I mentor early-career engineers. In the last two months, three mentees have asked whether to jump ship or stay. They wanted to know how either choice looks on their resume. Does moving help them grow or is it FOMO?
Are you building five years of experience or repeating one year five times?
Tenure isn’t experience. Five years at a single company doesn’t guarantee the mastery staff or principal roles demand. Both staying and moving can build experience and typically offer different payoffs. Engineers grow by taking accountability for harder problems and seeing how their decisions worked.
I value full-cycle ownership. Owning one difficult project and seeing its consequences (good or bad) can teach more than contributing across several without seeing how they turn out.
Full-Cycle Ownership
Ownership can start with a bracket, a software function, or a test fixture. Define what it needs to do, deliver it, and learn what happens when someone uses it. Engineers miss out when they write software but never see it behave in production or design hardware but never see it manufactured.
I expect senior engineers to lead programs. They need to:
- Distill problems into concrete objectives
- Execute and correct course
- See how their decisions affect the product and customer
Setting up a project requires crafting a proposal that defines scope, timing, objectives, and why the project matters. Turning a credible idea or early investigation into a proposal is a learned skill. Securing management approval means knowing who decides, what they care about, and what they expect.
Executing means working through the hard middle. Engineers build confidence and resilience as they solve problems and adjust plans. Reporting milestone results back to the same decision-makers creates feedback checkpoints: Did you do what you intended? What the company expected? What changed for the customer? What would you do differently?
Applying those answers refines assumptions, improves the approach, and develops judgment about where to focus and what to prioritize.
Ownership also requires understanding the product environment and interfaces. Researchers need to understand product requirements, and program managers need to understand technical targets and challenges. Learning this accelerates development and creates a better outcome.
At an industry gathering, researchers sought feedback on a battery chemistry they claimed was ready for automotive scale-up. They had spent ten years researching electrochemistry but had little experience taking it to product. Consequently, they optimized the cell design purely for energy density without considering metrics that influence charging and vehicle performance. The discussion revealed they didn’t know those metrics mattered. Those gaps undermined the claims, damaged trust, and ultimately cost funding.
The research was real, but the researchers didn’t understand the intended application. Fortunately, there are less demanding applications.
Why Moving Makes Sense
Changing employers resets pay and title to market value. Merit increases can run a few percent per year, and limited promotion slots can make staying expensive.
A Wharton study found that external hires earned 18-20% more than employees promoted internally for similar jobs. External hires who stayed past two years were promoted faster. However, in those first two years they received lower performance ratings and were more likely to be let go.
Not covered in the study: the labor market isn’t always up. A reset can mean lower pay, not a raise.
Moving exposes engineers to different environments. Different organizations, different projects, different problems. You learn new ways to solve them and when to use each.
You can also stall in an organization with more leads than projects, or one that blocks cross-functional work.
What Staying Can Build
Leaving before you see the results means missing feedback that could improve your next decision. Staying lets you adjust your approach and see whether the changes work.
Begrudgingly, even technical roles involve sales, politics, and bureaucracy. Leaders need support for project approval, resources to complete the work, and credibility when things fall apart. Staying also lets you watch colleagues’ long-term plays pay off… or blow up.
If you want to solve problems at scale, that organizational experience is what director and VP roles require. Delivering programs and earning trust can accelerate advancement into those roles, with higher pay later in a career.
A warning for title seekers. At one conference, the organizers wanted the Mercedes CEO, Dr. Z, and objected to getting “only” a director while early-career startup CEOs filled the agenda. Someone replied, “Those CEOs are cornfield supervisors.” That director led a 1,000-person organization and had survived many product lifecycles. “Director” didn’t describe the scale of responsibility.
How to Choose
An outside offer makes the immediate benefit visible. Staying needs a concrete case such as a credible next role or valuable work to see through.
If the role offers no room for broader scope or further learning, moving makes sense. Ask: What job do you have? What job do you want? Can this company give you the responsibility and support you need? Have you exhausted opportunities to grow?
Staying is worthwhile when the role offers greater responsibility and a clearer view of how the work affects other teams. You’re your own best advocate. Ask for responsibility. Push, volunteer, propose, and demonstrate growth.
My Advice: Be Uncomfortable
Choose a role, internal or external, where you can take on harder work and own the outcome. If the role is comfortable, take more ownership or push the target higher. Get after it. Complacency is how you repeat one year five times regardless of employer.
Own a full cycle early in your career: develop the plan, fix what goes wrong (there’s always something!), and see the impact. Scale it to your level. Own it end to end.
When I interview, I want to understand what you owned, which decisions you made and why, and what happened afterward.