Engineers who have left jobs for new ones, what was your primary reason?

Perhaps a slightly less common reason: I felt I was underappreciated.

At my old place, I was often the only person fighting fires, fixing critical bugs, and working on critical "we want this yesterdat" requirements (think new Government rules that require significant changes from our side). It wasn't a big company so I didn't mind that I was alone, but it did suck that I saw people who worked on shiny new features got much more appreciation than I did for keeping the lights on.

Money. I got a promotion in my previous job which got me a small raise but all the new joiners at my level were getting much larger salaries. So I jumped for a huge salary bump. Working with new tech to add to my resume was a bonus.

Management. Research has consistently shown that the most common reason people quit is their boss. I left my last job as a team lead because my manager, and the managers above him, simply didn't care about my team's work. We were in a holding pattern at best.

It’s depended. Toxic management once, product not going anywhere and new opportunity clearly impactful once, management clearly going to screw things up once, amazing new opportunity once.

Funny you ask, a balance of push and pull across time. Never a regret about changing. Only about timing and roads not taken.

Quality-of-life: old job paid well but wanted too much time and was high stress.

New job pays less, but now I have a life outside of work, I am happier, and I am healthier (both mentally and physically).

Depends on the situation in my case, but the last two were like this:

1. Got hired at a company right before COVID. They promised $MONEY per year. Then when revenue dropped they gave me the option of taking a pay cut of $MONEY x 0.6 (so they cut 60% of my salary, leaving me only 40%) or layoffs. I took the former because I'd just been through _hell_ trying to get that job for over a year following major tragedy. I couldn't afford a layoff.

Fast forward about 2.5 months. Company CEO says money's back and flowing good, everything's great, and they're hiring again. They proceed to keep hiring new people at full salary, but never restored my pay despite my requesting it.

All the while, the company co-founder is managing a project and screwing it up REALLY badly. Takes off for 2 weeks without notice dumping the whole thing in my lap, managing 4 college grads on an enterprise financial app in a programming language none of them had ever seen before (Go). And when he gets back he takes a ton of pot-shots at me, some passive-aggressive and others outright accusatory, basically trying to get me fired and claiming everything's a mess and it's my fault.

And they're not even paying me half of my salary, _for this_?

2. The other one was because the day-to-day of the job was a massive pain in the ass. Huge degrees of security theater, total paranoid neuroticism. Turn on the VPN to access a k8s cluster. Now toggle off the VPN because it blocks access to GitHub. Now toggle it on again to issue the next command, and so on. And nobody cared to fix this at all. I spent an entire week of wasted time because of another unwritten, undisclosed, badly configured network restriction policy in production designed for "security" before I figured out they were blocking the ability for a container in prod to reach certain hosts in the outside world (e.g. GitHub, again). On top of that there were a ton of management overhead things, constant monitoring and micromanagement, the company demanded all work on THEIR laptop (even though remote), and no they wouldn't let you set it up the way you wanted even though you're a developer with 20+ years of experience and know damn well what you're doing.

So yeah. Bad management plus huge pay cut and getting screwed over, along with rampant stupidity in the name of "security" that made the actual work damn near impossible to do. That's why I left both those dumpster fires.

Up next: privacy invasions. I told my boss last week that if the company demands anything that I consider a major privacy violation (cameras in the home, remote monitoring/administration, etc.) and they won't discuss or entertain alternative approaches, that I'm out. Privacy is a non-negotiable necessity. I'm willing to go jobless for a while to escape that hell if I have to.