[adamdrake]

Some thoughts on 'job hopping':

1. If you're in the first 10 years or so of your tech career, you should be changing jobs every 18 to 24 months. These are the primary years in which your salary goes up, and to stay in a role for a longer period of time without significant (e.g. 20%) raises could have a dramatic effect on your lifetime earnings.

2. NEVER discuss your current salary with a recruiter or potential employer. It's currently illegal in some jurisdictions to be asked about this, but overall it's still very common. See more details and negotiating strategies in an article I wrote on this topic: https://adamdrake.com/what-is-your-current-salary.html

3. Be prepared to transition into a role where you are responsible for people and output, to some extent. This makes you more valuable to companies because you are able to increase output from a group of people instead of from just yourself. Think of it like scaling your brain. The transition from Teammate to Team Lead can be difficult, and after advising multiple companies and teams on the topic I wrote up some of my thoughts: https://adamdrake.com/teammate-to-team-lead.html

3a. As an extension of the above, make sure you're leading for the right reasons and that you're taking care of the team: https://adamdrake.com/leaders-eat-last.html

4. Maintain technical skills and make sure you're always delivering valuable technical results, or providing guidance to people so that they can do the same: https://adamdrake.com/always-be-shipping.html. People and companies will almost always value you as a member of the organization based on what you've provided lately, so you have to keep producing. Once you've been hungry, you'll never feel full. Stay hungry.

Lastly, I think it's pretty clear to all of us that this could be avoided if companies took care of people, gave raises preemptively and as close to market rates as possible, and gave people an opportunity to advance in an environment with a high degree of loyalty. Unfortunately, that's almost never the reality.

[thoughtpalette]

Regarding #2, it gets harder to not disclose a range if you're on the higher end of the locations pay scale. I've been through a couple interviews attempting this strategy only to find out 5 rounds in they're offering a substantially lower salary than my current and it unfortunately was a waste of time for myself and the potential employer.

You can definitely talk about your value but most of the time the company has a set budget for the position.

/anecdotal

[mdorazio]

Completely agree on this. After the 5th time going through multiple screening rounds only to find the hiring managers had a really low budget and were actually looking for a cheap worker to take advantage of, I started telling recruiters up front what my salary expectations were. It's saved a huge amount of time.

[adamdrake]

I can definitely understand the feeling of wasted time, and perhaps I didn't do a good job of explaining the point.

The main issue is that you shouldn't discuss your current salary, but you should absolutely discuss the budget for the role. The reasons I make the distinction is because many candidates will have a lower current salary, and although the company has budgeted X for the role they will be happy to pay (X-delta) instead.

Talking about your current salary is basically never a good idea, but talking about the budget and salary for the role is certainly a good idea.

[thoughtpalette]

I definitely misinterpreted your point, and everything you said I agree with.