IT careers: Should you leave?

When the job market gets hot, as it is now, it’s easy to look around and decide that it’s time to move on to someplace new. The days are long past when companies treated employees as a community to whom they owed reasonable constancy and when employees felt a sense of loyalty in return. So the traditional emotional barriers to exiting a job or organization are quite low. And the financial constraints are relatively small as well. We are lucky enough to work in an industry where pay is relatively good and most practitioners are not living paycheck to paycheck, so quitting is not as big a risk as it might be in other professions.

But this doesn’t mean that just because you can easily go somewhere else, you should. Too often people who are frustrated with their current tasks, peers or supervisor quit on impulse, whether they have anything new lined up or not. Millennials have the reputation of being unusually prone to quitting when things don’t go their way. (Whether that reputation is deserved or not I’ll leave to academic researchers.)

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