I start looking at job boards, talking to local recruiters and seeing which technologies were trending on the hype cycle.
I then job hopped when my current company was either not keeping my salary at market rates or were getting behind technologically. I left one job that had two products - a legacy PHP product and a new C# project that was using then current technology.
The C# product wasn’t gaining traction after two years, raises were anemic and they moved everyone to the PHP product. There was no way that I wanted to spend a year doing PHP. I left.
But the smartest but riskiest move I made the next time I was looking for a job was to leave a full time job for a contract to perm where I would get the chance to build a development department and lead two green field projects.
That’s where I first (belatedly) learned about AWS and discovered how much “cloud consultants” made.
Once those two projects were done, I self demoted to a senior developer where the newly minted CTO wants someone to make the company “cloud native”. I jumped on every single project and took the lead on introducing AWS services.
Just from working at those two companies I was able to get my current job.
I then job hopped when my current company was either not keeping my salary at market rates or were getting behind technologically. I left one job that had two products - a legacy PHP product and a new C# project that was using then current technology.
The C# product wasn’t gaining traction after two years, raises were anemic and they moved everyone to the PHP product. There was no way that I wanted to spend a year doing PHP. I left.
But the smartest but riskiest move I made the next time I was looking for a job was to leave a full time job for a contract to perm where I would get the chance to build a development department and lead two green field projects.
That’s where I first (belatedly) learned about AWS and discovered how much “cloud consultants” made.
Once those two projects were done, I self demoted to a senior developer where the newly minted CTO wants someone to make the company “cloud native”. I jumped on every single project and took the lead on introducing AWS services.
Just from working at those two companies I was able to get my current job.