It's worth remembering this article seems to come from a rather clichéd and narrow frame of reference - overly driven by money and perceived status - one which seems to drive a lot of very similar advisory posts.
That's cool if it's what you want to dedicate your life to, but if you are in a happy position with a great work life balance that encourages and enables you to both improve yourself and - particularly - your non-worklife then that's a thing worth holding on to, whatever the article-heavy career gurus seem to be selling you.
Edit: as this comment has been significantly upvoted to visibility, I think I should acknowledge jasode's (and others) fair point that the author doesn't specifically focus on money. While I believe it is an implied strategic goal (which is fine) my concern is with the general over-focus on writing like this with careerism and the corresponding values which are definitely not shared by all. Thanks for the useful counterpoints to my reading.
I wrote a whole reply echoing another reply about how this article isn’t about maximizing money or status (though most of these articles are about that), that this article is just about staying competitive. But then I really thought about what you wrote and I think you’re saying that is besides the point, if you have good work life balance and really value that then it’s essentially maybe ok to give up some competitive edge.
Here I will caution you, that is a trap which I think the article is trying to get at. I am one of those people who stayed too long at a job where I was losing my competitive edge because I felt like I had a great work-life balance! And work was fun! But one day I realized I’m actually being asked to eat a lot of crap so to speak that I hadn’t really noticed before and once I started to look for the exit it was obvious it was going to be harder than it should be because I had stagnated.
Moral of my story (and this article), is stay competitive, you don’t have to crush it, but don’t lean back too far either.
>It's worth remembering this article seems to come from a rather clichéd and narrow frame of reference - overly driven by money and perceived status - one which seems to drive a lot of very similar advisory posts.
That was exactly my reaction. I was a lead for three years and recently decided to go back to a purely technical role. I just didn't like the work, and the prospect of spending the rest of my career in middle management was not appealing.
I currently received an offer from a FAANG(M) company. This was a real offer from someone I had worked with in the past which would have required a very thin interview process. I declined because I very much enjoy the work I'm doing today.
It may turn out to be a bad idea down the road if all I consider is money and that nice company name on my resume. I decided I don't care. I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond and work on truly interesting tech than be another cog in the wheel. I'm well past the "live to work" phase of my life, I just want to be happy, and I can't complain at all about my salary and benefits.
> if you are in a happy position with a great work life balance that encourages and enables you to both improve yourself and - particularly - your non-worklife
Someone needs to write "waste your personal life, one comfortable year at a time".
For me, keeping yourself relevant is not about money per se, but about freedom. Freedom to control your life instead of being controlled by an employer. By trading some current comfort (good work-life balance and low stress) for current discomfort (finding a new job and challenging yourself to grow) you make your "personal business" stronger (that is what value you and your career bring to prospective employers). That means if I do lose my job or my current employment situation goes south, I have less stress because I know my personal brand is strong and can go many places without fear.
Bottom line, moving to a new job regularly is about investing in yourself and allowing you to control the direction of your life and not allowing others to control it.
> a happy position with a great work life balance that encourages and enables you to both improve yourself and - particularly - your non-worklife
Any advice for scoring this on my personal OKRs? I’m vacillating between 0.6 and 0.7 for this quarter, and I’m circling back with the other members of my household this afternoon.
Depends on your motivations. It might also depend on your location.
Silicon Valley culture sort of expects you to move around every few years - you will get a more well-rounded perspective both technically and personally.
In other places, particularly with different employment opportunities, the picture might be different.
The one that got me here was "misplaced loyalty" because looking back, most of the companies I've worked for are either radically different or ...gone.
>It's worth remembering this article seems to come from a rather clichéd and narrow frame of reference - overly driven by money
But the blog author wrote the opposite of your characterization. Excerpt from article of not letting money distort your goals:
>Staying in a job for loyalty or money's sake is like staying in a bad marriage for the sake of kids. [...] Optimizing learning over money early in your career.
[EDIT to the many downvoters: Did I totally misunderstand the author's blog article? Where is the "overly driven by money" message? His framework chart doesn't have money anywhere on it. See:
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...]
One thing to always keep in mind is that your job can disappear very quickly.
If, or when, that happens those who've spent years in the comfort of that nice work-life balance and often, frankly, mediocrity (you don't improve yourself by staying in the comfort of such a job) are in for a shock.
exactly. I work with a guy who has a family, and probably stopped growing career wise years ago. But he makes good money, he enjoys the company, and he seems happy. He has enough depth of skill that if he were to get laid off, he could easily find another job in that area.
For a while I looked down at him, like “dude why are you stagnating?” But over time I could see why he’s doing what he’s doing, and it works for him. Maybe I’m wrong and if he got laid off he would have difficulty finding another job. But that’s his choice, relative to living with daily stress of stretching and pushing to the next level.
I think the people who are making poor choices are those who are driven by fear - they want to grow, they aren’t, and they are afraid to make a move. Or they fear being disloyal, or whatever.
I myself stayed in my second job far too long, and have regretted it since.
Since being at my current company, I’ve done something like this, though less formally. I went thru a period of 6 months where I was having less impact and I felt like I hit a “ceiling”, so I kept pushing for a different role. Then covid hit, some people left, priorities change, and now I have a perfect role and am growing again. If covid hadn’t happened I think I would’ve needed to start looking. I love my current company so was willing to wait it out a bit longer.
Really I think the only part of the post that's particularly status/money driven is:
> If you are an average 30 yr old engineer, let's say you want to retire reasonably by the time you are 60. You have at best 120 quarters left to make something of yourself. A year wasted at a poor job or role is equivalent to you throwing away 3.3% of your career. The older you get, the steeper your loss is.
Which sort of implies that what matters is where you end up at the end of your career, not enjoying yourself a long the way. I guess this isn't so much "status/money" as it is "destination vs. journey", but I feel like those can be related.
That said, I found most of the rest of the post to be much more broadly applicable. The Accomplishment/Impact/Growth/Challenge/Community framework I thought was especially good/useful to keep in mind.
I just want to provide a counterpoint to the above article. My first job out of college was at one of the "sexy" unicorns. I had fun working there, loved my coworkers, etc. I ended up leaving after 18 months to go start my own thing for many of the same reasons listed in this article. I'm in my twenties! Now is the time to take risks and optimize for learning!
In retrospect, I wish I hadn't. Maybe that's because they just filed for IPO. But I underestimated how rare these jobs are. Let's be honest--the types of experiences the author references are only available at hyper-growth startups the Valley has deemed to be "sexy". Just look at the examples: Uber, Stripe, Coinbase. The author makes it sound like you can walk into one of these roles whenever you want. It's a lie.
First, these companies only come around once in a blue moon. Second, you've got to time it just right. Third, you have to convince them to hire you. I'm sure most people on here have a story about how they didn't get a job for no discernible reason whatsoever.
There are many good reasons to leave a job. Don't let hustle porn be one of them.
Did your unicorn job meet the Accomplishment, Impact, Growth, Challenge, and Community aspects of the article?
While I have some reservations about the article (chiefly that these all have to be evaluated every three months) I think the framework to assess your current position is very different than just changing to start your “own thing”, chase the newest shiny object etc.
Many of these types of posts of reflections of the insecurity of the authors.
You don’t want to be like one of the IBM lifers back in the day who sat around waiting to get culled like a steer. But staying at a job where you enjoy what you do usually isn’t a bad move.
Agreed. There are many axes along which one's career can be wasted. Throwing prime earning years at a low expected yield activity like founding startups can be one of them, depending on your priorities and luck. If one views making money as the primary purpose of a career, that will inform decisions differently than the criteria this article identifies.
Even so you have to choose between status/money and skill. The way SV thinks about engineering is under the influence of billions of dollars being poured into 90s tech for incremental improvements. Linux. Java. Javascript. The research community has long known how to do better but change doesn't benefit monopolies.
> Now is the time to take risks and optimize for learning!
Why is now the time to take risks? Long term debilitating losses have more years to compound for you. For example if you crash in a motorcycle and are paralyzed you'll have to spend more years in a wheel chair than someone who is older.
Ugh. The mind of a narcissist on full display here.
Want to have a comfortable position with decent growth opportunities over time, and fair compensation? You must be some bottom-feeding moron who doesn't understand that [Unicorn Co]'s valuation just rose 4x YoY.
Think you can be happy at a company like Apple making six figures while unemployment is at record levels, and people are being bankrupted by hospital bills and shuttered businesses? clap emojis THINK ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL BRAND. This girl learned everything Apple had to teach her in 6 months. You can't possibly expect to just switch departments, or ask for more responsibilities to continue learning anything at a company like that!
It's incredible how insulated developers in the Bay Area can be. I would love to see how quickly all of this advice falls apart for an engineer in Portland, or Minneapolis, or just about any country besides the United States, where six-figure software jobs aren't so easy to come by.
On the other hand, once you've been doing this for a couple decades, have a family at home, hobbies, and are thinking more about your retirement than advancing a career... a nice, stable job with a good paycheck that you can forget about at the end of the day is also a pretty decent life.
What you have to avoid is the middle ground - if you are advancing your career that is great. If you have a comfortable, satisfying life, that also is great. But if you do not yet have that satisfying life AND you are failing to advance... that is the middle ground to get out of, fast.
Thank you, I resonate with this. I feel it's a perspective reached after spending those decades in the hustle; you reach a point where it's just a job (that doesn't have to be negative).
The grass is always greener as the saying goes - I'm going to do the same work at company X vs company Y (my specialty), so long as I'm being treated fairly with compensation, tasks, rewards, management, etc. and I believe enough in the core mission of the company, I'm satisfied. Leaving at 5pm to go work on a loved hobby is now more important than some ephemeral career goal. :) I think a key is financial stability though, it takes that hustle to build an investment reserve in the early years.
This is a good way to put it. I work at a well known big tech, and in many ways the money has given me a lot of freedom. I travel with my young family now because I can both afford it and I have enough co workers to easily cover my shift, which was NOT true at my startup.
It’s especially useful having young children, because there is no time for “side hustles” right now. After 5:00 my time and attention goes to my family and my work encourages that.
This makes sense. However, what kind of company culture does this set? If the company is OK with people being not passionate, what kind of signal does that give to the colleagues who want to be eager, passionate, driven?
I think the most predictable thing about the Internet is that articles like this have two kinds of comments:
- from people who feel that inside drive that leads them to be unhappy when they're not moving forward and upward (maximizers) who use it as validation
- from people who have a target life and see this as threatening (satisficers) or offensive
Every single comment always comes off like it has some sort of insecurity that it's trying to protect.
Here are some other types of articles that cause this:
- work really hard to be the best that you can be v work hard enough at your career so that you can focus on other things
- startups vs big companies
Almost all the 'advice' in the comments here is just a bunch of thinly veiled attempts on the commenters part to feel better.
Just read them from a neutral eye. They attribute so many non-existent traits to the opposite position: "overly driven by money", "stagnant", implications of not being "well-rounded" or in the opposite: "mediocre".
One anecdote: I had a very cushy position at a post-IPO startup that was taking off. My initial RSUs had appreciated by 5x by the time I left. Every time they vested I took the money off the table.
My colleagues loved me, I got great performance reviews, but I didn't feel like I was learning or growing. I was severely burnt out after working on a couple projects that exploded due to organizational problems. I went through 3 managers in a year because of reorgs and departures. Ultimately I left that job because I tortured myself - what was I doing, what value did I add? How would I get a job after this when my skills were out of date?
Meanwhile the company's stock has tripled since I left. Even if I had sold every time my stock vested I would be a millionaire by now. I grew up poor, and the security of having that money in the bank would be life-changing. Instead I'm at a new startup where I'm not any happier, but I also don't get a million dollars.
I really dislike how posts of this kind simply assume that everyone lives in Silicon Valley (and hence there are abundant jobs with ridiculously inflated pay) and has no ambition beyond working on hard technical problems and making loads of cash by working for other people.
This is completely invalid advice for people with any kind of entrepreneurial ambition, for instance, and even more so for those who might care more about building a family or spending time with loved ones than frittering their time away "increasing their net worth" by working on things they don't own.
What is most infuriating is the implication that if you don't live life by this person's constraints, you're "wasting it".
I always find these ‘optimise your net worth’ posts quite strange, especially in the context of working for FAANGs/
Unicorns where generally pay for software engineers is very, very high anyway. “I have more money that I need now, but if I’d done different thing ten years ago I’d have even more money than I need” is a weird thing to worry about.
I say this as someone who now works for a ‘unicorn’ and previously worked in a number of places that the author might consider dead end. I have some regrets about one previous job in particular, but mostly around stress it caused me at the time, not impact on my net worth. And, certainly, job hopping every couple of years seems like no life.
> I missed out on witnessing Uber's hyper-growth phase.
That is so alien to my personal values that I have a hard time following the post.
> [...] fueled what current and former Uber employees describe as a Hobbesian environment at the company, in which workers are sometimes pitted against one another and where a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers.
> One Uber manager groped female co-workers’ breasts at a company retreat in Las Vegas. A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate during a heated confrontation in a meeting. Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee’s head in with a baseball bat.
That the article describes this situation as a "missed out opportunity" just means that the writer personal goals are antagonistic to mine. And, to ask people to pursue such a situation seems quite bad advice from a mental health perspective.
Well, that depends. This article assumes you want to always chase that next thing, next incremental step up, next status boost There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but there's also nothing wrong with sticking with a job you like. Outside of SV that's both common and desirable in a candidate. I don't want to see a candidate who jumps around every 2-3 years. I want someone who will stick around a little longer to really learn the organization and be able to initiate and execute on projects that require a deeper understanding of how we work.
The people I see that hop around a lot seem to come in with what they think are big ideas, but often are simply the newest fad and don't fit our needs.
With respect to "just being a cog in the machine", if you're hopping around a lot then you really don't have time to work through the life cycle of really big projects. You come in at some stage, put in your time, and move on without making much of a mark before you leave. In that situation, you were just a plug-in component.
Obviously this dynamic is different if you're looking to work for startups. But even there, if your goal is to get equity and cash it in, you often have to be willing to stick it out a little longer. How many engineers left Google or Facebook too soon and left a lot of money on the table as a result?
What it all fundamentally comes down to though is understanding yourself. You need to dissect you motives, you impulses, to really understand what will make you happy. Once you do that, it would be foolish to chase change if the sacrifice is your happiness. I've seen people like that too, who are never content, always unhappy, and always think another change will be the solution. But it's not, because the problem isn't the job, it's the person.
I feel like FOMO is one other way to waste your career. The article talks about how they missed out on Uber's hyper-growth phase, but really, that's 20/20 vision after the fact. What if Uber went down instead? You never know the growth trajectory of any company really, even ones you work for.
Getting a job and then doing it (and moving, if that is required) takes a lot of time. Every time you move, you might as well kiss away 3 months of time from your life, between moving, packing, new friends and routines, ramp up at work, etc. Moving careers just because of a feeling isn't something you can do twice a year just because.
This also totally misses out on doing things you want to further your career that aren't in your job time, which I think is a lot more flexible and amenable to quick change to pursue growth and passion. Things like hobbies, side projects, etc.
It was a lesson I learned early on: "loyalty" doesn't make you any money. It doesn't grow your career, either. Your work life is a big part of your daily life and it should be fun, challenging to some degree, and rewarding.
For me, "rewarding" means financial compensation, learning new things, and being appreciated by my peers and those above me.
Currently, I work as a senior software engineer for Apple. I make a low 6-figure salary while working 100% remote (also before COVID-19). The assigned work is groundbreaking, secretive, uses new tech, and it's going to be used by millions of people around the world.
Then I got the offer a few weeks ago to work for a local bank, setting up their new platform. Even newer technologies and more responsibilities as a competency lead. The salary will increase by 60%.
Imagine making 120k a year and jumping to 192k a year, just by signing a piece of paper. I've worked for Apple for about 2 years now, and I'm having a great time. But there's no way they'll increase my salary like that.
What I have learned over the years is that if I make this switch and don't burn bridges behind me, I should stay in close contact with my current colleagues, and work to learn all I can at the new job.
Two or three years from now, I might apply at Apple again. For a higher-level job. Right now I'm a senior software engineer, but in 3 years with 3 years of enterprise leadership experience, I'd apply for a leadership role. I will use my connections and insider-knowledge to have a more personal connection to them.
That can be a quicker, but certainly more lucrative, way of promoting inside a company. And I've done that before at a different company.
I was a medior developer at CompanyA, moved to CompanyB where I became a senior developer for 2 years, then moved back to CompanyA as a senior developer.
Usually I would have gotten the usual +5% salary increase if I had stayed at CompanyA. But by making a little detour I increased my salary by 30% to 40% with each jump.
Loyalty is worth nothing, except to your employer. That just means you're an asset that is going to become worth increasingly more as time goes by, because your potential market value skyrockets while you remain working for the annual +5%. And every once in a while you'll get the +7% because you're so special. And that one year business is bad, so you'll only get +2%.
Switch jobs every 6 months to 2 years, and some people will label you a job hopper. Last more than that, and some people will think you are too comfortable for your own good.
I think you are better off accepting you can't make everyone happy and that, no matter what you do, someone won't like you for some random reason. Just trust your gut as long as you are making a decent living.
Bollocks. European management and screening people will judge negatively both CV gaps and "job hopping" (or whatever they'll judge as disloyalty). Will use both to lowball you or reject you when comparing with other candidates. Have a cozy full time job at major tech/engineering company? Stay where you are. It's dark and windy out there and believe me you don't want to deal with recruitment processes.
Not sure if I agree with this. I grew up in The Netherlands and as a software developer I would change companies every 1.5-3 years. From my experience (in The Netherlands) many jobs will give you just a very small raise every year and the only way to make big financial gains is to job hop every now and then. Or go freelancing at which point you set your own rates.
My anecdata. I'm often hiring for my European employer. Nobody bats an eye if you have a streak of e.g. 5 months, 9 months, 6 months, 10 months. Realistically, these candidates do get an honest shot at a tech interview (which is hard to pass for any candidate).
But if you forget to put Kubernetes in your resumé, that's when you are in trouble.
I'm based in Europe, although I run my own early stage company and we're not hiring, yet. I used to be a part of the job market until about a year ago, although my last two employers were both SV companies. So that's probably is where many of my biases come from.
I have a couple of freelancers working with me and I never really paid much attention to their CVs. I value the technical and (written) communication abilities over anything I see in the CV. Especially because everyone is working remotely.
I seem to have have the opposite bias. When I see that someone has spent > 5 years in a well established / post growth company. I see it as a sign of compacency, which has a slightly negative connotation in my books. I totally undestand it if you're getting fat raises and stock refreshers every year at a growth phase company. But if you've been working at a podunk company for 5+ years, that's definitely a negative signal for me.
Also, the old cliche quote: "If you want loyalty, get a dog" comes to mind. Loyalty and ambition are anti correlated. I think the extremes of both are bad, and it helps to strike a balance somewhere in the middle.
I'm not really sure that's what she's saying. There's a whole section at the end on "Change doesn't mean to quit".
To address your specific points, and as someone who's done a lot of hiring for different companies over the years:
- Yes, lots of job hopping can be viewed negatively (please see below).
- I've been amazed by the number of people I know who've changed jobs mid-pandemic. Clearly there is still a job market out there. With that being said my default position agrees with yours: unless you have a very compelling reason to change jobs, if your current job is secure, stick with it.
Back to job hopping...
If you've been working for 10+ years and never held down a job for more than a year or two the alarm bells start ringing. If you've pulled that off for 15 - 20 years all of the alarm bells go into maximum overdrive.
However, I certainly don't mind a bit of job hopping early in your career: it can take a while for people to find a position that really suits them.
Similarly, peoples' circumstances change: they get married, they move, they have children, they're made redundant, they have health problems, they need to care for a relative, they suffer bereavement, or they just get bored and need a change and it takes a while to figure out - not to mention all of the other changes that can happen within a company that make them to look for work elsewhere. The result is that people might go through another period where they change jobs more often: they might start contracting, or if they move and have to change jobs the first job they land might not be that great.
Often I've seen on CVs where people have been with a company for a long time, then might change two or three times after that because really good jobs that suit you well aren't actually as common as we'd all probably like. Again, that's generally OK.
What I do want to see is some solid evidence that under the right circumstances you can hold a job down and stick at it for a few years. The amount of evidence I'll want to see of that increases proportionally to the length of your career.
This is an inexact rule of thumb. Changing jobs a lot may not immediately put me off a candidate but it will, at the very least, mean I dig into the issue very thoroughly during the selection process, and if I don't like what I find then obviously you won't get the job (but that's true of any aspect of selection).
With that said it is possible to stay in a job too long. I was with one company for 10 years, and that was too long. Far too long. But not because it was 10 years: the company had stopped growing at the time and I'd run out of opportunities to really develop and advance in my career. I'd say I wasted at least the last 3 years there. In terms of career advancement that 3 years has probably cost me more like 5 - 7, because I was burned out and pissed off, so I spent a couple of years contracting before moving back into full time employment.
I don't really feel that there's prejudice on job hopping in Europe nowadays (at least in the software industry). If you're at a place for at least 2 years you kind of start to be considered an old timer.
Personally I have found a rather different factor has been at play in my career - I have been in the industry for 15 years and made several side-steps, including working as employee #1 at a startup (which I cashed out from a buy-back), working at a GPU company on the driver and much else. I've also contributed to the linux kernel, chromium, the go programming language and a number of others.
I have never lacked the ability to make a change in my career even when it was scary, including taking the early stage startup job at a >30% reduction in pay + they only had 2-3 months money in the bank max.
However I've found that my career progression has been stalled by each and every move. I'm back at the bottom of the ladder and those years of experience? Worth absolutely nothing.
It's felt like every move to another position for whatever reason (typically to have a more interesting, fulfilling career in my case) has absolutely reset my career every time.
I'm 39 years old and last week a 25 year old was promoted in my company above my position after he'd been there for 3 years. It's pretty galling to think that I could be in the same position as not far off a graduate engineer in my early 20's.
My experience has consistently been that only your experience at $CURRENTJOB counts for anything when it comes to progression.
By all means, seek out the best job for you, but don't be surprised if there's a cost in progression of any kind. I don't regret taking risks and aiming for happiness but I do regret that I was naive about how to do it in a smart way.
I think part of the issue is that many technical roles (note: I have never worked for FAANG so maybe different there) do not have a well-defined or sensible technical promotion route, so only managerial experience matters in terms of progression.
Is software really so shallow?
Does it wash away so quickly as fads change?
How do you get really, really deep knowledge?
A person that works at the same company for 25 years should show a progression of titles and work assignments, ending up with a very valuable perspective into the companies products, customers, and business issues.
Job hopping every 2 years? Do you even know how to make coffee before you leave?
"The moral is that you can tame wild ducks, but you can't wildify tamed ducks (that's why there isn't even such a word as wildify)."
Well, I don't know about ducks, but it's certainly possible to re-introduce animals that have been raised by humans into the wild, e.g. with hand-raised foxes. Moral of the story: don't make wild claims about things you don't know anything about if you want people to take your main point seriously.
I have seen and still seeing enough people prefering to use there work time to spend a lot (and i don't mean having a quick read once or twice or thrice a day) of time at work doing everything than working.
Feel free to do something totally unrelated while you are waiting for a build to finish but if you never ever reach a certain level, you will be stuck and you will live in your own missery.
And by missery i mean: Things you have done shitty and quick will fall on your feet daily; No one is asking you for guidance or real help. You might never be in the position of doing something additional than 'just working one ticket of after the other' and what i mean by this: forming your environment, forming the product and making that thing to yours.
Something you formed, you guided, you made.
You will be frustrated about your job, you will complain, your colleges, well aware what your problems are, will just not tell you what you need to here because you are probably not showing them that you do care.
You will earn the same amount of money, your job will not change switching companies much and thats it.
While the others are getting rid of the standard pitfalls, making their lives easier, learning new things, getting faster, better, more valuable. Earning more money for the same time spend at work, getting cooler projects, being aksed to join teams because of reputation, having more slack than you with a much better salary due to trust and past achievements.
And if you realize this too late, you lost the most valuable time: early in your career. The time where you advanced the most and the fastest, were you learn easier, where everything new is interesting and cool.
If you read this and you spend a lot of time on imageboard or whatever and you hate your job or you are depressed because of it, its not the fault of others.
I have never ever had the issue of doing my things to early and then not knowing what to do else. There is always an old bug to fix, something to automate, something new to try out, to read to watch etc.
And there is a secret: I actually like my job because of all the possibilities.
The author is talking about joining apple and uber like they are jobs in a restaurant that is easy to get for everyone!
And compared money in career with kids in marriage like everyone has a privilege of accepting a lower income without compromising basic needs of life or their dependents.
He has some points, but maybe he didn’t learn enough about what career means to many!
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
That's cool if it's what you want to dedicate your life to, but if you are in a happy position with a great work life balance that encourages and enables you to both improve yourself and - particularly - your non-worklife then that's a thing worth holding on to, whatever the article-heavy career gurus seem to be selling you.
Edit: as this comment has been significantly upvoted to visibility, I think I should acknowledge jasode's (and others) fair point that the author doesn't specifically focus on money. While I believe it is an implied strategic goal (which is fine) my concern is with the general over-focus on writing like this with careerism and the corresponding values which are definitely not shared by all. Thanks for the useful counterpoints to my reading.
[+] [-] hellisothers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EpicEng|5 years ago|reply
That was exactly my reaction. I was a lead for three years and recently decided to go back to a purely technical role. I just didn't like the work, and the prospect of spending the rest of my career in middle management was not appealing.
I currently received an offer from a FAANG(M) company. This was a real offer from someone I had worked with in the past which would have required a very thin interview process. I declined because I very much enjoy the work I'm doing today.
It may turn out to be a bad idea down the road if all I consider is money and that nice company name on my resume. I decided I don't care. I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond and work on truly interesting tech than be another cog in the wheel. I'm well past the "live to work" phase of my life, I just want to be happy, and I can't complain at all about my salary and benefits.
[+] [-] humanrebar|5 years ago|reply
Someone needs to write "waste your personal life, one comfortable year at a time".
[+] [-] Nemi|5 years ago|reply
Bottom line, moving to a new job regularly is about investing in yourself and allowing you to control the direction of your life and not allowing others to control it.
[+] [-] otras|5 years ago|reply
Any advice for scoring this on my personal OKRs? I’m vacillating between 0.6 and 0.7 for this quarter, and I’m circling back with the other members of my household this afternoon.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
Silicon Valley culture sort of expects you to move around every few years - you will get a more well-rounded perspective both technically and personally.
In other places, particularly with different employment opportunities, the picture might be different.
The one that got me here was "misplaced loyalty" because looking back, most of the companies I've worked for are either radically different or ...gone.
[+] [-] jasode|5 years ago|reply
But the blog author wrote the opposite of your characterization. Excerpt from article of not letting money distort your goals:
>Staying in a job for loyalty or money's sake is like staying in a bad marriage for the sake of kids. [...] Optimizing learning over money early in your career.
[EDIT to the many downvoters: Did I totally misunderstand the author's blog article? Where is the "overly driven by money" message? His framework chart doesn't have money anywhere on it. See: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...]
[+] [-] mylons|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|5 years ago|reply
If, or when, that happens those who've spent years in the comfort of that nice work-life balance and often, frankly, mediocrity (you don't improve yourself by staying in the comfort of such a job) are in for a shock.
[+] [-] xivzgrev|5 years ago|reply
For a while I looked down at him, like “dude why are you stagnating?” But over time I could see why he’s doing what he’s doing, and it works for him. Maybe I’m wrong and if he got laid off he would have difficulty finding another job. But that’s his choice, relative to living with daily stress of stretching and pushing to the next level.
I think the people who are making poor choices are those who are driven by fear - they want to grow, they aren’t, and they are afraid to make a move. Or they fear being disloyal, or whatever.
I myself stayed in my second job far too long, and have regretted it since.
Since being at my current company, I’ve done something like this, though less formally. I went thru a period of 6 months where I was having less impact and I felt like I hit a “ceiling”, so I kept pushing for a different role. Then covid hit, some people left, priorities change, and now I have a perfect role and am growing again. If covid hadn’t happened I think I would’ve needed to start looking. I love my current company so was willing to wait it out a bit longer.
[+] [-] robocat|5 years ago|reply
And it is an article focusing on your career, not any life goals outside of that.
[+] [-] alecbz|5 years ago|reply
> If you are an average 30 yr old engineer, let's say you want to retire reasonably by the time you are 60. You have at best 120 quarters left to make something of yourself. A year wasted at a poor job or role is equivalent to you throwing away 3.3% of your career. The older you get, the steeper your loss is.
Which sort of implies that what matters is where you end up at the end of your career, not enjoying yourself a long the way. I guess this isn't so much "status/money" as it is "destination vs. journey", but I feel like those can be related.
That said, I found most of the rest of the post to be much more broadly applicable. The Accomplishment/Impact/Growth/Challenge/Community framework I thought was especially good/useful to keep in mind.
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
“Comin’ up as a coder in the cash game / Livin’ in the fast lane / I’m for real.”
[+] [-] sbuccini|5 years ago|reply
In retrospect, I wish I hadn't. Maybe that's because they just filed for IPO. But I underestimated how rare these jobs are. Let's be honest--the types of experiences the author references are only available at hyper-growth startups the Valley has deemed to be "sexy". Just look at the examples: Uber, Stripe, Coinbase. The author makes it sound like you can walk into one of these roles whenever you want. It's a lie.
First, these companies only come around once in a blue moon. Second, you've got to time it just right. Third, you have to convince them to hire you. I'm sure most people on here have a story about how they didn't get a job for no discernible reason whatsoever.
There are many good reasons to leave a job. Don't let hustle porn be one of them.
[+] [-] bumby|5 years ago|reply
While I have some reservations about the article (chiefly that these all have to be evaluated every three months) I think the framework to assess your current position is very different than just changing to start your “own thing”, chase the newest shiny object etc.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
You don’t want to be like one of the IBM lifers back in the day who sat around waiting to get culled like a steer. But staying at a job where you enjoy what you do usually isn’t a bad move.
[+] [-] asdfasgasdgasdg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustingetz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|5 years ago|reply
Why is now the time to take risks? Long term debilitating losses have more years to compound for you. For example if you crash in a motorcycle and are paralyzed you'll have to spend more years in a wheel chair than someone who is older.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
Looking back I should have kept that, sold that, married that one, stayed away from that one, moved out earlier, tried harder, given up, etc...
[+] [-] Winterflow3r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aitrean|5 years ago|reply
Want to have a comfortable position with decent growth opportunities over time, and fair compensation? You must be some bottom-feeding moron who doesn't understand that [Unicorn Co]'s valuation just rose 4x YoY.
Think you can be happy at a company like Apple making six figures while unemployment is at record levels, and people are being bankrupted by hospital bills and shuttered businesses? clap emojis THINK ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL BRAND. This girl learned everything Apple had to teach her in 6 months. You can't possibly expect to just switch departments, or ask for more responsibilities to continue learning anything at a company like that!
It's incredible how insulated developers in the Bay Area can be. I would love to see how quickly all of this advice falls apart for an engineer in Portland, or Minneapolis, or just about any country besides the United States, where six-figure software jobs aren't so easy to come by.
[+] [-] codingdave|5 years ago|reply
What you have to avoid is the middle ground - if you are advancing your career that is great. If you have a comfortable, satisfying life, that also is great. But if you do not yet have that satisfying life AND you are failing to advance... that is the middle ground to get out of, fast.
[+] [-] gravitas|5 years ago|reply
The grass is always greener as the saying goes - I'm going to do the same work at company X vs company Y (my specialty), so long as I'm being treated fairly with compensation, tasks, rewards, management, etc. and I believe enough in the core mission of the company, I'm satisfied. Leaving at 5pm to go work on a loved hobby is now more important than some ephemeral career goal. :) I think a key is financial stability though, it takes that hustle to build an investment reserve in the early years.
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
It’s especially useful having young children, because there is no time for “side hustles” right now. After 5:00 my time and attention goes to my family and my work encourages that.
[+] [-] gamma3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
- from people who feel that inside drive that leads them to be unhappy when they're not moving forward and upward (maximizers) who use it as validation
- from people who have a target life and see this as threatening (satisficers) or offensive
Every single comment always comes off like it has some sort of insecurity that it's trying to protect.
Here are some other types of articles that cause this:
- work really hard to be the best that you can be v work hard enough at your career so that you can focus on other things
- startups vs big companies
Almost all the 'advice' in the comments here is just a bunch of thinly veiled attempts on the commenters part to feel better.
Just read them from a neutral eye. They attribute so many non-existent traits to the opposite position: "overly driven by money", "stagnant", implications of not being "well-rounded" or in the opposite: "mediocre".
This is mommy forum level stuff.
[+] [-] jskdvsksnb|5 years ago|reply
My colleagues loved me, I got great performance reviews, but I didn't feel like I was learning or growing. I was severely burnt out after working on a couple projects that exploded due to organizational problems. I went through 3 managers in a year because of reorgs and departures. Ultimately I left that job because I tortured myself - what was I doing, what value did I add? How would I get a job after this when my skills were out of date?
Meanwhile the company's stock has tripled since I left. Even if I had sold every time my stock vested I would be a millionaire by now. I grew up poor, and the security of having that money in the bank would be life-changing. Instead I'm at a new startup where I'm not any happier, but I also don't get a million dollars.
[+] [-] pcstl|5 years ago|reply
This is completely invalid advice for people with any kind of entrepreneurial ambition, for instance, and even more so for those who might care more about building a family or spending time with loved ones than frittering their time away "increasing their net worth" by working on things they don't own.
What is most infuriating is the implication that if you don't live life by this person's constraints, you're "wasting it".
[+] [-] rsynnott|5 years ago|reply
I say this as someone who now works for a ‘unicorn’ and previously worked in a number of places that the author might consider dead end. I have some regrets about one previous job in particular, but mostly around stress it caused me at the time, not impact on my net worth. And, certainly, job hopping every couple of years seems like no life.
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
That is so alien to my personal values that I have a hard time following the post.
> [...] fueled what current and former Uber employees describe as a Hobbesian environment at the company, in which workers are sometimes pitted against one another and where a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers.
> One Uber manager groped female co-workers’ breasts at a company retreat in Las Vegas. A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate during a heated confrontation in a meeting. Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee’s head in with a baseball bat.
That the article describes this situation as a "missed out opportunity" just means that the writer personal goals are antagonistic to mine. And, to ask people to pursue such a situation seems quite bad advice from a mental health perspective.
[+] [-] ineedasername|5 years ago|reply
The people I see that hop around a lot seem to come in with what they think are big ideas, but often are simply the newest fad and don't fit our needs.
With respect to "just being a cog in the machine", if you're hopping around a lot then you really don't have time to work through the life cycle of really big projects. You come in at some stage, put in your time, and move on without making much of a mark before you leave. In that situation, you were just a plug-in component.
Obviously this dynamic is different if you're looking to work for startups. But even there, if your goal is to get equity and cash it in, you often have to be willing to stick it out a little longer. How many engineers left Google or Facebook too soon and left a lot of money on the table as a result?
What it all fundamentally comes down to though is understanding yourself. You need to dissect you motives, you impulses, to really understand what will make you happy. Once you do that, it would be foolish to chase change if the sacrifice is your happiness. I've seen people like that too, who are never content, always unhappy, and always think another change will be the solution. But it's not, because the problem isn't the job, it's the person.
[+] [-] cbanek|5 years ago|reply
Getting a job and then doing it (and moving, if that is required) takes a lot of time. Every time you move, you might as well kiss away 3 months of time from your life, between moving, packing, new friends and routines, ramp up at work, etc. Moving careers just because of a feeling isn't something you can do twice a year just because.
This also totally misses out on doing things you want to further your career that aren't in your job time, which I think is a lot more flexible and amenable to quick change to pursue growth and passion. Things like hobbies, side projects, etc.
[+] [-] 734129837261|5 years ago|reply
For me, "rewarding" means financial compensation, learning new things, and being appreciated by my peers and those above me.
Currently, I work as a senior software engineer for Apple. I make a low 6-figure salary while working 100% remote (also before COVID-19). The assigned work is groundbreaking, secretive, uses new tech, and it's going to be used by millions of people around the world.
Then I got the offer a few weeks ago to work for a local bank, setting up their new platform. Even newer technologies and more responsibilities as a competency lead. The salary will increase by 60%.
Imagine making 120k a year and jumping to 192k a year, just by signing a piece of paper. I've worked for Apple for about 2 years now, and I'm having a great time. But there's no way they'll increase my salary like that.
What I have learned over the years is that if I make this switch and don't burn bridges behind me, I should stay in close contact with my current colleagues, and work to learn all I can at the new job.
Two or three years from now, I might apply at Apple again. For a higher-level job. Right now I'm a senior software engineer, but in 3 years with 3 years of enterprise leadership experience, I'd apply for a leadership role. I will use my connections and insider-knowledge to have a more personal connection to them.
That can be a quicker, but certainly more lucrative, way of promoting inside a company. And I've done that before at a different company.
I was a medior developer at CompanyA, moved to CompanyB where I became a senior developer for 2 years, then moved back to CompanyA as a senior developer.
Usually I would have gotten the usual +5% salary increase if I had stayed at CompanyA. But by making a little detour I increased my salary by 30% to 40% with each jump.
Loyalty is worth nothing, except to your employer. That just means you're an asset that is going to become worth increasingly more as time goes by, because your potential market value skyrockets while you remain working for the annual +5%. And every once in a while you'll get the +7% because you're so special. And that one year business is bad, so you'll only get +2%.
[+] [-] brookside|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl95|5 years ago|reply
I think you are better off accepting you can't make everyone happy and that, no matter what you do, someone won't like you for some random reason. Just trust your gut as long as you are making a decent living.
[+] [-] durnygbur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wsc981|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kubanczyk|5 years ago|reply
But if you forget to put Kubernetes in your resumé, that's when you are in trouble.
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
But if they do, I wouldn’t want to work there anyway :/
[+] [-] woadwarrior01|5 years ago|reply
I have a couple of freelancers working with me and I never really paid much attention to their CVs. I value the technical and (written) communication abilities over anything I see in the CV. Especially because everyone is working remotely.
I seem to have have the opposite bias. When I see that someone has spent > 5 years in a well established / post growth company. I see it as a sign of compacency, which has a slightly negative connotation in my books. I totally undestand it if you're getting fat raises and stock refreshers every year at a growth phase company. But if you've been working at a podunk company for 5+ years, that's definitely a negative signal for me.
Also, the old cliche quote: "If you want loyalty, get a dog" comes to mind. Loyalty and ambition are anti correlated. I think the extremes of both are bad, and it helps to strike a balance somewhere in the middle.
[+] [-] bartread|5 years ago|reply
To address your specific points, and as someone who's done a lot of hiring for different companies over the years:
- Yes, lots of job hopping can be viewed negatively (please see below).
- I've been amazed by the number of people I know who've changed jobs mid-pandemic. Clearly there is still a job market out there. With that being said my default position agrees with yours: unless you have a very compelling reason to change jobs, if your current job is secure, stick with it.
Back to job hopping...
If you've been working for 10+ years and never held down a job for more than a year or two the alarm bells start ringing. If you've pulled that off for 15 - 20 years all of the alarm bells go into maximum overdrive.
However, I certainly don't mind a bit of job hopping early in your career: it can take a while for people to find a position that really suits them.
Similarly, peoples' circumstances change: they get married, they move, they have children, they're made redundant, they have health problems, they need to care for a relative, they suffer bereavement, or they just get bored and need a change and it takes a while to figure out - not to mention all of the other changes that can happen within a company that make them to look for work elsewhere. The result is that people might go through another period where they change jobs more often: they might start contracting, or if they move and have to change jobs the first job they land might not be that great.
Often I've seen on CVs where people have been with a company for a long time, then might change two or three times after that because really good jobs that suit you well aren't actually as common as we'd all probably like. Again, that's generally OK.
What I do want to see is some solid evidence that under the right circumstances you can hold a job down and stick at it for a few years. The amount of evidence I'll want to see of that increases proportionally to the length of your career.
This is an inexact rule of thumb. Changing jobs a lot may not immediately put me off a candidate but it will, at the very least, mean I dig into the issue very thoroughly during the selection process, and if I don't like what I find then obviously you won't get the job (but that's true of any aspect of selection).
With that said it is possible to stay in a job too long. I was with one company for 10 years, and that was too long. Far too long. But not because it was 10 years: the company had stopped growing at the time and I'd run out of opportunities to really develop and advance in my career. I'd say I wasted at least the last 3 years there. In terms of career advancement that 3 years has probably cost me more like 5 - 7, because I was burned out and pissed off, so I spent a couple of years contracting before moving back into full time employment.
[+] [-] axetheone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barnacled|5 years ago|reply
I have never lacked the ability to make a change in my career even when it was scary, including taking the early stage startup job at a >30% reduction in pay + they only had 2-3 months money in the bank max.
However I've found that my career progression has been stalled by each and every move. I'm back at the bottom of the ladder and those years of experience? Worth absolutely nothing.
It's felt like every move to another position for whatever reason (typically to have a more interesting, fulfilling career in my case) has absolutely reset my career every time.
I'm 39 years old and last week a 25 year old was promoted in my company above my position after he'd been there for 3 years. It's pretty galling to think that I could be in the same position as not far off a graduate engineer in my early 20's.
My experience has consistently been that only your experience at $CURRENTJOB counts for anything when it comes to progression.
By all means, seek out the best job for you, but don't be surprised if there's a cost in progression of any kind. I don't regret taking risks and aiming for happiness but I do regret that I was naive about how to do it in a smart way.
I think part of the issue is that many technical roles (note: I have never worked for FAANG so maybe different there) do not have a well-defined or sensible technical promotion route, so only managerial experience matters in terms of progression.
[+] [-] derwiki|5 years ago|reply
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
[+] [-] bdavis__|5 years ago|reply
How do you get really, really deep knowledge?
A person that works at the same company for 25 years should show a progression of titles and work assignments, ending up with a very valuable perspective into the companies products, customers, and business issues.
Job hopping every 2 years? Do you even know how to make coffee before you leave?
[+] [-] roel_v|5 years ago|reply
Well, I don't know about ducks, but it's certainly possible to re-introduce animals that have been raised by humans into the wild, e.g. with hand-raised foxes. Moral of the story: don't make wild claims about things you don't know anything about if you want people to take your main point seriously.
[+] [-] Fumtumi|5 years ago|reply
Feel free to do something totally unrelated while you are waiting for a build to finish but if you never ever reach a certain level, you will be stuck and you will live in your own missery.
And by missery i mean: Things you have done shitty and quick will fall on your feet daily; No one is asking you for guidance or real help. You might never be in the position of doing something additional than 'just working one ticket of after the other' and what i mean by this: forming your environment, forming the product and making that thing to yours.
Something you formed, you guided, you made.
You will be frustrated about your job, you will complain, your colleges, well aware what your problems are, will just not tell you what you need to here because you are probably not showing them that you do care.
You will earn the same amount of money, your job will not change switching companies much and thats it.
While the others are getting rid of the standard pitfalls, making their lives easier, learning new things, getting faster, better, more valuable. Earning more money for the same time spend at work, getting cooler projects, being aksed to join teams because of reputation, having more slack than you with a much better salary due to trust and past achievements.
And if you realize this too late, you lost the most valuable time: early in your career. The time where you advanced the most and the fastest, were you learn easier, where everything new is interesting and cool.
If you read this and you spend a lot of time on imageboard or whatever and you hate your job or you are depressed because of it, its not the fault of others.
I have never ever had the issue of doing my things to early and then not knowing what to do else. There is always an old bug to fix, something to automate, something new to try out, to read to watch etc.
And there is a secret: I actually like my job because of all the possibilities.
[+] [-] taken_username|5 years ago|reply
And compared money in career with kids in marriage like everyone has a privilege of accepting a lower income without compromising basic needs of life or their dependents.
He has some points, but maybe he didn’t learn enough about what career means to many!