No, 'zuhayeer is right. For anything beyond the Scrum rent-a-jobs you should be outgrowing in your first five years, being liked is more important than being hi

No, 'zuhayeer is right. For anything beyond the Scrum rent-a-jobs you should be outgrowing in your first five years, being liked is more important than being highly effective. You can be great at your job, but if you fail the politics, the best-case scenario is that you get assigned more grunt work. I don't like that it's that way, but enough people are inherently corrupt that castle intrigue outweighs competence. So, every time you change jobs, you're rolling the dice on a new set of strangers. That doesn't mean, of course, that changing jobs is never the right move. Clearly, it often is. If there's a re-org and you're not promoted, you should probably leave--you're going to have to prove yourself to a new set of people either way, so you might as well get paid for it. As for the comp increases, this is tricky. If you're increasing your salary but not getting promoted, you're actually putting yourself first in line for layoffs in the future, because HR people are going to see you as anomalously expensive within a band. This strategy can pay off, especially because 99% of corporates are too dumb to assess performance correctly and so often you can improve your perceived performance by becoming more expensive--but you have to be sure you're getting yourself a better position in the pecking order, or otherwise you're going to end up in a career cul-de-sac. Also, the job-hopper stigma is real. It isn't right, but if you have three or more jobs under 18 months, people are going to assume you keep getting fired for performance or, worse yet, keep getting fired because you're disabled... neither of which they'll touch. The last thing I want to advocate for is corporate loyalty. They aren't loyal to you, and so you should always have your eyes open and be ready to take everything that isn't nailed down (within the confines of enforceable law, of course) and jump. However, you have to be strategic. Remember that these people are a lot more skilled at screwing people like you than you are at screwing them--that's just how capitalism works.