4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Leaving Your Job (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)

Name: 4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Leaving Your Job (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)
Uploaded: 2022-09-25T14:00:10.000Z
Duration: 8 min 4 s
Channel: Kun Chen

Kun ChenSeptember 25, 20228m

Topics6

Deciding Whether to Switch Jobs0:00 Question 1: Do I Know What I Want?0:31 Question 2: Have I Found What I Love?2:02 Question 3: How Can I Get What I Need?4:01 Question 4: Does the New Job Indeed Offer What I Need?5:32 Handling Counter Offers6:34

In a Nutshell

Before leaving your job, first clarify what you want in your career, identify the track that excites you, and determine how to get the growth or experience you need—often without switching companies. If a job change is required, rigorously evaluate whether the new role actually delivers what you need by asking targeted questions during interviews. Ignore counter-offers, as decisions should prioritize long-term trajectory over short-term salary gains.

AI-Generated Notes

These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.

At some point in your career, you might be evaluating whether or not you should switch to a different job. This decision can have a huge impact on your career trajectory and you definitely don't want to make the wrong call. This video shares how to arrive at a well-informed decision. The video is inspired by a recent interview with Jordan, an engineer at Google who has a channel that is a great resource for interview preparation.

During the interview, Jordan asked how to think about job switches, which led to a great conversation. The goal is to summarize it into a few questions you can ask yourself when considering leaving your job. These questions should take you through a holistic thought process that makes sure your decision will be beneficial.

The first question to ask yourself is: do I know what I want? Oftentimes, job switches are triggered by external events such as recruiters reaching out about a new opportunity, or having a bad performance review that surprised or disappointed you. What we then tend to do is look at this single event and try to give a reactive and binary answer. Should I take this new opportunity - yes or no? I should probably leave this job - true or false?

This reactive decision process can be missing a lot of information. Because your options are not limited to this single opportunity. There are actually many different paths you can take as your next step. By making the decision reactively, you risk being too focused on a single option and miss out on what's actually the best path for yourself.

This is why the recommendation is to ask: do I know what I want? What does the perfect place look like for my current stage? This question forces you to go through a proactive process to plan your career so that you will have a clear idea for where you need to be. Knowing this answer makes it very easy to assess whether or not the job switch would make sense.

If you realized that you don't have a clear answer to the first question yet, it's time to ask yourself the next question: have I found what I love? There are many branches in the software engineering career. For example, you can be a frontend engineer, backend engineer, or full stack engineer. As a frontend engineer, you can focus on web, iOS, Android, or desktop development. Within the backend world, you can focus on networking, cloud infrastructure, or system engineering. Not to mention specialized branches such as computer vision, machine learning, crypto, or game development.

Sometimes you start your career in a specific role not through an informed decision by yourself, but through random reasons or a choice by other people. It may or may not be the right track for you. So in the first phase of your career, you should optimize for finding a track that really excites you and keeps you motivated.

If you don't think your current role is one that you enjoy, then you need to keep looking. You need to develop some hypotheses for what you would feel passionate about, and just try them out. If you have already found a role that you feel good about, that you think you will stay interested in for at least a few years, then you are a very lucky person and what you want to do in this case is to go deeper down the track. A previous video about how to invest in your career can give more tactical suggestions on how to do that.

Sign in to read the full notes

Get access to AI-generated notes, topic timestamps, and more.

4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Leaving Your Job (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)

Deciding Whether to Switch Jobs00:00

Question 1: Do I Know What I Want?00:31

Sign in to read the full notes