Should I change the job or should I change the Position inside company?

Question

I am a little confused about the two choices :

Here is background first, I have 4.5 years of experience as Front-end Developer (had done B.tech ICT). I am working with a product company (team size is ~50) for last 1.5 years. The product and growth of the company is stable.

When I joined my major goal was to convert vanilla Javascript based frontend to Angular component based frontend, took 4 months to get a hold on the various parts of the product and last year we finished the intended target. After one month all things that will remain to fix random bugs.

The product backend is made in Java which I am not much experienced. I see two options in the future if I want to improve my personal productivity and growth.

1. Find a new employer which can provide sufficient new challenges
2. Ask for a new position within the company

I am confused between two choices.

Answer 1

You are a knowledge worker. To succeed in your career you need to learn new things continuously. (20 years from now will anybody use JS/Angular? I started programming using FORTRAN and assembly language on a PDP-11, now not very useful skills.)

Your decision about your next job assignment should be based, in part, on what you can learn. In your present company, if you join the back-end team you can leverage your knowledge of the front end. In the back-end team you will learn a whole ton of stuff about databases, servers, scaling, security, etc etc.

If you join a new company you should choose it based on what you will learn there. React? React native for mobile?

Or, you can ask for a transfer, temporary or permanent, to a different part of the company. A year spent working as a sales engineer is a great way to learn a lot about business.

And, with respect, I answer your "talk is cheap show me code" handle by saying "code comes out better when you thoroughly understand the problems it promises to solve." Sometimes you gotta listen to people talking to understand. That kind of talk is priceless.

Answer 2

My personal philosophy is to explore / exploit all opportunities of a place before moving on to another place - not limited to jobs, but to anything in life.

Therefore, applied to your case, I would do the following (I actually did it several times):

1. Ask for a new position in the current company. Being a new position, salary negotiation will most likely take place, and you might get lucky.

2. When there is nothing more to learn in the current company, or when a much better opportunity appears, move to another company.

---

There is a tendency that you will get higher salary rises if you switch companies, but this is not a very strong rule.

Answer 3

I would suggest you to start learning whatever new technology you want to learn side-by-side to your current role. Why? Let me explain:

• This would prove your caliber to justify that you can work in your new role with new technology in the current company.

• If you want to switch with the new tech in the new company, you will be able to clear interviews easily.

Now if you decide to switch the companies in your current tech stack only, I would still suggest that you brush up those concepts of JS/Angular which you are not aware of as of now, or even better if you can learn new JS frameworks such as React or Node.

In conclusion, learn something from your end first before thinking about asking for role change in the current company or going for a new profile in a new company.

All the best!