Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).
I've refused to hire people who job-hopped every year or two. With a record like that, there's zero reason to expect they're going to stick around. Why invest in bringing them up to speed if they're just going to leave?
Every time I've left a job, I've been uncertain and conflicted. every. time. Then, after being in the new job for a short while, I thought, "wow! I should have done this sooner!" Related, I remember a friend telling me a story. It wasn't so much about leaving, but how to leave. She was in a job that was just a mess. Finally one day during a spectacle of mismanagement, she just quit in disgust. She said it was a mista…
Why was it a mistake? What happened?
She put herself in a position where she didn't have a job, and the jobhunt and interview process had a pay-rent-and-feed-myself urgency.
My biggest mistake... is not a technical mistake. It's a mistake about the career in its entirety :)
The story is that I spent all my university years (and a couple of years after that, working in the IT industry) thinking that what I really wanted to do was being an CS academic. For a few personal reasons, I really inflated the idea. Then, finally, moved countries to start a PhD in one of the best universities in the UK, and... quit after not even 6 months.
The mistake: idealising the academic lifestyle. I thought that being an academic was the only way to really work on something you love, being free to do it when and where you wanted, engaging with brilliant people. It turns out that two things are true: that you can find these things in many other professions; and that... often the reality is you won't find these in academia (of course, there are great exceptions). Moreover, a PhD – especially in the UK, and especially in computer science – is an really, really narrow endeavour. I wanted breadth on the side of depth, and a PhD (nor 90% of academic research) would ever be like that. I had entirely idealised a profession without looking at the reality of what it's like, and the reality wasn't a good match for what I wanted. It's taken me about 10 years to process and be happy with it, though :-)
Turning down a promotion to VP early in my career, now I’m in my mid 50’s and no one truly understands why I didn’t. Personally I didn’t want to ascend into mediocrity like most VP’s and above. Now I’m having trouble with age bias as a Director or Senior Director.
I had a similar screwup, different outcome. Was working for a brokerage as an intern, IT gopher stuff, pretty much my first office job. A month in, I’m told by my boss to delete a directory on the file server. Which I do. I scurry off and rm -rf it, think it’s taking a while, so saunter out for lunch. Turns out that that directory was an active mount point for the root of the filestore on which they kept all of their…
SO many lessons here for a lot of people. 1. Always do backups. REMOTELY. OFFSITE. 2. Check your backups regularly. Make sure you can restore from them if needed. 3. Don't ask Interns to run delete commands casually. Heck, don't run deletes casually at all. 4. See #1. 5. Don't be a dick. This was really bad for the firm but having worked at investment banks myself, people can be dicks especially in high pressure envi…
6. What people tell you they want done and what they actually want done are often completely different.