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Promotion Or Job Change: Which Is the Best Way To Advance In IT?
I've had a couple of management consultants tell me that if you want to move into management, it's better to change jobs or change where you work within your current company than to stay where you are. What if you have to fire one of your old friends? Not cool. Or are you better off starting your management career surrounded by people who know and (hopefully) like you? Read the rest .
According to modern physics, two stories can suddenly appear out of nowhere. One is made of antimatter, the other is made of matter.
In some cases both are made of the common element "doesn't matter".
Subterfuge. It works every time. When I started in this industry nearly 33 years ago it was your attitude and your quality of work that determined your path of promotion and success. Nowadays the people I work with are more interested in Social Networking, gossip and "Diversity." It's not just in IT but all industries within white collar environments. The smart players keep their head down, know when to throw in a political jab and to document failures and whine about the mistakes of others. Don't sell it short but schmoozing pays too.
Don't get me wrong, I still consider myself successful, it's just now I work as a consultant and get to watch this go on all the time. It never ceases to amaze me when my clients promote some of the worst folks that I've ever seen and watch the ensuing anger and confusion it causes. You see if you want to get ahead in an organization you need to not create too many waves. That's for entrepreneurs and companies that want to be progressive. By and large, most organizations just want peace and quiet with the associated slow, I mean really slow, progress that it promotes.
If you're aggressive and talented, don't get into a large organization. You'll be frustrated and upset with the politics that go on and constantly in bewilderment at why Joe down the hall who hasn't produced anything in 4 years and who's last major project was a disaster is now a VP.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
DEC had a system where management and technical tracks were parallel. You could transfer between them, but managers did not earn more than the engineers that they supervised, so the only reason to switch to the management track was if you actually wanted to become a manager. It's a shame that more companies don't understand this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm 33, and I've worked for a single large aerospace company since getting my undergrad degree 11 years ago. I started off as a desktop support guy making $42k, and then was bumped to $43k after a year, then to $45k after another year, then to $46k after another year. In late 2004 I was promoted to junior sysadmin and was bumped to $50k, and through yearly raises got that up to $55k by 2006, when I transferred formally from sysadmin to the enterprise architect side of the house. That got me a bump to $68k, which brought me up to the minimum salary level for that position, and then between 2006 and mid-2010 the pay rose to $74k through those yearly incremental raises.
In 2010 I was a senior architect, making decisions that directly affected the technology direction of a Fortune 50 company with $65B in revenue, making $74k a year. It was nice, of course, and the job was fun, but the compensation just hadn't scaled to the job. There were other benefits--outstanding and near-zero-cost insurance, stock, a functioning pension program, and as near a thing to stability as it's possible to get in an American job--but I wanted more money, so I left. Now I work as a presales engineer (that's "engineer," not real engineer) at one of the same vendors that used to sell to me, making $120k. I would have had to stay at the first job for another 20 years to hit the same level of salary. More, I left on excellent terms, and I wouldn't mind going back there some day.
This experience echoes that of my much-older peers at the aerospace job, where I was one of the only folks in the group less than 50 years old. All of them, without exception, had left at some point for between 1-5 years and then come back, bringing with them a large salary bump. Even in a company that gives you near-guaranteed 2-5% incremental raises, the only way to get a massive salary increase is by leaving.