  The side-jump effect is a manifestation of the spin orbit interaction in
electron scattering from an atom/ion/impurity. The effect has a broad interest
because of its conceptual importance for generic spin-orbital physics, in
particular the effect is widely discussed in spintronics. We reexamine the
effect accounting for the exact nonperturbative electron wave function inside
the atomic core. We find that value of the effect is much smaller than
estimates accepted in literature. The reduction factor is 1/Z^2, where Z is the
nucleus charge of the atom/impurity. This implies that the side-jump effect is
practically irrelevant for spintronics, the skew scattering and/or the
intrinsic mechanism always dominate the anomalous Hall and spin Hall effects.
