When is it time to move on?

I perform a lot of interviews for my company. I get asked what I like about my company and for years my answer has been two things: Autonomy, and flexibility. I think it may be time to take advantage of some of those perks.

My job

I am a software engineer in developer infrastructure. I have actually been on the same team since I joined this company almost 4 and a half years ago. I'm sure doing some basic clicking around you can find where I work etc but I like to pretend I'm keeping some aspects of my personal life private. :)

As I was saying :) I've been on the same team now for roughly 4.5 years. We've grown and changed a lot over that time, but what I have found is I've accumulated so much knowledge and frustration over that time. And what adds to that is majority of my team is at the 1 year or less mark with the team. My team is 1 product manager, 1 engineering manager (people manager - stuff like growth, pay, etc), 4 backend engineers, 1 senior frontend engineer, myself (senior backend engineer), and 1 staff level engineer. The frontend engineer has been on this team for maybe about 2 years, same as the staff level engineer. But the 4 other engineers as well as both managers are all in the 1.5 or less year mark (majority coming up on their 1 year).

The reason I bring up tenure with the team is familiarity with the problem space. When I joined the company we formed a team consisting of just me and a product manager (who is now one of the leads of the entire org) to try and solve some of the problems in our infra offering. Since then I have seen countless members join and leave, me being the only consistent member through this time.

Sadly, what that means is I've embodied a lot of the problems we've tried to solve. So when something gets brought up for the 1001st time I find myself frustrated and annoyed that users as well as myself have been trying to push these solutions through to no avail for YEARS now. And I think despite being so passionate about the space I work in I may need to move on...

Why should you care when reading this?

This is just my diary at this point, why are you even reading this? Well I hope if you can relate to it in some way and maybe learn from my mistakes, or actively choose to avoid ending up in the situation I am in now.

What does it mean to move on?

Like I mentioned at the start - we have "autonomy" and "freedom" at my company. This comes with a grain of salt as you're still a cog in a corporate machine. There is always someone to answer to. But I don't have to leave my company to find a new opportunity. And having worked on the same problems for years on out, maybe I just pack up and find a new problem space.

You're not exactly a greybeard, why are you acting like one? Get off your high horse there Gandalf...

Something I feel I've recognized is that I take things too personally. But I also built a lot of these products from the ground up, and have seen people with barely an understanding of their meaning try and steer the product into a different direction ignoring the plan I had envisioned and pushed for well before they joined. So at times I see "maybe I should shut up and let my team make mistakes" I should just "state my piece, if people disagree so be it, it's just internal infra software, we can recover". But at the same time: I didn't dedicate 40+hrs per week for 4 years to just give up.

But I think I should just give up. I'm sure some famous movie quote something like:

> Have you ever just looked up and realized you're 10 years older and don't recognize anyone else around you?

Because that's how I feel right now.

I just joined my first big company, what can I do to not become 30 and bitter?

Stop caring so much. It's just work. Especially if you build in-house developer tooling... like you're not saving lives, just maybe some time and effort for your friends and coworkers.

Moving on isn't giving up. You should track your growth, if you're spending more energy getting mad than growing just move on. There is no medal for longest serving team member.

Keep track of how you feel each day. This is a good thing in general. If your partner, family, friend tells you "you seem unhappy" that means you've been unhappy for a while. So keep a log. Check back on it. If things are trending downward try and correct it. If you've tried and nothing is working, see point 2 - just change jobs/teams/whatever. Life is too short to care about ones and zeroes.

And if you ever find yourself a bit heated after some incident. Take a step back, breathe, leave a message with your people manager but asking if you can talk about it tomorrow.

> Hey, that meeting got a little rough. Honestly, things upset me quite a bit and that concerns me. I think it would be good if we could meet tomorrow to discuss what happened, why it affected me like this and how in future we can prevent this from happening again.

Or something. I am not a people manager, idk your job or your life. :) Don't take advice from me!

/end rant

I wonder if there is work in the NLP space at my company. I don't have any practical experience but I'll check our internal listings and talk to my manager and theirs to see if I can get some hands on experience in that area. It was always something I wanted to do coming out of school, but I had to stop pursuing the linguistics minor due to my CS courses conflicting. Plus I was lazy and wanted to watch Star Trek with my roommate instead. My company has programs where you can work with other teams on a short term basis. I've used it before to help teams within my org who needed a senior engineer or some seniority in the org space. But maybe I should take some time working for a different org.

Conclusion

Aside: Something I realized I was doing was naming my files after the post itself. Which is kinda not the point? As long as it's obvious which post it is? Either way. Curious to know if other people try to match the filename to the first header?

- Senders

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