Finding a mentor isn't the easiest process, though. I'm a very motivated self-taught developer but there's a giant gap that could be filled by someone with more experience. It's frustrating when I post more nuanced questions on forums and get zero response.
From what I gather, there are two approaches: (1) post in forums and develop a relationship over time (this can take forever), or (2) pay for an inorganic relationship through codementor or some other service and hope that it turns into a more organic mentor/mentee relationship over time. Neither is ideal.
"Locked in" needs some clarification. For the overwhelming majority of defined benefit pensions, employees vest in (become qualified to receive) their benefits within the first 5 years of their service. They only need to wait until they've met the payout provisions of the plan...something like 55 years old and 10+ years of service for early retirement, for example.
What's more likely is that employees are sticking around because their years of service factors into their ultimate benefit payout once they retire. More years of service (up to a limit, typically) gets a higher benefit. And this probably only matters for the employees who've been around longest because the plan is probably frozen to new entrants.
The employee being quoted is weighing the value he'll get from adding 2 more years to his benefit formula vs going somewhere else for higher pay.
Wholeheartedly agreed with this. Focus and get used to saying no even though you hate it. I've been plagued with the inability to do this effectively for practically my whole life and various technologies don't help. For instance, it was easy to aggregate 100+ blogs into Feedly so I could keep up on all the things I felt were important. This led to me browsing headlines all day long and storing those articles in Pocket to read later. One guess on what my Pocket library looks like.
Once I started prioritizing what mattered most right now and ignoring everything else did the results start to come in.
From what I gather, there are two approaches: (1) post in forums and develop a relationship over time (this can take forever), or (2) pay for an inorganic relationship through codementor or some other service and hope that it turns into a more organic mentor/mentee relationship over time. Neither is ideal.