Data engineering, pipeline stuff, cloud dev to support the pipeline... with enough cs chops to pass software engineer interviews rust/TS/python. Obv SQL too. Docker, terraform and similar like cloud formation. Conversational enough to interface with PMs and external clients.
Enough architecture experience to build out medium scale data applications
It sounds cool, tbh. I'd be willing to look a lot of places in tech for something new. My current place is just verifiably insane. They had no help desk tickets when I got here.
In my 20s, I always skipped the office holiday party. I love partying. I enjoy drinking. And a lot of my coworkers were young and attractive. I simply never heard of anything good coming out of that mix. Like: The risks (doing something foolish, losing respect) FAR outweigh the potential gains (flirting with someone? Or, maybe hooking up with them if you’re really really discrete, but that felt unlikely in any of the places where our offices had parties.)
I wonder how this looks when compared to a decent union shop. In union shops you probably tend to not move jobs a lot, or like in some trades you take your union creds with you no matter where you work.
You certainly can increase pay by jumping around a lot in regular work, but union gigs tend to have set progression based on seniority.
Unions periodically renegotiate their salary and benefits through broad company-wide contracts, so its not just a single small bean asking to be paid a bit more. Its an entire department or firm demanding a bigger percentage of the gross revenue.
Seniority solves a lot of the "how much money do I even ask for?" questions when renegotiating salaries. It also establishes a clear-cut cost of living track. You know what you'll be making in five years, so you can buy a house or get married or have kids with some underlying expectation of how much you'll earn when your cost of living goes up.
Well, yes…I’ve been union for decades so I’m quite familiar. This comment is helpful to summarize for some people a bit of how unions do things, but when I originally commented it was more a question about how the two compared as far as earnings. Do you have to constantly jump around non-union jobs to keep up with union wages? Will the mobile employee outpace union wages? At what rate? Overall lifetime earnings? My understanding is that union gigs for comparable jobs may not offer high pay off the bat, but over a lifetime often do better than non-union with wages, benefits, and retirement. However, some normal jobs will allow you to jump right in to good pay relative to a union gig but you may not advance much in pay or have to leave to advance.
By changing workplaces twice I tripled my income in under 2 years. The biggest thing that happened is that I was promoted to a much more senior position 6 months into the middle workplace, but they screwed me on the salary thinking that because it was a big bump from my lower position it would keep me around.
So I did that job for a year and got hired for the same job elsewhere for a 50% pay increase.
I've moved to a couple different employers over the last few years obtaining all kinds of skills, most of the companies went down or moved to cheaper labour countries.
My wage has been stagnant for the past 10 years. It's all bullshit anyway, they just fuck with you just to fuck with you.
Then you realize, since your raises no longer even keep up with inflation, your current job is now underpaying you - making it more difficult to hold on to what you do have.
Or alternately you jumped around a lot, make much more than your peers, and getting towards mid/late in your career where you become the target of layoffs for costing more than everyone else.
You get laid off... and then one of your connections from the last 15 roles has an open position that you fit in.
alternatively: you as 50something tech worker who has only had one gig for 15 years gets canned for whatever reason goes to the streets and every single employer who interviews you sees just how out of date you are with technology because you haven't learned anything new in forever. You end up working at an arcade until eventually taking a huge pay cut becoming tech support or working for a low paying company nobody with experience wants to work for.
I have never seen a good worker who moves on not do exceptionally well in a year or two years. Maybe one role or two will be awful for a 20k raise so you stay a year... then the next role gives you ANOTHER 20k raise (so +40k now in just one year) and the new role is phenomenal. Two or three more years you find another role for another 10-20k and then 50k in equity that matures in x years to try and keep you. Odds are by then you have multiple offers to pick from because past managers/companies are interested in you. Maybe now you're going back to a former company but into a more senior role because of all that modern experience you've gained.
As long as you get minimum 1 year in most roles, and do not have significant gaps, you're gonna be desired. I will as a hiring manager 100% of the time be more interested in the resume of a guy who has been at 5 roles in 10 years for 1yr+ each, than one guy who has been in one role for ten years.
There are definitely reasons not to change jobs constantly. It kind of depends on industry.
Finding a new job might mean you need to relocate, which is inconvenient and becomes harder if you own a home or have a family.
There is also always a risk that the new company’s culture or your new boss are bad. It’s not something you can really know for sure until you switch, but if they aren’t good, it might not be worth the extra money.
It also takes time to ramp up and figure out the way things work. Being new in a job kinda sucks for a lot of reasons.
Your current job might offer something that is hard to find elsewhere like flexibility to work remotely when you want, or free food, or a good 401k match.
Some benefits take time to accrue and starting over at a new company might mean starting over on benefits accrual. For example, some companies increase vacation days based on years of service. Same goes for other things like percentage of 401k match. You might also miss out on claiming the full 401k match that you’ve earned at your current job if you leave early depending on vesting schedules.
Some companies have better job security than others. A new company might pay more, but also do regular layoffs. If your current company is fairly stable, it might not be worth it to move to one that does more layoffs.
Your current employer might pay close to top of market already. It could be hard to find another employer that actually would pay you more, and even if they could, it might not be worth the little extra for all of the other above cited risks of changing jobs.
While not focused on exactly the same topic, this HMW video has some intersection and gets into the nitty of what's going on.
It also means the employers hosed themselves, since skilled labor is not threatened by a potential firing (the way they once were) and are continuously looking for their next rung on the ladder elsewhere. Also, it means promotions are no longer an incentive for hard work, since the workers expect you to hire from elsewhere. So all those incentives to overperform are gone.
PS: Curiously in The Sims 2 (a 2004 game) I figured out the best way to get rich legitimately (e.g. without using cheats, and not getting an Open For Business storefront, was to swap careers whenever you reached the top tier of a career ladder while sustaining necessary skill and friend minimums. The sim would get promotions every day of work, including a fat bonus, and I could finally afford that pre-built dream-house I made.)
The public sector model, there's definitely something good about knowing exactly where you are and where you're going, only a problem when the scale is totally off of whack with current CoL etc.
That's empirically testable in my case. Same employer's for ~10 years, went from £13k per annum to almost £30k. In the next 10 years, I went from £30k to £85k. Software developer, in the UK.
forbes.com
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