The Pros and Cons of Job Hopping as an Engineer

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This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum ’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i n partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Job Hopping as an Engineer: The Pros and Cons I’ve changed jobs more times than I ever imagined I would. In the past 12 years, I’ve worked at seven different organizations. Some of those moves were forced by layoffs. Others were deliberate bets on my own trajectory. Job hopping, done strategically, is one of the fastest ways to accelerate your compensation and reinvent your professional identity. Engineers who understand when to move and when to stay tend to out-earn and out-rank their peers who simply wait for internal recognition. Unfortunately, most engineers either job hop too much or not enough, and both mistakes are expensive. Here are the pros and cons of job hopping as an engineer, and when to make a leap. Pro: It’s the fastest way to grow your salary Internal raises and external offers operate on completely different logic, and most engineers don’t fully appreciate this until they make their first move. Within a company, compensation is anchored to your existing salary and capped by organizational pay bands. A strong performance review might get you 5 to 8 percent. An external offer is a clean slate. The company is bidding for your market value, not adjusting from your current baseline. My first deliberate job hop doubled my salary in a single year. A later move, at the same job title, pushed my compensation floor to a level that I never would have reached by staying put. Neither outcome was available internally. The math simply does not work in your favor when you stay. Pro: It lets you reinvent yourself Every new company is a chance to walk in as a slightly updated version of yourself: the version that learned something from the last place. The version that does not carry the baggage of whatever decision you made two years ago that all your coworkers still remember. Especially when you’re early in your career, this matters. You get to reframe your experience, take on a different scope, and establish a new reputation from scratch. That kind of reset is difficult to manufacture inside the same organization. Con: You don’t see the long-term outcome of your work This is the part nobody talks about, and it took me years to fully appreciate it. When I joined one company, I built a component library for a website from scratch. Starting projects from scratch is exciting, and the initial implementation held up well for the early use cases. But as the organization scaled, the limitations of my original design became apparent. I stayed long enough to address them rather than handing that problem to someone else. That experience taught me more about software architecture than any new project ever had. Engineers who move every 18 months only ever experience the exciting part of building something. They never experience the part where their original decisions stop working. They just repeat the exciting part on a loop, never realizing the debt they are leaving behind. Con: You cannot job hop your way to a promotion Above a certain level, things can change significantly. A new employer can evaluate your past performance through interviews, portfolios, and references. What they cannot do is evaluate your future potential the way a manager who has watched you grow over two or three years can. If you arrive as a senior engineer, you will almost certainly be hired as one. The promotions that actually changed my career trajectory—from senior to staff engineer, then engineering manager—all happened at one organization over four years. Those transitions required someone to observe my growth over time and make a bet on where I was headed next. That kind of credibility cannot be transferred on a resume. So when should you actually leave? The threshold I use is straightforward. If I have produced at least one measurable, clearly definable outcome at an organization, I have a reasonable basis for leaving. Impact, not tenure, is my unit of measure. I personally think that moving deliberately while early in your career will build a strong compensation baseline. Then become selective. Find an environment where real growth is available and stay long enough to build the credibility that job hopping cannot manufacture. Neither constant movement nor blind loyalty is the answer. The question worth asking at every stage is simple: Have I produced something meaningful here yet? If the answer is no, stay. If yes, it might be time to decide what’s next. —Brian The USC Professor Who Pioneered Socially Assistive Robotics What if robots didn’t just help us with physical tasks? 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