When Should I Leave The Company I Work For
Hi everyone, looking for a reality check on my career. I need an outside perspective on whether I have the skills to move on.
Background:
- Started in Service Desk (2 years).
- Completed an 18-month Platform Engineer apprenticeship (The course was for Software Enginer.)
- Have been a full-time Platform Engineer for 2+ years since then.
- Total Cloud/Platform experience: ~3.5 to 4 years.
The Tech Stack:
- GCP & AWS: Managing Landing Zones, IAM Federation, and Governance/Deny policies.
- IaC: Everything in Terraform. Maintaining infrastructure for a high-traffic e-commerce platform.
- DataOps: Managing Data Lake infrastructure. Updating Terraform for Cloud Composer (Airflow) and handling version upgrades.
- I have touched Kubernetes, I am able to look at logs and make changes to the code but don't fully understand Kubernetes yet.
The Situation: I work for a large company in the UK on £31k to £33k After a recent restructure, I realized I am on the lowest pay grade in my department. Everyone else has a "Senior" or "Lead" title (mostly former legacy Network/Storage engineers).
I recently asked for a pay rise increase. My manager said "it's not happening this year" and told me to just work on my PDR (Performance Development Review).
My Main Worry: I feel like I've outgrown the "Junior" label because I can be left alone to deploy to production and manage core infra. However, I still have to ask questions on tasks, which makes me worry I don't have the skills to survive at a new company.
Questions:
- Does being able to deploy to production solo (but still needing to ask questions occasionally) make me "Mid-Level"?
- Should I stick it out and "work on the PDR" or start looking for a fresh start
- What skill level do I need to be at in Terraform and AWS?