艾德蒙得•劳的回答，协作办公应用Quip工程师

    许多危险信号应该让你重新考虑自己在当前公司的位置，其中包括：

    未得到公正的待遇。

    受到欺压，价值被低估，得不到尊重。

    不认同公司的根本战略或做法，却没有能力做出改变。

    与上司和团队成员的相处不融洽。

    无法融入公司文化。

    如果你想跳槽，提出这些理由都很容易成立。

    当你在目前公司能学到的东西越来越少，陷入瓶颈时，这也意味着是时候考虑离开了。这个理由更加微妙，许多人都意识不到，但实际上，它可能会对更多人产生影响。选择另外一个团队或一家公司，意味着你有机会尝试不同的学习曲线，进而加快你的学习进程。

    通常而言，我们都应该重视学习速率，这对于初入职场的年轻人尤为重要。学习是对自己未来的一项投资。而且学习是一个不断积累的复合过程——知识带来更多知识，在此基础上让你学得更多更快。因此，大多数人在大学里学习的知识要多于高中，而在高中学习的知识则要多于初中。理想情况下，大学毕业之后，我们应该让自己比以前学到更多知识。

    在关于“大学生毕业后为什么应该选择初创公司而非知名公司”的讨论中，帕兰提尔技术公司（Palantir Technologies）联合创始人史蒂芬•科恩提到了学习积累效应的重要性：

    如果你22岁从斯坦福大学（Stanford University）毕业后被谷歌（Google）聘用，你将得到一份朝九晚五的工作。而真正努力工作的时间可能只是从上午11点到下午3点。你会得到丰厚的报酬，工作也很轻松。但你所接受的薪酬，实际上是以更低的知识增长速度作为交换。如果你知道知识是需要不断积累的，你便会发现错过长期积累的机会需要付出多么巨大的代价。他们给你的并非一生中最好的机会。接下来会发生一件可怕的事情：有一天，你可能意识到，你失去了竞争优势。你再也不是最优秀的人。你再也不会对新事物迸发出热情。在这样的公司，一切都唾手可得。而你却变得沾沾自喜，止步不前。

    初创公司可能并不适合所有人，但不要降低知识增速的观点依旧适用。

    怎么看对所从事工作的激情？对公司使命或自己正在从事的工作充满激情，并为之感到兴奋，对于保持陡峭的学习曲线至关重要。激情和有意义的工作会提供长期学习的动力，使你始终保持“心流”状态。米哈里•契克森米哈是全球积极心理学领域首屈一指的研究者，他提出了“心流”理论。在“心流”状态下，你会非常享受自己正在从事的工作，甚至于忘记了时间的流动，并且，他发现更多“心流”通常会带来更多快乐。而除非你相信并享受自己的工作，否则很难长期保持学习的动力，也很难进入“心流”状态。而只要对自己的工作充满热爱，你肯定会变得越来越好。

    Answer by Edmond Lau, engineer at Quip

    A number of red flags should cause you to reconsider your position at your current company, including:

    Being compensated unfairly.

    Being mistreated, undervalued, or disrespected.

    Disagreeing with the fundamental strategy or practices of the company and not being in a position to change them.

    Failing to get along with your manager and your teammates.

    Failing to fit in with the company culture.

    These types of reasons aren’t too hard to identify and provide concrete justifications for trying something new.

    It’s also time to leave when your learning rate at your job tapers off and starts to plateau. This is a much more subtle reason for leaving that’s harder for people to recognize but likely affects a much larger group of people. Transitioning to another team or company provides an opportunity to switch to a different learning curve and to accelerate your learning.

    Paying attention to your learning rate is important in general but particularly important for young professionals. Learning is an investment in yourself for the future. It also compounds — knowledge not only begets knowledge, but more knowledge gives you a foundation upon which to gain knowledge even faster. This is why most people learn more in college than they did in high school and more in high school than they did in earlier years. Ideally, out of college, you should set yourself up to learn even more than before.

    Palantir Technologies co-founder Stephen Cohen captures the importance of the compounding effects of learning in an argument for why college graduates ought to work at startups instead of established companies:

    If you graduate from Stanford University at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5 job. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 job in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall.

    Startups might not be for everyone, but the message about not shortchanging your intellectual growth rate still applies.

    What about a passion for what you’re working on? A strong passion and excitement in your company mission or in what you’re doing is critical to sustaining a steep learning curve. Passion and meaningful work supply the motivation for long-term learning and allow you to stay in a state of flow more often. MihayliCsikszentmihalyi, one of the world’s leading researchers in positive psychology, developed the theory of “flow,” a state where you enjoy what you’re doing so much that you don’t even notice the passage of time, and found that more flow generally leads to more happiness. It’s hard to stay motivated to learn or to enter a state of flow in the long run unless you believe in and enjoy what you do, and it’s also hard not to be getting better if you love what you’re doing.

    要评估学习速率，首先需要明确工作中不同类型的学习：

    与工作职责有关的专业技术。例如，对于软件工程师而言，这样的技术可能包括学习一门新编程语言、熟悉新工具、提高设计新系统的能力等。这些技能的不断提高，将使你成为一名更加出色的个人贡献者。

    优先级技能。很多时候，你手头上可能有数十个甚至数百个任务需要处理，而每一个任务都可能产生价值。那些杠杆作用最大的活动，能够以最少的工作实现最大的价值，然而在指定时间内确定这样的活动，难度很大。但这可能是你在职业生涯中所能学到的最宝贵的技能。

    执行力。学会如何打造和交付一款优秀的产品或服务，以及如何坚持不懈地按时完成，这需要不断磨练。

    指导/管理技能。一家组织的发展速度越快，你便会越早成为团队的资深成员。而资历会让你有机会指导或管理其他团队成员，参与塑造不断成长的公司文化与价值观，并影响团队的发展方向。

    团队领导技能。使团队有效运转所需要的技能，与使自己高效工作所需要的技能截然不同。如何管理团队的阶段性目标？如何有效协调，如何减少沟通成本？如何保持团队的凝聚力？

    在职业生涯的不同阶段，你对这些能力的侧重程度也要有所不同，你需要寻找机会发展自己重视的能力。这些能力大部分都可以从你当前的工作中提炼总结出来。你可以将这些能力和经验带到下一份工作当中。

    有一种学习对职业成功非常重要，但却不容易带到其他公司。这便是制度性学习，即在公司规定的特定流程内保持良好的工作状态：如何得到关键决策把关人员的批准，如何使你支持的项目得到更高的优先级，在公司资源分配程序中，如何为自己的团队争取更多资源等。你需要做好其中的一部分，而谈判和说服技能会对你的未来有所帮助。然而，由于该类学习仅针对特定的官僚作风或你需要处理的流程，因此其价值要低得多。

    刚加入一家公司时，学习曲线通常都非常陡峭（前提是你做出了好的选择）。你会沉浸在新技术、新产品和新团队当中，各个方面都有好的学习机会。大学毕业后加入谷歌的时候，我在前六个月学到了很多。谷歌制作了出色的谷歌教育（GoogleEDU）培训材料。我沉浸在那些讨论为什么会存在核心抽象及其工作模式的代码实验室中。我研究程序设计风格指南，引领我学习最佳行业实践。我阅读关于搜索索引和内部创建的其他可扩展工程系统的设计资料。我学会如何创建并在谷歌网站上发布能被上亿网民看到的内容。

    而由于组织结构问题（比如流程太过官僚化，限制了你迅速迭代和发布产品的能力）或维护问题（团队的发展速度赶不上产品的复杂程度），你的学习速率可能会下降。第二种情况令你很难转换到新的项目和尝试新事物。

    Assessing your learning rate first requires identifying the many different types of learning at a job:

    Technical learning specific to your job function. For a software engineering position, for example, this might include things like learning a new language, getting familiar with new tools, improving your ability to design new systems, etc. Getting better at these skills makes you more proficient as an individual contributor.

    Prioritization skills.Oftentimes, there are tens or hundreds of things that you could be working on that might generate value. Figuring out the highest leverage activity that generates the most value for the least amount of work at any given point is hard, but it’s probably the single most valuable lesson you can learn professionally.

    Execution.Learning how build and deliver a great product or service and how to do it consistently and on time takes practice.

    Mentorship/management skills.The faster an organization grows, the sooner you become a more senior member of the team. Seniority provides opportunities to mentor or manage other teammates, to shape the company culture and values that develop, and to influence the direction of the team.

    Team leadership skills.The skills needed to make a team function effectively differ from those needed to be productively as an individual. How should milestones be organized? How do you coordinate effectively and minimize communication overhead? How do you make sure a team gels?

    At various points in your career, you’ll value these skills differently and should seek out opportunities that develop the skills you value. All of these skills are mostly generalizable beyond your job at your current company. You take those skills and experiences with you to your next job.

    There’s also a type of learning that’s important for career success but that is less transferable to other companies. And that’s institutional learning on how to function well within the specific processes defined at the company: how to get the approval of key gatekeepers for decisions, how to get projects you believe in prioritized on the roadmap, how to negotiate for more resources for your team given the company’s resource allocation process, etc. Some amount of this is necessary to do well, and some of the negotiation and persuasion skills will help in the future, but to the extent that much of this learning deals with the particular bureacracy or process that you need to deal with, it’s significantly less valuable than other types of learning.

    When you first join a company, the learning curve usually starts really steep (hopefully, if you’ve made a good choice). You’re immersed in new technologies, in a new product, and on a new team, and there are opportunities to learn along multiple dimensions. When I first joined Google right out of college, I learned a lot in my first six months there. Google’s done a great job with their GoogleEDU training materials. I soaked in all the codelabs that discussed why core abstractions existed and how they worked. I studied programming style guides to learn best industry practices. I read design docs about search indexing and other scalable engineering systems being built internally. I learned to build and ship something seen by tens to hundreds of millions of people per day on google.com.

    Your learning rate might decrease due to organizational issues (maybe processes have become too bureaucratic and limit your ability to iterate and launch quickly) or due to maintenance issues where the team doesn’t grow quickly enough to scale with the complexity of the product. The second makes it hard for you to switch projects and work on new things.

    在谷歌工作期间，我意识到许多项目要么没有具体的发布途径，或者审批流程不透明，使我很难看清楚或控制这些流程，这时候，警报开始显现。能够发布产品对我而言非常重要，因为我想学习如何创建优秀的产品，而及时的迭代反馈则是学习的必要基础。我预测了一下在合理情况下，多工作一年能够取得的成就和可能发布的产品，结果无法令我满意，于是我选择了离开。如果留在那里，我肯定也能学到更多东西——我可以深入研究更多主要系统的内部结构，但我的学习速率与最开始时的速度已经无法相提并论。

    后来我之所以离开网络视频服务公司Ooyala，也是因为我在那家公司的学习陷入停滞。我在那里学会了如何打造和销售一款企业产品，了解了flash视频与分析的复杂性，掌握项目估算和团队组织等能力。在我离开的时候，我很清楚如果加入一个更小的、发展更快的团队，自己可以继续学习工程设计和产品构建。我在Ooyala工作一段时间之后才发现的一个影响因素，是我对企业产品一点都不感到兴奋，也没有研究的动力，我更希望参与每天都会用到的消费者产品的开发。

    在Quora工作两年以来，我很高兴自己依旧能持续高速学习新的知识，当然，我们的产品本身也是以学习为中心，这对我有很大帮助。

    大学三年级在微软（Microsoft）做暑期实习期间，从一位朋友的导师那里听来的建议令我受益匪浅：至少每隔两年对自己在职业生涯中的位置进行审视和反思。即便你对自己的工作非常满意，这样做也会迫使你去检验自己是否真的喜欢现在的工作，是否学到了新的知识，而不仅仅是感到舒适而已。

    J•迈克•史密斯的回答，职业导师

    这是个很好的问题。但我们很难知道具体在什么时候应该辞职。

    一个简单的信号是你对自己正在做或能做的事情不再感到兴奋。你开始问自己为什么还要留在这里。

    但话虽如此，曾经与我共事的一位高管，有一份很棒的工作（老板喜欢他，有丰厚的薪水，还有充分的自主权），却准备放弃这一切，然而，他并未意识到，相对于他当时的生活现状（3个年纪很小的孩子，一份不需要经常出差的工作）而言，这份工作非常划算。或许这不是一份终生职业，但确实还不错，因为在孩子们走向青春期的这几年时间里，他可以在家人身上投入更多精力。

    我认为，采取更平衡的观点来看待这个问题将很有帮助。至少对我而言，工作非常重要。但俗话说得好，晚上睡觉的时候，亲吻你脸颊的可不是你的工作。在因为一件事情不完美而决定放弃它之前，不妨审视一下生活中的其他部分（工作、自己、家庭、社区等），这会对你有所帮助。

    瓦特萨拉•舒克拉的回答，职业与生活教练

    许多迹象会提醒你应该开始寻找新工作，但最初往往会被忽视，直到它们变得显而易见，才会引起你的重视。你正在考虑跳槽的事实，意味着当前的工作中肯定有某些因素令你不舒服。对我而言，最重要的原因是潜在的倦怠。

    Warning flags for me at Google started to appear when I realized that many projects either had no concrete launch paths or depended on non-transparent approval processes over which I had little visibility or control. Being able to launch products was important to the extent that I wanted to learn how to build great products, and quick, iterative feedback is a necessary foundation for learning. When I projected what I could accomplish and reasonably launch by staying an additional year, I didn’t feel satisfied, so I left. There was certainly more I could have learned by staying — I could have dug into the internals of more major systems — but my rate of learning no longer mirrored what I encountered when I first started.

    I similarly left Ooyala when I felt that my own learning rate at the company began to plateau. While I was there, I learned about building and selling an enterprise product, the intricacies of flash video and analytics, project estimation and team organization, and more. I left when it became clear to me that I could learn much more on engineering and on building a product by joining a smaller and faster-growing team. A contributing factor that I only discovered after working at Ooyala for a while was that I wasn’t nearly as excited and motivated to work on an enterprise product as I was to work on a consumer product that I would actually use everyday.

    Having worked at Quora for two years, I’m happy that I’m still continuously learning new things at a good rate, and it certainly helps that the product itself is also so learning-focused.

    When I interned at Microsoft the summer of my junior year in college, I received a good piece of advice second hand from a friend’s mentor: always re-examine and reflect on where you are in your career at least every two years. Even if you’re perfectly happy with your job, the exercise forces you to check that you are actually enjoying your work and learning on the job rather than just being comfortable.

    Answer J. Mike Smith, career coach

    Good question. It’s tough to answer and know exactly when to quit.

    The simple (not simplistic) sign is that you’re not excited about anything you’re doing or can do; you start asking yourself why you’re sticking around.

    Having said that though, I just worked with an executive who had a great role (boss loved him, paid well, lots of autonomy, etc.) and who was ready to pack it in but just didn’t realize that for where he was in life (3 younger kids, a job that didn’t cause him to be out of town frequently) he had a pretty sweet deal. Perhaps not a forever deal, but a great role to have at a time where he could put energy into his family before the kids went away for a few years to adolescence.

    I think it helps to take a more broadly balanced view. Work, at least for me, is pretty important. But as the saying goes, your job doesn’t kiss you on the cheek at night when you go to bed. It helps to take a look at all the things that make up your life (work, self, family, community, etc.) before you chuck in one element because it’s not perfect.

    Answer by Vatsala Shukla, career and life coach

    The indicators that it is time to move on start coming to your attention but you ignore them until they cannot be ignored. The fact that you are thinking about it means that there is something that is not quite working for you in your present situation. The most important reason, for me would be potential burnout.    

    如果出现下面7种情况，我建议你诚实地审视一下自己的现状，认真考虑是否应该寻找新的机会。

    你在周一上午不想去上班，并且经常请病假；

    你不喜欢现在的工作——这份工作没有挑战性或者挑战性过高；

    你与上司的关系远远无法令人满意，双方无法进行顺畅的沟通；

    你对自己的职业发展失去了兴趣，对职业进步丧失了热情；

    你在工作中没有出色表现的动力，之所以去上班，只是为了登记考勤；

    工作场所的氛围是“有毒的”（不健康的流言蜚语、诽谤中伤、办公室政治和消极情绪）；

    工作的压力水平严重影响了你的健康和/或个人关系；

    如果上述七点符合你的情况，这也意味着你对当前的工作可能产生了倦怠。

    本杰明•肖汉姆的回答，创业者

    有一种职场病叫“员工麻木”，病因是员工对日常工作和待遇的满足。许多员工一直做着与昨天甚至一年前相同的事情，他们会避免任何改变，只是因为这种状态令他们感觉舒服。

    我认为，一个人的职业生涯就是专业与职业水平不断提高的过程。而原地踏步则意味着你偏离了这个轨迹。

    我喜欢每天早上（或至少每周）问自己两个问题：1. 做这份工作，我是否变得越来越专业？2. 对于我当前的经济状况而言，这是否是我最好的职业选择？

    我会一直关注新的机会，经常与有兴趣和我共事的人交流。如果我总是对新机会说“不”，这意味着我对现在的状态非常满意。如果有更好的机会，我会毫不犹豫地放弃当前的工作，迈出下一步。（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    Here are 7 circumstances where I would recommend taking an honest look at your situation and considering whether you should look for new pastures.

    You don’t feel like going into work on Monday mornings and often call in sick

    You don’t enjoy the work you are doing – it could be under or over-challenging

    Your relationship with your boss is far from satisfactory with no open lines for communication

    You have lost interest in your professional development to get ahead on your career track

    You are not motivated to perform well in your job and only come into work because you need to log in your attendance

    The ambiance in the work place is ‘toxic’ (unhealthy levels of gossip, backbiting, politics and negativity)

    The stress level in your job is adversely affecting your health and/or personal relationships

    If you answered yes to point 7, it might also be pointing toward a potential burn-out.

    Answer by Benjamin Shoham, entrepreneur

    There’s a disease called “employee numbness” caused by satisfaction from one’s daily routine and compensation. Many employees will keep on doing the same things they did yesterday and a year before, and will avoid any changes, just because it’s all comfortable enough.

    I see a professional career as a path to improvement both on the professional and the business level. If you are stepping in place, you’re not following this path.

    I like to ask myself two questions every morning (or at least every week): 1. Am I getting more professional doing my job? 2. Is that the best business choice for my current financial situation?

    I always keep my eyes open for new opportunities, and always talk to anyone interested in working with me. As long as I keep saying “no” to new opportunities, that means I’m in the right place for me right now. As soon as a better opportunity comes along, I say goodbye and take the next step.