Is the old advice to change companies every two-ish years still the best practice for career advancement?
I recall a regular piece of advice for software engineers: “change your job every two years.”
There’s innumerable Google results for this, even from as recently as 2022 — but none of them really seem that high-quality?
I’m really, really enjoying my current (somewhat unusual, hard-to-replicate) position; am about a year and a half into it; but I also don’t want to relax into that and have it cost me in the long-run, career advancement wise.
So, what’ve y’all been doing? Especially in the post-pandemic/fully-remote world, does that advice still apply?
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I've never left a job for more money, and I've still seen my salary double about once every 7 years (which is about 10% growth per year) not accounting for inflation. Some years my salary went down and some years it didn't move much, but the years it jumped made up for the slow years. There have been times where my salary stagnated while I stayed at a job, but there have also been a few times where I got raises of 10% or more without changing jobs. I could name a lot of factors in my salary growth (some luck-related), but regular job hopping hasn't been one of them. I've stayed 4-6 years at a few different places, and when it was time to move on, I could ask for big salary bumps.
If you like your current role, if you're making enough money to live comfortably, and you're continuing to grow, I wouldn't hop jobs just because conventional wisdom says you should. Your salary may fall bellow the market while you stay put, but that doesn't mean your skills will fall behind. If you are worried about either your skills or your salary falling behind, you can always talk to your manager about correcting those things before you jump to looking for a new job.
In fact, I would argue at some point before moving up to senior level or into engineering manager, it is useful to be at a single company for at least 3 years. That gives you time to systems evolve over time and how decisions play out. That's not to say there isn't also value in jumping around and seeing the different ways different places operate. But, staying put has some value.