GoKawiilThis article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!
Before we get into this week’s article, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question about your career or an upcoming decision that you want advice about, you can ask it here. I’ll be reading through your responses and picking questions to answer on a regular basis. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
The Safest Career Move Is Often the Riskiest
Software engineers have some of the shortest tenures of any white-collar profession. The average software engineer stays at a company for roughly two years, about half as long as workers in most other knowledge professions. The layoffs of the past few years have certainly highlighted this instability, but it was already there.
This isn’t an essay about a broken job market though. Rather, it’s about how to turn that instability to your advantage, which is something I’ve spent the last decade doing on purpose.
Playing It Safe Was the Riskiest Option
I switched careers into software in my 30s. I had a stable job at a community college, complete with a union and a pension. It was about as secure as a career gets, and I learned to program on the side.
Then I did something nearly everyone in my life considered reckless: I quit, leaving the secure job to become a junior developer at 31. My own mother was skeptical. I took the riskier job anyway, for two reasons: It was the work I actually wanted, and I could see potential.
My first development job was at a grocery retailer. Good people and a company I liked. But I kept meeting engineers earning twice my salary for the same work. In the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by some of the best engineering talent in the world, I realized my skills were stagnating.
So I left for a small startup. I learned more in nine months than I had in the previous two years, and my salary doubled.
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