4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Leaving Your Job (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)
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.
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.
In either case, answering this question should give you a rough idea of what you are looking for in the current phase of your career, whether it's about trying different roles to find one that you like, or about going deeper in a specific track and acquiring more skills.
The next question you should ask yourself is: how can I get what I need? For example, if what you need is to evaluate whether you would enjoy being a machine learning engineer, then how can you get into a position that allows you to do machine learning work? If what you need is to double down on your current path and grow from a mid-level engineer to senior, then how can you get opportunities to work on a project that would allow you to practice and demonstrate senior engineer's skills?
Once you start answering these questions, one thing you'll realize is that oftentimes, especially if you are in a big tech company, the solution may not require a job switch. Sometimes you simply need a conversation with your manager about your career goal and aligning on the right role for you on the team. Sometimes you can switch to a different team within the same company. You should at least enumerate and evaluate these options before you commit to leaving your job.
Switching to a different company comes with a lot of overhead such as interview preparations, rebuilding trust with your manager and coworkers, ramping up on different workflows, etc. that will take away a lot of your time and energy, which can set you back a little.
If you found out that what you need does require a job switch, then the next question is: does the new job indeed offer what I need? What are you getting yourself into? What does the day to day look like over there? Are you going to be well set up to achieve your goal? This requires you know enough about the new role you are evaluating.
One thing you should absolutely try to avoid is to simply run away from your current job and accept anything that's different. Many people made this mistake and ended up jumping into something even worse than before. You need to always make sure you are running towards something you know is good for you.
You can achieve this by asking targeted questions during your interviews to know more about the company culture, the team mission, and the role you will be put into. If you have done well during the interviews, you can also request the hiring manager to allow you to talk to a few people on the team to give you more insights about what it would look like if you work there.
A common question received about job switches is that sometimes during that process, you might get a counter offer from your current company that tries to convince you to stay. The general advice is to ignore it, because this decision should be much more about your long term career trajectory, and if you are changing your decision simply based on an immediate difference in salary, you might be missing the point for why you would want to make a job switch in the first place.
If you had asked yourself the questions listed in this video and arrived at the conclusion that the new job is the right place for yourself, it's very unlikely that salary alone would change your answer.
You should also understand the implication of taking a counter offer. From a manager's perspective, if money can make you stay, then I have to assume money can make you leave as well. It makes it difficult for managers to trust you with critical and high impact projects. Your manager will likely use the counter offer to buy some time, and then use the time to look for your replacement so that your eventual departure will have less negative impact on the team.
From both those two angles, the recommendation is not giving a counter offer too much weight on your decision.
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