This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Axel Dietrich
Staying too long may hurt your career
Times changed. About a decade or two ago, the conception people had of a job was to land in a good company and fortunately stay there their whole life, scaling the corporate ladder until retirement. Now change is the norm, especially in the software engineering world.
There are plenty of reasons to move change jobs, and staying still when the time has come can hurt your career. Here I’ll try my own guidelines, according to my experience after changing jobs 3 times (fourth job currently).
To give you some context, I’m a full time Software Engineer working in a giant not FAANG E-Commerce company. With that out the way, let’s get started.
1. You stop learning
This is the biggest reason for me to want to change jobs. If you are like me and love what you do, you want to become better every day, and that’s by learning. Learn, learn, learn. Maybe you don’t feel like you are sharpening your hard skills but you are gaining very important soft skills and that’s learning too. But the moment you just don’t feel challenged in any way or maybe doing repetitive and boring tasks after a while, I think it’s time for a change. Staying for too long in an unchallenging position can mean a stall in your development and this is the reason I left my first job.
2. Toxic work environment
After feeling unchallenged and bored for a time in my first job, I moved to my second job, working for an insurance company. It resulted to be the worst possible place to work I could ever imagined. To begin with, I was promised new technologies and challenges as they were migrating their whole systems to microservices. I made a huge emphasis on what was important to me, which was to continue learning. The few first days gone by working in a huge unscaled monolith with Java classes 20k lines long. I thought it was so I gained some business knowledge, so I delivered successfully every task that came my way. After 2 months I met with the Head of the Engineering Division because he wanted to congratulate me on my performance and I asked him to assign me new developments, to which he answered that the team responsible for new developments and migrations was full and wasn’t gonna change. I felt cheated. I sat there at the interview and expressed what was important to me and I was promised everything I wanted, just to get me to work on a 2003 application.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I heard misogynistic comments and jokes almost on a daily basis. Sexual harassment was completely overlooked, as a guy had two complaints of sexual harassment and was still working there like it was nothing. If you got to the office 10 minutes late, you’d get a cut off your paycheck and that’s just to name a few. After three months I decided to quit without a standing offer from another company, as it was making me miserable.
In my case, it was a horrible professional opportunity, but even if it had been the best career opportunity in the world, it wouldn’t have made up for the toxic work environment. Avoid this kind of environment at all costs.
3. Monetary reasons
We all need to pay our bills and even if you get paid enough to just that, life is more than just work and survive. You can have a great job but the love of art has a limit. If it doesn’t pay you well enough to have the kind of life you want or need, maybe it’s time to move to a better paying position if you can get an offer. This is one of the reasons I moved on from my third job. It was a pretty good job at a software factory startup, I was learning plenty, the CEO was always open to talk and you could feel you mattered. But as with a lot of startup, pay wasn’t great and cost of living was growing more rapidly than my paycheck so I had to move to my current position. This wasn’t the only reason but it had it’s fair part of weight.
4. Career opportunities
I mentioned that compensation was one of the reasons to move to my current position, but another great one, and possible the most important one, was career opportunities. I work at a massive e-commerce and finances company. It has a much better pay than my previous job and the opportunities that come along with such a gigantic company. You get clear objectives and career roadmap. If you deliver, you can climb the corporate ladder. It has really good challenges that you can’t get in a small sized company like maintaining a low response time and low error rate on a microservices that gets a million requests per minute. It comes with a fair share of stress and some passive guards, but the career opportunities and professional development outweighs the cons.
5. You don’t feel comfortable
Sometimes a work environment doesn’t have to be toxic for you to feel uncomfortable. Obviously I’m not talking about out-of-comfort-zone type of discomfort, as it is a good type to have. Maybe you just don’t click with the team or with your leader and that’s ok, it can happen and it’s nobody’s fault. This one is a lot more subjective to what is important to you, but it’s ok if you want to move to another position if you don’t feel comfortable. Maybe you push yourself to stay and underdeliver or have lower performance as a result. In most companies you can request to move to another team, but sometimes it isn’t.
6. Benefits
Most IT companies have benefits as part of the total compensation package and some can be better than others. Again, it comes down to what’s important to you. Maybe another company has a key benefit for you, like more vacation time and you need it to fulfill your dream of travelling the world, or you want to have kids and it has a much longer paternity leave. Only you can know what’s important to you.
7. Building a Startup
Getting more ambitious, building a startup can be a great reason to leave your job, given that you have the savings to afford to live without a constant income stream or you have another income streams. Personally, this is kind of a dream of mine, building something from the ground up, be it an app, a SaaS, on in the worst case scenario, a software factory. The thing is being the owner of your own work and get the full value of it; work for your dream instead of someone else’s.
8. Your side hustle makes more money than your job
Side hustles are a great way of getting multiple sources of income. There are ton of possible side hustles: starting a YouTube channel, writing and selling an e-book, recording and selling a course, freelancing after work hours, and why not, writing articles on Medium.
If your side hustle eventually grows into generating more income that your full-time job, maybe it’s time to quit and dedicate all your effort there and grow it even more, or just live from what it’s making. As always, it all depends on your priorities.
9. Going freelancer
Some people are just not caught up to work as an employee. No matter how good your job is, chances are you’ll answer to somebody, have to work a minimum of hours, not fully manage your schedule, days off and vacations. Surely working as a employee have several cons to balance the security and consistent paycheck, and a way out is becoming a freelancer. You are able to set your rates and only work in projects you find. Some say that you have to have low fees in order to obtain your first clients and build your brand from there, but it can also be done as a side hustle until you have enough consistent clients to take the jump.
10. Work/Life Balance
Finally is work/life balance. What job is right for you is all about your ambitions and your priorities. A job that pays well and has amazing career opportunities maybe is stressful and you just don’t want that kind of life and need to ease up; or you want to spend more time with your loved ones and need more free time; or you have another non work-related dream to fulfill that isn’t compatible with working long hours every day and having minimum vacation days. If this is your case, you might prefer to switch to a more chill and slow paced position that allows you to focus more on your personal life.
Best of luck in your career decision!
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How to Know It’s Time to Move On to Another Job as a Software Engineer was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Axel Dietrich
Axel Dietrich | Sciencx (2022-06-13T22:18:42+00:00) How to Know It’s Time to Move On to Another Job as a Software Engineer. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/06/13/how-to-know-its-time-to-move-on-to-another-job-as-a-software-engineer/
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