April 15, 2025

What do software engineers most often overlook when they decide to stay or leave their job? 🤔

There are two things I often see people miss when deciding whether to stay or move on:

1️⃣ Impact on skillset and expertise.
New environments 𝘥𝘰 build new skills. But over the long run, depth matters more than breadth.

📉 Yet many engineers don’t evaluate whether their next job will actually deepen their technical skills or domain expertise. Over time, multiple lateral moves can create a “jack of all trades” profile that makes it much harder to grow into Staff or Principal roles.

This gets even trickier when job descriptions don’t require much technical depth, and the promise of a 10-20% salary bump makes the decision feel like a no-brainer. It’s easy to prioritize money or novelty—and lose sight of your long-term goals.

2️⃣ Belief in a “clean slate.”
It’s tempting to think that a new job will magically erase all the stress, dysfunction, and disappointment from your last one.

📉 But our minds don’t flip switches like that.

If you haven’t taken time to process those experiences, they’ll show up again—through your reactions, your narratives, your relationships. Because 𝘺𝘰𝘶 are the one showing up in every job.

When I coach engineers with a history of frequent job changes, we often need to slow down and rebuild: start by clarifying their direction, then help them grow roots so they can actually advance.