I delayed.
When I was a new hire I got based in a city in the northern part of the Midwest and flew there from the fall into the winter and then after a couple months of intermediate bases I was able to get based at home. In the blink of an eye 2 years went by, most of it flying up and down the west coast in easy weather, I've always tried to learn as much as possible from the situations I encounter, but when a few options opened up I had to make a choice. Option one was upgrade back to the northern part of the midwest in the plane I was already flying in middle of winter, option two was stay in the seat I was in until I could upgrade at home, and option three was transition to an FO seat on the other airplane, taking a seat lock.
Some soul-searching revealed that I definitely did not feel safe going back to the Midwest and flying as a new captain with new FO's to terrible airports in awful weather. Option one was out fairly quickly, this realization bothered me and was the main reason I chose the path I did.
Option two was okay, it didn't look like a very long wait in those days and I felt comfortable doing the flying I was doing from the left seat... but that didn't sit right with me. It felt like dodging the issue and shirking the opportunity to round out my education.
I ended up choosing option three. The airplane I was on did mostly north/south flying, and this airplane did a lot of east/west flying and it has decent legs so I knew that there would be weather dodging experience, snow, ice, and everything else, and I could experience it for at least a year under some really great senior captains.
All in all I ended up being on the new airplane for about a year and a half and almost exactly 1000 hours.
Like others here I never felt "ready" but I eventually did come to feel that it was time. I had an opinion about how to handle most things that came our way, sometimes what the captains I flew with did would not have been what I would have done, and sometimes it was, and I had a decent amount of confidence that I wouldn't make a complete hash of it.
So it ended up being about 2500 hours of airline flying and three and a half years. That just so happened to coincide with being able to hold the old airplane at my home base, so it worked out quite nice.
I want my career to be largely trouble free, and that means a healthy level of self awareness. The FAA and airlines will absolutely put you in situations you aren't prepared for if your seniority can hold it and they will hope for the best and the training you're given is usually the bare minimum they can get away with. So, my advice is dont shy away from whatever opportunities you have to expand your comfort zone, and to do some serious soul searching, evaluate your skillset, and do what you have to do to get to where you need to be for the decision to be an easy one.
