Can't upvote this enough. Switching jobs vs. getting a raise, is the difference between a 30% raise and a 5% raise.

Also, if you get a 30% better offer, don't be afraid to switch after just a few months. Job hopping won't hurt your career, but throwing away a few thousand dollars of opportunity cost per month will hurt your wallet.

Job hopping too frequently actually can hurt your career.

I've seen people get passed over because they jumped around too frequently. Hiring people is expensive and a hassle, and nobody wants to hire a person who's just going to leave in 6-12 months.

Obviously that doesn't apply if all of a person's past gigs were contracting work or "contract to hire" type things.

If you don't incentivize me to leave, I won't. And I would prefer to work for an employer who understands that than for an employer who plays on my built-in herd instincts and sense of belonging to get me to stay.

There's a lot of opportunity cost in staying at a job where your salary doesn't grow as fast as the market salary does.

Let's say my salary right now is 100k and that is the same as market. Next year I get a 10% raise, which makes my salary 110k. But the market has gone up 30%, which means my salary should be 130k.

Repeat that another year and my salary is 121k, but the market salary is 169k. By not switching jobs every year, I've just lost 68k in two years. Assuming the same numbers, I will have lost 154k after another year. That is more than my whole salary that I've left on the table just because I don't want to hurt my career by job hopping.

In this overblown example (neither raises nor market growth are that fast, I think) I could afford almost two years of retirement after 3 job hops.

What could you do with two years of free time?

PS: this is why companies give you a 4 year vesting cycle with an exorbitant [potential] upside. They understand this calculation and are trying to give you incentive to stay.

PPS: this is also why employers don't like it when you discuss salaries with your friends. To the point that it's become almost taboo to do so

I more or less agree with you.

My point was that there's a limit to how frequently that can be done. By all means, get a higher paying job when you can, but be aware employers are hesitant when they see somebody who jumps ship every few months, and it's unlikely they'll come right out and tell you that if they turn you down.

If they don't believe in their ability to retain me, then I can reply to the other 10 companies whose recruiters contacted me this month.

Totally missing the point.

If looking at your resume sends the message, "Nothing you can do will retain me," then a lot of good companies won't even bother with you.

Maybe it's their loss, maybe it's yours, but in any case it's an opportunity missed due to jumping around a lot. Debating about it on HN isn't going to change the fact that it happens.

Anyway, I'm just saying, "it doesn't hurt your career," isn't completely accurate. To use your example, maybe it would have been 15 or 20 other recruiters contacting you if you didn't jump around so much.

some people get quickly bored no matter what kind of job you throw at them. IT is currently too geenerous profession and these spoilings are very common these days. good if you have skillset interesting enough for companies to overlook that (nobody is blind nor stupid enough to not notice that at all). or if you can just sell yourself, it doesn't matter how one gets the job. but for anybody looking for more than short term head count increase, with at least a bit of project management experience, what you describe is simple - a big NO, not worth the hassle. If last 10 comapnies failed to retain you for more than a year, 11th won't be much better, would it...

if you are a true born hopper there is perfect way to do things right - self employed consultancy. it's also paid better most of the time.

and btw getting bored too quickly is terrible, terrible personality trait, for any aspect of life.

This has been a pretty constant issue for me. I'm only a few years into my career, but my skills have always grown at a faster rate than my responsibilities (and my compensation). Job-hopping has kind of become the norm – 8 months, then 19/6/11 months each, before this one. I keep stumbling into these great jobs, but I wonder how many times I can bail so early before companies stop believing that I actually want to work there.

Yeah, it doesn't take a brilliant hiring manager to notice you've never stayed at a job longer than 9 months for the last 15 years. SV has a much greater tolerance for it than companies did fifty years ago, but you can still take it too far.

Heh, it hasn't been quite 15 years for me yet, but it's definitely something on my mind. The only thing making me feel better is that the last few job hops have been from being recruited, not the other way around, so people must not mind TOO much yet.

At a significant company (Apple, Google, Microsoft) very soon after getting hired, you'll have stock options and/or RSUs worth millions of dollars vesting vesting on a rotating schedule. "Leaving" can be painful unless the next company wants to make you whole against the millions of dollars in stock you'd vest over the next 6 years by staying.

It's often not talked about directly, but established tech companies (not "acqui-hire startup flavor of the month") routinely create hundreds of new millionaires every year. It's one of those weird worst best kept secrets. People don't like to talk about their net worth when it comes from steady work. People tend to only brag when it comes to media popularized lottery/startup windfalls.

Imagine even starting at Apple ten years ago before their stock went all rocket ship. Just by taking your standard options blocks and not getting fired, you'd be extremely well off today without overly exerting yourself (if not overly exerting yourself is even possible at Apple).

One should never consider RSUs as a form of wealth- you don't have any of that money, and you can't control it, so therefore you don't have it.

RSUs, when vesting on a regular schedule, are a form of salary. When I consider how much I "make" per year, in order to compare to other offers/companies, I add my yearly wage with the RSUs that will vest in the next year at current market prices. The sum is my real wage.

Could the stock suddenly go up, meaning my RSUs are worth so much more? Yes. It could also go down. But short of my having/using better information than the market has, the going rate of the stock price is probably a good measure of what the stock will be worth in the near future.

What level are we talking about? RSUs worth millions is a lot higher than what I have heard from people working at Apple/Google/Facebook.

Well, over time. Not one bulk grant (at least for "unimportant" employees), but every year you get an additional grant with a new vesting schedule. Over time it adds up.

Of course, it's always better to have been hired 10 years ago when you could get more stock at lower strike prices anyway.

I think you are assuming people hold onto the stock over those 10 years. Generally this is a terrible idea, as you are violating the core financial principle of diversifying investments. I've seen multiple friends get burned by this approach when all their net worth is with their employer who then hits a problem. It's very risky and just looking at apple or google over the last ten years is survivorship bias.

I work for a well-known tech company that includes RSUs as a pretty big chunk of compensation. I have absolutely no perspective on the level of the additional grants that come attached to the annual reviews, but I was under the impression it was maybe a $5–8k cost-of-living kind of deal. Now I'm very intrigued...

It really depends. The numbers aren't huge life-changing at the beginning, but they add up over time and if you're really strong^H^H^H^H^Hlucky^H^H^H^H^Hshrewd and get promoted quickly, the numbers can get pretty large. The numbers below are hypotheticals but not too far off from people I know doing the BigTechCo circuit. Some do better, some do worse.

As a new grad you might see $5-10k in extra annual compensation coming from vesting RSUs (i.e. in addition to your salary and cash bonus). But RSU grants start to stack. Say your grants start vesting after 1 year at 25% per year. Year by year you might see:

Year 1: $40k/4 = $10k vest, new $10k grant (also vesting over 4 years)

Year 2: $40k/4 + $10k/4 = $12.5k vest, new $15k grant

Year 3: $40k/4 + $10k/4 + $15k/4 = $16.25k vest, new $25k grant

Year 4: $40k/4 + $10k/4 + $15k/4 + $25k/4 = $22.5k vest, new $35k grant

Year 5: $10k/4 + $15k/4 + $25k/4 + $35k/4 = $21k vest, new $40k grant

At year 5 you've seen $82.25k worth of stock vest (assuming a flat share price). Which leaves you with $82.75k left to vest.

Now you're tired of working at BigTechCo #1 and get an offer from their competitor, BigTechCo #2. You know how this works, so you tell them you've got $83k in RSUs. To make it worth your while, they offer you $160k of their own RSUs vesting on a similar schedule. You're an experienced, senior hire at this point so your RSU grants are larger, but maybe because you're a new hire who doesn't know the ropes your first couple of years at BigTechCo #2 show respectable but not explosive growth:

Year 6: $160k/4 = $40k vest, new $30k grant

Year 7: $160k/4 + $30k/4 = $47.5k vest, new $50k grant

Then you interview again and move to BigTechCo #3. Or back to BigTechCo #1. Or you tell BigTechCo #2 you're out and they give you a retention offer. Or you get a big promotion. Either way, the RSU grants add up. All the while you've been pulling in a respectable base salary, raises, and cash bonuses. And maybe, if you're lucky, your company's stock price has gone up too.

Or you realize your gross income of $200-300k in the Bay Area earns you the ability to buy property, which means you pick 2-3 of the following outcomes: [1] small and/or shitty house [2] 2-3 hour daily commute [3] overextended and house poor. So you move to the midwest and buy a palace.

Wow, you put a ton of effort into this, thanks. It's basic math but it really helped to see the fractions laid out like that. Now, to get good at my job and buy a palace...

I guess it also helps to become irreplaceable and/or indispensable at something.

There are employees at Google with hundred million dollar stock packages, but those obviously aren't bottom-of-the-org-chart drones.

You can either work hard for a lifetime single-company career and get there in 10-30 years, or you can try to hack your way upwards with startups and get acquired by the same company. (or, the even more daring option—create something of value as a startup and get your own team to help grow it.)

I think it would be fun to be the type of person who throws startup-centric, hail-mary passes with my career, but now that I've actually gotten myself onto a track that I love, I've very quickly turned into the quarterback calling the end-around and screen-pass every play. I might win less, but I'm less likely to screw something up too badly.

One of the theoretical advantages of a large, diversified firm is the plethora of internal opportunities for job and even career changes with less friction than trying to put yourself on the open market.

In practice, unfortunately, it seems all too easy to get pigeonholed, hit a political snare, or some other roadblock that makes your career there a trap rather than an opportunity.

This.

I worked at Microsoft for nearly 14 years. I had the privilege of working on 4 very different teams (microBrowser, Palladium/Bitlocker, Robotics, Midori)

So in many respects it was like working at 4 different companies, in that respect I avoided the pigeonhole trap (which certainly also applies when you do move companies) but over time I accumulated corporate cruft which ended up dragging me down. Moving to a new company allows you to reset that.

What do you mean by corporate cruft?

For example, your review history follows you, after a certain point poor promotion velocity is used to justify not promoting...

You become the goto guy / domain expert over enough things that most of your time is spent being interrupted or in meetings instead of building stuff.

On the flip-side, joining a consulting firm is like a 10x multiplier on experience. You're constantly updating your resume for clients.

> On the flip-side, joining a consulting firm is like a 10x multiplier on experience. You're constantly updating your resume for clients.

Starting out at an agency was so incredibly valuable for me–the endless train of projects provided a massive boost to my skills and confidence. I started out self taught, basically programming for fun ever since I was a kid, never really considering myself a 'programmer'. My boss (and somewhat of a mentor) basically threw me in the deep end with client projects.

I somehow managed to actually do well on my first project, and wound up getting to tackle some of the more ambitious projects we'd land, eventually participating earlier and earlier in the planning process and having more influence in how things were done. It was such great all-around experience. Now I work at a startup (and quite a fast moving one at that), which is great, but I've realized that it would take me so much longer to get to the same level if I'd started out in a single-focus type of company rather than an agency/consultancy taking on all sorts of different projects.