I think the best way to optimize your interaction with the market as an FTE is to simply always be occasionally interviewing and scouting around. There are lots of biases and inertia and anchoring and stuff with orgs with which you have an existing relationship.
Of course, if you made a bad first impression or grew the wrong kind of reputation in your firm, it may be easier to do a lateral switch to start fresh.
My rationale: Especially in more senior roles, 2 years is about the sweet spot where your house of cards can start to fall apart. You start a new role, spend 1-3 months ramping up, another 3-6 months strategizing/planning, and a year or so executing. By the end of all this, you're ~2 years into it and those initial ROI statements of $XM per year will start getting assessed.
:/ 2 years is usually where people can only put up with so much toxicity before leaving. Even at 1m+/yr, I couldn’t last longer than 2.5 years. A lot of work environments change too - so, often you’re quitting your new manager (who won’t let you transfer) and not the company.
This is not my experience as a person involved in hiring in Europe.
If you never stay somewhere more than a year it’s a red flag.
If it’s less than 6months then you won’t pass the HR filter.
My suggestion is that you shouldn't wait very long at all for an internal promotion if you can just get a new job that pays better. I can't imagine this is a process that you engage too much in in the first year of a job, where you likely wouldn't be eligible for a promotion in the first place.
At least for me frequently is 1-3 years while i do wanna know why you left your company after a year.
But it is easy to come up with a reason why you switched early and in this market, i take one person who swtiched early but feels like a good candidate over one who feels like a bad one.
The market in germany was empty the last 5 years, we were happy to get what we could.
First point, there absolutely is. I review resumes, if someone has a history of moving on after a year, I assume they are going to move on after a year again, and since it typically takes that long for someone to be truly effective in the environments I have worked in, that's a hard no. Nothing personal, but no. With a job market as good as today's that might not be a huge penalty, but it's there.
Which leads us to the second point, people who are doing this are playing a game of musical chairs. If you have been in the software dev world for a few decades, you have been through some rough job markets and you know another one is coming, you don't know exactly when. You have seen people much smarter and more capable than you walked out the door, and not be able to get a job for years. You have seen half the company you work in get walked out the door suddenly one morning. And when that job market hits, the selection standards of employers suddenly gets much higher.
Just a friendly warning in case this is your first rodeo.
As long as you're already wealthy enough to be able to comfortably afford to move. And single, or with a stay-at-home or fully-remote spouse.
Personally, I think any company that refuses to offer full remote work to any developer who wants it deserves to crash and burn. However, I also think that's wishful thinking in the near-to-medium term: I'm expecting to see at least a small majority of companies try to force all their employees back remote once they decide that enough people are vaccinated that they can call the pandemic "over enough".
I think it's massively premature to dismiss concerns about having to relocate for a new job at this point.
Small majority means a large minority who don't. It's simple: just work for those. You're also talking about the future; right now, the majority is remote. Get any one of those, then simply don't ever relocate and let them shoot themselves in the foot if they want to fire you.
SWEs have their pick of employers, that isn't up for debate any longer.
The only way labor gets any power is through refusing having their deals made worse.
No need to move when you just switch your public transport line.
Nonetheless, honestly i think career progression is totally different if you don't live in a city or if you are not very flexible.