Source
r/webdev•
Gopher10

Advice on changing companies

Question

Hi guys,

I am 25 years old currently working at a company as a full stack developer. I started my career with a paid internship and ended up signing on with them full time after my 16 month internship finished. I ended up finishing my degree with night classes so I did not have any downtime between my internship and full time employment. I have been at this company for about 3.5 years now.

Recently a company that I had applied to when looking for an internship posted a full time position which I believe would be a great learning experience. The job posting exactly matches my experience and interests and seems to have a great work environment.

I love my current job. The benefits are fantastic, co-workers are great, and management is incredibly supportive. However, it is a corporate giant which means a lot of things get stuck in approval loops. We do not use some of the best of breed technologies as our old systems cannot support it and quite honestly we are behind the times. It is getting better but there is still a very long way to go. Another concern is that there seems to be very little advancement opportunities at the current time. Management has talked very openly about expanding the teams and creating new jobs but there has been little progress towards that as the board has not been approving more jobs. Currently we only have JR and SR roles, where SR roles require 8 years experience and are not based on performance at all. The only other upward move is into a manager position.

I have read a few times that most people in the tech industry move ever 3-5 years as that is the best way to advance in your career. I am opening to move if it means it will help me later in my career but quite frankly I don't know what will help me advance at this point. My current salary is above average for my city from what I can tell(~$80,000 CAD).

Can anyone offer any advice on when switching roles is good, expected wages, and at what point it is worth switching jobs when you have a stable and well paying job? Any advice appreciated.

Posted Jul 25, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

87
Charles_StoverCharlesStover.com•

Tough choice. I think it's important that you love your current job. A lot of jobs won't offer great benefits, won't have support management, and won't have pleasant coworkers. Don't take these for granted. You may further your career and get more pay, but you'll hate working -- something you have to do 8 hours a day for most of the rest of your life.

Moving jobs is great, because it gets you experience. It's also important that you aren't learning as many modern tools as you would like. Make sure you can't apply these things to your current job -- are you unable to implement them yourself, learning to use them as part of the implementation process? Would it hurt you to learn one of these tools, then submit a PR for your project using said tool? If it gets rejected, it's still something you have learned and will know for the rest of your life. If it gets accepted, you now get to work with a modern tool. If management scolds you for "wasting time" "learning" new skill sets, maybe you are right that this isn't where you want to work, and maybe management isn't as supportive as you claim.

Ask yourself, how much would you have to get paid to consider leaving this job you love?

Then leave if you get offered that much.

8
Gopher10OP•

We definitely do have some flexibility but if we use something new it has to be something we will use long term. We work as a team of 10 so anything we use has to kind of be accepted by many. I don't have a problem with this as it makes sense but a lot of our problems lie within servers and old legacy technology. We can't push through to the latest versions of many things because of legacy apps. There just isn't the resources to rewrite/move these so we get kind of stuck. As I said before, it is starting to happen but honestly our team needs to double in size to actually makes waves on some of this but the jobs won't get approved(lots of turnover in upper management right now so things have slowed down)

Thanks a lot for the answer. Much appreciated!

1
backtotomorrow•

Switching jobs has a financial, social and opportunity cost. I tend to be very conservative about moving so a new job has to be much much better in one or all of these catagories. I have made one lateral (in regard to pay) move - while it got me out of a bad situation it also set back my career growth. Now that I'm older switching is much more difficult so there is something to be said for taking risk when you are younger.

2
Gopher10OP•

That's kind of where I am at. I feel like another 2-3 years down the road in my current job I could be in line for a management position but I don't know if there will be an opening at this rate. Right now I am young so it's a lot easier to move around. The older I get the tougher those moves are.

2
backtotomorrow•

I wouldn't move to new employeer that was a similar position on the hope of further advancement in the future. Either advance when I made the move to a new job or stay put. But I like I said - I'm not much for taking risks. No matter what you end up doing, good luck!

1
Kthulu666•

The others have some sound advice. You have a job with many aspects that are great, but it doesn't sound like it's going to get better any time soon and you may be stagnating.

Switching would be a risk. There's no guarantee you'll like your coworkers as much or that management would be as supportive as it is now. Then again, the new job could be even better than your current one in those regards. Salary and benefits are about the only things you can be 100% sure of before taking the job.

There are some good reasons to consider switching though. You'll learn new things and meet new people, both of which are valuable. Right now you're comfortable with one way of doing things, but you'll benefit from potentially working with a different management style, workflow pipeline, etc. You won't know unless you take the leap.

I've taken jobs that I wasn't even sure I was qualified for, but I took them anyway because they broadened my experience and skillset. Not every job is wonderful, but I wouldn't take any of them back if given the chance. I never imagined I'd be spending half of my time doing data visualization, motion graphics and illustration, but I'm glad I can add that to my resume and I'm happy with my current situation.

2
Gopher10OP•

I definitely am considering the benefit of working under new management and learning new workflows and tools. Right now I work with a a web content management that isn't widely used(Websphere Portal). I am working as a front end web dev mostly but don't really have any guidance in terms of a senior. I can pretty much call the shots of how anything front end gets coded which is awesome but also terrifying because you have no clue if there are better ways to do something. It puts my in a good position if some technical lead jobs would come up but that's IF they make new jobs. Right now those don't exist.

I just fear being 5 years down the road, ready to move up and no jobs in my company to move into and being a on trick pony who knows a very specialized WCM system and no other work experience besides to one company.

1