I've gone completely the opposite. I seem to have made more mistakes as I've gotten older (35y) and learning seems to go more slowly. Some of them are mistakes you'd expect someone with 0-1 years of experience to make, even though I've got 5 or so. It's all downhill from here, I guess.
How do you prove to the next company that you won't leave? You really can't. You can easily prove you've been working on leetcode problems. If they don't want to hire people with short stays, you can't really fix that. If they don't want to hire people who haven't practiced leetcode, you can fix that. So to an employer, does it really matter if you are good at leetcode if they feel you won't stay around long? So the tenure takes precedence.
Some companies won't care, but finding those is just about as easy as finding a company that's a good fit before you've worked there.
I'll put my experiences down as a cautionary tale.
I've had 3 relatively short stints in tech jobs, but none where I left responsibilities on the table, like leaving in the middle of a project, or promising some work only to bail. Notice was always given, and I made the best effort to transition by completing all work before the end date. My reasons for leaving each are a bit more serious than a lifestyle downgrade, but none-the-less, that doesn't matter to future employers.
There are lots of sectors to jump between that utilize programming and IT knowledge (DevOps, Cloud roles, security roles), so even when you go to try them out, it's being considered a job hop by recruiters/hiring managers. If it doesn't work out, you're now potentially job hopping twice when you try to go back to something you know you can do due to world events.
Not only is this the major take-away from the article, it also applies to switching industries, and in my experience for switching industries, it applies even if you have a recent certification in the new industry which gets requested by a lot of companies:
>It’s ok to quit after a few weeks (just don’t make it a pattern)
Unfortunately, companies won't see the notice you gave or the transition work you did. Those companies likely can't verify that, so they really only have your employment dates to look at. If they don't like it, they just won't put you forward regardless of how much they like your skills.
For some people, there will be companies where they don't fit in with because of personality traits. If you get particularly unlucky, you'll run into 2 or 3 of those companies in quick succession, with the latter positions being even worse than the first, and so you'll have to stick it out and endure more. This unluckiness doesn't do you any favors, though. But it's really up to you if those personality traits need to be fixed or not.
The only thing that seems to count is your tenure, so don't fuck it up. You might not even get to the leetcode step if you do.
Azure would compliment my previous work with MS technologies. I think AWS is more popular though so might be more amenable to a lateral move. But I'm sure Azure has their own path as well?
I left voluntarily before I had something else lined up. We weren't really doing anything we were hired to do (pentesting), so I wanted something else. I got really restless and it's why I'll stay away from government contracting positions in the future unless desperately needed.
4 months ago this wasn't a completely bad idea as tech was known as a seller's market and taking time off to learn new things was normal.
It's obviously not realistic for the next year or so at least.