Episode 1: Startup Opportunities and Switching Jobs

Welcome to Soft Skills Engineering, where we answer your questions about non-technical topics in software engineering. Come get some wisdom, or at least some wise cracks.

In episode 1, Dave and Jamison answer two questions:

1. I’m a developer who gets approached from time to time to work on new software ideas. While I find working on something new and intriguing I have no experience with business. How do I determine how legitimate these opportunities are?

2. At my current job, our codebase is a few years old and we use an “older” javascript framework. In my spare time I’ve really really enjoyed using one of the newer paradigms and technical stacks and I wish I had more opportunity to get experience with these technologies. I don’t see a rewrite or even a migration any time soon for our codebase at this company and have been considering taking a job where I’d have opportunity to work with these newer technologies. This despite enjoying my coworkers, and lacking any major complaints at this company. On a scale from 1 to 10 how crazy am I for considering a job change?