Ultimately I feel like switching jobs isn't entirely about money, but more so driven by a lack of growth and fulfillment in your role.
Ultimately I feel like switching jobs isn't entirely about money, but more so driven by a lack of growth and fulfillment in your role.
IMHO, once you're in the new role, it's not so scary. Sure it's a risk, but life is all about calculated risks. Of course you should do your homework. Talk to people from the company, check out their Glassdoor, get some references from the potential employer, etc. My experience is that you can find good jobs and be paid well. I just make my expectations about work-life balance clear in the interviews. I won't work longer than 40 hours a week. If the expectation is more, I'm not your man. My priority is my kids, not work. Sure it has lost me some potential roles, but I've also had some great roles.
Yup. If you're decent at your current job, you'll be decent at the next job after an initial adjustment period.
The only time I'd be worried is if I thought I was bad at my job, because I feel like a new company is going to be more critical at first.
Like compounding comp increases?
Honestly, most software jobs, even "tough" ones with lots of domain knowledge are bullshit.
It's very easy to jump into a new job and immediately be "highly effective."
Sorry you didn't figure this out yet, but those traits can be taught. You are not a lost cause.
I agree 100% with this. If you are staying long time at a big corporation, you will eventually become an expert in the domain you are covering. Now, sure you can transfer some experiences to other companies, but mostly the domain knowledge is worthless outside of the company.
You'd be a lot more reluctant to risk switching to a higher paying job from a job you've only been at happily for a month than one you've been at happily for several years.
That doesn't mean, of course, that changing jobs is never the right move. Clearly, it often is. If there's a re-org and you're not promoted, you should probably leave--you're going to have to prove yourself to a new set of people either way, so you might as well get paid for it.
As for the comp increases, this is tricky. If you're increasing your salary but not getting promoted, you're actually putting yourself first in line for layoffs in the future, because HR people are going to see you as anomalously expensive within a band. This strategy can pay off, especially because 99% of corporates are too dumb to assess performance correctly and so often you can improve your perceived performance by becoming more expensive--but you have to be sure you're getting yourself a better position in the pecking order, or otherwise you're going to end up in a career cul-de-sac.
Also, the job-hopper stigma is real. It isn't right, but if you have three or more jobs under 18 months, people are going to assume you keep getting fired for performance or, worse yet, keep getting fired because you're disabled... neither of which they'll touch.
The last thing I want to advocate for is corporate loyalty. They aren't loyal to you, and so you should always have your eyes open and be ready to take everything that isn't nailed down (within the confines of enforceable law, of course) and jump. However, you have to be strategic. Remember that these people are a lot more skilled at screwing people like you than you are at screwing them--that's just how capitalism works.
Or maybe I've just seen people get burned by spending too much time trying to get people to like them.
Knowing this cycle well you're already effective when starting a new job. Want to start even faster keep your tools limited and multi platform, lets just say your tool set shouldn't exceed a post-it note using big letter sizes.
The rest is domain knowledge something you will pick up over the coming months or years from colleagues and be paying attention at refinements and other meetings.
This is mostly about software development jobs/gigs, if you're doing some STEM job in nuclear reactor design etc then yeah thats a completely different story.
That's a gift and a curse. After working on the same things for years, not being responsible for any of the current woes can be very freeing. My MO early in my career was going into new positions and cleaning up the mess. It seems most like greenfield, but I like cleaning :)
I just went through this starting earlier this year, and it didn't go well. It was a smaller company and even though I knew all the parts of the tech stack ahead of time, there were just a ton of undocumented internal-isms and an overall culture of "just stay in your lane and iterate on JIRA tickets. None of us really understand how to build the software, can deploy the software, or can trace inputs and outputs throughout the system." Among other tedium.
I only lasted four months before moving on, but the new job is working out a lot better and pays more, too. So I agree it's not risk-free, but at the end of the day, I was getting paid the whole time and ended up somewhere better, so it worked out anyway.
this; I read the headline as:
"People who regularly out-grow their roles earn more than people who are sitting still."