Financially, waiting for promotion does not make any sense.

Photo by PiggyBank on Unsplash

A traditionally ideal career path is that you work hard, you get promoted, you keep working hard, and you get promoted again. Along the way, your salary grows along with your promotions.

Actually, this is far from being an ideal career path from a financial perspective. Let’s look at a real-world situation.

Let’s say we have company Foo with 3 levels for SDE (software development engineer)and the below pay scale:

SDE-I: 100k — 200k

SDE-II: 200k — 300k

SDE-III: 300k — 400k

And we also have company Bar, with the same SDE levels and the same pay scale as company Foo.

If you keep growing at Foo, you get

• Year 1: 100k as SDE-I
• Year 2: 150k as SDE-I, with a promotion to SDE-II at the end of year 2
• Year 3: 220k as SDE-II
• Year 4: 250k as SDE-II
• Year 5: 270k with a promotion to SDE-III mid-year
• Year 6: 320k as SDE-III

6 years total: 1310k

This has already assumed a steady career growth with a normal-to-fast promotion timeline. You would probably think this is a pretty good spot…