After 4 years of this, you may not have your original career - but 8-15 years of pay saved provides lots of optionality.
Not an engineer but in tech. My career has stalled out but I'm making better money then I would in a different place with more upward trajectory. It's been wild (and blessed) being able to save 1+ years worth of expenses each year (after taxes, retirement contributions, expenses, etc).
If you're telling yourself to hang on until you reach this point... just realize that you may reach it and find you're still stuck.
I guess that depends how you're defining "pay" in relation to taxes and deductions.
It is most certainly transformative if you pretend you don’t have it for what amounts to a pretty short period of time.
10 years is a common rule of thumb to double your investment, this is a good guess since after adjusting for inflation, the real return of S&P 500 is about 6.8%. Which is about 10.5 years to double your investment.
(give or take S&P 500 being one of the best returns you will find historically)
Relatively common to be significantly higher than 1/3, too.
But to elaborate more, do you ever play a single player game like Skyrim, finish every quest, lead every guild?
Life is unfortunately not like that, you can't "win" every path. It's multiplayer, and everything comes with a tradeoff.
If you want to win at "career success", it's there, lots of people would love to be in your place. But people will sometimes tell you what to do.
If you want to win at "agency" it's also available, but you lose money and progress, take a big risk.
Right now I'm leaning towards: this other domain is close enough to my old domain that given work's context in my overall life, the pay makes it worthwhile to compromise on my work goals, as long as I'm able to "leave the door open" to re-enter my old domain. That probably won't happen at this company until the other, more experienced engineer who took over my old domain leaves, and maybe not even then.
But the magnitude of the pay difference is great enough that a couple, few years of the dot product between what I'm doing and what I'd like to be doing in my career is ~0.8 rather than 1.0 is worth it in my life right now, given that I want to eventually buy a home in my high COL city.
I think having been in the situation where I felt I was basically in my dream-job and knew I was, makes it harder to have lost it, even though I am in a really good spot in my career overall.
OP should look around for other roles and other directors within the company. There's a good chance that there's something available, particularly for a high performer with a dedicated track record. It does require leaving behind some of the skills and relationships that got him to this point, though.
It's not unreasonable to imagine transfer not being a possibility for him in the near future, so your comment feels a bit out of place.
But those are only as tight as he lets them be. He can choose to be happy with where he is, or make a change.
A. Get rich (how rich? How likely?), so I can do what I like absolutely.
B. Do what I like now, so am guaranteed to have done what I like, but still be at the mercy of corporate/academic tides.
Both are fine choices. Need to do the decisioning to find out which has more "do what I like" ness to it.
and
> I'm not willing to leave the company because its stock 6x'ed last year.
Those two things, right there, are at complete odds with each other. You're artificially limiting your options because of some magic numbers you can't control look good right now. (Magic numbers which, by the way, have vesting periods and other fixed-time rules precisely to trap people into cycles where they feel they can't leave.)
It's a perfectly valid thing to stay for financial reasons, but that must come with acceptance that sometimes you'll have to roll over and take whatever they decide to dish out. It's also perfectly valid to accept that the ground shifted under your feet and the only reasonable thing is to move to greener pastures. But you can't do both.