The Pros and Cons of Job Hopping as an Engineer

This 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!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 salaryInternal 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 yourselfEvery 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 yea