What I Learned from Changing Jobs 3 Times (What Matters More Than Salary)
I'm a developer with 7 years of experience, and I've changed jobs three times. My salary went up every time, but on the third move I realized what really matters.
First move: salary +20%
Second: +30%
Third: +15% (smaller raise, but highest satisfaction)
What I cared about on the third move:
- Team lead's tendencies (code review style, how they give direction)
- Onboarding process (level of documentation)
- Release cadence and incident response culture
- How remote/flexible work actually operates
- Future of the tech stack (proportion of legacy code)
These five things determine who I'll be a year from now more than a 1 million KRW salary difference. In particular, you absolutely need to draw out the team lead's tendencies through questions of your own in the final interview.
The biggest regret I had while preparing to change jobs was rushing my first move with a "salary first" mindset. It took me two years to recover.
6 answers
Agreed, especially their leadership tendency is really strong. You can kind of tell just from their tone in an interview lol.
Well, isn't that kind of case-by-case? When the salary gap is big, it does more to change who I am a year later. I've been at a place with good team culture too, but the 200,000 won difference in monthly pay stressed me out every month, so I ended up leaving. I can put up with about 1 million won, but once it's in the millions, it's a different story.
The level of onboarding documentation really matters. At my previous job, there wasn’t a single wiki—everything was handed over verbally—and I struggled for three months. Back then, you could just read the code, but nobody told you why it was written that way. My current company has a culture of writing ADRs (Architecture Decision Records), so new hires can get to their first deploy in two weeks. That one thing alone makes the perceived difficulty at least twice as different.
Could you elaborate a bit more on tips for asking questions to the interviewer in a final interview? I’d like to use them when I change jobs next time, and I’m curious which questions were effective. I respectfully ask for your advice.