do you think your productivity or output or skill level increased 60% alongside the 60% raise or do you think your skill level increase / change in 'worth' was less?
Or in other words once you got in, did things get way more difficult / stressful?
Re:The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013)
by majormajor on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @01:09PM
(#28063527)
My skill set and abilities increased the most rapidly in the job before the 60% raise. It then increased further in that job, but because it was a bigger, more established company, it took longer to get exposed to different things, and because my skill set was already larger, fewer of those things were as brand new.
Stress level was about the same as a result: on one hand, I had more to lose - my other jobs hadn't paid nearly as well. On the other hand, I found I had a broad enough base of skills to be useful immediately plus was becoming more confident in my ability to learn things.
One part is pure numbers game: apply everywhere that pays well until you get some interviews. This may take a while.
The other part is practice: can you figure out the sort of questions that those companies ask? If not, can you do so if you practice enough?
Personally, I did the jump in two steps. This was ten years ago, but I've seen people do similar more recently. First I found a company with interesting work but still not a lot of prestige (after getting rejected, mostly silently, by dozens of others on LinkedIn). This gave me a lot of hands-on experience with the non-pure-algorithmic sorts of questions that I'd be asked in future interviews (like "what happens when you visit google.com" or say, around how internet networking and web service stacks work). This didn't increase my pay, though - but it was a place with a more conversational interview style plus a smaller pool of candidates, so my desire to learn came through and counted for more.
Second, I continued applying and bugging recruiters (thought not quite as frequently, since I was busier at work now!) until I got some interviews at higher paying places. Failed a couple, succeeded at one, got a 60% raise. It got easier from there since recruiters use company history as a big heuristic.