The advice you hear most often is to move every couple of years, and there are good reasons behind it. There is also a category of learning that only arrives if you are still there, and nobody talks about it because it is slow and unglamorous.
You get to watch your own decisions get old.
The schema you designed meets the requirement nobody mentioned at the time. The abstraction you were proud of collects its third exception and starts to look like a cage. The workaround you left with a note saying it was temporary is still running, and now two teams depend on it. That is not punishment. That is the only feedback loop that turns opinions about software into judgement about software, and it takes eighteen months to close even once.
Leave before it closes and you never find out which of your instincts were right. You carry the same confident opinions to the next place, where you will also leave before anything you built has had time to disappoint you.
There is a second thing that only time gives you, which is being asked before a decision rather than after it. That is not a title and nobody announces it. It arrives somewhere in the second or third year, when enough people have seen you be reliable about something dull, and it changes what your working week is made of more than a promotion usually does.
And you learn the organisation. Where the real approval lives, which promise is safe, who to talk to a week early. Most engineering difficulty is organisational, and that knowledge is entirely local and entirely non transferable.
The honest counterweight. Staying stops paying at some point, and you have to check rather than drift. Twice a year, ask yourself two questions. What did I learn in the last six months. What would I do differently now because of something I saw play out. If both answers are empty two cycles running, you are not compounding any more, you are just familiar, and familiar is comfortable enough to cost you a decade.
Monday: pick two decisions you made over a year ago and go and look at what they turned into.
– Asael Shinder
