It’s not about “I’m indispensable pay me more”. It’s about “I don’t want to have 1 year of experience 10 times”. I always want to have the optionality to change jobs . Things change. Culture changes.
I've heard this "one year of experience 10 times" phrase before. It seems to mean different things in different contexts to different people. Can you explain what it means to you and the implications?
I started my second job in 1999 it was for a bill processing/printing company. Companies would send us data files via ftp, we would merge the files and create files in a format used by industrial printers and mail them out. Later on we were one of the early integrators with CheckFree that was the backend for most online bill payment services.
I wrote mostly processing programs in VB6, Perl and C++. I did some GUI programming with C++/MFC/COM (ask your parents).
Fast forward to 2008, the world had moved on. But I was still using VB6 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC. My compensation was only $7K more in 2008 than it was in 2000. There were other people doing the new shiny while I maintained the old systems.
I learned my lesson. Over the next 10 years, I changed jobs 5 times and doubled my income - nothing to brag about. It was still about what entry level developers get as return offers in BigTech. I was laser focused on keeping my skillset in sync with the market.
By 2017 though, I realized my market value as an enterprise dev was going to plateau in 3 years and my youngest was graduating from college. I started pivoting to “cloud” and got into “application modernization” consulting - basically a fancy term for cloud app development and deployments.
I got my current job in consulting in about two years ago.
Good lessons here on tracking the market, keeping skills up to date, and skating to where the puck is going. I imagine the modernization niche pays pretty well. :)
Ironically, “application modernization” seems to be the worse paying cloud specialty in the industry. At most consulting companies, “implementations” pays the least and is outsourced to cheaper labor and junior consultants.
I work at the one company that pays decently well for AWS + enterprise dev + consulting. It’s not hard to guess which one it is..
