Job hopping at the start of your career

Published on April 2, 2026

It's always said that to progress in your career, you need to change companies regularly — every 2-3 years. Without it, you stagnate forever in your career. No salary growth, no internal promotions, and no new skills acquired.

I think that's true, but only up to a certain point.

The golden rule of the first 10 years

It's essential at the start of your career if you want to evolve quickly and gain experience rapidly. Every company works the same way but also differently. There are always small differences, slightly different ways of working that are important to acquire in order to adapt and evolve quickly.

You shouldn't change jobs too often. If you change every year, you're perceived as unstable or as someone who was quietly fired because they weren't doing their job well. If you change every 5 years, you come across as sluggish and sorely lacking in drive—important because when you hire someone in their twenties, you expect dynamism and rapid adaptation. Not a pre-boomer forty-year-old who just does what's asked and leaves at 5pm. So you should change within a window of 2 to 3 years.

All of this is essential to progress in your career over about ten years. You'll evolve, see lots of things, acquire skills and even take on some responsibilities.

Watch the market

You still need to account for the market before switching jobs every 2-3 years. If the market is tough, as it currently is, it's a bad idea because even if you find a new permanent contract before resigning, you restart on a probationary period of several months that can be renewed. In tech, it's 4 months renewable. During difficult periods, companies renew it automatically. So you spend 8 months in a precarious situation where things can change overnight, regardless of your skills and work behavior. If you change jobs every two years, that's a third of the time spent in an unstable period. That's dangerous.

The transition trap

But all of this only works for a certain time. If after 10 years of career you still operate the same way by changing jobs every 2-3 years, you fall into the category of someone who changes too often, someone unstable or incompetent.

At this stage of your career, employers expect more stability from you, and that's the trap: within a few years you can be viewed very negatively for changing jobs frequently, and it becomes counterproductive for career progression.

The signs of change

How do you know when it's time to switch strategies? The signals are clear: after about ten years of salary growth, the ceiling starts to be reached. Opportunities become scarce. Salary increases from changing companies are no longer as significant as before. You start to see positions similar to yours with equivalent or even lower salaries.

This is exactly when you need to change everything. And it's by staying, not by changing, that you can evolve professionally.

Within a few years, you need to do the complete opposite of what you've been doing so far.

The senior recruitment paradox

Nobody recruits a CTO for 100k on LinkedIn.

Why? Because nobody can trust a perfect stranger with their project, their baby, their life. Give them the keys and pray they don't break everything and make it thrive. You don't entrust the future of your company to someone you just met, no matter how impressive their resume is.

That only happens as a last resort when things are really bad. When the company is in a desperate situation and has no choice. It's a risky gamble you only take when you have nothing to lose.

To get a CTO position at 100k, there are two options: create your own company and manage to make it thrive, or work within your company, bring real value, help bring in a lot of money. There's no other way. It's money that counts, money is the result. Anyway, the company pays your salary with the money you've brought in. The more money you've helped it make, the more it can pay you.

How to bring real value

You need to be patient. You shouldn't just do the work asked of you, but you need to try to make money for the company. For that, there are two ways: either you need to help the company win contracts, or you need to help the company save a lot of money. There are no other solutions. You can't print banknotes — only the ECB can do that.

Can a dev really have a financial impact?

Yes. Absolutely. And it's even directly the dev's responsibility.

You need to stop focusing on tech and focus on the customer, on the need. Understand what's necessary, what the priorities are, understand the trade-offs. Understand that what matters is making money. For that, you need to deliver the project as quickly and cheaply as possible.

It's not by doing Kubernetes, Kafka, and OpenSearch that you'll manage to deliver a project quickly and cheaply. Doing overkill stuff like that takes time, complicates infrastructure, and costs more in servers. It adds tens of thousands of euros in costs right away.

A microservices architecture when a monolithic application would be more than sufficient? Ultra-complex and overpriced cloud infrastructure when a simple server would do? Hexagonal architecture with 15 layers of abstraction for a basic CRUD?

Let's do the math: 5 devs working for 6 more months at 7k/month (that's what it costs the company with employer contributions), that's 210,000€! Not counting the infrastructure that will need to be rented or bought and will cost more.

Unfortunately, devs like to do that kind of thing rather than do something simple, quick, and that users like.

And management is going to notice that right away. If you deliver a product quickly and cheaply, don't worry that they'll notice and be happy. If the boss gives themselves 50k in extra dividends at the end of the year thanks to you, they'll be happy. And they'll thank you. You'll become the trusted person, the one you can count on to deliver. And that's worth a fortune.

The necessary aside on architects

You might tell me: "It's different for me, I don't have the same feeling, I observe people hired and reaching a good salary at a good position." That's true, I agree, I observe it too, architects hired at 80k.

But look at how it plays out over time. The guys arrive with good status in the company. Work for a few months, it systematically goes badly, conflicts appear, problems arise, everything eventually explodes and the person leaves. Sometimes fired, sometimes with a severance agreement. When lucky, they lasted 3 years in the company, otherwise it's a matter of months.

I don't know what these people become afterward, but I know that their time in the company was chaotic — and it's systematic.

You could say that maybe an architect in a tech company is simply useless, that they bring no added value, just unnecessary complexity, which would explain why the situation systematically explodes. After all, who's ever seen an architect bring a beneficial contribution to a project? They arrive, add complexity, processes, diagrams, endless meetings on technical choices that have no real impact. And in the end, the project moves slower and costs more.

Look around you

Look around. Those who have a good career at 30 are those who changed jobs regularly.

Look at those who had a good career at 45: they're those who stayed in one company. It's the complete opposite!

You need to stay where you are, bring real added value, and wait for the position above to open up.

That's what I observe around me. All the CTOs were either the original founder of the application, the one who created it and grew it into the company it is today, or arrived very early in the project, starting from almost nothing to make it the company's flagship product.

They built trust over years. They know every corner of the code, every technical decision, every failure and every success. They're not there because they have a pretty resume, they're there because they've proven their worth day after day, sprint after sprint, year after year. They've brought stability, success, and peace of mind to the company. The boss needs someone they can rely on and trust.

• "A coworker survived an acquisition that wiped out management simply because he didn’t cost much and he knew the legacy systems. When the new owners needed someone who could explain how everything actually worked, he was the only person left. Six months later he was a director. A year after that, a VP.". LindyMan

How long to wait?

That's the question everyone asks themselves. There's no universal answer, but you need to be realistic. If after 8 years in the same company, no evolution is in sight, no promotion is taking shape, you might need to start asking questions.

The trap is staying too long hoping things will change. Sometimes the position above will never open. Sometimes the company is too small to offer progression. Sometimes you're simply not in the good graces of management.

Conclusion

Career progression in tech follows a paradoxical logic that's never explained to juniors. For the first 10 years, you need to move to progress. Change every 2-3 years, multiply experiences, increase your salary with each move. That's the golden rule.

But past that point, the rule completely reverses. Continuing to change becomes a negative signal. To access real positions of responsibility and real salaries, you need to stay, build, prove your worth over time.

The cost of bad timing is enormous. Staying too long early in your career means depriving yourself of tens of thousands of euros and valuable experiences. Changing too often after 10 years closes the doors to senior positions and makes you look unstable.

This information asymmetry is the real problem: nobody tells juniors that one day they'll have to do exactly the opposite of what they're being told. They're told over and over that they need to change regularly, but nobody ever tells them when to stop.

The switch is brutal and counterintuitive. You need to stop thinking tech and start thinking business. Stop wanting to use the latest technologies and start focusing on delivered value. Stop changing to progress and start staying to build something solid.

Look at the paths of those who succeeded: it's never the person who keeps switching who becomes successful. It's the one who managed to detect the right moment to change strategies and who had the patience to build their legitimacy over several years within the same company.