To stay or to leave: It’s the question many workers wrestle with for months, if not years.
While job-hugging may feel safest in this employment market, some employees are still choosing to walk away from cushy jobs, and one former Microsoft engineer shared his framework for making that decision.
In an episode of Steve Huynh’s, “A Life Engineered” podcast released Monday, Kun Chen, a former engineer at Microsoft, Meta, and Atlassian, said that he used a simple test to decide whether it was time to leave. Chen, said he decided to leave Microsoft when he realized he was no longer growing much at the company.
Many people, he said, wait until they miss a promotion to realize they’re no longer growing.
“That’s a very lagging indicator. I think actually we can tell if we’re growing much, much earlier,” Chen said on the podcast.
Chen told Business Insider that since starting at Microsoft, he had been regularly asking himself a simple question to keep himself honest about his growth: “What did I do this month that I couldn’t last month?”
When he was six years into his first job at Microsoft, he told Business Insider that he realized he couldn’t give himself a good answer to that question for a few months.
On the podcast, he said that he was mainly working on the same tasks, and he already knew how to do them. He said that while he could find ways to do some of his work faster and better, it was still largely the same.
“That’s how I knew I wasn’t growing as much,” he told Business Insider.
Chen said that a monthly test is especially relevant given the current pace of change.
The software engineering field, in particular, is in the midst of a radical transformation, as AI models have improved dramatically over the past several months. Google, for example, just announced that 75% of its new code is now generated by AI. Last fall, the company said it was 50%.
“The world is changing very fast, and we should constantly question ourselves,” Chen said.
That doesn’t automatically mean workers should leave a company or team if they find themselves stagnant in their roles, Chen said on the podcast. Still, he said it’s worth asking yourself the question so that you can figure out what kind of changes to make.
Chen told Business Insider that he could have spoken with his manager at Microsoft to discuss ways to move to a project or role that would allow him to keep growing and learning new things.
However, he said he ultimately realized that switching to a smaller company with a very different culture and business model would give him a different level of growth. He said on the podcast that Facebook’s stock was rising at the time.
Chen said on the podcast that he figured it was a good time to give it a try, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions he made, both financially and for his personal growth.
Chen ended up coming back to Microsoft after his project at Facebook was “well-established,” and the “remaining work was more incremental.” He said he had an opportunity at Microsoft to help bootstrap a new games platform.
“I saw that as an opportunity to apply what I learned during my years at Facebook,” Chen said.
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