I'm not saying this is what somebody should do, but if you're only indexing for income, then it's the only answer IMO.
I would recommend having at least one stop where you spend more than a year or two, just to show that you can get past the initial ramp up period. This avoids having a red flag on your resume, but that may be old fashioned thinking.
The original stipulation is someone with the skills to get into a FAANG, so I'll focus less on that. I'm also going to ignore quality of life considerations.
Cynical ideas, with a slant towards making the most money: - Don't be afraid to move, or take advantage of working remotely.
- Get a job that pays Silicon Valley money / RSUs but then move somewhere cheap.
- Pay more attention to potential stock benefits, that's where the bigger money can be.
- When the market is running better again, jump to a company that should go public soon. This way you get the most shares with the least personal risk. If you get good a guessing who the "hot" company will be, you can do really well.
- Companies aren't allowed to say when they're going public, or their stock may disappoint. Switch and try again if you've guessed wrong.
- Don't stick around past your initial stock grant (generally 4 years).
- Keep an ear out for the hot new tech / VC focus, and learn enough of those skills to get hired.
- Get good at interviewing.
Note: this is what's worked in the past, future conditions may be different.
When I look up the org chart, the people higher up have been at the company 5+ years. Moving into the higher roles requires the right opportunity, which often takes time to find. Those "right opportunities" are rarely given to people new to the company and are often used to retain existing high performers.
Certainly if you're stuck in your career and are not on a growth path, jump ship. But if your job is promoting you consistently every 2–3 years, then I'd stay.
Perhaps there is an argument for getting to the "staff" level quickly, and then hop around more as it's harder to advance past that level?
As far as reaching staff and then jumping ship, I have no idea. I started my career 10 years ago and at the time, I thought "senior" was the highest option, but then staff role got created.
I wonder if in 10+ years, the IC ladder will get taller, so people don't feel "trapped" at staff level.
Companies don't expect people at the beginning of their careers to stick around for long.
The other benefit is that you get to experience a broader range of environments and technologies, which is good for everyone.
We considered someone’s career history a problem when they had several jobs of ~a year or less. Or someone interviewing for a senior position with 4-5 years of experience across 5 companies, for example. If those were the case, we were much more likely to reject them.
If someone (hypothetical) had 10 years experience, with a few that lasted 1-2 years, one that was only a few months, and maybe one that was 4-5ish years, then that was no problem at all. We wanted to be sure they had seen the consequences of their prior decisions, if they were coming into a high-mid or senior role.
When we did hiring, we wouldn’t be comparing candidates 1-to-1 like “Well A had this, but B was good at this, which one should we pick?” …instead, we would just say “ok we’re in hiring mode, keep hiring everyone who is good until we have enough for xyz goal”. So it wouldn’t be that CandidateA is better than CandidateB, but rather if they both met the standards, then they’d get hired.
Some of the qualifiers that mattered more than tenure for us were:
* are they capable of explaining technical problems and communicating
* do they understand algorithms at enough of a level that they won’t cause major performance issues
* are they polite and friendly, how do they respond to feedback
* can they build an architecture which handles expanding requirements
* how eager are they to learn and work on our tech stack + business domain
I haven’t interviewed juniors really, so I can’t speak much to that. But when we’ve hired someone less experienced, it would be the same requirements as above just with a lot more leeway on tech, and more emphasis on “eagerness to learn” + “receptive to feedback”
Does seeing things through, pushing through the hard bits, the bits that only come up after a few years when your pet project starts spouting fire or some major restructuring happens and not to mention loyalty doesn’t mean anything anymore?
This pragmatism is understandable, but I don’t think it’s a nice way to live. Of course to each its own.
Asymmetric loyalty is a dead end. Deriving your virtue and character from your job is also a fools errand and a myth that is perpetuated by anti-labor capitalists to line their pockets before they absolve themselves of equal social responsibility.
Build character and exercise virtue by making your community and family richer.
You may be spiteful, and perhaps rightfully so, against the powers that be, but it is ultimately futile. Who is in power is not up to us, but our response to it is.
Not preaching to you, you may be the most virtuous being in existence. Just mumbling in the wind here.
If you are a partner in a business, then walking away is not so easy and probably a lot less desirable (and still, "junior partner" is sometimes a trap).
Most people who work for businesses are "human resources", so let's treat employers as "income providers" and nothing more.
> let's treat employers as "income providers" and nothing more.
It's fine that you and many of you consider this to be an agreeable way to live. I'm just saying that it's not the only way and in my opinion not a particular desireable one.
Minority opinion here, but I am entertaining the vague and quite dangerous notion that with a bit of compromise from both sides we can have our cake and eat it too. The dangerous part might consist in accepting we are not all born for great works and some humility and acceptance might not actually be such a bad thing. Of course, in moderation as with all things, but I don't think modern people are in any danger of being too humble anytime soon.
I wouldn't be too hasty to dismiss such notions as "loyalty", because "trust" is quite close and it might just be a fundamental driver of human civilization.
What sort of compromise are you thinking of? I get the impression that workers have done a lot of compromising (involuntarily) in the past decade or two and bosses have not.
The idea of a co-operative has always been appealing to me, but having encountered and worked with a lot of real live humans my idealism regarding that is pretty much shattered and in practice I suspect it would be very frustrating and fairly short-lived.
Personally I ended up as a business myself, I have clients rather than employers. It's far from perfect, but it feels more honest and 'real' somehow.
Thing is, without sounding too negative, because my team mates are all good people, but I have seen some negativity in them along these lines that in my opinion is uncalled for. Without proper care it is easy to fall into a black and white, purely transactional relationship with your employer. To be completely honest, I myself have fallen for it quite some time and it made me deeply unhappy.
I speak to the “bosses” perhaps on a different level now and it’s not like they are living to grind their staff into dust. There is a complexity to their job as well and it would perhaps be enlightening to keep that in mind even as an “employee”.
Perhaps my idea of compromise is that you, as an employee, need to come to terms that you might not be perfect and that there is a lot you do not understand, but that is OK. Try to do a good job and don’t point fingers (“they started!”). Try to imagine how your “boss” feels. We are all humans trying to do an adequate job, barring some pathological types. Not to make your boss happy, but yourself.
But I am rambling too long now. I of course need to add here that exercising wisdom is crucial: don’t let yourself be abused. Everything depends on the circumstances and they are always complex.
Edit: btw I work with small businesses and those are a completely different game than, say, Adobe. I still think the general point about trying to do good without falling into pure transactionalism is helpful.
> Perhaps my idea of compromise is that you, as an employee, need
> to come to terms that you might not be perfect and that there is
> a lot you do not understand, but that is OK. Try to do a good
> job and don’t point fingers (“they started!”).
I think this describes most people already. I mean, I've encountered some prima donnas but that problem solves itself eventually (they flounce off). I'm not sure what you're suggesting ordinary employees should be doing that they aren't already, and what it would cause their employers to do differently?
It's a good point about small businesses, I much prefer dealing with them to bigger firms. If my point of contact is one of the directors then everything flows so much more smoothly. (Smallest direct client had 7 employees, biggest I think about 200K - very different experiences.)
When I refer to "the bosses" I really mean the set of people at the upper layers of larger companies who, week to week, have no contact with staff who are doing actual productive work - their subordinates are managers, and the subordinates of their subordinates are also managers. They're insulated from, and often unaware of, the effects of their decisions - they probably don't consciously intend to grind their staff to dust, but everyone they talk to is happy and the numbers look good so surely everything is fine.
Further down the chain you've got a bunch of middle-managers with no investment in the overall good of the company and no power to really improve the conditions of the workers beyond passing messages up the chain, and the truth in those messages is filtered and transformed with every extra layer of people. Nobody wants to tell their boss stuff he/she doesn't want to hear.
Of course a reasonable explanation for why a person has turned over jobs so many times can negate the concern. It really depends on the candidate. My point is that someone early in their career needs to recognize that there are both upsides and downsides to switching jobs frequently.