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Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#31
My personal advice to anyone is to move from a company before you are there for 10 years. It does not matter how well you are doing, how good you are rated, it is both a career killer and a personal investment that will make it a lot harder to leave when you should have left a long time ago.

I am not talking about job hopping, not at all, but after 20 years in a company it becomes a sort of a marriage and this is not healthy for you, even if it is great for the company. Your marriage is for life, your employer is not.

Another moment to leave is when you did not learn anything new in the past 6 months. In IT, this is not good.

Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#32
post #2

I never regretted quitting a job. There always was a good reason to switch. If you are unsure if its worth to stay, do some interviews. I recently did 3 interviews and found out that my current job was better than the offered positions.

Curious: in what way better? I am doing interviews from time to time just to see what is outside and I found companies with better pay but very toxic atmosphere, companies that pay less but great to work in (relaxed, friendly), not yet better pay and better atmosphere but that's what we all should be looking for.

Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#33
I would say that, regardless of the company, you should seriously consider quitting your first job after a couple years.

Even if your first job is great, you just have no basis for comparison. If your next job is great too, then swell - now you can work there confidently! If it sucks, you try again. The knowledge you gain by trying a few places is better than sitting in one place, even if that place is actually really good.

For me, my first job was ok. My second job was ok, but in different ways: some things it did way better then job #1, some things way worse. By the end of my second job, I have at least the start of an idea of what I liked and disliked, and used that to inform my third job search.

Really the third job search is where it's really at: you have a lot more options (as a mid or senior engineer) and you have two data points about what you want and don't want in a job. This allows you to optimize around what the best job for you is. My third job lasted my about 5 years until an acquisition because I had dialed in what I liked by that point. If I'd stayed at my first job, I'd never have found that.

Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#34
post #6

Never regretted quitting either. My first job was pretty stellar too, in engineering R&D, and probably the smartest set of people I've worked with to date. I must have been among the top earning graduates from the CS program at my university (which isn't a great university for CS, to be fair). I quit because I couldn't adjust to being a company employee, working in a bland business park on the edge of a new city, wri…

This resonates.

Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#36
post #27

At one of my previous jobs, I did a project on employee retention. Our goal was to identify valuable employees who were most likely to leave. The results were surprising at first. The top two factors leading to an employee moving to a new job were: high performance review and high increase in compensation (raise and bonus). On reflection, we realized that we just reaffirmed their market value, so they could negotiate…

Really curious about something: according to the Pareto principle you should identify the top square root of employees that are top performers and pay them significantly more than the rest (they are producing several times more,~ 9 times, you even if you pay them double you get more value than from the rest of the people). Was this a conclusion of your project on employee retention?

Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#37
If there is something about your job that is making you miserable daily, especially if it effects your mood outside of work definitely make a move. Beware of strongly linking your general happiness to your job generally though. If your are unhappy about something outside of work changing your job probably isn’t going to help make you happier.

Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#38
The best physical analogy I can muster is that of a sail: wind propels you forward, yet it's never originating from one direction. Ride the wind to your next challenge; the younger you are (and with the least amount of external responsibilities, e.g., family, mortgage, debt reduction), the easier it is to adapt to quick changes in wind direction / speed.

Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

#39
One thing I often think about is a description of the distribution of job-quality as being fat-tailed[1]. That is, the 95th percentile job is a lot better than a median job and, in particular, is a lot better than if job quality were normally distributed. The referenced piece describes some strategies for looking for outliers in a fat-tailed distribution (e.g. the best jobs). If you agree that job-quality is fat-tailed, you should be wary of the phrase ‘as good as the best’ because there is a lot of difference in the tail. But, it is conceivable that your firm gives you a job which suits you to a similar amount than what you might get at similarly sized companies with similar businesses.

If your job is currently outlier-good, you have a high chance of ending up with something worse if you move to a random job, and even if you know what sort of things you like about it and try to find things you think you’ll want, there might be things that you like but don’t realise until you move and so fail to take into account when looking for other jobs.

One thing that might be useful to you is trying to figure out how your job compares to what other jobs could be. I think the only real way to do this is talking to people you know at other companies, ideally people who have worked at multiple places and have been around long enough wherever they work to see more of the inner workings. If you don’t know such people then maybe you’d be able to meet them socially at parties or conferences or something. I think things online will be written either by companies (mostly emphasizing good parts) or by people with unrepresentative opinions and so you will likely not get the most realistic picture.

There are some other things you could do, e.g. talking to people within your own firm who have worked in many places but stuck there – why did they leave places before, why do they like the current place, what do they not like about it? Or looking at some statistics like attrition (and do people not leave because they are happy or because they are e.g. sitting around waiting for an IPO?). Another thing you could look for is people who leave and then come back (which would likely also be an option for you too if you left – don’t burn bridges and if they liked you before they would presumably be happier to hire someone they already have a good read on and who better understands the business than a typical external hire). If people leave and then return, maybe they left for personal reasons unrelated to the job (e.g. a spouse moving to a distant city for work and then returning), or maybe they left for other companies, and thought that the previous place was a better option. Or maybe they went to pursue something like being a farmer or a carpenter or retired or whatever and decided it wasn’t for them and returned.

[1] https://www.benkuhn.net/outliers/

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