'Great Flirtation': Should workers constantly job hunt? | Hacker News Reader

'Great Flirtation': Should workers constantly job hunt?

bbc.com

20 pointsperfunctory10 comments

I don't know about 'constantly' but I think once you're 8-10 months into a gig it doesn't hurt. For one, it gives you some real data about your market value in case you want to negotiate at the end of the year for a raise/bonus and second, it's just good to keep these skills in practice just in case of a layoff or you want something better. A bit time consuming but I've found it useful.

Maybe its only my gig and my area of the world, but going through the rounds with companies can be quite a grueling process and many recruiters can't explain the exact technical details or give any concrete salary information.

It's hard to just do it to test the waters when you have a technical project and multiple interviewing rounds (which also include live coding, which for me is very stressful).

Any time you've grown in your job and you're not receiving a corresponding raise, is a great moment to look around.

But also: I like change. I notice I'm more productive in the first half year on a project. Almost every project is interesting at first. Not all projects are still interesting after a year or two. When I get bored, I know it's time to move on. Some companies may have enough diversity in work, and enough flexibility to move me around, that can keep growing without quitting, but my experience is that most don't.

But I'm not constantly job hunting; as long as I'm enjoying myself, I tend to ignore other offers.

Sounds a little early for me. I personally wait at least 1.5-2 years and I'd definitely start interviewing as you near your 4 year cliff which incidentally is why I have started interviewing this past month.

4-year cliff?

Most tech companies give you a large grant when you join, say 16x that vest 1/4 per year so 4x per year. Then, every year after that they usually give you another 4 year grant but usually at about 1/4 the initial one so 1x per year. Thus, your total amount of stock vesting is in this example would be 4 for the first year, 5 for the second, 6 for the third, and 4 for the 4th.

This also gets more extreme with stock appreciation because the first grant being the largest is also the oldest so has the most time to appreciate in value. Me for example, the value of my vesting equity per year will drop 30% once I hit my cliff next year.

Interesting to reflect on how this plays out in the tech world. I know a lot of people who work in tech and outside, and my impression is that the interview process outside tech (and specifically data science or software engineering roles) involves more discussion and networking, whereas in tech (for tech roles), it shifts very rapidly to exam taking. For instance, a fundraiser might talk a bit about her experience as a fundraiser, whereas a programmer is likely to talk about how to find the shortest path in a graph using python, or the difference between logistic regression and a one-layer neural net. By "talk", I mean implement at a white board, preferably in julrythonava++script, but tight pseudo code is fine too.

There are such things as more casual job hunting in tech (giving presentations and having discussions can be great), but this sounds to me like living in a perpetual mid-term week during second year of a computer science curriculum. Which maybe is a good thing, at least you wouldn't ever forget how to implement merge sort or how to find all subsets of a superset of words that combine to make a different word that is also in the set.

> For decades, the prevailing narrative has been to stay in a role for as long as possible, build résumé clout and make a lasting contribution to an organisation.

I don't know in which world BBC lives.

> For decades, the prevailing narrative...

a bit later:

> The global recession of the 1980s shook loose some of this thinking

Based on the following paragraph it appears they are talking about the decades before 1980, which seems reasonable.

In the UK. But in the past 4 years or so, apparently in a fantasy version of the UK.

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