I knew it when my new job offered 30% more in salary and bonus and benefit comparing to the 1st I got out of college.
Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
41–50 of 60 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#42The market sucks right now, especially for junior engineers - so get an offer before you quit. (I have, in the past, done it the other way around.)
When you do interview, try to get a good sense of the team you'd be working on and what you'd be doing day to day. Interview them and make sure that they're a right fit for you.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#43You should quit. There's a randomized controlled experiment on this exact topic. See column 6 in page 28 of https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22487/w224... On average, people who flip a coin to decide whether to quit are much happier when they quit. To be precise, if we define H as self-scored-1-to-10 happiness six months after the coin toss, then B_wald = (EV[H | heads] - EV[H | tails]) / (Pr[quit |…
some entries in the same column:
should I quit my job -> 5.203
should I start my own business -> 5.256
should I propose -> -5.125Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#44What if switching jobs came with no overhead? That is, what if you could decide one day to change jobs and you'd be going to a different job the next day? Would you do it? Sure you would. At worst, you'd find out that your original job was great and you'd go back there.
The reason I pose that question is that I've found that for me the hardest thing about switching jobs is the overhead of switching: I have to do uncomfortable things for a while: grinding leetcode, switching to a salesman mentality where I'm selling my skills, risking lots of rejection, etc. The thing is that it's always been worth the hassle. I've gotten a raise every time. I've met people I respect and like every time. I've also learned things that I didn't know existed at every new job.
If you go through a couple more jobs and find you miss your first employer then you can at least go back there with a better resume than you had when you left.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#45I 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.
For me switching jobs always was two steps ahead and maybe one back. My first full time job had subpar pay and benefits but allowed me to take over a lot of responsibility.
After 2 years I switched jobs (thanks to a friend) to get a better salary, less pressure, but also a bit more boring, and too much paperwork.
After 2 more years the huge amount of paperwork started to really bug me. Fortunately 2 job offers came from former colleagues and I accepted the second one.
This job was really awesome and I stayed many years and did not follow up on any jobs that were offered to me.
After these years however some changes in management above me led to significant shifts in my projects and suddenly I was interested again in job offers, and this is how I ended up at my current 4th full time job.
I'm quite content at my current position, still I interviewed with 3 positions that were relayed to me by a headhunter. All 3 offers had at least one catch (the ones I did not interview with were even worse), so I agreed with that headhunter to not contact me again.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#46> Money aside, did you ever leave a job you were happy with to find one where you were even more happy? Did that work? I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer. Frequently. I've…
I don’t think this is great advice. I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical take that does not apply so well to the kinds of jobs that many people have at HN. I think the main way that money (above a point) matters a lot is that it tends to correlate with other good qualities like not being stressed or overworked, being respected by your colleagues / bosses, etc. So I think it mostly isn’t like you choose between company A and company B where they are equivalent except company A pays less to have beer and ping pong, but rather that they aren’t equivalent and company A probably has beer and ping pong and pays more. Indeed, I think one should be wary of abnormally high pay (compared to competitors) as the high pay may be required to compensate for poor conditions. Given the amount of one’s life spent working, I think it’s good to find a job you like. Certainly, I wouldn’t knowingly trade a $100k raise for e.g. being yelled at every day or working 6 days a week, but I think this isn’t a commonly offered trade for the reasons above.
There do exist companies that value tenure more than others. An easy example to describe is that Amazon backloads their stock awards so if they say they will give you $X over 4 years when they hire you, you might get (made up numbers) 30% in the first two years and 70% in the next two. One explanation is that this is to make it cheaper to hire people because many will hate the job and quit after two years, but another is that it expresses that the company values long-tenured employees. One can survey salary reports online and get an impression of whether the company more values people with a lot of experience at the company or people who were recently hired.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#47At times, I regretted a bit quitting my first non-internship job, because the second one was so much worse (but with better pay, and i learned corporate software like Jenkins and some AWS stuff). But the third (that i started 4 months ago, full disclosure) is so much better than even my first job that i cannot advise you against changing job.
I intend to stay until they don't need me anymore.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#48You should quit. There's a randomized controlled experiment on this exact topic. See column 6 in page 28 of https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22487/w224... On average, people who flip a coin to decide whether to quit are much happier when they quit. To be precise, if we define H as self-scored-1-to-10 happiness six months after the coin toss, then B_wald = (EV[H | heads] - EV[H | tails]) / (Pr[quit |…
some entries in the same column: should I quit my job -> 5.203 should I start my own business -> 5.256 should I propose -> -5.125
I’m not sure I understand what I’m looking at but I think my reading is that if people are unsure about quitting their jobs they probably just need a bit of kick out of status-quo bias, but if people are unsure about whether or not they should propose, they should probably find something they are more sure about instead of letting a coin decide. It doesn’t sound totally unintuitive to me. I guess I think of people thinking about quitting as being biased towards the status quo and I think of people who propose as being indecisive about the timing/method but having reasonable conviction about wanting to do it, so I guess that the people having reservations and being indecisive have genuine reservations?
Also, based on the GP’s formula, maybe the effects look large because people don’t do what the coin tells them very often so you are dividing by a small number?
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#49A good rule to determine whether you should quit a job is to examine how much you think about quitting. If you're thinking about quitting on anything resembling an occasional basis let alone a regular basis, the answer is yes. If you ever suspect you might get laid off or forced out via an unacceptable change in your working conditions, start looking immediately. As stupid as it sounds to anybody who hasn't accepted…
> many companies consciously discriminate against unemployed
Those companies are generally terrible places to work with toxic people.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#50At 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…
Maybe people who get raises are the talented people who can get offers elsewhere.
Maybe people leave after getting a bonus because they postpone leaving until they get paid for their work.
Did you check for confounders?