How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer
youexec.com
youexec.com
Step 2 - Switch jobs for pay increases every couple of years.
Step 3 - When you get to market rate for senior devs, say, "Look! I doubled my salary!"
"People who switch jobs are making more money!"
"People who are offered more money will switch jobs."
Despite the common notion to "provide more value" to a business if you want a raise, it seems most business people, and thus those responsible for employee raises, conflate value with leverage.
Someone can double their output and easily be denied a raise because they have no leverage. However, if you have leverage but do not increase your output, you can likely get a raise.
So maybe we should nix the old advice about "creating more value" as it's a very confusing and an unclear metric. If businesses see value as leverage, employees should do the same as that's the only way they'll get what they want.
I hope this makes sense, I've been trying to figure out the relationship between value and leverage (at s microeconomic level) and they seem to be almost, if not completely, identical.
Thoughts?
Be generally likable Write decent to good code Connect on a regular basis with current and former co-workers Be aggressive about finding new opportunities (usually through people you've worked with)
I agree with most of the points the author makes here, but I don't think you need to stay 2 years at a particular job - 1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects and still get some decent projects under your belt.
A string of one year stints would be a huge red flag to me. I would have a hard time selling this person up as we don't hire FTE's to come and go in a span of 12 months. Too much churn kills you, I'd likely pass unless circumstances where extraordinary.
Of course I probably wouldn't know if a place passed on me because of that.
I wonder what the probability distribution for how much hirers weight "loyalty" or "stick-around-ness" looks like.
On the flip side, it's my responsibility to make sure that my engineers are happy in their position and weren't sold on a lie.
There is a huge difference between being able to fix bugs and being able to fix architecture problems. I needed at least a year before I was capable of the latter in SunOS, probably more than a year.
But maybe the people jumping every year are doing more grunt stuff and the ramp up doesn't take as long? I dunno, I'm mostly retired and sort of a dinosaur.
I work for one of the big 5 and thus use a lot of the tools I use are developed in house (also, there are lots of special technological requirements that I have to understand and work with).
I've been here a few years and am still learning loads about unique company specific things that save me time when I have to do similar things in the future. 1 year stints would definitely not look good to me.
Good process reduced this to the level that is practical, but reducing churn is an important key to managing the unavoidable cost due to this.
"Oh, I didn't get to work there long because X company made an offer that I couldn't reasonably turn down when taking into account my family's future".
Granted you have to get to the interview stage...
Which jurisdictions have which rules?
Obviously if you don't have to disclose your previous salary you get an advantage. The same advantage as the employer has in not disclosing the salary they paid to the person you'll be replacing.
Personally, I've always been asked and it has definitely bitten me especially when moving from a region with a different cost-of-living.
I've only changed jobs twice in my career but I included my salary requirements in a cover letter and did not disclose my previous salary.
It is very secretive though, for obvious reasons.
If you pay well, good engineers swarm to apply the job.
Job switching is the best opportunity to negotiate your salary for both current and next employers.
"If current employer don't pay more, I'll leave."
"If the next would-be employer don't pay more, I'll stick with the current job."
Also, it pressures existing employers to raise and keep the high salary because if they don't, they'll lose the good engineers to the competitors. So the fact there are many job switching engineers benefits those who don't switch job that often.
I think I was earning (the equivalent of) $8k/year in my first job hah
I did exactly that and my salary is more than double in less then 4 years. I started working after 1 year of experience, I have 5 years now.