5 Tips For Making Your Next Career Decision in 2022
On average software engineers change their job somewhere between every 2 to 3 years, depending on the place and type of companies they work in. Bigger companies with deep pockets tend to have the ability to retain employees longer, but the reality stays the same, engineers move around a lot.
In the past year or so especially, we’ve seen some extreme trends happening in this ever changing ecosystem of high-tech employment, trends that have been making things hard for engineers as well as for recruiters, but for completely different reasons. This period holds a lot of potential for people looking to make their next career move, but also a lot of confusion and risks that can already be seen up on the horizon.
But first, we need to talk about how we got here…
2020 and early 2021 gave birth to a pandemic driven slowdown in people seeking to make a change in their workplace. It was a time of major uncertainty going all the way down to the smallest aspects of how we manage our life. All this happening on the backdrop of financial turmoil as markets came tumbling down into the red, a response to fear of the unknown.
In hindsight it was no surprise people weren’t looking to make any more changes in their life, and many that otherwise would have wanted to switch their workplace chose to stay put instead.
But come late 2021 and now 2022, we’ve all learned to live with the virus or at least accept these new paradigms of remote-first and hybrid work models. Driven by a better understanding of what is important for us to be happy, with heightened senses and re-adjusted priorities for our career goals and work-life-balance, many of us that waited to make a move have decided to make it now. Enter the great resignation.
Further fueling this bonanza, global governments money printing and quantitive easing have injected trillions of dollars into both public and private markets, funding the creation of thousands of new startups as well as stimulating growth in pre-existing companies.
All this translates into jobs, lots and lots of jobs. All the companies are out there just trying to get your attention to choose them as your next career move, if you are good of course.
All there’s left for you is just to choose, easy no?
Surprisingly enough, no. I’m actually amazed by the number of conversations I’ve been having lately with friends and old colleagues looking to make a change. They all find themselves overwhelmed by choice and the proverbial cornucopia of open positions.
It seems that with this abundance of options, comes great difficulty to focus on what people actually want. Spice that up with some storm clouds setting up once more on the horizon of the global economy, and making a decision is really never a clear cut.
So while I do not think the way you make career decisions should be greatly influenced by market conditions or employment trends, here are my 5 tips for making your next career move in 2022.
Understand your career goals
This is pretty basic, but somehow people avoid thinking about it.
Ask yourself “What do I want to do in 5 years?” and try to be honest. Whatever you answer, think what type of position would be a stepping stone getting there.
If you want to be a blockchain developer (because apparently that’s a thing now), your next role should be in a company that builds a blockchain based product. If you want to be a system architect, your next role should probably be a senior engineering one or even an entry level architect role. If you want to be an engineering manager, your next role should probably be as a team lead or an other junior leadership position.
Because there’s such a high demand right now for all types of technical roles across the entire spectrum of seniority, many companies will be willing to overlook some lack of experience in favor of potential. This is an amazing opportunity to make a career jump that would have otherwise been much more difficult, and you should leverage it to reach your career goals.
Figure out the optimal company archetype for you
There are many ways to slice and dice the plethora of companies out there. They come in different sizes and in different phases in their growth. Some are more business focused while some are very technologically driven. Some are very methodical and organized and some are still figuring things out. Some dabble in morally grey domains but have deep pockets while some set their mission statement to make the world a better place, but with a leaner bottom line.
When thinking where to go next, you need to think what is the type of environment that brings out the best in you and that you feel the most engaged in.
If you like fast paced action and the ability to be involved in anything and know everyone, than you should probably aim for a smaller startup company that is still in it’s early stages of growth. On the other hand, if you like to focus on a very specific domain and you like things nice and organized and done by the book, joining a bigger more well established company is probably better for you.
There’s a million other things you can consider, and some positions you might be interested in might not even exist in some types of companies. For example, jobs like platform engineer rarely exist in smaller emerging companies, because they just haven’t grown to the scale that requires such specialization.
Familiarize yourself with the companies out there by doing some reading in tech media sites, and the likes of LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Try to figure out what are the types of companies you’d want to work in the most and see what they have to offer.
Define the compensation model you are comfortable with
Well we all go to work for money, and while it’s definitely not the only thing that matters when making a career decision, it sure is important. Understanding what is the type of compensation model that would make you feel happy and satisfied is key for making the right choice.
Compensation is a complex thing and companies differ from one another by the many perks and benefits each provides (or doesn’t provide). But while all these are great to make you feel warm and fuzzy, which for some people matters a lot, the main compensation components that usually move the needle are the base salary, equity and bonuses.
The type of compensation model you prefer may dictate the type of company you should choose.
If you are very much risk averse, you might want to avoid private companies that offer stock option plans that might be worth a lot someday, but might also turn worthless. Instead you would value a more stable public company that has a yearly bonus plan and provides RSUs that have immediate real world value.
However others that have less need for immediate income, might prefer a comp plan that is very heavy on the equity side, believing some day it will turn into a small fortune. Such people would value a lot from joining a very young startup at a stage where the equity given can be significant.
Just remember that when offered equity it will always come with great stories on growth and multipliers and unicorns. While all those might be true, it’s also always a question of when that would happen and whether you won’t need that liquidity beforehand. So be cautious of making financial estimations based on eggs that have yet to have hatched.
Sometimes it’s best to just think of equity in terms of it’s current value discounted of potential risk, and when it comes to private companies take even that with a grain of salt and make sure you know roughly how much those stock options are actually worth on paper.
Check the runway
Start-ups die from one thing only — running out of money.
In the startup world money equals time, and that time is extended from one funding round to another, until the company is acquired or becomes publicly traded.
The company’s “Runway” is the amount of time it can survive on the cash in it’s bank account, before going out on an additional funding round.
If you are going to work in a startup, especially a young one, there’s one question you have to ask: “What is your runway?”.
It’s always good to ask that question, it is a good way to gain insights on how the company thinks, operates and how it plans growth. But in 2022, this question is even more important.
As we are heading into what seems like a prolonged period of more financial turbulence, the ease at which some companies are able to fund themselves could significantly decrease in the coming year or even years. It’s hard to tell right now if this is just a minor correction or something similar to the dot-com period. History doesn’t repeats itself, but it often rhymes.
In any case, if you plan on joining a start-up, understanding the company’s runway is key to make an educated decision on the potential risks involved in joining the company and how struggles for getting more funding can affect you as an employee down the road.
Above all else, culture culture culture
If there’s one thing you remember from all of this post it should be this one — cultural fit trumps all.
It doesn’t matter how good a position is for your resume, how shiny is the tech stack, or even how much money you are being offered. If you are not able to culturally relate to the company’s core values and the people within it, in the long run you will end up miserable.
Good companies will explicitly mark their cultural values on their banner, but even for those that don’t, you can implicitly understand the cultural norms from the people that interview you.
Ask as many questions as you can about the things you care about the most, be it engineering excellence, work-life-balance, team dynamics, management style, or anything else that might be of interest to you.
Don’t compromise on those core values and trust your intuition when it comes to the people you meet along the interview process. This is especially important when meeting your to-be hiring manager and any other leadership figure such as founders, VPs and managing directors.
I sincerely hope that despite recent volatility good times are ahead of us, and that the myriad of options existing today for making good career decisions will remain the same for years to come.
Like I said before, the economy or state of the market shouldn’t affect the way you build your path, but you should be smart and timely, and leverage your opportunities correctly as they unfold before you.
Disclaimer: This post has been written midway through Q1’22 in a highly dynamic market environment. I personally live and work in the Israeli high-tech ecosystem, so anything I said here might not apply as well in other global regions and may become drastically different later in the year.
