Zendesk Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I’m currently relatively happy in my current role working on challenging problems, I like my technical peers and management and during my 3 years here I got promoted from entry level engineer to senior engineer (SD1 to SD3).

However, given the scope and impact I provide, it feels like I can potentially make ~100k more (50% increase) with a job hop talking to multiple recruiters.

The worry is that I lose the equity I built in my current role and be exposed to layoffs at the new company. Also, getting promoted to staff engineer for a similar compensation increase would probably take a while. I’m tempted to switch jobs to maximize compensation.

I'm at a stage in my career where I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want to do and where I want to go. Something I've thought about a lot about is specializing (e.g. going deep into ML), but I've also heard advice that you should be careful of going too narrow and pigeonholing yourself. Is that latter scenario really possible and how do I navigate myself along this spectrum of staying broad <-> specializing?