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Comment by crunchlibrarian | Hacker News Reader

I love reading these rants. I wish more young people fresh out of college were confident and critical like this, I see too many people simply accept whatever the organization tells them without doing the research.

You really have to stand up for yourself and be willing to fight in every interaction with corporations, because they will exploit you in every way possible if you let them. And there is very little recourse for wronged employees in today's rigged arbitration arena.

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Funny enough, the OP's later Reddit posts were things like "Two months into my first job, I'm still fucking up on basic tasks" and a complaint that their co-workers are too good at their jobs, and making the OP look bad by comparison.

>Two months into my first job, I'm still fucking up on basic tasks"

Shocking, a new hire made mistakes

Probably why new hires are "only" offered $100k and not $190k like this person was expecting.

To be fair, thats part of 'experience'.

7 years after college, I'm not a noob engineer, I'm a leader on my team.

The way I talk to recruiters has changed as well, and they know what my paygrade is as a result.

A grad doesnt have that industry experience and HR penalizes them greatly for it.

The biggest threat is being a new grad and never changing companies. I know a kid 2 years younger than me making 50k less per year than me.

I once said "I get paid twice as much as a junior engineer, but I can do things two junior engineers can't do".

What is so wrong with not changing companies? I ask for a friend who has worked on the same product for over 10 years, although the company has been bought sold a few times.

This "friend" found that any job offers he got always resulted in a pay-grade drop (normally for startups), or working with boring technologies that would not advance his personal knowledge.

I know for a fact that this has hurt me with big companies like Google when interviewing there, the last interview resulted in them flat out telling me I have not worked at enough companies.

I personally think that is unfair, as I don't think you know what you have done good or bad at a company if you only stay there for 2 years. I did some checking and found that many software engineer seem to have a chain of companies they worked for 2 or less years. And I could not help to think they have no way of really knowing if the things you did were good or bad in the long run.

Anyways, just wondering what others thoughts are on work patterns, and their experiences.

Conventional wisdom is that job hopping leads to better salaries. Of course, conventional opinion is also that changing jobs once every year or two shouldn't be viewed as a red flag by hiring managers and it certainly is in many cases.

Personally, I've been a reasonably long tenure at most jobs I've had.

I do think there's a reasonable medium though. If you've been at some big company for a couple of decades and try to switch jobs later in your career, that can be difficult too.

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