How can I deal with all the anxiety thinking about job switching?
I feel like everyone's talking about getting into FAANG all the time, and I've been thinking about it as well since I haven't worked at a FAANG company yet. I see people with really short stints on their resume - Is that really okay? Overall, it's all a lot to take in and I'm just wondering how to best think about my career and get away from all this job switching noise.
Discussion
(1 comment)- 02 years agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
The constant talk about getting into "FAANG" is indeed annoying and very noisy. While Rahul and I do advocate for joining a Big Tech company early in career in a vacuum, I also deeply believe in this:
- You don't need to have worked at a Big Tech company to be an amazing engineer.
- You shouldn't work at Big Tech forever. There are so many things you can't really learn at these companies.
- A lot of the best engineers I've worked with have never worked at a Big Tech company before.
- For many engineers, it's in their best interest to not work for a Big Tech company.
All that being said, I consider Intuit a very good company and have met many solid software engineers from there. I think you should be proud that you're there. Tone out all the noise, and just focus on doing good work!
For the job tenure thing, my rule of thumb is this:
- At least 1 year for first job
- At least 2 years for subsequent jobs Of course, these are just rough guidelines, and you can make exceptions to these and succeed. What I will say though is that if you leave a job very quickly of your own agency (i.e. there wasn't some extreme reason that forced you to leave), I would try to stay at your next job for quite a while.
Lastly, I recommend going through this other Taro career advice where I talk about creating healthy goals for yourself in tech.
