What helped you find success in the early years of your career?
I’m somebody who’s switched 3 roles so far, all within 2 years, it’s actually helped me and I think it may work for a lot of people.
But curious what the actual spread is like, and whether I’m just biased by my journey
Everyone is working on cutting edge technology and every organization is a family, keep switching families every 24 months, take those 30% increment, learn tech from YouTube or while working on it.
That's how I did it
This will work when you have until 10 years experience. Not sure how will it go about once u are 15+. It's a red flag .. most of the folks i see on this platform are either newbies or early in their career.
Define success?
Earning money is success? Yes for majority NOT for all
Being debt free is success? Yes
Being happiness is success? Yes
Being able to look after aging parents till end is success? Yes
Here I’m assuming success means getting really good at what you do or trying to improve yourself as opposed who you were before.
It’s different for different people. For some switching might help, for others growing along with an organisation.
I’m into sales and just completed 2 YOE as of this month. I am at my 4th company.
First job was a small startup that has a software intended for CAs, Tax consultants. I was mostly selling to Tier 2, Tier 3 India. Stuck for 1 yr and 5 mos, switched due to language barriers.
Second job was proper B2B SaaS sales at an HR tech company. Got laid off after 3 months, had severance for two months. VP told me I could work for that two months if I wanted to, if I could bring in some revenue he’d try to retain me. Worked on and off as I needed some work experience in US sales.
Got offers at other places, went to a very early stage cybersecurity startup, thinking I could pull it off without much mentorship. Literally got burnt out after 2 months.
That’s when a college junior approached me with an offer, a traditional product cum services company that has a very mature product with some good clients, jumped immediately.
The place had more seasoned professionals as top-line management who are literally willing to mentor.
Feels better here as you have people to depend upon as I’m still early on in my career.
Even though my linkedin makes look like I’m jumping frequently, each of those places had something or the other to teach me.
In short like Saurabh Mukherjea said in one of his interviews “ Life takes you in unexpected directions, as long as you have an open mindset to doing interesting work you end up having fun and end up working with good people.”
If your definition of success is money then definitely the first one works. But to be capable of understanding a codebase and work on meaningful projects to grow as a better engineer minimum 2 years required in a company.
Still looking for success
First job was 3.5 years, joined as first BE engineer, left as lead with BE team of 7 nd devops of 4. Best decision, learned so much. Saw a company go from 0 to 1, barely anyone on site to a burst traffic of 500rps.
If you work at a company with RSUs, stick around for a while.
If there's no equity component, jump around
If you are at a startup with ESOPs, I have no recipe. It can go anywhere. Good luck is all I can say :)
My company pays fairly and work environment is decent. I don't have much expense so I am able to invest a good amount of my salary. So, currently I don't see the need to switch the company.
Ive never switched a role cuz never worked in corporate. But i keep layering things. Started with freelance on new technologies, accepted a fulltime position in a fintech, now along with that i am a tech generalist for another company.
Works great for me. Being able to experiment with work is something i always want to be able to do.
I don't even know what's my success criteria
