Hey Reader! 👋

Continuing my observations from the career clarity calls I'm doing:

Meet S (referred by their friend H).

S switched 3 companies quickly and is on their 4th now. While joining, they decided to stay here for a minimum of 5 years for long-term stability.

On the frontend side, the company's VP is bullish on AI doing most of it and is pushing everyone to pull of all-nighters. There were a bunch of reframings that happened on the call:

1. "I don’t like the fact that I’m in the same bucket with people putting in 60% of my effort" → Let's take out those hours then, see it from a capitalist lens, and put that time into leveling up outside of work.
2. "I want to get promoted from sde-2 to sde-3 but there's not much opportunity to showcase my skills in the current work I'm doing." → Since we already have extra time (see previous point), let's use that to pick up an adjacent backend project and build a PoC. We scoped this out to lie in the sweet spot of feasible in a month and technically challenging at the same time.
3. "People get promoted if they are in the inner circle of the leadership team." → We dived deeper on what they are doing differently and found out that those people are spending 25% extra time on personal toy projects of higher-ups. Looking at this objectively, it totally makes sense for them to get a higher hike percentage.

Towards the end, S also touched on what it will take to switch by end of year. I reminded them of the context: we don't want to tag our resume as a job-hopper. Running away is easy. Staying and fixing things is where value lies. Applies to all areas in life. It helps to keep our constraints in front of us so we are always grounded and don't hallucinate!

💚,
Swapnil