When It’s Time to Switch Companies in Tech

With so many openings in the tech job market right now, you may have been thinking of a reason to try a new company. Here are some times when I’ve switched companies and the reasons why.

The Great Resignation has been a major topic amongst the tech community since the pandemic. For those of you who have never heard of it, the Great Resignation is a phenomenon that occurred where multitudes of people were resigning from their jobs after the pandemic in 2021. Maybe you are someone who has been a part of this event, or maybe you’re thinking about hopping on the bandwagon. From location to work life balance, there are a plethora of reasons why you might decide to move on from a company. Here, we’ll focus on a couple of reasons why I have in the past.

Con Edison → Mastercard

When working at Con Edison, I had the perfect setup. I was hired as an information technology (IT) intern over the summer of 2017. There I learned a bunch of core IT practices. In addition to the growth in that skillset, I also had great work-life balance and a great team. With such a comfortable work/life balance, I even decided to continue into the school year as an IT fellow so I could work part time during the school year.

In college I really enjoyed some of the courses I took in the Computer Science major. I learned how to actually write code and wanted to make that skill be the one that I could survive off of. This was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be.

I applied to dozens of jobs where I wasn’t getting any callbacks for software engineering intern roles. After talking with a bunch of real engineers, I found out my resume was far from where it needed to be considered. I had no work experience actually building software. In addition, I didn’t really have any projects where I coded outside the classroom. Between classes and my IT internship at Con Edison, I didn’t really have time to focus on improving my resume. I was overwhelmed.

After coming to the realization about my poor standing as a candidate, I wanted to put all of my focus outside school into getting a software engineering internship. I quit my good paying job at Con Edison and was unemployed for a bit. Here is a list of things I decided to do with the extra time.

After Con Edison

• Bought Udemy course so I could work on building a portfolio website with pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript. https://github.com/chumomega/my-website
• Started networking HEAVILY. I spent so much time networking with others whether it was at meetups or just talking to my peers who got internships. With this I was looking to get feedback on my resume, referrals for software engineering internships, or just general career advice. And boy did I receive a bunch
• Hackathons! Through networking with others, I heard about these events called hackathons. These are events that can be up to 24 hours long where teams create technical solutions to problems in a competitive fashion. I used these events to not only network with recruiters, but also gain more experience building apps and acquire achievements in the events that I won. I won awards in at least 3 of the hackathons I participated in. Of course this went on the resume

With all the focus I put on improving my standing as a candidate, my resume got a lot better and my network got a lot wider. This led to me to secure an internship as a Quality Assurance Intern at JobDiva during the school year. While this wasn’t exactly what I wanted, it was a step in the right direction towards a Software Engineering role. By the end of the internship, I was able to start working on templates and functions for new pages on the website. A month or so after completing the JobDiva internship, I applied to Mastercard as a software engineering intern in Missouri and I got it!!

Etsy → Amazon

Etsy was my first full time job after graduating from Brooklyn College with my bachelors degree in Computer Science. It was a really great experience working there and I enjoyed my time. I actually wrote about my experience over 2.7 years there in an article, so check it out if you’re interested. Anyways, I started looking for new roles out of a desire to work in the machine learning space and to deal with more challenging problems to improve my skillset as a software engineer.

This time was different from the former situation at Con Edison because I was already a fully functioning adult. I had bills to pay since I lived on my own and couldn’t afford to quit and prepare for my transition to a new job. With my experience, I knew I could get an interview pretty much wherever but I was rusty on doing technical interviews. So I decided to focus a large amount of my free time on interview prep. I had a network of peers who were doing the same thing so after work, we would hop on a discord server and practice interview problems together. We would even give each other mock technical interviews. I still give mock technical interviews to this day so you can schedule yours at this link now.

Like I mentioned above, working in a new and challenging technical space while using machine learning were key factors in my decision to start looking. After doing interviews for almost the whole year, I landed 2 job offers from different companies. The reason I chose Amazon was because after speaking with a hiring manager there, the role seemed to be just what I was looking for. I would be working on a team with machine learning engineers, data scientists, and software engineers in a role that required engineers to take ownership to solve difficult problems related to data extraction from receipt images. I also heard the conversation about how difficult engineering at Amazon was, and to be honest I was excited to take on the challenge.

The career journey is a difficult one and unfortunately, there is no one size fits all manual to it. The process is specific to you and there may be many different reasons why you may need to move on from a company. With this article, maybe you can learn from my experience and apply it to your career journey in a niche way. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read/listen. If you enjoyed this article or got some value out of it, please follow me on Medium and share with your friends.

All links

• Book a 1 on 1: Mock Technical Interview/Tech Resume Review/Career Coaching/System Design Consult— https://calendly.com/chumomega
• Youtube channel with my 1 on 1 conversations and other content — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0YlyJ2hsXvPOtrbBjvTwjg
• Podrank, The podcast ranker app that I built — http://podrank.co/
• Buy me a coffee to support my work — https://www.buymeacoffee.com/chumomega
• Connect with me on Linkedin — https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuma-okoro