Model staying for annual raises vs job-hopping for bigger bumps — cumulative earnings trajectories, the crossover year, and the costs the salary math hides (vesting resets, promotion paths, search risk). Use when asked should I switch jobs for more money, is job hopping worth it, model my salary if I stay vs leave, or raise versus new offer. Produces the year-by-year salary and cumulative-earnings table, the crossover year, and the not-in-the-model checklist that usually decides it.
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Use raise-vs-jump to compare staying versus changing jobs from [current salary], using [stay raise and jump assumptions] and [equity, promotion, and search details], with yearly and cumulative earnings, crossover year, and an honest recommendation.
Required inputs
[current salary]
[stay raise and jump assumptions]
[equity, promotion, and search details]
User-approved starter prompt based on a pinned source version; check current skill requirements before running. Task evidence ↗
SKILL.md
name: raise-vs-jumpdescription: "Model staying for annual raises vs job-hopping for bigger bumps — cumulative earnings trajectories, the crossover year, and the costs the salary math hides (vesting resets, promotion paths, search risk). Use when asked should I switch jobs for more money, is job hopping worth it, model my salary if I stay vs leave, or raise versus new offer. Produces the year-by-year salary and cumulative-earnings table, the crossover year, and the not-in-the-model checklist that usually decides it."
Raise vs Jump Skill
"Job hoppers earn more" is true on salary and incomplete on everything else: equity that vests on a cliff you keep resetting, the promotion you were two quarters from, the months of search time, the reputation cost of a short-stint résumé. This skill runs the salary math properly — trajectories, not single offers — and then insists on the checklist of what the salary math can't see, because that checklist decides more of these choices than the compounding does.
What This Skill Produces
The trajectory table — year-by-year salary and cumulative earnings for both paths
The crossover year — when cumulative jump-earnings pass cumulative stay-earnings
The gap at horizon — final salary gap and cumulative gap, on stated assumptions
The not-in-the-model checklist — scored for this user's actual situation
Required Inputs
Ask for these if not provided:
Current salary and realistic stay-raise % — their employer's actual recent raises, not the poster in the break room (default 3%, labeled)
Jump assumptions — bump per jump (default 15%), years between jumps (default 3), raises between jumps (default 2% — jumpers often land at the top of a band and stall)
The invisible items — unvested equity and its schedule, pension/tenure benefits, promotion proximity, how they'd handle a search
Deterministic. Models salary only — the script prints its own not-modeled list, and the skill's job is to make that list concrete for the user.
Framework: What the Salary Math Hides
Vesting resets are the jump tax — walking away from unvested equity and restarting a cliff is often worth more than the bump; compute it in dollars, not vibes
The stay path has step functions too — a promotion is a 10–20% event; if one is genuinely close (named role, named timeline — not a vague "soon"), model it as a stay-side jump
Raises between jumps sag — new hires land high in the band and then stall; that's the --jump-year-raise 2 default, and it's why the crossover is later than the first bump suggests
Search risk is asymmetric — a jump that takes 4 months of search or ends in a bad fit erases years of edge; weight it by how in-demand the user actually is
Three jumps is a pattern — recruiters read tenure; the strategy that maximizes 5-year earnings can shrink 15-year options
Output Format
Raise vs Jump: [scenario]
The Trajectories
[Script output: year-by-year table, crossover year, gaps at horizon]
What the Table Says
[Two sentences: the size of the pure-salary edge and how sensitive it is to the bump/raise assumptions.]
The Checklist the Table Can't See
Item
This user
Weight
Unvested equity walked away from
[$ and schedule]
[often decisive]
Promotion proximity on the stay path
[named role/timeline or "vague"]
Search risk
[in-demand? runway?]
Résumé pattern
[tenure history]
The Honest Read
[One paragraph: what the numbers plus the checklist actually suggest — a recommendation with its reasoning, not a dodge.]
Educational model, not financial or career advice — the checklist items are prompts for the user's judgment, not scores from the model.
Quality Checks
Trajectories and crossover shown — never just "the offer is 15% more"
Unvested equity is computed in dollars if it exists
A genuinely-close promotion is modeled, a vague one is named as vague
The honest read takes a position with reasoning
The disclaimer line appears in the artifact
Anti-Patterns
Do not compare a single offer number to a single current salary — trajectories or nothing
Do not ignore equity because it's "complicated" — the complication is the money
Do not treat "my manager hinted at promotion" as a modeled event — named role and timeline, or it's noise
Do not assume the jump cadence repeats forever without naming the résumé-pattern cost
Do not hide behind "it depends" — deliver the honest read with its reasoning