There are many reasons to change your job as a developer: money, needing more freedom, toxic environment, no innovation, and the list could go on and on.

Whatever is your reason, you are probably going looking for a new job. It does not matter if you are a junior or a senior developer.

How do start looking for a new job?

Let’s start talking about 3 basic things that you should think of before starting your job search.

WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?

That’s what you do: contact the first recruiter that wrote you on LinkedIn and jump on the first opportunity that he will give you. Great idea, right.

Don’t do that.

The first thing that you should start thinking about is WHY you want a new job and WHAT will be the happy career path for you.

• What would make you happy in the next job?
• What would be the perfect environment for you?
• Which kind of project or industry would you like to work on?

Compensation

After you answered these basic questions, you should ask which offer will make you happy. Money is a big part of your the overall offer but not everything. Have a figure in mind that would make you happy and then evaluate other benefits that you would like in future offers.

• Are they offering remote working?
• Flexible working hours?
• More weeks of holidays?
• Longer parental leave?
• Health insurance?

The tech stack

Ok, now you understood what would make you happy in your next job and you have a much clear idea what would be a good offer for you (money and benefits).

As a developer, there is the last point that I think it is very important. Which technologies would you like to use in your next job?

For example, If you are planning to work as a frontend developer, would you be ok working with JQuery? Would you only work with ReactJS, Vue or Angular?

That’s just an example and you can ask yourself the same kind of questions if you want to be a backend, mobile or full-stack developer.

My way to answer this is making a list of technologies I do NOT want to work with. They are technologies I have no interest in learning for different reasons. Every other technology outside this list is worthy and interesting to learn for me, even if I have no experience at all.

You decide your next job. You decide your career path.

Finding a new job is hard, but finding the right job can be even harder if you don’t think what you really want before you start job hunting.

As a recap, if you are looking for a job:

• Find what would make you happy in your next job.
• Be clear with yourself about what would be a good offer. Have in mind a base salary and benefits that you will like.
• Decide which technologies you would like to work on in your next job.

Happy job hunting!

Well, last thing: If you arrived until here, thank you so much for your support and time that you spend in this page.

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