Fire Me, I Beg You

I mean, I have that same twinge about a lot of things, and I had identified it as something I need to evaluate instead of acting on immediately. This lead to me sticking in a position way too long (I actually only recently resigned), and becoming utterly miserable.

The line is fuzzy, but there was definitely a point at my last position where I would have been premature in leaving. I would say, however, that the appropriate point to leave would have been right around the time when relief would have been my primary reaction to being let go.

If you haven't been in that situation, it's a bit hard to relate the feeling, but it's definitely it's own class of "positive", not like the "excitement of reacting to the immediate and having to think on ones feet" feeling at all.

I personally think that the biggest problem with this approach is that you have to remember to do it. The "fundamentally unhappy" situations tend to sneak up on you as you get into that weird cycle of going to work and doing the dance being prioritized higher up on the list than your long-term mental health. It's hard to stay in the moment.

It's also a challenge to prove something.

When you are hired, you can negotiate a salary $X based on your skills, the company's needs, the job market, and a whole host of factors.

At each pay review period (or however your firm does it) thereafter you may get a salary increase of Y%. The realities of corporate politics, management, social dynamics, etc. say that the frequency of the review (or if you even get one) is mostly out of your control. Further, the amount of the increase may have little to do with you; maybe there's "no room in the budget for increases this quarter", or maybe your manager is giving you poor evaluations to try and keep you from being promoted out of his department thus reducing his headcount. Finally, there is a force in almost every organization that says that salary should be based on seniority not merit. There may be pay grades, or salary caps, and there is almost always some limit on the size of the raise any person can get without a top exec signing off on it. I could go on. :)

Meanwhile, you (hopefully!) have more knowledge and skills than when you were hired; you certainly have more experience. After a few years, you are almost certainly worth a lot more than when you were hired. (If the job market has improved since you were hired, this goes triple.)

The end result is that, for most people, your salary represents a pretty good snapshot of your "worth" when you are hired, but every quarter thereafter it diverges. Changing jobs periodically lets the good employees "lock in" that extra value. (Meanwhile the poor employees will do their utmost to stay, as they know they may not deserve all of the raises they've received. This is but one of many reasons why organizational performance trends downwards over time.)

You'd think that you could just renogotiate with your current employer. "Hey, I know I was only worth $60k when you hired me, but I'm now an expert on X, Y, and Z, and the job market is really hot right now. I know you've upped my salary to $90k, but you'd have to pay over $140k to replace me. Give me a raise or I'll go next door and get $120k." Seems logical, but human nature being what it is, this never works. Instead, you quit and go to work next door for $120k, while one of their guys quits his $90k job and comes to work at your old employer for $120k. Of course, both of you are now less productive for the next 6 months as you learn new systems and a new codebase. It's silly, but there you are.

While the average increase in salary when you start a new job is about 20%.

I think the differences are usually even more dramatic near the beginning of most people's careers. Entry level employees tend to be extremely underpaid and undervalued.

With at least one year of experience under your belt, your worth on the job market is significantly higher than someone who's fresh out of college. But the company with which you've been working at since college rarely sees it that way, and tends to undervalue you. If you switch jobs, you are almost guaranteed a significantly higher salary -- even more so with two or three years under your belt.

In my own case, I managed to more than double my salary in about three years of job hopping about once a year at the start of my career. Of course, simple math will tell you you can't keep that sort of thing for long (unless you're one of the few to win the career lottery and make C__ at a successful company). So eventually your salary increases will start to plateau, and you might even price yourself out of the job market entirely -- making your current job (the one willing to pay top market rates) that much more valuable for you to keep. But when you're just starting out, and even in the middle of your career, this won't be much of a concern.

I gave notice at my job of ten years last week, and I'm about as unexcited about the future as you can get. I've accumulated years of skill rot, self doubt, health problems, and straight up depression. I live in a part of the country with almost nothing in the way of a tech industry, so finding a better job will probably require moving to a strange new place. Despite having two years' gross in the bank and no debt, I constantly worry about ending up broke and on the street.

Going from "miserably employed" to "somewhat less miserably unemployed" to "happily employed" takes significantly more work than just walking away from a job, but talking about that isn't the sort of material that gets the pageviews.