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Engineer Kun Chen said that he decided to leave Microsoft and choose Meta through a test.
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To see if he was still growing, he asked himself what he had done this month that he couldn’t do last month.
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If employees aren’t growing, they don’t necessarily have to leave their jobs, he said.
To stay or to leave: This is the question many workers spend months or even years pondering.
While it may be safest to embrace your job in this job market, some employees still choose to give up the comfort of their jobs, and a former Microsoft engineer shared his framework for making this 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 he uses a simple test to decide if it’s time to move on. Chen said he decided to leave Microsoft when he realized he no longer had much growth at the company.
He said many people wait until they miss out on a promotion opportunity to realize they are no longer growing.
“It’s a very lagging indicator. I think we can actually tell whether we’re growing much, much ahead of schedule,” Chen said on the podcast.
Chen told Business Insider that since joining Microsoft, he’s often asked himself a simple question to keep himself honest about his growth: “What have I done this month that I couldn’t do last month?”
Six years into his first job at Microsoft, he told Business Insider that he realized he wouldn’t be able to give himself a good answer to that question for several months.
On the podcast, he said that he was mostly doing the same task, and that he already knew how to do it. He said that while he can find ways to do some things faster and better, it’s still basically the same.
“That’s why I know I haven’t grown that much,” he told Business Insider.
Chen said monthly testing is especially important given the current pace of change.
The field of software engineering, in particular, is in the midst of a radical transformation, as artificial intelligence models have made huge strides in the past few months. For example, Google just announced that 75% of its new code is now generated by artificial intelligence. Last fall, the company said the ratio was 50%.
“The world is changing very quickly, and we should keep questioning ourselves,” Chen said.
Chen said on the podcast that this doesn’t mean employees should leave a company or team if they find themselves stagnant in their role. Still, he says it’s a question worth asking yourself so you can figure out what changes to make.
Chen told Business Insider that he could have talked to his manager at Microsoft about moving to a project or position that would allow him to continue to grow and learn new things.
However, he said he eventually realized that moving to a smaller company with a very different culture and business model would give him a different level of growth. Facebook’s stock price was rising at the time, he said on the podcast.
Chen said on the podcast that he thought now was a good time to try it, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions he made, both financially and for his personal growth.
Chen eventually returned to Microsoft after the Facebook project was “refined” and “the remaining work was more incremental.” He said he had an opportunity at Microsoft to help guide a new gaming platform.
“I saw this as an opportunity to apply what I learned at Facebook,” Chen said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
