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Job hop. Early in your career, your skills and market rate improve so quickly that a single employer just can't keep up. You'll be twice as good at what you d

Job hop. Early in your career, your skills and market rate improve so quickly that a single employer just can't keep up. You'll be twice as good at what you do next year. And you'll be even better at picking up new technologies. Repeat this four times at four shops in four sectors and get demonstrably good at lots of stuff. Build artifacts you can point to that prove how good you are. The sad truth is that no matter how good your first few jobs are, you can't keep them (unless you got hired by Google or Facebook right out of school, in which case you can ignore all the above and coast along until you vest.) The company that hired you as a new grad for an entry level salary will never give you 50% raises four years in a row. The market as a whole will do that though. Early on, it's all about building up your market rate. Get that up to where it belongs fast. Then find the place you want to get comfortable.

Rainymood 9y ago
Although this approach probably maximizes your total revenue, constantly chasing money might not maximize your happiness. Work related friends are quite important to me personally, but then again I'm not too concerned about money anyway ...
- jasonkester 9y ago
  Having lots of short stints at different companies also grows the pool of people to choose work-related friends from. And it increases the likelihood of ending up in a good workplace with fun people, since your pool of companies to choose from expands. There are lots of reasons to bust out of local maxima besides "chasing money". (Which, incidentally, nobody but computer programmers uses as a term to describe negotiating a fair market rate for one's work. Everybody else would call that "not getting taken advantage of.")