Changing jobs frequently to change your role may be unavoidable. Your company has its interest at heart, its revenue now and its revenue later. This is completely reasonable. If you feel you have grown enough to merit a change in roles, or title or compensation, you will have to make your case to them on their level. I've known many engineers who become frustrated because the company doesn't recognize how well they're doing on their own. But as much as you want a company to notice you, only a handful will, and behind attentive managers is a very real bottom line. If you want a raise, it will be on their timeline, when they determine that they can and will afford it. If you want a promotion, they need to decide if they can use you in that higher role, and if your changed usefulness outweighs your usefulness in your current role. It's not about you. It's about what they need.
The engineer who taught me IT in the very beginning is still at the same place. Absolutely brilliant, paid likely half of what he could make outside, likely as frustrated that he isn't acknowledged for what he can do. He does good work for a company that can't use him to his fullest. He's working to please himself, for his own personal satisfaction. They pay him as they actually value him. And he is effectively paying himself in lost potential income for the satisfaction of what he likes to do. And that's a choice we all get to make. How much is your comfort quantitatively worth to you?
If you've outgrown your current role or compensation, if you don't want to go by the company's timeline, then you look outside. If you want to take command of the what, when and how, you sign on with someone else. Except in the rarest cases, you will always meet your career objectives faster than someone else will for you. Because everyone holds their own interests as paramount for them. Absent great narcissism, this is not evil, or selfishness, it's just our nature. Hence, love others as you [already] love yourself. We know ourselves better than others. It's the same reason why Reagan asserted that government is unlikely to spend your money as wisely or efficiently as you can yourself. Where government is the only player that can spend money in a certain way (i.e. coordinated national defense) we sign off on the inherent inefficiencies we get. But for your own career?
You have the most control of your situation prior to your hire. Once hired you're subject to what your company needs. Prior to hire, this is where you negotiate responsibilities and pay. A 3% raise at your current company? Or 5-10% with the next one? Of course, this all depends on if/when other companies are hiring, but this is where you have the most control over your life.
On the other hand:
Changing jobs frequently to increase your salary is short-sighted. Where jobs outnumber qualified applicants, it is still possible. The question is which is strategic: increasing your salary because another company values your current skill more, or increasing your salary because you gained a new skill and are suddenly more valuable to any employer?
The first is tempting because it only involves restarting a job search, or simply picking up the phone if your resume is already out there. The second is harder because you actually have to become more valuable before you re-sell yourself to the market.
The first runs into the problem that there is an upper limit to how much any employer will pay for your current skill, no matter how honed it is. At some point, the employer weighs your salary requirement against what your work is worth to him. It's worse if they see a history of trading one employer for another with no change in function. Your marginal increase in pay is outweighed by the expected costs of hiring and coming up to speed.
On the other hand, adding skills, increasing your actual value to the market, removes your upper limits as you move from function to function, pay range to pay range. Prioritizing increasing your value to the market is the strategic choice. I am much more valuable to a company today than I was ten years ago. And I recognize that I am much more valuable to those companies that can use my skill set fully than to those that can't. I've been paid much less by company #1 and convinced I wasn't worth the money than by company #2 where I was absolutely convinced I was worth it. The difference is knowing what they are getting out of me. In a good fit, they tap your skill set fully.
There is enormous satisfaction in knowing that you are worth the money they pay you.
When engineers are in demand, job-hopping is a terrific way to rapidly increase your compensation. This is common knowledge among employers and employees alike. It's enough reason to worry employers. That any expenditures made to hire you and losses sustained while you became effective, will never be made up. Turnover costs. We hire effectively when we minimize how often those expenditures occur. A failed high effectively means doubling or tripling the normal expenditure in hiring since the first employee never became profitable before leaving. Where money is the employees principal motivation, in a competitive environment, a wise employer factors into his expected costs needing to pay above market rate to proactively reduce the effectiveness of other pitches that will inevitably be made.
Money hasn't been my motivation in leaving any position. Even so I admit the obvious benefit. If the employer can find out what makes a good employee tick and leverage it, the worker is likely to be a long-term hiring success story.
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