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Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

I wonder in general what are the odds of finding a better job? Are they 50/50 or do they skew one way or the other?

Depends on how bad your current job is. The better the current job, the harder it is to find something still better.

There can be a halo effect - the better your current jobs, to some degree the better offers you get - but I still think that on net, you should be more reluctant to leave a decent situation. If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse.

I’ve seen a similar idea with employees, but a bit more forgiving. I can’t find the article, but it was about when it makes sense to replace someone vs keep them. The idea was to keep them if they get 70% of their work correct / do 70% of the job well and go to the market for a new hire if they don’t hit that.

It seems low, but with the inefficiency caused by turnover I guess 70% is where they settled.

> If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse.

This is a wise insight. It therefore would be good if developers had created a Glassdoor-like site where people can enter technical details about their jobs (languages used, appreciation of refactoring, software tools, pair programming, technical documentation, use of version control, A/B testing, unit tests, UML, ...) in order to permit people to get a sense of what they're getting into. Asking about this at interviews is not productive, as hiring managers may bend the truth a bit to get talent on board.

Seems very difficult to gauge quantitatively. I've changed jobs at year 2, 12, and 19. Each time, what I was interested in to make my next job better had changed based on my age as well as my accrued experience at the different jobs. And there's the fact that for someone like myself, I'm guilty of moving the goalpost. I honestly have a great job right now. Bit as I get used to that, then new things bug me.

This.

I loved my first job. Every thing about it. But looking back in hindsight, it was a vanity project of the ceo, and was never going to recoup the manpower investment. Requirements and goal posts were ever-shifting. I was too naive to even perceive role status and did little or nothing concrete to forward my career except turn out (quality) code.

I loved it.

I would be frustrated to distraction if I were in that position now.

Great point. My first programming job in college was for a little boutique software company in town. My boss would walk into my office at noon, describe some software, and ask if I could have a PoC by 4 so he could drive over to the client and hopefully get a check to build. Now, something like that would drive me nuts, but at the time I didn't know better and it was exciting.

The one consistent thing in my career is I don't tolerate jobs that have too little work to do. I've had 2 jobs at various points in my career where was I told to just hang out for extended periods of time, and in neither case did I make it a year working there.

I've often found that the thing that made me take a new job was the change that I wanted and failed to make in the old. In fact, often enough I misjudged the new org in the interview and they had the same problems but I ended up being the force for the change that I wanted to see.

For some odd reason, it always seems like getting that inertia is easier at the next job than the current one.

The more inclined you are to leave it, the worse it is (all else equal), and therefore the bigger the chance the next one is better.

(By your own judgment.)

You can always reduce to more material aspects, like money. Sometimes a large salary increment can make you accept much more shit.

I have incredible frustrations at my current job but the 2x increment I got compared to my amazingly fun job I had in a small company before makes me brush them off much more easily :D

Every time I've changed jobs I've been happier for maybe 12 month or so and then it felt like the same old grind as the last job. It's almost like I might be a factor as well in the whole thing and not just the job.

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