When Job Hopping Doesn't Make Sense

Early vs late career strategy

The common advice is that job hopping is the fastest way to make more money and get promoted. And this looks obvious when you see that Zach got promoted to both Senior at Netflix and Staff at Airbnb through job hopping in just a few years.

Although job hopping can be a useful tool to grow your early career, it can actually slow your growth at later levels.

Once you get to the Staff+ levels, the gaps between the next levels are much bigger. Therefore, it’s rare that any top company would offer you a promotion* to join. However that isn’t the main reason not to. Even if you could get a minor compensation bump from switching companies you might want to reconsider.

At the highest levels, the primary way you scale yourself and have more impact is through influence. Every time you switch companies, you reset your credibility and domain-specific knowledge. This will slow you down since you need to build those back up to regain influence in the new organization.

A large part of why I got my Staff promotion in one year is that people already trusted me and I had a successful track record. If I job hopped into Senior, I probably wouldn’t have grown to Staff at Meta as quickly as I did.

So as you plan your career, don’t blindly job hop. If you’re early in your career and have a guaranteed job hop promotion, it’s a great idea.

Later in your career, you’ll almost never find job hop promotions, so you’ll need to be calculated when you take on a new role. Job hopping can reposition you for your next period of growth at the expense of momentum and taking on some risk.

This post was inspired by a discussion I had with Rahul, here’s the relevant clip.

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Ryan Peterman

*When I say promotion here, I mean similar tier company offering a clear bump in title and compensation. Many smaller companies offer significant title bumps to entice people but the title doesn’t have much meaning. You can use levels.fyi as a source of truth.