Think about your career risk budget
In certain areas of software operations, the concept of an error budget makes an appearance. An error budget is a way of tracking how often errors occur. When the budget is exceeded, you spend time and energy to decrease them.
Having a number like this is a good way to align different areas of the business with the reality that at a certain scale and complexity, issues will arise. When this happens, the question is always, should you spend time fixing the issue or working on new functionality? The error budget helps make the answer clearer. (There’s a lot more to this concept and the link above is worth digging into.)
In the same way, you have a career risk budget. You will work for approximately 40 years, give or take a decade. Each job and career move you make is important, because if you move jobs every three years (on average) you get only 14 different opportunities. These are complex decisions; how can you choose which job at any given time is the right fit? Here are three things I consider:
This is a very common one. Is this new job moving me toward my goals? Goals can differ for each person, but here are common questions I ask:
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