HACKER Q&A
📣 newjobremorse

New Job Remorse


Last year I hit a wall motivation wise at my old job after 4 years, so I changed to a new one. I'm about 5 months in at the new place and it's not been what I was hoping for in pretty much every regard. I'm a staff-level engineer with about 15 years exp.

- Some of the work is in a technical area I don't enjoy but kind of circumstantially stumbled into in the last 2-3 years. One of the reasons I left my old team was to try and get away from it but somehow it has landed on my plate once again

- My direct manager and the line-level manager are pretty bad. They don't have a view on anything, they're pretty detached and don't really provide any leadership

- The engineering level on the new team is quite a bit lower than my old team. If the other aspects of the job were fine I would just work to raise the level but they aren't and so the whole thing just feels like a big downgrade

- Because of delayed RSU vest I need to get to about the 1 year mark to break even financially

Has any regretted moving jobs before? What did you do?

  👤 throwaway818z Accepted Answer ✓
Switched from one FAANGM to another and regretted it. Job was really bad, I had no confidence in the product or leadership once I saw how the sausage was made, and the RTO wall was coming up imminently which would require me to relocate. Ended up crawling back to my old job after less than a year. Had a new appreciation for the old job and was pretty happy with it, until I was laid off a few months ago when the whole project was shut down. I think it was still a better outcome than if I had stayed at the other job.
👤 breckenedge
You’re staff level and you’re looking for leadership from your “line-level manager” (?) and direct manager? I’d definitely talk with them about it. Maybe they’re expecting some intrinsic motivation?

And as a staff-level engineer you should definitely be spending time leveling up your team.

I mean, at some point you just start taking your job wherever you want, doing whatever you think is most important to the business, and just encourage them to hang on to you.

👤 chatmasta
If you could wait 17 days after creating this account to submit this post, you can probably wait 7 months to quit your job.

But RSU vesting can be a red herring. Will they actually be worth anything? If not, you're focusing on the wrong constraint. You should quit if you wake up in the morning and don't look forward to what you're going to do that day (Steve Jobs quote).