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How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer

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Re: How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer

#42
Job switching is the most effective way to pressure the employer to raise and keep the high salary.

If you pay well, good engineers swarm to apply the job.

Job switching is the best opportunity to negotiate your salary for both current and next employers.

"If current employer don't pay more, I'll leave."

"If the next would-be employer don't pay more, I'll stick with the current job."

Also, it pressures existing employers to raise and keep the high salary because if they don't, they'll lose the good engineers to the competitors. So the fact there are many job switching engineers benefits those who don't switch job that often.

Re: How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer

#43
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects A string of one year stints would be a huge red flag to me. I would have a hard time selling this person up as we don't hire FTE's to come and go in a span of 12 months. Too much churn kills you, I'd likely pass unless circumstances where extraordinary.

I've worked for many 1 year stints (everywhere I've worked besides my old startup), and have never had a problem finding jobs. Of course I probably wouldn't know if a place passed on me because of that. I wonder what the probability distribution for how much hirers weight "loyalty" or "stick-around-ness" looks like.

What tools do you use and are they applicable to your next job?

I work for one of the big 5 and thus use a lot of the tools I use are developed in house (also, there are lots of special technological requirements that I have to understand and work with).

I've been here a few years and am still learning loads about unique company specific things that save me time when I have to do similar things in the future. 1 year stints would definitely not look good to me.

Re: How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer

#44

In my experience, just do the following: Be generally likable Write decent to good code Connect on a regular basis with current and former co-workers Be aggressive about finding new opportunities (usually through people you've worked with) I agree with most of the points the author makes here, but I don't think you need to stay 2 years at a particular job - 1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects…

Having recruited several hundred people, I can say with certainty that several ~12 month "regular" jobs is not optimal for projecting career stability. It's not a positive most of the time.

Re: How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer

#46
post #4

In my experience, just do the following: Be generally likable Write decent to good code Connect on a regular basis with current and former co-workers Be aggressive about finding new opportunities (usually through people you've worked with) I agree with most of the points the author makes here, but I don't think you need to stay 2 years at a particular job - 1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects…

>1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects A string of one year stints would be a huge red flag to me. I would have a hard time selling this person up as we don't hire FTE's to come and go in a span of 12 months. Too much churn kills you, I'd likely pass unless circumstances where extraordinary.

Kinda sounds like poor management. It seems to me that proper management would have everything arranged such that an employee is a drop and replace asset.

Re: How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer

#47
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects A string of one year stints would be a huge red flag to me. I would have a hard time selling this person up as we don't hire FTE's to come and go in a span of 12 months. Too much churn kills you, I'd likely pass unless circumstances where extraordinary.

Kinda sounds like poor management. It seems to me that proper management would have everything arranged such that an employee is a drop and replace asset.

Even if there is perfect replaceability of transferrable skills, there's a non-zero time to gain familiarity with the unique aspects of the tech stack, specialized domain niche, etc.

Good process reduced this to the level that is practical, but reducing churn is an important key to managing the unavoidable cost due to this.

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