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Is the old advice to change companies every two-ish years still the best practice for career advancement? (self.experienced_devs)

submitted 1 year ago by ELLIOTTCABLE to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

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I recall a regular piece of advice for software engineers: “change your job every two years.”

There’s innumerable Google results for this, even from as recently as 2022 — but none of them really seem that high-quality?

I’m really, really enjoying my current (somewhat unusual, hard-to-replicate) position; am about a year and a half into it; but I also don’t want to relax into that and have it cost me in the long-run, career advancement wise.

So, what’ve y’all been doing? Especially in the post-pandemic/fully-remote world, does that advice still apply?

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[–] jim@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I think it's good advice to keep your options open and look around to see if there's any good opportunities every year. It's good to keep your ear to the ground, even if it's just networking or browsing through openings and talking to recruiters. But no, you don't have to change jobs every X number of years.