but only for some (about whom the employee cares very much).

If that smaller, treasured group believes that tenure is important, then that’s what the employee will emphasize. It’s in this way that claims of tenure are words in code: I am what you are, and we are all that matters. The greater group, the greater society, be damned.

That’s a gamble, but one that many insiders and town fathers are prepared to make: indifference to many, for the sake of attentiveness to, and support from, a far smaller few.

It pays off, but with ever-diminishing returns. (Some insiders know this, too, but once they’ve started down the road of satisfying a few, they find the path grows only narrower.)