I've heard in many places and across different mediums that people need to advocate for their own career. I've also heard that the highest earners are often not the highest contributors or hardest working, but people who can promote their own work. Practically speaking, how does one do this? At my previous role, my tech lead/mentor strongly believed in my work and was a strong advocate for my career growth. I was blessed to have that. At my current role I haven't found the same support. I've worked hard, but haven't had as much success picking the right projects or advocating for my own work and consequently being recognized for my efforts. As a result, I got a fairly average review, and fairly paltry stock grant. I was lucky enough to have a pretty big jump both in career and compensation by switching to my current role, but in terms of future rate of growth, things are not yet where I'd like them to be. I'd like to hear from you guys any practical advice you have. One other option of course is to job hop every few years, but I am overall happy with my role, just not super excited about my growth trajectory. TC ~$190K #tc #stock #rsu
At Oracle we didn’t have a formalized review process so it made talking about contributions and measuring it much more difficult. That’s why so many people at Oracle just coast and rot away without even an inflation adjustment. A lot of coworkers were okay with that but I’m young so that wasn’t going to fly with me. I’m no longer here, went somewhere where the review process is much more defined and I’m able to get recognized for my contributions and therefore speak to them as justifications for compensation increase or at least refreshers. If there is no expectation setting and accountability for you to meet expectations then it is difficult. That’s when you job hop and leave.
Job hopping stops working at some point
I know how many hopes you can do and still grow? Isn’t there a saturation ?
There is no number. What hops do is they keep you priced at market. The problem is that as you get older your market value at some point starts declining, say after 40 or so.
I have the same questions.
100% become a good sales person for your work on the company. Not only within your own department, but across the whole company. Build those relationships across the org. and with the exec level people (whatever higher ups you have access to). I can honestly say that’s what my biggest mistake was at my previous company. I was a top performer and most of my immediate peers, and direct boss knew that but it didn’t keep me from getting laid off. Many poorer performers were kept because they were better at the politics than me.
That's the challenge. A poor performer would use his limited time resource in building visibility. A good performer would mostly be focused on doing high quality work and would focus on details. That's just politics versus work and it is unfortunate. I am in your shoes right now and fearing a lay off. It's disappointing.
It is disappointing and I think it speaks a lot about the organization and how much it lets politics influence it. but it’s probably very difficult to control that. You need really good people top-down that will do the right thing for the org and not just what benefits them. I can tell you now that the layoff was the best thing that happened to me tho. Got a good severance package and already got a new gig with a significant raise. Best of luck to you!
You job hop every few years. That's pretty much the easiest and only way to keep up. Or work at Netflix.